STREETS 197Dickens, Lady Dedlock walks loyally toward the landmarks of her past shame
when her uncontrollable mind and feelings overwhelm her best efforts at
self-discipline. This story of a character who attempts to shed herself by
walking resonates with everything we know about Dickens’s own need to
walk—away from the domestic sphere, away from his internal specters, and
toward the external specters that rise up out of the city streets.
Trapped
Solitary confinement is the nightmare antithesis of walking, because it causes
the mind to rebound only on itself. In Dickens’s universe it is virtually
impossible to be alone. Even in their most excruciating or exquisite soli-
tary moments—Oliver Twist confined in Fagin’s house, Paul Dombey mus-
ing with the clock on the stairs—Dickens figures produce in the narrative
another head or an answering face. Views of London rooftops are always
desolate scenes, but they are never entirely depopulated: when Oliver gazes
out his dirty window he sees “a confused and crowded mass of house-
tops, blackened chimneys, and gable-ends. Sometimes, indeed, a grizzly head
might be seen, peering over the parapet wall of a distant house, but it was
quickly withdrawn again” (OT 18). The dizzying view from Todgers’s works
in a similar way: first it is a confused “crowd of objects, which sprung out
from the mass without any reason,” then the chimney pots are endowed
with the ability to observe and comment on what goes on below; then “The
man who was mending a pen at an upper window over the way, became
of paramount importance in the scene, and made a blank in it, ridiculously
disproportionate in its extent, when he retired” (MC 9).
Depicting loneliness requires not only an absence of others, but a presence
that disappears before the eyes. David Copperfield, paying a solitary visit to
his childhood home, sees an elderly face at the same window from which he
had gazed at the tombstone of his dead father; left alone in criminal London,
Pip is eyed by sinister plaster casts or assaulted by furniture endowed with
aggressive intentions. Even in descriptions of deserted country landscapes a
head or a pair of watching eyes will show up somewhere. Neither narrators
nor characters can tolerate solitude; if necessary they will invent live pres-
ences made of houses, furniture, shadowy dark corners, ghosts or phantoms,
and suffer horrors from them. The power of animation in Dickens serves,
I think, his fundamental fear of isolation.
John Forster, a man who had lived alone for many years of his life, comes
to a complex perspective on this aspect of his friend. “It will not do to draw