198 KNOWING DICKENS
round any part of such a man too hard a line,” he writes near the end of his
biography,
and the writer must not be charged with inconsistency who says that
Dickens’s childish sufferings, and the sense they burnt into him of the
misery of loneliness and a craving for joys of home, though they led
to what was weakest in him, led also to what was greatest. It was his
defect as well as his merit in maturer life not to be able to live alone.
When the fancies of his novels were upon him and he was under their
restless influence, though he often talked of shutting himself up in out
of the way solitary places, he never went anywhere unaccompanied by
members of his family. (Forster 834–35)It is a tricky passage, accurately reflecting Forster’s ambivalence as well as his
desire to explain most of Dickens’s strangeness by way of the blacking fac-
tory. “Not to be able to live alone” is not just the characteristic of any family
man; it belongs to a particular writer who lived for hours a day in his study
peopling his inner world with character after character. When he emerged,
he flung himself out of doors and walked the streets of London, Paris, Bou-
logne, Boston—wherever he could see and be seen by fellow passengers.
While Forster stresses Dickens’s need for his family, it is also important to
recognize his flight from domesticity into writing and into the mirror-world
of the streets, where the mere passing sight of other men and women fed an
essential need of his nature.
Contemporary debates about penal reform provided special grist for Dick-
ens’s fear of isolation. He became notorious in his time for his attacks on soli-
tary confinement, or “the separate system,” which aimed to reform inmates
by keeping them apart from other criminals and effecting moral change
through quiet reflection and dialogue with prison chaplains. He would cham-
pion instead “the silent system,” which allowed prisoners to see one another,
although it carried heavy punishments for violating the rule of silence, and
imposed in general a more directly punitive regime of physical labor. It was
more important for Dickens to see other people—and to be provided with
evidence from which he could imagine their internal lives—than to talk with
them. He experienced the difference as one between keeping and losing one’s
sanity, and—almost literally—as the distinction between life and death. His
writing about solitary confinement, whether voluntary or involuntary, can
help to illuminate the intensity of his need to walk in city streets.
When Dickens visited the United States in 1842 he toured Cherry Hill,
the Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia, which was run on a system he later
called “rigid, strict, and hopeless solitary confinement” (AN 7). A series of