STREETS 203of social life, as well as in Dickens’s interest in social reform projects. Editing,
writing, and public readings are the paramount concerns, along with anxiet-
ies about how to place his seven sons in useful occupations. The ferocity of
his attack on the deranged hermit may stem in part from Dickens’s reactions
to the changes, which, despite his ongoing family life at Gad’s Hill, may have
included some fear that he had managed to isolate himself.
Walking toward Death
Dickens’s powerful need for the forward motion of walking could not be
gainsaid even when it was threatened by the deterioration of his energies.
Walking had always been a central character in the mythology of his health,
whether he was boasting about his robust physique or trying to walk off
his nervous anxieties. When it became clear in his fifties that his health was
in decline, walking again took center stage: the story he told was about the
pain in his left foot and his insistence on walking in spite of it. Dickens had
suffered from fragile health since childhood, and he remained vulnerable
to attacks of pain in his left side that he associated with an inflammation
of the kidney. In adulthood he prided himself on outgrowing his fragility
through discipline and vigorous exercise, but Catherine and Forster shared a
more realistic knowledge of his susceptibilities. John Dickens died in 1851
after a bloody operation—without chloroform—for a long-standing blad-
der disease. Dickens, who was present, told Catherine that his father had
never mentioned his condition to anyone, and that he showed great strength
through the ordeal. “All this goes to my side directly, and I feel as if I had
been struck there by a leaden bludgeon,” he wrote (6.333). Clearly both he
and Catherine understood the psychological component of those attacks.
When it came to his own mortal disease, however, Dickens was his father’s
son. He was willing to complain vigorously about the pain of a “frostbitten
foot,” but not to connect it with the diagnosis of degenerative heart disease
that he received two days after his fifty-fourth birthday. As he wrote to both
Georgina and Wills that day, “I am not so foolish as to suppose that all my
work can have been achieved without some penalty, and I have noticed for
some time a decided change in my buoyancy and hopefulness” (11.155).
The formula had shifted a bit; now illness rather than restlessness was the tax
he paid on his genius. And that was the end of that, at least so far as letter
writing was concerned.
A year earlier the foot saga had begun. Dickens had always thought of
walking as the cure for anything that ailed him. In the winter of 1864 he was
staying indoors with a cold, but “the remedy is so new to me, that I doubt