BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 219London (Sewanee Review 58 [1950]: 419–38 and often reprinted). Todgers’s has
been repeatedly reread, either as a tragic vision or as a harmless and genial one; for
one example of a thoughtful revision see Gerhard Joseph, “The Labyrinth and the
Library: A View from the Temple in Martin Chuzzlewit,” i n Dickens Studies Annual
15 (1986): 1–22.
Raymond Williams’s classic essay on Dickens’s London appears in The Country
and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), chap. 15. Richard Maxwell’s
four allegorical models are summarized in The Mysteries of Paris and London (Char-
lottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 14–20; Maxwell studies these as they
are registered in the novels of Dickens and Victor Hugo. Michel de Certeau’s essay,
“Walking in the City” is chapter 7 of The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Ren-
dall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Like others—including Dick-
ens—who write about the city, de Certeau moves in the essay as if inevitably from
walking urban streets to psychoanalytic encounters with the self. James Buzard writes
some compelling pages on the limitations on apparently omniscient looking, and the
ambiguous valences of mobility and immobility, as they appear in the double narra-
tion of Bleak House; see Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-
Century British Novels (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 120–34.
On walking in literary history see Anne D. Wallace, Walking, Literature, and English
Culture: The Origins and Uses of the Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clar-
endon Press, 1993). Wallace identifies a literary ideology of walking as a restorative
reconnection with the self, the past, and nature that emerges from Wordsworth. Her
Dickens partially shares that ideology but repeatedly discovers its failure: for him the
walking/writing syndrome is “both antidote and illness, as both creative and destruc-
tive or ineffectual” (229).
G. K. Chesterton’s description of Dickens’s early walking appears in chapter 3 of
Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1906). When he adopted
the phrase “the key to the street,” Chesterton may not have known of George
Augustus Sala’s first essay for Household Words, “The Key of the Street” (6 September
1851), which recounts the night wanderings of a narrator who has been locked out
of his boardinghouse. Ned Lukacher’s biographical analysis appears in Primal Scenes,
287–330. Lukacher, reading backward through Benjamin and Benjamin’s Baudelaire,
arrives at a rather dire view of Dickens’s streets as labyrinths of no thoroughfares that
represent a mind trapped in traumatic repetition. Peter Ackroyd describes the 1820s
London through which the child and his father walked to work (85–94). In my expe-
rience Dickens’s writing about walking in London is infectious; for a good example
of its effect, see Walter Dexter, The London of Dickens (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1924).
Dexter takes his reader on fifteen well-organized walking tours of Dickens’s London,
noting every place mentioned in the novels or relevant to the life, and reporting on
what was still standing (before the Blitz) and what was not.
For a sequence of essays on Dickens as a flâneur, see Michael Hollington, “Dickens
the Flâneur,” The Dickensian 77.2 (1981): 71–87; “Dickens, Household Words, and the
Paris Boulevards,” I and II, Dickens Quarterly 14.3 (September 1997): 154–64 and
14.4 (December 1997): 199–212; and “Nickleby, Flânerie, Reverie: The View from
Cheerybles,’ ” Dickens Studies Annual 35 (2005): 21–43. Hollington’s definitions of
the flâneur grow increasingly capacious; in the most recent of these essays he sets up
a wonderful interplay between passages about walking and reverie from Benjamin’s