220 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Arcades project and passages from Nickleby. See also Mark Willis, “Dickens the
Flâneur—London and The Uncommercial Traveller,” Dickens Quarterly 20.4 (2003):
240–56.
My remarks on Walter Benjamin’s representation of the flâneur are based on “The
Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” and “Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in
Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn
(London: New Left Books, 1973), as well as The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland
and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1999), especially section M: “The Flâneur.” For Benjamin, Dickens came
mediated through a French translation of Chesterton, whose sentences on Dickens’s
early walking are repeatedly transcribed in the Arcades Project, once with the signifi-
cant label “On the psychology of the flâneur” (M 11, 3). Apart from Chesterton,
Benjamin makes use of a quotation he found in a German article on Dickens in Die
Neue Zeit, from the letter Dickens wrote to Forster from Lausanne in 1846, in which
he laments having no city streets or crowds to walk in at night. The quotation appears
suddenly, when Benjamin has jumped from a discussion of Poe’s “The Man of the
Crowd” to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s attraction to city walking; it is then juxtaposed with
Baudelaire’s criticism of Brussels, which provides no shop windows for strollers to
look at (Baudelaire 49–50).
The concept of the flâneur shows up in three notable studies of Sketches by Boz.
Deborah Nord’s account of London in the 1820s and Dickens’s sketches (chaps.
1 and 2) have been especially useful to me; see Walking the Victorian Streets: Women,
Representation, and the City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). Audrey Jaffe
emphasizes the spectator’s distance between Boz and his subjects in Vanishing Points,
chap. 1. Geoffrey Hemstedt writes about the improvisatory quality of Dickens’s
London in “Inventing Social Identity: Sketches by Boz,” in Victorian Identities: Social
and Cultural Formations in Nineteenth-Century Literature, ed. Ruth Robbins and Julian
Wolfreys (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 215–29.
Robert Newsom discusses connections between John Dickens’s death and “Night
Walks” in Dickens on the Romantic Side of Familiar Things, 105–13. Harry Stone focuses
on the pudding-eating man as part of Dickens’s obsession with cannibalism and
ambivalence toward the mother; see The Night Side of Dickens, 102–13. John M.
Picker treats Victorian theorizing about ongoing sound waves, as well as the street
music and noise that annoyed many professional writers, in Victorian Soundscapes
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
On Dickens and solitary confinement, see Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime,
chaps. 5 and 6. Collins is inclined to defend Dickens against critiques aimed at the
solitary confinement chapter in American Notes. Reading Dickens’s account of the
Eastern Penitentiary in connection with The Pickwick Papers, Sean Grass makes an
argument for Dickens’s depiction of solitary confinement as an experience that cre-
ates the odd sensation of being watched and incurs permanent psychic damage; see
chapter 2 of The Self in the Cell: Narrating the Victorian Prisoner (New York: Routledge,
2003).
My remarks on Dickens’s health have been informed by Peter Ackroyd’s specula-
tions on pp. 957–58, 1000–1001, and 1018–20.