Night Walks – Charles Dickens/Penguin Books

The photo shows St. James Church, Cooling in Kent, where Dickens used to come as a child with his family who lived in nearby Higham. Cooling is about 5 miles from Rochester and close to the north Kent marshes. Dickens later used this spot for the opening scene in ‘ Great Expectations’ and the nearby Thames estuary for the final scene in the novel.

Early in his writing career Dickens was a journalist and ‘Night Walks’ and other related essays about life in Victorian London are published in his Selected Journalism 1850-1870. Experiencing insomnia Dickens decided that the best cure was to walk through London in the small hours , and discovered homelessness, drunkenness and an assortment of characters on the streets. Further essays in the series focus on other observations he made during his wanderings. Throughout his life Dickens was a prodigious walker and the observations from these wanderings provided considerable material for the creative work which later dominated his output. That,and his imagination.

Dickens walks around and through the City and other parts of central London sharing his thoughts and sights as he walks on:

‘To walk on to the Bank(of England), lamenting the good old times and bemoaning the present evil period, would be an easy next step, so I would take it , and would make my circuit of the Bank, and give a thougth to the treasure within; likewiseto the guard of soldiers passing the night there, and nodding over the fire. Next, I went to Billingsgate , in some hope of market-people, but it proving as yet too early, crossed London bridge. And got down by the waterside on the Surrey shore among the buildings of the great brewery. There was plenty going on at the brewery and the reek and smell of grains , and the rattling of the plump dray horses at their mangers, were capital company . Quite refreshed by having mingled with this good society , I made a new start with a new heart, setting the King’s Bench as my object before returning to my bed.’

The vigour, clarity, spirit and optimism so characteristic of the writing in his novels, are already there as he wanders fearlessly through Victorian London at night.