The Walker

by Matthew Beaumont

  As the Uncommercial Traveller observes: ‘My walking is of two kinds: one, straight on end to a definite goal at a round pace; one objectless, loitering and purely vagabond.’ ‘In the latter state,’ he adds, ‘no gipsy on earth is a greater vagabond than myself; it is so natural with me, and strong with me, that I think I must be the descendent, at no great distance, of some irreclaimable tramp.’22 Nightwalking is walking of this objectless, loitering, vagabond kind.

  It is in the light of these reflections on the semiotics of walking that I want to re-examine The Old Curiosity Shop. This is a novel that ‘almost universally’ continues to be thought of as ‘a text of notorious sentimentality, morbid and uncontrolled, embarrassing and absurd by turns’, as John Bowen has authoritatively stated; and it is in consequence still relatively overlooked by critics.23

  Published as a weekly serial in Master Humphrey’s Clock, The Old Curiosity Shop was initially conceived as nothing more than a sketch, in a single issue of the miscellany, of the narrator Master Humphrey’s encounter with Little Nell, a thirteen-year old girl, in a London street at night. The periodical proving both unpopular and unprofitable, Dickens feared that its ‘desultory character’, as he put it in the Preface to the ‘Cheap Edition’ of the novel in 1848, risked undermining his hitherto intimate relationship with his readers.24

  He therefore extended and reshaped this story, developing Nell’s narrative to the point at which it subsumed the weekly publication completely, thus saving it from financial collapse. Daringly, and a little desperately, Dickens also discarded his first-person narrator – in spite of the fact that ‘Personal Adventures of Master Humphrey: The Old Curiosity Shop’ was one of the titles he had recently considered for this tale.25 Master Humphrey is unceremoniously expelled from the narrative at the end of Chapter 3, when he announces, abruptly and a little confusingly, that he is leaving the other characters to ‘speak and act for themselves’ (33). (Improbably, Dickens eventually reintroduces Master Humphrey to the narrative in the form of the Single Gentleman, who is the brother of the Old Man.)

  The picaresque plot of The Old Curiosity Shop is motivated by the fact that Nell’s grandfather, the Old Man, has been gambling in order to support her, and has consequently become indebted to Daniel Quilp, a violent, dwarfish usurer. It is in order to escape Quilp that Nell and her grandfather steal out of London early one morning, in sunshine that transfigures ‘places that had shewn ugly and distrustful all night long’ and ‘chase[s] away the shadows of the night’ (119), and commence their journey to some resting place in the countryside where they can forget about their past, and about the city:

  The two pilgrims, often pressing each other’s hands, or exchanging a smile or cheerful look, pursued their way in silence. Bright and happy as it was, there was something solemn in the long, deserted streets, from which, like bodies without souls, all habitual character and expression had departed, leaving but one dead uniform repose, that made them all alike. (120)

  This flight from a dead city, which famously ends in Nell’s death, is structured as a pilgrimage. Later in this chapter, in fact, Nell explicitly compares herself and her grandfather to John Bunyan’s Christian (122). So this is a pilgrim’s progress; and walking thus serves a spiritually as well as socially symbolic function in The Old Curiosity Shop.

  In spite of the eventual success of The Old Curiosity Shop, the intensive demands of producing a weekly publication had a corrosive effect on Dickens. In the late autumn and winter of 1840, depressed by his relative unproductiveness, he took ‘long walks at night through the streets of London to restore his spirits’.26 The composition of this novel was itself, then, shaped by nightwalking. This compulsive activity appears however not to have provided much relief. As an antidote, it had a positively toxic effect. ‘All night I have been pursued by the child,’ he told his friend John Forster on one occasion in November, alluding to Little Nell; ‘and this morning I am unrefreshed and miserable. I don’t know what to do with myself.’27

  The Old Curiosity Shop is all about pursuing the child. Almost every character in the novel, it transpires, pursues the child (and she ‘provides a vehicle for the fantasies of each character that desires, or is curious about her’, in Audrey Jaffe’s formulation28). And the reader, too, pursues her. But, from the reverse perspective opened up by Dickens’s comment to Forster, the innocent Little Nell acquires a slightly demonic character. She seems more like ‘the implacable and dreaded attendant’ that haunts Barton in Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘The Familiar’ (1872), to cite a slightly later instance of a narrative with a plot centred on pursuit at night.29

  Master Humphrey is one of those individuals who, albeit not in especially obvious ways, pursues the child. He is a character whose oddness has often been overlooked, perhaps because he is superficially less peculiar than so many of Dickens’s characters. Scholars of Victorian fiction have tended either to ignore him or to take him at face value as a benign, if rather eccentric, geriatric.30 He is a far darker character, though, and not least because he is a nightwalker. In a double sense, he is the novel’s most curious character.

  Some critics have implicitly recognized this. Bowen, for example, has pointed out that he ‘links the archaic and the modern in his nocturnal city strolling’.31 I intend to unravel his identity a little more intensively. In so doing, I hope to provide an alternative introduction to the novel; and, in a sense, the introduction to an alternative novel. This alternative novel might be called ‘The Old Cupiosity Shape’ – for such is the phrase with which, in Finnegans Wake (1939), James Joyce casually and deftly excavates the book’s hidden channels of desire.32 Master Humphrey is the old cupiosity shape at the heart of The Old Curiosity Shop. Its libidinal secret.

  At the start of The Old Curiosity Shop, Master Humphrey reflects on ‘that constant pacing to and fro, that never-ending restlessness, that incessant tread of feet wearing the rough stones smooth and glossy’ that typifies life in the metropolis (9). He paints the city as a sort of secular purgatory:

  Think of a sick man in such a place as Saint Martin’s Court, listening to the footsteps, and in the midst of pain and weariness obliged, despite himself (as though it were a task he must perform) to detect the child’s step from the man’s, the slipshod beggar from the booted exquisite, the lounging from the busy, the dull heel of the sauntering outcast from the quick tread of an expectant pleasure-seeker – think of the hum and noise always being present to his sense, and of the stream of life that will not stop, pouring on, on, on, through all his restless dreams, as if he were condemned to lie, dead but conscious, in a noisy churchyard, and had no hope of rest for centuries to come. (9)

  For the sick man, the activity of physiognomizing people’s footsteps, as it might be called, of identifying their relationship to the city, whether it is ‘lounging’ or ‘busy’, lazily sauntering or briskly hurrying, becomes a sort of urban mania. The restlessness of London, embodied in the constant, repetitive movement of feet on pavements, shapes the sick man’s ‘restless dreams’, troubling the distinction between the sane and the insane that Dickens subsequently, more deliberately, deconstructs in ‘Night Walks’ when he describes wandering by the walls of Bedlam.

  Indeed, it seems plausible that the nameless man in St Martin’s Court is sick precisely because of his obsession with the sound of footsteps; that this febrile attempt exhaustively to classify passing feet is not some palliative response to the sickness, nor even a symptom of it, but the sickness itself. Perhaps, then, it is a mental state rather than a physical one. The man in St Martin’s Court is at rest, but he is no less restless for all that; in fact, he is probably more restless as a result of his immobility. Like the nightwalker, he is one of the urban undead, for it is ‘as if he were condemned to lie, dead but conscious, in a noisy churchyard, and had no hope of rest for centuries to come’.

  This is the urban mania that Alfred Tennyson subsequently explores in his poem Maud (1855). In the fifth section of the poet’s extraordinary �
�monodrama’, ‘the mad scene’ as Tennyson called it, the speaker pictures himself dead and buried ‘a yard beneath the street’, listening to the horses’ hooves and the footsteps above him: ‘With never an end to the stream of passing feet, / Driving, hurrying, marrying, burying …’33 This is a poem freely scattered with invective against the corrupt practices of mid-nineteenth-century capitalism, so in the gerunds that end the line I have cited, which reproduce what Dickens calls the ‘hum and noise’ of passing feet, it is possible to detect an implicit association of hurrying and marrying, and indeed burying, with busy-ness. With business. And, by extension, with buying – a word buried in the word ‘burying’.

  Both the speaker of Maud and the man in St Martin’s Court, immobilized and entombed as they are, embody a protest, conscious or unconscious, against the rhythms of commerce that drive the life of the metropolis. If sauntering and lounging constitute a muted form of social protest in the conditions of industrial capitalism, then the state of physical paralysis imagined by the speaker of Maud represents a pathological refusal of its logic.

  As I demonstrated in the previous chapter, another important, contemporaneous representation of this urban mania, or one closely related to it, is the convalescent narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (1840).

  Recall the plot of Poe’s mysterious short story. Recovering from an illness, the narrator sits beside the window of a coffee shop in London and watches the passers-by, regarding ‘with minute interest’, as Poe writes, ‘the innumerable varieties of details, dress, air, gait, visage and expression of countenance’.34 In spite of his sedentariness, he is at this point still a slightly feverish physiognomist of life in the city. Then he suddenly sees a man who fascinates him, because he seems completely unreadable, resistant to physiognomic assessment, and he rushes out into the street, tailing him through the labyrinthine streets of London, throughout the night. As Benjamin puts it, ‘Poe purposely blurs the difference between the asocial person and the flâneur.’35 The narrator has become a nightwalker – that is, the neurotic as opposed to neurasthenic incarnation of this urban mania – obsessed with people’s perpetual transit through the spaces of the metropolis.

  The curiosity that drives the narrative of The Old Curiosity Shop, the interest that Master Humphrey takes in Little Nell when he meets her in the streets of London at night, is itself the consequence of a kind of convalescent state. If he distances himself from the ‘sick man’ about whom he fantasises, he does so because of an uncomfortable proximity to him. For Humphrey is himself a cripple, one who has suffered from some unnamed ‘infirmity’ since childhood, as he testifies in the first chapter of Master Humphrey’s Clock. It is presumably partly for this reason that for many years he has ‘led a lonely, solitary life’.36

  Humphrey lives, so he informs us, in an old house in a ‘venerable suburb’ of London that was once a celebrated resort for ‘merry roysterers and peerless ladies, long since departed’:

  It is a silent, shady place, with a paved courtyard so full of echoes, that sometimes I am tempted to believe that faint responses to the noises of old times linger there yet, and that these ghosts of sound haunt my footsteps as I pace it up and down. (5)

  This courtyard full of the echoes of older footfalls is of course sequestered in a quiet suburb. And the elderly narrator seems quite sane, albeit a little quaint. But Humphrey’s footsteps, in this urbane sentence, and the footsteps that haunt them, are indelible symptoms of an urban mania – as the unsettling image of him perpetually pacing this confined space implies. There is evidently some kind of secret kinship, perhaps even an identity, between Humphrey and the sick man he subsequently mentions, who inhabits another courtyard, St Martin’s Court, although the former’s obsessiveness is far less intense than the latter’s, and his infirmity more chronic than acute.

  For the frail Humphrey, as for Baudelaire’s convalescent, ‘curiosity has become a compelling, irresistible passion.’37 It impels him into the city’s streets. In fact, the ‘Curiosity Shop’ of the title refers not merely to Nell’s grandfather’s home, stuffed with ‘heaps of fantastic things’, but to the city itself (19). In Master Humphrey’s Clock, the eponymous narrator announces that he has lived there ‘for a long time without any friend or acquaintance’. He goes on:

  In the course of my wanderings by night and day, at all hours and seasons, in city streets and quiet country parts, I came to be familiar with certain faces, and to take it to heart as quite a heavy disappointment if they failed to present themselves each at its accustomed spot. (10)

  For him, implicitly, faces are curiosities, just as ‘the inanimate objects that people [his] chamber’ have acquired anthropomorphic qualities (9).

  But if he likes to amble around the lumber-room that is the city, Humphrey manifestly isn’t completely comfortable in it. Embattled because of his disability, he does not feel at home in the crowd. He is no flâneur. In contrast to the hero of the Physiologies of the 1840s, who revels in being ‘at the very centre of the world’ but at the same time ‘unseen of the world’, Humphrey is, unenviably, in the inverse position: he is a socially marginal figure who is nonetheless the object of public fascination.38

  Humphrey is, in fact, ‘a misshapen, deformed old man’, as he himself puts it in Master Humphrey’s Clock (7). And when he first moved to the venerable suburb he presently inhabits, he informs us, he was variously regarded as ‘a spy, an infidel, a conjuror, a kidnapper of children, a refugee, a priest, a monster’: ‘I was the object of suspicion and distrust – ay, of downright hatred too’ (6). We are told that at that time he was known as ‘Ugly Humphrey’ (7). So, according to his neighbours, who identify him with the feudal, the foreign and the folkloric, he is outside the pale of modernity.

  The identities initially ascribed to Humphrey by his suspicious-minded neighbours – spy, infidel, conjuror, kidnapper of children, refugee, priest, monster – might be the consequence of his eccentric nocturnal habits as much as of his peculiar physical condition. He is the victim of popular prejudices about men of slightly odd appearance who walk about the metropolis at night because they do not feel at home in it during the day. He is a ‘sauntering outcast’, like one of the archetypes whose footsteps the sick man in St Martin’s Court hears outside his window.

  But Humphrey feels half at home at least in the city at night, when there is nobody around to monitor his ‘objectless, loitering, purely vagabond’ mode of walking, as the Uncommercial Traveller had put it.

  In Master Humphrey’s Clock Humphrey claims to walk in both the country and the city, during both the day and the night. But in the opening sentence of The Old Curiosity Shop he admits to a preference for the nocturnal city: ‘Night is generally my time for walking’ (7).

  He adds that he ‘seldom go[es] out until after dark’, except in the countryside (where he likes to ‘roam about fields and lanes all day’); and continues:

  I have fallen insensibly into this habit, both because it favours my infirmity and because it affords me greater opportunity of speculating on the characters and occupations of those who fill the streets. The glare and hurry of broad noon are not adapted to idle pursuits like mine; a glimpse of passing faces caught by the light of a street-lamp or a shop window is often better for my purpose than their full revelation in the daylight; and, if I must add the truth, night is kinder in this respect than day, which too often destroys an air-built castle at the moment of its completion, without the least ceremony or remorse. (7–8)

  Refusing the ‘hurry of broad noon’ and the brisk rhythms of business, Humphrey prefers ‘idle pursuits’, like rambling, and speculating about ‘those who fill the streets’, even when they aren’t filled. The city at night, a place and time in which there are fewer people about to police a loitering mode of perambulation, permits him to wander and wonder at the same time. Master Humphrey is most comfortable walking in the time of ‘guilt and darkness’, the asocial phase of the night identified by Dickens in ‘The Heart of
London’ a couple of years later. It is a space of fantasy, where – in contrast to the daytime city – ‘air-built castles’ can be erected and maintained.

  Humphrey’s narrative begins, then, with an anecdotal account of his encounter with Little Nell, the incident that constitutes the novel’s primal scene:

  One night I had roamed into the city, and was walking slowly on in my usual way, musing upon a great many things, when I was arrested by an inquiry, the purport of which did not reach me, but which seemed to be addressed to myself, and was preferred in a soft sweet voice that struck me very pleasantly. I turned hastily round and found at my elbow a pretty little girl, who begged to be directed to a certain street at a considerable distance, and indeed in quite another quarter of the town. (9)

  After this paragraph, Dickens delays a fraction before reassuring us of the innocence of Nell’s inquiry, and of her innate goodness, and we have to suppress an impulse to mistrust her soft sweet voice. We momentarily suspect that Little Nell has attempted to hustle Master Humphrey. As Catherine Robson notes in her perceptive reading of the novel, ‘Nell is alone walking the streets, perilously close to Covent Garden, London’s traditional red-light district, when she “solicits” Master Humphrey.’39

  Is this adolescent girl in the street at night a child prostitute? One of the most visible forms of prostitution in the nineteenth century, as Judith Walkowitz has reminded us, was that of ‘the isolated activity of the lone streetwalker, a solitary figure in the urban landscape, outside home and hearth, emblematic of urban alienation and the dehumanization of the cash nexus’.40