The Walker

by Matthew Beaumont

  4 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1983), p. 55.

  5 Dickens, ‘The Heart of London’, in On London, pp. 5–6.

  6 Dickens, ‘Gone Astray’, in On London, pp. 7–19.

  7 Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, p. 53. The Tramp’s mode of ambulation might be called a concrete instance of the Kantian notion of ‘purposiveness without purpose’.

  8 George Eliot, Romola, ed. Andrew Brown (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998), pp. 202–3.

  9 Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, p. 54.

  10 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 12–13.

  11 J. S. Mill, cited in Norman Feltes, ‘To Saunter, to Hurry: Dickens, Time, and Industrial Capitalism’, Victorian Studies 20: 3 (1977), pp. 251–2. I have relied extensively on pp. 250–2 of Feltes’s excellent article in this paragraph, though it should be pointed out that he is interested in time-discipline as opposed to walking per se.

  12 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 255.

  13 Quoted in Joseph A. Amato, On Foot: A History of Walking (New York: New York University Press, 2004), p. 1.

  14 See E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present 38: 1 (1967), pp. 56–97.

  15 Charles Dickens, ‘The Street – Morning’, in Dickens’s Journalism: Sketches by Boz and Other Early Papers 1833–39, ed. Michael Slater (London: Phoenix, 1996), p. 54.

  16 Quoted in Michael Slater, ‘Introduction’, in Dickens’s Journalism, p. xvi. These sentences were subsequently omitted from collected editions of the Sketches.

  17 Thomas Hood, unsigned review of Master Humphrey’s Clock in the Athenaeum of 7 November 1840, in Charles Dickens: The Critical Heritage, ed. Philip Collins (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 97. Note that Hood’s apparently misleading assessment of Swiveller, who eventually evolves into something close to the novel’s moral hero, reflects his characterization in the first issue of the periodical.

  18 Paul Carter, Repressed Spaces: The Poetics of Agoraphobia (London: Reaktion, 2002), p. 39.

  19 Charles Dickens, ‘His General Line of Business’, in The Uncommercial Traveller and Reprinted Pieces, ed. Leslie C. Staples (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 1–2.

  20 ‘Cash Payment the sole nexus: and there are so many things which cash will not buy!’ See Thomas Carlyle, ‘Chartism’, in Selected Writings, ed. Alan Shelston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 199.

  21 Dickens, ‘His General Line of Business’, pp. 1, 2.

  22 Charles Dickens, ‘Shy Neighbourhoods’, in The Uncommercial Traveller, p. 95.

  23 John Bowen, Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 133.

  24 Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, ed. Elizabeth M. Brennan (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998), p. 5. Hereafter, page references appear in parenthesis after the quotation. Note that the first issue of Master Humphrey’s Clock sold 70,000 copies but that within a fortnight its circulation had dropped to 50,000.

  25 See Elizabeth M. Brennan, ‘Introduction’, in The Old Curiosity Shop, p. xxvi.

  26 Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (London: Minerva, 1991), p. 335. Michael Hollington has underlined the fact that throughout his life walking in streets functioned for Dickens as an outlet for tension when he was labouring especially hard on a book – see ‘Dickens the Flâneur’, The Dickensian 77: 2 (1981), pp. 71–87.

  27 John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, vol. 1 (London: J. M. Dent, 1966), p. 121.

  28 Audrey Jaffe, ‘“Never Be Safe but in Hiding”: Omniscience and Curiosity in The Old Curiosity Shop’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 19: 2 (1986), p. 130.

  29 Sheridan Le Fanu, ‘The Familiar’, in In a Glass Darkly, ed. Robert Tracy (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1999), p. 70.

  30 For example, Michael Hollington does not mention him in his discussion of The Old Curiosity Shop in his Dickens and the Grotesque (London: Croom Helm, 1984), pp. 79–95.

  31 Bowen, Other Dickens, p. 141.

  32 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, ed. Seamus Deane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), p. 434. Loralee MacPike invokes Joyce’s phrase, but makes little more than cosmetic use of it, in Dostoevsky’s Dickens: A Study of Literary Influence (London: George Prior, 1981), p. 19.

  33 Alfred Tennyson, Maud, in Tennyson: A Selected Edition, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longman, 1989), p. 575.

  34 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Man of the Crowd’, in Selected Tales, ed. David Van Leer (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998), p. 85. On relevant aspects of the complicated, rather elusive literary relations between Dickens and Poe, who reviewed the first volume of Master Humphrey’s Clock for Graham’s Magazine, see Gerald C. Grubb, ‘The Personal and Literary Relationships of Dickens and Poe, Part One: From “Sketches by Boz” through “Barnaby Rudge”’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 5: 1 (1950), pp. 1–22; and Laurence Senelick, ‘Charles Dickens and “The Tell-Tale Heart”’, Poe Studies 6: 1 (1973), pp. 12–14.

  35 Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, p. 48.

  36 Charles Dickens, Master Humphrey’s Clock, ed. Derek Hudson (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1958), p. 5. Hereafter, page references appear in parenthesis after the quotation.

  37 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. P. E. Charvet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 397–8.

  38 Ibid., pp. 399–400.

  39 Catherine Robson, Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 87.

  40 Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (London: Virago, 1992), p. 22.

  41 See Brennan, ‘Introduction’, p. xxviii.

  42 Charles Dickens, ‘The Prisoners’ Van’, in Dickens’s Journalism, p. 272.

  43 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, ed. Victor Neuberg (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 475.

  44 Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Weir of Hermiston, ed. Emma Letley (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998), pp. 9, 19. ‘Compared most often to an ape, a monkey, or a child’, Nina Auerbach has observed, ‘the dwarfish Mr Hyde is less vividly present than was Dickens’ Quilp, from whom he seems to have derived’ – see Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 102.

  45 See Rosemary Mundhenk, ‘Creative Ambivalence in Dickens’s Master Humphrey’s Clock’, Studies in English Literature 32: 4 (1992), p. 652, where she calls Quilp ‘a grotesquely inverted parody of Humphrey’. Matthew Rowlinson, in ‘Reading Capital with Little Nell’, Yale Journal of Criticism 9: 2 (1996), p. 359, has observed that Master Humphrey and Nell’s grandfather, both of whom take walks at night, are also doubles,. Incidentally, I am convinced that G. K. Chesterton was correct to argue, in an essay on The Old Curiosity Shop, that ‘the function of criticism, if it has a legitimate function at all, can only be one function – that of dealing with the subconscious part of the author’s mind which only the critic can express, and not with the conscious part of the author’s mind, which the author himself can express. Either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position) or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots.’ See Criticisms and Appreciations of the Works of Charles Dickens (London: J. M. Dent, 1933), pp. 51–2.

  46 See Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, p. 79: ‘the dwarf being one of that kind of persons who usually make themselves at home, he soon cast his eyes upon a chair, into which he skipped with uncommon agility, and perching himself on the back with his feet upon the seat, was thus enabled to look on and list
en with greater comfort to himself, besides gratifying at the same time that taste for doing something fantastic and monkey-like, which on all occasions had strong possession of him. Here, then, he sat, one leg cocked carelessly over the other, his chin resting on the palm of his hand, his head turned a little on one side, and his ugly features twisted into a complacent grimace.’

  47 Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 433.

  48 Ibid., p. 33. In Stephen Hero (1903–05), Stephen mentions The Old Curiosity Shop during a discussion of The Wild Duck with his mother. She has been moved by it, but Stephen is keen not ‘to encourage her to an open record of her feelings’, so he pre-empts her by saying: ‘I hope you’re not going to mention Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop.’ See James Joyce, Stephen Hero, ed. Theodore Spencer (London: Panther, 1977), p. 80. Joyce also parodies Little Nell’s death in ‘The Oxen of the Sun’ section in Ulysses – for a discussion of this, consult Matthew Bolton, ‘Joycean Dickens/Dickensian Joyce’, Dickens Quarterly 23: 4 (December 2006), p. 245.

  49 See Thomas Karshan, Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 178. Note too that the name of Humbert’s antagonist Quilty recalls that of Quilp.

  50 Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 62.

  51 Ibid., p. 115.

  3. Disappearing

  1 Quoted in Greg Olsen, David Lynch: Beautiful Dark (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2008), p. 436.

  2 See David Lynch, Lynch on Lynch, ed. Chris Rodley, revised edition (London: Faber & Faber, 2005), pp. 238–9, 289.

  3 American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition (Washington: American Psychiatric Association, 2013), pp. 293, 299.

  4 Iain Sinclair, London Orbital: A Walk Around the M25 (London: Granta, 2002), pp. 120–1.

  5 Ibid., p. 121. See also Iain Sinclair, ‘The Pilgrim Painter’, Tate Etc. 45 (2019), pp. 70–81.

  6 Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000–1887, ed. Matthew Beaumont (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2007), p. 197. Here-after, page references appear in parenthesis after the quotation. For a fuller account of Looking Backward, see Matthew Beaumont, The Spectre of Utopia: Utopian and Science Fictions at the Fin de Siècle (Bern: Peter Lang, 2015), Chapters 1 to 5.

  7 William Morris, ‘“Looking Backward”’, in Political Writings: Contributions to Justice and Commonweal, 1883–1890, ed. Nicholas Salmon (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994), p. 420.

  8 Krishan Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p. 151.

  9 Edward Bellamy, ‘Why I Wrote “Looking Backward”’, in Edward Bellamy Speaks Again! Articles, Public Addresses, Letters (Kansas City: Peerage Press, 1937), p. 202.

  10 Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia, p. 151.

  11 I am of course echoing Adorno’s limpid assessment of the dialectical relationship between high and low art, in a letter to Walter Benjamin of 18 March 1936: ‘Both are torn halves of an integral freedom to which, however, they do not add up.’ See Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), p. 130. The essay and romance forms are, respectively, expressions of precisely this cultural divide.

  12 Franklin Rosemont, almost the only critic to have taken Bellamy seriously as a psychologist, has gone so far as to eulogize him as ‘a relentless explorer of his own mind’ who ‘advanced to the threshold of psychoanalysis and even of surrealism’. See ‘Bellamy’s Radicalism Reclaimed’, in Looking Backward: 1988–1888, ed. Daphne Patai (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 149.

  13 Edward Bellamy, Miss Ludington’s Sister (London: William Reeves, 1893), pp. 96, 98.

  14 The formulation ‘Go West, young man, and grow up with the country’ was used by John B. L. Soule as the title of an editorial for the Terre Haute Express in 1851. Subsequently, in the abbreviated form of ‘Go west, young man’, it came to be associated with Horace Greeley, founding editor of the New York Tribune, who was famous in the mid-nineteenth century for his criticism of the consequences of monopolization and land speculation. In 1870, Greeley publicly supported a Fourierian utopian colony, called Greeley, which the agricultural editor of the Tribune, Nathan Meeker, set up in Colorado.

  15 Edward Bellamy, ‘The Blindman’s World’, in Apparitions of Things to Come: Edward Bellamy’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, ed. Franklin Rosemont (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1990), p. 45.

  16 Tom H. Towers, ‘The Insomnia of Julian West’, American Literature 47: 1 (1975), pp. 56, 53.

  17 Philip E. Wegner, Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), p. 90.

  18 Kathryn Milun, Pathologies of Modern Space: Empty Space, Urban Anxiety, and the Recovery of the Urban Self (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 2.

  19 Edward Bellamy, Talks on Nationalism (Chicago: Peerage Press, 1938), pp. 98–9.

  20 Edward Bellamy, ‘A Midnight Drama’, in Apparitions of Things to Come, p. 102.

  21 Edward Bellamy, ‘The Old Folks’ Party’, in Apparitions of Things to Come, p. 54.

  22 Ibid., p. 62.

  23 Samuel Haber, ‘The Nightmare and the Dream: Edward Bellamy and the Travails of Socialist Thought’, Journal of American Studies 36: 3 (2002), p. 435.

  24 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983), p. 18.

  25 Michael G. Kenny, The Passion of Ansel Bourne: Multiple Personality in American Culture (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986), p. 77.

  26 Richard Hodgson, ‘A Case of Double Consciousness’, cited in Frederic W. H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival or Bodily Death (London: Longmans Green, 1903), vol. 1, p. 309.

  27 Kenny, The Passion of Ansel Bourne, p. 67.

  28 Jessica Catherine Lieberman, ‘Flight from Haunting: Psychogenic Fugue and Nineteenth-Century American Imagination’, in Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination, ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004) p. 150.

  29 William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 371.

  30 Ibid.

  31 In the medical literature, Albert Dadas is often referred to as ‘Albert X’ – appropriately, perhaps, because since at least the late eighteenth century the letter ‘X’ has signified an indeterminate identity, or, in mathematical terms, an unknown quantity.

  32 Ian Hacking, Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 7.

  33 Ibid., p. 12.

  34 Ibid., p. 32.

  35 Ibid., pp. 28, 78.

  36 Ian Hacking, ‘Automatisme Ambulatoire: Fugue, Hysteria, and Gender at the Turn of the Century’, Modernism/Modernity 3: 2 (1996), p. 41.

  37 W. H. Hudson, A Crystal Age (London: Fisher Unwin, 1887); and Mrs George Corbett, New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future (London: Tower, 1889). On the latter, see Matthew Beaumont, ‘The New Woman in Nowhere: Feminism and Utopianism at the Fin de Siècle’, in The New Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin de Siècle Feminisms, eds Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis (London: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 212–23; and Matthew Beaumont, Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870–1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), pp. 120–8.

  38 Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde & Weir of Hermiston, ed. Emma Letley (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998), p. 67.

  39 William Morris, News from Nowhere, in Three Works by William Morris, ed. A. L. Morton (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1986), pp. 400–1.

  40 Hacking, Mad Travelers, p. 37.

  41 H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, ed. John Lawton (London: Everyman, 1995), p. 81.

  42 Hacking, Mad Travelers, p. 115.

  43 See Beaumont, Utopia Ltd., pp. 1–5.

  44 In 1881, the physician George Miller Beard published American N
ervousness. In it he defined neurasthenia as the ‘American disease’, locating its origins in the mechanics of metropolitan life at the fin de siècle – in particular, technological developments such as steam power and the telegraph, and social developments such as the periodical press and the women’s movement. Beard also argued that, although forethought or ‘foreworry’, as he termed it, makes civilization possible, ‘this forecasting, this sacrifice of the present to the future, this living for our posterity’, also causes anxiety and increased nervousness. See George M. Beard, American Nervousness, Its Causes and Consequences; A Supplement to Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia) (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1881), p. 129. Bellamy’s utopian vision offers to redeem the neurasthenic consequences of ‘forecasting’ by transforming anticipation of the future into an inspiriting activity, collective rather than individual, active rather than passive.

  45 Bellamy, ‘The Blindman’s World’, p. 33.

  46 Edward Bellamy, ‘Plots for Stories’, in Apparitions of Things to Come, p. 175.

  47 Kenny, The Passion of Ansel Bourne, p. 69.

  48 See Lieberman, ‘Flight from Haunting’, pp. 149–50.

  49 Ibid., pp. 151–2.

  50 On ‘social dreaming’, see Lyman Tower Sargent, ‘The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited’, Utopian Studies 5 (1994), pp. 1–37; and Beaumont, Utopia Ltd., passim.

  51 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), p. 339.

  52 Morris, News from Nowhere, p. 400.

  53 Robert Philmus,’H. G. Wells’s Revisi(tati)ons of The Time Machine’, English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 41: 4 (1998), pp. 427–52.

  54 Making a rather different point, Jameson writes that the fiction of Philip K. Dick ‘is a virtual “art of the fugue” of storytelling, narrative pyrotechnics that unravel themselves in delirium and can stand as a critique of representation itself’ – see Archaeologies of the Future, p. 348.

  4. Fleeing

  1 H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man, ed. Matthew Beaumont (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2017), p. 114. Hereafter, page references appear in parenthesis after the quotation.