Night Walks: Charles Dickens (Penguin Great Ideas)

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Now, I have always held that there may be, and that there unquestionably is, such a thing as use without abuse, and that therefore the total abolitionists are irrational and wrong-headed ( Uncommercial Traveller, p. 361). I was rather amazed to be told this by the very queer small boy; for that house happens to be MY house, and I have reason to believe that what he said was true ( Uncommercial Traveller, p. 61-62). GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are. Read more Details

All about him,' said the very queer small boy. 'I am old (I am nine), and I read all sorts of books. But DO let us stop at the top of the hill, and look at the house there, if you please!' The UT can't sleep and spends his nights walking around London visiting Newgate, Covent Garden, Westminster Abbey and other locales A nocturnal walking tour through the heart of London, “Night Walks” engages our sympathies and enlarges our social vision. It invites the reader to look at familiar places with fresh eyes, to see people who might otherwise remain invisible, and to imagine what we may have in common with those less fortunate than ourselves. I took him up in a moment, and we went on. Presently, the very queer small boy says, 'This is Gads-hill we are coming to, where Falstaff went out to rob those travellers, and ran away.' The UT visits several miserably poor abodes in Ratcliff. He is heartbroken at the sight of these poor families and starving children. He brightens as he turns his steps towards home and stumbles across the East London Children's Hospital, run by a young doctor and his wife. This saintly couple, with a staff of young nurses, give much-needed care to the children of this poor neighborhoodThe UT pays a series of visits to one of the alms-houses established in his last will and testament by Sampson Titbull in 1723. He observes how the inmates, men and women, keep close tabs on one another and as one voice curse the trustees who run the place. A conceived blight upon the establishment occurs when the youngest of the ladies of the house marries a Greenwich pensioner The month was March, and the weather damp, cloudy, and cold. The sun not rising before half-past five, the night perspective looked sufficiently long at half-past twelve: which was about my time for confronting it.

The UT rambles through the deserted City on the weekend. He observes couples making hay, and making love, in the old churchyards. He also muses about the closed up banks and Garraways shut up coffeehouse Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Henry Jekyll, to give a classic example, disappeared into the city’s shadows, in the shape of his nocturnal underside Mr Edward Hyde, in 1886, some eight years after London streets were first lit by electric arc lamps. In the early 20th century, exploiting women’s limited opportunities for social liberation, Virginia Woolf celebrated her walks after dark in terms of ‘street haunting’. She praised ‘the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow’. The UT presses with a Parisienne crowd to view the body of a recently killed old man. He also recounts seeing the body of a woman drowned in Regents Canal in London and of his serving at the inquest of a young mother whose baby has died quadrangles.” His novelistic descriptions of the spot still bear true today: “It is one of those nooks, the turning into which out of the clashing The UT imagines himself a policeman on his beat in East London. He revisits the Children's Hospital and visits the lead-mills, both referred to in A Small Star in the East

Night Walks

The UT finds himself in an old coaching inn, the Dolphin's Head, in a town gone to seed since coach travel was supplanted by the railroad The UT fondly recalls visits to places he has never been...in the beloved books of his youth. He also recalls being terrified as a child by the macabre stories told him by his nurse The UT visits a workhouse in Liverpool containing dead and dying soldiers who have returned from India amid terrible conditions onboard the Great Tasmania People who inhabited the streets after dark were still popularly assumed to be social outcasts of one kind or another’

The UT boards the steamship Russia in New York for his return from America on April 22, 1868. He reports on the voyage and the contant roar of the ship's screw. He arrives in Liverpool on May 1, 1868, completing a trip that severely taxed his health The UT visits the School of Industry, sponsored by the Stepney Union Workhouse where students attend class for half of the regular school hours and the other half in industrial (vocational) training. He approves of this form of education and cites his reasons London Night, a book of photogravures by Harold Burdekin and John Morrison published in 1934, depicts the capital in inky, unsettling darkness The UT muses on seemingly absurd savage rituals, particularly funerals and government, that, on reflection, are no more absurd, and maybe less so, than those of civilized England

The UT makes two visits to the Britannia Theatre in Hoxton. On Saturday night he sees a pantomime and a melodrama. On the following Sunday evening he attends religious services there

The UT recalls, fondly and otherwise, the birthday celebrations he has attended, both his own and others...including Shakespeare's To walk on to the Bank, 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 houseless circuit of the Bank, and give a thought to the treasure within; likewise to 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 the 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 old King’s Bench prison before me for my next object, and resolving, when I should come to the wall, to think of poor Horace Kinch, and the Dry Rot in men. The UT observes a Temperence Movement rally from his window in Covent Garden. His view on Temperence has always been that there can be use without abuse. Noticing that some of the wagons used in the rally were over-burdening their horses he states the case that all should obstain from using horses, even those who do not misuse themAn outdoor cinema projection in Wood Street, Waltham Forest, brings people together in Philipp Ebeling’s image The UT spends a year of Sundays visiting the ill-attended old churches in the City of London, monuments to another age The UT, accompanied by his friend Bullfinch, endures a terrible dining experience at the Temeraire in Namelesston