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I wasn’t really planning on posting on Saturdays, and I’m sure I won’t routinely. But last weekend’s short note on Martin Luther actually drew a surprising amount of traffic, so I thought I should experiment with another Saturday post—aiming again, however, at keeping it short, and focusing, as I did a week ago, on something less than book-length.
But what? As I left my office earlier today, I cast my eye over the stack of books on my desk. And it fell on a slender volume from Penguin’s “Great Ideas” series: Night Walks, by Charles Dickens. Its real significance in my library has less to do with its content than with where I bought it a little over a year ago: at the Charles Dickens Museum, a house at 48 Doughty Street in London where Dickens lived from 1837 to 1839. Nothing like buying a book by Dickens in his own former house!
It contains eight essays describing—this will not come as a surprise—walks that Dickens took by night through parts of London. I haven’t read all of them, but I had the chance to read a few—more than anticipated—while sitting around cooling my heels in a waiting room this evening.
Every few years I spend a semester in London while teaching in my university’s honors program, so one of the pleasures of these essays is recognizing various locations Dickens passes: the Guildhall, St. Paul’s, Waterloo Bridge, the Houses of Parliament, Covent Garden. There is always a special kind of pleasure—like the secret thrill of being “in the know” on a secret—that goes along with reading stories set in familiar places that you know yourself. And with thinking that you and the author have walked the same streets.
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The essays, short though they are, bear the usual Dickens touches. His sense of humor is on display, as when he describes getting lost as a boy of eight or nine, and wandering the city, certain that he would now need to fend for himself in life. A small dog, whom he christens Merrychance, appears to befriend him—young Charles was certain “that he was to be my dog for ever afterwards, and that he would help me to seek my fortune”—but then proves more interested in the boy’s sausage, which he snatches and runs off with. “He never came back to help me seek my fortune,” reports the adult Dickens.
That evening the boy wanders into a local working-class theater—another typical touch, since Dickens was a great lover of theater and enjoyed acting himself. He recounts watching a rather remarkable show but not being able to enjoy it, because he is certain the whole time that his ticket will prove to hold the winning number for a donkey being raffled off at intermission. “How was I to feed him? Where was I to stable him?,” he wonders. “It was bad enough to have gone astray by myself, but to go astray with a donkey, too, was a calamity more tremendous than I could bear to contemplate.” Fortunately, his fears of good fortune are unfounded, for another fellow wins the donkey—ironically, someone who already seems surprisingly well-acquainted with the beast. But Charles is able to enjoy the second half of the show, before the enormity of his situation finally sinks in.
Dickens’s social conscience is also on display in a moving essay entitled “A Small Star in the East.” He describes walking one day through the east side of London, through a “squalid maze of streets, courts, and alleys of miserable houses let out in single rooms,” populated by unskilled laborers trying desperately, and often unsuccessfully, to find work. Dickens enters a few houses and speaks to their inhabitants, finding unemployed fathers, a young woman sick with lead-poisoning from working in the lead mills, mothers trying to maintain some semblance of dignity and tidiness while feeding their children on old bread and a bit of weak tea. And children: young, hungry, sick, and dying.
“I could not bear the contemplation of the children,” writes Dickens. And then he spots a sign bearing an inscription for the East London Children’s Hospital. Entering, he finds an oasis of “nourishment, cleanliness, and ventilation.” A young husband and wife had opened the hospital—Dickens does not name them, but they were Nathaniel Heckford and his wife Sarah—in order to care for the poor children of the neighborhood. Assisted by nurses who work less for money than for love of their small charges, they have a house full of children whom they are kindly nursing back toward health. Dickens’s eyes meet those of one of the children, and as they gaze at each other, he writes,
I felt as though the child implored me to tell the story of the little hospital in which it was sheltered to any gentle heart I could address. Laying my world-worn hand upon the little unmarked clasped hand at the chin, I gave it a silent promise that I would do so.
Classic Dickens, that. And he kept his promise. This very essay helped raise awareness of the hospital, as well as funds to sustain its operation. Eventually, in 1942, it would be incorporated into the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children. As a little bonus below, you can see some images I found showing scenes from the East London Children’s Hospital, Dicken’s “small star of the East.”
Thanks for reading, have a great weekend, and I’ll see you next week with another installment From My Bookshelf.
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