Night Walks: Charles Dickens (Penguin Great Ideas)

Product Information

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 neighborhood London Night, a book of photogravures by Harold Burdekin and John Morrison published in 1934, depicts the capital in inky, unsettling darkness The UT can't sleep and spends his nights walking around London visiting Newgate, Covent Garden, Westminster Abbey and other locales 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 shabbiness of our English capital, as compared with Paris, Bordeaux, Frankfort, Milan, Geneva—almost any important town on the continent of Europe—I find very striking after an absence of any duration in foreign parts. London is shabby in contrast with Edinburgh, with Aberdeen, with Exeter, with Liverpool, with a bright little town like Bury St. Edmunds. London is shabby in contrast with New York, with Boston, with Philadelphia ( Uncommercial Traveller, p. 250).

Whenever I am at Paris, I am dragged by invisible force into the Morgue. I never want to go there, but am always pulled there ( Uncommercial Traveller, p. 64). The UT spends a year of Sundays visiting the ill-attended old churches in the City of London, monuments to another ageThe 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 A very curious disease the Dry Rot in men, and difficult to detect the beginning of. It had carried Horace Kinch inside the wall of the old King’s Bench prison, and it had carried him out with his feet foremost. He was a likely man to look at, in the prime of life, well to do, as clever as he needed to be, and popular among many friends. He was suitably married, and had healthy and pretty children. But, like some fair-looking houses or fair-looking ships, he took the Dry Rot. The first strong external revelation of the Dry Rot in men, is a tendency to lurk and lounge; to be at street-corners without intelligible reason; to be going anywhere when met; to be about many places rather than at any; to do nothing tangible, but to have an intention of performing a variety of intangible duties to-morrow or the day after. When this manifestation of the disease is observed, the observer will usually connect it with a vague impression once formed or received, that the patient was living a little too hard. He will scarcely have had leisure to turn it over in his mind and form the terrible suspicion “Dry Rot,” when he will notice a change for the worse in the patient’s appearance: a certain slovenliness and deterioration, which is not poverty, nor dirt, nor intoxication, nor ill-health, but simply Dry Rot. To this, succeeds a smell as of strong waters, in the morning; to that, a looseness respecting money; to that, a stronger smell as of strong waters, at all times; to that, a looseness respecting everything; to that, a trembling of the limbs, somnolency, misery, and crumbling to pieces. As it is in wood, so it is in men. Dry Rot advances at a compound usury quite incalculable. A plank is found infected with it, and the whole structure is devoted. Thus it had been with the unhappy Horace Kinch, lately buried by a small subscription. Those who knew him had not nigh done saying, “So well off, so comfortably established, with such hope before him—and yet, it is feared, with a slight touch of Dry Rot!” when lo! the man was all Dry Rot and dust. The UT reflects on a tutor from his youth and imagines himself as Tommy Merton, from the children's book The History of Sanford and Merton (by Thomas Day-1783) who was tutored by Mr Barlow

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 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 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 The UT laments the ubiquitous thug having free reign in the streets of London and the seemingly powerless effect of the police. He also gives an account of his bringing charges against a young woman for using foul language in public

Retailers:

People who inhabited the streets after dark were still popularly assumed to be social outcasts of one kind or another’ 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 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 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). 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).