Night Walks: Charles Dickens (Penguin Great Ideas)

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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 People who inhabited the streets after dark were still popularly assumed to be social outcasts of one kind or another’ 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. resisting the urge to stop into the fine art galleries and new restaurants at Somerset House, a mansion complex that once housed the Navy

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). 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 The UT recalls, fondly and otherwise, the birthday celebrations he has attended, both his own and others...including Shakespeare's 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 An outdoor cinema projection in Wood Street, Waltham Forest, brings people together in Philipp Ebeling’s imageThe 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 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). 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 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 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).

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 NamelesstonAll 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!' Trafalgar Square by Moonlight by Henry Pether, c1865, exemplifies the Romantic portrayal of London at night 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 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