Bharles 4ickens – the prodigious walker

While I might congratulate myself on a couple of 10-mile walks in a week, Charles Dickens was a much more notable walker, both for speed and length of his walks. He strode around London (by both night and day), the results of which are recorded in his novels and other writings.

Sam Weller in Pickwick Papers shares his “extensive and peculiar knowledge of London”.

As the narrator in The Old Curiosity Shop records, “Night is generally my time for walking... it affords me greater opportunity of speculating on the characters and occupations of those who fill the streets... a glimpse of passing faces caught by the light of a street-lamp or a shop window is often better for my purpose than their full revelation in the daylight”.

Miss Havisham in Great Expectations is said to be based on a woman who wandered Berners Street in her wedding dress having been abandoned by her fiance.

But his most prodigious walk took him one night in 1857 from Tavistock House, which he had leased since 1851, to Gad’s Hill near Rochester in Kent, which he had bought in 1855, and which became his base for the remaining 13 years of his life.

“My last special feat” wrote Dickens, “was turning out of bed at two, after a hard day, pedestrian and otherwise, and walking thirty miles into the country to breakfast. The road was so lonely in the night that I fell asleep to the monotonous sound of my own feet, doing their regular four miles an hour. Mile after mile I walked, without the slightest sense of exertion, dozing heavily and dreaming constantly. It was only when I made a stumble like a drunken man, or struck out into the road to avoid a horseman close upon me on the path - who had no existence - that I came to myself and looked about.” (1860 All The Year Round)

His eldest son, Charley, in recalling walking with him, provides a more likely explanation of ‘dozing’: “Many a mile have I walked with him thus - he striding along with his regular four-miles-anhour swing; his eyes looking straight before him, his lips slightly working, as they generally did when he sat thinking and writing; almost unconscious of companionship, and keeping half a pace or so ahead”.

Walking was then an essential part of everyday life, as maybe it has become again. In Sketches by Boz he notes how “the early clerk population of Somers and Camden towns, Islington, and Pentonville, are fast pouring into the city; or delivering their steps towards Chancery Lane and the Inns of Court. Middleaged men, whose salaries have by no means increased in the same proportion as their families, plod steadily along, apparently with no object in view but the counting-house; knowing by sight almost every body they meet or overtake, for they have seen them every morning (Sundays excepted) during the past twenty years, but speaking to no one.”

In 1857 he had gone on a walking tour with his fellow author Wilkie Collins in the north of England in pursuit of Ellen Ternan, who was to become his mistress, and just happened to turn up at the races in Doncaster where Ellen was performing at the theatre (see The Walking Tour of Two Idle Apprentices). But that of course is another story.