Insomniacs of the City: ‘Houselessness’ and Liminal Spaces in Dickens’ ‘Night Walks’
Insomniacs of the City: ‘Houselessness’ and Liminal Spaces in Dickens’ ‘Night Walks’
Charles Dickens, famous for his social critiques on Victorian England’s poverty, among other issues, was also a pioneer and prophetic writer for the field of modern day medicine, specifically in the areas of sleep disorders such as insomnia. ‘Night Walks’ from The Uncommercial Traveller (1860), a collection of city sketches of nineteenth century London, therefore illustrates the observations of an insomniac. Most likely due to mental exhaustion, the narrator at one point experiences a ‘night fancy’, reflecting upon the relationship between the sane and insane in terms of how and at what time of day they dream. This reflection provides a momentary sense of sympathy and acceptance for this group, as Dickens demonstrates a popular binary mentality that Victorians often used in order to understand the ‘others’ they deemed different from themselves. While a marginalized group such as the insane is able to fit into the binaries of night/day, inside/outside, and asleep/awake, another group is unable to abide to this categorizing system. Thus, in order to understand the homeless—going beyond the social survey of poverty by Charles Booth -- Dickens compares the existence of the homeless with his own participatory role of temporary ‘houselessness’ as an insomniac on a nightly walk. Through the use of language, the theme of insomnia is read in several ways throughout the essay and is an accurate metaphor for the liminal existence of homelessness since insomnia, at its very core, is a shared, human experience.
Famous for attention to detail and realism in his writing, Charles Dickens’ contributions as an author span far beyond the push for social justice during his lifetime in Victorian England by influencing modern day medicine, especially in the areas of sleep disorders such as insomnia and sleep apnea. In the European Respiratory Journal researchers on the study of snoring credit the nineteenth-century novelist by praising Dickens for his work in the introduction to their article:
“In literature, even before medicine, Charles Dickens (1812-1870), with remarkable insight, closely observed and vividly described sleep, its disorders and its facets. Considering that he had no medical experience and lived in an age when sleep was not formally studied, the descriptions that are now recognizable in medicine were depicted with great accuracy…his characters showed the snoring and forms of sleep apnea syndrome, as in "Barnaby Rudge" (Chapter 33) or in "The Uncommercial Traveller" (Chapter 13).” (Dalmasso & Prota 146)
While Dalmasso and Prota specifically mention a character description of snoring in ‘Night Walks’ (chapter 13) from The Uncommercial Traveller as an example for examining sleep apnea, the theme of insomnia instead is examined more closely in this paper as an overarching theme and most importantly, metaphorically describes the condition of homelessness.
Before delving into this complex idea, we must first have a thorough understanding that the role insomnia plays in ‘Night Walks’ for Dickens both as narrator and author. On Dickens and insomnia, Europe PubMed Central states that much of Dickens’ writing illustrates “a variety of manifestations of sleep and its disorders” in due part because “Dickens was, himself, a self-confessed episodic insomniac” and “for this he devised the unique therapy of long night walks” in order to fall back asleep (Europe PMC). Dickens reflects the narrator’s situation with his own personal struggle with insomnia and self-prescribed treatment by taking nightly walks. Thus, the narration in ‘Night Walks’ is from the perspective of an insomniac who decides to take a walk at night in order to achieve sleep, noting his observations of night life and its inhabitants—primarily the homeless, among others--along the way.
Additionally, the theme of insomnia is clearly seen in the author’s language and diction throughout the essay. Linguistically, Dickens anthropomorphizes the natural environment and the city of London as a restless sleeper. When the narrator is at the River Thames he notes, “the wild moon and clouds were as restless as an evil conscience in a tumbled bed…” (Dickens 2) before arriving at the dreary Waterloo Bridge, known for its reputation of suicides. One of the earliest observations on his night walk is “the restlessness of a great city, and the way it tumbles and tosses before it can get to sleep…” which was the case for London, “as if in imitation of individual citizens belonging to it, had expiring fits and starts of restlessness…” (Dickens 1). These descriptions of “fits and starts of restlessness” not only connect us with the experiences of the narrator as an insomniac, indeed a very human experience we can relate to, but the language further helps the reader to imagine London as a living, breathing, restless sleeper. Imagery of insomnia also helps to further understand the idea of liminality, or spaces in between or in transition, that is continually seen throughout the essay. The liminal space of insomnia, as we will later see, is read as a metaphor for the living conditions and existence of homelessness.
One example of liminal space is temporal, or the time in between day and night. Dickens first introduces roughly when he decides to take his nightly walk when he states, “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” (Dickens 1). We can deduce from these clues given to us that the narrator spent approximately the entire night, from 12:30pm to 5:30am, on his night walk. However, these initial concrete details eventually become lost as the narrator keeps track of time, not by the determinant ‘telling of time’, but instead by relying on the nightly activity of the city and changes in the natural environment. In one instance the narrator “came to the great steps of St. Martin’s church as the clock was striking Three”, implying it was 3:00am. In the concluding paragraph, the narrator acknowledges the beginning of day, not by the clock tower this time, but by the sky slowly becoming lighter with the first presence of people in the street: “Now, too, the conscious gas began to grow pale with the knowledge that daylight was coming and straggling workpeople were already in the streets, and as waking life…began to be rekindled with the fires of the first street corner breakfast-sellers” (Dickens 5). The city again is described as an individual, this time stirring and slowly waking up to the beginnings of a new day. However, this is the time for the narrator to retreat as he states “and so by faster and faster degrees, until the last degrees were very fast, the day came, and I was tired and could sleep” (Dickens 5). For the insomniac, daybreak is when sleep is achieved.
This progression—or rather, regression--of telling time (firsthand knowledge, hearing the clock tower, seeing the changing light at daybreak) again reinforces the theme of insomnia. In other words, we can read this change from the determinant to the liminal as a parallel to the exhaustive conditions of an insomniac’s mind: when at first clearly analytical and more in tune with the mind’s inward monologue, thought patterns begin to slow down as an effect from exhaustion; observations become vague, often relying on one’s senses and relationship to the outer environment and ideas become drawn-out and elaborated. It may feel as though one has even reached a dream-like state, though fully awake.
One such elaborate idea or ‘fancy’ as Dickens calls it, is his observation of the insane’s position in Victorian society in relation to the sane. When wandering by Bethlehem hospital at night, the narrator shares his idea or ‘night fancy’ concerning the relationship between insane and sane individuals:
“Are not the sane and the insane equal at night as the sane lie a dreaming? Are not all of us outside this hospital, who dream, more or less in the condition of those inside it, every night of our lives?...Are we not sometimes troubled by our own sleeping inconsistencies, and do we not vexedly try to account for them or excuse them, just as these do something in respect of their waking delusions?...I wonder that the great master who knew everything, when he called Sleep the death of each day’s life, did not call Dreams the insanity of each day’s sanity.” (Dickens 3)
This passage clearly illustrates the dichotomous nature of the narrator’s idea. While the insane are marginalized and considered as one of the groups that live on the fringes of society--both in Victorian times and today--the narrator takes a moment to reflect on their experiences as the inverse experiences of the sane individuals in society. The narrator connects the sane and insane with the idea and conditions of dreaming, viewed through the dichotomous lenses of day and night, alertness and sleep, and inside and outside (the asylum). From this reflection, Dickens encourages such rhetorical questions as: If we are prone to dreaming at night, who is to say that those inside of an asylum experience dreaming during the day? Instead of living our dreams at night through an unconscious mind, what if the insane do the same thing by acting them out during the day? What if they are also unconscious of their physical actions during the day, as we are unconscious of our mental ones at night? A fascinating and thought provoking reflection, this black-and-white dichotomy enables the legitimacy of and raises the class position of this marginalized group on a pedestal at equal height with the rest of society, even if momentarily. However, there is another marginalized group that does not fit neatly into the categories of inside/outside, day/night, sanity/insanity, whichever way it is twisted. To put it quite frankly, where then does the homeless lie in this dichotomous relationship?
On Dickens’ city sketches of London, literary critic David Seed incorporates his opinion with the tensions that scholar Audrey Jaffe observes in Dickens’ writings by stating:
“Eighteenth-century benevolence encounters both nineteenth-century anxiety about social mobility and a nineteenth-century perception of the poor as requiring government scrutiny and regulation. To classify or categorize the figures he saw was one means Dickens used to order the bewildering multiplicity of the city” (Seed 160).
We have already seen Dickens use this method of categorizing social groups with the example of the insane-sane relationship, to attempt to ease this “anxiety about social mobility” by trying to understand them. While taking a moment to reflect upon the conditions of a marginalized group, such as the insane, is a commendable effort on Dickens’ part, herein lies my argument: since the homeless do not fit into any category, their position in society, living conditions, and mere existence, is more complicated to understand and is best understood through the lens of liminal spaces, specifically through the metaphor of insomnia that permeates the entirety of Dickens’ essay. Simply put, as insomnia is the ‘in between stage’ of wakefulness and sleep, awareness and dream, night and day, so too is the condition of homelessness.
To put the issue of homelessness and poverty into a historical perspective during this time period, it is helpful to examine the painstaking efforts and work by Charles Booth. A nineteenth-century businessman turned archivist, Charles Booth was skeptical of the studies made by social reformers who he believed to have “exaggerated London’s poverty levels…estimating that a quarter of the population lived in unacceptable conditions” (British Library). In 1886, Booth decided to find out the truth for himself, and after living with and researching London’s poor, his research concluded that not a quarter, but rather a third of the population lived in poverty. Booth’s research initially entitled the Inquiry into the Life and Labour of the People in London, a project undertaken between the years 1886 and 1903, was later published into 17 volumes. (Charles Booth Online Archive). Booth also created a color-coded visual map illustrating his findings entitled “Booth’s London Poverty Map” and showing the various poverty levels across the districts in London. Examples of the color codes include: “Dark blue stands for 'Very poor. Casual, chronic want', while Black stands for 'Lowest class. Vicious, semi criminal’” (British Library). While his research, maps, and statistics contributed to the foundation for surveying social issues in Victorian England, Dickens was able to give a face to Booth’s statistics—and a grotesque one at that.
As previously mentioned, categorizing groups that were considered non-normative ‘others’ was one way to try to understand the positions of the marginalized in society, in turn temporarily relieving the public’s anxiety of social mobility of these groups. Dickens is able to use this technique in his reflection of the relationship between the insane and sane, evoking sympathy for this group and raising their class level—on an emotional level--to the rest of society, even if momentarily. However, this tactic is impossible to do so with the homeless because they exhibit a liminal existence that does not fit within the normative binaries of day and night, outside and inside, awake and asleep, and sanity and insanity. In order to fully immerse himself and observe this population, Dickens the narrator removes himself from his home on his night walk, temporarily identifying with the condition he calls ‘houselessness’. This differs from ‘homelessness’ since he has the option to return back in the morning to a place of shelter and one he calls home. While the insane are seen as equal and human, the homeless are grotesquely dehumanized to creatures of another species:
“Suddenly, a thing…rose up at my feet with a cry of loneliness…we then stood face to face looking at one another, frightened by one another. The creature was like a beetle-browed hair-lipped youth of twenty…It shivered from head to foot, and its teeth chattered, and as it stared at me…it made with its whining mouth as if it were snapping at me, like a worried dog. Intending to give this ugly object money, I put out my hand to stay it—for it recoiled as it whined and snapped—and laid my hand upon its shoulder. Instantly, it twisted out of its garment…and left me standing alone with its rags in my hands.” (Dickens 4)
Upon first reading this passage, we see Dickens describing this figure using animalistic terms such as “thing”, “creature”, “dog”, “ugly object” and describing its actions with “whining”, “snapping”, “shivered”, “chattered”, “stared”, “recoiled”, “twisted” as if describing the progression of encountering and approaching a wild animal that inevitably escapes out of fear. This animalistic imagery of a homeless person, while hyperbolized, helps to describe the extreme effects living in a liminal existence can have on the homeless. Looking again at the binaries, this individual seems to exist in a liminial, in between stage that includes both and neither phases at the same time; although it is night and the ‘sane’ people are asleep inside, he is clearly awake although it is night, permanently living outside. It is possible that he may sleep when it is day, however, his ‘outside’ appearance is ever-present, regardless of the presence of other people. Similarly, an insomniac is able to be awake both indoors when it is night and when others are supposed to be sleeping, and also outside (in the case of nightly walks) encountering daybreak and the presence of people. While the narrator of ‘Night Walks’ concludes his walk by retreating back indoors at daybreak to go to sleep, other insomniacs are able to stay awake for days on end. This idea of being ever-present despite the conditions of day, time, or state of awareness, is a similar state to those who are homeless.
In essence, insomnia is read as a type of liminal space and state of being that metaphorically describes the existence of the homeless in Charles Dickens’ ‘Night Walks’. Dickens the narrator is able to divorce himself from the rest of society that fits into the binaries of day/night, awake/asleep, inside/outside, sanity/insanity, because of his insomnia. He takes to the streets on a nightly walk in order to treat his sleep disorder by strolling the streets of London and noting his observations. While most are comfortably inside their homes and asleep in their beds at night, this is not the case for the homeless who exist primarily outside in states of awareness and sleep regardless if it is day or night. This in between state is an example of liminality that is further supported by the insomnia imagery seen in Dickens’ language, especially when anthropomorphizing the city and natural environment, and change in telling time, as if from the perspective of an insomniac. This complex idea confirms that the traditional mode of categorizing the ‘others’ in binary terms in order to relieve anxiety of social mobility does not work for every marginalized group, such as the homeless. In order to understand the complex societal position of the homelessness, the idea and parallels of insomnia—a very human and relatable experience—is necessary if we want to attempt to understand them.
Works Cited
“Booth’s Poverty Map.” British Library: Learning Map History. The British Library Board. Web.
“Charles Booth and the Survey into Life and Labour in London (1886-1903).” Charles Booth Online Archive. London School of Economics and Political Science. Web.
Cosnett, J.E. “Charles Dickens: observer of sleep and its disorders.” Sleep. 15.3. (1992): 264- 267. Europe PubMed Central. Web.
Dalmasso, F., R. Prota. “Snoring: analysis, measurement, clinical implications and applications.” European Respiratory Journal. (1996):146-159. Print.
Dickens, Charles. “Night Walks.” The Uncommercial Traveller. (1860). Broadview Anthology of British Literature: The Victorian Era, Volume 5, Second Edition. Broadview Press: 2012. Print.
Seed, David. “Touring the Metropolis: The Shifting Subjects of Dickens’ London Sketches.” The Yearbook of English Studies. 34. (2004): 155-170. Modern Humanities Research Association. Print.