Night Walks

Reading Night Walks you can sense how night life is a completely different in London. Reading this it seams like I’m reading what London is hiding through the day. Dicken’s kind of  goes into detail about the people who are homeless trying to find shelter anywhere they can and what they do at night. But reading this I think it goes into Dickens relationship with the city at night and just looking at his surroundings.

You can sense the loneliness of the night when he mentions, “We lost a great deal of companionship when the late public-houses turned their lamps out”. When the lights of the city die down the loneliness can start to creep in because everyone is at home sleeping. It could also mean that they are forgotten. In the daytime the streets are busy with people, you forget the surroundings around you.  “London would sink to rest. And then the yearning of the houseless mind would be for any sign of company, any lighted place, and movement”.

Throughout the whole essay he mentions a lot of places in London.  In this essay, you can really put a picture in your head of him walking through the streets of London at night and what he was seeing and feeling. “Between the bridge and the two great theatres, there was but the distance of a few hundred paces, so the theatres came next, Grim and black within, at night, those great dry Wells, and lonesome to imagine with the rows faded out, the lights extinguished”, you can really put a picture in your mind at what he is looking at and feeling. I think of London as this dark lonely night.

He describes these people as “houselessness”, instead of calling them homeless or poor.  I also observed in the beginning that he talks like he is houselessness, but in the beginning of the essay he talks about only being an “amateur of houselessness”. I wonder why he picks the word houslessness instead of homeless, poor, etc. Also, he describes himself as houselessness. Maybe it is just someone who isn’t at home?

Dicken’s mentions Convent-Garden Market where, “men and boys lying asleep under them”. The people who don’t have homes find a way to get by sleeping under wagons. Also, he mentions “children who prowl about this place; who sleep in the baskets, fight for offal, dart at any object they think they can lay their thieving hands on”. London is a big city which has poverty. Every city has it pros but it also has its cons. Children are in poverty trying to do everything they can to stay alive is a sad sight to see.

He really creates a detailed story of what he is seeing through the streets of London.