Dickens, as captured by a cartoonist for the Boston Daily Advertiser in March 1868. Drawing: The Boston Daily Advertiser

Charles Dickens counted miles as well as pages. His sense of the intimate relation between walking and writing can best be glimpsed through his correspondence, which attests to a strenuous interplay between the two. Throughout his life, he wrote letters excusing himself from social visits because of the pressure of work and the necessity of walking.

Dickens consistently represented himself as a kind of emotional machine that required careful handling. As he was courting Catherine Hogarth, the woman who would become his wife, he instructed her about the peculiarity of his composition style: “I never can write with effect—especially in the serious way—until I have got my steam up, or in other words until I have become so excited with my subject that I cannot leave off.” When his monthly numbers (installments) were running late, he pointed out to his publishers that “spirits are not to be forced up to the Pickwick point, every day.” Particularly in the early years when he caged himself in with multiple deadlines, discipline came hard, and he measured his progress by the slips of 8 3/4 x 7 1/4 paper he filled; 32 of them made up a number. Working on Nicholas Nickleby (1837–39), he confessed that he had written much of the night, but had four slips remaining, “and as I foolishly left them ’till this morning have the steam to get up afresh.” After finishing a number he would sometimes describe himself as “breaking out,” as though he had been imprisoned or enchained by the practice of publishing in serial.

By 1850 Dickens could boast that he was working at David Copperfield “like a steam engine,” and he sounded more assured about the necessity for keeping his working and walking hours free from distraction: “At this time of the Month, I must get air and exercise in the evening—and think. . . . This is really the sort of condition on which I hold my inventive powers; and I can’t get rid of it.” Excusing himself from a social invitation, he wrote to the philanthropic heiress Angela Burdett-Coutts as he was working on Bleak House in 1852 that he was anxious to get the month’s number done, “And if I let myself out of my room under such circumstances, I have lost my power over myself for the day.” By 1857, as his personal unhappiness mounted—he and his wife would separate the next year—he was referring to his restlessness as “the penalty of an imaginative life and constitution”; or “the wayward and unsettled feeling which is part (I suppose) of the tenure on which one holds an imaginative life.” His talent, as he experienced it, was a charge that required both rigorous harnessing and daily bouts of physical release. He was required to hold it, and it came with conditions and penalties that exempted him from ordinary social behaviors.

Walking was essential, to bring his books into being, and to calm the effects of his intense engagement with his characters. Repeatedly his letters mention extended periods of walking as he worked toward a new project. The activity of walking allowed him to think his way into new fictional worlds, while allaying the increased restlessness that came upon him when he was still in a state of uncertainty. Dickens joked about this state to Miss Coutts, evoking the emotional violence that accompanied the process: “In the agonies of plotting and contriving a new book . . . I am accustomed to walk up and down the house, smiting my forehead dejectedly; and to be so horribly cross and surly, that the boldest fly at my approach.” At such times, he claims, his publishers never visit him alone “lest I should fall upon a single invader and do murder on his intrusive body.” In the earliest stages of Dombey and Son (1846–48), he writes, “Vague thoughts of a new book are rife within me just now; and I go wandering about at night into the strangest places, according to my usual propensity at such a time—seeking rest, and finding none.” Half-comic images of murder show up frequently to describe both the ends of numbers and the deaths of characters: Dickens begs off a dinner “until my February work has had its throat cut: which laudable deed I shall perform with all convenient dispatch”; the death of Little Nell is a “Nellicide.”

Violent or not, endings required walking. as he was completing Martin Chuzzlewit in 1844, Dickens begged off an invitation from the famed hostess Lady Elizabeth Holland because “I am obliged to walk about the fields and streets every evening . . . otherwise I should not be steadily enough set upon the dismissal of two of the greatest favorites [Tom and Ruth Pinch] I have ever had.” Paul Dombey “died on Friday night about 10 o’clock; and as I had no hope of getting to sleep afterwards, I went out, and walked about Paris until breakfast-time next morning.” As he worked on Little Dorrit (1855–57), in Paris: “My head really stings with the visions of the book, and I am going, as we French say, to disembarrass it by plunging into some of the strange places I glide into of nights in these latitudes.” John Forster, the author’s lifelong friend and biographer, wrote that Dickens needed “an equal severity” of mental and physical exertion; he also seems to have needed a balance or interchange between the internal stimulation of his imaginative labor and the external stimulation of the streets.

Dickens came to understand his need for night streets as “quite a little mental phenomenon” during the mid-1840s, when his writing slowed down and left him restlessly moving between London and the Continent. As he geared up to write The Chimes in Genoa in the fall of 1844, he complained to Forster: “I want a crowded street to plunge into at night.” But that was only one side of the picture. A few weeks later, The Chimes completed, Dickens wrote to his friend and solicitor Thomas Mitton: “I have worn myself to Death, in the Month I have been at Work. None of my usual reliefs have been at hand; I have not been able to divest myself of the story—have suffered very much in my sleep, in consequence—and am so shaken by such work in this trying climate that I am nervous as a man who is dying of Drink: and as haggard as a Murderer.” Images of insomniac self-destruction—drunkard or murderer—are characteristic of his outbursts to friends, suggesting that the invented actions and reactions of his writing left him subject to disturbing arousals of violent and guilty feeling. He truly did feel something like a murderer whenever he completed a story or killed off a character who had been brought to life with such internal intensity on his part.

The best-known letters about writing and city streets come from 1846, during Dickens’s residence in Lausanne, Switzerland. When he arrived there he recognized that he might “want streets sometimes,” and he imagined that Geneva, 24 miles away, might suit the purpose. The Lausanne streets were steep and uninteresting, but the country provided plenty of walking along the lake, in the hills, and along “excellent country roads,” he told Forster. As he wrote the first numbers of Dombey and Son, he reported himself full of invention, “but the difficulty of going at what I call a rapid pace, is prodigious. . . . I suppose this is partly the effect of two years’ ease, and partly of the absence of streets and numbers of figures. I can’t express how much I want these. It seems as if they supplied something to my brain, which it cannot bear, when busy, to lose. . . . My figures seem disposed to stagnate without crowds about them.” The use of the word “figure” to describe both human shapes seen in crowds and Dickens’s already invented characters suggests an intimate traffic between external vistas and internal visualizations that Dickens recognized as essentia1, but which he could not name. This interchange was connected with his desire for rapid motion, and with a corresponding fear of stagnation, of being unable to move.

Being unable to move forward in composition had its obverse side: being unable to get away from his writing. Three weeks after his letter to Forster, Dickens repeated his complaint with a twist: “The absence of accessible streets continues to worry me. . . . At night I want them beyond description. I don’t seem to be able to get rid of my spectres unless I can lose them in crowds.” “My figures” have turned into “my spectres”; the possessor is possessed. Dickens’s anxiety about accessible streets suggests that streets are themselves an important figure for him. They provide the half-lit glimpses that activate the imagination, as well as the stage against which characters may be seen, as one sees in relief a figure who stands out against the crowd.

At the same time, the night street is a place of anonymous merging, where crowds of walkers may absorb, or reabsorb, the interior “spectres” that refuse to dissipate of themselves. The physical action of walking anonymously in a large city can outrun the internal phantasmagoria, while the city offers immersion in the ever-moving, visual entertainment of its crowded streets. These 1846 letters get as close as Dickens ever did to formulating the relationship between streets and narratives. They show how the forward impetus of walking stimulated invention as well as release, and they suggest that walking and writing were entwined with the tension between motion and stasis, creation and death.

Dickens’s powerful need for the forward motion of walking could not be denied, even when he was threatened by the deterioration of his energies. Walking had always been a central character in the mythology of his health, whether he was boasting about his robust physique or trying to walk off his anxieties. And walking would occupy center stage in his decline.

Dickens had suffered from fragile health in childhood, and he was vulnerable to attacks of pain in his left side that he associated with an inflammation of the kidney. In adulthood he prided himself on outgrowing his fragility through discipline and vigorous exercise. His father, John Dickens, had died in 1851 after a bloody operation—without chloroform—for a long-standing bladder disease. Dickens, who was present, told Catherine that his father never mentioned his condition to anyone, and that he showed great strength through the ordeal.

When it came to his own mortal disease, Dickens was his father’s son. He was willing to complain vigorously about the pain of a “frostbitten foot,” but not to connect it with the diagnosis of degenerative heart disease that he received on February 9, 1866, two days after his 54th birthday. As he wrote to his sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth that day, “I am not so foolish as to suppose that all my work can have been achieved without some penalty, and I have noticed for some time a decided change in my buoyancy and hopefulness.” The formula had shifted a bit; now illness rather than restlessness was the tax he paid on his genius.

The saga of the foot began a year earlier. Dickens had always thought of walking as the cure for anything that ailed him. In the winter of 1864 he was staying indoors with a cold, but “the remedy is so new to me, that I doubt if it does me half the good of a dozen miles in the snow. So, if this mode of treatment fails today, I shall try that tomorrow.” Weeks later, in February 1865, he reported being laid up with a wound that he explained to friends as “a frost-bitten foot, from much walking in deep Kentish snow.” Forster got a full-blown explanation: Dickens had had perpetually wet feet in boots that swelled and shrank; he’d repeatedly forced his boot onto a swollen left foot, and continued his rituals of work and walks, until he found himself lame in the snow, three miles from home. The dogs, he reported, were terrified. The pain, causing “sleepless agony,” went on for two months. Then he returned to his 10 miles a day, but he could not wear shoes or boots in the evenings, and he ordered the first of several extra-large boots for his left foot. “Work and worry, without exercise, would soon make an end of me,” he exclaimed to Forster.

The condition recurred periodically, worsening until his death. Perhaps no one knew enough to tell him that it was probably a symptom of vascular disease, or perhaps he could not hear that explanation. The fancy doctor he consulted in 1867, Sir Henry Thompson, told him that he had erysipelas caused, as Dickens put it, by the “action of the boot on an undefended part of a bone, in constant walking.” Whatever Thompson actually said, Dickens read according to his myth of walking. He had to walk; therefore he had to suffer. The idea seemed to cheer him up. Soon after his consult with Thompson, he was writing letter after letter to deny a “preposterous paragraph” in the newspapers about his bad health, declaring himself to be “in sporting training.” He was on his way to America again; in Boston during November, he wrote to Georgina, “I every day take from seven to ten miles in peace.” By the end of the American reading tour, he was limping up to the podium leaning heavily on his manager, George Dolby, and collapsing into Dolby’s arms at the end of each performance.

May 1870 was the last month of Dickens’s life. On the 26th he told a friend he had been “dead-lame” for three weeks. His correspondents all received the same story: “I have been subject for a few years past to a Neuralgic attack in the foot, originating in over walking in deep snow and revived by a hard winter in America. . . . Deprivation of my usual walks is a very serious matter to me, as I cannot work unless I have my constant exercise.” On the 29th, he wrote his last letter to John Forster and included a brief health bulletin: “Foot no worse. But no better.” On the ninth of June he was dead of a stroke.

Rosemarie Bodenheimer is a professor of English at Boston College and the author of The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction (1994). Her essay is drawn from her latest book, Knowing Dickens (copyright © 2007 by Cornell University), by permission of Cornell University Press.