The Shadow of Lear’s ‘Houseless’ in Dickens

Summary

To walk the streets of London by night, in the wind and rain, this was for Dickens the surest way to summon and greet his darkest visions. And this was how he staged himself for the readers of All the Year Round in one of his most astonishing pieces of non-fiction writing, the essay entitled 'Night Walks' (21 July 1860), subsequently gathered in The Uncommercial Traveller (1861, and later, expanded editions).

Unable to sleep, he recalls, he had wandered through the night past the great enclosures of the capital, past theatres, prisons, Bank, Hospital, Parliament, Law-Courts, Abbey, Market and railway terminus. His thoughts and imaginings are suffused with Shakespearian echoes, of Macbeth's sleeplessness and Hamlet's graveyard, but the words that reverberate most persistently have their source in King Lear: 'houseless' and 'houselessness'. Shakespeare finds the adjective for the moment at which Lear is seized by the thought of the 'poor naked wretches' whose condition he is now about to endure feelingly for the first time.