Page:Works of Charles Dickens, ed. Lang - Volume 29.djvu/15

Rh devotee, in this chapter on churches, with his "Thirteen thousand pounds," to which the child added in a weak human voice, "Seventeen and fourpence," may have lent a trait to Mr. Pumblechook. "Shy Neighbourhoods" illustrate Dickens's very original remedy for insomnia, of which the Faculty, we may presume, does not approve. Going to bed tired, and failing to sleep, he did not, like Wordsworth, count the visionary flocks, nor adopt any such devices. He merely got up, and walked endlessly through the night. It was a remedy apt to kill most men of weary brains. He tells how, walking half asleep, he composed thousands of verses, and spoke with fluency a language almost lost to him in his waking condition. His intellect was as remarkable in its abnormal as in its normal condition, and psychologists might have worse themes than the less normal psychical states of Dickens, as of Shelley, Tennyson, George Sand, Alfred de Musset, Scott, Goethe, and many others. Dickens has left some very curious notes on experiences of his own, in the subconscious region out of which genius appears to rise. But these notes are scattered, as mere curiosities, among the less curious things which he observed in his nocturnal rambles. Among "Tramps" he is out again in the sunlit world, and his remarks prove that the tramp has forgotten nothing. "Dullborough Town" is Rochester: "all my early readings and early recollections dated from this place," he said; and from Chatham, where the field and hawthorns of his infancy were devoured, as is usual, by a railway station. "I suppose it is all built over now," said the English child wistfully, when first informed about the amenities of Heaven.

Returning to dreams, in " Night Walks," Dickens asks, un consciously repeating Swift, "whether the sane and insane