Retitled 'Night Walks' in collected editions of the series 

In March of the year 1851, Dickens's father entered a painful last illness, resulting in his death on the final day of the month. He was buried on the 4th of April, in Highgate cemetery. On the morning of the 3rd, Dickens wrote to W.H. Wills from his bed at Tavistock House, to say that 'I took my threatened walk last night' and that 'I am so worn out by the sad arrangements ... that I cannot take my natural rest' (see Pilgrim, Vol. VI, p. 345–46&n.). The letter goes on to propose an all-night visit to the Bow-street Station House, described in 'The Metropolitan Protectives' (HW, Vol. III [26 Apr 1851], pp. 97–105; repr. in Stone, Vol. I, pp. 253–73), and remind Wills that the following night 'we go to the gas-works'. The letter thus indicates at least three consecutive night expeditions made by Dickens during a period of insomnia provoked by his father's death, and suggests a possible derivation of the narrator's opening remarks (and the description of Bow-street coffee shops) in Dickens's personal experience.

The narrator locates the 'series of nights' described in the month of March, and dates them to before 1857, as on 9 October of that year a dismembered corpse – the 'chopped-up murdered man' referred to – had been discovered in a bag on a pier of Waterloo Bridge. Foreign Office and Scotland Yard evidence suggested that the victim had been an Italian Police Agent murdered by London-based revolutionists (see W. Matchett, 'The Chopped-Up Murdered Man', The Dickensian, Vol. 14 [1918], pp. 117–19).
      Neverthless, Dickens' experience of night-walking cannot be confined to any particular year or decade. Planning Dombey and Son in March 1846, for example, he records 'wandering about at night into the strangest places, according to my usual propensity at such a time – seeking rest, and finding none' (Pilgrim, Vol. IV, p. 510&n.). In an essay of October 1852, 'Lying Awake' (HW, Vol. VI, 30 October 1852), he recalls defeating insomnia 'the other night' by resolving 'to lie awake no more, but to get up and go out for a night walk'. As with daylight walking, nocturnal rambling was a lifelong habit, and since Boz's celebrated sketch of 'The Streets – Night' (1836) the experience had been providing him with inspiration for writing. By 1860, accounts of 'noctambulisme' in London had become the specialty of Dickens's talented protegé, G. H. A. Sala, by now a rival magazine editor, whose racy and sometimes risqué articles were republished in the popular collections Gaslight and Daylight (London, 1859) and Twice Round the Clock (London, 1859).
      Items 26 and 42 of this Volume reiterate Dickens' serious concern with the state of London's homeless youth. The mention of the Newgate 'lodge' with a 'spiked' wicket-gate manned by the 'turnkeys' forms a group of references Dickens returns to in the 20th instalment of Great Expectations, when describing Pip's visit to the prison (ATYR, Vol. 5 [13 April 1861]).

Literary allusions

• 'Yorick's skull': Shakespeare, Hamlet (1603) Act 5, Sc. 1; 
• 'the peasantry of Naples dancing among the vines': Auber's opera Masaniello (1828) Act 5, Sc. 2; 
• 'this degenerate Aceldama': Acts 1:9; 
• 'Horace Kinch': untraced; 
• 'the great master... the death of each day's life': Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 2, Sc. 2; 
• '(as the philosopher has suggested)': Bacon has broadly similar things to say about the movement of sound in Sylva Sylvarum: or, a Natural History ([1627] 1826, ed. Montagu), Vol. 4, Century II, pp. 88, 110; 
• 'young man in the New Testament': Mark 14:51–52; 
• 'houseless wanderer': 'poor houseless wanderers', Thomas De Quincey, Works, Vol. 5, Confessions of An English Opium-Eater (1856), p. 170; 
• 'have its own solitary way' echoes the last line of Milton's Paradise Lost (1674) (Book XII, l. 641).

Textual note

• Copy text has 'another drunken object would probably stagger up': [The Uncommercial Traveller (The Charles Dickens Edition), (Chapman & Hall, 1868)] has '...would stagger up'; 
• 'God knows how far: seemingly to the confines of the earth': [The Uncommercial Traveller (The Charles Dickens Edition), (Chapman & Hall, 1868)] has 'God knows how far.'