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Lying Awake
Lying Awake is a short story by Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens created some of the world's most memorable fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period. During his life, his works enjoyed unprecedented fame, and by the twentieth century his literary genius was broadly acknowledged by critics and scholars.
13 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 20, 2021
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About the author
Charles Dickens
12.6k books31.2k followersCharles John Huffam Dickens (1812-1870) was a writer and social critic who created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the twentieth century critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories enjoy lasting popularity.
Dickens left school to work in a factory when his father was incarcerated in a debtors' prison. Despite his lack of formal education, he edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education, and other social reforms.
Dickens was regarded as the literary colossus of his age. His 1843 novella, A Christmas Carol, remains popular and continues to inspire adaptations in every artistic genre. Oliver Twist and Great Expectations are also frequently adapted, and, like many of his novels, evoke images of early Victorian London. His 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities, set in London and Paris, is his best-known work of historical fiction. Dickens's creative genius has been praised by fellow writers—from Leo Tolstoy to George Orwell and G. K. Chesterton—for its realism, comedy, prose style, unique characterisations, and social criticism. On the other hand, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf complained of a lack of psychological depth, loose writing, and a vein of saccharine sentimentalism. The term Dickensian is used to describe something that is reminiscent of Dickens and his writings, such as poor social conditions or comically repulsive characters.
On 8 June 1870, Dickens suffered another stroke at his home after a full day's work on Edwin Drood. He never regained consciousness, and the next day he died at Gad's Hill Place. Contrary to his wish to be buried at Rochester Cathedral "in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner," he was laid to rest in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. A printed epitaph circulated at the time of the funeral reads: "To the Memory of Charles Dickens (England's most popular author) who died at his residence, Higham, near Rochester, Kent, 9 June 1870, aged 58 years. He was a sympathiser with the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world." His last words were: "On the ground", in response to his sister-in-law Georgina's request that he lie down.
(from Wikipedia)
Dickens left school to work in a factory when his father was incarcerated in a debtors' prison. Despite his lack of formal education, he edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education, and other social reforms.
Dickens was regarded as the literary colossus of his age. His 1843 novella, A Christmas Carol, remains popular and continues to inspire adaptations in every artistic genre. Oliver Twist and Great Expectations are also frequently adapted, and, like many of his novels, evoke images of early Victorian London. His 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities, set in London and Paris, is his best-known work of historical fiction. Dickens's creative genius has been praised by fellow writers—from Leo Tolstoy to George Orwell and G. K. Chesterton—for its realism, comedy, prose style, unique characterisations, and social criticism. On the other hand, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf complained of a lack of psychological depth, loose writing, and a vein of saccharine sentimentalism. The term Dickensian is used to describe something that is reminiscent of Dickens and his writings, such as poor social conditions or comically repulsive characters.
On 8 June 1870, Dickens suffered another stroke at his home after a full day's work on Edwin Drood. He never regained consciousness, and the next day he died at Gad's Hill Place. Contrary to his wish to be buried at Rochester Cathedral "in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner," he was laid to rest in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. A printed epitaph circulated at the time of the funeral reads: "To the Memory of Charles Dickens (England's most popular author) who died at his residence, Higham, near Rochester, Kent, 9 June 1870, aged 58 years. He was a sympathiser with the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world." His last words were: "On the ground", in response to his sister-in-law Georgina's request that he lie down.
(from Wikipedia)
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June 6, 2025
Lying Awake. Tossing and turning for hours on end. Or lying stock-still, trying to convince yourself that if only you can remain motionless, sleep will be bound to come. Does this sound familiar? Then you are not alone.
Some studies have shown that a surprising 60 per cent of us will have problems with insomnia at some time of our lives, and Charles Dickens was no exception. In Lying Awake, he shares some of his experiences; his wildest, most gruesome, and most inconsequential thoughts, as he lies “glaringly, persistently, and obstinately, broad awake”. It is the sheer monotony and frustration of it all, that will not go away. You do not have time to lie awake and not sleep! Does this sound familiar too? What about the dreams that are too ridiculous to share, such as flying over the housetops—or those you would never ever share with anyone else, such as finding yourself in a crowd of strangers, but discovering that you have no clothes on? Yes, we all have these, and so did Charles Dickens. He wonders if Queen Victoria had such dreams, when she dreamt she was still in her underclothes at state occasions.
So what prompted Charles Dickens to write these strange musings? He was 40 years old, and at the height of his fame, juggling more projects in writing, acting, editing and so on than most people would dare to attempt. Two years earlier he had founded the weekly magazine “Household Words”, in which this essay Lying Awake first appeared, on October 30, 1852. It was later included in the collection “Reprinted Pieces” (1861), and this is where it is normally now read.
At the time of publication Charles Dickens was 6 months into writing the monthly serial of his ninth, and arguably most complex, novel “Bleak House”. He was reading excerpts of his books in public, as well as attending charitable functions. His amateur acting troupe had been performing throughout England during the summer. On the personal front, Charles Dickens’s tenth and youngest child “Plorn” (Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens) had been born earlier in 1852, and he was grieving for his father, who had died the previous year. Charles Dickens was about to move house to Tavistock Place, and his relationship with his wife Catherine was rapidly deteriorating. He had little patience with his faithful wife, who was increasingly unable to keep up with her energetic husband, having grown quite stout and lethargic after giving birth to ten children. Charles was increasingly dissatisfied with Catherine.
Put all these worries, concerns and stresses together, and it is small wonder that Charles Dickens found it difficult to sleep! He used to walk miles through London’s labyrinthine streets at night—fifteen or twenty miles—many a night when most folks had gone to bed. Whichever city he happened to be in, this was his habit, and he was later to describe this in another essay “Night Walks”.
In Lying Awake, he begins as if it is his uncle who is the insomniac:
“My uncle lay with his eyes half closed, and his nightcap drawn almost down to his nose”, although he immediately explains that this is taken from a sketch called: “The Adventures of My Uncle” by Washington Irving in “Tales of a Traveller” from 1824. The random, unconnected thoughts described there set the tone for Charles Dickens’s own piece, lurching from one thought to another, with unwanted murderous thoughts popping into his mind, despite all attempts to think of something restful. He postulates that this might be scientific proof of the duality of the mind: an early exploration in the scientific circles of the day, which would later be taken up by Sigmund Freud to develop his theories of the conscious and the unconscious. It could be that Dickens had been reading Arthur Ladbroke Wigan’s “A New View of Insanity: The Duality of the Mind”, in which case these thoughts were akin to our “What will happen if my heart stops?” or “Why am I breathing so fast?” night dreads. On the other hand, Dickens continues:
“perhaps one part of my brain, being wakeful, sat up to watch the other part which was sleepy”
which made me laugh out loud, as it it so typical of Dickens, who cannot resist being quirky and impishly ridiculous. So we move on, being entertained and horrified by turn, finding it difficult to keep up with Dickens’s ricocheting thoughts, and well nigh impossible to predict them. He promises to “devote this paper to my train of thoughts as I lay awake”, and we can believe that this is indeed an authentic record. The date may be before what literary critics define as the start of “stream of consciousness writing” but the style of Lying Awake certainly qualifies.
Charles Dickens decides he ought to make a conscious (pun not intended!) effort to fall asleep, and remembers Benjamin Franklin’s paper “The Art of Procuring Pleasant Dreams”. He duly selects one of these “prescriptions”, shaking up the bedclothes and walking around in the cool air, only to find after performing “the whole ceremony”, he was “more saucer-eyed than I was before”. Oh yes, we nod sagely. And warm milky drinks? Or counting sheep? They aren’t much use either.
“I often used to read that paper when I was a very small boy, and as I recollect everything I read then as perfectly as I forget everything I read now …” But this is no use, Mr. Dickens! Surely you know that if you crack jokes you will remain wide awake? But he moves on to another method, much in favour with New Age counsellors, that of visualisation. Imagine a happy place; a restful haven with cool, soothing water running through. Charles Dickens visualises Niagara Falls (well that might be a bit too dramatic and violent … )
But it was clearly a favourite image. Elsewhere, during his visit to the United States in 1842, Charles Dickens had eulogised: “Niagara was at once stamped upon my heart, an image of beauty, to remain there, changeless and indelible for years to come.”
Here he mentions “the very rainbows that I left upon the spray when I really did last look upon it, were beautiful to see”. Perhaps this will do the trick. He is remembering a visit he had made to the USA, but for some reasons, his mind whirls off for no reason, to think about his great friend who is playing Macbeth at Drury Lane Theatre. Macbeth? Mulling over that story is hardly conducive to a good night sleep! He must be thinking of his William Charles Macready, to whom Dickens, passionate about drama and the theatre, dedicated his most theatre-related novel, “Nicholas Nickleby” in 1839. But that association could well make Dickens’s passing fancies even worse!
A year earlier, in 1851, Dickens and several other celebrity authors had toasted Macready after his farewell performance. But two years before that was the Astor Place Riot, which was in New York in 1849. It had started because of feuding between fans of Macready and those of a popular U.S. Shakespearean actor, and left quite a few people dead. These horrific events are not good topics to dwell on in bed! And the specific line he is remembering from Shakespeare: “the death of each day’s life” comes from the speech where Macbeth has :
“Methought I heard a voice cry
’Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep’”.
But Charles Dickens wisely pushes these topics from his mind:
“But, Sleep. I will think about Sleep. I am determined to think (this is the way I went on) about Sleep.”
After all, everyone sleeps, from the highest to the lowest in the land. Both Queen Victoria and “Winking Charley”—a vagrant in Her Majesty’s gaols—have both tumbled off the tower of sleep, to “skim along with airy strides a little above the ground”, and think extravagant nonsensical thoughts. Queen Victoria in déshabillé is paired with Winking Charley, who seems to be a general picture of a desperado. “Winking” of course may be Charles Dickens himself: the Charley not even able to get forty winks of sleep. He is an everyman of a villain—but also, I suspect, Charles Dickens’s alter-ego. Many Victorian writers were dabbling with the idea of the dark side of human nature, well before Robert Louis Stevenson’s unforgettable “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”. “Winking Charley” seems to have caught the public’s imagination, with drawings, ornaments and tankards of the character, much as there are of Mr. Pickwick.
But Dickens comes back to Earth with a bump, only to find himself climbing through the Great St. Bernard Pass in the Swiss Alps. This is another area which Charles Dickens repeatedly visited in his writing. The extraordinarily surreal short story “To Be Read at Dusk” was set there, and has a similar feel to this piece.
It is possible that this came into Dickens’s mind because of a tragedy just a few months earlier. Dickens made several trips to Switzerland, describing it in “ Pictures from Italy”. In 1846 he had ascended the Great St. Bernard Pass with a party of friends, including two very dear ones, the Hon. Richard Watson and his wife Lavinia. Watson’s death, in July 1852, grieved him deeply. He reminisces about this trip, using the same disturbing images as preoccupied his mind in passages of “Little Dorrit”: the jolly monks in the remote inn, the bodies buried in the snow, “a smell … coming up from the floor, of tethered beasts, like the smell of a menagerie of wild animals”.
And now the horrors are on him for real, and he is plagued by a bogeyman from his childhood, describing “the running home, the looking behind, the horror, of its following me”.
He decides to force himself to think of a better topic, and chooses a very suitable one: the balloon ascents of the last season … but they will not stick. Instead arrives the horror of a public hanging he had attended three years earlier. This was the notorious case of the so-called “Bermondsey Horror”, which the newspapers reported with great relish. Marie Manning was a Swiss domestic servant who was hanged on the roof of London’s Horsemonger Lane Gaol on 13 November 1849, after she and her husband were convicted of the murder of her lover, Patrick O’Connor. This real life event horrified Dickens enough to write an impassioned letter to the Times newspaper. He also included an aspect of it later, in “Bleak House”, in which Charles Dickens’s description of the hanging bodies is gruesome and disturbing. He has to force himself to mentally take the bodies down, and bury them, and get back to the ascending balloons, which were in various London pleasure gardens during that summer.
Cremorne probably comes into his mind, despite trying to think of a peaceful image of a rising hot air balloon, because of an incident there just a month before, in September 1852. A French acrobat ascended on a trapeze, suspending himself first by his neck and then by his heels, and a Mme. Pritevin, ascended on the back of a heifer. She incurred the displeasure of the local magistrates and both she and the manager of the Gardens were fined for cruelty to animals.
Another flash: “a disagreeable intrusion! Here is a man with his throat cut, dashing towards me as I lie awake!” pursued by attendants from a madhouse. The balloons. He must return to the balloons. Charles Dickens argues with himself wonderingly why it is that we accept violence on stage, or in a circus, accepting all sorts of dangers as entertainment in the “Cremorne reality”, which in real life we find horrific. He thinks of many examples—but this is not helping him drop off to sleep. And neither does the image which supplants it:
“I wish the Morgue in Paris would not come here as I lie awake, with its ghastly beds, and the swollen saturated clothes hanging up, and the water dripping, dripping all day long …”.
This gruesome vision seems a peculiarly ghastly set of images to pop into Charles Dickens’s mind. But we remember that he used to spend many nights wandering London, and viewing the bodies in the morgue. He was always fascinated by the Paris Morgue too, where bodies fished out of the river and other anonymous corpses were publicly exposed for identification purposes. Dickens invariably visited it whenever he was in the city, and clearly the memories intruded into his thoughts at night time.
It blends into a consideration of current events: “the late brutal assaults”. During the last ten days or so of October, there had been several cases of violent assault on the police force. No doubt Dickens is referring to these, but being Dickens, he begins to voice his opinions about the scandalous increase in street crime. He moves on to another social issue, arguing strongly against whipping as a punishment in the penal system, and also argues against what he calls “Pet Prisoning”, recommending to: “at least quadruple the term of imprisonment for aggravated assaults”, advocating hard work, and a diet of bread and water for all prisoners.
Whether Dickens on his high horse, lecturing the darkness with his thoughts and theories—perhaps practising for his next celebrity dinner—would enable him to relax into sleep is extremely doubtful. Charles Dickens himself came to that conclusion too, saying:
“I found I had been lying awake so long that the very dead began to wake too, and to crowd into my thoughts most sorrowfully”.
He decides to get up and go for a walk, and surmises in his typical wry manner, that we are probably grateful to him for doing so. Again, this is advice given even now. If all else fails, get up. Make a cup of tea, read a book, or do whatever it is that is bothering you because it was left undone. (For me, it is sometimes writing a review in the middle of the night.) Yes, Charles Dickens is timeless.
Lying Awake is one of Charles Dickens’s most remarkable pieces of short nonfiction. He appears to have recreated the exact experience of trying to fall asleep. It could be called a collage of seemingly disconnected memories and imaginings, or a process essay. It is extremely well constructed, and we follow his thoughts and experiences as if they were our own. We feel his anxiety, are disturbed by the ghastly and gruesome phantoms which plague him, and diverted by his irony.
Knowing a little about the man himself and his works adds extra depth to this essay, but there is something here which nearly all of us can relate to. It is a short read; please don’t miss it!
Some studies have shown that a surprising 60 per cent of us will have problems with insomnia at some time of our lives, and Charles Dickens was no exception. In Lying Awake, he shares some of his experiences; his wildest, most gruesome, and most inconsequential thoughts, as he lies “glaringly, persistently, and obstinately, broad awake”. It is the sheer monotony and frustration of it all, that will not go away. You do not have time to lie awake and not sleep! Does this sound familiar too? What about the dreams that are too ridiculous to share, such as flying over the housetops—or those you would never ever share with anyone else, such as finding yourself in a crowd of strangers, but discovering that you have no clothes on? Yes, we all have these, and so did Charles Dickens. He wonders if Queen Victoria had such dreams, when she dreamt she was still in her underclothes at state occasions.
So what prompted Charles Dickens to write these strange musings? He was 40 years old, and at the height of his fame, juggling more projects in writing, acting, editing and so on than most people would dare to attempt. Two years earlier he had founded the weekly magazine “Household Words”, in which this essay Lying Awake first appeared, on October 30, 1852. It was later included in the collection “Reprinted Pieces” (1861), and this is where it is normally now read.
At the time of publication Charles Dickens was 6 months into writing the monthly serial of his ninth, and arguably most complex, novel “Bleak House”. He was reading excerpts of his books in public, as well as attending charitable functions. His amateur acting troupe had been performing throughout England during the summer. On the personal front, Charles Dickens’s tenth and youngest child “Plorn” (Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens) had been born earlier in 1852, and he was grieving for his father, who had died the previous year. Charles Dickens was about to move house to Tavistock Place, and his relationship with his wife Catherine was rapidly deteriorating. He had little patience with his faithful wife, who was increasingly unable to keep up with her energetic husband, having grown quite stout and lethargic after giving birth to ten children. Charles was increasingly dissatisfied with Catherine.
Put all these worries, concerns and stresses together, and it is small wonder that Charles Dickens found it difficult to sleep! He used to walk miles through London’s labyrinthine streets at night—fifteen or twenty miles—many a night when most folks had gone to bed. Whichever city he happened to be in, this was his habit, and he was later to describe this in another essay “Night Walks”.
In Lying Awake, he begins as if it is his uncle who is the insomniac:
“My uncle lay with his eyes half closed, and his nightcap drawn almost down to his nose”, although he immediately explains that this is taken from a sketch called: “The Adventures of My Uncle” by Washington Irving in “Tales of a Traveller” from 1824. The random, unconnected thoughts described there set the tone for Charles Dickens’s own piece, lurching from one thought to another, with unwanted murderous thoughts popping into his mind, despite all attempts to think of something restful. He postulates that this might be scientific proof of the duality of the mind: an early exploration in the scientific circles of the day, which would later be taken up by Sigmund Freud to develop his theories of the conscious and the unconscious. It could be that Dickens had been reading Arthur Ladbroke Wigan’s “A New View of Insanity: The Duality of the Mind”, in which case these thoughts were akin to our “What will happen if my heart stops?” or “Why am I breathing so fast?” night dreads. On the other hand, Dickens continues:
“perhaps one part of my brain, being wakeful, sat up to watch the other part which was sleepy”
which made me laugh out loud, as it it so typical of Dickens, who cannot resist being quirky and impishly ridiculous. So we move on, being entertained and horrified by turn, finding it difficult to keep up with Dickens’s ricocheting thoughts, and well nigh impossible to predict them. He promises to “devote this paper to my train of thoughts as I lay awake”, and we can believe that this is indeed an authentic record. The date may be before what literary critics define as the start of “stream of consciousness writing” but the style of Lying Awake certainly qualifies.
Charles Dickens decides he ought to make a conscious (pun not intended!) effort to fall asleep, and remembers Benjamin Franklin’s paper “The Art of Procuring Pleasant Dreams”. He duly selects one of these “prescriptions”, shaking up the bedclothes and walking around in the cool air, only to find after performing “the whole ceremony”, he was “more saucer-eyed than I was before”. Oh yes, we nod sagely. And warm milky drinks? Or counting sheep? They aren’t much use either.
“I often used to read that paper when I was a very small boy, and as I recollect everything I read then as perfectly as I forget everything I read now …” But this is no use, Mr. Dickens! Surely you know that if you crack jokes you will remain wide awake? But he moves on to another method, much in favour with New Age counsellors, that of visualisation. Imagine a happy place; a restful haven with cool, soothing water running through. Charles Dickens visualises Niagara Falls (well that might be a bit too dramatic and violent … )
But it was clearly a favourite image. Elsewhere, during his visit to the United States in 1842, Charles Dickens had eulogised: “Niagara was at once stamped upon my heart, an image of beauty, to remain there, changeless and indelible for years to come.”
Here he mentions “the very rainbows that I left upon the spray when I really did last look upon it, were beautiful to see”. Perhaps this will do the trick. He is remembering a visit he had made to the USA, but for some reasons, his mind whirls off for no reason, to think about his great friend who is playing Macbeth at Drury Lane Theatre. Macbeth? Mulling over that story is hardly conducive to a good night sleep! He must be thinking of his William Charles Macready, to whom Dickens, passionate about drama and the theatre, dedicated his most theatre-related novel, “Nicholas Nickleby” in 1839. But that association could well make Dickens’s passing fancies even worse!
A year earlier, in 1851, Dickens and several other celebrity authors had toasted Macready after his farewell performance. But two years before that was the Astor Place Riot, which was in New York in 1849. It had started because of feuding between fans of Macready and those of a popular U.S. Shakespearean actor, and left quite a few people dead. These horrific events are not good topics to dwell on in bed! And the specific line he is remembering from Shakespeare: “the death of each day’s life” comes from the speech where Macbeth has :
“Methought I heard a voice cry
’Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep’”.
But Charles Dickens wisely pushes these topics from his mind:
“But, Sleep. I will think about Sleep. I am determined to think (this is the way I went on) about Sleep.”
After all, everyone sleeps, from the highest to the lowest in the land. Both Queen Victoria and “Winking Charley”—a vagrant in Her Majesty’s gaols—have both tumbled off the tower of sleep, to “skim along with airy strides a little above the ground”, and think extravagant nonsensical thoughts. Queen Victoria in déshabillé is paired with Winking Charley, who seems to be a general picture of a desperado. “Winking” of course may be Charles Dickens himself: the Charley not even able to get forty winks of sleep. He is an everyman of a villain—but also, I suspect, Charles Dickens’s alter-ego. Many Victorian writers were dabbling with the idea of the dark side of human nature, well before Robert Louis Stevenson’s unforgettable “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”. “Winking Charley” seems to have caught the public’s imagination, with drawings, ornaments and tankards of the character, much as there are of Mr. Pickwick.
But Dickens comes back to Earth with a bump, only to find himself climbing through the Great St. Bernard Pass in the Swiss Alps. This is another area which Charles Dickens repeatedly visited in his writing. The extraordinarily surreal short story “To Be Read at Dusk” was set there, and has a similar feel to this piece.
It is possible that this came into Dickens’s mind because of a tragedy just a few months earlier. Dickens made several trips to Switzerland, describing it in “ Pictures from Italy”. In 1846 he had ascended the Great St. Bernard Pass with a party of friends, including two very dear ones, the Hon. Richard Watson and his wife Lavinia. Watson’s death, in July 1852, grieved him deeply. He reminisces about this trip, using the same disturbing images as preoccupied his mind in passages of “Little Dorrit”: the jolly monks in the remote inn, the bodies buried in the snow, “a smell … coming up from the floor, of tethered beasts, like the smell of a menagerie of wild animals”.
And now the horrors are on him for real, and he is plagued by a bogeyman from his childhood, describing “the running home, the looking behind, the horror, of its following me”.
He decides to force himself to think of a better topic, and chooses a very suitable one: the balloon ascents of the last season … but they will not stick. Instead arrives the horror of a public hanging he had attended three years earlier. This was the notorious case of the so-called “Bermondsey Horror”, which the newspapers reported with great relish. Marie Manning was a Swiss domestic servant who was hanged on the roof of London’s Horsemonger Lane Gaol on 13 November 1849, after she and her husband were convicted of the murder of her lover, Patrick O’Connor. This real life event horrified Dickens enough to write an impassioned letter to the Times newspaper. He also included an aspect of it later, in “Bleak House”, in which Charles Dickens’s description of the hanging bodies is gruesome and disturbing. He has to force himself to mentally take the bodies down, and bury them, and get back to the ascending balloons, which were in various London pleasure gardens during that summer.
Cremorne probably comes into his mind, despite trying to think of a peaceful image of a rising hot air balloon, because of an incident there just a month before, in September 1852. A French acrobat ascended on a trapeze, suspending himself first by his neck and then by his heels, and a Mme. Pritevin, ascended on the back of a heifer. She incurred the displeasure of the local magistrates and both she and the manager of the Gardens were fined for cruelty to animals.
Another flash: “a disagreeable intrusion! Here is a man with his throat cut, dashing towards me as I lie awake!” pursued by attendants from a madhouse. The balloons. He must return to the balloons. Charles Dickens argues with himself wonderingly why it is that we accept violence on stage, or in a circus, accepting all sorts of dangers as entertainment in the “Cremorne reality”, which in real life we find horrific. He thinks of many examples—but this is not helping him drop off to sleep. And neither does the image which supplants it:
“I wish the Morgue in Paris would not come here as I lie awake, with its ghastly beds, and the swollen saturated clothes hanging up, and the water dripping, dripping all day long …”.
This gruesome vision seems a peculiarly ghastly set of images to pop into Charles Dickens’s mind. But we remember that he used to spend many nights wandering London, and viewing the bodies in the morgue. He was always fascinated by the Paris Morgue too, where bodies fished out of the river and other anonymous corpses were publicly exposed for identification purposes. Dickens invariably visited it whenever he was in the city, and clearly the memories intruded into his thoughts at night time.
It blends into a consideration of current events: “the late brutal assaults”. During the last ten days or so of October, there had been several cases of violent assault on the police force. No doubt Dickens is referring to these, but being Dickens, he begins to voice his opinions about the scandalous increase in street crime. He moves on to another social issue, arguing strongly against whipping as a punishment in the penal system, and also argues against what he calls “Pet Prisoning”, recommending to: “at least quadruple the term of imprisonment for aggravated assaults”, advocating hard work, and a diet of bread and water for all prisoners.
Whether Dickens on his high horse, lecturing the darkness with his thoughts and theories—perhaps practising for his next celebrity dinner—would enable him to relax into sleep is extremely doubtful. Charles Dickens himself came to that conclusion too, saying:
“I found I had been lying awake so long that the very dead began to wake too, and to crowd into my thoughts most sorrowfully”.
He decides to get up and go for a walk, and surmises in his typical wry manner, that we are probably grateful to him for doing so. Again, this is advice given even now. If all else fails, get up. Make a cup of tea, read a book, or do whatever it is that is bothering you because it was left undone. (For me, it is sometimes writing a review in the middle of the night.) Yes, Charles Dickens is timeless.
Lying Awake is one of Charles Dickens’s most remarkable pieces of short nonfiction. He appears to have recreated the exact experience of trying to fall asleep. It could be called a collage of seemingly disconnected memories and imaginings, or a process essay. It is extremely well constructed, and we follow his thoughts and experiences as if they were our own. We feel his anxiety, are disturbed by the ghastly and gruesome phantoms which plague him, and diverted by his irony.
Knowing a little about the man himself and his works adds extra depth to this essay, but there is something here which nearly all of us can relate to. It is a short read; please don’t miss it!
September 20, 2022
Charles Dickens often suffered from insomnia, and he shares his train of thoughts as he tries to fall asleep. He begins with memories of America, and the lighthearted writings of Washington Irving and Benjamin Franklin involving sleep. He also reminisces about traveling to Niagara Falls, the Swiss Alps, and other locations.
As the essay continues, his thoughts get darker, turning to scary memories and tragic events he observed as a journalist. After he thought about some barbaric punishments at a prison, Dickens knew he was not going to fall asleep. The solution was to go on a night walk until he was exhausted, and his troubled mind was calm.
"Lying Awake" first appeared in the journal "Household Words" in 1852. Multiple events in the narrator's thoughts occurred in the 19th Century so it takes some research to understand all of Dickens' references. Readers that have an interest in Victorian times would be the best audience for this work.
As the essay continues, his thoughts get darker, turning to scary memories and tragic events he observed as a journalist. After he thought about some barbaric punishments at a prison, Dickens knew he was not going to fall asleep. The solution was to go on a night walk until he was exhausted, and his troubled mind was calm.
"Lying Awake" first appeared in the journal "Household Words" in 1852. Multiple events in the narrator's thoughts occurred in the 19th Century so it takes some research to understand all of Dickens' references. Readers that have an interest in Victorian times would be the best audience for this work.
September 20, 2022
This is a dark short piece by Dickens about where his brain goes when he can’t get to sleep. His thoughts may start in something calm like travelling to Niagara falls but his thoughts often go to something much darker like the morgue in Paris, or a hanging he witnessed. Brilliantly done!
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