Strange Things That Really Do Happen — On Duty with Inspector Field
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In the summer of 1851, Charles Dickens went looking for a story the way he always did: he went and stood in the middle of it. He arranged to walk London's worst streets after dark with a real Scotland Yard inspector, a man named Charles Frederick Field, and simply wrote down what happened. On Duty with Inspector Field isn't fiction dressed up as reportage. It's the other way round, journalism that reads like fiction because Dickens couldn't help but write it that way.
Field takes him through the rookeries: the courts and lodging houses where London's poorest lived stacked on top of one another, places respectable readers of Dickens's magazine would never set foot in themselves. Field knows every room, every landlord, every face. He doesn't ask permission to enter. He doesn't need to.
There's a moment early on where Field walks into a lodging house full of strangers and simply announces himself, and the whole room rearranges around him, quiet, watchful, deferential, before he's said more than a few words. Dickens can't decide whether to be impressed or unsettled by it, and he lets that uncertainty sit on the page rather than resolving it for you.
That's really the engine of the piece. Dickens is fascinated by Field's authority and slightly uneasy about what it costs the people on the receiving end of it. He's a famous novelist being given a guided tour of other people's hardship, by a man whose job is to walk into their homes uninvited. Dickens knows exactly how that looks, and writes it anyway, because he can't stop watching.
It's the same restless curiosity that runs through everything in this collection. Six pieces, one writer who couldn't leave the city's dark corners alone, whether he believed in ghosts or not.
Something to think about:
Dickens goes into the rookeries because he wants to see them himself, not because his magazine assigned him the story.
Is that honest curiosity, or is there something a little uncomfortable about a famous writer treating other people's poverty as material?
