Of course, I am not Dickens. My night walks do not inspire debates in the House of Commons about the workhouse, the ragged schools or housing provision for the poor. I walk because I enjoy the independence. Because I do not want to wait for a night bus. Because I do not like the smell of fried chicken on the Tube. For a rare sight of Reynolds's Dilettanti by candlelight. I walk because Dickens walked and in that year of reading Boz, his accounts of London by night and on foot cast a spell. 

The streets of Bayswater were built during Dickens's lifetime. When he was born, Sussex Gardens, where I live, was only a proposal on a developer's map. It wasn't in London at all, but open fields. But by the 1850s, when Dickens suffered his first bout of sleeplessness, the white stucco houses around the new Paddington station had been built. I like to think that Dickens's night walks sometimes took him past my stretch of terrace with its tall ash trees. They would have been just saplings then.