“The pleasure which we derive from the representation of the present is due not only to the beauty with which it can be invested, but also to its essential quality of being present” (Baudelaire 793). Baudelaire’s theory of the flaneur written in The Painter of Modern Life is relevant today, most notably in the works of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Man of the Crowd and Charles Dickens Our Mutual Friend. The reading of the flanerie occurring within these narratives is the representation of urban experiences through the depiction of the landscape of London and an exploration of city street life. Our Mutual Friend captures the panoramic urban city with its people, incidents and the flaneur who observes and records reality objectively. "An 'I' with an insatiable appetite for the 'non-I' at every instant rendering and explaining it in pictures more living than life itself, …show more content…
Baudelaire likens the flaneur “to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness”. Dickens novel reflects life in London’s urban environment and its vast, diverse and rich space of complex interactions and interconnected relationships. The sketches of marginal London are the reader’s compass to hidden localities and it’s mass of inhabitants, such as the “tract of suburban Sahara” (Our Mutual Friend 1: 4, 42) where Boffin’s mounds are heaped between Holloway and Battle Bridge. Dickens penetrates into the myriad nooks of sprawling London to fulfill the forensic desire of his middle-class readership, and he achieves this objective through the perspective of the flaneur in the city.
In the fullest sense of a city, Our Mutual Friend is the harvester of souls and characters are poured into its narrative. The story delves extensively