Throughout Dickens’s writing process, he looks for new sources of inspiration. He makes references to his “mental museum” (32), in which he keeps names that interest him and inspire him to create future characters. For example, he gets the inspiration for the names of the characters Fezziwig and Cratchit from a business card, and he uses the name of a disgruntled man who threw away his autograph to create the character of Jacob Marley. However, after starting on his Christmas book, Dickens suffers from writer’s block, which drives him to search for inspiration wherever he can. He is so desperate to reinvigorate his imagination that he goes looking for inspiration in problematic places, such as when he grudgingly agrees to meet with his former love, Maria Beadnell, believing that because she has inspired him to write before, she “could lead [him] to write again” (61). This proves an imprudent and disastrous decision, as Maria visits Catherine, precipitating the crisis that shakes Catherine’s trust in him and drives her to take the children to Scotland.

In his resulting solitude, his search for inspiration takes him in ever more erratic directions. On an aimless walk through London, he irrationally hopes that he can hoping “count on [the city] to fill his head with novel things, or at least show him where to look” (72).