The following version of this essay was used to complete this guide: Woolf, Virginia. "Street Haunting: A London Adventure." The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. Project Gutenberg Australia. http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks12/1203811h.html#ch-06.

Note that all parenthetical citations refer to the paragraph in which the quotation appears.

Woolf begins "Street Haunting" by positing that sometimes we can say we need to buy a pencil as an excuse for wandering the streets of London. According to Woolf, the best time to travel through the city is during the evening in winter. Once outside, people are able to shed the contents of the self and all the memories associated with the individual. On the street and outside the home, "all that vanishes" (3), and we can travel through London as a detached entity that does not look at anything too deeply. We can admire the bustling life around us as long as we do not stop to contemplate the individuals who compose it. If we start to speculate about the personal lives of those we encounter, "we are in danger of diffing deeper than the eye approves" (5). Instead, Woolf argues, we must obey the eye instead of the mind, though it is inevitable that we will fall into contemplation eventually, asking questions like, "what is it like to be a dwarf?" (6).

Next, Woolf describes a scene in a boot shop: a small woman, a "dwarf," entered with two other women who seemed to be protecting her. The salesperson asked the small woman to place her foot on the stand, and everyone was shocked to see that the woman's foot was a normal size. The woman took pride in this realization and purchased her shoes, but Woolf notes that "by the time she had reached the street again she had become a dwarf only" (7). This woman, however, had created a disturbance in the street. One could now notice "an atmosphere which, as we followed her out into the street, seemed actually to create the humped, the twisted, the deformed" (8). The disabled and disfigured were now noticeable, "joined in the hobble and tap of the dwarf's dance" (8).

Woolf continues her walk through London. She explains the delight of window shopping and the fantasy of purchasing everything we see. One purchase can catapult us into an entirely different life. But, she announces, "it is, in fact, on the stroke of six; it is a winter's evening; we are walking to the Strand to buy a pencil" (11). She questions how someone can be in two places at once. Then, she abruptly announces that we have arrived at the used bookshops. Inside, she imagines the author of one of the books and the life he lived while writing. She explains that secondhand bookstores are a place to "make other such sudden capricious friendships with the unknown and the vanished whose only record is, for example, this little book of poems" (13).

Woolf continues on, mentioning a conversation overheard in the street as commuters return home for the evening. She announces that we have arrived at the Strand, but quickly pivots to look over the bridge at the Thames River, imagining those who also have also stood in the same spot. Finally, we enter the stationer's shop to purchase the pencil. Woolf says the husband and wife who run the shop were quarreling, but that the purchase of the pencil helps them resolve their argument. In the time it took to buy the pencil, the streets have become virtually empty. Woolf celebrates the pleasure of escape and the notion of inhabiting other lives. But, she concludes, it is still comforting to return home to one's life and one's possessions after such a night of "street haunting" (18).