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Chapter 5
Manager of the House
Shortly after Dickens’s twenty-seventh birth-
day, he tried to put his parents away in a cottage. John Dickens, whose debts
had been accumulating for some years, was headed for bankruptcy again;
his Holborn landlord had given him notice and bill collectors were at his
door. Midway through Nicholas Nickleby and relatively secure in his prospects,
Dickens decided to settle the matter of his embarrassing parents once and
for all. After completing the monthly number for March 1839, he would
find them a cottage far from London, pay the rent, give them an allowance,
and get his father out of the vicinity of his publishers Chapman and Hall,
from whom John Dickens had been regularly begging. Speed was essential:
he wanted his parents to disappear the day their lodging expired, before their
creditors could be notified. He would have to pay the bills, but might, he
thought, be able to get away without paying in full if John Dickens were
“non est inventus,” not to be found (1.515). The town of Exeter in Devon
was chosen, far enough from London on the southwestern coast, and Dickens
booked himself a place in a coach for Monday, 4 March, leaving his lawyer
Thomas Mitton and his friend John Forster to carry out the London details
of the business. The move was to take place on the following Saturday.
The “toilsome journey” he anticipated in a letter to Forster (1.515) be-
came, in his letters home, a triumphant success story. On Tuesday morning
he “walked out to look about me,” and immediately found Mile End cottage