128 KNOWING DICKENS
Wo rd s, acquiring and furnishing houses for his own family and others, and
enforcing household disciplines on his wife and children.
Houses—as distinguished from the inns and lodgings of the early fic-
tion—came into greater prominence in the fictions of this decade, beginning
with Dombey and Son, and continuing through David Copperfield, Bleak House,
and Little Dorrit. In the 1850s Dickens also began experimenting with collab-
orative forms of storytelling in the Christmas numbers of Household Words,
for which he would create frame stories—narrative houses, so to speak—and
ask other writers to furnish individual rooms with their own inventions. All
of these enterprises reveal variants of the pattern or rhythm that showed itself
in the matter of Mile End cottage: Dickens takes detailed control over the
practical housing of a complex human situation, and discovers that, in one
way or another, his willed order fails to contain either his own emotional
conflicts or those of others.
The almost automatic association of Dickens with the celebration of hearth
and home went unquestioned for many decades after his death; he was, after
all, its first promoter. Whether critics participated in that celebration or criti-
cized Dickens for indoctrinating his readers with Victorian domestic ide-
ology, Dickens and the sentiments of Home seemed virtually inseparable.
Recent studies of the concept of home and the representation of family in
Dickens have pushed beyond the mythic quality of that association to study
the many ways in which Dickens’s fiction flies in the face of such idealizing
concepts, even when they continue to hover in the wings as lost paradises or
futures just off the page. Focusing on the house itself rather than the home
or the family allows for some new perspective on the necessarily intertwined
themes of house, home, and family life.
Dickens experienced the house as a site for the exercise of managerial con-
trol and as a neat and pretty world he could make; he found it both a burden-
some locus of family responsibility and a proud setting for scenes of family
hospitality. In his fiction, houses are sometimes allegorically or metaphorically
expressive of the lives of their inhabitants; like all inanimate objects in Dickens
they are injected with living qualities by the pressure of his narrative voice.
In this chapter, however, I will be most interested in the interplay between
Dickens’s experiences of acquiring, furnishing, and running three large family
houses and his shifting representations of fictional houses. As he moved from
Doughty Street to Devonshire Terrace to Tavistock House to Gad’s Hill Place,
changes in his emotional apprehension of the family he housed, as well as his
social experiment in housing homeless women, brought about developments
in his fictional depictions of what houses meant. Recurring concerns include
the space of the writer who works at home in relation to the space of the