MANAGER OF THE HOUSE 129larger house, the tension between the house as a safely grounded place and
as an imprisoning container, the house haunted by lingering family secrets,
and the insistence on good housekeeping that arises not just from Dickens’s
fantasy of the ideal Victorian woman, but from the extraordinarily neat and
tidy housekeeper he was himself.
Devonshire Terrace, 1839–1851
In the young writer of 1839, the obsessive tinges that were to color the
hyperactive decade of his forties were not yet so apparent. Once Nickleby was
completed on 20 September 1839, Dickens turned his attention to the proj-
ect of moving his own family from 48 Doughty Street to a larger London house
more fully in keeping with the status he had so rapidly earned. His third
child, Kate Macready Dickens, was born at Doughty Street on 29 October;
by 1 November Dickens was immersed in house hunting, apparently hoping
to settle the move as rapidly as he had set up the Devon dollhouse for his par-
ents and youngest brother. Although his mother had returned to London to
help with both the new baby and the house hunting, Dickens quickly began
to “droop and despair” after Macready warned him that a desirable house in
Kent Terrace was subject to “the stench from the stables at certain periods
of the wind” (1.597). Three days later he was in “ecstatic restlessness” while
Mitton negotiated for the remaining eleven years on the lease of One Dev-
onshire Terrace, near the York Gate at Regents Park, which was to serve as
the family residence until 1851 (1.598). His references to the furnishing and
moving process during the month before taking possession in early Decem-
ber express efficiency and impatience to have it over. Always conscious of his
own expenses, he is eager to sell to his landlord the made-to-order fixtures he
had had installed at Doughty Street, and writes persuasively of the advantages
he is offering by leaving the house empty while he continues to pay the rent
for the remaining months on the three-year agreement. We also learn from
this letter that smelly drains have contributed to the family discomfort at
Doughty Street: despite many visits from plumbers, “we have not been able
to make them last our time without often receiving strong notice of their
being in the neighborhood” (1.600). Less delicately phrased struggles with
drains were to recur in each of his future houses, offering small glimpses of
the sewage and disposal problems that Londoners had to tolerate on an indi-
vidual as well as a city-wide scale.
Devonshire Terrace was newly furnished, carpeted, and draped in respect-
able style; the years of household improvisation were at an end. Yet the young