130 KNOWING DICKENS
Dickens seems to have maintained his perspective; a healthy irony is evident
in his announcement to Forster that a “house of great promise (and great
premium), ‘undeniable’ situation, and excessive splendour, is in view” (1.598).
His letters complain briefly about the trials of moving and his impatience
with legal processes: “I am in the agonies of house-letting, house-taking,
title proving and disproving, premium paying, fixture valuing, and other ills
to numerous to mention,” he wrote to an acquaintance. “If you have the
heart of anything milder than a monster, you will pity me” (1.603). Only
the brevity and sparseness of the extant letters suggest his absorption in the
details of the process.
Like all of Dickens’s family houses, One Devonshire Terrace was often
left behind; his impatience to set a house in order was matched only by his
desire to be somewhere else. The house was rented to others during the
Dickenses’ six-month tour of the United States in 1842 and during their
year’s residence in Italy, 1844–45. Anticipating their return in the summer of
1845, Dickens wrote to Mitton in April with requests for redecoration. He
wanted “a nice, bright cheerful green” paint on the garden doors and rail-
ings and for the indoor hall and staircase, but later bowed to the combined
advice of Catherine and Mitton, who deplored the notion of green walls.
As an Italianate surprise for Catherine, he wanted an estimate for repaper-
ing the drawing room in purple or blue and gold with gold molding around
the paper, the ceiling painted with “a faint pink blush in it,” and a wreath
of flowers painted around the lamp: “I should wish it to be cheerful and
gay” (4.297–98; 4.312). It is the first time we see direct evidence of “the
kind of interest in a house which is commonly confined to women” that his
eldest daughter Mary (called Mamie) described in My Father as I Recall Him
(M. Dickens 12).
The estimate for the drawing room proved to be “what Mr. Swiveller
calls, a Staggerer,” Dickens discovered, but he leaned toward doing the work,
“for as it is, it is very poor and mean in comparison with the house—and
I had been ‘going’ to do it these five years” (4.312). He also asked Mitton to
set in motion all the tradespeople Dickens regularly hired to do thorough
yearly cleanings of the house and its fixtures, hoping to return to a pristine
dwelling. Apparently his elated return was shadowed by disappointment on
that score: “Once more in my own house!” he announced to Count D’Orsay
on 5 July 1845, “If that can be called mine, which is such a heap of hideous
confusion, and chaos of boxes” (4.325). Even a temporarily messy, disorderly
house was anathema to his temperament.
Just eleven months after the return from Italy, the Devonshire Terrace
house was rented again and the family moved to Switzerland, then Paris,