MANAGER OF THE HOUSE 133withered,” and dreaming up cozy devices for his use; she hides the evidence
before he returns (DS 23). At the novel’s climactic moment Dombey emerges
from his room and strikes his daughter as she tries to express her pity for him;
her rush from his house only literalizes the emotional homelessness she has
suffered in all her years of living there. Florence’s nearly endless capacity to
appeal to her father’s affection by attempting to care for his needs and pret-
tify his house represents on Dickens’s part a fantasy that his daughter Mamie
was quite willing to absorb.
Dickens’s pathos is not entirely reserved for the abandoned child in the
half-empty house, though that image appears in so many guises through-
out his work. Edith’s sumptuous apartments diminish and eject Dombey as
effectively as his own rooms eject Florence. After the collapse of the firm,
the house is invaded, the furniture is auctioned off, and the house carries a
To Let sign, but Dombey continues to hide in his rooms while loyal female
caretakers remain in obscure corners, leaving plates of food for him to eat
when no one is near. His internal collapse takes the form of being unable to
leave the house; tied to it in remorse, he goes on midnight trips to the upper
rooms—he doesn’t know which was Florence’s—where his children had
lived. Florence rescues him from suicide and makes him part of her family,
but the house is left behind, still badged with To Let notices. The figure of a
character bound to a house because he or she is trapped in unspeakable guilt,
resentment, rage, or remorse becomes a repeated motif in Dickens’s work. So
does the house To Let, which always evokes failure and shame made visible
to the street and vulnerable to the depredations of neighborhood boys.
Dombey’s house is, of course, the antithesis of Devonshire Terrace with
its involved, home-loving father, its colorful furnishings, its careful mainte-
nance, its frequent dinner parties, and its family fun. Yet the story of a man
who hides out in his own house while others lurk in upper regions or creep
around in silence has its own spectral qualities for a preoccupied novelist
working at home. The empathic attention given to both Dombey and Flor-
ence raises the probability that Dickens knew a guilty underside of emotional
distance from the children he courted with charm during his intervals of
accessibility. He joked about it in a letter to Lavinia Watson about six months
after the final number of Dombey was published, as he was beginning The
Haunted Man: he was “falling into a state of inaccessibility and irascibility
which utterly confounds and scares the House. The young family peep at me
through the bannisters as I go along the hall; and Kate and Georgina quail
(almost) when I stalk by them” (5.419). The habit of imagining his life as if
it were a part of a recent novel shows itself here, but so does the conscious-
ness that imagined the separate zones of Dombey’s house. The alternative