134 KNOWING DICKENS
household in Dombey and Son, Sol Gill’s shop-home in the City, is ship-shape,
snug, and ready to create a safe nest for Florence when she is astray in the
London streets. Its obsolescence marks it with a kind of nostalgia—perhaps
for the days of bachelor improvisation in small spaces, before the “dreadfully
genteel” years at Devonshire Terrace had come upon the ever-expanding
Dickens family. Like the flights to the Continent that produced it, Dombey
has something to say about Dickens’s reluctance to get stuck in a house.
Well before Dombey came to its end in March 1848, however, Dickens had
recommitted himself to a life in London marked by engagements with new
projects that connected him with wider circles of English life and allowed
him to exercise his managerial talents outside his own home. His amateur
theatrical company coalesced in a production of Ben Jonson’s Every Man
in His Humour that Dickens stage-managed in 1845. In 1847–48, after his
return from Switzerland and Paris, the play was revived and performed on
tour in a number of northern cities. Dickens reveled in his double roles as
mastermind manager and as the bombastic swaggerer Bobadil, dressed in
bright red breeches and wide boots designed to meet his standards of perfect
historical accuracy in costume. Between 1850 and 1854 the amateur players
became part of a more grandiose scheme, the Guild of Literature and Art,
proposed by Dickens and Edward Bulwer-Lytton and intended to dignify
the profession and to support artists who found themselves in financial need.
It was characteristic of this time in his life that Dickens should attempt to
justify his own delight in the theater by assigning to it a philanthropic social
purpose and a dream of systemic reach. A set of cottages meant to solve
the problems of indigent retired artists was planned, though never executed;
Dickens was not confronted with the actual difficulties of running this pet
housing project because the Guild failed to garner widespread support.
Meanwhile, Dickens planned and founded his weekly magazine House-
hold Words, employing William Henry Wills as his reliable sub-editor. The
magazine began its run in 1850, and connected Dickens with fiction-writers,
poets, and journalists throughout the country. In this case his very directive
editorial management proved a workable if controversial procedure; Dick-
ens’s hand could be felt in every piece, but he was a good, meticulous editor
who spoke from the center of his expertise. As early as 1851 Wills had become
the anchor of the Household Words office, steadily and intelligently keeping
the magazine going while Dickens came and went, sending in editorial deci-
sions and orders from wherever he was staying. Wills was soon a Dickens
agent for other matters than the magazine; he clearly had a rare capacity to
subordinate himself to his boss’s formidable will while retaining his own
judgment and sense of integrity. Dickens gradually came to recognize the