142 KNOWING DICKENS
shooing donkeys from the tiny lawn speaks of all the human disorder she
works to keep out of her little domain, while the periodic returns of her
rejected husband make it clear that the project is impossible. In that portrait
Dickens understands the self-defensive nature of orderliness; in David’s frus-
trated efforts to domesticate Dora he recognizes the implicit violence of the
attempt to impose it on others. However, Dickens/David cannot sustain the
tension between the desire for domestic dominion and the moral imperative
of letting others be themselves: Dora dies, and David marries the perfect
housekeeper. Just after writing the number narrating Dora’s death, Dick-
ens referred to Georgina as “my little housekeeper, Miss Hogarth” (6.158).
Catherine, enduring her usual postpartum suffering, was busy nursing the
newborn Dora Annie Dickens, who had just eight months to live.
Tavistock House, 1851–1860
When David Copperfield was complete, Dickens turned his attention to house
hunting; the lease of One Devonshire Terrace had run its course. It was a
disruption he had been dreading since September 1847, when he was dis-
mayed to learn from Mitton that the lease was two years shorter than he
had thought. He was quick to worry about compensation for the new gas
fixtures he had just installed: “I am paid for them when my time is up; am I
not?” (5.162). That time was also on his mind as he responded to his brother-
in-law Henry Austin’s move in March 1849: “I suppose you have been wash-
ing in a cheese-plate this morning, and breakfasting out of a clothes-basket.
Those agonies of moving, though two years off, afflict me already” (5.516).
The rapid transfer of the move from Doughty Street to Devonshire Terrace
was not to be repeated; instead the process of resettlement stretched through
most of 1851, accompanied by periods of acute distress and an anxious sense
of houselessness.
Houses were on Dickens’s mind after he returned to London from a Janu-
ary theatrical performance for his friends the Watsons at Rockingham Castle;
as usual he suffered from leaving the little world of theater behind: “What a
thing it is,” he moaned to Mrs. Watson, “that we can’t be always innocently
merry, and happy with those we like best, without looking out at the back
windows of life! Well—one day perhaps—after a long night—the blinds on
that side of the house will be down for ever, and nothing left but the bright
prospect in front” (6.266). As 1851 rolled on, allegorical houses gave way to
the realities of bricks, doors, and drainage, while Dickens engaged in pro-
longed brooding over a new novel, Bleak House, in which concrete images