MANAGER OF THE HOUSE 145of the workmen every night. They make faces at me, and won’t do anything”
(6.495). His inability to make the workmen work faster also expressed itself
in the exaggerated despair of letters to other friends, especially during Octo-
ber, when Dickens felt ready to begin Bleak House and had no study to write
in. “I can not work at my new book—” he complained to Miss Coutts on
9 October, “having all my notions of order turned completely topsy-turvy.”
He hopes that when she returns she “will find us settled, and me hard at
work—and will approve, both the tangible house and the less substantial Edi-
fice” (6.513). The same day he vented his hostility about invading workmen
to another correspondent, describing “how low this makes the undersigned,
who is accustomed to keep everything belonging to him in a place of its
own, and to sit in the midst of a system of Order” (6.514). As comic relief,
Dickens amused himself by inventing silly titles for the fake book-backs
that were to adorn shelves on a sliding door connecting his study with the
drawing room: “Five Minutes in China. 3 vols.”; “Bowwowdom. A Poem”;
“Growler’s Gruffology, with Appendix. 4 vols.” and the like (6.851). He was
quite pleased when these were skillfully executed by the strangely named
bookbinder Mr. Eeles.
The Tavistock House letters show Dickens mediating a rebuilding of gar-
den walls shared by all three adjacent houses (the Stones rented one of them),
insisting that the cold shower bath, an essential part of his daily regimen, be
curtained off from the W.C., and worrying that hard dancing in the school-
room would bring down the kitchen ceiling beneath it. The study–drawing-
room door, which spoke to his negotiations between writing and family life,
was the most elaborate of his innovations. Planning for that door, designed
both to create and to conceal a passage between the all-important study and
the large drawing room, occupied a number of Dickens’s letters during Sep-
tember. He was willing to go to some extra expense—though he worried over
it—in order to get both a sense of seclusion and access to house space. “When
the rooms were thrown together,” Mamie remembered, “they gave my father
a promenade of considerable length for the constant indoor walking which
formed a favorite recreation for him after a hard day’s writing” (M. Dickens
51). Arranging the door to balance the design of both rooms grew into a
rather complex negotiation with Henry Austin and the carpenters: a large
mirror taken from Devonshire Terrace was reframed and installed in a recess
of the door-bookcase directly opposite the study window, while other mirrors
were installed in three recesses on the drawing-room side. The mirror on the
study side was probably the one in which Mamie, convalescing from an illness
on the sofa in Dickens’s study, once saw him making “extraordinary facial
contortions” while in the throes of creating a character (M. Dickens 49–50).