146 KNOWING DICKENS
Dickens’s love of household mirrors was not an uncommon Victorian
preference, but he seems to have had a special investment in expanding the
imaginary space of a room by hanging mirrors opposite windows, or plac-
ing them where they would magnify the scale of social occasions. The actor
Henry Compton remembered that Dickens’s dining tables were “purposely
made very narrow, to facilitate opposite guests talking with one another.
Sometimes the end of the table touched a mirror, which reflected the whole
scene, and increased the brilliance of its appearance” (Collins 1981, 191).
Dickens himself revealed the distancing, stagy aspects of his dining-room
mirrors in Our Mutual Friend when he described the Veneering dinner guests
only as they appear reflected in the mirror as static, one-dimensional carica-
tures. Despite his reputation as a perfect host who brought out the best in his
guests, a quiet part of him was observing those guests without having to look
directly at them. Early in 1865, his actor friend Charles Fechter presented
Dickens with a miniature Swiss chalet that Dickens used as a writing room
on the grounds of Gad’s Hill. He put five mirrors in it; as he wrote to Annie
Fields in 1868, “they reflect and refract in all kinds of ways the leaves that
are quivering at the windows, and the great fields of waving corn” (12.119).
Mirrors were the decorative equivalents of Dickens’s imaginative ability to
expand, heighten, or double everything he looked at.
Three weeks after moving into the Tavistock study, Dickens had com-
pleted most of the first number of Bleak House. With “the tangible house”
in place, “the less substantial Edifice” grew into a remarkable feat of engi-
neering, the most intricate fictional mansion Dickens ever built. Fresh from
a year of immersion in the details of theatrical production and house moving,
he invented a narrative that lures the reader into a detective-like attentiveness:
we sense from the start that any detail tells or foretells. The design of the
interlocking stories justifies that sensation; each separate piece takes its proper
place in a remarkably resonant whole, as though Dickens were taking a kind
of artistic revenge over the delays and distractions of practical life by subdu-
ing them firmly to his systematizing imagination. Esther’s narrative gives full
play to the precision of Dickens’s own housekeeping eye, while the novelist
sits at last “in the midst of a system of Order” that revels in the representation
of disorder.
Esther, we are told, has trained for six years at the Greenleaf boarding
school, where she has led only a somewhat less carceral existence than the
women of Urania Cottage. “Nothing could be more precise, exact, and or-
derly, than Greenleaf,” she writes approvingly. “There was a time for every-
thing, all round the dial of the clock, and everything was done in its appointed
moment” (BH 3). Rather like Urania Cottage, Greenleaf is designed to cover