MANAGER OF THE HOUSE 151Egg had proposed to her and been refused, whether because Georgy had
decided to dedicate her life to her brother-in-law’s household or because she
was not interested in Egg. “Georgina is not yet married,” Dickens wrote to
his Swiss friend William de Cerjat, “and not in the least likely to be. She
seems unaccountably hard to please” (6.671). “Unaccountably” may have
been disingenuous, but Dickens was determined to see himself as a neutral
factor. “I took no other part in the matter than urging her to be quite sure
that she knew her own mind,” he assured Miss Coutts, but the sentence that
follows might tell a different story: “He is very far her inferior intellectually;
but five men would be out of six, for she has one of the most remarkable
capacities I have ever known” (7.172). How could Georgy have failed to
know that Dickens himself was a sixth man?
Nevertheless her choice was a topic for family concern. When Dick-
ens, Egg, and Wilkie Collins traveled together in the fall of 1853, Dickens
reported back to Catherine, “A general sentiment expressed here this morn-
ing, that Georgina ought to be married. Perhaps you’ll mention it to her!”
(7.167). He did not yet know that Georgy would choose him rather than her
sister when the Dickens marriage was dismantled a few years later, but it had
been clear for a long time that she was essential, not only to the smooth run-
ning of the household, but as a sturdy walking companion and a quick study
of Dickens’s habits and needs. What was Dickens, fifteen years older, to his
useful sister-in-law? A brother? A father? A fantasy partner whom she served
as mistress of the house? The ambiguities of the relationship hover in the
Esther-Jarndyce-Woodcourt plot, which Dickens may have used to assure
himself that, were Georgy really to fall in love, he would be nobly willing to
give her up. He was careful, however, to steer away from the explicit rivalry
between sisters he had felt free to satirize a decade earlier in the Pecksniff
sisters of Martin Chuzzlewit. In the 1850s he was beginning to experience
his own version of the wider cultural anxiety that lay behind the Deceased
Wife’s Sister’s Act of 1840, which outlawed marriage between a widower
and the sister of his late wife. The dearth of employment opportunities for
unmarried women created all too many reasons for a sister-in-law to become
an integral, potentially competitive, part of a couple’s household.
Dickens’s fear of losing Georgina centered in his view that she was essen-
tial to the care and training of his children. As his agent rather than the chil-
dren’s mother, Georgy was quick to follow the household rules of orderliness,
punctuality, and discipline that Dickens thought appropriate to impose on his
offspring no less than on the women of Urania Cottage. The children were
later to recall his practices in quite different ways. “We can see by the different
child characters in his books what a wonderful knowledge he had of children,