152 KNOWING DICKENS
and what a wonderful and truly womanly sympathy he had with them in all
their childish joys and griefs,” writes the enchanted Mamie, perhaps not quite
recognizing that she has put Dickens’s imaginary children first. She is quick to
retrieve: “I can remember with us, his own children, how kind, considerate and
patient he always was” (M. Dickens 14). Writing at fifty-eight in her last ill-
ness, she still buys into Dickens’s household management, recalling his careful
attention to the room she and Katie had shared in a garret at the top of Devon-
shire Terrace, where they could put up any prints so long as the job was neatly
done. “Even in those days,” Mamie writes, “he made a point of visiting every
room in the house once each morning, and if a chair was out of its place, or a
blind not quite straight, or a crumb left on the floor, woe betide the offender”
(16–17). In her eyes, such attentions were proof of the theme she sought to
impress on her reader: “From his earliest childhood, throughout his earliest
married life to the day of his death, his nature was home-loving” (11).
What we know of Katie Dickens Perrugini’s last memories comes fil-
tered through her friend Gladys Storey, whose unsystematic narrative leaves
some doubt about their authenticity. According to her, Dickens inspected
the insides of drawers as well as the neatness of the children’s rooms. If they
used language he disapproved, he would write remonstrating notes, “folded
neatly and left by him on their pincushion, which they called ‘pincushion
notes.’ ” Like a number of others who left memories of Dickens, she calls his
punctuality “almost painful”; even Mamie admits “And then his punctuality!
It was almost frightful to an unpunctual mind!” before she goes on to justify
it as a form of consideration for others (Storey 77; M. Dickens 17).
The memories of Henry Fielding Dickens, the sixth and only successful
one of Dickens’s sons, represent the brood of younger boys that Dickens
found rather superfluous; ten years younger than Katie, Henry experienced
a quite different distance from his father. In Memories of My Father (1929)
he speaks for his brothers: “In his habits his methods of tidiness were very
marked, so pronounced, indeed, as to fail to meet with the entire approval
of us small boys.” Dickens’s rather military idea of how to treat a group of
little boys emerges in the practice “which went by the name of ‘Pegs, Parade,
and Custos.’ To each boy was appropriated a particular peg for his hat and
coats: a parade was held once a week for overhauling the inevitable fresh
stains on our garments; and one of us was deputed in turn to be the general
custodian of the implements of the games, whose duty it was to collect them
at the end of the day and put them in their appointed places.” In retro-
spect, Henry finds these rules reasonable enough, but he admits that reason
is sparse in young boys: “they were received by us with mingled feelings of
dislike and resentment. It is true we gave no open utterance to our feelings