MANAGER OF THE HOUSE 153of antagonism. That we dare not do. Our resentment took another form,
the more insidious form of deeply whispered mutterings among ourselves
on the subjects of ‘slavery,’ ‘degradation,’ and so forth.” Though ineffective,
they “still served as a kind of safety-valve and helped to soothe our ruffled
feelings” (H. Dickens 25–26). His wry, twentieth-century voice offers some
clue about the difficulties of growing up a Dickens son.
Henry was about five when Dickens’s disapproval began to descend upon
the carefully nurtured eldest son Charley. At seventeen, Charley was failing
to live up his father’s hopes: a German professor, to whom he had been sent
to learn the language in preparation for training in a German commercial
school, had advised Dickens that the discipline at the school would be too
harsh for a child of Charley’s sensitivity and inaptitude for study. Dickens
duly reported to Miss Coutts, his special confidant where Charley was con-
cerned, and added his own assessment. Charley was “gentle and affection-
ate” but “I think he has less fixed purpose and energy than I could have
supposed possible in my son. He is not aspiring, or imaginative in his own
behalf.” Dickens blamed this on Catherine, from whom “he inherits an
indescribable lassitude of character—a very serious thing in a man—which
seems to me to express the want of a strong, compelling hand always beside
him” (7.245). The complaint was the first of many about successive sons.
Dickens felt that Catherine did not manage the household of children the
way he wished them to be managed, and that she had failed to model a
kind of temperament that would render the children as independent and
resourceful as he had been. He was conveniently forgetting, or fearing to
recognize, that his own family included several men—his younger brothers
as well as father John—whom he had propped up for years. Nor did he
consider his own precocious independence, the different economic situa-
tions of the two generations, or the fact that his tendency to take energetic
charge left little room for the initiatives of others and enforced their depen-
dency on him. Instead, he withdrew his trust from Catherine and invested
it in Georgina.
Gad’s Hill Place, 1855–1870
When Dickens, at thirty-nine, bought a forty-five-year lease on Tavistock
House, he assumed that he had settled his final family home. In fact his years
of house-taking had barely begun. His interest in room design did not dimin-
ish either, once Tavistock House was, in his word, complete. On 1 Novem-
ber 1854 he inspected a drawing room that Miss Coutts was refurbishing in