154 KNOWING DICKENS
her house on Stratton Street, and made a detailed recommendation: “The
general compactness of this important part of the room is greatly marred
by there being nothing in the little piers on either side of the looking glass
opposite the door.” He prescribed for each pier “a long tasteful piece of
drapery” that would “hold the whole together, and make the rest tell for a
great deal more than at present.” He insisted on a table next to the bookcase,
“because the bookcase as it stands, is quite insanely perched in the air, with-
out appearing to have any root in the ground—which is always disagreeable;
and secondly, because there must be no table in the middle of the room, or you
destroy the fireside.” He also recommended a new carpet “in dark chocolate
or russet, with maybe a little green and red. The eye would rise from a dark
warm ground, with great pleasure, to the light walls and the rich-colored
damask” (7.450).
More than any other letter, this one displays the habits of interior decora-
tion, along with the “Napoleonic commander-in-chief ” style, that Marcus
Stone recalled. Dickens’s sense that the look of a room must create a sense of
natural “grounding” may also indicate the role that houses played in stabiliz-
ing his inner world. As he grew older, the need for ritual stability became
more extreme. It became necessary to rearrange the furniture of any house
in which he stayed. Eliza Lynn Linton, from whom Dickens bought Gad’s
Hill Place, recalled that Dickens “was always fidgety about furniture, and
did not stay even one night in an hotel without rearranging the chairs and
tables of the sitting-room, and turning the bed—I think—north and south.
He maintained that he could not sleep with it in any other position; and he
backed up his objections by arguments about the earth currents and positive
or negative electricity. It may have been a mere fantasy, but it was real enough
to him” (Collins 1981, 213).
It was the inner world of fantasy that came into play when Dickens
noticed, on a wintry forty-third birthday walk from Gravesend to Rochester,
that Gad’s Hill Place was for sale. “The spot and the very house are liter-
ally ‘a dream of my childhood,’ and I should like to look at it before I go
to Paris,” he wrote to Wills. “And I want you, strongly booted, to go with
me!” (7.531). The dream he referred to was the famous childhood story that
Dickens had apparently told to Forster whenever they passed the house on
their walks. Forster retells it on the second page of his biography: “upon
first seeing it as he came from Chatham with his father, and looking up at
it with much admiration, he had been promised that he might himself live
in it or in some such house, when he came to be a man, if he would only
work hard enough” (Forster 2–3). Forster oddly attempts to “authenticate”
the story by referring to a later retelling, in Dickens’s Uncommercial Traveller