MANAGER OF THE HOUSE 155essay “Travelling Abroad” (AY R, 7 April 1860). Whether it was true or not,
the story held a central spot in Dickens’s personal mythology.
For Cerjat in Switzerland, the new house was further mythologized as
“Shakespeare’s Gad’s Hill, where Falstaff engaged in the robbery” (8.265).
This identification, along with a speech of Falstaff ’s from Henry 4 Part I, was
framed and placed on the first floor landing at Gad’s Hill Place as soon as
Dickens moved in (Forster 652). He also fabricated for Cerjat a retrospec-
tive tale of destiny, in which he and Wills see the house on a walk; the same
evening Wills meets the owner, Eliza Lynn (Linton) at a dinner party, where
it is revealed that she spent some childhood years in the house; Wills returns
to Dickens saying, ‘It is written that you were to have that house at Gad’s
Hill” (8.265–66).
In fact Wills looked at Gad’s Hill Place while Dickens was in Paris and
was unimpressed with anything but the “the view and the spot.” Dickens
concluded that it was not worth the money, and announced that the house
“is to be thought no more about” (7.541–42). He did continue to think, of
course; his other trusty agent Henry Austin was sent to look at the house
in July. By mid-November 1855, Austin, Forster, and Wills were engaged
in helping Dickens make an offer; by February 1856 he was calling it “my
house” (8.50). Though it was the first house owned outright as a freehold
in the Dickens family, it was not a house he needed or that he could really
afford. He planned to “make it clean and pretty” and rent it out; “Whenever
I cannot, I shall use it for myself and make it a change for Charley from
Saturday to Monday,” he told Miss Coutts (8.50). A few days later he told
Forster that he planned to do the repairs and “keep it for myself ” during the
summer of 1857 (8.57). He never did rent it to anyone; in retrospect, it looks
as though he was, half-consciously, preparing an escape hatch. The house also
served as a writer’s purchase that placed him among the gods of the British
literary tradition—a position that few have denied him since.
Repairs began in February 1857, once the sitting tenant was out. Henry
Austin resumed his role as Dickens’s building contractor, and the house was
inaugurated on Catherine’s birthday, 19 May 1857, with family and a few
friends. In June the family returned for the summer, though Dickens com-
muted frequently to London; it appeared that the country house was now to
replace family summers in Boulogne, where they had gone in 1853, 1854,
and 1856. (Broadstairs had been abandoned after the prolonged stay dur-
ing the Tavistock repairs.) Dickens enjoyed filling “the little old-fashioned
place” with his “ingenious devices”; even the lingering presence of work-
men on the premises was not so disturbing when the family had a home
elsewhere (8.330, 331). When he reported to Austin that the well had to be