156 KNOWING DICKENS
redug—they did not hit a spring for two months—or that the drains had to
be redone, he put on some mock despair, but sounds more amused than anx-
ious. Full ownership of Gad’s meant that he could improve his estate without
restriction, and he seems to have taken pleasure in “throwing out” additions:
an extended drawing room, additional bedrooms under a raised roof, a con-
servatory, a servant’s hall, a coach-house schoolroom and dormitory, a tunnel
connecting the house with an additional piece of land across the Gravesend
Road. By the late 1860s “last improvements” had become a standing joke
among the Dickens children (M. Dickens 115).
Little Dorrit was composed during the period between the negotiations
for Gad’s Hill and the family’s first summer residence there. In light of this
juxtaposition, the most striking common features of the novel’s London
interiors are their airless stuffiness and their bad smells. Dickens conveys
the impression that it is impossible to breathe in a London house; only the
Meagleses’ country cottage provides freshness and sweet air. His variations
on the theme are characteristically ingenious, and suggest the sensitivities of
an asthmatic. Mrs. Clennam’s personal prison holds “a smell of black dye
in the airless room, which the fire had been drawing out of the crape and
stuff of the widow’s dress for fifteen months, and out of the bier-like sofa
for fifteen years”; the whole place is pervaded by “the musty smell of an old
close house” (LD 1.3). Frederick Dorrit’s house “was very close, and had an
unwholesome smell” (LD 1.9). Tite Barnacle has a fancy address, but “to
the sense of smell, the house was like a sort of bottle filled with a strong
distillation of mews; and when the footman opened the door, he seemed to
take the stopper out” (LD 1.10). The jars of “old rose leaves and old laven-
der” in the Casby house seem promising, but they have not been freshened
for twenty years (LD 1.13). When Mr. Meagles and Arthur Clennam try
to find Miss Wade, they search among “ricketty dwellings... of a capacity
to hold nothing comfortable except a dismal smell” (LD 1.27). After Fanny
Dorrit marries Mr. Sparkler they live at a most fashionable address in “a
little mansion... with a perpetual smell in it of the day before yesterday’s
soup and coach-horses” (LD 2.24). Bad smells, indicative of clogged-up
psyches as well as bad drainage, know no social boundaries in Little Dorrit.
All of London is now, in Dickens’s imagination, rendered as a place of stifled
impulse and feeling.
From the street view, most of the houses in London are either squeezed
into their spaces or literally falling down; the Clennam house, most dra-
matically, is “leaning on some half dozen gigantic crutches” that offer “no
very sure reliance” (LD 1.3). The house collapses in allegorical fashion once
Mrs. Clennam’s choked story of self-imprisoning resentment is aired, but