MANAGER OF THE HOUSE 157there is no hope of renewal—or stability—anywhere in town. Arthur Clen-
nam goes directly from his prison room to his wedding, and the end of the
novel leaves the married pair apparently houseless in the streets. For other
characters, urban dwelling is a form of camping. The inhabitants of Bleed-
ing Heart Yard live there “as Arabs of the desert pitch their tents among the
fallen stones of the Pyramids” (LD 1.12). The pretentious Mrs. Gowan lives
at Hampton Court, whose “venerable inhabitants seemed, in those times,
to be encamped like a sort of civilized gipsies. There was a temporary air
about their establishments, as if they were going away the moment they could
get anything better” (LD 1.26). The peripatetic Miss Wade is discovered
in “an airless room” containing odd scraps of furniture and “a disorder of
trunks and travelling articles,” “as she might have established herself in an
Eastern caravanserai” (LD 1.27).
Instability and restlessness mark the inhabitants of houses of Little Dorrit
as they marked Dickens’s life in the mid- 1850s, when he was more often
out of London than at home. Arthur finds the comfortably well-organized
Meagles cottage a welcome alternative to London, but when Mr. Meagles
greets him at the door, he describes himself as “boxed up... within our own
home-limits, as if we were never going to expand—that is, travel—again.” In
Mr. Meagles’s “whims to have the cottage always kept, in their absence, as if
they were always coming back the day after tomorrow,” Dickens describes
himself (LD 1.16). Houses had to be perfect in their readiness, yet easily left
behind. The acquisition of Gad’s Hill Place assured him that there would
always be a comfortable place to be—elsewhere. Still, when he invented
Mrs. Plornish’s fantasy of the thatch-roofed Happy Cottage, its exterior
painted on a wall of her parlor in Bleeding Heart Yard, Dickens struck a
comic death-blow to the pastoral solution he had employed so recently in
Bleak House. “To Mrs. Plornish, it was still a most beautiful cottage, a most
wonderful deception; and it made no difference that Mr. Plornish’s eye was
some inches above the level of the gable bedroom in the thatch” (LD 2.13).
For the narrator and the reader, it is simply a most wonderful deception.
Little Dorrit is notably uninterested in housekeeping; its houses are traps
for foul air and festering secret resentments. Dickens was not to return to
the theme of the little housekeeper for a decade, until, near the end of Our
Mutual Friend, he sounds a brief farewell reprise of the erotic-domestic tune
in Bella Rokesmith-Harmon. In Great Expectations the fatally house-bound
Mrs. Clennam reappears in the guise of Miss Havisham, Mrs. Joe’s household
efficiency is rendered as domestic terrorism, and Wemmick’s heavily fortified
suburban “castle” features Wemmick himself as a comical suburban Dickens,
the proud genius of clever arrangement. Between the depressive Little Dorrit