MANAGER OF THE HOUSE 159sexual relations? Catherine would have known and demurred when he crept
out of bed in his restless anxiety; had they euphemistically agreed to protect
her from these disturbances? Dickens’s famous thirty-mile night walk from
London to Gad’s Hill took place sometime during this troubled month of
October, but it is not clear whether Dickens was walking from his office
digs toward Catherine at Gad’s, or away from Tavistock House after their
return at the end of the month; on 7 December he told Lavinia Watson that
the walk had occurred “six or eight weeks ago” (8.489). It is often assumed
that the walk was a result of a fight with Catherine, and that the walled-off
bedroom was a definitive turning point made in response to some incident
of Catherine’s jealousy, but there is no hard evidence about either assump-
tion. Nor do we know if Catherine bought into the bedroom decision, or
whether it greeted her as an awful surprise on her return to Tavistock House.
We do not really know anything about what happened between them.
We do, however, have access to one of Dickens’s fantasies, a Gothic tale
often referred to as “The Bride’s Chamber,” that was completed on 2 Octo-
ber 1857 as part of the fourth chapter of “The Lazy Tour of Two Idle
Apprentices.” Triggered by Dickens’s and Collins’s stay at the King’s Arms
Inn at Lancaster, where a man who murdered a wife called Ellen had recently
been hanged, the tale is narrated to the traveling pair at the inn by the ghost
of the hanged man (Dent 3.447). The ghost narrator is doubled with the
Dickens-Goodchild figure through the gaze of fascination: “threads of fire
stretch from the old man’s eyes to his own, and there attach themselves” (Dent
3.452). Every critic who pays attention to the story recognizes that the tale
of an older man who terrorizes his pathetic young bride until she is abject
before him, and then orders her to die, expresses something about Dickens’s
marital feelings. It goes almost without saying that the story dramatizes a
death wish that does not involve an act of actual murder: after signing away
her property, the Bride dies (it takes many days and nights), simply because
she can no longer hold out against the will of her husband.
In the elaboration of this fantasy, however, Dickens reveals a complex
set of understandings. The wife-killer forms his victim’s mind from child-
hood on: “The girl was formed in the fear of him, and in the conviction,
that there was no escape from him”; she sees in him the embodiment of
“power to coerce and power to relieve, power to bind and power to loose.”
As a result, she can do nothing but apologize, plead forgiveness, and promise
to obey his every wish; and as a result of that, he hates her for her abjection
(Dent 3.454). The portrait of sado-masochistic psychological abuse drew on
intimate material that was familiar to Dickens and doubtless to Catherine;
as early as 1842, in a thank-you letter to an acquaintance in New York, he