MANAGER OF THE HOUSE 165into a house at 2 Houghton Place near Mornington Crescent, purchased in
the names of Frances and Maria Ternan, but meant for Ellen, who became
its owner when she turned twenty-one.
Dickens’s own “gipsy tent” at the Household Words office was expanded
that spring into serious bachelor digs when the office moved to larger quar-
ters a few doors down Wellington Street. In 1865 the Ternans left Houghton
Place, but Ellen was to profit for the rest of her life from its rental. She had
not lived there long, having spent most of the 1860s in various undisclosed
houses that Dickens took for her, often under false names. After she was
injured in the 1865 Stapleton railway accident, Dickens placed her in Lon-
don suburbs with good rail connections to London and Gad’s Hill: Elizabeth
Cottage in Slough and then Windsor Lodge in Peckham. Claire Tomalin
notes that Ellen, trained for the stage rather than the home, was “totally
undomesticated; household management and cookery were of no interest to
her at all” (Tomalin 124). His irregular, migratory love life had finally allowed
Dickens to put sexual intimacy and housekeeping under different roofs.
Finding houses for Ellen was just one of the many real estate transactions
that were to occupy Dickens during the 1860s. His brother Alfred Dickens
died in 1860, leaving no money to support his widow Helen and their five
children. Dickens found and supported London houses for Helen, and she
reciprocated by caring for his mother as Elizabeth Dickens declined into
senile dementia. The following year Henry Austin died, leaving Dickens to
advise his sister Letitia about her housing arrangements. Letters to her during
November and December 1861 show him urging her to leave her house and
take furnished lodgings while she flurried about making money by keeping
the house and taking in lodgers. He finally secured a government pension for
her as Henry’s widow; she seems to have capitulated and gone into lodgings.
In addition, Dickens rented West End houses nearly every year so that Mamie
could be in town during the social season. If we consider all of these houses,
combined with the support of Catherine, improvements at Gad’s Hill, and
the expenses of launching the younger boys, it is no wonder that Dickens
became obsessed with his public readings. They were not just a way to revel
directly in the approval of his public, but a financial necessity.
Houses were constantly on his agenda, but he was always in motion,
between the apartment in the office of All the Year Round, Gad’s Hill, Ellen’s
lodgings, and the prolonged, strenuous reading tours. “I cannot regard myself
as having a home anywhere,” he wrote to Wilkie Collins in 1863, though
Gad’s “gets so pretty, that I can’t help being fond of it, and I am always touch-
ing it up with something new” (10.239). The dream of being grounded
in a stable domestic space was gone, but so were the nightmare visions