MANAGER OF THE HOUSE 167had curled up, as if the damp air of the place had given them cramps” (CS
261–62). It is doubtless also Dickens who invests the old lady with a lost
beloved brother called Charley, whose child she had once yearned to raise.
Inset stories by Dickens (“Going into Society”) and Elizabeth Gaskell (“A
Manchester Marriage”), as well as a poem by Adelaide Procter (“Three Eve-
nings in the House”) fill the empty rooms of the frame story.
The secret is revealed in “Trottle’s Report,” written primarily by Col-
lins, but clearly imagined by Dickens. The mysterious house conceals—how
could it have been otherwise?—a bright-eyed young boy abandoned to his
caretakers; a “little, lonely, wizen, strangely-clad boy, who could not at the
most, have been more than five years old.” He spends his days scouring the
floor of his garret room with “a mangy old blacking-brush, with hardly
any bristles left in it, which he was rubbing backwards and forwards on the
boards, as gravely and steadily as if he had been at scouring-work for years,
and had got a large family to keep by it” (CS 291–92). No one but Dickens
could have written the sentences that reveal how the collapse of his marriage,
long concealed within the beautifully ordered family home, has merged with
the traumatic prison years of the Dickens parents. The child and the cease-
lessly working novelist are one, both scrubbing away to clean up the shame
of family failure.
“The Haunted House” (1859) was more fully in Dickens’s charge; he
wrote the beginning and ending frame narratives, as well as a long inset story
called “The Ghost in Master B’s Room,” while Collins joined four others
who contributed the other inset tales. Each was supposed to unmask a ghost
in a particular room, though the contributors in fact went their own ways,
as Dickens complained to Forster on 25 November; he could put fellow-
writers into a house together, but he could not force them to decorate the
rooms the way he wanted. The idea for the issue had arisen from Dickens’s
correspondence that year with William Howitt, a spiritualist and believer
in ghosts; Dickens was now out to demonstrate that there were no haunted
houses, only minds haunted by human fears and memories. His frame nar-
rative features a Dickens-like narrator determined to make his point by rent-
ing a “haunted” country house which, like “A House to Let,” has stood
empty for years because of its reputation. The narrator’s rational skepticism
is set against the uneducated hysteria of his female servants, who catch the
infection of fear disseminated by local workers; so far as he is concerned, the
house suffers primarily from cheap repairs, bad maintenance, and thought-
less furnishing. His sister, even more cheerfully rational than the narrator him-
self, proposes that they send the servants away and invite friends to stay with
them to test the house. The friends arrive, each is allotted some household