168 KNOWING DICKENS
duties, and they agree to say nothing until Twelfth Night, when they will
meet and tell stories set off by their experiences in the rooms assigned to
them. With these good companions and snug arrangements in place, the nar-
rator “never was happier in my life” (CS 325).
The contrast between the rationalistic frame story and the wild contents
of Dickens’s inset tale makes a striking instance of the pattern I have been
following throughout this chapter. “The Ghost in Master B’s Room” may
be the most chaotic, dreamlike narrative Dickens ever allowed into print.
Deborah Thomas emphasizes its autobiographical visions, as well as its loose,
associative organization and its lack of narrative control (Thomas 75–80).
When the narrator shaves in the mirror of Master B’s room, he is terrified by
seeing, not his own face, but those of a boy, an adolescent, a young man, his
father, and even the grandfather he never met. In this generational sequence
there is, perhaps, an implicit recognition that he is after all no better than
his dubious predecessors. As if returning to more comfortable territory, the
piece closes with self-pitying childhood memories of family debt, the repos-
session of “my own little bed” in a mixed lot of family furniture, and shame
at school. As in “A House to Let,” Dickens’s most primary association of
houses with exposure, failure, and shame returns to haunt his tale. These
memories allow him to end the story with the moral he intends: there has
been “no other ghost” than “the ghost of my own childhood, the ghost of
my own innocence, the ghost of my own airy belief ” (CS 337).
Between the recognitions in the mirror and the sad songs of youth Dick-
ens wrote some fantasies bizarre enough that Thomas does not even mention
them—fantasies of forbidden male power and sexuality that suggest anything
but childhood innocence. At this point in the narrative “I was marvelously
changed. I was myself, yet not myself.” Behind a door, to a doubled figure, the
narrator confides a proposition: “The proposition was, that we should have
a Seraglio.” The other creature assents: “he had no notion of respectability,
neither had I” (CS 331). As the narrative proceeds, it becomes clear that the
participants are children at school, who spend much of their energy hiding
their sexual fantasy from the schoolmistress Miss Griffin. Yet the childhood
setting does not conceal the narrator’s urges for power: he gets rid of the
double, appoints himself Caliph, and reigns supreme among eight beautiful
little girls. Rules about the Caliph’s kissing rights are debated and settled.
“There were difficulties in the formation of the desired institution, as there
are in all combinations,” says the fantasist, but it is only enhanced by the
“mysterious and terrible joy” of secrecy: there was “a grim sense prevalent
among us that there was a dreadful power in our knowledge of what Miss
Griffiths... didn’t know” (CS 332–34).