MANAGER OF THE HOUSE 169In this oblique way, Dickens celebrated his new life. Written some months
after he had established the Ternan women at Houghton Place, the Caliph
story embeds a tale of joyful, secret, guiltily empowering sexual dominion
at the center of a narrative house. “A Haunted House” appeared in the first
Christmas issue of the new journal that announced Dickens’s break with the
alliances of his past, but it epitomizes one of the organizing rhythms in his
life and art: the house is rationally ordered and respectable, but the dream life
of its occupant is not.