MANAGER OF THE HOUSE 127just a mile out of Exeter. “Something guided me to it,” he wrote to Cathe-
rine, “for I went on without turning right or left, and was no more surprised
when I came upon it and saw the bill up, than if I had passed it every day
for years.” Everything about it was perfect, from its landlady to its “excellent
parlor,” its “noble garden,” its numerous cellars, meat-safes, and coalholes, and
its exquisite neatness and cleanliness. The rent was low, only twenty pounds
a year. He took it immediately (1.517).
In the long and detailed letters he wrote from Exeter to Catherine, Forster,
and Mitton, Dickens’s sense of competence and dispatch is on full display. He
is charmed by his ability to charm the landlady, the upholsterer’s daughter,
and everyone else he encounters. He enumerates for Catherine just what
furniture he has chosen for each room, down to “the crockery and glass, the
stair-carpet, and the floorcloth”; he assures Mitton of the beauty and interest
of the spot (1.522–24); he regales Forster with comic accounts of the rural
characters he has met, rehearsing them for future fictional roles (1.518–21).
He arranges for precise sums of money to be given to his parents for their
coach journeys. Every detail of the ignominious retreat is—as he tells it—
under his control. The anger, disappointment, and sense of interruption that
fueled his decision to banish his parents from London were transformed, or
bound, by the excitement of making a house into which they would safely
fit—for the rest of their lives, he trusted. John Dickens, at fifty-three, was
willing and able to work, but that inconvenient fact was swept under the rugs
that Dickens had chosen for the cottage’s two sitting rooms.
The exile was tolerated for about four years; by the end of 1842 the
John Dickenses were back in the outer boroughs of London. Their complaints
had begun as early as four months after the move, making Dickens “sick at
heart” after all he had done in his whirlwind reorganization of their lives
(1.560). Putting intractable human material into magically appearing cottage
retreats was not turning out as well as it did in his fiction. Nonetheless, the
business of making houses to contain family scenes and family secrets, as well
as other kinds of humanly unmanageable experience, was to become increas-
ingly important to Dickens, both in his life and in his narratives. His way of
writing novels in monthly numbers, requiring the regular production of a
precise number of chapters and pages within a ritualized time frame, was just
one example of a characteristic negotiation between highly ordered frames
and their potentially explosive contents. This tendency came to its fullest
expression during the busiest decade of Dickens’s life, from the late 1840s to
the late 1850s, when his managerial talents and obsessions were engaged in
a variety of ways: running the Home for Homeless Women at Urania Cot-
tage, managing elaborate amateur theatricals, creating and editing Household