132 KNOWING DICKENS
sins most egregiously in his dismissal of daughters. When Dickens’s grandly
named fourth son, Alfred D’Orsay Tennyson Dickens, was born on 28 Octo-
ber 1845, he announced the birth with a caveat: “I care for nothing but girls
by the bye; but never mind me.” “I am partial to girls, and had set my heart
on one—but never mind me,” was the way he put it to Clarkson Stanfield
(4.418; 4.419). When Stanfield’s wife produced a new son the following
year, Dickens—with three more sons in his own future—grumbled, “I sup-
pose you are (like me) past all congratulations on that score” (4.527). The
preferred daughters Mamie and Katie were eight and nearly seven years old
as Dickens began to work out the story of Dombey, Florence, and the house
that was not a home.
Dombey’s house is located “on the shady side of a tall, dark, dreadfully
genteel street in the region between Portland-place and Bryanstone-square”
(DS 3)—that is, in the immediate neighborhood of Devonshire Terrace. Dick-
ens smothers the house in a number of paragraphs mythily evocative of decay
and death, but its most chilling feature is that each inhabitant is confined
to a separate zone within it, and incurs penalties for violating the boundar-
ies between zones. This way of imagining the house is the more powerful
because it is not directly addressed in the narration. Dombey’s three rooms
on the ground floor (placed, like Dickens’s studies, facing the garden) form
a self-contained male unit in which library, study, dressing room, and dining
room are combined. When Dombey wants to see his infant son Paul, he
orders the nurse to walk with the baby in the third glassed-in room, while he
sits in one of the others looking at his son as if through a distant window. To
Nurse Richards, Dombey looks like “a lone prisoner in a cell, or a strange
apparition that was not to be accosted or understood” (DS 3). It is not impos-
sible that Dickens imagined himself in similar terms while he was engrossed
with his work in his study; it is certainly clear in Mamie’s account that a
father “not to be accosted or understood” was the father often presented to
the Dickens children.
Florence’s ever-hopeless attempts to find a home in her father’s affection
are expressed in her efforts to enter these rooms. After Paul dies she sneaks
downstairs in the middle of the night to crouch at Dombey’s door, which
never opens; “Perhaps he did not even know that she was in the house.”
One night the door is ajar and she enters, only to be rejected and ejected.
Her father redraws the zone boundaries as he lights her up the stairs: “The
whole house is yours above there... You are its mistress now” (DS 18). When
Dombey leaves town, Florence performs secret rituals of housekeeping in
the forbidden territory, nestling in her father’s chair, putting things in order,
“binding little nosegays for his table, changing them as one by one they