MANAGER OF THE HOUSE 141absconded; in full detective mode, he invented an elaborate explanation of
how they had managed to get hold of a key to the wardrobe (6.207). When
a girl secreted some clothes in which to escape, Dickens announced to the
Home that she was to be discharged the next day; when she robbed and
escaped early in the morning a policeman was in the lane to apprehend
her. Dickens, who found the example instructive to the others, made sure
she was taken into custody and convicted summarily (6.540–41). In 1854
Dickens dismissed Frances Cranstone as an evil-doer who had corrupted
the whole house, and took firm measures with another girl who claimed to
be her friend, in order to “crush the bad spirit summarily” (7.316). As
the years passed, he increasingly regretted decisions in which leniency had
triumphed over suspicion. Once again, it appeared that it was easy to put
destitute people into well-regulated cottages, but not so easy to keep them
there. As for the success stories—by Dickens’s count about half the cases
they accepted—they were promptly dispatched overseas once they had per-
formed to standard.
David Copperfield, written during the height of the Home’s brief history,
may be more deeply related to Urania Cottage through its emphasis on
housekeeping than in its sentimentally stylized portraits of the fallen women
Martha and Emily. Dickens had displayed his penchant for erotic domesticity
through Ruth Pinch’s pie making in Martin Chuzzlewit, but Copperfield is the
first of his novels to make a sustained connection between good housekeep-
ing and good character. Agnes Wickfield’s perfect but unobtrusive house-
keeping serves to shore up her father’s respectability (and later her husband’s),
while Dora Spenlow Copperfield’s domestic ineptitude is a kiss of death, the
sign of her inability to grow from a girl into a woman. The tightly packed
Peggoty boat/house, complete with ship-shape fittings, follows in the wake
of Sol Gills’s shop as a fantasy of neat bachelor improvisation. No married
couples or biological parents and children live there. Sexual love destroys
it, as it corrupts or threatens so many of the novel’s other houses: the Cop-
perfields’, the Wickfields’, the Steerforths’, the Strongs’. The substitution of
housekeeping for sexuality, as well as the expression of acceptable sexuality
through housekeeping, is a peculiarity of Dickens’s imagination whose ori-
gins can only be guessed at.
Along with such familiar fantasies, however, David Copperfield suggests
a kind of knowledge that does not appear in his letters about the Home
for Homeless Women. Betsey Trotwood’s neat-as-a-pin cottage in Dover
is the house that saves young David from his life as an abandoned work-
ing boy; its extreme order, like that of Urania Cottage, is a welcome haven
from the shame of his immediate past. Yet Betsey’s housekeeping is obsessive;