MANAGER OF THE HOUSE 147up the shame and humiliation of her early experience, and to give her a place
in the world authorized by her ability to serve in the houses of others. Esther
with her bunch of household keys is an emblem of feminine housekeeping
that frequently makes Dickens a target for feminist impatience; yet the early
sources of Esther’s need for order, as well as her observant eye for household
detail, are as intimately linked with Dickens himself as with a simple Victo-
rian ideology of womanhood.
Dickens could hardly wait to describe the Jellyby household, which appears
in the first number he wrote at Tavistock House. Mrs. Jellyby’s messes are
beyond Esther’s capacity to tidy, but her orderly eye allows Dickens to elabo-
rate on the comedic potential in household articles that are misplaced, mis-
used, or badly improvised. Mrs. Jellyby’s dress fails to meet at the back, and is
“railed across with a lattice-work of stay-lace—like a summer house”; Esther
finds that “the curtain to my window was fastened up by a fork”; the doors
do not close, “for my lock, with no knob on it, looked as if it wanted to be
wound up; and though the handles of Ada’s went round and round with the
greatest smoothness, it was attended with no effect whatever on the door.”
Richard “had washed his hands in a pie-dish,” and “they had found the kettle
on his dressing-table”; the dish of potatoes is “mislaid in the coal skuttle,”
while “the handle of the corkscrew” comes off and strikes the servant on the
chin. When Caddy visits Esther late at night, she carries a broken candlestick
and an egg-cup filled with vinegar in which to wash her inky middle finger
(BH 4).
Dickens had never written quite like this before; the clash of his careful
habits with the prolonged disruptions of the move and the dirty, dilapidated
state in which Stone had left Tavistock House had added a new note of
humorous specificity. Once the Jellyby house has advertised its shame with
a To Let sign, and the Jellybys have been relocated in a furnished lodging in
Hatton Garden, Dickens returns to the game of category mixing as Esther
lists what tumbles out of Mrs. Jellyby’s closets. The list includes such brilliant
touches as “damp sugar in odds and ends of paper bags,” “books with but-
ter sticking to the binding,” “guttered candle-ends put out by being turned
upside down in broken candlesticks,” and “heads and tails of shrimps” (BH
30). The human costs to the physical and mental health of Mr. Jellyby and
the Jellyby children are of course the novel’s overt thematic concern, but
Dickens’s ability to evoke disgust at the way disorderly housekeeping turns
everything to garbage makes its own powerful effect.
Esther’s eye is also employed to register the chaos of Krook’s shop, in
thoroughly Dickensian style: “Everything seemed to be bought, and nothing
to be sold there.” Krook’s inability to part with the accumulated litter of