166 KNOWING DICKENS
of characters stuck for a lifetime in houses that could barely contain the
emotional tensions they were intended to hide. Brief descriptions of houses
continued to appear in the late novels, but the characters in Our Mutual Friend
and The Mystery of Edwin Drood tend to be, like Dickens, on the move.
At the end of the managerial 1850s, however, houses became structuring
images for the special Christmas issues of Household Words and its successor
All the Year Round. Like previous Christmas numbers, “A House to Let”
(1858) and “The Haunted House” (1859) were organized as frame sto-
ries into which the contributions of other writers could be fitted. Working
closely with Dickens’s idea, Wilkie Collins wrote much of “A House to
Let,” which is rarely discussed except as an example of their collaboration.
It is important, however, that in the year of his separation from Catherine
Dickens chose a title and a situation that had a longstanding internal associa-
tion with failure. The “To Let” motif takes us all the way back to his 1834
sketch “Shops and Their Tenants,” in which Boz observes from the street
the rise and fall of a shop’s fortunes. Once the To Let sign goes up he loses
hope, “for that the place had no chance of succeeding now, was perfectly
clear.” After a few more permutations the shop turns into the Gower Street
house in which Elizabeth Dickens had vainly hoped to support her fam-
ily by running a school, forever symbolized for her son by the brass plate
advertisement on the door of the house. Observing “these signs of poverty,
which are not to be mistaken,” Boz turns away, thinking that the house
“had attained its lowest pitch of degradation” (Dent 1.63–64). When they
show up throughout his subsequent work, To Let signs invariably suggest sad
stories of decline that can only be imagined from the street. The poverty of
family life inside Mr. Dombey’s house is mirrored in “the dirty house to let
immediately opposite,” and when Florence is left alone, the neglected outside
of the Dombey mansion is treated as if it too were a house both haunted and
To Let: “boys chalked the railings and the pavement... and drew ghosts on
the stable door” (DS 3.23).
“A House to Let” is narrated by an old woman who takes lodgings in
London across from a house that has stood apparently empty for years; no
one will take it. The frame story turns on discovering the reason and uncov-
ering the family secret hidden behind the To Let sign. The first chapter,
“Over the Way,” establishes the narrator in a rather jaunty, fast-moving Col-
lins voice, interrupted occasionally by paragraphs unmistakably written by
Dickens. The description of the house opposite has all of his markers: the
rusty, peeling area-railings, the broken glass and stones telling of mischievous
neighborhood boys: “there were games chalked on the pavement before the
house, and likenesses of ghosts chalked on the street door... the bills ‘To Let,’