BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 217calls “land-ships” (44); Carey’s Dickens is also very aware of the close relationships
between order and violence, security and imprisonment. Frances Armstrong pro-
vides a useful overview of Dickens on houses and housekeeping in Dickens and the
Concept of Home (Ann Arbor: U. M. I Research Press, 1990). Armstrong expands on
Carey’s concept of the land-ship, and contributes some especially interesting analysis
of female “doll’s house” and male “Robinson Crusoe” modes of housekeeping in
Dickens. Natalie McKnight, “The Poetics of Dickens’s Domestic Spaces,” Dickens
Quarterly 20.3 (2003): 172–83, describes how the snug land-ships suggest a balance
between the values of imaginative play and domestic order.
Studies of Dickens as a celebrant of home and hearth, or as a perpetrator of
domestic ideology, are numerous. In a chapter entitled “Charles Dickens’s Angels of
Competence,” Elizabeth Langland makes an important modification to the “Angel
in the House” concept, showing how Dickens’s household angels are required to be
competent managers of class status requirements and relations between middle-class
householders and servants. See Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic
Ideology in Victorian Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 80–112. For
another study of Dickens’s complex negotiations with domestic ideology see Cath-
erine Waters, Dickens and the Politics of the Family (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997). For essays that push beyond familiar concepts, see Helena Michie, “From
Blood to Law: The Embarrassments of Family in Dickens,” in Palgrave Advances in
Charles Dickens Studies, ed. John Bowen and Robert L. Patton, 131–54, and Michal
Peled Ginsburg, “House and Home in Dombey and Son,” Dickens Studies Annual
36 (2005): 57–73. Michie’s article explores the words that create safe boundaries
between nonsexual and sexual family connections; Ginsburg treats the house as a
physical space subject to decay.
For a useful description of Dickens at 48 Doughty Street, see David Parker, The
Doughty Street Novels (New York: AMS Press, 2002), 1–28. In developing my story
about Dickens’s successive houses, I have been aided by the variety of emphases in
Dickens biographies: Frederic G. Kitton, The Dickens Country (London: Adam and
Charles Black, 1905), Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, Fred
Kaplan, Dickens: A Biography (New York: Avon Books, 1988), and Peter Ackroyd,
Dickens.
For an account of the phases in the editorial relationship of Dickens and William
Henry Wills, see Sandra Spencer, “The Indispensable Mr. Wills,” Victorian Periodicals
Review 21.4 (1988): 145–51.
The best introduction to Urania Cottage, its social contexts, and Dickens’s suc-
cessful work there is in Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime, 94–116. Amanda Anderson
makes an important argument about the continuities between Urania Cottage and
Dickens’s novels in Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian
Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 66–107. Anderson emphasizes the
ways that Dickens reproduced attitudes to prostitution in his attempts to redeem
the women by separating them from their stories and their agency. On the question
of Dickens’s appropriation of the women’s stories see also Joss Lutz Marsh, “Good
Mrs. Brown’s Connections”; and Margaret Flanders Darby, “Dickens and Women’s
Stories,” Part 2.
On the houses in Bleak House, see especially Robert Newsom, Dickens on the
Romantic Side of Familiar Things. Newsom emphasizes the uncanny, or “unheimlich”