218 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
aspects of houses in chapter 3; in chapter 4 he discusses Dickens’s private sources for
Bleak House, including the making of Urania Cottage and the rather unwelcome
move to Tavistock House, and suggests the deep thematic of “being housed, ill-
housed, or houseless” in Dickens (103). In Newsom’s view, to be properly housed
is to know who one is. For a discussion of the many bleak houses in the novel, as
well as an allegorical reading of the winding passages of Bleak House, see Alice Van
Buren Kelley, “The Bleak Houses of Bleak House,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 25.3
(1970): 253–68.
Dickens’s separation from Catherine has of course received many interpretations
over the decades. Of these, the most definitive for our time is that of Michael Slater in
chapters 6 and 7 of Dickens and Women; chapter 8 treats Georgina Hogarth with equal
sympathy and fairness. Slater makes the connections with fiction: he discusses the
Jarndyce-Esther relationship in relation to Dickens and Georgina, and “The Bride’s
Chamber” in relation to the failing marriage, though his readings are somewhat
different from my own. I have also profited in my account of the separation from
Lilian Nayder’s “The Widowhood of Catherine Dickens,” Dickens Studies Annual 32
(2002): 277–98. I am indebted for the material on the Ternans to Claire Tomalin, The
Invisible Woman. Speculations about the significance of the divided bedroom may be
found in Ackroyd (798–99) and Fred Kaplan, Dickens: A Biography, 375–78.
For a study of the Dickens children, including the pros and cons of his style of
fatherhood, see Arthur A. Adrian, Dickens and the Parent-Child Relationship (Athens:
Ohio University Press, 1984), 30–63. Natalie McKnight considers Dickens’s fictional
fathers in relation to his own mixture of play and control, in “Dickens’s Philosophy
of Fathering,” Dickens Quarterly 18.3 (2001): 129–38.
“The Bride’s Chamber” is extensively discussed by Harry Stone in both Dickens
and the Invisible World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 288–94, and
The Night Side of Dickens, 299–345. Stone reads the young man in the story as the
Dickens who yearns for Ellen Ternan. Deborah A. Thomas treats “The Bride’s
Chamber,” “A House To Let,” and “The Haunted House” in Dickens and the Short
Story, 74–80, 89, and 110–21.
6. Streets
Alexander Welsh makes the necessary generic distinctions among Dickens’s bor-
rowed and new languages of the city as he argues for a shift from Dickens’s early
and conventional vision of the city as satire to his later and more Victorian sense
of the city as problem; see The City of Dickens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
F. S. Schwarzbach’s Dickens and the City (University of London: Athlone Press, 1979)
shows how the image of the city changes from novel to novel, and emphasizes the
vitality of the city in Dickens’s imagination. Nancy Aycock Metz’s essay “Little
Dorrit’s London: Babylon Revisited” (Victorian Studies 33.3 [1990]: 465–86) gives an
excellent account of the historical layers in the London of that novel.
Dorothy van Ghent’s 1950 essay “The Dickens World: A View from Todgers’s,”
gives a famous analysis of Dickens’s habit of animating nonhuman things while
dehumanizing people; it has had the odd side-effect of installing the description of
Todgers’s in Martin Chuzzlewit at the center of critical discourse about Dickens’s