Knowing Dickens

5. Manager of the House

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Chapter 5 Manager of the House Shortly after Dickens’s twenty-seventh birthday , he tried to put his parents away in a cottage. John Dickens, whose debts had been accumulating for some years, was headed for bankruptcy again; his Holborn landlord had given him notice and bill collectors were at his door. Midway through Nicholas Nickleby and relatively secure in his prospects, Dickens decided to settle the matter of his embarrassing parents once and for all. After completing the monthly number for March 1839, he would find them a cottage far from London, pay the rent, give them an allowance, and get his father out of the vicinity of his publishers Chapman and Hall, from whom John Dickens had been regularly begging. Speed was essential: he wanted his parents to disappear the day their lodging expired,before their creditors could be notified. He would have to pay the bills, but might, he thought, be able to get away without paying in full if John Dickens were “non est inventus,” not to be found (1.515). The town of Exeter in Devon was chosen,far enough from London on the southwestern coast,and Dickens booked himself a place in a coach for Monday, 4 March, leaving his lawyer Thomas Mitton and his friend John Forster to carry out the London details of the business. The move was to take place on the following Saturday. The “toilsome journey” he anticipated in a letter to Forster (1.515) became , in his letters home, a triumphant success story. On Tuesday morning he “walked out to look about me,”and immediately found Mile End cottage MANAGER OF THE HOUSE 127 just a mile out of Exeter. “Something guided me to it,” he wrote to Catherine , “for I went on without turning right or left,and was no more surprised when I came upon it and saw the bill up, than if I had passed it every day for years.”Everything about it was perfect,from its landlady to its “excellent parlor,”its “noble garden,”its numerous cellars,meat-safes,and coalholes,and its exquisite neatness and cleanliness. The rent was low, only twenty pounds a year. He took it immediately (1.517). In the long and detailed letters he wrote from Exeter to Catherine,Forster, and Mitton, Dickens’s sense of competence and dispatch is on full display. He is charmed by his ability to charm the landlady, the upholsterer’s daughter, and everyone else he encounters. He enumerates for Catherine just what furniture he has chosen for each room, down to “the crockery and glass, the stair-carpet, and the floorcloth”; he assures Mitton of the beauty and interest of the spot (1.522–24); he regales Forster with comic accounts of the rural characters he has met, rehearsing them for future fictional roles (1.518–21). He arranges for precise sums of money to be given to his parents for their coach journeys. Every detail of the ignominious retreat is—as he tells it— under his control. The anger, disappointment, and sense of interruption that fueled his decision to banish his parents from London were transformed, or bound, by the excitement of making a house into which they would safely fit—for the rest of their lives, he trusted. John Dickens, at fifty-three, was willing and able to work,but that inconvenient fact was swept under the rugs that Dickens had chosen for the cottage’s two sitting rooms. The exile was tolerated for about four years; by the end of 1842 the John Dickenses were back in the outer boroughs of London. Their complaints had begun as early as four months after the move, making Dickens “sick at heart” after all he had done in his whirlwind reorganization of their lives (1.560).Putting intractable human material into magically appearing cottage retreats was not turning out as well as it did in his fiction. Nonetheless, the business of making houses to contain family scenes and family secrets,as well as other kinds of humanly unmanageable experience,was to become increasingly important to Dickens, both in his life and in his narratives. His way of writing novels in monthly numbers, requiring the regular production of a precise number of chapters and pages within a ritualized time frame,was just one example of a characteristic negotiation between highly ordered frames and their potentially explosive contents. This tendency came to its fullest expression during the busiest decade of Dickens’s life, from the...