Love of home life assumed unprecedented importance for the Victorians, and Dickens was hailed by his first reviewers as one
of its earliest proponents. His domestic ideal can be seen in Dombey and Son, in the description of the house across the road from Mr Dombey’s chilly mansion occupied by ‘rosy children’, who eagerly
await their father’s return from work, and who romp with him ‘or group themselves at his knee, a very nosegay of little faces,
while he seemed to tell them a story’ (ch. 18). Although the family is sadly motherless, the hallmarks of the happy home are
nevertheless evident as her absence is filled by the cheerful and orderly housekeeping of her eldest daughter, who ‘could
be as staid and pleasantly demure with her little book or work-box, as a woman’, making her father’s ‘tea for him – happy
little housekeeper she was then!’ (ch. 18). Closely watching this domestic tableau from her lonely window across the street,
Florence Dombey’s longing gaze is framed by the imaginative movement inwards, from exterior to interior perspective, that
typifies Dickens’s vision of the bright, cosy home sequestered from the chill outdoors. Elsewhere in his writing – in the
metropolitan Sketches of ‘Boz’ or the wanderings of Little Dorrit, locked out of the Marshalsea with Maggy, or the night walks of the ‘Uncommercial
Traveller’ – the movement inwards is projected from the street, a perspective that was vital to Dickens’s imagination. Serving
as a foil to Florence’s desolation and exclusion from her father’s love, the ‘rosy children’ in Dombey and Son demonstrate the way in which the domestic ideal is frequently shadowed by familial failure in Dickens’s fiction. Together
with his recurring need for the streets, it suggests the tension that lies at the heart of his vision of domesticity.
Dickens’s investment in the values of hearth and home reflects the central emotional importance of the family in Victorian
middle-class culture. Under the transformative impact of industrialisation and urbanisation, English family life had changed.
As factories replaced home workshops
for the labouring classes, and middle-class men began commuting daily to their city employment from the suburbs, a division
emerged between the world of work and the home, which became an exclusively domestic space. The separation is dramatised in
the daily movement of figures such as John Carker, travelling between the cottage he shares with his sister Harriet, in a
neighbourhood on the north side of London ‘neither of the town nor country’ (ch. 33), and his work at the City offices of
Dombey and Son. Accompanying these changes, earlier understandings of the family as blood-related ‘kin’ or as a household
including live-in servants, apprentices or clerks, gave way to the idea that those who inhabited the home, newly defined as
a space of privacy and self-containment, now constituted the ‘family’ – at least according to the 1851 Census Report, which
identified this basic ‘social unit’ as consisting of ‘a head and of dependent members, living together in the same dwelling’.
1 Servants, so necessary for maintaining the home but always posing a residual threat to its privacy by their presence, were
not included. In practice, actual living arrangements varied widely. But the middle-class ideology of domesticity that emerged
with the separation of home and work became normative, even if its formation was ‘uneven’.
2 Home ownership was not important, nor indeed affordable, for most of those who aspired to the domestic ideal; what signified
was the quality of the home as a place of retreat from the turbulent world of industrial capitalism. With this ideal went
a series of binary oppositions through which the Victorians sought to order their world: outside and inside, work and home,
public and private, male and female.
The cult of the hearth was invoked in a range of discourses throughout the period, beginning with Victoria’s domestication
of the monarchy and ranging across debates about women’s employment, working-class housing, religion and national identity.
However, John Ruskin’s 1865 lecture, ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, has become especially well known for its account of the so-called
doctrine of ‘separate spheres’ that underpinned the domestic ideal. Ruskin famously describes the home as a refuge, ‘the place
of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division … a sacred place, a vestal temple,
a temple of the hearth watched over by Household Gods’.
3 ‘In so far as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate into it … it ceases to be home’, he writes. At the centre of this
‘sacred place’ – indeed, constituting it ‘round her’ wherever she goes, so that her gender identity is inseparable from it
– is the ‘true wife’: ‘The stars only may be over her head; the glowworm in the night-cold grass may be the only fire at her
foot: but home is yet wherever she is’. Ruskin’s idealisation of the home makes clear the values of privacy, womanly self-sacrifice
and manly protection which are held to distinguish and shield it from the public realm of capitalist competition, struggle
and self-interest. The ‘Angel in the House’, eponymous heroine of Coventry Patmore’s narrative poem (published between 1854
and 1862), is the phrase often used to identify the ‘true wife’ depicted by Ruskin.
Although Ruskin and Patmore’s celebrations of the hearth have become widely known articulations of Victorian domestic ideology,
a more important formative role was played by the family magazines of the period, at a time when the periodical press was
wielding considerable cultural power in the dissemination of information and attitudes regarding home and family life. Cheap
periodicals such as the
Family Herald (1842–1939),
Family Friend (1849–1921) and
Family Economist (1848–60), while aimed at the lower middle and working classes, addressed their readership using the discourse of separate
spheres that the middle classes had defined.
4 As the
Family Herald argued in an 1844 essay identifying home as ‘woman’s empire’,
however important political questions may be to all and each, we should never forget that a strong, elegant, and well-spread
table, and warm blankets, and good bed-linen – with pots, and saucepans, and cups and saucers, and knives and forks, not forgetting
the toasting fork, are of far more importance to each of us than all the 2,000 laws which have been passed by the Reform Parliament.
5
The
Family Herald sets up ‘domestics’ as ‘an independent science’, needful of close study by the woman upon whom devolves the care of regulating
the affairs of the home. Her status as household manager or domestic economist was acknowledged and consolidated by the launch
of the
Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine in 1852, a monthly journal that dealt with the daily minutiae of its readers’ lives and which soared in sales to 50,000 copies
an issue by 1857.
6 By this time its founder, Samuel Beeton, had married the woman who was to publish the most famous of the various manuals
of instruction for domestic economists to appear throughout the nineteenth century – Isabella Beeton. Her
Book of Household Management went through five editions and derivations during her own lifetime and has been followed by more than forty (often bestselling)
spin-offs since.
7 Mrs Beeton gave advice ranging from how to deal with servants and how to prepare elegant meals as well as more modest dishes
that could be accommodated in small kitchens with limited resources, to how to manage a household budget.
It is just such a book that the newly married Mrs John Rokesmith studies in
Our Mutual Friend, ‘a sage volume entitled
The Complete BritishFamily Housewife, which she would sit consulting, with her elbows on the table and her temples on her hands, like some perplexed enchantress
poring over the Black Arts’ (book 4, ch. 5). As the comic account of Bella’s perplexities suggests, Dickens liked to poke
fun at the professionalising of domestic management implied by such manuals, even as he rigorously insisted upon good housekeeping
in his life and fiction. Esther Summerson, giving ‘the housekeeping keys the least shake in the world as a reminder’ (ch.
8) to herself of her domestic duties in
Bleak House, exemplifies the good homemaker, while Dora’s inability to grow up into a competent domestic manager in
David Copperfield is signalled by the principal use made of the cookery book that David optimistically buys her, which is ‘put down in the
corner for Jip to stand upon’ (ch. 41). As a number of Dickens’s biographers have remarked, his fictional portraits extolling
the well-ordered home owe much to his own punctilious habits as a housekeeper who was fully involved with the house-hunting,
decoration or refurbishment of the various homes he leased, and who was not averse to intervening himself in the domestic
management of his household. Such engagement on his part suggests that the gendered roles within the family, dictated by Victorian
domestic ideology, were in practice more open and ambiguous than the doctrine of separate spheres would indicate.
The preparation and consumption of food were central to Victorian domesticity in general, and to Dickens’s fiction in particular.
The Cratchit Christmas goose, steeped in sage and onions, or the humble ‘old knuckle of ham’ served with crusty loaf and butter
by Dot Peerybingle in
The Cricket on the Hearth, convey the homely comforts of food; they contrast with the freezing repast that follows Paul’s cheerless christening in
Dombey and Son – ‘a cold collation, set forth in a cold pomp of glass and silver, and looking more like a dead dinner lying in state than
a social refreshment’ (ch. 5) – or with the ostentatious banquet served by the Analytical Chemist at the Veneerings’ home
in
Our Mutual Friend; while, once again, Dora’s failure to produce an edible meal for the little dinner to which Traddles is invited in chapter
44 of
David Copperfield signals her unfitness as a housekeeper. Her ineptitude contrasts with the quiet competence of that exemplary domestic angel,
Agnes Wickfield, but also with the more unconventional homemaking arrangements of Traddles’s wife, Sophy, whose ‘loving, cheerful,
fireside quality’ is thrown into relief by its setting within the ‘withered’ walls of Gray’s Inn (ch. 59). Returning from
his sojourn overseas following Dora’s death, David discovers his old school-friend as a fledgeling barrister living with his
new
wife and her five sisters in ‘“domestic arrangements [that] are, to say the truth, quite unprofessional altogether’” (ch.
59). The unorthodox combination of Traddles’s professional and married life in these chambers gives a relish to domesticity
that is carried through in his description of their improvised bedroom up in the roof: ‘“a capital little gipsy sort of place’”
(ch. 59), which Sophy has papered herself, it suggests the chaste expression of female sexuality through housekeeping that
Dickens characteristically favours.
8 Notwithstanding the evidence of her ‘“punctuality, domestic knowledge, economy, and order’” within their thoroughly ‘unprofessional’
home, Sophy also reveals a notably undomestic and unfeminine sideline talent as a copying-clerk for her husband, writing with
a ‘“stiff hand”’ that is ‘“extraordinarily legal and formal”’ (ch. 59), thereby adding to their harmonic combination of public
and private life.
Dickens’s fondness for such unorthodox domestic arrangements can be seen elsewhere in the remarkable preponderance of alternative
and quasi-familial units found in his fiction. The occupants of the back parlour at the Wooden Midshipman in Dombey and Son, the inhabitants of Mr Peggotty’s boathouse in David Copperfield or the group gathered by Mr Jarndyce at Bleak House are obvious examples, where the snug seclusion of the hearth – that icon
of morality, security and comfort – unites characters bound by affective rather than consanguineous ties. But dysfunctional
families are even more common. Bleak House alone includes the disordered household of the Jellybys; the ‘rapaciously’ benevolent Mrs Pardiggle and her ‘unnaturally
constrained’ (ch. 8) sons, who resent being made to give up their pocket money to her countless charities; the narcissistic
Mr Turveydrop and his overworked son, Prince; the avaricious Smallweeds, all born as adults; and Mr Skimpole’s neglected family,
left to fend for themselves while he looks after ‘number one’. Such satiric portraits of deviant family life strive to affirm
a dominant domestic ideology in the novel, even as they attest to its failure.
Although domesticity remains a dominant discourse in Dickens’s fiction, its limits are also tested, as Holly Furneaux has
compellingly argued, through the homoerotic possibilities of in-law intimacy, where choice of a marital partner may be shaped
by the importance of relations with other family members, such as a wife’s brother or sister.
9 The transgressive women who so deeply engage Dickens’s imagination – the prostitutes, Nancy and Alice Marwood; the socially
eminent but self-loathing Edith Dombey and Lady Dedlock; or the embittered spinsters, Rosa Dartle and Miss Wade – offer other
challenges to normative ideology, as do the many plots involving family secrets, which depend upon the
supposed inviolability of the home to leverage a narrative effect of sensational exposure. The tenuousness of the familial
ideal is also suggested by the readiness with which the boundary between private and public life can be breached: returning
to the Wooden Midshipman, Walter Gay is distressed to find a broker named Brogley, who has taken possession of the shop because
Sol Gills failed to meet the payment due on a bond debt, ‘sitting in the back parlour with his hands in his pockets’ (ch.
9). Occupying the inner sanctum of the Wooden Midshipman, Mr Brogley demonstrates the ease with which the home could be violated,
its privacy exposed to public view, as in the heterogeneous goods displayed in his shop, ‘where every description of second-hand
furniture was exhibited in the most uncomfortable aspect, and under circumstances and in combinations the most completely
foreign to its purpose’:
A banquet array of dish-covers, wine-glasses, and decanters was generally to be seen, spread forth upon the bosom of a four-post
bedstead, for the entertainment of such genial company as half a dozen pokers, and a hall lamp. A set of window curtains with
no windows belonging to them, would be seen gracefully draping a barricade of chests of drawers, loaded with little jars from
chemists’ shops; while a homeless hearthrug severed from its natural companion the fireside, braved the shrewd east wind in
its adversity, and trembled in melancholy accord with the shrill complaining of a cabinet piano, wasting away, a string a
day, and faintly resounding to the noises of the street in its jangling and distracted brain. (ch. 9)
These goods have lost their functionality, have been orphaned and made vagrant. Left over from household clearances, their
forlorn disposal in Dickens’s anthropomorphic description bespeaks the domestic failures of their former owners.
Such scenes remind us of the resources required to make a home. Victorian England was an unequal society, and the domestic
ideal was constructed to suit the material and social circumstances of the middle classes. The upper classes could afford
lifestyles antipathetic to the modest comforts of the homely hearth, and Dickens depicts moribund great houses, such as Chesney
Wold, as emblematic of their owner-families as well as raffish aristocrats, such as Sir Mulberry Hawk in
Nicholas Nickleby, or questionable gentry, such as Bentley Drummle, ‘the next heir but one to a baronetcy’ (vol. 2, ch. 4), in
Great Expectations, who threaten the values of domesticity with their vicious behaviour. Towards the other end of the social scale, the meagre
income of many working-class families depended upon the employment of women and children, provoking reform campaigners to
lament the negative impact of such economic conditions upon home life. Thus, Dickens furthers his social critique by adding
the plight
of Charley Neckett – forced to go ‘“Out a washing’” (ch. 15) when the family is orphaned (until she is rescued by Mr Jarndyce’s
generosity) – and of the unemployed brickmakers and their wives in
Bleak House to the other anti-domestic families depicted in the novel. At the very bottom of the scale were the denizens of common lodging
houses such as Tom All Alone’s, ‘tumbling tenements’ that contained ‘by night, a swarm of misery’ (ch. 16). The grotesque
portrait of Tom All Alone’s was based upon a nocturnal tour of the St Giles ‘Rookery’ that Dickens undertook with Inspector
Charles Field, chief of the Detective Department at Scotland Yard, in 1851 and vividly described in
Household Words. The essay reveals again the tension in Dickens’s vision of domesticity, as his horrified recoil at the evidence of Irish
families crowded into filthy ‘lairs and holes’ without any privacy or comfort, is accompanied by a fascination with the very
act of exposing these hidden spaces to public view. His narrative stance is distinguished by continually shifting pronouns
that alternate his identification with the slum tourist observers and with the objects of their scrutiny: ‘Some wake up with
an execration and a threat. – What! Who spoke? O! If it’s the accursed glaring eye that fixes me, go where I will, I am helpless.
Here! I sit up to be looked at. Is it me you want? – Not you, lie down again! – and I lie down, with a woeful growl.’
10 Like his city walking more generally, these excursions into outcast London show that while domesticity remained at the heart
of Dickens’s fiction, his imagination was at the same time inescapably drawn to its opposite – the kaleidoscopic world of
the streets.