OTHER DICKENS
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active type of his century (and ours), a type more ambitious than
the craftsman or professional. Dickens is the artist as tycoon, dedi–
cated to building up an impregnable personal empire, literary,
domestic, financial. His ambition throbs unmistakably in his letters.
Like our Victorian grandfathers whose sense of power was mani–
fested in their weighty tread on the floor, their heavily drawn
breaths, their loudly ticking watches, Dickens is almost physically
present in his assured rhythms and turns of speech. He knew, as he
once confided to his wife, "what a thing it is to have power." Yet
his sense of power is infinitely refined by its supreme confidence in
itself, in short by his consciousness of genius; and his greatness, un–
like that of the legendary tycoon, is of the proudly accommodating
kind. Much of the legendary life of that type is nevertheless in
evidence in his letters. Three times he and his family make that
significant move which Hardy describes in one of his wonderful
"period" poems.
They change to a high new house,
He, she, all of them-aye,
Clocks and carpets and chairs
On the lawn all day.
..
Three times he moves, each time to a higher house. Indeed,
no ordinary tycoon cared more for clocks and carpets and chairs–
or mirrors and curtains and stairs-then Dickens does. In his house–
holding role he combines the scruples of an ambitious hostess with
the vigilance of a concierge. His passion for domestic order equals
his sense of power but can seem more oppressive, for it often ap–
pears to operate at the expense of his wife. The poor "apathetic"
incompetent Catherine Dickens, so tactless in company, so given to
misdirecting letters, turning her ankle, falling through trapdoors on
stages, dropping her bracelets in the soup-she is definitely not to
be trusted as a householder. When he proposes to bring a guest
home for the week end he must tell her to arrange the guest's room
in such and such a manner and layout a copy of
The Scarlet Letter
for him to read (the guest is a judge) .
Yet Dickens has real cause for anxiety in these respects. With
his large and clamoring body of dependents, including the ten chil-
