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Between homes: moving house in the Victorian novel and popular culture; and, Heroine (poems)

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Between Homes:

Moving House in the Victorian Novel and Popular Culture

and

Heroine (poems)

by

Corinna McClanahan Schroeder

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING)

May 2019

ii

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Literature and Creative Writing Program and the English
Department at the University of Southern California for their years of guidance and support. I am
particularly grateful to my co-chairs, Carol Muske-Dukes and Hilary Schor, for always
championing my work and for helping me refine and shape these dissertation projects. “Heroine”
and “Between Homes” would not be what they are without their mentorship. I also want to
extend a heartfelt thank you to committee member Kate Flint for inspiring both of these projects
in her excellent Victorian literature seminar, “Materials Fictions,” and for her careful and
thorough feedback along the way. Thank you, too, to committee member David St. John for his
insight and encouragement—and for helping me find my way to USC in the first place. I also
want to express my gratitude to outside committee member Elinor Accampo for her excellent
historical commentary on these dissertation projects and to Vanessa Schwartz for her help in
shaping “Between Homes” in its early phases.
Thanks as well to Emily Anderson and Joe Boone for their boundless guidance in the end
years of this PhD; to Janalynn Bliss, who truly has an answer to every question; to Rich Edinger
and Trisha Tucker in the Thematic Option Honors Program, for making TO a home for students
and instructors; and to Meg Russett, whose CORE 102 class sessions kept me sane during a very
busy final fall semester and whose teaching continues to inspire me. Thanks, too, to my many
students in Thematic Option, the Writing Program, and the English Department, from whom I
have learned a great deal.
And finally, a special thank you to Michelle Brittan Rosado, Tyler Mills, Marci Vogel,
Dagmar Vanengen, Kyung Hee Eo, and Brianna Beehler for their feedback and encouragement
on these projects and, most importantly, for their friendship.
iii

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ii

Between Homes: Moving House in the Victorian Novel and Popular Culture

List of Figures 2
Epigraph 3

Introduction: Telling the Story of the Victorian Household Move
Introduction 4
Residential Mobility in Victorian England 6
House and Home: Middle-Class Residential Moves 11
Narrativizing the Middle-Class Household Removal 27
Chapter Overview 36

Chapter One: “Houses, houses everywhere, but not a house for me”:
House-Hunting, Male Narrative Control, and the Victorian Periodical Press
Introduction 41
“Hunting for Houses”: The Middle-Class Male Fantasy of the Hunt 47
The “Miseries” of House-Hunting: House Agents, Advertisements, 52
and Strangers
Valuable Companion or Liability?: Middle-Class Wives and the House-Hunt 66
“Bewildered in time”: Losing Control of the Hunt 70
“I put my foot down”: Forking Narrative Outcomes in the Story of the Hunt 76
Reasserting Male Control in the Narrative of House-Hunting 79
“The lot of man is misery”: Narratives of Moving House 83
After “Hunting for Houses”: The Limits of Narrative Control 97

Chapter Two: “The little society of the back parlour broken up, and scattered
far and wide”: Reuniting the Family Unit in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son
Introduction 100
The Birth of a Son, the Death of a Wife, and a Removal Within 102
The Death of a Son and a Departure: The Role of Independent Removals 109
in Dombey and Son
Remarriage, Redecoration, and the Limits of Material Change 120
On the Move with Nothing: Physical Removal and Emotional Removal 125
“Then why don’t he go?”: Removing the “removed Being” from the House 129
Removal and Privilege in Dombey and Son
iv

Chapter Three: “And all so changed”: Loss, Instability, and House Removal
in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South
Introduction 146
“Only daughter of Helstone parsonage”: Removal and the Threat of Loss 150
“How in the world are we to manage removal?”: The Labor of a 160
Household Move
“How much of the original Margaret was left”: Change and Instability 167
in Milton
“Helpless, homeless, friendless Margaret”: Social and Financial Stability 179
in North and South
“Whirled on through all these phases of my life”: Internal Stability 187
for a Body on the Move
“Such strange unexpected changes”: Marriage, Milton, and Margaret’s 197
Life Beyond the Novel’s End

Afterword: Moving House in the Later Nineteenth Century 203

Works Cited 213

Heroine 223

Table of Contents 224

Poems 226

Notes 280

Between Homes:

Moving House in the Victorian Novel and Popular Culture

2

List of Figures

Figure 1 “‘The First of May’—The Discomforts of Moving,”
Harper’s Weekly, May 4, 1867, pp. 231

Figure 2 “Hunting for Houses,” Yankee Notions, April 1854,
pp. 151

Figure 3 Hugh Rowley, illustration accompanying Clarence Capulet’s poem
“Lodging to Let,” London Society, September 1867, pp. 253

Figure 4 “A House to Let,” Fun, August 25, 1866, pp. 242

3

They change to a high new house,
He, she, all of them—aye,
Clocks and carpets and chairs
On the lawn all day,
And brightest things that are theirs. . . .

—Thomas Hardy, “During Wind and Rain”

4

Introduction
Telling the Story of the Victorian Household Move

Introduction
In 1854, The Leisure Hour published a short nonfictional narrative titled “Moving
House.” Its author, Charles Manby Smith, begins the piece by explaining that he is writing “upon
the eve” of the Midsummer quarter day, one of the four quarter days around which middle-class
leases were coordinated in Victorian England (508):
[W]e are reminded by demonstrations at this season, always very numerous, and
which meet us as we walk the streets, that a pretty large section of the London
population are about changing their abodes, or are even now in the very act of so
doing. First, there is the sudden apparition of ‘This house to let—enquire within,’
or somewhere else, stuck into parlour and drawing room windows, or mounted on
a board in the front garden. Then there is the spectacle of respectable fathers of
families, or agitated young wives, flitting backwards and forwards like unquiet
phantoms, and turning their heads constantly on this side and that, in search of a
new domicile. Again, there are those long ominous-looking vans, upon whose
fronts are inscribed the words ‘Goods removed,’ either standing open-mouthed at
the green-grocers doors, with their shafts reared perpendicularly like rampant
skeleton arms, or their cavernous throats filled with the household goods of a
migrating family, creaking slowly along the highway on the route to a new
domestic retreat. These outward signs, which we cannot escape if we would,
forcibly recall to our recollection the events of that last flitting, when, leaving the
southern banks of the Thames we took our flight northwards, to the suburban
precincts of merry Islington. (508)

Before launching into the story of his family’s last move, Smith thus makes clear at the outset of
his piece that “house removal” was a visible part of middle-class Victorian life at least four times
a year—“to let” signs peppering the windows of houses; men and women “flitting backwards
and forwards” along sidewalks as they looked for their next residence; grocers’ hired vans, piled
high with households’ possessions, clogging the streets.
But just as “demonstrations” of this sort reminded the middle classes that many of their
fellow Victorians were on the move, so too did the periodical press. Indeed, in the mid-1850s, at
5

just the moment that Smith was writing, a middle-class conversation about moving house erupted
in the periodical press, with middle-class journals like Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine,
Household Words, The Leisure Hour, and The Saturday Review publishing pieces with titles like
“House-Hunting,” “Moving House,” “How I Let My House,” and “How We Moved In.” Made
up of advice literature, short fiction, narratives (like Smith’s) styled as autobiographical writing,
poetry, editorials, serialized novels, journalism, and even humorous illustrations, this
conversation happened across a variety of genres, and it also persisted over time, swelling to its
fullest in the 1860s and then quieting somewhat thereafter, though periodicals continued to
publish removal-related pieces occasionally through the first decade of the twentieth century.
Though this print conversation did involve many genres of writing, including an
abundance of advice literature, what is interesting is that Victorian authors turned again and
again to narrative, putting into story form the Victorian search for a new residence and the move
into that new residence. Indeed, even a small slice of publication history represents this larger
trend: Smith’s narrative with which we began appeared in The Leisure Hour on August 10, 1854;
the following month, on September 2, Household Words began its weekly serialization of
Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, a novel about moving if ever there was one; and then the
following month, on October 26, The Leisure Hour ran yet another narrative about moving, this
one called “House-Hunting.”
1
In other words, middle-class Victorians may have been
“reminded” each quarter day “by demonstrations […] always very numerous” that no small
portion of their neighbors were on the move, but the periodical press reminded them of this
reality even more frequently.

1
Charles Manby Smith, “Moving House,” The Leisure Hour No. 137 (August 10, 1854), pp. 508-509; North and
South (i), Household Words No. 232 (September 2, 1854), pp. 61-68; “House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour No. 148
(October 26, 1854), pp. 683-684.
6

So why did this mid-century conversation about middle-class residential moves erupt at
the moment that it did? Why did so many Victorian authors in the periodical press and in the
novel narrativize the process of a household removal again and again? And what exactly did a
change of address mean to middle-class Victorians? These are the questions that this project
seeks to answer, for while a great deal has been said about what filled the middle-class house and
what made the middle-class home, we have not yet fully grappled with how middle-class
Victorians’ many relocations affected their lives, their sense of home, or the stories they told
themselves.
*
Residential Mobility in Victorian England
The print conversation about what the Victorians called “house removal” was, in the first
place, a result of the fact that middle-class Victorians were by and large renters who moved quite
regularly. Historians estimate that ninety percent of all Victorians were renters (Muthesius 17),
and these leaseholder ranks were made up of the city- and town-dwelling middle classes, in
addition to the urban working classes, the rural middle class of farmers, and rural labourers who
did not live in tied cottages. Certainly, some Victorians did own their homes; freehold property
and home ownership were generally associated with the upper-class elite, including the landed
aristocracy and gentry, and to some extent with upper-working-class artisans (Thompson, Rise
167-169). In addition, freeholds were somewhat more common in northern industrial cities and
rural districts (Banfield 8-9). But for the many sectors of the population who were renters, the
dominance of leasehold allowed for a higher degree of mobility than would have been likely
under a wider system of freehold, and the middle classes in particular usually took renewable and
repairing leases on their houses, whose terms often ran from one quarter to one year to seven
7

years—and sometimes longer—in length (Burnett 97; Thompson, Rise 169). The typical duration
of a Victorian family’s lease—or the number of times a family might renew a lease—depended
in part on location and income level. In London, as J. T. Emmet noted in “The Ethics of Urban
Leasehold” (1879), the average length of residence in any one house for the middle classes was
three years, though, as F. M. L. Thompson has pointed out, five- to seven-year tenancies were
common for those who could afford eight- to ten-bedroom homes (Emmet 308-9; Thompson,
Hampstead 277). On the other hand, in 1870s Leicester, as R. M. Prichard notes, “Between a
fifth and a sixth of the electoral population”—a largely middle-class population—“changed their
address every year,” with a much larger proportion (approximately 80%) remaining in their
houses longer (66).
2

John Burnett refers to the middle classes as “that part of the population whose economic
resources allowed it to exercise some real choice as to how and where it lived,” and this notion
of “choice” is at the heart of how many historians understand the Victorian middle classes’
relationship to leasehold housing (94). For historians like Burnett and Thompson, the landlord-
tenant system of short-term leases was well-suited to middle-class Victorians, for it offered them,
in Thompson’s words, an “astonishing flexibility,” allowing them to move when they wanted to
move, to select the house and suburb that best suited their family, and to rise socially through
changes of address (Thompson, Rise 171). Burnett traces out one pattern of such removals,
imagining “a young professional or businessman” who “rents his first house at £25 a year”—a
six-room terrace house—upon marrying (100):
In five years’ time they move to a semi-detached house in the suburbs, with four
bedrooms so that the two children may normally have separate rooms, and with a
somewhat larger dining-room which does not disgrace the monthly dinner-party.

2
The population to which Prichard refers was a largely middle-class population thanks to the Reform Act of 1867,
which enfranchised all adult male householders who had been living in a particular borough for at least a year, in
addition to any lodgers paying more than ten pounds per year in rent.
8

In another five years, by which time the husband is forty and his income has
expanded to £750 a year, the important move is made to a newly-built, detached
villa, perhaps in another town, at a rent of £75 a year. (100)

After that, according to this hypothetical trajectory, the family might stay put, having as it were
“arrived”—or if they were among “the few whose incomes continue to expand from the
hundreds into the thousands,” this third house might be “only another step in the search for status
which might end in a mansion in a fashionable London square or even in a country seat” (101).
Though, as Thompson rightly notes, “it was perfectly possible to put down roots and remain in
the same house for a generation, even if it was rented under a succession of short leases,” there
was nonetheless “a considerable section of the middle classes” that was “constantly on the
move” due to the entwined nature of residential and social mobility and the relative ease with
which a middle-class family could remove thanks to the short-term lease system (Thompson,
Rise 171).
This is certainly not to suggest that middle-class Victorians were the only ones moving.
Indeed, the middle-classes’ regular household moves on quarter days made up only one part of
Victorian England’s residential movement. The Victorian era also witnessed the massive and
unprecedented movement of people from the rural countryside to England and Wales’s growing
towns and cities—what social geographers call inter-urban migration. Abandoning a shrinking
labour market and a rural housing shortage, seeking better employment and social opportunities,
these rural inhabitants were mostly young people, unmarried or newly-married, and their exodus
led to dramatic shifts in the make-up of the population (Burnett 8). As Burnett summarizes,
while in 1801 approximately 80% of the population of England and Wales lived in “rural” areas,
“by 1851, the decisive tilt had taken place, and more than half the English people were already
town-dwellers: by then, 54 per cent of people were living in ‘urban’ areas”—that is, towns
9

having more than 5,000 inhabitants—“as against 46 per cent in ‘rural’” (7). Indeed, the
proportion of the population who were town-dwellers only grew as the century progressed. In the
words of Pamela Horn, “By 1861 these urban dwellers outnumbered their rural counterparts in
the ratio of five to four. Thereafter the trend continued, until at the time of Queen Victoria’s
death less than a quarter of the population lived in country districts” (The Rural World 255). This
widespread exodus of Victorians from the countryside also led to towns and cities with high
proportions of non-native populations. As Michael Anderson notes, “The 1851 census revealed
that in almost all large towns migrants from elsewhere outnumbered those born in the towns”
(Family Structure 34).
In addition to inter-urban migration, there were also high levels of intra-urban working-
class migration throughout the Victorian era, and these city-dwelling working classes moved
even more frequently than the middle classes. In 1840, the Statistical Society determined that of
5,366 houses in the parishes of St. Margaret and St. John, Westminster, “no less than 1,834 had
been occupied by periods of one to six months only” (Burnett 64); in 1847, Edwin Chadwick
“found that in ten parishes in York over a third of the population moved within two years”
(Anderson, Family Structure 41); studying Leicester in the 1870s, R. M. Prichard more recently
observed that “the districts in the north and east where the slums housed the very poorest were
the most mobile” (62); and in Life and Labour of the People of London (1
st
series: Poverty, vol.
3, 1904), Charles Booth noted of the late nineteenth-century metropolis, “There are districts […]
where as many as a quarter of the inhabitants change their addresses in the course of a year”
(61). Indeed, in the first volume of the Poverty series (1902), Booth quotes a Bethnal Green
School Board visitor who found that nearly half of all the families on his books (530 out of 1204)
removed within one year (26-27).
10

In large part, working-class Victorians moved so frequently because of the particular
system of leasing associated with working-class housing. In England, as M. J. Daunton explains,
yearly and quarterly tenancies were confined to middle-class properties,” whereas “working-
class property was overwhelmingly let on weekly tenancies, with the rent payable every Monday
in arrears” (138). But working-class Victorians also moved frequently because of how closely
tied housing costs were with working-class incomes. While the middle classes spent (and were
advised to spend) one-tenth of their income on housing costs, including rent, rates, and taxes, the
working classes spent on average sixteen percent of their income on these costs—and, as Burnett
notes, “the fraction was inversely proportional to income, and was often much higher among the
very poor,” with some working-class Victorians spending one-third or even one-half of their
income on rent (Cohen 13; Burnett 93, 146-7; Reeves 23). Thus, while a subtle reduction in
income might not have affected many middle-class Victorians’ ability to maintain their current
residence, a subtle reduction would absolutely have necessitated a move to cheaper quarters for
many working-class Victorians. In this way, residential moves for the working classes were often
a kind of immediate response to their current financial state and employment status.
Of course, though we hear less about it, the opposite is also true: a system that let
working-class rentals by the week also allowed working-class Victorians to move when they
wanted to do so. Just as a sudden decrease in income could necessitate a quick move to tighter
quarters, a sudden increase in income could allow a family to relocate swiftly to larger housing—
trading one room for two or three; trading subdivided housing for a self-contained house; or
moving into housing which simply had, in the words of Anna Davin, “fewer disadvantages—
which was less damp, or had more light, better cooking facilities, easier access to water, fewer
stairs, or a less intolerable smell” (34). Indeed, even a steady income allowed a family to use the
11

short-term leasing system to their advantage: to move away from a difficult landlady, noisy
neighbors, or a nearby pub without having to suffer through a quarter- or year-long lease (Davin
36). In mid-century Birmingham, as Daunton writes, short-term rentals allowed some artisans to
upgrade their living conditions without necessarily increasing their rent, for “the practice of […]
agents was to redecorate a house each time it was empty,” and so artisans often moved
frequently in order to live in a newly-repaired house (146). One commentator in the 1860s
suggested that “over 60 per cent of the small occupiers in Birmingham changed their residence
every year” (qtd. in Daunton 147).
That said, for the lower working classes especially, residential life was far from stable.
As Prichard writes, “[I]n a world, where bereavement, illness or unemployment could reduce
even the more prosperous [working-class] families to abject poverty overnight […] it is hardly
surprising that the housing market should have been so volatile” (64). Indeed, the frequent
relocations, evictions and “midnight flittings” of poor, working-class Victorians unable to pay
rent are, to this day, a familiar part of the narrative of the Victorian city.
*
House and Home: Middle-Class Residential Moves
While many sectors of the Victorian population were on the move, and even frequently
on the move, the fact remains that a particularly middle-class conversation about household
removals erupted in the periodical press in the 1850s, fueled by the specific questions, concerns,
and anxieties that moving created for the middle classes. In part, this conversation erupted at this
moment in time as a result of legislation—the abolishment of “advertising duties in 1853, the
stamp duty in 1855, and excise taxes on paper in 1861”—which led to a proliferation of
periodicals and newspapers (Saunders 200). But even more fundamentally, this conversation
12

erupted at this moment in time as a result of the crystallization of new middle-class domestic
ideals about home.
At the heart of the middle classes’ focus on moving was the importance that they placed
on both house and home. First, as Deborah Cohen writes, middle-class residences were “flexible
indicators of status, which could be exchanged for better accommodations as fortunes allowed”
(xi), and as we have noted, the social expectation was that middle-class families would undergo a
series of removals, each to an increasingly larger house in a more socially-exclusive
neighborhood, as the family and the husband’s income grew. In this way, for the middle classes,
residential mobility was importantly linked with both lifecycle mobility and upward social
mobility, and it mattered deeply both what one’s house looked like and where it was located.
Indeed, middle-class residential moves were often driven by what Prichard calls “directional
bias,” involving a change in neighborhood or suburb and occurring over a greater distance than
the residential moves of the working classes, who often moved within one neighborhood or
within a closely-associated group of neighborhoods (59).
3
As Lenore Davidoff writes, then, “a
good deal of social mobility [for the middle classes] was literally mobility from area to area”
(85).
Second, as John Burnett notes, by the mid-nineteenth century, the middle classes had
become “the most family-conscious and home-centered generation to have emerged in English
history” and the home “became almost a sacred institution, the pivot not only of domestic
comfort but of moral rectitude” (95, 96). This was the result of the “extensive revaluation and

3
Observing the working classes of the East End in the late 1880s and 1890s, Charles Booth wrote that “the people
usually do not go far, and often cling from generation to generation to one vicinity, almost as if the set of streets
which lie there, were an isolated country village” (1
st
series, Poverty, vol. 1 [1902], p. 27). The short-distance
moving patterns of the urban working classes are typically explained by two factors: the advantages offered by local
networks and, especially in London, the lack of cheap transport to the suburbs (Prichard 64-65, Davin 34-35).
13

change,” in Thad Logan’s words, which home as an ideological construction underwent in the
early nineteenth century (23). At the heart of this revaluation and change was “[t]he separation of
life into a public sphere of production inhabited by men and a private sphere of the home
presided over by women” (Logan 24-25). As Margaret Ponsonby summarizes, in the late
eighteenth century, “home was an extension of the working life of the family, not just because it
was often physically joined, but as a statement about the credit worthiness, the reliability and
work ethos practiced by its inhabitants” (3). On the other hand, the domestic space of the
nineteenth-century home was not only separate from the spaces of work and commerce, but the
home was “meant to provide a safe haven from the sinful outside world,” offering its inhabitants
a kind of private moral sanctuary (3). As such, the home was endowed with an incredible number
of social functions. It was meant, in Burnett’s words, “to comfort and purify, to give relief and
privacy from the cares of the world, to rear its members in an appropriate set of Christian values,
and, above all, perhaps to proclaim by its ordered arrangement, polite behavior, cleanliness,
tidiness and distinctive taste, that is members belonged to a class of substance, culture and
respectability” (96).
With so much weight placed on both house and home, moving reminded middle-class
Victorians of all there was to gain and to lose, both socially and morally, materially and
immaterially, through a house removal. Indeed, if we listen to the conversation that we find in
the periodical press, both the selection of a new house and the relocation to a new house were
challenging, fraught acts for middle-class Victorians.
In terms of the house-hunt, the rental housing market offered middle-class Victorians an
adequate supply of houses—indeed, even at times a surplus—and it offered them a diverse
supply of houses. The majority of middle-class housing was built on speculation, not
14

individually commissioned, and as F. M. L. Thompson writes, “the total number of houses in
Britain kept steadily, if only slightly, ahead of the increase in the number of people throughout
the Victorian period” (Rise 170). While some large towns did witness overcrowding, especially
among working-class housing, and while there was a serious rural cottage shortage, it “not
infrequently happened” that the town- and city-dwelling middle classes were actually
“overprovided with houses” (172). An extreme instance of this occurred in London in the 1880s,
“when the suburbs were glutted with new but tenantless houses,” as H. J. Dyos notes, but in
general, somewhere between five to ten percent of rental properties stood empty at any given
time in Victorian England (Dyos 82; Muthesius 18). In addition to the availability of residences,
the middle-class market of speculatively-built housing offered, in the words of Thompson, a
“wide choice of houses to suit all tastes and circumstances,” including terraces, semi-detached,
and detached houses (Thompson, Rise 172; Burnett 187-8). Though there were certainly
common floor plans for each of these types of houses, the urban middle-class housing market, in
Burnett’s view, nonetheless offered renters “highly individual forms expressive of personal
taste,” with houses “differing in number and size of rooms, quality and quantity of architectural
ornament, and orientation to the public street,” as Thad Logan points out (Burnett 187-8; Logan
17).
Though it would seem that the middle-class rental market should have offered a suitable
house for any family on the hunt, the number and diversity of houses available does not seem to
have made house-hunting any less distressing or complicated an act for middle-class Victorians.
In the first place, house hunters needed to find a particular kind of house with physical attributes
and a layout that would allow them to create and sustain the middle-class domestic ideals of
home within its walls. It needed to be physically healthy—built on gravel, showing no signs of
15

dampness or drainage issues, and having no history of disease (Beeton 30-31; “House-Hunting,”
Cassells 99; Panton 24)—but it also needed to suggest that the moral health of the family would
be possible within its walls. As the home was meant to be “a scene for the performance of
intimate family life,” in Logan’s words, and also a place which could accommodate “the
separation of different household members and functions into distinct rooms,” in Sharon
Marcus’s words, a house’s internal layout needed to offer residents spaces in which to come
together and also spaces in which to pull apart (Logan 218; Marcus 84). It was thus important
that a house offered specific spatial areas for intimate family time, for dining, and for more
formal social occasions, just as it was important that it offered specific male spaces—a study or
library, perhaps—and specific female spaces, usually the drawing-room (Burnett 108, 111). In
addition, in order to isolate “family from servants, guests from tradesmen, males from females,”
“a moderate-sized house” might need two staircases, while a larger house might need “three or
more [staircases], besides innumerable doors, passages, hallways and vestibules” (Burnett 108).
Of course, as the site of the private sphere of home, the house also needed to offer its residents
sufficient privacy from the outside world—from signs of commerce and business, from the
working classes, and even from middle-class neighbors. Thus, while the ideal house was a
standalone house, physically separate from others, even a terrace house in a row of terraces
needed the illusion of separation: set back from the street, well-screened by foliage, and so on.
The house was also, of course, “a statement of the owner’s precise place”—or, rather, the
renter’s precise place—“in the social hierarchy,” to use Thompson’s words, and so the house
needed, ideally, to be larger than the family’s last and located in a neighborhood that was more
private, more socially exclusive, and more attractive than the family’s last (Rise 152). Indeed, as
Cohen notes of middle-class Victorian life, “Where you lived was all important” (x). The choice
16

of neighborhood was particularly tricky for those who lived in cities that were still actively
expanding—such as London and Liverpool, which “attracted constant waves of migrants”—for
moving between suburbs meant dealing with residential spaces that were still not only physically
but also socially changing (Burnett 57). This was particularly true of London, where, in Lara
Baker Whelan’s words, “the meaning of suburban space continued in flux much longer than it
did around any other English urban center” (3). While by the 1850s cities like Manchester and
Liverpool “had almost ceased to grow” and thus their suburban spaces were relatively stable,
London’s suburbs “grew fifty percent per decade between the years 1861 and 1891,” which
meant that not only was there always a new suburb “just a little further on” being built but that
other, still relatively-new suburbs were changing in character, many losing their middle-class
status as the middle-class population continued to move further out and as upper-working-class
populations began to move in (Whelan 3, 8). In the telling words of one author in The Leisure
Hour in 1870, “Thus, whole neighbourhoods are surrendered to the poor, for whom they were
never intended” (“House-Hunting,” Leisure Hour [1870] 237). This perpetual change in the
social status of suburbs made choosing a new residence even more complicated than it already
was and was indeed part of why Londoners typically only took (and were advised to take) three-
year leases (Emmet 308-9; qtd. in Flanders 24).
With so many requirements for house and neighborhood to meet, and with so many
options to consider, middle-class Victorians were tasked with no small labor when it came time
to find their next residence. It is no wonder, then, that, in piece after piece published in the
periodical press, we find descriptions of house hunters scouring lists of houses-to-let; walking to
various suburbs, some still under construction; and “ascending and descending” the stairs of
residence after residence (“House-Hunting,” Literary Magnet 204). Indeed, the authors of the
17

periodical press even make clear that the many choices of house and suburb available became
their own kind of burden for house hunters. The author of “The Perils of House-Hunting,”
published in The Saturday Review in 1860, argues, “The man, in short, who has the whole world
to choose from becomes in a manner the victim of his own advantages. Here is indeed unlimited
competitive examination. Every empty house […] is a zealous candidate” (201). Expressing a
similar sentiment, the same 1870 Leisure Hour author who lamented that “whole
neighbourhoods are surrendered to the poor” writes that a house hunter can become “bewildered
in time, and quite incapable of weighing the different merits of a crowd of domiciles whose
various features are apt to mix all together in the memory” (“House-Hunting,” Leisure Hour
[1870] 237).
At the same time, though, the burden of choice was not just the result of middle-class
Victorians having myriad housing options to consider. As Thad Logan writes, “[T]he very idea
of a home as a refuge, as a site at which a family’s status and taste are displayed, and as a scene
for the performance of intimate family life guarantees its being also a locus of anxieties about
adequacy and excess,” and this sense of anxiety is at the heart of the house-hunt too (218).
Burnett refers to the middle classes as “that part of the population whose economic resources
allowed it to exercise some real choice as to how and where it lived,” and it is indeed that
choice—or, rather, the need to make a good choice—that contributed to middle-class anxieties
about the house-hunt, for the selection of a house was also the selection of a family’s social and
moral future, be it for one quarter or three years or an even longer period of time (94).
As much as the difficulty of house-hunting was bound up with choice, house-hunting also
forced middle-class Victorians to confront all they could not choose—that is, all they could not
control. In the first place, many house hunters found themselves at the whim of the industry that
18

developed around the middle-class rental housing market and sought to make a profit on
Victorians’ regular relocations. This industry included both house agents, who often listed
“fervid and glowing”—and ultimately false—advertisements for houses-to-let in the newspapers,
and hired caretakers, who (at least according to the authors of the periodical press) notoriously
lied to house hunters about the condition of a house in order to continue their own residence in
that house (Helps 765). In the second place, due to the fact that middle-class leases were
coordinated around the four annual quarter days, middle-class house hunters often experienced
competition on the hunt. Charles Manby Smith describes the “spectacle of respectable fathers of
families, or agitated young wives, flitting backwards and forwards like unquiet phantoms, and
turning their heads constantly on this side and that, in search of a new domicile” in the lead-up to
a quarter day, and indeed, these many “respectable fathers” and “young wives,” who house-
hunted concurrently, were often interested in the same residences (508). This meant that, if a
family waited too long to sign a lease on a house in which they were interested, they could very
well go back and find the “to let” sign taken out of the window and another family moving in. A
house-hunt may have been a domestic endeavor, then, but it was one that required middle-class
Victorians to enter the larger world and to deal with other people, whether they were house
agents or fellow house hunters, and these interactions could both extend the time required for a
house-hunt and increase its complication.
Even more fundamentally, it is also true that house-hunting was not always a middle-
class family’s choice. While Burnett’s example of the Victorian family who moved from a
terrace house to a semi-detached house to a detached villa aptly illustrates the way that a series
of moves was built into the lifecycle expectations for middle-class Victorians, it is also certainly
true that most Victorians’ lives did not follow such a neat upward trajectory (100). As Logan
19

writes, “The specter of scarcity haunted the Victorian middle classes: ruin and bankruptcy were
relatively common, and for many families the loss of a wage earner led to the necessity of
relinquishing a genteel way of life,” and indeed, this “relinquishing” often involved a removal
into a smaller, more modest house (207). In addition, there were other factors external to the
family and its finances that could send a family, reluctant though they might be, into a house
hunt, from the mundane—such as a case of loud neighbors—to the more extreme—such as the
demolishment of a street of houses to make way for a railroad or, later in the century, new flats,
as was the case with Wickham Place in E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910).
Stefan Muthesius may argue that, for their “users,” “houses were simply a commodity
like any other,” but the Victorian conversation about moving suggests otherwise (5). The choice
of a new residence was an all-important one for middle-class Victorians, wrapped up in social
advancement and the moral private life of the family. Indeed, it is no coincidence that, while the
noun-phrase “house-hunting” dates back to the mid-eighteenth century, the verb phrase “house-
hunt” and the noun phrase “house hunter” date to 1812 and 1831 respectively (“house”). As the
notion of home changed over the course of the first half of the nineteenth century, the middle
classes’ serial need to house-hunt resulted in both an action and an identity, for the time of the
hunt could be all-consuming. Take, for example, the Gaskells. When Elizabeth Gaskell and her
family were searching for their third house in Manchester in early November 1849, Gaskell
wrote to her friend Eliza Fox, claiming that “just now houses haunt me” (Gaskell, Letters 86
[L51]). It is no wonder that Gaskell said so, for the Gaskells could not find an appropriate new
residence for their family. In late November 1849, Gaskell wrote again to Fox: “Now don’t
congratulate us too soon my dear! The house is as far off as ever. The nurseries were not healthy
in the otherwise perfect house at Cheetham Hill, windows looked into a dry well in the middle of
20

the house; so that’s thrown up sky-high, and we’re still hovering and quavering and wavering”
(L55, 91). The Gaskells did eventually settle on renting 42 Plymouth Grove, which Gaskell
announced to Fox in April of the following year: “It is not very far from here, in Plymouth
Grove—do you remember our plodding out that last Saty in snow to go and see houses? and
looking at 2, one inhabited by a Jewish Mrs Abram and old clothes. Well, its nearly opposite to
the first we looked at (not the old clothes one) I shall make Meta draw you a plan” (L69, 107-8).
Here, in Gaskell’s announcement, we can sense that the same tedious house viewing and house
consideration that had been going on for months continued up to the last moment—or rather to
“that last Saty in snow.”
While the house-hunt caused a variety of concerns and anxieties for middle-class
Victorians and could indeed stretch on and on, the physical process of removal—of packing up
one’s portable property, transporting it to a new residence, and unpacking it in an unfamiliar
space—was also quite troubling. As Anthony Trollope writes in The Small House at Allington
(1864), “Who does not know how terrible are those preparations for house-moving[?]” (537-8).
In the first place, the process of packing disturbed the spatial and temporal order that was
so important to the newly-crystalized middle-class domestic ideal. Both time and space became
highly regularized during the Victorian period. One Victorian miscellany of advice, for example,
suggests three rules for “making every house a ‘well-ordered’ one” (qtd. in Logan 28). They are:
“1. Do everything in its proper time. 2. Keep everything to its proper use. 3. Put everything in its
proper place” (qtd. 28). That possessions needed to be disturbed from their “proper place” in
order to be packed and moved meant a confusion of this highly ordered use of space and time,
and it also led to a kind of indiscriminate mixing of one’s belongings, making it possible for “the
inside of the drawing-room [to] descend[] to consort with the scullery,” as Harry Jones put it in
21

The Leisure Hour in 1874 (181). Indeed, in the periodical press, writers again and again lament
the disorder that removal breeds—“the deal dresser in the kitchen,” “incongruous” authors of
books “piled one on another,” and an “oft-poured over chart of the Arctic Circle (in search of
Franklin) […] crunched round a silver candlestick” (Smith 508; Swayne 593; Jerrold and Wills
63). Behind these material descriptions—meant, one assumes, to elicit both knowing laughter
and groans of sympathy from readers—is the sense that the leadup to a removal undid the
supposedly-seamless domesticity of the Victorian home, leaving everything—and everyone in
the home—in a jumble. This is exactly the sense we get from Charles Dickens’ letters when, in
the fall of 1851, he and his family were preparing to move from Devonshire Terrace, where they
had lived since 1839, to Tavistock House. In contrast to “the regularity and precision with which
the domestic affairs of a certain ‘Inimitable’ creature are usually conducted,” Dickens found
himself distracted by the confusion of his soon-to-be former home: “I can not work at my new
book,” he admitted to Miss Burdett Coutts on October 9, “having all my notions of order turned
completely topsy-turvy” (Letters, vol 6., 473, 513).
At the same time, disorder aside, packing was a complicated process for many middle-
class Victorians due to the quantity of their belongings. Over the course of the nineteenth
century, Victorians acquired more and more possessions. As Cohen notes, while incomes
remained low during the first half the nineteenth century, “average income per head doubled
between 1851 and 1901” as the cost of necessities decreased (13). With middle-class families
spending on average only one tenth of their income on housing costs, including rent, rates, and
taxes, “possessions, especially portable property, provided an important outlet for disposable
income,” and as the century progressed, the “relatively spare” rooms of the 1830s and 1840s
“became more crowded with possessions in a bewildering variety of styles”—possessions that all
22

needed to be packed up and, come quarter day, hauled out of the house, driven across town or
even shipped across the country, and unloaded in a new house (13, 34). As Forster writes in
Howards End, “The age of property holds bitter moments even for a proprietor. When a move is
imminent, furniture becomes ridiculous”—and an impending move left both real and fictional
Victorians—and Victorian women especially—wide awake at night, pondering that “ridiculous”
furniture. One female advice author writing in The National Magazine in 1857 admitted to her
readers, “I may be wholly unable to sleep at night, owing to the haunting phantoms of the book-
cases, which, with a relentless obstinacy, wholly refuse to fit themselves into the recesses to
which they are destined” (111); so too, in Howards End, we see Margaret Schlegel “[lying]
awake at night wondering where, where on earth […] all their belongings would be deposited in
September next” when her family’s lease on Wickham Place runs out (Forster 127).
With so much to move, middle-class Victorians relied on their domestic servants to help
them, but they also hired additional outside workers to help them accomplish their moves.
Indeed, just as an industry existed to help ease Victorians’ many house-hunts, a whole industry
existed, especially in populous areas like London, to ease the frequent household moves that the
middle classes made. This industry included carpenters who built crates, upholsterers and
cabinetmakers who packed and transported furniture, green-grocers who hired out their vans on
removal days, dedicated removal contractors who moved middle-class Victorians’ belongings by
road or rail, and teams of unskilled day laborers hired to do the heavy lifting (Trollope 538;
“Moving House,” Chambers’s Journal 737; Ponsonby 57; Mayhew 362). However, though these
outside workers were essential for accomplishing middle-class Victorians’ moves, the presence
of working-class tradesmen and unskilled laborers in the middle-class home complicated the
home’s ability to be a private space, separated from the world of work and from the world of the
23

working classes and urban poor. This was a source of tension for middle-class Victorians, and
the periodical press’s male authors in particular frequently depict the presence of working-class
men in their homes as a kind of unwelcome invasion. Harry Jones writes in The Leisure Hour in
1874, for example, of the way that a house is “invaded” by movers: “Invaded, did I say? Sacked;
taken by assault. Strangers jostle you in your most sacred retreats. Men on whom you never set
eyes before walk into your sanctum and shoulder your treasures without apology” (181). This
sense of invasion is made visible in an illustration which appeared in the American publication
Harper’s Weekly in 1867 (see fig. 1). Titled “‘The First of May’—The Discomforts of Moving”
after the New York City practice of residential leases beginning on May 1, the illustration depicts
a middle-class house in the midst of a removal. In the center, two laborers haul out a large piece
of furniture as the householder anxiously tries to communicate with them. Further back, to the
right, another laborer paints a door, and in the center background, yet another laborer climbs a
ladder outside, seeming to leer through the window as he ascends. In the illustration, then, the
middle-class home is opened up to pubic view and filled with the unfamiliar bodies of working-
class strangers, even as it is emptied out onto the street.
24

Figure 1. “‘The First of May’—The Discomforts of Moving,” Harper’s Weekly, May 4, 1867, pp. 231
Perhaps most profoundly, though, moving revealed to many middle-class Victorians the
fundamental fragility of home as a material and immaterial construction. Home, after all, was not
simply four physical walls. A sense of home, to Victorians, emerged out of the complex
relationship between the householder, the householder’s possessions, and the space the
householder inhabited, and that sense of home developed—and solidified—over time. Indeed,
for many middle-class Victorians, it seemed as if both they and their belongings came to be
attached to their residences. Harry Jones writes, for example, of the way that “things fit
themselves into rooms, and almost grow into part of the building,” and in The Canadian
Magazine in 1893, Bernard McEvoy notes “the habit some people have of taking root in a place”
(Jones 181, McEvoy 669). Moving, of course, required middle-class Victorians to break the
25

“roots” tying them and their belongings to their homes, and this proved to be an unsettling
experience.
In the first place, in dislodging items from their familiar locations, Victorians found those
items changed. One Saturday Review author writes of how “poor fragments of furniture detached
from their accustomed rest-place, seem suddenly to lose their beauty,” and Jones himself notes
that the “dilapidation” of one’s furniture is nowhere so clear as “when it is fairly turned out of
doors, and stands by the area rails, waiting for the men in white aprons to hoist it into the van”:
“A sofa or a pet armchair then appears like a friend in the shabbiest distress. You know it
intimately, but are almost ashamed to own it” (“Moving House,” Saturday Review [1873] 343;
Jones 110). In other words, moving caused Victorians to confront their belongings in a
profoundly estranging way—it forced them to re-see their belongings and even to realize that
they had mis-seen their belongings. As G. C. Swayne notes in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
in 1856, moving “is not only a complete dislocation and disorganization of all your chairs, tables,
books, and domestic appurtenances, but it is a complete bewilderment of all your ideas
concerning them” (Swayne 593).
In addition to requiring middle-class Victorians to detach their furniture and belongings
from their “accustomed rest-place[s],” moving required Victorians to detach themselves from
their own “accustomed rest-place,” and this was another profoundly unsettling experience, for it
required Victorians to give up their sense of lived time in a domestic space (“Moving House,”
Saturday Review [1873] 343). Writing of “the habit some people have of taking root in a place,”
Bernard McEvoy suggests, “They stretch out fine filaments of soul into every room and corner.
They grow into their surroundings. Events happen, and the house becomes redolent of
associations and memories” (669). Here, McEvoy draws on a common middle-class
26

understanding. As Marcus notes, domestic discourse cast the home as “a container of
memories”—or as “the place where all our best associations are to be found,” as Francis Cross
put it in 1854 (Marcus 92; qtd. in Marcus 92). In McEvoy’s formulation, it even seems as if
those “associations and memories” come to serve as some of the “fine filaments” which root the
resident to the space of home. While this function of the home as “a container of memories” was
considered to be a boon, creating and sustaining “the feeling of attachment to home, said to be so
characteristic of the true English heart,” as one author put it in 1851, moving threw this function
into crisis (“On Taking a House” 49). Indeed, one Saturday Review author writes of “the feelings
of a human being torn from the building which has almost become a part of himself,” suggesting
that “[h]owever slight the change may be, he is breaking innumerable threads of association, of
whose force he was never before sensible” (“Moving House” [1873] 343).
In breaking these “threads of association,” middle-class Victorians on the move were thus
required to destroy a kind of archive of their past—but they were also forced to recognize just
how easily that archive could be destroyed. Home, it turned out, was easily torn down, no matter
how many years a family had been living within a residential space. The family had simply to
roll up the rugs, pack up the books, and take the pictures off the walls (or pay someone to do it
for them), and “home” turned into an uncanny space—“seeming already unfamiliar and strange,”
as the narrator of Gaskell’s North and South (1854-5) notes of the emptying Helstone
parsonage—just as the family turned into strangers within its walls (Gaskell, North and South
52). In the leasehold culture of middle-class Victorian England, an emptying house during a
removal made clear that the space with which residents had been intimate—perhaps for several
years—was after all nothing more than a rental that had housed previous occupants and would
house future occupants. It was no longer the place of a family’s daily routines, no longer the
27

container of their memories, no longer the place to which they belonged. In this way, while a
household move certainly did not make most middle-class Victorians homeless in the literal
sense, it did make them homeless in a more figurative sense.
Furthermore, that feeling of homelessness—of having no sense of home—was not
immediately fixed upon a family’s arrival in their new house. A sense of home required time to
build: time to stage the furniture; time to order and put away the family’s belongings; time to
learn the sounds of a space, from “church-clocks” and “street cries” to even “domestic
creakings”; and time, especially, to create new domestic rhythms and routines (Jones 182).
Gaskell called these rhythms and routines the “accustomed household grooves” of a home, and
indeed, these “grooves” had to be carved by the family into their lives in a new domestic space,
the new house slowly becoming its own “container of memories,” the family slowly becoming
themselves—even their new selves—in this new space (Gaskell, North and South 209; Marcus
92). But in the interim, there was the unsettling reality of living in a house that did not yet feel
like home, of the family lying awake at night in “unaccustomed rooms” feeling not quite like
their accustomed selves (McEvoy 672). As we can see, then, for the most “family-conscious and
home-centered generation to have emerged in English history,” the exchange of homes was no
small or easy feat (Burnett 95).
*
Narrativizing the Middle-Class Household Removal
From the choice of a new neighborhood to the emotional loss of home as a “container of
memories,” a change of address reminded middle-class Victorians of all there was to gain and to
lose, both socially and morally, materially and immaterially, through a house removal (Marcus
92). In this way, residential relocations raised two sorts of questions for the middle classes. First,
28

with more suburbs and houses to choose from, and with Victorians owning more portable
property than previous generations, moving raised practical questions: “how do I find a socially-
acceptable house? what should I look for in a lease? how do I move my belongings into my new
residence?” Second, with removal unsettling so many of the middle-class domestic ideals about
home, moving also raised deeper social, emotional, and psychological questions: “how will
removal affect my family? what do I lose in leaving the house I’ve inhabited for three years?
how can I rebuild the immaterial sense of home in a new space?” In other words, the
conversation about removal was about both middle-class Victorians’ “physical removals”—that
is, the process by which they found a new house and packed and transported their portable
property to that new house—and their “emotional removals”—that is, the process by which they
reckoned with the end of their residence in one home and the start of their residence in another
and made meaning out of their experience. These two major types of questions help explain the
two most common genres to which middle-class authors turned when they wrote about house-
hunting and moving house, for while this print conversation involved many genres, including
editorial writing, journalism, poetry, and even humorous illustrations, the genres to which
authors turned again and again were advice literature and narrative.
That the middle-class Victorian conversation about removal included an abundance of
advice literature makes sense, for it provided specific answers to Victorians about their physical
removals and helped them navigate the complex industry that developed around the middle-class
rental housing market and sought to make a profit on Victorians’ continual relocations.
Housekeeping manuals, suburban guidebooks, and advice columns published in the periodical
press guided their readers through the process of house-hunting, offering suggestions for how to
navigate the long lists of houses to let published in daily newspapers, how to deal with house
29

agents, how to pick the best suburb, and what questions to ask when viewing a potential
residence.
4
Other advice literature offered readers legal guidance, reprinting sample leases and
specifying when a leaseholder should give his landlord notice of his intention to remove, and still
other advice literature guided readers through how best to pack their portable property and
interact with the hired working-class movers who entered the middle-class home on moving
day.
5

But in addition to this abundance of advice literature in the middle-class Victorian
conversation about house removal, there was also an abundance of narrative. In short fictional
stories, in short autobiographical narratives, and in novels, Victorian authors again and again
narrativized the experience of searching for a new residence and moving into that new residence,
at times making a household removal one part of a larger plot and at times making it the plot.
Indeed, authors did this so frequently that we can refer to their collective body of narratives as
“narratives of house removal.”
In terms of the short narratives published in the periodical press, these started to appear
regularly in middle-class publications in the 1850s, with important precursors dating back to the
1820s.
6
Though these short pieces began to be published less frequently starting in the 1870s,
they nonetheless continued to be published in middle-class periodicals through the first decade of

4
Suburban guidebooks were published from the 1850s onward and helped middle-class Victorians pick a suburb on
which to focus their house-hunt. See for example The Suburban Homes of London by William Spencer Clarke
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1881). For house-hunting advice found in domestic guidebooks, see for example Mrs
Beeton’s Book of Household Management (London: S. O. Beeton Publishing, 1861) and Cassells Household Guide
(London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1869). For advice on how to house-hunt published in the periodical press, see
for example “On Taking a House,” The Family Economist 4 (1851): 49-53.
5
For legal advice, see for example “Hints on Legal Topics,” Leisure Hour No. 703 (June 17, 1865), p. 378-381. For
advice on how to complete one’s physical removal, see for example “Moving House,” The National Magazine 2.8
(June, 1857), p. 109-111.
6
One early nonfictional narrative, “House-Hunting,” was published in Literary Magnet in January 1827 (vol. 3, pp.
201-207). Another nonfictional narrative, titled “A House to Let,” was published in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal
on May 5, 1838 (vol. 7, no. 327, pgs. 113-114). In addition, a short story featuring a removal plot, called “The
Tenants of Holywell Lodge,” appeared in Blackwell’s Edinburgh Magazine in November of 1839 (vol. 46, no. 289,
pp. 677-688).
30

the twentieth century, after which they largely disappear. The short narratives of removal
published in the periodical press included both fictional and nonfictional pieces, and there are
important differences between the two. The short fictional narratives of removal are quite various
in terms of their plots and themes: in some short stories, a house-hunt reconnects a house-hunter
with an old lover and thus leads to marriage; in others, a neighborhood is changed by the arrival
of a new tenant moving into an empty house-to-let; in others, a newly-married couple set up their
first home together.
7
On the other hand, those narratives stylized as nonfiction are far more
uniform: they are written by men, they deal with the experiences of married couples, and they
narrativize either the house-hunt or the move that followed a successful house-hunt. In this way,
they mirror advice literature and editorial writing which also generally split apart these two
processes, linked though they were, for these processes were gendered—middle-class husbands
responsible for the house-hunt, middle-class wives responsible for the household removal.
8

As for the novel, certainly the removal plot was not new to this genre in the mid-
nineteenth century. Indeed, Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) serves as an important
early example of a novel that was engaged with issues of residential moves. Its fifth chapter
offers readers a poignant scene of leave-taking, Marianne Dashwood wandering the house at
Norland Park and bidding farewell even to the trees on the eve of her removal with her mother
and sister to Barton Cottage:
Oh! happy house, could you know what I suffer in now viewing you from this
spot, from whence perhaps I may view you no more!—And you, ye well-known
trees!—but you will continue the same.—No leaf will decay because we are
removed, nor any branch become motionless although we can observe you no

7
For a short fictional narrative in which a house-hunt leads to love, see for example “House-Hunting,” The Sixpenny
Magazine, vol. 7, no. 35, May 1864, pp. 459-461. For a short fictional narrative of a neighborhood changed by the
arrival of a new resident, see for example “Our Suspicious Neighbours,” Belgravia, vol. 9, April 1876, pp. 217-237.
For a short fictional narrative in which a newly-married couple set up home together, see for example “How We
Moved In,” The Leisure Hour 1899-1900, London, Religious Tract Society, 1900, pp. 889-893.
8
One rare example of a piece that narrates both the house-hunt and the move following the house-hunt is “Moving
House” by Bernard McEvoy, The Canadian Magazine, vol. 1, no. 8, October 1893, pp. 669-672.
31

longer!—No; you will continue the same; unconscious of the pleasure or the
regret you occasion, and insensible of any change in those who walk under your
shade!—But who will remain to enjoy you? (22)

While there are certainly household moves in novels from the eighteenth and early-nineteenth
centuries, it is also true that plots of removal came to be a nearly standard feature of the novel as
the nineteenth century progressed. Think of nearly any Victorian novel, and some character in its
pages is bound to be on the move—from the Hale family relocating to Milton in North and South
to the Durbeyfields loading their possessions in a wagon on Lady-Day and heading to Kingsbere
in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891); from the eponymous heroine packing her
trunk to head to Thornfield in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) to Pip heading off to the city
to meet his future in Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860-1); from Crosbie and his new wife
Alexandrina setting up house in Princess Royal Crescent in Anthony Trollope’s The Small House
at Allington to the widowed Mrs. Gereth leaving her marriage home for a dowager’s cottage in
Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton (1897).
The abundance of these “narratives of removal” in both the novel and the periodical press
is, in part, no surprise. Many of these narratives were published or serialized in periodical press
publications whose job it was, at least in part, to entertain readers. Stories do that—and these
particular stories presumably did that by using a common plot from Victorian readers’ own lives.
And indeed, moving is excellent material for narrative, for moving is itself a narrative act,
requiring narrators and characters to pack up, transport, and resettle a version of themselves. But
these narratives of removal—like most narratives—are of course doing more work than simply
entertaining through their plotting. Indeed, authors narrativized removal so frequently because
narrative allowed them to explore removal as a process—as a series of steps and events that a
character or narrator must undergo and as a series of steps and events that have the potential to
32

change, even transform, that narrator or character. In other words, narrative let authors explore
the physical and material aspects of removal and its immaterial aspects—its emotional and
psychological effects, its social and cultural meanings.
In addition, these narratives of removal offered readers strategies for handling the
challenges and even threats presented by a change of address. This is true of both novels and the
short narratives of removal published in the periodical press, and one particular body of these
short narratives can help us see this. These are the male-authored nonfictional pieces which focus
on the experience of house-hunting. In these narratives, an autobiographical “I” often tells
readers his story, though sometimes an experienced, avuncular “I” or “we” addresses an
inexperienced house-hunter. In the case of the latter, the narratorial “I” or “we” narrates what
will happen to their reader during a house-hunt using the second-person point of view. In all of
these narratives, house-hunting is not only a narrative act but a predictable narrative act, and so
the texts become a kind of education for their inexperienced readers, revealing to them the
challenges they will face—from house agents to wives with minds of their own—and offering
them strategies for handling these challenges. These short house-hunting narratives, which
explicitly instruct their readers how to survive the chaos of a house-hunt, help us see the ways in
which other narratives of removal—even those in the novel—are doing much the same work
(albeit not so explicitly), subtly demonstrating for readers how to move forward logistically and
emotionally. From Gaskell’s North and South, which shows readers a heroine who must
negotiate her private understanding of home and self in order to navigate the many removals into
which her family thrusts her, to Trollope’s The Small House at Allington, in which Mrs. Dale and
her daughters prepare to adjust to the reduced circumstances that will greet them when they
33

move away from Allington, the Victorian novel gave its Victorian readers models for how to
handle the different “plots” that removal opened again and again in their lives.
At the same time, there are of course important differences between novels of removal
and the periodical press’s short narratives of removal, for they have their own focuses and
accomplish different social and cultural work. In the first place, these two bodies of narratives
offer readers different perspectives. The narratives of the periodical press tend to privilege the
perspective of middle-class families, and the nonfiction pieces especially privilege the
perspective of middle-class men, which requires readers to “read between the lines,” considering
what these authors erase or obscure in order to consider the experiences of other characters such
as middle-class wives, domestic servants, and working-class movers. The novel, on the other
hand, offers more diverse perspectives on removal. These include female perspectives, such as
Gwendolen Harleth and her mother and sisters in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876);
working-class perspectives, such as Jude Fawley in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895); and even
upper-class or aristocratic perspectives, such as Mrs. Gereth in The Spoils of Poynton. In this
way, the novel deepens and expands the middle-class conversation happening in the periodical
press, inviting readers to put themselves in the shoes of a variety of Victorian characters and to
consider the different anxieties and concerns faced by very real sectors of the population on
moving day—anxieties and concerns that were very much gendered and classed.
But this is certainly not to say that the novel’s consideration of removal is always a step
ahead of narratives published in the periodical press. Rather, in many ways, these two bodies of
narratives are complimentary, each revealing something of what is repressed in the other. For
example, details of house-hunting are largely missing from the pages of the Victorian novel. In
North and South, we briefly see Margaret Hale and her father navigate Milton’s “long, straight,
34

hopeless streets of regularly-built houses”; in Amy Levy’s The Romance of a Shop (1888), we
are told that Gertrude and Conny Lorimer “paced the town from end to end, laden with sheaves
of ‘orders to view’ from innumerable house-agents”; and in Howards End, we quickly witness
Margaret Schlegel “[going] over” the Ducie Street house with Mr. Wilcox before he proposes
(Gaskell, North and South 59; Levy 73; Forster 139). In most novels involving plots of removal,
then, house-hunting is either summarized or it happens off the page. On the other hand, the short
narratives of the periodical press very much focus on the search for a new home, foregrounding
the labor of house-hunting and the social ambition that was central to the middle-class quest for a
new home. In the novel, this social ambition is more frequently lampooned than admitted as a
norm, house-hunting becoming the indulgent activity of characters who do not actually have
money for a house, as is the case in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864-5) with the penniless,
social-climbing Lammles who “were always looking at palatial residences in the best situations,
and always very nearly taking or buying one, but never quite concluding the bargain” (249).
In addition to the periodical press’s narratives representing removal as socially-
motivated, they also represent removal as a fact of middle-class life—as a serial event Victorians
underwent every few years. In the novel, on the other hand, removal is represented as an out-of-
the-ordinary, exceptional event. There, removal tends to be the result of a dramatic event in the
life of a character—the death of a loved one, a break within the family, financial ruin—and the
focus tends to be on the loss of the old home, for this emotional experience lends itself to the
novel’s concern with interiority. In part, this focus on removal as exceptional results in a false
sense of middle-class stability in the novel—such as in Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1846-8),
where we primarily see working-class characters like the Toodle family and Captain Cuttle
moving while middle-class characters like the Chicks, Miss Tox, the Perches, and Mr. Dombey
35

himself stay put. Periodical press narratives, however, make clear that the middle classes were
not residentially stable; rather, to return to Charles Manby Smith’s narrative with which this
introduction began, each quarter day resulted in “the spectacle of respectable fathers of families,
or agitated young wives, flitting backwards and forwards like unquiet phantoms, and turning
their heads constantly on this side and that, in search of a new domicile” (508).
But at the same time, we can also say that the novel helpfully sheds light on the harsher
realities of removal not touched on in the periodical press’s short narratives, such as bankruptcy,
distraint, and eviction. In the periodical press’s narratives, we rarely see a character move as a
result of reduced financial circumstances. Rather, narrators and characters move as a result of
growing families, career choices, and unexpected inheritances, and we must turn to the periodical
press’s advice literature to find details about these harsher realities, such as instructions for what
to do in case a middle-class family finds themselves involved in distraint.
9
In the novel, however,
financial difficulties send character after character packing, from Mr. Dombey in Dombey and
Son, to the Sedleys in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847-8), to the
Durbeyfields in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, to the Basts in Howards End. In this way, even as the
novel sets up a false sense of middle-class stability in terms of the number of times a middle-
class Victorian family might move, it powerfully reminds its readers that one change sat between
a Victorian family and a very different life, just as it reminds them that that change was different
for characters from different social classes, ranging from the bankruptcy of the entire Dombey
firm for Mr. Dombey down to the loss of one clerk’s job for Leonard Bast. Of course, here, we

9
See for example The Family Economist’s 1851 advice piece “On Taking a House,” which offered readers an
explanation of what would happen in a case of distraint and instructions for how to manage it. For example, the
author explains the costs for which a tenant in distress is responsible, which includes the catalogue created for the
sale of the tenant’s belongings: “The costs are three shillings for levying the distress, three shillings a day for the
man, appraisement sixpence in the pound under £20, one shilling in the pound over that sum; and the charges for
advertising sale of goods, catalogues, and all expenses of the sale” (52-3).
36

could equally say that the novel shies away from representations of financial success which led
to a move and which feature prominently in the narratives of the periodical press. But this indeed
is the point: together, the narratives of the periodical press and the novel offer us a fuller
understanding of Victorian attitudes towards removal.
Chapter Overview
The three main chapters of this critical dissertation project follow this logic, putting
narratives of residential moves from the novel and the periodical press into conversation. The
first chapter takes up short narratives which were published in the periodical press from the
1850s through the first decade of the twentieth century, and then the second and third chapters
consider Charles Dicken’s Dombey and Son and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South as two
novels of removal which variously build on and complicate the male-authored periodical press
narratives.
Chapter One, “‘Houses, houses everywhere, but not a house for me’: House-Hunting,
Male Narrative Control, and the Victorian Periodical Press,” specifically considers male-
authored nonfiction narratives of house-hunting that were published in the periodical press.
Though married couples often house-hunted together, house-hunting was nonetheless considered
a task for which middle-class men were responsible, and in these narratives, male authors lament
the many people to whom they lose control during their search for a new residence. In these
narratives, house-hunting becomes a predictable story of “miseries” as the hunters feel their
autonomy slipping away first to house agents, then to the outgoing female residents and female
caretakers whom they encounter during their search, and finally even to their wives and children.
But these authors do not just stop with complaint. In these narratives, male authors seek to
reestablish control over their house-hunt and to demonstrate their control over the narrative of
37

house-hunting itself. As so many of these authors’ house-hunts result in them choosing less-than-
ideal houses, this latter effort proves particularly important. In insisting on all the knowledge that
they have gained from the experiences they have narrated, these authors maintain that the
seriality of middle-class house-hunting does indeed have its benefits and that male house-
hunters, including their readers, can learn from a failed house-hunt and thus better control and
conquer the next one. At the same time, demonstrating their mastery over the narrative of house-
hunting also offers these authors a way of reestablishing patriarchal control. In complaining
about the slippage of male control during the house-hunt, these authors re-inscribe the idea that
middle-class men should be in control, not subjected to the needs and whims of female strangers
or their wives. That these narratives appear throughout the Victorian period and stay largely the
same, showing little reflection of the changing cultural attitudes about moving, points to the male
anxiety at the heart of these narratives.
Chapter Two, “‘The little society of the back parlour broken up, and scattered far and
wide’: Reuniting the Family Unit in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son,” then takes up Charles
Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1846-8)—a novel which keeps its main character in his house
despite a series of life events that would have sent nearly any other Victorian packing: the death
of a wife, the death of a child, a remarriage, even bankruptcy. But just as the novel keeps Mr.
Dombey in his house so long, it also throws nearly every other character (including his wife and
daughter) into sudden, even traumatic movement, often forcing them to move independently of
their families. In doing so, the novel expands the story of removal that we find again and again in
the periodical press, which largely limits itself to the whole household removal of one family
from one residence to the next. Dombey and Son switches the focus from the family who relocate
together to the family who splinter apart, considering the many nuanced ways that home and
38

family are fragile constructions, prone to breakage by forces without and within. By its final
pages, however, the novel rehouses nearly all its characters and reunites its broken families,
regardless of whether they were driven apart by forces external or internal to the family home. In
providing one narrative end to the story of the unhomely man who will not move and the story of
the many other characters who must move, Dombey and Son thus shuts down its complicated
vision of a world on the move, insisting that the losses of removal can be undone and opting for a
more comforting vision of mid-nineteenth-century Victorian England than that which it
developed earlier in the novel.
Chapter Three, “‘And all so changed’: Loss, Instability, and House Removal in Elizabeth
Gaskell’s North and South,” next explores Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854-5), a
novel which provides a full investigation of both physical removal and emotional removal.
Unlike Charles Dickens in Dombey and Son (1846-8), which concerns itself primarily with the
act of emotional removal, Gaskell is careful to represent the material realities of moving house,
including both the physical and mental labour involved in a change of address, and the instability
of the domestic sphere itself. In this novel, home is not the solid space of marriage, family, and
household goods but a fragile material and emotional construction that takes work to build and to
dismantle, and as Gaskell makes clear, this is work primarily carried out by women and hired
male laborers. In this way, Gaskell’s novel is a powerful counterpoint to those narratives of
removal published in the periodical press which obscure female labor during a move.
At the same time that Gaskell represents the material realities of physical removal, she
also investigates the emotional toll of moving house on her heroine, Margaret Hale, who can
only experience removal as a dangerous act that threatens to open a deep sense of loss and
instability within herself. As an unmarried middle-class Victorian woman who remains
39

dependent on her family for much of the novel, Margaret lacks control over her residence and
her removals, and so she works to control and manipulate her private, subjective understandings
of self, home, and movement to minimalize the sense of unsteadiness that moving opens in her
life. Indeed, this leads Margaret to make a series of radical revisions to her sense of self, finally
landing near the end of the novel on a self-understanding that allows her to move without feeling
such internal loss. However, North and South is not Dombey and Son, and Gaskell cannot
promise her heroine a life free of change, as Dickens seems to promise Mr. Dombey once he
moves in with Florence. Rather, the novel’s final chapters make clear that its heroine’s work is
far from over. While North and South thus certainly offers a profound exploration of the social
and psychological unsteadiness of middle-class women who are on the move—something the
male-authored nonfictional narratives of removal published in the periodical press do not do—
this chapter argues that Gaskell’s novel nonetheless shies away from exploring more extreme
forms of loss and change. North and South never places Margaret Hale in any truly insecure
position, and its engagement with the many forms of social, financial, and material instability
that other characters—especially the Milton millworker families—face within its pages remains
limited. Margaret may represent new forms of gendered and psychological mobility, but the
novel leaves her securely housed within the middle class both financially and socially, and in
doing so, it misses an opportunity to place her sense of instability within a larger Victorian
context.
Finally, the afterword, “Moving House in the Later Nineteenth Century,” then turns to the
historical progression of middle-class Victorian attitudes towards household moves. While
Chapter One considers male-authored narratives that stay largely the same over the course of the
Victorian period and while Chapters Two and Three examine mid-nineteenth-century novels, the
40

afterword turns to narratives of removal that were published in the second half of the nineteenth
century and in the early twentieth century, and to the changing cultural attitudes about moving
that shape these narratives. Drawing on novels like Anthony Trollope’s The Small House at
Allington (1864), George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure
(1895), and E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910), in addition to other short pieces published in
the periodical press, the afterword argues that the optimism of mid-century narratives like
Dombey and Son and North and South—in which the main characters do indeed find a new
home—gives way, first, to an interest in not moving, in staying put and maintaining a permanent
home, and then, by the turn of the century, to a darker vision of the dangers of repeated removals
and an insistence on the impossibility of finding that permanent home. In this way, my afterword
sketches out the material that I will be working with as I turn this dissertation project into a book
project.
41

Chapter One
“Houses, houses everywhere, but not a house for me”:
House-Hunting, Male Narrative Control, and the Victorian Periodical Press

Introduction
On October 26, 1854, The Leisure Hour published a short piece titled “House-Hunting”
in its pages. Written from the point of view of a collective “we”—a kind of editorial board of
Victorian men experienced in the practice of house-hunting—its narrators begin, “One of the
undelightful contingencies of a life in London, is that of being turned out of doors, and
compelled, will you nill you, to seek a new shelter for your household goods” (683). Nearly
sixteen years later, on April 9, 1870, The Leisure Hour ran another piece, also titled “House-
Hunting,” which reiterated the subject and stance of the original. Its narrator opens with the
declaration, “No one aware of what is involved in the undertaking would ever willingly enter on
the business of house-hunting. But, unfortunately, that is not always a matter of choice” (236).
But neither the collective narrators of the 1854 piece nor the single narrator of the 1870
piece are speaking generally, for both pieces are addressed, it becomes clear, to a specific kind of
reader—a less-experienced middle-class man who will soon face his own house-hunt—and the
narrators in both pieces work to identify some of the many possible “backstories” that might
bring their reader to this search. While the 1870 narrator acknowledges that “one is forced to flit
by causes so various that to catalogue the whole of them would alone supply matter for an
article,” the narrators of both pieces nonetheless proceed to list various reasons why their
middle-class readers might have to move, using the second-person point of view to do so (236).
They consider changes internal to the family—“your olive-branches may so increase and
multiply as to require more room to bud and blossom in, in which case you are driven to search
for larger premises; or they may be shorn away from your side, and the place that has known
42

them may know them no more, and its black desolateness may chill your very soul, and you must
away from it in order to breathe at peace elsewhere”—and they also consider the myriad changes
external to the family that can lead to a move (“House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1854] 683):
Your house has been sold over your head to a man who wants to live in it himself,
or who, while willing to retain you as tenant, perhaps insists on raising your rent,
or on making you responsible for all future repairs. […] Or a noisome nuisance
has come to live next door, in the shape of a bird-fancier, whose Cochin-China
monsters never know what o’clock it is, and by their crowing, screaming, and
cluttering, keep you awake all night long. Or it is a professional singer,
determined to become a prima donna, who practises at all hours, and almost
without intermission. Or a fine new gin-palace, or free-and-easy, has established
itself at the corner of the street, and you are roused out of your first sleep by a
nightly chorus of drunken roysters. (“House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1870]
236)

On and on the narrators of both pieces go, all while admitting there are a vast number of other
reasons why their readers might be preparing for an upcoming move. In presenting these
possibilities, the narrators demonstrate their own knowledge of the causes of removal and make
space for a variety of middle-class readers to find themselves on the page, to identify their own
backstory which will lead to their need to house-hunt, even if it is not explicitly named. As the
1870 narrator says of his own list, “Any of these annoyances may be a sufficient reason to induce
a quiet-loving man to a change of residence, though fifty others might be named of equal or of
still greater weight” (236).
And then something quite interesting happens. Out of an infinitude of possible
backstories for their “you,” the narrators of both pieces lock onto one narrative of house-hunting,
which they begin to narrate for their reader. In the words of the 1854 narrators:
As the period of migration draws near, that very common-place announcement
‘THIS HOUSE TO LET’ assumes a degree of interest, and becomes attractive to
your anxious gaze. Having fixed upon a favourable neighbourhood, you make
occasional expeditions into it, and note down in your memorandum book such
dwellings as offer their hospitality, and then you confer with your better half as to
43

their different claims for selection. Then you write to the agents for cards of view,
which come duly by next post, and away you go, with your wife hanging on your
arm, to take a survey. (“House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1854] 683)
1

In other words, while the causes that may lead a middle-class Victorian to seek a new home are
“so various,” the story of a house-hunt is actually quite singular: a kind of one-size-fits-all
experience that middle-class Victorians—and middle-class Victorian men in particular—could
not help but undergo whenever it was time for a removal (“House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour
[1870] 236). Indeed, this story is so singular that the narrators of the Leisure Hour pieces can
predict it for their reader, telling him a story about himself that has not yet occurred but will,
come next quarter day.
This suggestion about the singularity of the house-hunting experience is not just made by
the narrators of the 1854 and 1870 Leisure Hour pieces. Rather, it is also present in numerous
house-hunting pieces—from narratives to advice literature—published in a variety of journals
throughout the Victorian period, all of which tell the same general story of house-hunting, even
down to easily identifiable steps. In the many male-authored narratives of house-hunting which
are stylized as nonfiction or autobiographical writing, for example, the narrators all name a
different reason for needing to move—getting married, relocating to London for work, gaining
an inheritance—and yet the stories of their house-hunts all quickly fall in line. While these
nonfictional narratives are working to tell the reader a story about the narrator’s own life, not a
story about the reader’s self, the narratives’ collective similarities nonetheless tell their reader,
“This is the story of house-hunting, and it will be your story too.” The narrative of house-hunting
is not a narrative of forking paths, then, but a narrative with forking origins that narrow to one

1
The 1870 Leisure Hour piece begins its narration of the house-hunt somewhat less dramatically: “Having made up
your mind to remove, the first thing you do is to peruse the various advertisements of Houses to Let in the columns
of the morning papers” (236).
44

story, one course of action, one plot. And that plot, the male authors of the periodical press make
clear, is one of “miseries”—of “trials and troubles” (“House Hunting,” Literary Magnet 201;
Helps 764). Indeed, as the 1870 Leisure Hour narrator declares at the outset of his piece: “No
one who is aware of what is involved in the undertaking would ever willingly enter on the
business of house-hunting” (“House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1870] 236).
For these male authors, house-hunting is a story of “miseries” because it is a story of
losing control over a process that was supposed to be within their control. In the middle-class
world of Victorian England, house-hunting was understood to be an activity carried out by
married couples. In Good Words in 1869, E.A. Helps refers to “[a]ny of my readers who have
been unfortunate enough to require to change their residence, either as young married people or
middle-aged parents,” and indeed, these are just the sorts of people who house-hunted each
quarter day (764). But while husbands and wives did often search for a residence together,
house-hunting nonetheless fell within a husband’s purview: it was his responsibility, in the end,
to find and secure a new house for his family. As the 1854 Leisure Hour narrators explain to
their male reader, “We will suppose, therefore, that affairs have taken their regular course—that
you must abandon your present dwelling next quarter day, and it is, in consequence, incumbent
on you to provide another” (“House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1854] 683). A wife and even
older children might participate in the house-hunt, then, but it was “incumbent” on the husband
to finish the task. As the male authors of the periodical press make clear, however, finishing this
task was no easy feat, for again and again they find their control slipping away with the
progression of the house-hunt. While the early stages of a search for a new residence are marked
by the independence of the male house hunter and, at times, a kind of carefully-controlled
collaboration with family and friends, the later stages of house-hunting come to involve more
45

and more people (and indeed, more and more women), more and more variables, and less and
less autonomy for the male house hunter. This, indeed, is why house-hunting is an inevitable,
predictable story of “miseries”—it is a story of middle-class men losing control over a process
that was meant to be theirs to control.
In telling this story of “miseries,” the narrators and authors of the periodical press
certainly mean to complain, but in telling this story of “miseries,” they also very much mean to
regain control—to demonstrate their own mastery over their house-hunt, their story, or both and
to reclaim house-hunting as their responsibility and their “right.” For many of the nonfiction
narrators who are telling the story of their own house-hunt, this regaining of control comes at the
end of their narratives, when they either triumphantly share with their reader that they found and
secured an excellent house or when they admit that they picked a house that has proved to be
unsatisfactory in some way but that they have learned from their experience and will do better
(and thus better control the house-hunt) next time. In other house-hunting pieces, this reassertion
of male control comes not only at the level of the house-hunt but at the level of the story. The
narrators of the 1854 and 1870 Leisure Hour pieces—and others like them—simultaneously
predict their reader’s house-hunt, pointing to the thousand ways that house-hunting will cause
that reader to lose control, and they offer him advice about how to make it better. This insistence
on prediction, instruction, advice, and improvement is itself a way of achieving control, for in
telling the reader his story, these narrators show their own knowledge and authority—over
house-hunting, over narrative, and even over their readers. This is not to say that these house-
hunting pieces are not also meant for their readers. Indeed, these pieces work to give their male
readers some small sense of control too. For the uninitiated, house-hunting narratives serve as a
kind of education that—in conjunction with more traditional advice literature—supposedly
46

prepares them for their first house-hunt. For the experienced, these narratives perhaps tell readers
what they already know, but in complaining about the slippage of male control that comes with a
house-hunt, these narratives reassure their experienced readers that this slippage of male control
is worthy of complaint and they re-inscribe the idea that men should be in control.
We can best understand this reassertion of male control in house-hunting narratives by
putting them in conversation with narratives of moving house—a smaller body of male-authored
narratives that also appeared in the Victorian periodical press and that narrate the actual
household move that follows a house-hunt. These narratives, like house-hunting narratives, make
clear that a household removal is also a story of “miseries,” for it results in male house-holders
losing their autonomy and power in the middle-class home, and yet the male narrators and
characters in these narratives do not work to regain control over either the process of their move
or the story of their move in the same way that the narrators and characters in house-hunting
narratives do. This difference comes down to a difference in responsibility: while it was
“incumbent” on middle-class Victorian men to find a new home for their family, it was not
“incumbent” on them to accomplish the move into that new home (“House-Hunting,” The
Leisure Hour [1854] 683). Thus, while moving-house narratives may be stories of “miseries,”
they are not stories about men losing control over a process they were meant to control, and so
there is at less at stake for the male narrators and characters. In moving-house narratives,
narrators and characters can content themselves with complaint as they wait for moving day to
pass and for their power as patriarch to return. In house-hunting narratives, however, male
narrators and characters must confront a more complicated reality outside the narrow confines of
the middle-class home. There, on the hunt, the power and control that these men feel they are
losing is not so easily returned to them.
47

*
“Hunting for Houses”: The Middle-Class Male Fantasy of the Hunt
As a story of “miseries,” the house-hunt that the male authors of the periodical press
narrate does not actually start off so miserably—and this is because, for the first stage of house-
hunting, male narrators and characters work alone, picking an area on which to focus their search
and looking for possible houses to view there (“House-Hunting,” The Literary Magnet 21).
While sometimes a house hunter “peruse[s] the various advertisements of Houses to Let in the
columns of the morning papers,” this initial step is more often than not carried out by men
moving independently through residential spaces (“House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1870]
236). In The Leisure Hour’s 1854 second-person narrative, the “you” makes “occasional
expeditions” into his “favourable neighbourhood,” jotting down “in [his] memorandum book
such dwellings as offer their hospitality” (“House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1854] 683). In
his advice piece published in Good Words in 1869, E. A. Helps recommends “quiet and
promiscuous prowls through the district in which you have determined to settle” to his readers
(765). So too, in The Canadian Magazine in 1893, Bernard McEvoy writes of an urban house
hunter who begins house-hunting “by looking at the advertisements as he comes home in the
street-car,” the passing city becoming its own catalogue of possible residences (669). In these
representations of the initial phase of house-hunting, then, men are in control. Though they may
have an “anxious gaze,” they act as autonomous individuals, making decisions for their wives
and families regarding the area on which they will focus their search and the sorts of houses they
will view (“House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1854] 683).
In these men’s ability to peruse advertisements or perambulate around the city on their
own is the middle-class male fantasy of how the whole house-hunt should proceed, not just its
48

first stage. As the periodical press tells its male readers, “it is […] incumbent on you to provide
another [house for your family],” and in this fantasy, that is exactly what middle-class men are
able to go out and do, methodically and autonomously picking a house for their family from
among a selection of available rental properties (“House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1854]
683; italics added). We see this fantasy made visual in an illustration that appeared in the
American publication Yankee Notions in 1854 (see fig. 2). The illustration, titled “Hunting for
Houses,” depicts several men quite literally hunting for houses, shooting the lanky figures of
birds—each dressed in a house and labelled with a rent—out of the sky. The sky is well-stocked
with “game,” and each man faces his own direction, suggesting that there is a feeling of
comradery rather than competition among the hunters. Indeed, the whole process looks quite
straightforward: each man finds what he wants, takes aim, and shoots his prey down, securing a
new home for himself and his family (who are, it should be noted, nowhere to be seen). Nothing,
it seems, could be easier.

Figure 2. “Hunting for Houses,” Yankee Notions (April 1854), pp. 151
49

And yet, in the Victorian periodical press’s narratives of house-hunting, this fantasy of
male independence hardly lines up with the house-hunt that follows this initial stage of searching
for houses to view. As the search for a new residence comes to involve more and more people, it
comes to resemble less and less the male-controlled and male-executed hunt in the Yankee
Notions illustration. Indeed, the search—and its telling—become more complicated. It is no
mistake that the narrative conveyed by the “Hunting for Houses” illustration is captured in one
still image: it is a simple story involving characters going out and getting exactly what they want.
This is also true of the first stage of house-hunting, the search for houses to view: narrators can
narrate this stage succinctly or even summarize it because it involves so little complication. As
we saw, the narrators of The Leisure Hour’s 1854 piece need tell their reader nothing more than
that he will “fix[] upon a favourable neighbourhood,” “make occasional expeditions into it,” and
“note down in [his] memorandum book such dwellings as offer their hospitality” (“House-
Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1854] 683). But, on the other hand, when complications and
conflict arise, when other characters with competing needs and desires enter the plot, a narrative
cannot help but grow, no matter how much its narrator might wish that it would not. This is
precisely what happens in an early nonfiction narrative published in The Literary Magnet in
1827, whose narrator is unable to select “a favourable neighbourhood” by himself as other male
narrators and characters are able to do but must instead make this decision with his sixteen-year-
old daughter and his wife, who is prone to disagreeing with him. The family’s selection of a
London suburb thus becomes, in the narrator’s words, “a knotty point, and one upon which we
found it extremely difficult to agree” (202). Though the family is eventually able to compromise
and agree to look for houses in “quiet streets of the west end,” we see that the process is hardly
so smooth—or as able to be so quickly narrated—as it is in other male-authored accounts, for
50

this narrator must narrate the whole “knotty” process of disagreement and concession that comes
with the slippage of male control (203, 202). This, indeed, is what happens to the bulk of house-
hunting narratives as they move beyond the simple, male-controlled first stage—as more and
more people and variables come to be involved and as the fantasy of male autonomy breaks
down bit by bit.
Interestingly, however, in the bulk of these house-hunting narratives, the first increase in
the number of people involved in the hunt is actually sanctioned by the male narrators and
characters themselves. After their initial search for houses to view, they invite wives, children,
and even extended family members and friends to participate in a preparatory stage in which
house hunters decide what strategies to employ when they go out and view the houses they have
only “note[d] down in [their] memorandum books” (“House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1854]
683). For the addressed “you” of the 1854 Leisure Hour piece, this phase involves “confer[ring]
with your better half” regarding various houses’ “different claims for selection” and thus
deciding which houses are worth visiting (683). Indeed, even the Literary Magnet couple who
argue over which London neighborhood they should conduct their house-hunt in come together
for this stage. The narrator describes how he and his wife were “[d]etermined not to proceed
precipitately or unadvisedly in the matter” of house-hunting and thus “consumed the whole of
Sunday […] in concocting and digesting a series of questions for our guidance in House-
Hunting” (“House-Hunting,” Literary Magnet 203). In another nonfiction narrative, this one
from The Leisure Hour and published in 1884, the male narrator prepares to move his family
from the countryside to London. However, “less confident of [his] powers than some of his
friends thought wise,” he writes down not a list of his own questions but the questions and
considerations that various family members and acquaintances suggest to him, from his wife’s
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advice to “be very careful to go down to the kitchen and see that the offices contain everything a
large family requires” to his aunt’s suggestion to “inquire who last lived in the house you take,
and what they died of” to his friend Mr. Green’s recommendation to “walk upstairs as heavily as
possible” in shooting boots to hear “if any of the stairs creak or the boards shake” (“House-
Hunting,” Leisure Hour [1884] 606).
In a narrative marked by an obsession with control and its loss, the collaboration involved
in this second stage of house-hunting is certainly noteworthy, especially considering that it
follows on the heels of male house hunters’ more solitary search for possible houses. The male
house hunters who populate the house-hunting narratives of the Victorian periodical press,
however, do not seem to consider collaboration at this stage of house-hunting an affront to their
control. In part, this is a result of the autonomy that most house-hunting narrators and characters
are granted during the first stage of house-hunting. In picking a neighborhood and in selecting
possible houses to present to their wives and families, these men set boundaries which yield a
kind of control that carries over into this second, more collaborative phase. No matter which
houses from her husband’s memorandum book a wife would like to pursue, no matter what
questions she would like to ask landlords, the houses they will view will be ones that her
husband has already selected. But the willingness of these narrators and characters to collaborate
during this second stage of house-hunting also speaks to the importance that middle-class
Victorians placed on preparation. Indeed, we even see the narrator who drafted his series of
questions with his wife quite literally cling to them, tucking the list into his glove on the day
their house-hunt begins “in order that we might refer to it at a moment’s notice” (“House
Hunting,” Literary Magnet 203-4). In “confer[ring] with your better half,” in seeking advice, in
drafting lists of questions and considerations to bring along on the hunt and even tucking them
52

into their gloves, these male narrators and characters reveal their belief that, through
collaborative preparation, they can “secure [themselves] from the possibility of mischance” and
thus make their search for a new residence more successful than it would otherwise be (“House-
Hunting,” Leisure Hour [1854] 683; “House Hunting,” Literary Magnet 203). In other words, by
ceding total control and working together with family and friends, these narrators and characters
believe that they can actually better control the house-hunt that follows.
*
The “Miseries” of House-Hunting: House Agents, Advertisements, and Strangers
While so many of the pieces published in the Victorian periodical press suggest that there
is a benefit to be gained from the preparatory stage of house-hunting, whether that involves
drawing on one’s own previous house-hunting experiences or consulting the advice of others, the
vast majority of these pieces soon make clear that the benefits that house hunters derive from this
preparation are extremely limited. Despite one’s previous house-hunting experiences, despite the
plethora of house-hunting advice available in the periodical press and domestic guidebooks,
despite even the best made list hidden in a glove, when it comes to the actual viewing of houses,
house-hunting remains a difficult, time-consuming, and frustrating process. Indeed, with the
viewing of houses, house-hunting turns from the easy hunt pictured in the Yankee Notions
illustration into that series of “miseries” that so many male authors of the Victorian periodical
press claim it is, for it draws them into a series of encounters which subject them to the needs,
wants, motivations, and even the whims of others (“House-Hunting, The Literary Magnet 201).
In this way, the viewing of houses forces house hunters to confront all that they cannot control—
and especially all the people whose actions they cannot control and who, indeed, seem bent on
controlling them.
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In the periodical press’s narratives of house-hunting, narrators and characters in general
first complain of their loss of control when they encounter house agents and advertisements, both
of which belong to the industry that developed around the middle-class rental housing market
and sought to make a profit on Victorians’ continual relocations. In E. A. Helps’ 1869 Good
Words piece “House-Hunting,” Helps imagines a fellow Victorian in need of a new residence,
writing, “So what does Smith do? A cold shudder comes over me as I say it—he ‘puts himself in
the hands of a House Agent’” (764). For the male house hunter, what Helps refers to as “the
dreadful significance” of the phrase “House Agent” comes, in part, from a loss of autonomy—
from being placed “in the hands” of an agent and made subject to his direction (764). But “the
dreadful significance” of the phrase also comes in no small part from the fact that the house
hunter is made subject to the agent’s misdirection, for—as the male authors of the periodical
press emphasize again and again—a house agent will exaggerate and even lie about the rental
properties that he presents to a house hunter to spark that hunter’s interest. According to Helps
and other authors, this is equally true of the advertisers who publish “fervid and glowing”
descriptions of houses-to-let in newspapers like The Times of London. Both agents and
advertisers, then, lead house hunters after all sorts of residential “El Dorados” that never quite
materialize when they are sent to view them in person (Helps 765). The narrator of The Leisure
Hour’s 1884 piece “House-Hunting” chases after several of these “El Dorados” over the course
of his London house-hunt, and he admits, “Many a weary tramp I took to find a house which was
said to contain exactly what I wanted to have about half the rooms I required” (607). On one
“tramp,” he even views a house which an agent tells him has a larder. When he asks the person
showing him the house on behalf of the agent to see the larder, the person, looking around, can
54

only say, “I believe it cannot have been built yet, but you see, sir, there is a bit of garden here
under the south wall where one could be built” (607).
Though the authors of the periodical press do not say as much—and, indeed, even try to
suggest the opposite—one senses that this state of being “in the hands” of house agents and
advertisers is additionally miserable for house hunters because, here again, experience seems to
afford house hunters little benefit. Many house-hunting pieces emphasize the moment that a
novice house hunter realizes that advertisements and agents lie, that their language and promises
are not to be trusted. Addressing his novice reader, the narrator of the 1870 Leisure Hour
“House-Hunting” piece describes the process leading up to this moment: “Having made up your
mind to remove, the first thing you do is to peruse the various advertisements of Houses to Let in
the columns of the morning papers. At the first glance nothing seems easier than to suit yourself
by making choice of one or other of the ‘desirable residences’ which are every day in the
market” (236). However, as the piece makes clear, this optimism does not last: “You learn, by
the time you have been a week on the hunt, that advertisements are in no case to be explicitly
relied on,” and the house that seemed, according to its description, like a perfect fit for a couple
or family “turns out on examination to be all you could wish to avoid” (236). Here and
elsewhere, a Victorian’s first foray into house-hunting is presented as a learning process, and the
simultaneous suggestion is that experienced house hunters must be a step ahead. And yet this
does not quite pan out. An experienced house hunter may know better than to believe any house
agent who claims that “the only drawbacks” to a certain house are “the noise made by
nightingales, and the litter caused by the roses shedding their leaves”—but for a house hunter
forced to rely on an agent to introduce him to rental properties, this knowledge is not enough to
protect him (Helps 768). After all, a house hunter cannot know the exact ways in which he is
55

being lied to or misled until he arrives at the house in question and sees not just the leaves of
roses on the lawn but the house’s actual drawbacks, which neither advertisement nor agent will
simply identify up front (768).
While house hunters find it frustrating to be placed “in the hands” of house agents and
advertisers, they also find it frustrating to be placed “in the hands” of two other groups of
strangers with whom they come into contact on their house-hunt, specifically when it comes to
“[t]he viewing of inhabited houses” (Helps 767). While some houses-to-let stood empty, others
brought house hunters into contact with outgoing middle-class residents still living in a house or
with hired, usually working-class people whose job it was to live in a house-to-let and show it to
prospective renters. Both the outgoing residents and the hired caretakers or “house-squatters”
with whom house hunters came in contact were largely women, and the male authors of the
periodical press make clear that it was quite difficult to be “in the hands” of either group, for
they both variously slow and stymie the house-hunting process, eroding the male house hunter’s
control over his search for a new residence (“House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1870] 236).
As middle-class wives were more likely to be at the home during the day than their
husbands, the outgoing residents with whom house hunters came into contact were mostly
women. E. A. Helps advises his less-experienced male readers, “In seeing [inhabited houses] it
often happens that you have to deal with the lady of the house” (767), and his piece and others
make clear that “deal[ing] with the lady of the house” yields different results depending on
whether a male house hunter knocks at that lady’s door with “[his] wife hanging on [his] arm” or
whether he does so alone (Helps 767; “House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1854] 683). In those
narratives in which male house hunters are accompanied by their wives, the narrators’ general
complaint is that outgoing residents, regardless of their gender, fail to consider how their actions
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affect either house hunters’ search for a new residence or their feelings. For some, this complaint
arises when an outgoing resident will not allow them to view their residence. The Literary
Magnet narrator with his list of questions in his glove provides readers with some of the myriad
excuses that he and his wife and daughter are given by tenants denying them full or partial
entrance to their homes:
Mr. A. was at breakfast, and could not be disturbed! Mrs. B. has no objection to
our viewing her sitting-rooms, but the bed-chambers (the black-holes of her
establishment), were in a state of confusion, which rendered it impossible that we
could be allowed to inspect them! Mrs. C. had chimney-sweepers in her kitchen!
(it was just then under water, and might have impressed us with an ugly prejudice
against the general comfort of the tenement) so that we were not allowed to
penetrate lower than her dining-room. Mrs. D. was at dinner; and wondered how
people could expect to obtain admittance at so unseasonable an hour. (“House-
Hunting, Literary Magnet 204)

For others, their complaint about outgoing residents arises less from any delay that the residents
cause to their house-hunt than from the treatment they receive once they are admitted. The
narrator of The Leisure Hour’s 1870 piece “House-Hunting” refers to outgoing residents’ lack of
“patience and courtesy” as a kind of cultural fact and even notes their ability even “to turn a little
acid” to the house hunters viewing their home (“House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1870] 236,
237). It is as if, suffering through their story of “miseries,” house hunters expect nothing less
than sympathy and hospitality from the middle-class strangers who admit them into their
residences.
Of course, what those house-hunting narrators and authors who complain about outgoing
residents fail to consider is what outgoing residents themselves must undergo when living in a
house-to-let. After all, outgoing residents are dealing not just with one house hunter knocking at
their door but with many house hunters “who come at all hours, and catch you at all sorts of
occupations,” as Wilkie Collins phrases it in his 1864 All the Year Round piece “To Let”—one
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of the few pieces published in the periodical press to consider the “unpleasant” experience of
living in a house-to-let (444). In addition, from the point of view of outgoing residents, house
hunters have a tendency once they are admitted for a viewing to be nosey, examining not just the
house but the residents’ personal belongings. The anonymous author of “Love of Change,”
published in Eliza Cook’s Journal in 1854, describes how house hunters “peer under [a man’s]
beds and into his closets,” and Collins notes not only that house hunters “stare at your papers, at
your letters lying open on the table, at your egg-shells, and at your streaky beef,” but “[t]hey
back out of the room in which you are sitting, in order that they may see the last of you” (“Love
of Change” 109, Collins 445). In this way, house hunters prove both disruptive and invasive
when they enter the private domestic space of outgoing residents. This, indeed, is what the
narrator of the 1870 Leisure Hour piece “House-Hunting,” in a rare moment of empathy, tries to
make clear to his house-hunting readers: “[Outgoing residents] are really entitled to some
allowances on the score of the annoyances they undergo, and if you find them a little ruffled after
showing a dozen or so of curious people over their dwelling, ‘up stairs, and down stairs, and in
my lady’s chamber,’ you ought not in reason to be surprised” (236).
Narratives like Wilkie Collins’s that offer the perspective of residents living in houses-to-
let help us see the irony of the complaint in house-hunting narratives that outgoing residents act
selfishly, failing to consider how their actions affect house hunters, for outgoing residents make
the same complaints about house hunters. Not only do house hunters behave “as if exercising a
natural right” when viewing inhabited houses, but they show little sympathy for the residents of
the houses that they view, who are not only facing their own exchange of homes but find their
current home suddenly on public display (“House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1870] 236). This
is noteworthy, for not only are these residents and house hunters presumably social equals, but
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many of the same middle-class Victorians who house-hunted most likely also occupied a house-
to-let at one point or another and thus would have had experienced the difficulties and
frustrations of this other position. House-hunting narratives suggest, however, that during the
search for a new home, house hunters view outgoing residents not as fellow middle-class
Victorians on the move, sharing a similar experience, but as antagonists who belong to a very
different social group and who are there only to complicate their search and make their story one
of “miseries” (“House-Hunting,” The Literary Magnet 201).
While male house hunters who view houses with their wives feel this antagonism with
outgoing residents, there is an additional layer of antagonism—indeed, an additional complaint
to be made—when a male house hunter attempts to view houses alone and encounters the female
resident of a house-to-let. E. A Helps covers a range of the ways that “the lady of the house” can
make house-hunting frustrating for a man on his own, from her supposed ignorance of “the terms
of letting, &c.,” to the way that she makes it hard for a man “to say plainly that [he doesn’t] like
the house” (767, 766). While Helps here judges “the lady of the house” and determines that her
very gender risks making the house-hunting process more difficult for a man, he also makes clear
an opposite risk: that “the lady of the house” will return that judgment on the lone male house
hunter. As Helps writes, “You will also meet with inhabited houses where the mistress will quite
resent your coming, and treat you as if you had come after the spoons; refusing sometimes to
hold any converse with you, and perhaps audibly telling the maid to ‘see that the person wipes
his shoes on the mat before going up-stairs’” (767).
Helps’s comment here reminds us just how closely linked house-hunting was with
marriage and the family. In the Victorian popular imagination, house hunters were married
couples wandering residential streets, the wife “hanging” on her husband’s arm, and indeed, in
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the majority of the periodical press’s house-hunting narratives, the husband and wife perform the
viewing of houses together (“House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1854] 683). A man house-
hunting alone, on the other hand, is immediately a more suspicious figure, raising questions
about whether he is performing a house-hunt in earnest or really knocking at the door to cause
trouble for a woman who is home alone. Indeed, the suspicious figure of the lone male house
hunter was so familiar to Victorians that it was employed in the short fiction of the periodical
press for comical effect. In the story “House-Hunting” published in The Sixpenny Magazine in
1864, the main character, a young cavalry officer named Lieutenant Rayner who is house-
hunting for his sister, is turned away from a house-to-let when the old woman who answers the
door “in curl papers” finds out that he is not married: “Then what are you taking up folks’ time
lookin’ at their houses for? […] I know what you’re after—you’re a hall thief! Get along—
quick—with your shoulder-straps and your airs and graces, or I’ll call the police! Imposin’ on a
lone woman this way!” (459).
2

In narrative moments like this, be they serious or comical, we find a male house hunter
who has gone to judge a house but instead finds himself not only judged but misjudged by a
female stranger. Indeed, it is his very aloneness—the absence of a wife on his arm—that makes
him subject to this judgement. As Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall write, middle-class men
occupied a privileged position in Victorian England, able to move freely and independently

2
The London Reader also published two short stories, both of which were written by one “A. R.,” in which
unmarried men attempt to house-hunt to comedic effect. In “The First of May,” published on June 17, 1865, two
young men who board at a lodging house decide to rent a house and “go to house-keeping ourselves” (217). At the
first house they visit on their hunt, they are turned away by the female resident once they admit they are not married:
“Get along with you for a couple of impudent jackanapes. Do you s’pose I’m goin’ to let my house for gambling and
champagne parties, and all such sinful goin’s on? I ain’t—not by a long sight” (217). Likewise, in “‘This House to
Let,’” published on June 15, 1867, the main character, who is house-hunting on behalf of his cousin, is turned away
from a few houses-to-let by the women who live there. Though they do not explicitly accuse him of being a hall
thief or a jackanapes, his encounters with them nonetheless lead him to think, “I wonder if I do look like a rogue”
(165).
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through the public sphere and also between the public and private spheres—something most
middle-class women were not able to do (319). In this instance, however, viewing a house alone
requires a middle-class man to cross the threshold into another woman’s private domestic space,
and here, the house hunter’s presence as an autonomous individual actually becomes a
hindrance, causing “the lady of the house” to misread him. But it also makes him realize all the
ways in which he is made subject to this female resident’s control, whether that means being
treated “as if you had come after the spoons” or denied entry altogether (Helps 767). In
encounters between lone male house hunters and female residents of inhabited houses, then, the
house hunters reach one limit of their male privilege. And yet reaching this limit only leads these
male narrators and characters to insist that they have been wronged. We see this in Helps’s
indignation that a respectable middle-class man might be treated as if he were a thief and in
Lieutenant Rayner’s ejaculation that he “won’t be made a fool of any more” when he is turned
away from a house (“House-Hunting,” The Six Penny Magazine 459). In their encounters with
female residents, then, we see the same selfishness—the same expectation that outgoing
residents should put their needs and feelings first—that we see in narratives in which house
hunters view houses with their wives—but here this selfishness is more clearly grounded in a
shakable sense of male middle-class privilege.
While house-hunting narrators and characters lament the ways that outgoing residents,
and especially outgoing female residents, slow and complicate their house-hunt by denying them
entry, treating them rudely, and judging them, they have a different sort of trouble when they
encounter those whom one author in the periodical press names “house-squatters”—“a singular
class of people” who worked as caretakers, living in houses-to-let and showing them to
prospective renters (“House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1870] 236). However, as it is a house-
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squatter’s job to help house hunters—“to show the house to applicants, to answer all inquiries,
and of course to let the house to a tenant if they can”—house hunters do not have a relationship
that is so immediately antagonistic with this group of people as they do with outgoing residents;
rather, that antagonism develops more slowly (236).
House hunters’ initial encounters with house-squatters are marked by a kind of
fascination on the part of middle-class house hunters for this group of people. This fascination
results, in the first place, from the fact that house-squatters are “a new [phase] of life” to many
middle-class house hunters, to use the words of the 1870 Leisure Hour narrator with which this
chapter began (“House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1870] 236). Indeed, this narrator, who is
writing primarily to “novice” house hunters and who is narrativizing and predicting the course
their house-hunt will take, stops his second-person narrative to introduce house-squatters to his
readers: “Some are single women, or widows, some are married couples without incumbrance,
while not a few are families more or less numerous. Few or many, they will be found located in
the basement floors, where they are generally snug and comfortable enough” (236). The narrator
continues, even describing the types of people who work as house-squatters, which included
policeman and their families, retired soldiers and their wives, and charwomen, who might leave
their daughters “in charge” while they are out working (236). In explaining to readers who
house-squatters are, this Leisure Hour narrator again points to the supposed benefit of house-
hunting experience: through his own house-hunts, he has presumably come into contact with a
variety of working-class people employed as house-squatters and can thus pass this wisdom on to
his readers. In this way, he works to prevent them from being surprised when they knock at an
“apparently empty” house and a charwoman’s daughter answers the door—or, in the case of the
scenario that the narrators of the 1854 Leisure Hour piece invent for their reader, when “you”
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open the door to a bedroom in a house-to-let and stumble upon “a spectacle which you never
dreamed of witnessing, and probably will never witness again as long as you live, and which is
nothing less than policeman A 95 (or some other member of the force, and of the alphabet)
sprawling between the sheets and snoring in his nightcap” (“House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour
[1854] 683, 684).
At the same time, though, there seems to be something inherently startling—even,
indeed, unsettling—about house-squatters to middle-class Victorian house hunters. This is
linked, in the eyes of middle-class Victorians, to the difference they perceive between this
“singular class of people” and themselves (“House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1870] 236).
Most house-squatters were working-class Victorians, and so their work brought them to live in
neighborhoods to which they did not socially or economically belong, and they seem to have
lived there in a shadowy, ghostlike way, many of them inhabiting the basement floors of houses-
to-let and many of them visible to the middle classes only when they knocked at the door of an
“apparently empty” house for a viewing (“House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1854] 683).
But house-squatters’ work also lent a peripatetic and transitory quality to their lives,
which sat at odds with the middle-class Victorian domestic ideal of a permanent home. Though
middle-class Victorian renters, many of whom moved every few years, were hardly able to
achieve this themselves, house-squatters existed as a kind of antithesis to this ideal, what with
“[t]heir turn-up bedstead never [having] a permanent home, and their gridiron and their kettle
[…] ever hanging on unaccustomed nails,” as Wilkie Collins phrases it in All the Year Round
(444). In a way, Collins’ point here that house-squatters’ belongings were “ever hanging on
unaccustomed nails” aligns with a broader middle-class view about the working classes. Due to a
variety of factors, the Victorian working classes tended to move more frequently than the middle
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classes, and middle-class observers often critiqued their higher rates of residential mobility. As
Anna Davin notes, “‘nomadic’ and ‘migratory’ were terms often applied to the poor,” and the
middle classes viewed the urban working classes’ frequent moves as both incomprehensible and
morally dangerous (31). Davin quotes one Walworth clergyman who lamented that the children
of people who were “wanderers like the Arabs of old, dwelling in tenements instead of
tents…[formed] no attachment to any habitation or locality” (qtd. 31). Interestingly, in narratives
of house-hunting, middle-class writers view house-squatters with more sympathy. As Collins
writes, “What a time they have of it. How are they hunted from mansion to mansion, and from
villa to villa” (444). This sympathy results in large part from house hunters’ belief that house-
squatters would prefer not to move so frequently—as if their very presence in a middle-class
neighborhood endowed them with supposedly middle-class values. Nonetheless, we can also see
that house-squatters—moving “from mansion to mansion, and from villa to villa”—must have
still served to remind middle-class Victorians (and especially those in the midst of a house-hunt)
of the continued precariousness of home and the rootlessness of even a middle-class Victorian
renter’s life.
House hunters’ sympathy and uneasy fascination with house-squatters, however, does not
last. Rather, male house hunters soon enough come to distrust house-squatters, and female
house-squatters especially, determining that house-squatters are lying to them about the house or
some aspect of its rental. This distrust of female house-squatters in particular is the result of the
fact that (like outgoing middle-class residents) women were the ones who showed the house to
prospective renters and answered questions while their husbands (if they had husbands) either
worked elsewhere or, like the policeman, slept off a nightshift. But it also relates to male authors
and characters’ assumptions about female house-squatters’ dissatisfaction with their peripatetic
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existence. Claiming that house-squatters “must have a miserable time of it,” Wilkie Collins
suggests that “it is enough to make this constable’s wife disparage the house which she is
employed to show off, in order that she may be allowed to remain there in peace” (444). This is
precisely what the narrators of the 1854 Leisure Hour piece have their “you” assume. There, the
wife of the sleeping policeman tells the wife of their house hunter about “the suspected condition
of the drain” and leads her to suggest that it is best to view other houses (“House-Hunting,” The
Leisure Hour [1854] 684). The “you” then “entertain[s] a not unnatural suspicion” that the
policeman’s wife has given a “bad character” to the drain thanks to “the disinclination she very
naturally feels to be turned suddenly out of the excellent quarters which she enjoys gratuitously”
(“House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1854] 684). Here, the “you”—or, more exactly, the
narrators behind the “you”—presume to know that this woman “naturally” feels a
“disinclination” to leave her current residence and is thus lying. As we saw, house-hunting
narrators make little attempt to understand the feelings of middle-class residents still living in
houses-to-let because it helps them maintain a narrative of the ways they have been wronged.
Here, on the other hand, the narrators ignore important class and gender differences and
condescend to know what a working-class female house-squatter must be feeling, for doing so
helps them write off the house-squatter as another antagonist and maintain their narrative of the
ways they have been wronged.
Indeed, whether these narrators and characters are correct in their presumptions or not,
they nonetheless render female house-squatters the competitors of middle-class house hunters—
and victorious competitors at that, for male house hunters and their wives do usually walk away
from these houses after hearing the disparagements offered by house-squatters. The “you” who
suspects the policeman’s wife of lying about the drain does indeed take his wife to see other
65

homes, despite “rather lik[ing]” the house (“House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1854] 684). In
the 1907 Answers piece “This Desirable Residence,” a caretaker tells the narrator “a tale that
almost froze the marrow in [his] bones” about the house he is considering renting, leading him to
“[flee] from the place before her catalogue of drawbacks was complete” (515). So too, in a poem
published in London Society in 1867, the speaker describes how one house-squatter gives a
prospective tenant and her daughter a laundry list of everything wrong with the cottage they are
viewing. In the accompanying illustration by Hugh Rawley (see fig. 3), the woman is even
covered in soot, which she has presumably rubbed all over herself to imply that the chimney
behind her smokes uncontrollably. All of this leads the woman and her daughter to run from the
house, which in turn leads the speaker of the poem to announce: “Moral—the tyrant of course
got the best of it— / They left the cottage, and she kept her place” (Capulet 252, lines 37-38).

Figure 3. Illustration by Hugh Rowley which accompanied Clarence Capulet’s poem “Lodging to Let,”
published as part of his “Phases of London Society” series for London Society, September 1867, pp. 253

*
66

Valuable Companion or Liability?: Middle-Class Wives and the House-Hunt
With house agents, advertisers, outgoing residents, and house-squatters all serving, in the
male house hunter’s eyes, to make his search for a new residence more difficult, more time-
consuming, and more miserable, it comes to seem that the whole world is indeed against the
house hunter. As E. A. Helps writes of the house hunter’s experience, “Everybody in any way
connected with a house, or the letting of a house, appears to be in a league to deceive one” (764).
But for most house hunters in these narratives, there is still the house hunter’s wife “hanging” on
her husband’s arm, participating in the hunt and presumably allied with her husband against the
rest of the house-hunting world (“House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1854] 683). And yet
house hunters’ experiences with house-squatters in particular raise an important danger. With
one wife convinced by a house-squatter that the drains are bad and with another wife falling for a
soot-covered house-squatter’s lies, the male-authored pieces of the periodical press point to the
fact that middle-class women can form their own opinions, that they can come to disagree with
their husbands, and that, in doing so, they can further complicate and prolong the house-hunt.
After all, though the house-squatter in the 1854 Leisure Hour piece convinces the middle-class
wife that the house’s drains are problematic, her husband does not agree with this
pronouncement, considering “that the bad character she has given the drain, if not altogether a
fiction, has not a very solid foundation in fact,” but he nonetheless “submit[s] to matters,” giving
in to his wife’s desire to see another house (“House Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1854] 684).
For some house hunters, then, it is not just strangers with whom they must vie for control but
also their most intimate partners. Indeed, for some, their wives become another antagonist with
which they must reckon.
67

In part, the figure of the antagonistic wife appears in house-hunting narratives as a
stereotype used for comedic effect—the fussy, demanding wife who makes life difficult for her
husband. We see this stereotype at work in the poem “House-Hunting: A Moving Tale,”
published in Judy in 1879 (177). The poem, which borrows from Browning and is subtitled “Any
Wife to Any Husband,” is a list of instructions given by the speaker to her husband, regarding
everything he must find in a house. From making sure the kitchen copper is “good as new” to
inspecting “ev’ry flue,” the wife-speaker catalogues a rhyming compendium of requirements so
long that she closes by admitting the near impossibility of finding such a house, all while still
holding out her right to reject that house should her husband succeed in locating it (lines 6, 8):
And, should you find a place at all—
And, really much I doubt it—
And should the rent be really small—
Why, then—we’ll see about it. (lines 29-32)

The poem thus makes clear through its ridiculous list of requests that a wife does not even need
to be along for the house-hunt to exert her pickiness and make house-hunting a longer, more
difficult, more miserable process for her husband.
3

While the one-dimensional stereotype of the picky housewife is certainly a common one,
elsewhere in the periodical press we find a more earnest—and interesting—representation of the
way in which a wife can express her own opinion and cause her husband to feel a loss of control
during the viewing of houses. In Bernard McEvoy’s nonfictional narrative “Moving House,”

3
While middle-class wives typically bear the brunt of being called picky in house-hunting pieces published in the
Victorian periodical press, a few pieces do engage with the idea that men—or at least some men—can be too picky.
For example, in The Saturday Review’s 1860 piece “The Perils of House-Hunting,” the narrator mimics the views of
certain overly-fastidious male house hunters seeking, in this case, to buy a home, not to rent: “This place is
admirable in every other respect, but the house looks the wrong way. That is absolute perfection in everything else,
but it is too near London, or too far from London. The estate is delightful, but the house is rather too large, or rather
too small. The house is all that could be wished, but there are a few acres too much or too little” (201). As he
explains, “And so go on the series of plucks, till the inquirer finds out that the great laws of human nature apply to
buying houses and land as well as to everything else” (201).
68

published in The Canadian Magazine in 1893, the narrator admits that “a man is apt to look at
the potentialities of a house with different eyes from those of his wife”:
He looks at a house and is charmed with it. For the moment it appears to be all
that is delightful, and he almost agrees to rent it on the spot. But when he takes
the partner of his joys and sorrows to see it, the glamour seems to fade. Under her
pertinent and searching questions, the luckless man feels that he really knows
nothing about a house at all, and wonders that ever he could have thought the one
specially under consideration a possibility. There is perhaps nothing that gives a
man such a wholesome distrust of his own powers as an experience or two of this
sort. (670)

What is interesting here, in the narrator’s third-person configuration, is that the husband changes
his mind about the house in question thanks to his wife’s different interpretation. Taking his wife
to see the house and seeing her response to it makes him “wonder[] that ever he could have
thought the one specially under consideration a possibility” (670). Nowhere, however, does the
narrator express his appreciation or relief that his wife, through her “pertinent and searching
questions,” has presumably identified the ways in which this house would not be suitable for
their family, preventing a potentially years-long housing mistake from being made. Rather, the
focus is on what this wife has caused her husband to feel, and the problem is that the wife, in
expressing her different opinion, has taken away her husband’s authority. Not only has she made
him anxiously doubt his ability to conduct a house-hunt (a task it is “incumbent” on him to
complete), but she has made him doubt his very self (“House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1854]
683).
There are, of course, exceptions to this trend: not every house-hunting narrative features
an overbearing, picky wife or a husband made self-doubting “in the hands” of a wife with a mind
of her own. Indeed, in some narratives, husband and wife seem allied in the work, functioning as
a kind of team. In the 1854 Leisure Hour piece “House-Hunting,” for instance, the narrator
considers his wife to be his “alter idem,” his second self, and he house-hunts with her “hanging
69

on [his] arm,” husband and wife moving together as one through London’s various rental
properties (684, 683). In other narratives, the wife is even portrayed as a valuable companion
who, far from being a liability, can provide house-hunting help that her husband admits that he
needs and openly appreciates. We see this most clearly in the 1884 Leisure Hour piece “House-
Hunting,” where the narrator, who conducts two rounds of house-hunting in London by himself,
is relieved that his wife is finally able to join him for the third round. In addition, in the Bow
Bells’ May 1896 advice column “Furnishing the House,” the narrator there suggests the
importance of a man bringing his wife on a house-hunt, for men struggle to imagine what their
life might look in an empty house. While a man can only see how “[a] sprinkling of nail-heads,
torturingly unsightly, mock the picturesque walls” and can only wonder, “How can this place be
made into a trim cozy home?,” a woman is able to see beyond the house’s current state: “her
imagination has already draped and furnished until it is beautiful in her sight” (464).
Nonetheless, there remains an easy slippage between the role of a wife as a valuable
companion and the role of a wife as a liability in these house-hunting narratives. We see this
even in the 1854 Leisure Hour piece in which the “you” house-hunts with his wife “hanging on
[his] arm” (683). There, the narrators describes their character’s wife as his “alter idem” at the
very moment at which she asserts her own opinion, taking the side of the policeman’s wife about
the drains and leading them to continue their house-hunting journey (684). So too, in the 1907
Answers piece “This Desirable Residence,” the narrator and wife’s house-hunting work seems at
first very much united: “Goodness knows, we made our requirements clear enough to the various
firms of house-agents, for whenever I stopped to get my breath Ethel would take up the thread”
(515). However, the narrator quickly makes clear that his wife has her own views, which depart
from his and which (according to the narrator) also complicate their already-rushed house-
70

hunting process. In the first place, the many houses that they view during the first two days of
their hunt present “one or more insuperable objections from Ethel’s point of view,” and when
they finally settle on a house and attempt to rent it, they discover that it has already been leased
to someone else, which leads the narrator to complain to the reader, “Mind you, I don’t put all
the blame on the agents. Ethel herself was very, very trying sometimes!” (515). Furthermore,
after this failed attempt, Ethel decides she would like “a picturesque, old-world, ivy-clad kind of
place” and insists on seeing another two days’ worth of “various mildewed habitations in remote
spots,” refusing “to be choked off” from her vision by her husband’s protestations (515). Here,
over the course of a very short narrative, the wife turns from a partner who can “take up the
thread” for her husband to a liability, for the house-hunt, the narrator implies, would ultimately
have been much easier without her.
*
“Bewildered in time”: Losing Control of the Hunt
In being placed “in the hands” of house agents, outgoing residents, house-squatters, and
even their wives, the male narrators and characters of the periodical press find that house-hunting
is no simple feat in which they can go out and claim the residence that they want, like the hunters
shooting their targets out of the sky in the Yankee Notions illustration (Helps 764). Rather,
house-hunting is a process that is made long and complex by the strangers with whom house
hunters come into contact and, at times, by their most intimate partners. Whether an agent sends
a house hunter off after an “El Dorado” of a house, whether an outgoing resident tells a house
hunter to come back for a viewing in three hours’ time, whether a house-squatter lies about the
state of the drains, whether a house hunter’s wife decides she does not like any of the houses
they have viewed, the male narrators and characters in these periodical press pieces find that
71

their inability to act autonomously slows and delays their ability to find a new residence and thus
end the hunt—and, indeed, this is true (Helps 765).
But this is not to suggest that, without other people involved, a house hunter would be
able to make quick work of a house-hunt. The male fantasy of the house-hunt may be the
simplicity of a bird hunt in which the hunter goes out, takes his pick of prey, and fires his gun
into the sky, but the reality of a house-hunt, as the pieces published in the Victorian periodical
press make clear, is far more complicated. Indeed, house-hunting does not just place the male
narrators and characters in these pieces “in the hands” of others; it makes them lose control in a
different, perhaps even more uncomfortable way, for it reveals to them their own limitations.
This is clear from the moment a house hunter starts to view the interiors of houses, for this act
shows him that there is nothing he can do—no amount of experience or preparation or advice—
that will allow him to predict the actual condition or details of a house’s interior when he jots it
down in his “memorandum book” as a possible home about which to “confer with [his] better
half” (“House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1854] 683). A house hunter can only determine the
state of a house and, most likely, the ways in which it does not meet his or his family’s
expectations once he is inside, “ascending and descending stairs, and exploring cellars and
servants’ offices” (“House-Hunting,” Literary Magnet 204). It is only then that he can note the
“rooms with low oppressive ceilings,” or the lack of cupboards, or the dry-rot, or the “mews in
the rear,” whose “pungent, ammonia-like smell […] pervades the atmosphere of the sleeping
rooms” (“House Hunting,” All the Year Round 85; “House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1854]
684).
What is more, there is also the issue of all that a house hunter cannot discern even when
he is inside a house—particularly the house’s history, including the how long the house has sat
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empty and who the previous tenants were and why they left. These are questions that many
Victorians considered it important to answer during a house-hunt—and they are also questions
that require more work on the house hunter’s part to answer. In The Leisure Hour’s 1884
nonfiction narrative “House-Hunting,” the narrator views two London houses which seem quite
promising, but thanks to the advice of his aunt, he makes sure to inquire about their histories
from local tradesmen and shopkeepers. This work yields disappointing results: a chemist
divulges “a tragic story of a family swept away by typhoid fever” in one house, and an
upholsterer, speaking to him about the other house, admits that “the gentleman who had it last
Michaelmas committed suicide” (608). Both the history of disease, with its threat of contagion,
and the history of a suicide, with its unpleasant connotations, were causes for alarm for Victorian
house hunters (though the latter also served as the material for a particular kind of dark humor
[see fig. 4]),

and both of these histories lead the narrator to reject the houses in question. With so
many variables (both seen and unseen) thus involved in a house, house-hunting forces even the
most experienced and prepared house hunter to recognize that there is no shortcut that will allow
him to pick the right house at the outset of his search. Rather, he must undergo the work of
viewing a house and the subsequent work of following up about that house, and most likely, he
must repeat this work again and again, whether that is because a house’s unsavory past causes
him to cross it off his list or because he finds a house so “damp” that it is “as though November
Fog, esquire, had taken private lodgings in it, and never dined out” (“House-Hunting,” The
Leisure Hour [1854] 684).
73

Figure 4. “A House to Let,” Fun, August 25, 1866, pp. 242.
Party with order to view:—“Can you tell me why the last tenant left?”
Party in Charge:—“Left? Lor, poor dear man, he didn’t leave. Lived here
till the werry last, and hanged himself in that there very room.”

Viewing houses, then, requires a kind of surrender to the process—and especially to its
intensity and duration, to its repetitive disappointments, each unsatisfactory house requiring the
house hunter to view another. The narrators of the 1854 Leisure Hour piece, who address their
reader and inform him how his hunt will unfold, make this clear even though they narrate only
one day of their reader’s search for a new residence. Over the course of that day-long narrative,
they explicitly move the reader and his wife through nine different (and varyingly disappointing)
houses, in addition to an unquantified “several others in succession” (“House-Hunting,” The
Leisure Hour [1854] 684). Furthermore, they conclude the piece by admitting, “There is nothing
for it now but to renew your search to-morrow, when we cordially wish that you may meet with
better success” (684). With this admission, they reveal how the addressed reader’s hunt—thanks
to its many disappointments—has spilled forward into future time, unnarrated though it may be.
74

We see something similar happen in the 1884 Leisure Hour piece “House-Hunting,” in which the
narrator lives with his family in the countryside and thus must travel to London to conduct his
house-hunt. Not only does his search for a new residence spill over from day to day during his
time in London, but it ultimately requires him to make two more repeat visits to London.
Certainly there are those narrators who set temporal limits to their hunt—be it one week or six—
in an attempt to control that hunt, but these narrators seem to find that their self-imposed limits
only intensify their work, increasing the number of viewings they must complete—and the
number of stairs they must ascend and descend—within that given time frame and even raising
the specter of failure. The narrator of the 1827 Literary Magnet piece, for example, sets aside six
days for his hunt with his wife and daughter and nearly makes up his mind near the end of those
six days that “such a domicile as we were in search of, like happiness, was not to be met with in
this world” (“House-Hunting,” Literary Magnet 205).
This is indeed part of the challenge of house-hunting—and part of the way that house-
hunting reveals to house hunters that they are not in control, for implicit in the feeling of the
1827 Literary Magnet narrator that “such a domicile as we were in search of, like happiness, was
not to be met with in this world” is the realization that his house-hunt may not be progressing
toward a satisfactory, successful conclusion (“House-Hunting,” Literary Magnet 205). In other
words, even as a house-hunt spills over from day to day and, for some, from week to week,
house hunters do not even have the consolation that they are on the right track. This same
Literary Magnet piece opens with an epigraph from Paradise Lost: “The world was all before us
where to choose / our place of rest, and Providence our Guide” (201).
4
If, like the illustration of
the bird hunt, Milton’s lines offer us another version of the middle-class Victorian fantasy of

4
The author has changed Milton’s third-person point of view to first-person in the epigraph.
75

house-hunting, the viewing of houses dispels it, for not only do the possibilities for “our place of
rest” diminish with each house that the house hunter sees but the house hunter is even forced to
grapple with the idea that his search is leading nowhere. As the narrators of the 1854 Leisure
Hour piece tell their reader, “The next [house], and the next, and the next, and several others in
succession, are each and all of them afflicted with some one or other of the imperfections
incidental to all human contrivances; and it would appear that the further you go, the worse you
are fated to fare”—or, in the Coleridgian words of the house hunter who travels to London three
times, “There seemed houses, houses everywhere, but not a house for me” (“House Hunting,”
The Leisure Hour [1854] 684; “House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1884] 607).
Because house-hunting reveals to male house hunters that they are not in control—that
they can never be entirely in control—of the process of finding a new residence, house-hunting
also brings a kind of internal loss of control for many male house hunters. Bernard McEvoy lists
house-hunting as a cause of insanity that should be added to “the statistics of lunatic asylum,”
but more seriously, this internal loss of control manifests itself as a sense of growing confusion
(669). The narrator of the 1870 Leisure Hour “House-Hunting” piece makes this clear when he
laments, “The longer the hunt for a house continues, the less likely does the chase seem to come
to an end. One gets bewildered in time, and quite incapable of weighing the different merits of a
crowd of domiciles whose various features are apt to mix all together in the memory” (“House-
Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1870] 237). Hardly the confident hunter shooting his intended
target from out of the sky, the house hunter “suffering from house-hunting on the brain” is more
like, in the words of one narrator from The Architect, “the pioneer on the American prairie, an
explorer without a guide in a perfect wilderness, knowing nothing, trusting nobody” (“House-
Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1884] 606; “House-Hunting,” The Architect 169). Here we find a
76

new metaphor for the house-hunt and the house hunter, and indeed, as the pieces in the periodical
press inadvertently make clear, each house-hunt turns even the experienced hunter into a pioneer
on this residential frontier, lacking a guide, “knowing nothing, trusting nobody”—indeed, at
times, not even himself.
*
“I put my foot down”: Forking Narrative Outcomes in the Story of the Hunt

So how does a house-hunt (and, for that matter, a story of “miseries”) end when it seems
endless, when the hunter himself feels lost? For some, the house-hunt ends with the house-
hunting narrator or character simply putting down his foot and declaring it over. We see this in
the 1907 Answers’ piece “This Desirable Residence.” After the narrator and his wife, Ethel, view
eighty-six houses, “about a hundred-and-fifty newly-built homes,” two days’ worth of “various
mildewed habitations in remote spots,” and as many flats as they can tour in six hours, the
narrator stops their search: “At last, thoroughly dizzy and angry, I put my foot down, and swore I
would take a house that day, or die” (515). As the narrator’s “At last” makes clear, this decision
is both sudden and seemingly inevitable, but it also involves a limited degree of reflection, as if
too much thinking has been one of the problems of the house-hunt. We find both this suddenness
and this lack of reflection in The Leisure Hour’s 1854 narrative “House-Hunting,” where the
addressed reader, the second-person “you,” also becomes frustrated with his house-hunt and
abruptly returns to the first house he and his wife viewed, “resolving to hire it out of hand”—that
is, without taking the time to think—“in spite of the confidential warning of the policeman’s
wife” about the drain (684).
The narrator of Bernard McEvoy’s “Moving House” notes that this kind of quick—and
solitary—male decision-making is not uncommon when it comes to taking a house: “In nine
77

cases out of ten the man chooses as a house as he chooses a wife—with a desperate dash” (670).
However, based on the many narratives published in the Victorian periodical press, we might
revise McEvoy’s formulation, for all of the male narrators and characters who “put [their] foot
down” or “resolv[e] to hire” a house “out of hand” experience what they might call opposition—
and what we might call a difference of opinion—from their wives and other family members. In
“This Desirable Residence,” when the narrator “put[s] [his] foot down” and decides to take a
house called Ivyglade for three years, he does so just after “a solid six hours going up in lifts and
coming down again” because his wife suggested they look at flats (515). So too, in McEvoy’s
third-person narrative, the husband “determines at last that ‘something must be done’” only after
arguing with his wife over which house to choose, at the moment when “[i]t looks as though the
attempt to change the domicile would overturn the household in a calamitous crash” (670). In
other words, there is a correlation between a male narrator or character choosing a house “with a
desperate dash” and a male narrator or character feeling that he is losing control to the family
members who were meant in Victorian England’s patriarchal society to be subject to his control.
In this way, we see that making a quick and solitary decision not only allows a male
character or narrator to re-exert his control over the house-hunt, but it allows him to re-exert his
control over his wife and, in some cases, his children too. In “This Desirable Residence,” the
narrator uses his authority as husband to decide on Ivyglade without being “assisted and advised”
by his wife, Ethel (515). So to, in McEvoy’s third-person narrative, the husband “screws up his
courage” and chooses a house, “ultimately experiencing a delicious peace” (670):
What is done can’t be undone. He has agreed to take a house, and the
advertisements have lost their power over him. He will be drawn this way and that
by contending forces no longer. A sense of certainty comes into his tone. The
thing is done, and he answers all objections by a simple assertion of this important
fact. (670)

78

While the phrase “[w]hat is done can’t be undone” is an echo of Lady Macbeth, we can hardly
say that this character feels any of the guilt inherent in the original use of the phrase, for his
decision affords him multiple benefits.
5
Not only does this character’s decision free him from the
power of outside forces like advertisements and outgoing residents, but it also reestablishes his
household control over both his wife and children. Though they object to his selection of a
house, those objections do not matter because he has exerted his patriarchal control. As the next
paragraph begins, “By degrees the futility of objection under these circumstances filters through
the household”—and that futility is a result of both the lease he has presumably signed but also
the finality of a patriarchal decision: “What is done can’t be undone” (671).
Not all male house-hunting narrators and characters “put their foot down” and take a
house of their own choosing, though; rather, some let the hunt run its course. The husband, wife,
and daughter of the 1827 Literary Magnet piece house-hunt together until they find a “genteel-
looking house” that charms them all (“House-Hunting,” Literary Magnet 205). So too, in the
1884 Leisure Hour narrative, the out-of-town narrator is joined by his wife for his third round of
house-hunting in London, and together they find “a house that would answer [their] purpose”
(“House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1884] 609). In other words, here we begin to see how our
singular narrative of house-hunting—which coalesced from various narrative origins into one
predictable story of “miseries”—begins to splinter, forking off into different possible paths.
This becomes even clearer in light of the outcomes or conclusions of these narrators’ and
characters’ house-hunts, for regardless of whether a narrator or character “puts his foot down” or
not, the success of their house-hunts varies. The narrator of All the Year Round’s 1866 nonfiction
narrative “House-Hunting” ends his story by sharing that he and his new wife have been in their

5
See Macbeth V.i.68 for Lady Macbeth’s comment, “What’s done cannot be undone,” a small but important
revision of her earlier comment “What’s done, is done” to her husband in III.ii.12.
79

new house for two months and “like it” (88), and the narrator of the 1884 Leisure Hour piece
“House-Hunting” concludes by declaring, six months into his London residence, that “on the
whole my house-hunt was not unsuccessful” (609). On the other hand, the narrator of the 1907
Answers piece “This Desirable Residence”—who most emphatically “put [his] foot down”—
admits that he “succeeded in securing just the kind of house [he and his wife] didn’t want” (515),
and the narrator of the 1827 Literary Magnet piece finds, upon moving in, that the “genteel-
looking house” that he and his family have leased is actually a house of “horrors without
number” (“House-Hunting,” Literary Magnet 205, 206). In other words, even amid the utter
predictability of all the ways that a house hunter will lose control and be made miserable, both
house-hunting and the narrative of house-hunting maintain an element of suspense, for—thanks
to the uncontrollability at the heart of house-hunting—neither the outcome of a hunt nor the
conclusion of a particular narrative can be predicted.
*
Reasserting Male Control in the Narrative of House-Hunting
Nonetheless, in many of these house-hunting narratives, the male narrators and characters
attempt to reassert control over the house-hunt and over their narrative. For those narrators who
choose a satisfactory house, this reassertion of male control is built into the conclusion of their
story of “miseries”: in navigating house agents, outgoing residents, and house-squatters and in
finding an appropriate house for their family, they demonstrate their mastery over the process.
For those narrators who choose an unsatisfactory house, however, they generally accomplish this
reassertion of control by acknowledging what they have learned through their house-hunt, for in
doing so, they acknowledge that they will be better prepared for the next hunt. The author in The
Architect who likened the house hunter to a “pioneer on the American prairie, an explorer
80

without a guide in a perfect wilderness,” writes that the house hunter can “rely[] at the worst
upon his liberty to try again,” and this indeed is the spirit of narrators and characters in narratives
of not entirely successful house-hunts (“House-Hunting,” The Architect 169).
A narrator’s acknowledgement of what he has learned through his house-hunt—and how
he will be better prepared when it is “his liberty to try again”—tends to happen more subtly
when the narrator is only somewhat dissatisfied with his choice of a house and more explicitly
when he is deeply disappointed with his choice. The narrator of the 1884 Leisure Hour piece
“House-Hunting” who considers his house-hunt “not unsuccessful” admits, “I have lived to
repent having neglected any of the advice I received,” and he acknowledges, for instance, that,
“Had I ‘walked upstairs in my shooting boots’” as his friend Mr. Green recommended, “I should
have discovered that squeaking stair which now irritates my nerves whenever I am writing”
(609). This narrator thus quietly suggests to his reader that he knows his mistake and will not
make it during the next house-hunt. On the other hand, in the 1907 piece “This Desirable
Residence,” the narrator who “puts [his] foot down” and takes a three-year lease on “just the
kind of house [he and his wife] didn’t want” acknowledges his lesson learned much more
explicitly, for his mistake is much more serious. He tells his reader, “But if Ivyglade isn’t an
ideal house, I can at least say that I only just missed one that was. It was a quaint old place, with
a pretty strip of garden ground around it. The rent was low, the rooms were just the rooms we
wanted” (515). As he explains this “near miss,” “an aged caretaker” convinced him that there
were too many problems with the house: “Damp? Well, damp was hardly the word for it! The
drains were bad, the roof leaked, there had been a murder in the house some years before, and at
night one heard mysterious knockings and the low, tremulous wailing of an uneasy spirit” (515).
Having “since learned that it was all a tissue of lies, invented by a caretaker, who has lived in the
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house in placid content for twenty-seven years, and is anxious to live out her days in undisturbed
possession,” the narrator has realized, however, that he was “in the hands” of this female
caretaker who duped him, and he plans to regain control: “But directly my three years at
Ivyglade are up, I am going around to take that house,” he declares at the end of his narrative
(515). Not only has this narrator learned his lesson and shared it with the reader, then, but he has
a plan for how to get the house he wanted all along.
These nonfictional narratives, in which a narrator reestablishes some of his lost control by
drawing a lesson from his experience and indicating that he will be better prepared for his next
hunt, help us see how the predictive, advisory texts like the 1854 and 1870 Leisure Hour pieces
with which this chapter began are doing this same work of reestablishing male control—and how
they are doing this work all along, not just in their conclusions as is the case with other
narratives. In the first place, the narrators of these pieces establish their control and authority
simply by being able to narrate the story of house-hunting for their reader, telling him what will
happen to him and all the ways he will inevitably lose control. In addition, the narrators of these
pieces also “educate” their reader, explaining who “house-squatters” are, warning their reader
not to believe advertisements’ glowing descriptions of houses-to-let, and tracing all the ways
outgoing residents can make viewing houses difficult for a hunter (“House-Hunting,” The
Leisure Hour [1870] 236). As much as instructional passages like these do seem meant to help
the reader—to rear a smarter, more prepared, more in-control house hunter—these moments of
readerly education also allow these narrators to highlight their own knowledge, to point out all
that they themselves have learned over the course of their own house-hunts. We can see this in E.
A. Helps’s advice piece “House-Hunting.” There, Helps instructs his reader to stick with
“Catalogues” and not look at house advertisements, which only open up a “vast field” of
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“vexation and disappoint” for the house hunter who peruses them (765). After issuing his
warning, however, Helps narrates the mistake that his reader will nonetheless make: “Deluded at
first by the fervid and glowing descriptions you read in the papers, you begin to wish that you
had not wasted so much time over your Catalogues; but after following up a few of these El
Dorados, and wasting much time and money, you find they seldom or never come up to their
promise, and you fall back again on your Catalogues” (765). In other words, even after he has
advised his reader not to look at advertisements, Helps knows that his reader will do so anyway,
just as he knows that his reader will eventually accept the soundness and wisdom of his advice.
In this pairing of advice and predictive narrative, Helps thus points to his own superiority and to
his mastery over both the house-hunting process and his reader.
The male authors and narrators of the Victorian periodical press work so hard to
reestablish male control for two reasons—one related to the nature of house-hunting and one
related to issues of gender and class. In the first place, this reestablishment of control allows the
male authors and narrators to make some meaning out of house-hunting. As the narratives of
house-hunting suggest when the one-size-fits-all story of “miseries” splinters off into various
narrative outcomes, there was little that middle-class Victorians could do to guarantee a
successful house-hunt—and in that way, there was a kind of pointless seriality at the heart of
Victorian domestic life. They were doomed as renters to house-hunt every few years, and yet
there was no sense that their previous experience helped them. Sometimes the house-hunt turned
out well, sometimes it did not, and it was miserable, regardless. Indeed, all middle-class
Victorians’ previous house-hunting experience seems to have afforded them was the knowledge
that the house-hunt would be miserable and that they should not “set forth house-hunting in a
very hopeful frame of mind” (Helps 764). These narratives, then, are responding to this
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frustrating reality and trying, in a way, to remedy it by re-asserting the control of the male house
hunter. Whether a narrator insists on the lessons he has learned from his house-hunting
experience, or whether a narrator shows off his authority by predicting his reader’s story, these
narratives are careful to insist to readers that house hunters can learn from their house-hunting
experiences and that they can eventually master the process of house-hunting, successfully
finding and renting a home that will provide them both domestic comfort and social
advancement.
In the second place, there are gendered, class-based reasons for the insistence on the
reestablishment of male control in these house-hunting pieces. As the 1854 Leisure Hour piece
makes clear, it was “incumbent” on male middle-class Victorians to provide a new house for
their families (“House-Hunting,” The Leisure Hour [1854] 683). House-hunting was their
responsibility, but it was also, in a way, their social right. That they lost control of this “right,”
finding themselves “in the hands” of everyone from house agents to house-squatters, was
something that needed to be remedied. The need to regain this “right” becomes clearer when we
consider these house-hunting narratives alongside another, albeit smaller, body of male-authored
nonfictional narratives, moving-house narratives.
*
“The lot of man is misery”: Narratives of Moving House
Moving-house narratives, or narratives about the actual household move that followed the
search for a new home, were occasionally published in the periodical press from the 1850s
through the 1870s.
6
As the narrators of these moving-house pieces make clear, the story of

6
These narratives include “Moving,” Household Words 132 (October 2, 1852), pp. 61-63; Charles Manby Smith,
“Moving House,” The Leisure Hour 137 (August 10, 1854), pp. 508-509; “Moving House,” Chamber’s Journal of
Popular Literature, Science, and Art 152 (November 24, 1866), pp. 737-739; “Moving House,” The Saturday
Review 35.907 (March 15, 1873), pp. 342-344; and Harry Jones, “Moving House,” The Leisure Hour 1160 (March
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removal is, like the story of house-hunting, one of predictable miseries. Indeed, the narrator of an
1852 Household Words piece entitled “Moving” outright declares, “To chronicle all the miseries
of ‘moving’ would be to draw a picture too harrowing” (Jerrold and Wills 63). Part of what
makes this story so miserable, of course, is that moving brings about the “bewildering”
suspension of domestic order, leading to “a complete dislocation and disorganization of all your
chairs, tables, books, and domestic appurtenances” (Jones 181; Swayne 593). That these
narrators and characters find the “complete dislocation and disorganization” of their belongings
to be frustrating is hardly surprising considering the value that middle-class Victorians placed on
order in the home. But, according to these moving-house narratives, material disorder is not all
that a removal breeds: it also brings about a loss of male power in the home. During a household
move, just as “the inside of the drawing-room descends to consort with the scullery,” the social
hierarchies of the middle-class home turn upside down (Jones 181). Not only do male
householders lose patriarchal control over their families and private domestic space, but wives,
tradesmen, and the laborers hired as movers rise to power, gaining dominance over male
householders and their homes.
As in the story of house-hunting, then, the story of moving house is one of so-called
miseries because male narrators and characters lose their autonomy and power. However, in
these moving-house narratives, we do not find the same anxious reassertion of male control that
we find in house-hunting narratives. In large part, this is because the preparations for a
household move are not something for which these male narrators and characters feel
responsible. In other words, while it was “incumbent” on middle-class Victorian men to find a
new home for their family, it was apparently not “incumbent” on them to pack up their family’s

21, 1874), pp.181-18. While these narratives all appear within a twenty-two year span, non-narrative pieces about
moving and moving day were published in the periodical press from the 1850s through the end of the century.
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portable property and arrange for its transportation to that new home (“House-Hunting,” The
Leisure Hour [1854] 683). Because middle-class men did not consider the work of a household
move to be their responsibility, there is thus less at stake for the narrators and characters in these
moving-house pieces: there is no process to master, and there is also no chance of their own
failure. This is not to say there is nothing at stake for the male characters and narrators of these
stories: we can sense their frustration with their changed homes—and their anxiety—in the way
that they misrepresent and even erase the labor of their wives and the hired laborers in their
residences. But in these narratives, we never see a husband “putting down his foot” to end the
move, and no male narrator offers his readers advice about how best to manage this removal
process. Here, a household move is not something to conquer; it is something, simply, to endure.
These moving-house narratives make clear that—unlike the house-hunt, whose miseries can
stretch on and on, whose narrative outcome can never be known in advance—the miseries of a
removal will end of their own accord, the “proper” social hierarchies of home righting
themselves on the other side of the move.
Of the handful of moving-house narratives published in the periodical press, two
explicitly dramatize the way that a household move results in male householders being displaced
from their position as paterfamilias by their wives. In both of these, nonfictional narrators share
with their readers the story of either an invented character or a “you” whose household, thanks to
the preparations for removal, is no longer run in accordance with his wishes but with the wishes
of his wife. In the anonymously-authored piece “Moving House,” published in Chambers’s
Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art in 1866, the narrator tells his reader the story of
the fictional Mr. Merryden, and he describes how, despite Mr. Merryden’s wishes regarding their
removal, “Mrs Merryden does just as she likes” (738). In fact, “the more doleful and bare the
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house becomes, the more bustling and victorious grows Mrs Merryden, the rejoicing housewife
who directs the storm” (738). This idea of the “bustling and victorious” housewife who “directs
the storm” of domestic disorder is also at the heart of William Blanchard Jerrold and W.H.
Wills’s 1852 Household Words piece “Moving.” Using the second-person point of view to
narrate what happens to a “you” in much the same way that some of the house-hunting pieces do
(albeit without the advice and instruction), the narrators describes how, “[i]n the first place,
several days before you perceive any necessity, your wife orders the curtains to be removed from
your study, and your Turkey carpet to be carried away on the back of a sturdy fellow who
promises to beat it” (62). In both pieces, then, wives make decisions regardless of their
husbands’ opinion, and they go on to hire various tradesmen and laborers and to orchestrate
chaotic preparations that destroy all accustomed sense of peace and order within the home.
In addition to housewives gaining power over both their husbands and their homes during
the preparations for a move, male characters and narrators—in these narratives and others—also
perceive that the various tradesmen and working-class laborers who enter their residences wield
a new and particularly destructive kind of power. In the first place, there are the workers—often
tradesmen—who arrive early on during the removal process to make repairs and take down
fixtures (which often belonged to tenants and went with them when they moved). The very
presence of these tradesmen immediately begins to break down the Victorian domestic ideals of
privacy and temporal order. The addressed “you” of the Household Words piece “Moving”
experiences this the day after his wife “orders” the Turkey carpet in his study “to be carried away
on the back of a sturdy fellow” (Jerrold and Wills 62). “[D]escend[ing] quietly, as usual, to the
breakfast-table,” the “you” finds a tool basket in his arm-chair and a plumber and carpenter at
work in his breakfast room (62). As Sharon Marcus summarizes, the Victorian middle-class
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house was meant to be “an impenetrable, self-contained structure with distinct and specialized
rooms” which were “designed to secure occupants from observation and intrusion” (94). Here,
though, it is as if the tradesmen have entered the residence of their own accord—so much so,
indeed, that they do not “intrude” upon the main character but are already present in his breakfast
room with ladders and tools when he arrives. In penetrating the middle-class home, the plumber
and carpenter destroy the desired privacy of the home, but they also ruin the main character’s
morning routine of eating “roll and rasher” and reading the Times, which (the “you” notices) the
carpenter has co-opted “as a convenient tray for his nails” (Jerrold and Wills 62). In this way, the
tradesmen seem to be working according to their own schedule rather than the normal schedule
of the home—which is the male householder’s schedule—and so they also destroy the temporal
order so valued in Victorian domestic space, where “each hour of the day had its appropriate
duties and pleasures,” as Thad Logan writes (28). Thanks to the newfound power of plumbers,
carpenters, and upholsterers, then, a male householder can neither secure his house from
outsiders nor do what he wants in his house when he wishes.
The power of these initial tradesmen to enter and disrupt the home certainly annoys and
disconcerts the addressed “you” of the Household Words piece, but it is the working-class
movers, who arrive en masse to carry away a house’s portable property, who make most other
narrators and characters feel their utter lack of control. In nearly all of the moving-house
narratives published in the periodical press, these working-class laborers storm the home, turning
male householders into passive victims of removal. Harry Jones writes in The Leisure Hour in
1874 of the way that a house is “invaded” by movers: “Invaded, did I say? Sacked; taken by
assault. Strangers jostle you in your most sacred retreats. Men on whom you never set eyes
before walk into your sanctum and shoulder your treasures without apology” (181). In the
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Chambers’s Journal piece, the movers are to Mr. Merryden “like cavalier soldiers sacking a
mansion” (“Moving House,” Chambers’s 739). To the imagined household of an 1873 Saturday
Review piece, they are “tyrannous invaders,” “tearing down his pictures, his books, and his china
with a zeal worthy of German troops taking farewell of a French village” (“Moving House,”
Saturday Review 343).
This language of assault and invasion reflects, on the one hand, the increased number of
workers in the home. Whereas, earlier in the process of removal, a male householder might have
had one or two workmen in his house at a time, this climactic phase of removal brings a whole
army of “[m]en on whom you never set eyes before” (Jones 181). But this language of assault
and invasion also reflects the type of people who worked as movers. Instead of skilled
tradesmen, moving day brought working-class laborers into the middle-class home, and if we
know anything about Victorian middle-class life, it is that it involved a great anxiety about its
own contamination, particularly by those who were not middle-class. As Lara Baker Whelan
writes, Victorian floor plans were “designed to offer family members protection from encounters
with servants” just as Victorian suburbs were designed to offer the middle classes protection
from encounters with the urban poor (18). On moving day, however, this function of both house
and neighborhood to secure middle-class Victorians from those who fall below them on the
social ladder apparently broke down as working-class laborers “invaded” the home, moving
through room after private room and handling the householder’s personal belongings. With
movers present, then, not only do these male characters and narrators perceive that their middle-
class residences are ripped open and destroyed through both the movers’ physical actions and
their very social standing, but they find themselves powerless to do anything about it. They are
made to feel, in the words of the Saturday Review’s narrator, like “little more than a useless
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obstacle,” even as they are forced to watch as their “altar is desecrated,” as one Blackwood’s
narrator puts it (“Moving House,” Saturday Review 343; Swayne 593).
Though the male narrators and characters in moving-house narratives lose control of the
home to both their wives and working-class male strangers, they do not work to regain control of
their homes and families or even their stories in the same way that the male narrators and
characters in house-hunting narratives do. In large part, this is because it was not “incumbent” on
middle-class men to carry out the work of a removal in the same way it was to carry out the work
of a house-hunt. Rather, this work was taken up by—or fell to—middle-class women and the
domestic servants and working-class men whom they hired. A variety of sources make this clear
to us, from female-authored narratives like Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, in which we see
Margaret Hale plan and supervise her family’s move and domestic servants and hired laborers
complete it, to female-authored advice pieces published in the periodical press.
7
Though the
latter are rare, the anonymous author of one advice piece recommends to her female readers that
they begin to go through their belongings “some weeks, or even months, before [they] leave
[their] present abode” and she includes instructions for “[t]he week before the week of moving,”
the week of moving, and “the day before the day” (“Moving House,” National Magazine 110). It
is telling that nowhere does this advice author indicate what a man’s responsibilities are during
the lead up to “the day.” Certainly, some middle-class men participated in the work of a
household move, in both fiction and fact. For example, in his 1854 Leisure Hour narrative
“Moving House,” Charles Manby Smith uses the first-person plural point-of-view to unite
himself and his wife in the labor of “packing and bundling, sorting, arranging, and rejecting” that
precedes their move (508). However, this male involvement is unusual, and the many other

7
See Chapters V and VI in North and South for depictions of this removal-related work.
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moving-house narratives indirectly show us this. After all, in complaining about how “your wife
orders the curtains to be removed from your study, and your Turkey carpet to be carried away on
the back of a sturdy fellow who promises to beat it,” the narrators of the Household Words piece
inadvertently make clear that “your wife” is orchestrating the work of removal and the “sturdy
fellow” is performing it (Jerrold and Wills 62).
Though there is less at stake for middle-class householders in these narratives because the
work of removal is not their responsibility, the experience of losing control of their homes is not
an easy one for these narrators and characters. Indeed, their anxiety about losing control of their
homes becomes apparent in the way that they misrepresent and even erase the work that their
wives and working-class movers perform. This misrepresentation and erasure of others’ labor
functions, at times, as a way for male householders to respond to their perceived loss of power,
allowing them to point to either the ways in which they are being wronged or their own
superiority. At other times, it results from the male householders’ blindness to the required labor
of removal, including both its details and its scope. In other words, there is a difference between
the house-hunting pieces, in which male narrators make clear through their own careful
articulation that they know each step of the process of finding a new residence, and the moving-
house pieces, in which the narrators often seem oblivious to the work that needs to be
accomplished and when exactly it needs to be accomplished.
When it comes to female labor in particular, male-authored moving-house narratives
overwhelmingly fail to recognize this labor for what it is—necessary work, completed by
women, which is required for a middle-class family to achieve its change of address. On one
hand, those male-authored texts that explicitly acknowledge female labor often belittle it by
writing it off as an inconvenience—and even an unnecessary one, such as when the wife in the
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Household Words piece “orders the curtains to be removed from [her husband’s] study” “several
days before [he] perceive[s] any necessity”

or when Mr. Merryden feels that his “comforts are
snatched from him” by Mrs. Merryden: “to-day, the pictures; to-morrow, the piano; the next day,
the books; the day after, the carpets” (Jerrold and Wills 62; “Moving House,” Chambers’s 738).
In these narratives, a wife’s actions are represented not as something she does to accomplish her
family’s removal but as something that she does to her husband, most likely with the intention of
annoying him. But more frequent than these instances in which a male narrator or character
deprecates female labor are instances in which a male narrator or character simply neglects to see
his wife’s labor at all. When the main character of the Household Words piece stumbles upon the
plumber and carpenter in his breakfast room, for example, he is surprised to find them there, but
he does not stop to think—nor does the narrator stop to acknowledge—that inherent in his
discovery of plumber and carpenter in the breakfast room is that fact that his wife planned what
repairs needed to be made, what fixtures needed to be taken down for the removal, and who
needed to be hired—and when—to accomplish this work.
This way that some male-authored narratives have of failing to acknowledge a female
character’s work, even as they represent that work, is amplified in two particular moving-house
pieces published in the periodical press. Both Harry Jones’ 1874 piece in The Leisure Hour and
the anonymously-authored 1873 Saturday Review piece describe the experiences of married men
undergoing a removal with their families, and yet neither ever mentions a wife in connection
with the removal or depictions of its work. In reading those narratives of moving house
published in the periodical press that do acknowledge the labor contributed by women, even if
they belittle it, and in realizing that so much of the mental and even sometimes the physical labor
of removal was performed by women, we realize that the omission of these householders’ wives
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is also an omission of the work that they are doing. As these narrators and characters ponder the
“bewildering” way that incongruous objects have of “get[ting] thrown together” and feel their
change of residence “like a hermit crab dislodged from the old shell,” we are thus left to imagine
housewives at work in the background of these pieces, hiring plumbers, ordering the curtains to
be taken down, or even “pack[ing] small vases and little Sèvres ornaments with extreme care in
cotton-wool” as Mrs. Merryden does right in front of Mr. Merryden, though it never occurs to
him to help her with this work (Jones 181; “Moving House,” Saturday Review 343; “Moving
House,” Chambers’s 739).
While the male narrators and characters of moving-house narratives often fail to notice
women and their labor—especially the more immaterial labor of planning and coordinating—
these same narrators and characters are highly aware of the labor that hired movers perform in
their residences during a removal. In representing the movers and their work, these narratives
employ seemingly oppositional strategies that accomplish the same end: lessening the perceived
threat of the “invasion” of working-class men in the middle-class home. The first strategy that
male-authored texts use is to turn the movers’ very bodily labor into a bodiless force through the
use of passive voice sentence constructions. We see in the Saturday Review piece “Moving
House” when the narrator describes how “[t]he poor fragments of furniture detached from their
accustomed resting-place, seem suddenly to lose their beauty like a gathered flower” without
clarifying just who has “detached” those pieces of furniture from their “accustomed” locations
(343). Even more overtly, in the Chambers’s Journal story of Mr. and Mrs. Merryden, the
narrator describes the emptying of the house: “One by one the carpets are stripped off, and the
house is flayed as if it was a huge dead animal, whose skin was its only valuable part. One by
one the pictures are removed, and placed in melancholy stacks against the walls” (“Moving
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House,” Chambers’s 738). Thanks to the passive verbs that the author uses, it is not only unclear
who strips off the carpets and stacks the pictures against the wall, but it comes to seem as if these
actions are simply happening with no agent to perform them—a sense that is amplified at the
climax of the story when Mr. Merryden thinks to himself, “Is the house not gone mad?,” as he
watches “the old fixed and familiar objects seem to become alive and revolve around him till he
is the centre of a whirlpool, a Malström [sic] of furniture” (739). In turning the movers’ labor
into a bodiless force—that is, in acknowledging the labor but obscuring the bodies doing that
work—these texts render the movers less of a threat by simply removing them from the home.
The second strategy in these narratives for representing working-class movers and their
labor—and one that would seem to be the opposite of the first—is to highlight the movers’
bodies and the physical actions that they are performing. This allows middle-class narrators and
characters to turn these working-class men into all body and no mind, making clear that, even
though the movers have power enough to “invade” the middle-class home during a removal, it is
the middle-class householders who are socially, culturally, and mentally superior. Under this
strategy, the movers are reduced to “a rabble rout of grimy workmen,” “men who make the
merest pretence of taking off their hats or wiping their shoes,” and “illiterate workmen” with
“rude hands” (“Moving House,” Saturday Review 343; Jones 181; “Moving House,” Saturday
Review 343). In addition, in describing the actions of these “grimy workmen,” these moving-
house narratives turn the movers’ actions into work performed incorrectly. This is particularly
true of the Saturday Review piece. There, the anonymous narrator complains that the movers
who pack the books in his study “regard a book as though it were simply a thing” and thus throw
his books “down on the floor with no more ceremony than coals are deposited in our cellars”
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(“Moving House,” Saturday Review 343). According to this narrator, the workmen do not just
handle his books incorrectly, though. Being “illiterate,” they also pack his books incorrectly:
It shocks one’s sense of propriety to see the strange discords which have been
produced by the fortuitous combinations of thoughtless hands. Stray volumes of
Voltaire are mixed up with Butler, and Jeremy Taylor; Shakespeare is being
crushed under a pile of Blue-books or treatises on Political Economy, and Charles
Lamb suffocated amongst a crowd of the books which no gentleman’s library
should be without. (343)

Setting aside the fact that this “gentleman” could have simply packed his books to his
liking, this emphasis on the confusion and disarrangement that the movers create is something
we see more broadly across these moving-house narratives. In Mr. Merryden’s house, for
example, the narrator describes how the movers create “[d]isorder worse than prevails in a
plundered city”: “stacks of pictures encumber the hall, piles of carpet pyramid the stair-landings,
book-chests fill the kitchen, stair-rods cover the dressers, wardrobes stand like sentinel-boxes at
the front door, shouting men, urged on and guided by a burly foreman, steer down stairs chests of
drawers and frames of book-cases” (“Moving House,” Chambers’s 739). It is true that this final
stage of removal was a time of extreme confusion and disarrangement, everything being quite
literally on the move, but in descriptions of the movers’ work as chaotic, random, and
thoughtless is the implicit criticism that they do not know how to move a household’s portable
property correctly. In reality, as the female author of the advice piece published in The National
Magazine suggests, the men who worked as movers were experienced and skilled at their work:
in her words, they exhibit “dexterity and forbearance” and “know perfectly what they have to
carry, and the places they have to carry it through” (“Moving House,” The National Magazine
10). But in noticing these supposed failures of these movers, middle-class male narrators and
characters assert their own superiority and thus reassert some of the power that they feel they
have lost to these working-class men.
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As we can see, then, there are certainly similarities between narratives of house-hunting
and narratives of moving house. Just as the narrators and characters in house-hunting pieces
lament their loss of control to house agents, outgoing residents, house-squatters, and wives, the
narrators and characters in moving-house pieces lament their loss of control to wives and hired
laborers. In addition, just as the narrators and characters in house-hunting pieces misconstrue the
actions of others, turning outgoing residents into unkind hosts and house-squatters into self-
motivated liars, the narrators and characters in moving-house pieces misrepresent and even erase
the labor of others, turning their wives into disturbers of the household peace and the working-
class movers into a bumbling invading army. And yet—even though these misrepresentations
and erasures are certainly a response to the male narrators and characters’ perceived loss of
power—the narrators and characters in moving-house pieces do not work as hard to regain
control, on the level of either the removal or the story, as the narrators and characters do in the
house-hunting pieces. Here, in these moving-house narratives, no male narrator or character puts
his foot down with this wife, and no male narrator or character plans to take revenge on the
“invading” movers like one house-hunting narrator does with a house-squatter.
This limited effort on the part of male narrators and characters to regain control of their
households and their families is a result, as we know, of the fact that the work being carried out
in a household removal is not middle-class men’s work to complete, which means that it is not
their work to lose to others, or to fail at, or to become lost in. Rather, according to the narratives
published in the periodical press, middle-class men exist on the periphery of the work of
removal, able to watch and complain and critique the labor of middle-class women and hired
working-class men. But the limited effort by these male narrators and characters to regain control
is also made clear by the endings of these moving-house narratives, which indicate that the social
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hierarchies of home will quite naturally right themselves on the other side of the move. This
happens most obviously and immediately in the Chambers’s Journal story of Mr. and Mrs.
Merryden. While Mrs. Merryden, “the rejoicing housewife who directs the storm,” grows
“victorious” as the house empties in the lead-up to their move, Mr. Merryden finds himself
“restored to power” over both his wife and the working-class people around him the moment that
he and his wife are “driven off from the old house” (“Moving House,” Chambers’s 739). Then,
not only is Mr. Merryden able to dismiss his wife’s fears “that those men will break every bit of
that glass” in the moving van with a “Pooh!” but he snaps at the driver of their fly, “Drive faster,
man,” the driver becoming a stand-in for the movers who left Mr. Merryden speechless and
overhwlemed (239). More subtly, the narrators of the Household Words piece imply the same
restoration of male power when they declare near the end of their piece, “From the hour when
the parlour curtains are taken down, to that when you are requested to take your last meal in the
old house upon a hair trunk, the lot of man is misery” (Jerrold and Wills 63). In other words, the
miseries of “moving”—that is, a man’s loss of control over his home to his wife and workmen—
last only through the last meal in the old house.
Because the “miseries” of a household removal supposedly end of their own accord, the
male narrators and characters of moving-house pieces have no need to reassert control over their
households or wives during the removal process, just as they have no need to gain a sense of
mastery over the process or offer advice to their readers. Rather, they know that they will regain
control regardless of any effort on their part. The return of control is indeed so inherent in this
story that many of these narratives do not even describe their narrators and characters’ arrival in
a new home. Unlike in the house-hunting narratives, where the singular story of the hunt
splinters off into various narrative outcomes, the ending here is inevitable. Just as the family
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hears the “furniture creaking and cracking as it painfully settle[s] down in its new quarters,” the
hierarchies of the Victorian middle-class home will right themselves as the wife and domestic
servants unpack the boxes, and everyone will settle back into place—the husband returned to his
position of patriarch, the wife and children subordinate to his command, and working-class
strangers closed out of the home (“How We Moved In” 893).
*
After “Hunting for Houses”: The Limits of Narrative Control
The ability of moving-house narratives to put forward the fantasy that the “miseries” of
removal will end once the family leaves the old house is a result of their more limited temporal
range. The authors of these narratives extract the story of a household removal from the larger
story of a change of address, which involves finding a new house and settling into that new
house. In doing so, moving-house narratives can tell the story of a dispossessed male
householder who holds no responsibility for the work being carried out and every assurance that
others will soon return him to his “proper” position as patriarch. On the other hand, the authors
of house-hunting narratives tell a fuller story, and this difference explains their more anxious
endings. While house-hunting narratives do omit the actual household move from their plots,
they offer readers the story of a house-hunt and a look at the family’s new life in their house,
long after the boxes have been unpacked. In doing so, these narratives make clear not only that
the house-hunting work of male narrators and characters can be complicated and even coopted
by others, but that those male narrators and characters risk failure with each hunt. In other words,
the “miseries” of exchanging one home for another can long outlast the house-hunt: the windows
of the new house drafty, the new neighbors noisy, the walls damp, and a narrator or character’s
wife complaining about his poor choice of a house until the conclusion of the lease. As one
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house-hunting narrator admits, “[F]or three years to come I am doomed to listen to a daily recital
by Ethel of [the house’s] various drawbacks, and how much better I should have done had I been
assisted and advised by herself” (“This Desirable Residence” 515). Here, certainly, is no male
householder “restored to power” over his wife on the other side of their removal (“Moving
House,” Chambers’s 739).
No wonder, then, that so many narrators and characters in house-hunting narratives work
to reestablish male control over either the house-hunt or the telling of its story. Reestablishing
control over a house-hunt or the story of a house-hunt allows a narrator or character to insist that
he has not entirely failed and to reestablish his own patriarchal power as a married middle-class
man. This happens again and again in individual narratives, a narrator or character either putting
down his foot and reasserting his control over his wife and children or insisting on his lesson
learned. If we take these narratives collectively, we can also imagine how they must have offered
their original middle-class male readers some small sense of control too, advising them on how
best to proceed, promising them that the hunt gets easier over time, insisting they had every right
to complain, and assuring them that they were not alone. Indeed, there is a way in which these
house-hunting narratives try to become their own version of the Yankee Notions illustration with
which we began, the endings of these narratives offering readers a world in which men can go
out and “shoot down” the house they need, even if it takes a few tries.
At the same time, though, if the house-hunting narratives of the Victorian periodical press
make anything clear, it is that the story of a house-hunt is not as simple or as straightforward or
as uncomplicated as the Yankee Notions illustration. Indeed, house-hunting narratives’ final
moves at reasserting control, at insisting that house-hunting can be mastered by those whose
“right” it is, ring rather hollow. The story of house-hunting is not, like the Yankee Notions
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illustration, a bird hunt. It is a circuitous, complicated story involving men and women, middle-
class Victorians and working-class Victorians; it is a story that crosses and re-crosses thresholds
between public and private space; it is a story of male middle-class privilege and the moments
when middle-class men reach some of the limits of that privilege; it is a story that spills forward
in time, with ever more houses to view and no guarantee of success; and it is a story that often
ends in disappointment, the male narrator or character already looking forward to the end of his
lease when he will have the “liberty to try again” (“House-Hunting,” The Architect 169). Indeed,
this is another difference between moving-house narratives and house-hunting narratives. In
staying hyper-focused on the time of a household move, the authors of moving-house narratives
are able to tell an easier story of a passing inconvenience. Narratives of house-hunting, on the
other hand, are much messier stories, involving interactions with the world and ongoing conflicts
within the family, and as such, they cannot reach so neat a conclusion. Though the authors and
narrators in the Victorian periodical press try to give the story of house-hunting a neat
conclusion, it never quite fits, for just under the surface of these narratives of male control is the
anxiety involved in the selection of a new home, the specter of failure everywhere.
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Chapter Two
“The little society of the back parlour broken up, and scattered far and wide”:
Reuniting the Family Unit in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son

Introduction
Charles Dickens’ Dombey and Son (1846-8) is, in many ways, the opposite of a narrative
of removal. It is the story of a proud upper-middle-class man who faces a series of life events—
the birth of a son, the death of a wife, the death of a son, a new marriage—which were common
reasons for middle-class and even upper-middle-class Victorian families to remove. These were
events internal to family life that broke the routines of domesticity and encouraged the family to
consider the benefits of a change of address—a larger residence for a growing family, for
example, or a new space devoid of memories of the deceased. In other words, these were events
that invited the family to reimagine the possibilities of their domestic life. These removal-
inducing events do not, however, lead Mr. Dombey to remove. Instead, each of these events
leads the “cold and distant” man to orchestrate increasingly unhomely arrangements within his
house until, finally, at the end of the novel, when he faces bankruptcy, the auctioning off of his
portable property, and the termination of his residential lease, he finds himself alone and frozen
inside that house (62). In this way, Mr. Dombey is an image of middle-class stability taken to its
perverse extreme.
But this is not the whole story. Even as Mr. Dombey stays put in his rented mansion for
eighteen of the novel’s nineteen monthly parts, a whole host of other characters are nearly
continuously on the move.
1
These characters, many of them belonging to the working classes or
the lower middle classes, are more often than not forced to move: they are fired, their
neighborhoods are demolished, they must leave home to earn money for their families, or they

1
By “stays put,” I mean “holds the lease on,” for Mr. Dombey does at times depart temporarily from his London
house.
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are sent to live on the other side of the world, with no guarantee of safe passage or return. These
characters also frequently move independently of their families. In doing so, they suffer
profound emotional losses, in addition to frequent material losses, and they leave their families
behind to miss them in the “strangely altered” domestic space of home (369). These characters’
experiences make clear that the world of Dombey and Son—much like the world of mid-
nineteenth-century Victorian England—is a dangerous world of “sweeping” changes that can
break up “the little society of the back parlour,” in Captain Cuttle’s words, and scatter characters
and their loved ones “far and wide” (497).
In telling the story of one character who will not move until the very last while also
telling the story of the many characters who have no choice in their movement, Dombey and Son
sets up two narratives of removal. Indeed, if we follow the first narrative, reorganizing the novel
to examine each of the events which could lead Mr. Dombey to remove but do not, we are able
to see the many comparisons that Dickens develops between homely homes and unhomely
homes, between loving families and unloving families, and between the different removals that
these domestic spaces and these families undergo. Certainly, in reorganizing the novel by the
events which do not lead Mr. Dombey to remove, we depart from those critics who foreground
their readings of the novel in the father-daughter relationship so central to Dombey and Son—for
it is true that much of the novel is focalized through Florence’s perspective and grounded in her
desire to turn her “Head of the Home Department” into a father and her house into a home (33).
2

But if we reorient ourselves to think about the Dombey house itself as a guiding force in the
novel—as Dickens’s own emphasis on the shifting internal arrangements of the house

2
See for example Kathleen Tillotson, who argues that the book’s “true subject” is “Dombey and Daughter”; Lynda
Zwinger, who argues that Dombey and Son is “the story of one man’s doomed resistance to his family firm’s being
‘a daughter…after all’”; and Hilary Schor, who argues that the “transformative process of Dombey’s plot” is the
daughter’s transformation from “base coin” to “golden link” (Tillotson 164; Zwinger 420; Schor, Dickens 51).
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encourages us to do—we are able to see how the novel expands the story of removal that we find
again and again in the periodical press. There, the story of removal is largely limited to the whole
household removal of one family from one residence to the next. On the other hand, Dombey and
Son switches the focus from the family who relocate together to the family who splinter apart,
and in telling two stories of removal—the story of Mr. Dombey who does not move and the story
of the many other characters who are forced to move—the novel is able to consider the many
nuanced ways that home and family are fragile constructions, prone to breakage by forces
without and within.
In the end, however, Dickens’s novel “solves” both of its narratives of removal in the
same way, rehousing nearly all its characters and reuniting its broken families, regardless of
whether they were driven apart by forces external or internal to the family home. In providing
one narrative end to the story of the unhomely man who will not move and the story of the many
other characters who must move, Dombey and Son thus shuts down its complicated vision of a
world on the move, opting for a more comforting vision of mid-nineteenth-century Victorian
England than that which it developed earlier in the novel.
*
The Birth of a Son, the Death of a Wife, and a Removal Within
Dombey and Son opens with two events that led many a middle-class Victorian family to
remove: after delivering a son into the world, Mr. Dombey’s first wife, Fanny, drifts out “upon
the dark and unknown sea that rolls round [it]” (21). The birth of his son, Paul, and the death of
his wife certainly lead Mr. Dombey to reimagine the possibilities of his domestic life and to
make a change, but he does not move out of his rented mansion, located on a “genteel street in
the region between Portland-place and Bryanstone-square” (34). Rather, the birth of his son and
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the death of his wife lead Mr. Dombey to remove deeper inside his house, “remain[ing] in his
own apartment” on the ground floor (27). Mr. Dombey moves to the ground floor of his house
not out of grief, for he feels the loss of his first wife like the loss of “something gone from
among his plate and furniture, and other household possessions” (16). Rather, Mr. Dombey’s
move deep inside his house is associated with his idea of himself as a “removed Being” (608).
Before the novel’s plot begins, Mr. Dombey seems to have conducted himself as a “removed
Being” primarily through his emotional demeanor to his family, remaining “Mr Dombey” to his
first wife throughout their marriage and ignoring his daughter, Florence, who he views as a non-
issue—“a piece of base coin that couldn’t be invested—a bad Boy—nothing more” (608, 13).
Now, though, through his inverse removal inside his house, he also becomes what we might call
a “physically-removed Being,” his emotional demeanor taking on a spatial element. That this
new spatial element appeals to Mr. Dombey at this moment is no wonder—not only is he full of
an “angry sorrow” that his motherless son “should be tottering for a nurse,” but he is eager for
“Paul’s infancy and childhood [to] pass away” and for him to become “a grown man—the ‘Son’
of the Firm” (27, 61, 109). In moving out of the main house and into a private apartment on the
ground floor, then, Mr. Dombey thus moves away to bide his time until he and Paul will be able
“to hold [their] own” as heads of the House of Dombey (61).
Though the Dombey house was no “home sweet home” before Mr. Dombey retreats into
his private apartment, Mr. Dombey’s new domestic arrangements after his wife’s death mean
that the Dombey house runs contrary to the domestic ideal that the rest of the novel puts forward.
In Dombey and Son, the happiest, most comforting homes are organized so that they gather their
family members together, allowing them to enjoy each other’s company and love. In this way,
the novel’s domestic ideal accords with the Victorian middle-class domestic ideal, epitomized by
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John Ruskin in his lecture “Of Queens’ Gardens,” delivered and published nearly twenty years
after the publication of Dombey and Son. There, Ruskin argued that the Victorian home was not
“only a part of that outer world which you have roofed over, and lighted fire in”; rather, it was to
be “the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and
division” (77-78, 77). Placed, in John Tosh’s words, “at the centre of the Victorians’ moral
world” and in opposition to the “cruel and impersonal competition” to which modern society
seemed dedicated, home “stood for cooperation and for love” and was meant “to inspire in both
adults and children a moral life” (29, 31). To achieve this ideal, home was to be a site, as Thad
Logan notes, “for the performance of intimate family life”—a place where “familial affections”
were given “supreme importance” (Logan 218, Tosh 27). Variously epitomized in domestic
discourse as “[t]he family circle gathered around the cheerful fire” and “the circle of all tender
relationships,” the Victorian home was intended to offer its inhabitants both refuge from the
world without and “the comforts of love and nurture” within (Fawcett 41, qtd. in Davidoff and
Hall 115, Tosh 30).
Drawing on this middle-class domestic ideal, Dombey and Son insists that all homes,
regardless of their social status, are meant to bring family members together and cultivate this
“intimate family life” (Logan 218). Such loving, happy gathering occurs most prominently in the
intimate scenes of family life that we witness in both the Wooden Midshipman, which Kate Flint
has referred to as “the most comforting domestic space in the novel,” and the Toodles’ family
home, which Henri Talon has called “the setting of an intense, affectionate life” (Flint 41, Talon
148). In the Wooden Midshipman, we see Solomon Gills, his nephew Walter Gay, and family
friend Captain Cuttle frequently assembled in the cozy back parlour. So too, we see various
members of the “apple-faced” Toodle “family group” congregating in both their Staggs’s
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Gardens house and the railway company housing they later inhabit (D&S 581, 24). As Kathleen
Tillotson has noted, these homes “mark a contrast” with the Dombey household, and over the
course of the novel, readers are asked again and again to compare what is happening in these
homes, and particularly in the Wooden Midshipman, with what is happening in the Dombey
household (199).
At the same time, it is worth acknowledging that neither the Wooden Midshipman nor the
Toodle family home belongs to the same social world as Mr. Dombey’s mansion. The
Midshipman is a lower-middle-class home associated with the past due to its physical linking of
shop and living space, and both the residences the Toodles inhabit are decidedly working-class.
3

And yet the novel makes very clear that the domestic ideal of the novel can be achieved in a
larger residential space with a higher social standing, like the Dombey house, for it offers readers
glimpses of familial gathering in the house opposite Mr. Dombey’s. These glimpses do,
however, reveal that different arrangements are needed to achieve this domestic ideal in a large,
upper-middle-class house than those in the Wooden Midshipman or the Toodles’ family home,
where we more often than not see the “family group” simply “mustered in overwhelming force
round the family tea-table” (581, 340). After all, as much as “the performance of intimate family
life” was central to the middle-class domestic ideal, so too was the privacy that becomes possible
in a larger house (Logan 218). Throughout the nineteenth century, as Sharon Marcus
summarizes, the middle-class house was meant to be “an impenetrable, self-contained structure
with distinct and specialized rooms” which were “designed to secure occupants from observation

3
The Midshipman’s linking of shop and residence associates it with the eighteenth century. As Margaret Ponsonby
summarizes, whereas, even in the late eighteenth century, “home was an extension of the working life of the family,
not just because it was often physically joined, but as a statement about the credit worthiness, the reliability and
work ethos practiced by its inhabitants,” in the nineteenth century, the domestic space of the home was not only
separate from the spaces of work and commerce but was “meant to provide a safe haven from the sinful outside
world” (3).
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and intrusion” by both the outside world and others within the residence (94). Accordingly, the
space within the middle-class house was “divided into more or less private areas […] and only
some of the inhabitants had the freedom to cross over these boundaries,” as Moira Donald
explains (107). While women were able to “move most freely” and at times most privately in the
bedroom and drawing-room, men usually had access to areas that were designated for male use
only (107). In a small middle-class residence, this might be a study or dressing-room off the
main bedroom; in larger house, it might be a series of rooms, including a study, library, and
billiard or gun room, which is similar to what we see in Mr. Dombey’s house (Burnett 111). In
addition, children’s movement was the most regulated, with some children confined almost
entirely to “the specialized zone of the nursery” in order to keep them out of “adult space” (Tosh
28, Donald 107). While the middle-class domestic ideal’s dual aims of cultivating “intimate
family life” and ensuring individual privacy might seem inherently at odds with one another, the
concept of “family time”—which, as John Gillis has pointed out, originated during the
nineteenth century—reconciled these different aims (87-108). One of many temporal routines in
the Victorian middle-class home, “family time” brought parents and children together into shared
familial spaces during designated periods of the day. For the middle-classes, then, the domestic
ideal involved a careful balance of isolation and togetherness.
This balance of isolation and togetherness is exactly what we see in the house opposite
Mr. Dombey’s mansion. Later in the novel, after Paul’s death, Florence watches this house from
her window, having learned the family’s rhythms:
It was easy to know when [the father] had gone out and was expected home, for
the elder child was always dressed and waiting for him at the drawing-room
window, or on the balcony; and when he appeared, her expectant face lighted up
with joy, while the others at the high window, and always on the watch too,
clapped their hands, and drummed them on the sill, and called to him. (275)

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With the father’s arrival home, the house is set in motion, Florence able to track the family’s
movements “through the open windows”—the elder daughter going down to greet her father; the
younger daughters descending from the nursery “and cluster[ing] round the table” only after their
father dines; the whole family ascending to the drawing-room where they children “romp about
[their father] on the sofa, or groupe [sic] themselves at his knee, […] while he seemed to tell
them some story”; and the elder daughter sitting with her father after the younger children go up
to bed (275, 276). Though it is clear from Florence’s observations that there are different zones
of the house appropriate for different family members at different times of the day—the younger
children passing much of their time in the nursery, the elder daughter able to spend more time in
the drawing-room—the many staircases mounted and descended by father and daughters alike
highlight the family’s ability to circulate through the house and to come together for family time
in the evenings. Indeed, the most successful homes in this novel, the homes in which love and
the “performance of intimate family life” flourish, are arranged and run precisely so that this
circulation and this coming together of the “family group” are possible, and this is true regardless
of whether these homes are located in a “genteel street in the region between Portland-place and
Bryanstone-square” or in railway company housing (Logan 218; D&S 24, 34).
Thanks to Mr. Dombey’s perverse and unhomely arrangements, the Dombey mansion,
however, functions as an uncanny parody of these successful homes, for it is organized not
around the performance of intimate family life but the alienation of its members. Whereas
successful homes allow for the circulation and coming together of members of the “family
group,” Mr. Dombey specifically seeks to control and limit this circulation. After his first wife’s
death, he not only removes himself to the ground floor of his mansion, but he orders the house’s
living spaces, including the “whole suite of drawing-rooms” on the first floor, to be closed up,
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“the furniture to be covered up […] and the rooms to be ungarnished” (D&S 34). In this way, he
ensures that there are no communal spaces in the mansion where his family might come together
for family time as the widower and his daughters do in the house opposite. In addition, Mr.
Dombey turns his ground-floor apartment from a space meant to give a male householder
occasional privacy into what Rosemarie Bodenheimer calls a “self-contained male unit,” thus
enacting “an extreme form of the bourgeois desire for privacy,” in the words of Audrey Jaffe
(Bodenheimer, Knowing Dickens 132, Jaffe 97). Consisting of “a sitting-room; a library, which
was in fact a dressing-room […]; and a kind of conservatory or little glass breakfast room,” Mr.
Dombey’s apartment is large enough to house a bed, desk, and easy chair, among other articles
of furniture (D&S 35). In this way, the rooms (and, of course, the domestic staff who service
them) fulfill all of Mr. Dombey’s basic domestic needs, allowing him to exist as a “removed
Being” there for as long as he likes (608).
4

It is true that at times Mr. Dombey emerges from his room. When Paul—characterized as
“Boy born, to die” by Dickens in his number plans for the novel—lies on his deathbed at age six,
Mr. Dombey spends more time with his children than he ever has, gathering with Florence
around Paul’s “little bed” and enacting a kind of family time (qtd. in Herring 152; D&S 274).
But once Paul passes away, Mr. Dombey “passes immediately into his own room,” again
remaining in his “shut-up chamber” (268). Indeed, he even puts into place more extreme
measures to limit the circulation of Florence and to prevent their coming together. After Paul’s
death, Florence begins sneaking to the ground floor of the Dombey house at night, circulating

4
While it is true that Mr. Dombey does admit Paul into his rooms, these encounters are highly controlled—begun
only with the ringing of a bell—and hardly qualify as the family time that we witness in the house opposite, where
the children “cluster round the table” after their father dines and “groupe [sic] themselves at [their father’s] knee”
while he sits on the sofa and tells them a story (275). By contrast, Mr. Dombey invites only his son into his
apartment, not Florence, and he maintains his stature as an “emotionally-removed Being” throughout these
encounters, watching Polly walk the infant Paul “to and fro” from the distance of another room or, later, sitting
silently by his son’s side before the fire (35, 109).
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her body through the house in order to bridge the distance between herself and her father: “When
no one in the house was stirring, and the lights were all extinguished, she would softly leave her
own room, and with noiseless feet descend the staircase, and approach her father’s door. Against
it, scarcely breathing, she would rest her face and head, and press her lips, in the yearning of her
love” (276). On the one night that Florence finds the door open and enters, Mr. Dombey banishes
Florence from the entire ground floor. In this way, he makes the staircase not a passage of
communication that might bring them together, as it does for the family in the house opposite,
but a wall. As Mr. Dombey tells his daughter: “The whole house is yours above there […] You
are its mistress now” (285). In orchestrating such extreme arrangements, in privileging his own
ability to be not a father but a “removed Being,” Mr. Dombey thus makes sure that his residence
is not a “shelter” from “division,” as Ruskin would have it, but the opposite: a purposefully-
arranged place of separation and alienation (Ruskin 77).
*
The Death of a Son and a Departure: The Role of Independent Removals in Dombey and Son
Like the death of Fanny Dombey and the birth of Paul, Paul’s death serves as just the
kind of major life event which led many middle-class Victorian families to remove. The
narrators of an 1854 Leisure Hour piece entitled “House-Hunting” make this clear as they
imagine reasons their readers might have for seeking a new residence: “[Y]our olive-branches
may so increase and multiply as to require more room to bud and blossom in, in which case you
are driven to search for larger premises; or they may be shorn away from your side, and the place
that has known them may know them no more, and its black desolateness may chill your very
soul, and you must away from it in order to breathe at peace elsewhere” (683). To some extent,
this sentiment is true for Mr. Dombey: while Paul’s death first leads Mr. Dombey to seal himself
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in his “shut-up chamber,” he does seem to find that he “must away from [his house] in order to
breathe at peace elsewhere,” for he departs for Leamington soon after banishing Florence from
the ground floor (D&S 268; “House-Hunting” 683).
We can best understand this need to leave one’s house after the death of a child through
the lens of middle-class Victorian domestic discourse. As Sharon Marcus notes, domestic
discourse cast the home as a “container of memories”—“the place in which all our best
associations are to be found,” as Francis Cross wrote in Hints to All about to Rent, Buy, or Build
House Property (1854) (Marcus 92). We see this same insistence in the periodical press, often
when authors are describing the difficulty of leaving their homes and those “best associations”
stored there when they are faced with a removal. The Saturday Review author of an article
entitled “Moving House” (1873), for example, writes of “the feelings of a human being torn from
the building which has almost become a part of himself,” suggesting that “[h]owever slight the
change may be, he is breaking innumerable threads of association, of whose force he was never
before sensible” (343). So too, in an 1893 Canadian Magazine article also entitled “Moving
House,” Bernard McEvoy writes of “the habit some people have of taking root in a place,”
explaining, “They stretch out fine filaments of soul into every room and corner. They grow into
their surroundings. Events happen, and the house becomes redolent of associations and
memories” (669). To live in a Victorian home, then, is to live with one’s memories not only in
one’s mind but externalized and visibly present in one’s space: they are “threads” or “filaments”
that extend outward from the self and attach that self to the space of home.
While middle-class Victorians seem generally to have viewed the home’s ability to keep
an archive of their memories as a boon, creating and sustaining “the feeling of attachment to
home, said to be so characteristic of the true English heart,” as one author put it in 1851, we can
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see that in the case of the death of a child, home’s archival ability becomes problematic,
reminding the grieving family of their loss (“On Taking a House” 49). Elizabeth Gaskell, whose
infant son Willie died of scarlet fever in August 1845, makes this clear in a letter that she wrote
to her friend Anne Shaen in April 1848:
I have just been up to our room. There is a fire in it, and a smell of baking, and
oddly enough the feelings and recollections of 3 years ago came over me so
strongly—when I used to sit up in the room so often in the evenings reading by
the fire, and watching my darling darling Willie, who now sleeps sounder still in
the dull, dreary chapel-yard at Warrington. That wound will never heal on earth,
although hardly anyone knows how it has changed me. (Gaskell, Letters 57
[L25a])

Indeed, the house continued to store these “feelings and recollections” for Gaskell, and this—at
least in part—led her family to leave Manchester’s 121 Upper Rumford Street in 1850. A she
wrote to her friend Eliza Fox in April of that year, “here there is the precious perfume lingering
of my darling’s short presence in this life—I wish I were with him in that ‘light, where we shall
all see light’, for I am often sorely puzzled here—but however I must not waste my strength or
my time about the never ending sorrow; but which hallows this house” (L70, Chapple and
Pollard 111).
While we are not granted access to Mr. Dombey’s interiority, proud and closed-up man
that he is, in the same way that Gaskell’s letters grant us access to her private thoughts, we can
imagine that Mr. Dombey’s departure from his house in the wake of Paul’s death is similarly
motivated by a desire to get away from the “feelings and recollections” stored there. The last we
see of Mr. Dombey before he leaves for Leamington is when he watches Florence walk up the
stairs after banishing her from the ground floor. There, he suddenly finds himself remembering
the last time he watched his daughter ascend—a night many years ago when Florence “had had
her brother in her arms”: “She was toiling up the great, wide, vacant staircase […] his head was
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lying on her shoulder, one of his arms thrown negligently round her neck. So they went, toiling
up; she singing all the way, and Paul sometimes crooning out a feeble accompaniment” (286,
113). With the staircase holding this localized memory of his dead son, with his private rooms
presumably also holding memories (for Paul is the only one who was ever invited to sit with him
there), Mr. Dombey’s house is an archive of memories that he must, in the depths of his grief,
escape.
Mr. Dombey’s departure from his house is not, however, a permanent removal. He is, as
Kate Flint has argued, a character who imposes “emotional stasis” upon himself, and his house,
on which he appears to hold an usually-long lease, is an important part of how he achieves his
unwavering sense of pride and self-sufficiency (40). This is a house which “had been inhabited
for years by [Mr. Dombey’s] father” and a house which Mr. Dombey seems to have continuously
inhabited since becoming “the sole representative of his firm” some twenty years ago (35, 12).
We can assume therefore that the Dombey family has held the lease on the house for several
decades. Certainly long leases were possible under the leasehold system—they could run, with
few exceptions, up to ninety-nine years (or “three lives”), allowing a tenant to bequeath the
remaining portion of a lease to his or her inheritors (Sharon Marcus 110, Muthesius 21).
5

Dickens himself negotiated for the remaining eleven years on the lease for One Devonshire
Terrace in late 1839 and purchased a forty-five-year lease on Tavistock House in 1851
(Bodenheimer, Knowing Dickens 129, 153).
6
However, such longer leases were certainly not the
norm. Though, as J. T. Emmet suggests, the average length of residence for a middle-class

5
However, as Sharon Marcus summarizes, “because inheritance law defined leaseholds not as ‘real’ property but as
personal property, heirs could not directly inherit leases” (110).
6
While Dickens had intended to make Tavistock House his home for the rest of his life, he separated from his wife,
Catherine, in 1858 and became anxious to get rid of the house, the “harbor of so many memories,” as Peter Ackroyd
writes (874). First a promise of stability, his long lease became in the end a burden, and he sold the remainder of it
in 1860, “planning to spend the summer and autumn months at Gad’s Hill Place,” which he had purchased outright
as a freehold in 1856, “and then renting a furnished house in London from February to March” (Ackroyd 880).
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Londoner in any one house was three years, even those who could afford 8- to 10-bedroom
houses still usually took only five- to seven-year tenancies, according to F. M. L. Thompson
(Emmet 308-9, Thompson 277). The unusually long lease that Mr. Dombey holds on his
mansion thus represents the highest degree of stability possible for a tenant under the leasehold
system—and it is this stability that perhaps contributes to Mr. Dombey’s only-temporary
departure. Holding a long lease on his house, dependent on the way that his house lets him
believe that he lives as an unchanging and “removed Being” within it, Mr. Dombey stays in
Leamington only temporarily—long enough, one senses, to master his grief and return to the
house so important to his self-conception (D&S 608).
In leaving his daughter and household staff to continue on in his wake, Mr. Dombey
nonetheless links the Dombey household with the many other households in the novel that
experience what we might call an “individual removal.” In the event of an individual removal,
one or more residents either permanently or temporarily depart from a domestic space, while the
remaining residents are left to carry on the routines of home. We see individual removals
repeatedly in Dombey and Son: when the Dombey firm orders Walter Gay to Barbados, he leaves
his Uncle Sol behind in the Midshipman; when Sol departs the Midshipman to find Walter, he
leaves Captain Cuttle to keep both house and shop for him; and when Polly Toodle leaves home
to work twice for the Dombey household and once for the Midshipman, she leaves her husband,
children, and sister to continue on without her. Indeed, for all the removals that take place in
Dombey and Son’s pages, we see many more individuals moving alone than families moving
together, which means that instead of seeing houses being emptied at once, we more often see
houses becoming emptier.
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That this novel represents so many individual removals is an important part of how
Dombey and Son expands the Victorian narrative of removal, moving beyond the story of the full
household removal of the middle-class family that we see so often in the periodical press and
representing a world—and a largely working-class world—of individuals on the move. Published
in the late 1840s, Dombey and Son was written during a time of incredible social change which
was marked, in part, by the vast migration of different populations around Great Britain. By the
time of the 1851 census, just a few years after Dombey and Son’s publication, fifty-four percent
of the population lived two or more kilometers from their stated place of birth (Anderson,
“Social Implications” 11). Many of those on the move were young, working-class people—
“single men and women, or newly-marrieds”—moving independently of their families, often
from rural areas into towns and cities, where migrants often outnumbered those born there
(Burnett 8; Anderson, Family Structure 34). Indeed, we might assume that the many “stragglers
who [come] wandering into London, by the great highway” that runs past Harriet and John
Carker’s house are themselves carrying out individual removals, leaving behind their families
and their families’ houses or cottages in the countryside (D&S 522).
In representing so many individuals on the move, Dickens’s novel not only mirrors the
rapidly-changing social world in which it was created, but it considers the nuanced effects of an
individual removal on both the domestic space and the residents that a departing character leaves
behind—an experience that many of the Victorian readers of the novel no doubt shared. What
exactly happens, the novel asks, to a residence that does not empty all at once but instead
empties person by person? How does the departure of certain residents affect those who remain?
In exploring these questions, the novel offers two answers—one for the loving, successful homes
of the novel, for which the Midshipman stands as representative, and one for Mr. Dombey’s
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unhomely home. Indeed, the novel makes clear that, though Mr. Dombey links his household to
the many other households that experience an individual removal, his individual removal is
unique in its perversity. Other characters leave their homes and their families out of necessity—
often to work for wages that will benefit their families, often as a result of the business or
household decisions of Mr. Dombey—but Mr. Dombey intentionally abandons his daughter in
his house. The perversity of his domestic arrangement becomes clear through the contrasting
effects of his individual removal and other characters’ individual removals. It is no accident that
Dombey and Son is structured so that readers see the effects of Walter’s absence on the
Midshipman right before they see the effects of Mr. Dombey’s absence on his mansion: the
novel very much intends for readers to compare these cotemporaneous individual removals and
their effects.
When Florence and Susan visit the Midshipman’s back parlour after Walter’s departure
to Barbados, they find it “strangely altered,” and this indeed is what happens to loving,
successful domestic spaces that experience the individual removal of one of their residents (369).
This “strange alteration” is both material and immaterial. On the one hand, the person who
departed might have taken some or all of their belongings with them, as Walter did with “his
little stock of pictures and books” when he left for Barbados, and so the space of home may be
physically emptier, its normal appearance now jarringly changed for those residents who remain
behind (287). On the other hand, this “strange alteration” is also intangible, related to the home’s
function as a “container of memories,” to use Sharon Marcus’s phrase (Marcus 92). When
Florence and Susan visit Sol, they find the back parlour of the Midshipman “strangely altered by
the absence of Walter” not only because Sol has spread “charts and maps” around the room but
because the room is now uncannily marked by both Walter’s absence and the memory of his
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presence (D&S 369). In other words, a domestic space that one resident has left but that remains
inhabited by others continues to hold the “associations and memories” of the departed resident,
and yet these “associations and memories” are also a continual reminder to those who remain
that the departed resident is gone (McEvoy 669). The simultaneous presence and absence of a
departed resident can be both salve and irritant, depending on the circumstances. Much later in
the novel, after Florence and Walter depart the Midshipman to sail abroad as newlyweds, Sol,
Captain Cuttle, Mr. Toots, and Susan find that “[t]here is a strange charm in the house, and in the
room, in which they have been used to be together, and out of which so much is gone. It
aggravates, and yet it soothes, the sorrow of the separation” (D&S 874). Here, the “strange
charm” of Walter and Florence’s simultaneous presence and absence in the Midshipman is, at
least in part, comforting to the characters who remain. Elsewhere, though, we see sorrow
overwhelm the character who is left behind, such as when Sol nightly “climb[s] up-stairs, so
lonely, to the attic” after Walter’s departure to Barbados (300-301). And no wonder, for in
climbing the stairs—which themselves become lonely through Dickens’s syntax—Sol must
confront the fact that he is alone—that Walter is not walking up by his side, though the stairs
hold the memory of the many times that he did—and that his nephew may never come back to
rejoin the routines of home. (Indeed, Dickens originally intended Walter to turn “bad, by
degrees,” which likely would have meant that he would not rejoin the Midshipman and its
routines [Letters, vol. 4, 593].)
On the other hand, as a result of Mr. Dombey’s individual removal and the abandonment
of his daughter, the Dombey mansion changes in more material and extreme ways than what
happens following an individual removal in the Midshipman. Of the material changes that
transpire in the Dombey mansion, some seem to be the result of simple neglect, as if Mr.
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Dombey did not leave instructions for the maintenance of his house or as if the household staff
suddenly stop doing their job in the absence of their employer. The outside of the house, the
narrators tells readers, “was now so neglected in appearance, that boys chalked the railings and
the pavement” and “grass began to grow on the roof” (350, 352). Inside, among the shut-up
rooms and “staircases and passages where no one went for weeks together,” “[m]ildew and
mould began to lurk”; “[d]ust accumulated, nobody knew how or whence”; and “[r]ats began to
squeak and scuffle in the night time, through dark galleries they mined behind the panelling”
(351). Such descriptions recall “the dirty house immediately to let opposite,” which was empty at
the novel’s beginning, the straw spread during the late Mrs. Dombey’s illness gathering on its
untended threshold (35). In this way, the Dombey mansion comes to look, in part, like an
“empty,” an uninhabited house-to-let.
But the Dombey mansion is no “empty,” and the changes to the Dombey house are not
simply the result of neglect. In the first place, Mr. Dombey is a controlling, habit-driven man—
one who would very much want his residence maintained in his absence, ready for his return.
Indeed, the novel gives us every indication that the household staff is still present and at work—
Mr. Towlinson driving off the boys who chalk the house and the staff gathering each night to eat
their dinner downstairs (350, 353). Instead, it is as if the house is out of control, changing despite
the routines of housekeeping and changing at a rate that exceeds the normal passage of time. In
Mr. Dombey’s absence—which lasts for several weeks, perhaps a few months at most—it is as if
years pass, “[f]ragments of mortar [losing] their hold upon the insides of unused chimneys”
(352). These accelerated changes are also coupled with other unrealistic changes that the house
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undergoes—both of which would seem to belong more to a fairy tale than the realist novel.
7

Here, the house and its possessions come alive, the “[h]ecatombs of furniture, still piled and
covered up,” able to “[change] insensibly,” the “[p]atterns of carpets” becoming “perplexed,” the
floorboards “starting at unwonted footsteps” (351). In this way, the house does not “alter
strangely” in Mr. Dombey’s absence—it alters monstrously, the inanimate becoming animate
(369).
These material alterations are the result of the perversity of Mr. Dombey’s independent
removal. While other characters depart the family circle of home out of necessity, bidding their
loved ones farewell tearfully but bravely, Mr. Dombey instead unnecessarily abandons his
daughter in his house because he does not care for her and because he is jealous of his late son’s
love for her. As the narrator tells us in the chapter’s refrain, “Florence lived alone in the deserted
house, and day succeeded day, and still she lived alone” (352). It is because of this particularly
unheimlich situation that the mansion seems to decay so rapidly and the household possessions
seem to come to life. Indeed, these descriptions—as unrealistic, as fairy tale-like, as they seem—
convey a realistic emotional sense of Florence’s abandonment in the Dombey home. The narrator
declares, “No magic dwelling-place in magic story, shut up in the heart of a thick wood, was ever
more solitary and deserted to the fancy, than was her father’s mansion in its grim reality”—and
as Frances Armstrong notes, “it is the difference between fairy tale and reality that is stressed”
(D&S 350, Armstrong 64). Here, the actual domestic situation is far worse than anything that
happens in a “magic dwelling-place in magic story,” the daughter living fatherless, motherless,

7
See Mikhail Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination for a discussion of the hyperbolization of time in the fairy tale:
“There appears a hyperbolization of time typical of the fairy tale: hours are dragged out, days are compressed into
moments, it becomes possible to bewitch time itself” (154).
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and brother-less in an abandoned mansion: “And oh the desolation of the solitary house again,
with evening coming on, and no one home!” (D&S 353).
In putting Walter’s removal from the Midshipman so close to Mr. Dombey’s removal
from his mansion, Dickens differentiates his two narratives of removal, allowing readers to
contrast the subtle and “strange alterations” of a loving home which experiences the departure of
one of its members and the monstrous alterations in Mr. Dombey’s unhomely house, in which a
daughter is left to live alone “in her wilderness of a home” (369, 353). However, his attention to
so many residences missing one or more of their members also helps us see something else—
that, in this novel, he is more interested in thinking through the nuanced effects of partial
removals than full removals. Said differently, he is more interested in houses which are inhabited
and uninhabited at once than houses that are entirely empty, and this interest is another way that
Dombey and Son expands the narrative of removal that we find in the periodical press. This is
not to say that Dickens is uninterested in the image of the “empty.” “Empties” and houses to let
appear throughout Dickens’s fiction, from the “deserted” and “dismantled” Old Curiosity Shop,
to “the dirty house immediately to let opposite” the Dombey house, to the Jellybys’ residence, its
windows lined with bills and the house looking “dirtier and gloomier and ghastlier than ever”
(Old Curiosity Shop 112-3, Dombey and Son 35, Bleak House 380). However, in Dombey and
Son, not only are residences in which individual removals occur more frequent but they are more
interesting. From the Midshipman which is “strangely altered” by Walter’s absence, to the
Dombey house which is “shunned […] as a hopeless place” in the absence of its patriarch, to the
“shut-up” Feenix family house in Brook Street which “hoard[s] darkness and sadness” in its
“funereal” rooms, residences in which individual removals are occurring—in which at least one
resident remains or, in lieu of that, in which a resident still holds a lease or deed on the house—
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contain a rich tension between missing residents and remaining residents, between furnished
rooms and uninhabited space, between home as a container of memories and a site of absence
(369, 350, 935, 469). On the other hand, the truly empty houses in Dombey and Son are simply
dirty blank slates. They may be neglected, straw gathering on their doorsteps like the “dirty
house” opposite Mr. Dombey’s mansion, and they may stand empty “for a long time,” but they
hoard neither darkness nor sadness nor the previous residents’ history (35, 275). Rather, those
“innumerable threads of association” that make home a container of memories are broken when
the last resident leaves. (“Moving House,” The Saturday Review 343). As the narrator notes of
the Dombey house at the end of the novel, after Mr. Dombey is finally taken out and Polly locks
the door for the last time: “The great house, dumb to all that had been suffered in it, and the
changes it had witnessed, stood frowning like a dark mute on the street” (913). In Dombey and
Son, it is the house which remains cognizant of what has been “suffered in it”—the house that
still serves as a container of memories for its resident—to which the novel turns again and again.
*
Remarriage, Redecoration, and the Limits of Material Change
Mr. Dombey’s individual removal to Leamington brings about his engagement to Edith
Granger. Like the birth of Paul, like the death of the first Mrs. Dombey, like the death of Paul,
this impending remarriage serves as yet another event which led middle-class Victorian families
to remove, seeking a new domestic space in which to begin again. Unsurprisingly, Mr.
Dombey’s looming second marriage does not lead him to remove from his mansion after his
return from Leamington, but it does lead him to redecorate, making “great alterations” to his
mansion (442). Here, for once, Mr. Dombey’s actions link him with a common domestic
practice, for a remarriage led many real and fictional Victorian families—in lieu of a removal—
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to redecorate. We see redecorations, for example, in Dickens’s own David Copperfield, when
David arrives home to find his mother married to Mr. Murdstone and the domestic space of
Blunderstone Rookery radically changed, and in Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, when the
Gibson house is restyled with “[n]ew paint, new paper, new colours” to mark the marriage of Dr.
Gibson to Miss Clare (Dickens, David Copperfield 44; Gaskell, Wives and Daughters 171). That
many families either removed or redecorated in the event of a remarriage points to the unique
power—and disruption—of this event. Especially in families with children, a remarriage
reformed the family by bringing in a new step-father or step-mother and perhaps even step-
siblings. A remarriage was thus an event that called for a kind of blank domestic slate, allowing
the newly-formed family a fresh start. In this way, we see that redecoration in the event of a
remarriage was meant to effect a kind of removal, destroying an already-established home’s
“accustomed household grooves,” to borrow a phrase from Gaskell, and allowing other routines
to form (Gaskell, North and South 209). In other words, redecoration allowed for the creation of
a new home, albeit within a familiar domestic space.
Mr. Dombey, of course, does not make “great alterations” to his home in order to destroy
its “accustomed household grooves” and make way for new routines with his wife and daughter
(D&S 442; Gaskell, North and South 209). Rather, just as he viewed his first wife as something
akin to “his plate and furniture, and other household possessions,” he seems to view Edith as a
particularly expensive piece of portable property that he is moving into his house, and so his
redecoration thus seems intended to create a more-fitting backdrop in which to display his wife’s
“proud character” and, through that character, his own “magnificent supremacy” (16, 609, 610).
In this way, Mr. Dombey’s motives for redecoration are unhomely, but his redecoration of his
house is not in itself an unusual or unhomely act. Indeed, for a brief time, the “great alterations”
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even succeed in making his house a little more like a home, inching it closer to the novel’s
happy, successful residences in which family members and love are able to circulate.
Dombey and Son first links redecoration and removal when the narrator describes
Florence and Susan’s return home after a stay with the Skettles. Here, Dickens uses the tropes
and imagery of a household move to describe the work being performed on the house. In the
periodical press’s narrative depictions of removal, the middle-class home is generally “invaded”
by working-class tradesmen and laborers, the privacy of home destroyed, its order turned to
chaos. Though readers’ last glimpse of the Dombey house was not of its order but of the decay
that Mr. Dombey’s absence bred within it, this sense of invasion is precisely what Florence and
Susan witness when they approach the house amid the “great alterations” taking place:
Ladders were raised against the walls; labourers were climbing up and down; men
were at work upon the steps of the scaffolding; painters and decorators were busy
inside; great rolls of ornamental paper were being delivered from a cart at the
door; an upholsterer’s waggon also stopped the way; no furniture was to be seen
through the gaping and broken windows in any of the rooms; nothing but
workmen, and the implements of their several trades, swarming from the kitchens
to the garrets. Inside and outside alike: bricklayers, painters, carpenters, masons:
hammer, hod, brush, pickaxe, saw, and trowel: all at work together, in full chorus!
(441-2)

With workers both inside and outside, and even “glaring in at the windows like flying genii or
strange birds,” the house has seemingly been taken over by a “full chorus” of working-class men
(446, 442). As the narrator says, “the enchanted world [of the house] was no more, and the
working world had broken into it” (459). Of course, the workers have not actually broken into
the house, just as they do not actually “invade” the middle-class home in narratives of removal.
Rather, they have been hired to perform a job. In the case of Mr. Dombey’s redecoration, they
have been hired to dismantle and break down the old house in order to build it up again as a new,
radically-revised house. Thus, while these workers are not loading furniture and rugs and crates
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into vans and carting them across town to unload them in a new mansion, they are nonetheless
performing similar work—opening up the long-closed suite of drawing-rooms, taking down the
picture of the first Mrs. Dombey, replacing the old furniture which belonged to Mr. Dombey’s
father with new furniture, repaneling the rooms, remodeling the bedrooms, and turning the house
from a “dark blot on the street” into a “handsome” site of “elegance and splendor” (442, 540,
492, 462).
And for a brief time, regardless of Mr. Dombey’s intentions, these “great alterations” of
furniture, paint, wallpaper, and a new wife do succeed in removing the usual “household
grooves” from the mansion, allowing for new behaviors within the old home. In particular, the
combined events of a redecoration and remarriage result in a more open domestic space, bringing
Mr. Dombey out of his ground floor apartment and allowing the circulation of family members
throughout the house. Indeed, family members even come together for something like family
time on the first evening of the newlyweds’ return from their honeymoon. Then, Mr. Dombey
permits Florence to sit with him in one of the newly-decorated drawing-rooms, leaving his
daughter to marvel at “finding herself for the first time in her life—for the very first time within
her memory from her infancy to that hour—alone with her father, as his companion” (546). But
even though redecoration seems to allow the Dombey household a new beginning, that new
beginning does not last: frustrated with his new wife’s pride “arraying itself against him” and full
of the false sense of his daughter “leagued against him,” Mr. Dombey soon enough retreats to
“the solitude of his old rooms,” closing himself up yet again (609, 610, 609). In this way, the
novel makes clear that redecoration is not enough to change the “household grooves” of this
mansion or the patterns of its main character. Rather, Mr. Dombey is able—after only one night
in the house—to revert to his old behaviors as a “removed Being,” for the physical space of his
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house still makes these behaviors possible: his private apartment exists, unchanged, at the bottom
of the house. In David Copperfield, redecoration and the presence of a new step-father so
radically—even terrifyingly—alter Blunderstone Rookery that David wanders forlornly through
the house “to find anything that was like itself, so altered it all seemed” (44). In Wives and
Daughters too, Molly Gibson finds her father’s redecorated house “already strange, and what
Warwickshire people would call ‘unked,’ to her” (171).
8
Here, though, the Dombey mansion
does not change enough through redecoration, which Florence notices, “comparing the bright
house with the faded dreary place out of which it had arisen, and wondering when, in any shape,
it would begin to be a home; for that it was no home then, for anyone, though everything went on
luxuriously and regularly, she had always a secret misgiving” (553).
Indeed, the Dombey household’s division only increases under Mr. Dombey’s second
marriage. Earlier in the novel, Mr. Dombey’s unhomely domestic arrangements split the house in
two, turning the ground floor into his residence and the rest of the house into his children’s
residence. Now, thanks to Mr. Dombey’s unwillingness to compromise with Edith, the newly-
redecorated “pageant” of a house further splinters, Edith living “arrayed with her soul against
[her husband]” in her own private rooms, Mrs. Pipchin posted like a sentry in the first of Mr.
Dombey’s rooms, and Florence left—under the cover of night—to wander in between as if trying
to stitch her broken family together (627, 545). No “site for the performance of intimate family
life,” no “shelter” from “division,” the redecorated Dombey house is no home—and on the night
before Mr. Dombey and Edith’s second wedding anniversary, it even loses its most basic
function, the very ability of the house to hold its three inhabitants giving way (Logan 218,

8
A footnote in the Penguin Classics edition of Wives and Daughters explains that “unked” means “dismal,
troublesome, through being unfamiliar or unknown, eerie even” (661). The note continues, “In a letter Gaskell says,
‘I can’t find any other word to express the exact feeling of strange unusual desolate discomfort’ (Letters, p. 292)”
(661).
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Ruskin 77). Confronting Mr. Dombey with his conduct in their relationship, with his use of
James Carker in their marriage, and with the estrangement that he created between herself and
Florence, Edith demands a separation, which Mr. Dombey refuses. Having demanded a
separation, however, Edith enacts her own, running away that night to Dijon with James Carker.
The next morning, in a rage at his wife’s desertion, Mr. Dombey strikes Florence and knocks her
to the floor, leading her, finally, to see the truth that “she had no father on this earth” (721). This
leads her to “[run] out, orphaned, from his house” (721). As Mary Douglas writes, home
“survives only so long as it attends to the needs of its members”—and while the Dombey
“home” has long attended inadequately to the needs of its members, it finally and utterly fails
(281). In less than twelve hours, it turns from a residence of three into a residence of one, Edith
and Florence exploding out of the house as the unbending Mr. Dombey remains inside, a more
fully “removed Being” now fully alone (D&S 608).
*
On the Move with Nothing: Physical Removal and Emotional Removal
With Edith and Florence’s departures from the Dombey mansion, the novel once again
asks readers to think about removal as something broader than the middle-class full household
move that we find in the periodical press, in which a family’s furniture is packed up, carted out
of the house in which they have been living, driven across town, and unloaded in a new space.
Not only are Edith and Florence’s departures two more individual removals in the novel, but
both of their “removals” fail to involve the actual removal of their belongings—a key step,
according to the Victorian periodical press, in the process of a residential move and in the telling
of its narrative. Indeed, Edith and Florence remove only their bodies from the Dombey mansion,
Edith intentionally leaving “every ornament,” “every dress,” “everything she had possessed” as
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Mrs. Dombey behind and Florence too busy fleeing “like the sole survivor […] from the wreck
of a great vessel” to take anything with her, though her dog, Diogenes, faithfully follows in her
wake (D&S 720, 722).
Certainly, Edith’s abandonment of her things is meant as a sign of her irrevocable break
with the Victorian family unit and with the Victorian family home, just as Florence’s lack of
possessions functions as a sign that she has been “orphaned” and made homeless by her father’s
“cruelty, neglect, and hatred” (721). But that Edith and Florence “remove” with nothing also
reminds us that their experience is not entirely unique, for removal in the world of Dombey and
Son is for many an experience full of loss. Walter loses his trunk at sea on his way to Barbados,
Captain Cuttle is forced to abandon (albeit temporarily) a chest of his “heavier property” when
he flees Mrs. MacStinger’s house, and countless other unnamed, unseen characters lose their
possessions to shops like that of “Brogley, sworn broker and appraiser,” when they face
distraints, evictions, and the auctions of their belongings (395, 134). In Brogley’s shop, which is
full of the detritus of “bankruptcy and ruin,” we learn that “every description of second-hand
furniture [is] exhibited” for sale, from sideboards to dish-covers to “a homeless hearthrug,” and
we can imagine that so much of this stock is composed of the belongings that anonymous
characters had to give up when they were faced with financial hardship and a move of their own
(134). In this novel, then, removal is an experience full of potential loss, whether that is because
of distraint, or “dreadful” bonneted landladies, or shipwreck, or a father who “murder[s]” his
daughter’s “fond idea” of him (156, 721).
At the same time, that Edith and Florence remove with nothing means that their removals
are comprised of only the crossing of a threshold as they slip or run beyond Mr. Dombey’s front
door. This helps us see that so many of the removals that characters undertake in the novel are
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similarly portrayed as the simple crossing of a threshold, even when they are bringing their
possessions with them. In other words, this is a novel that is not that interested in narrating or
engaging with physical removal—or the process by which characters look for a new residence,
pack up their possessions, and transport them to the next abode. By this point in the novel, the
only full household removals that have been mentioned are the Toodle family’s relocation from
Staggs’s Gardens to railway company housing and the arrival of the widower and his daughters
in the house opposite the Dombey house, and both of these removals happen off the page: we
have no information about how they are orchestrated or how long they take. While there have
been many more individual removals, in which one character departs from a home that will
continue on without them, the novel offers limited representations of the labor that presumably
goes into even these smaller removals. In part, this is a temporal issue. In Dombey and Son, the
need to remove often arises suddenly—for example, no small number of domestic service
workers are fired from their positions in the Dombey household and required to leave
immediately—and so characters must make quick work of their physical removal. But even on
those occasions when the labor of physical removal is explicitly mentioned in the text, it is not
narrated; rather, it is either alluded to or summarized. For example, right before Walter departs
the Wooden Midshipman for Barbados, we learn that his bedroom has been “[d]ismantled of his
little stock of pictures and books,” but we never see him pack that “little stock” (287). So too,
when Susan is fired from the Dombey household, we are told only that she “bestirred herself to
get her trunks in order” (670). What exactly she does to accomplish this, or how many trunks she
actually has, is never made clear, for the next physical description that the narrator offers readers
of Susan is that she “had locked the last trunk and was sitting upon it with her bonnet on” (670).
This is hardly the story of removal we find in the periodical press, obsessed as it is with the
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packing and transportation of household materials, from boxes of bonnets, to rolled-up rugs, to
glassware cushioned in crates of straw. Rather, in Dombey and Son’s narrative of removal, it
does not actually seem to matter what a character stows in her trunks.
Indeed, whether a character stows all her belongings in her trunks or leaves home empty-
handed or loses everything along the way, the novel insists that moving’s real work is emotional,
related to how a character manages her separation from those whom she is departing. After all,
while we do not see Susan packing her trunks, we know that she was “sobbing heartily all the
time, as she thought of Florence,” and while we do not see Walter pack “his little stock of
pictures and books,” we know that he “could hardly believe that he […] would soon be lost to
Uncle Sol, and Captain Cuttle, and to glimpses few and far between of Florence Dombey […]
and to all he loved, and liked, and looked for, in his daily life” (670, 204). And we sense, through
the intensity of these characters’ emotions, that these characters will continue to experience their
emotional removals long after their physical removals are over. Indeed, this is particularly true of
Florence. Perversely driven from home from within, grappling with the loss of the “fond idea” of
her father and with his abusive mistreatment of her, she not only hides for a long time inside the
Wooden Midshipman, but she works continually to erase her memory of all that happened to her
in that house after she snuck past Mrs. Pipchin and entered the second room of her father’s
private apartment, kissing his sleeping face: “she always left him so, and never, in her fancy,
passed that hour” (870, 852). In emphasizing the extended duration of the work of emotional
removal, in narrating it more fully than the work of physical removal, Dombey and Son does not
suggest that the material world of portable property and furniture is unimportant to characters’
lives or to their moves—indeed, it highlights the fragility of characters’ belongings, which can so
quickly end up in a shop like Brogley’s or at the bottom of the sea. But the novel does make
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clear that the emotional removal characters face is by far the harder and the longer work, for like
Paul Dombey sent to live apart from Florence, emotional removal can leave a character feeling
“as if he had taken life unfurnished, and the upholsterer were never coming” even in fully-
furnished rooms (214).
*
“Then why don’t he go?”: Removing the “removed Being” from the House
The final monthly part of Dombey and Son brings the final event in the novel which
really should lead Mr. Dombey to remove and yet, somehow, does not. A year after Florence and
Edith’s departures, the commercial House of Dombey appears on the “List of Bankrupts,” and in
order not to “increase[] the losses of those who [had] dealings” with his Firm, Mr. Dombey uses
up his whole personal fortune to “clear, or nearly clear, the House” (877, 883). Personally ruined,
Mr. Dombey thus faces the auctioning off of his portable property in a public sale and the
termination of the residential lease that he and his family have held for so long. Here, the
narrative offers readers an extended description of the takeover of the Dombey mansion by a
broker and his men and the subsequent auction that takes place. This scene is in many ways like
the periodical press’s scene of physical removal (a scene which, as we have noted, has not yet
appeared in this novel): here, working-class labors fill the Dombey residence, “tumbling the
furniture about” and making “[c]haotic combinations” of Mr. Dombey’s portable property,
which they ultimately cart out, “staggering by the dozen together on the staircase under heavy
burdens,” until the house is left empty (898). But, of course, this is not actually a scene of
physical removal: it is a scene of loss. Unlike the hired movers in the short narratives of the
periodical press who are misleadingly described as “invaders,” these men really do “invade” the
Dombey house in the sense that Mr. Dombey does not hire them and they arrange for the
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removal of Mr. Dombey’s portable property regardless of his wishes. In addition, the portable
property carted out of the Dombey mansion is not being transported across town and unloaded
into a new house, as it would be in a removal. Rather, this portable property, including even
“Paul’s little bedstead,” is sold off, loaded into the myriad new owners’ “gigs and chaise-carts,
vans and wagons,” and dispersed (899, 898-899). This is not the dismantling of a residence that
precedes its resurrection in a new space; this is a dismantling that marks utter ruin, and it thus
links Mr. Dombey to the many other characters in the novel who experience material loss
associated with a removal, especially the anonymous characters whose belongings fill Brogley’s
shop. As Mrs. Pipchin bluntly notes of the proceedings at Mr. Dombey’s house, “It an’t so
wonderful a case. People have had misfortunes before now, and been obliged to part with their
furniture. I’m sure I have!” (899-900).
At the same, time, this scene of loss also links Mr. Dombey with larger patterns of loss in
both the actual world of Victorian England and its fiction. As Barbara Weiss notes, “The
experience of bankruptcy was […] only too common an occurrence to the Victorians,” with
“cases of bankruptcy increas[ing] tremendously during the early years of industrialization,” and
this experience “surface[ed]” frequently in the realist novel of the mid-nineteenth century (15,
26, 15). Thus, while the scene of middle-class house removal was a familiar sight in the
Victorian periodical press, fictional scenes of “seizure and auction” were “almost a set piece” in
the realist novel—“the seizure and sale of a character’s possessions to satisfy creditors”
occurring so often “that we may recognize in it one of the collective nightmares of the middle
class in the nineteenth century,” as John Vernon writes (Weiss 26, 104; Vernon 69). Indeed,
here we see an important difference between the short narratives of removal published in the
periodical press and the narratives of removal that appear in the Victorian novel: in general, the
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Victorian novel is interested in representing and exploring harsher and more extreme forms of
loss like bankruptcy, while the short narratives of the periodical press are interested in exploring
removal as a fact of middle-class life—as a serial event that Victorians underwent every few
years. Dombey and Son is no exception, and as Weiss points out, Mr. Dombey’s bankruptcy and
the auction of his possessions are so far from unusual that Dickens’s narration echoes with
similar descriptions from other novels, including Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, whose serial
publication overlapped with the serial publication of Dombey and Son. Thus, from the broker “of
a Mosaic Arabian cast of countenance” to “the gentlemen with the pens and ink”; from “the men
in the carpet caps” who create the “[c]haotic combinations of furniture” to the “herds of shabby
vampires, Jew and Christian, [who] overrun the house”; from “the head and shoulders, voice and
hammer, of the Auctioneer, [which] are ever at work” to “the mouldy gigs and chaise-carts,”
“spring vans and wagons,” which arrive to haul off the highest bidders’ loot, nothing about Mr.
Dombey’s auction makes it “so wonderful a case” either in Dickens’s novel or across the
Victorian novel more broadly (D&S 895, 897, 897-8, 898).
9

In the end, what is actually exceptional about Mr. Dombey’s “case” is that he does not
remove out of his house post-auction. After the house is emptied of its furniture around him;
after bills are posted in the windows “respecting the lease of this desirable family mansion”; after
Mrs. Pipchin quits and moves back to Brighton, the other servants having resigned before the
auction began; after even “the rats have fled” from the “ruin” of the house, Mr. Dombey remains
inside his “locked rooms on the ground-floor,” “the window-blinds […] drawn down close,” and
the days passing (899, 902, 899). Though Mrs. Chick laments, “What does my brother mean to
do? Business won’t come to him. No. He must go to it. Then why don’t he go?,” Mr. Dombey

9
See Weiss, pgs. 103-108, for a discussion of similar scenes of auction in other Victorian novels.
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proves to be the one character in the novel who does not “go” when faced with an event that
necessitates removal (900).
The answer to Mrs. Chick’s question “why don’t he go?” is that Mr. Dombey is stuck in
his private apartment on the ground floor of his house, which he has not left since before the
auction began. This is a space that has for much of the novel’s twelve-year plot isolated him
from the world: it has allowed him to exist as a physically “removed Being,” and in doing so, it
has allowed him to exist more easily as an emotionally “removed Being,” distant from his family
and acquaintances, sure of his own supremacy and rightness and control (608). However, his
many recent losses—the result of his own actions—have changed him. Now, instead of being a
prideful “removed Being,” he is a fragile, changed man, so “removed”—which is to say
withdrawn—that he cannot even leave his apartment, let alone move out of his actual house. And
no wonder, for even opening the door separating his private apartment from the rest of the house
would force him to confront too much: the lack of furniture and the to-let signs in the windows
immediate evidence of his utter ruin. Unable to face all this, he thus becomes a squatter in his old
house, staying on in his private apartment for days after the auction ends. In a way, it thus
becomes the novel’s mission in its final pages to bring about the removal of this character who
has again and again refused to move. Indeed, the novel provides extended narration of the
process of this removal, primarily foregrounding Mr. Dombey’s emotional removal while
nonetheless making clear that Mr. Dombey’s physical removal involves two steps: he must
move, first, out of his private apartment in which he is stuck and, second, out of the larger house.
Mr. Dombey’s first move out of his private apartment and into the house itself comes
about thanks to the archival ability of domestic space, or its ability to be a “container of
memories,” as Sharon Marcus phrases it (92).While we have more often than not seen Mr.
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Dombey try to avoid memories—fleeing the house after Paul’s death, trying to “exclude”
memories from his own mind, telling his children to “cease to remember”—it becomes clear that
Mr. Dombey’s “cold, black rooms” nonetheless serve to remind him of the past while he is
locked up inside them, for when the narrator finally reenters Mr. Dombey’s apartment halfway
through the chapter titled “Retribution,” the narrator finds “the ruined man,” and he finds, “He
did remember it” (D&S 42, 29, 67, 904). In particular, what Mr. Dombey remembers is
Florence’s “one prolonged low cry,” uttered on the night four years ago when Mr. Dombey
“spurned” his daughter’s love in the very room in which he is now stuck and banished her from
the ground floor (285). At the time, Mr. Dombey expelled Florence’s cry from his memory,
believing that her cry “pass[ed] as quickly from his brain” as it “faded from the air” (285). Now,
though, we learn that he remembers the scene in all of its specificity: “He heard the words again,
and saw the face. He saw it fall upon the trembling hands, and heard the one prolonged cry go
upward” (29, 904). In Mr. Dombey’s ability to hear Florence’s words and cry, in his ability not
only to imagine but to see her face before him, the narrative reveals that Florence’s cry did not
“[fade] from the air” at all, and it thus again indicates domestic space’s ability to hold localized
memories, to preserve what happens within particular rooms. Just as Mr. Dombey once stood at
the bottom of the stairs to light Florence’s way up and could not help but recall “[t]he last time
he had watched her, from the same place, winding up those stairs,” the middle room of his
apartment has both preserved his daughter’s “one prolonged low cry” and recalled it to him (286,
285). Though Mr. Dombey has long been unable to see the presence of this memory in his
apartment due to the obscuring “mist of his pride,” he sees it—finally—now (D&S 42).
In particular, Mr. Dombey’s recognition of the past in his private room leads him to
feel—for the first time in the novel—an emotional connection to his house. Mulling over the
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memory of his daughter’s cry from deep within the “ruin” of the house, he realizes that “the
sharp grief of his soul” is his treatment of Florence, and he finds himself overcome with “sorrow
and remorse” that his daughter is “lost” (899, 907). This profound change, brought about by the
presence of a memory in his room, leaves him with the sense “that he had had two children born
to him in that house and that between him and the bare wide empty walls there was a tie,
mournful, but hard to rend asunder, connected with a double childhood, and a double loss” (907).
With this “tie,” Mr. Dombey finally comes to feel an emotional connection not just to his private
rooms but to his whole house, for it holds the traces of what he no longer has—his children, and
this connection leads him, finally, to leave his private apartment and enter the fuller house.
Like Florence and Susan Nipper returning home from the Skettles’ villa and looking
forward to “go[ing] through the old rooms,” Mr. Dombey leaves “his cell,” entering his house as
a man who has been away from home for a long time—as, in truth, he has (441, 907). Here, in
his “homecoming,” Mr. Dombey’s unfamiliarity with the house becomes particularly evident, for
he lacks intimacy with many of its previous rhythms, not “so much as know[ing] in which of
these rooms [Florence] had lived, when she was alone” (908). In addition, the house itself
appears greatly altered since the auction, and he must confront these changes—the furniture
gone, the floors covered with the footprints of strangers, the rooms “now so bare and dismal and
so changed, apparently, even in their size and shape” (908). Nonetheless, despite his lack of
intimacy with the house and despite its altered appearance, Mr. Dombey finds that his past is
very much legible there, and he performs a kind of reading similar to that suggested by his
daughter and her maid, “go[ing] through the old rooms” and encountering the memories stored
there (441). Ascending the staircase to the main house, he sees ahead of him on the steps “a
figure, childish itself, but carrying a child, and singing as it went” and also “the same figure,
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alone, stopping for an instant, with suspended breath; the bright hair clustering loosely round its
tearful face; and looking back at him,” the memory of Florence carrying her brother and the
memory of Florence walking up the stairs in her banishment existing simultaneously before him
(907). Wandering the first floor’s rooms, “lately so luxurious,” and then “wandering higher up”
he finally arrives at “the old room high up, where the little bed had been” and where, he recalls,
“[h]e had shed so many tears” in the aftermath of his son’s death “long ago” (908). On this
upward journey, then, Mr. Dombey not only removes from his private apartment, reentering the
house after a long time away, but he experiences the house as what it always was to Florence—a
“sanctuary of […] remembrances” (441).
While Mr. Dombey is finally out of his “cell,” he is nonetheless still trapped within his
larger house, for he does not know how to remove either emotionally or physically. In terms of
his emotional removal, he does not want to lose his house as a “sanctuary of […] remembrances”
(D&S 441). After all, according to middle-class Victorian domestic discourse, home as a
“container of memories” lasts only as long as an inhabitant’s tenancy, for removal results in the
“breaking [of] innumerable threads of association” (Marcus 92; “Moving House,” The Saturday
Review 343). Though Mr. Dombey’s house as a “container of memories” has survived a great
deal—including Mr. Dombey’s abandonment and neglect of the house during his stay at
Leamington, the extensive redecoration that preceded his second marriage, and the auction of all
of his portable property—it cannot survive his final departure, and Mr. Dombey senses this
already in the way that “the very walls that sheltered him looked on him as a stranger” (D&S
906). And indeed, he is right: once he does finally leave his old mansion, it transforms itself into
a blank house, “dumb as to all that had been suffered in it” (913). Unwilling to lose the house,
which is his only connection to his children, he thus sees no way to leave. In addition, he sees no
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way to complete his physical removal, for he sees nowhere to go beyond the walls of his
mansion, despite an invitation to stay with his sister. With the figurative ground beneath him
“long undermined,” “weaken[ing], and crumbl[ing],” and ready to “fall down in a moment,” Mr.
Dombey—like a “despoiled house” himself—determines that he need not leave his mansion at
all, deciding instead to stay and kill himself, “only sever[ing] the tie between him and the ruined
house, by severing that other link” (909, 908, 909). Utterly unable to envision a life beyond his
unhomely mansion, he can only imagine getting himself out by bleeding out on the floor and
thus emptying the house of its last life, Polly’s excepted.
But at his lowest, full of regret for the past and ready, like Mrs. Clennam’s house, to
collapse, Mr. Dombey is actually the readiest he has ever been to remove. As Hilary Schor
writes, Mr. Dombey’s fantasy of death “promises, in Dickensian fashion, that he is now ready to
live, which really means that he is ready to allow himself to be loved by his daughter”—which
also really means that he is ready to leave (Dickens and the Daughter 64). After all, the life and
love for which he is now ready cannot exist within the walls of a house that is both
“despoiled”—the adjective aptly signifying that the mansion is rid of its spoils and spoiled at
once—and papered with “to let” signs (D&S 908). In addition, while Mr. Dombey may not know
how to leave or where to go, he has in fact already “emotionally removed.” We saw this almost
upon his recognition of the memory of Florence’s “one prolonged low cry” in his private
apartment (285). There, not only does Mr. Dombey obsessively remember and mull over his
daughter’s cry, implying the internalization of this memory (and his regret), but the narrator
makes explicitly clear that that which Mr. Dombey had previously “exclude[d]” from within
himself “was heavy on his mind now” (29, 904). With his memories stored inside himself, with
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his changed attitude, Mr. Dombey—whether he knows it or not—is a packed trunk ready to be
transported.
What Mr. Dombey really needs, then, are both a moving company and a leasing agent to
set him in motion—to evacuate him and to find him a new home—and just as he grasps a
penknife in his “guilty hand,” ready to take his own life, his daughter arrives to fulfill both of
these roles (910). Having married Walter, voyaged with him to China, and borne a son at sea
“who taught [her] to come back,” Florence breaks into her father’s private apartment just as she
did on the night that she uttered her “one prolonged low cry,” this time apologizing for leaving
and for being so long away and begging her father, “Never let us be parted any more!” (911, 285,
911). She then brings about his bodily removal, so long impossible for that “removed Being”:
“He dressed himself for going out, with a docile submission to her entreaty; and walking with a
feeble gait, and looking back, with a tremble, at the room in which he had been so long shut up,
[…] passed out with her into the hall” (608, 911-2). Leading her father “to a coach that was
waiting at the door,” Florence “carr[ies] [her father] away” to the house that she and Walter now
inhabit “out of London, and away on the borders of a fresh heath,” sending “certain persons”
back later that evening to collect her father’s clothes and books, packed “with great care” by
Polly and Miss Tox (927, 912). In this way, Florence not only moves her father out of the house
in which he has been so long trapped—functioning as a gentler but no less efficient version of
the “men with carpet-caps” who left their footprints all over the mansion—but, like a leasing
agent, she rehouses him too (898).
*
Removal and Privilege in Dombey and Son
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If the process of Mr. Dombey’s emotional and physical removals makes anything clear, it
is his privilege. In the first place, he is able to stay in his house long enough to complete his
emotional removal—to “ramble through the rooms” of his house, to catalogue its archive of
memories, and to internalize those memories in order to carry them forward, which is a process
that takes multiple nights to complete (907). In many Victorian narratives of removal, this is not
the case. As we will see in Gaskell’s North and South, this is certainly not the case for an
unmarried Victorian daughter: when Margaret Hale’s father tells her that it is time to leave the
Helstone parsonage, she cannot refuse, remaining behind in the empty house until she is
emotionally ready to depart; rather, she must go at once. In this novel, too, many of the
characters have no choice in when they leave. Susan may “sob[] heartily” as she packs her
trunks, but she must leave after being fired by Mr. Dombey; Walter too may “hardly believe that
he […] [will] soon be lost to […] all he loved, and liked, and looked for, in his daily life,” but he
must board the Son and Heir for Barbados (670, 204). That Mr. Dombey is granted the time
necessary to complete his emotional removal before his physical removal is a result of the social
and gender privilege that he retains. Though Mrs. Chick worries about the house being let—
“there would be an ejectment, an action for Doe, and all sorts of things”—the truth is that no one
is there to drag him out of the house, as we might imagine would have been the actual case for
those with less social privilege in Victorian England (900-1). In addition, even at his lowest,
even as a squatter, Mr. Dombey is still supported by female labor. Polly Toodle, who moves
back into the mansion after the auction and replaces Mrs. Pipchin as housekeeper, delivers food
and drink to “one of those darkened rooms” each morning, and Miss Tox arrives daily to add
anonymous “little dainties” to his tray (D&S 608, 903). In this way, while Mrs. Chick may not
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understand why her brother does not “go at first instead of at last,” the answer is that Mr.
Dombey has the social privilege and the male privilege to stay (901).
In addition to being able to complete his emotional removal at his own pace, Mr.
Dombey’s privilege is also apparent in the circumstances of his physical removal. He may
succeed in getting out of the house, but women accomplish that act for him. Not only does
Florence quite literally lead him out of his private apartment and across the threshold of his
house, but Polly and Miss Tox pack his things, and Polly locks up the house, “deliver[ing] the
key at an agent’s hard-by” (913). In one light, it is true that Mr. Dombey has no real power in his
removal, and so he does come to seem connected to the male narrators and characters in the
periodical press’s narratives of removal, who find the gender hierarchies of home turned upside
down by a removal, the “bustling and victorious” housewife taking charge (“Moving House,”
Chambers’s 738). But as is to some extent true in the periodical press’s narratives, Mr.
Dombey’s lack of power here is really a sign of his privilege: women are doing the physical and
mental work of removal for him. This fact is equally apparent on the other side of his removal.
Florence brings him to a fully-prepared, fully-functioning new home—her home—which means
that, just as he had no work to do in terms of packing up his things or searching for a new
residence, he has no work to do in terms of furnishing and arranging a new residence or building
those “accustomed household grooves” which make a residence feel like home (Gaskell, North
and South 209).
10
Upon his arrival, he is simply and immediately “at home.”

10
Indeed, that the novel brings Mr. Dombey into the Gays’ home “on the borders of a fresh heath” and yet never
shows readers the work Florence did to set up that home is another way that the novel reveals its lack of interest in
the physical and material aspects of removal. But while at least we know that Susan packs her trunks and Walter
dismantles his bedroom of “his little stock of pictures and books,” here Florence’s work is not even summarized: it
is obscured (287). Her home seems to have sprung up “on the borders of a fresh heath” of its own accord.
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But even this is not all. Mr. Dombey’s privilege is also apparent after he arrives in his
new home—that is, during the recovery that follows his move. While removal is full of
emotional loss and even trauma for many other characters in the novel—breaking up “the little
society of the back parlour,” ripping characters from “all [they] loved, and liked, and looked for,
in [their] daily [lives]”— Mr. Dombey’s change of address is actually his salvation (497, 204).
His move quite literally saves his life, giving him, as it were, a new lease on life. Under this new
lease, Mr. Dombey not only convalesces, healing his “perilously sick” body, but he comes,
finally, to participate in a happy, loving home, which is the true salvation in this novel (928). At
first, Mr. Dombey practices this participation mentally: “What he would oftenest do was this: he
would recall that night he had so recently remembered, the night on which [Florence] came down
to his room, and would imagine that his heart smote him, and that he went out after her, and up
the stairs to seek her” (929). While for years Mr. Dombey organized his mansion as a purposely-
arranged place of division, locking doors, closing up a “whole suite of drawing-rooms,” and
banishing his daughter from the ground floor, he now, in wishing that he had gone after his
daughter, imagines the very circulation of bodies that his previous organization worked to limit
and even stop: “Still she was going on before. Still the restless mind went, following and
counting, ever farther, ever higher, as to the summit of a mighty tower that it took years to
climb” (34, 929).
11
With such imaginings, Mr. Dombey shows himself finally ready to
participate in “the performance of intimate family life” so important to the Victorian home but
possible only when family members can circulate in order to come together (Logan 218).

11
Mr. Dombey’s imaginings during his convalescence, in which he is “shattered in mind, and perilously sick in
body,” foreshadow Esther Summerson’s fever dreams, which involve a more nightmarish laborious climbing: “I am
almost afraid to hint at that time in my disorder—it seemed one long night, but I believe there were both nights and
days in it—when I laboured up colossal staircases, ever striving to reach the top, and ever turned, as I have seen a
worm in a garden path, by some obstruction, and labouring again” (D&S 928; Bleak House 555).
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Bedridden as he is, though, Mr. Dombey cannot actually move through his new home. Rather, he
can only keep his door open—Walter and Florence moving in and out of Mr. Dombey’s room
and also sometimes sitting there “together, as he liked to see them,” the baby in Florence’s
arms—in order to prevent his room from being the “cell” that his private apartment was (D&S
930, 907). Like the widower’s house that Florence long ago observed, then, we see that Walter
and Florence’s house is also run so as to encourage the kind of movement that brings bodies
together for family time. As a changed man, Mr. Dombey thus finally finds himself both living
and participating in a Victorian home as John Ruskin would have it—the house functioning as a
“shelter” from “division” and circulating both love and bodies in order to create the very
“community of feeling” that Mr. Dombey, the “removed Being,” once scorned (Ruskin 77; D&S
310, 608).
If, in light of his earlier mistreatment of his family, the novel grants Mr. Dombey a
surprising degree of privilege at the end of the novel, it is also true that the novel extends a
version of this same privilege to nearly every other character in its pages. In the first place, just
as Mr. Dombey is quickly rehoused on the other side of his move, so are the many characters
who are thrown into extreme and even traumatic removals.
12
Moving may be full of material and
emotional loss in Dombey and Son, but characters rarely struggle to find a new residence on the
other side of a move. Indeed, their relocations often seem easy and even inevitable: when the
Toodles’ Staggs’s Gardens home is demolished to make way for the railway, they successfully

12
It is also true that, in Dombey and Son, Dickens is interested in happily rehousing even those characters who have
not been thrown into movement. By the end of the novel, Dickens makes sure, for example, to unite Harriet Carker
and Mr. Morfin in marriage, Mr. Morfin presumably joining Harriet and her brother John in their loving home by
“the great highway” (522). In this way, Mr. Morfin no longer has to live alone, “producing the most dismal and
forlorn sounds out of his violoncello before going to bed” (881). Dickens’s passion for settling his many characters
in houses is striking in comparison with other novelists. In North and South, Gaskell is even content to leave the
residential fates of her heroine open-ended, for it is not clear where Margaret and Thornton will live after they
marry.
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relocate to railway company housing; when Susan is fired from the Dombey house, she
immediately knows that she will travel to Essex and stay there with her brother; when Florence
finds herself “in the streets” after leaving her father’s house, she heads straight for the
Midshipman, where she is rehoused (721); when the Dombey household staff leave in the lead-
up to the auction, they presumably have new service jobs lined up or old homes to which they
can return, for they all decline Mrs. Pipchin’s offer to “stay here on board wages for a week or
so, and make themselves useful” (896). Indeed, even the novel’s most unhouseable character—
the (seemingly) adulterous wife—is rehoused. Near the end of the novel, when Florence meets
Edith once more in the Brooke Street house, Cousin Feenix announces that he and Edith are soon
to depart for the South of Italy, “there to establish ourselves, in point of fact, until we go to our
long homes” (938). While critics have emphasized Edith’s escape “from the social world of the
novel and […] from the novel itself” after her vanishing acts from both the Dombey mansion and
the Dijon hotel, it is equally significant that readers are afforded one more glimpse of her when
she is on the verge of being rehoused (Yelin 317). Before Edith’s marriage to Mr. Dombey, she
and her mother lived a largely itinerant life, “visiting and resting here and there” (D&S 319). The
fact that she and her father-like protector, Cousin Feenix, are now going to “establish”
themselves in a home—even if that home is far from Victorian England, even if that home can
never be the Victorian family home—nonetheless pulls Edith firmly back into the novel’s plot of
rehousing all who remove.
In addition to rehousing its characters, the novel also works to reunite those families
whose members have had to move independently of one another, just as it reunites Mr. Dombey
and Florence. In this way, the novel undoes the emotional losses involved when “the little
society of the back parlour” is broken up and loved ones are “scattered far and wide” (497). This
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reunification is particularly true of those families that honor the Victorian domestic ideal, making
home what Ruskin was to call “the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from
all terror, doubt, and division” (Ruskin 77). As we have seen, both the Toodles and the residents
of the Midshipman serve as two of these families in the novel, running their homes so as to
cultivate “the performance of intimate family life”—and yet each home also serves as the site for
a great many individual removals (Logan 218). In both of the Toodle family homes, Polly packs
her “box” and takes leave of her husband and children to work at the Dombey mansion, and both
Walter and Sol depart the Midshipman with no guarantee of return (D&S 901). By the end of the
novel, however, these fissures are importantly undone, for—in the world of Dombey and Son—
the departed return home, whether they are coming from the far ends of the earth, as Walter and
Sol do, or whether they are coming from across London, as Polly does when she locks up the
Dombey mansion at the end of the novel and “[goes] home as fast as she could go; rejoicing in
the shrill delight that her unexpected arrival would occasion there” (913).
As we can see, then, though the Victorian vision of “[t]he family circle gathered around
the cheerful fire” is frequently frustrated in Dickens’s mid-century novel, this vision is not
written off but rather rewritten as “the family circle reassembled around the cheerful fire”—and
it is a vision that becomes a reality for the majority of the novel’s families (Fawcett 41).
Certainly, there is a finality to the reunification of Florence and Mr. Dombey that makes it
unique. When Florence breaks into her father’s private apartment to pull him out of it, she
insists, “Never let us be parted any more!,” and the novel gives us every indication that this will
be the case (D&S 911). Though the Gays may change residences based on the needs and
financial success of Walter’s new firm, Florence and Mr. Dombey will never move
independently of one another again. This, we sense, is not necessarily true of other families.
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Polly Toodle, for example, may occasionally have to pack her box and move outside the family
home to earn money for her family. Nonetheless, the novel gives us the sense that she—and her
husband, often away working for the railway company—will always come home. In this way,
though family members must move independently of one another, and though houses are
“strangely altered” by the absence of one or more family members, Dombey and Son insists that
the family can always be stitched back together again (369).
In so quickly rehousing the many characters who remove, in reuniting the many families
who splinter apart, Dickens’s novel extends some of the privilege that it grants Mr. Dombey to
the rest of its characters. In doing so, it ends up offering a single narrative end for two very
different narratives of removal. As we have seen, the first narrative involves an upper-middle-
class male character who is so privileged that, even when he is penniless and squatting in an
empty house, women come to care for him; who is so privileged that, even when he drives his
daughter away, she comes back for him. Meanwhile, the second narrative involves characters
who are at the whim of external forces, whether that be economic need or a rich merchant, and
who must move even when they do not want to, even when they are “sobbing heartily,” even
when they can “hardly believe” they must go (670, 204). In this way, Dombey and Son’s
narrative structure becomes the inverse of the house-hunting narratives published in the
periodical press, whose singular plot splinters into various narrative outcomes. Here, two very
different plots converge.
In using the same resolution for these different narratives of removal, Dombey and Son
offers readers an ending that is more conservative than the rest of the novel. There, as we saw,
Dickens expands the narrative of removal that we find again and again in the Victorian
periodical press, setting aside the removal of a whole family from one house to another to
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consider less definite and more complicated residential realities: individuals moving
independently of their families, moving with nothing and even losing all; houses not emptied at
once but becoming emptier, haunted by the memory of the departed. There, too, Dickens offers
readers glimpses of a terrifying world, one not unlike the world of mid-nineteenth-century
England: migrants pouring into cities, whole neighborhoods demolished and “vanished from the
earth” to make way for the railroad, shipwreck leading to countless lives-in-transit lost, shops
like Brogley’s full of the evidence of pervasive financial ruin, the working classes thrown into
residential movement thanks to the whims of the rich (244). And yet, in the end, the novel covers
this darker reality up, simplifying its narrative about the fragility of home and family and putting
forward a narrative in which people may have to move but the family circle can always
reconvene around the fire, regardless of whether that family belongs to the upper-middle classes,
the lower-middle classes, or the working classes.
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Chapter Three
“And all so changed”: Loss, Instability, and House Removal
in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South
Introduction
For most critics, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854-5) begins in earnest when its
heroine, Margaret Hale, reaches the industrial city of Milton-Northern in the novel’s seventh
chapter. And yet this is not where Elizabeth Gaskell begins her novel. Rather, she begins two
moves back—relocating her heroine first from London’s fashionable Harley Street to the rural
village of Helstone and then from Helstone to Milton-Northern, Gaskell’s own Manchester in all
but name. For some critics, these early chapters are false starts, demonstrating, in Martin
Dodsworth’s words, “first, the sort of novel [Gaskell] is not writing, and second, the sort of novel
she is writing” (10). On the other hand, for many critics, these early chapters are simply passed
over en route to a critical discussion of the long middle section of the novel which takes place in
Milton. Both the speculation about these early chapters and their absence from much scholarship
on the novel result, in large part, from the fact that criticism of Gaskell’s novel has tended to
focus on the industrial plot and the marriage plot, which are rooted thematically and spatially in
Milton, and on the complicated relationship between these two plots.
1
Indeed, for many critics,
the Milton section is the novel.

1
Louis Cazamian first wrote about North and South as a “social problem novel” in The Social Novel in England
1830-1850: Dickens, Disraeli, Mrs. Gaskell, Kingsley, trans. Martin Fido (1903; rpt. Boston: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1973). See Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958) for
another influential reading. For a discussion of North and South’s marriage plot and the marriage plot’s relationship
to the industrial plot, see Deirdre David’s Fictions of Resolution in Three Victorian Novels (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1981), Judith Lowder Newton’s Women, Power, and Subversion: Social Strategies in British
Fiction, 1778-1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981), Catherine Gallagher’s The Industrial Reformation
of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832-1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985),
and Hilary Schor’s Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 1992) for influential readings.
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But to focus only on the Milton section of North and South—on the social and economic
struggles between the so-called “masters and men,” on Margaret’s relationship with John
Thornton, and on her actions in the public sphere—is to miss the fundamental work of Gaskell’s
novel (83).
2
From Harley Street to Helstone, from Helstone to Milton, from Milton back to
Harley Street, from Harley Street back to Helstone back to Harley Street and then on to Cromer
and then back to Harley Street, the novel moves its heroine with dizzying frequency, leaving her
on the verge of moving back to Milton once again by the end of its narrative. In considering the
entirety of North and South—and especially its early chapters—we come to see that the Milton
section of the novel is only one part of a larger story about Margaret Hale’s movement and her
many departures and returns.
3
Indeed, as much as North and South’s narrative involves an
industrial plot and a marriage plot, it is also fundamentally a narrative of house removal.
As a narrative of removal, North and South provides a full investigation of both physical
removal—or the process by which a resident moves both her body and material possessions from
one residence to another—and emotional removal—or the process by which a resident

2
There are certainly critics who have argued for the importance of these early chapters. For example, Rosemarie
Bodenheimer writes that “the consistency of the narrative emphasis on change itself makes these early chapters both
emotionally coherent and socially significant” (“North and South” 283).
3
In arguing for the importance of house removal to this novel, this chapter is connected to a branch of criticism
which explores issues of mobility in North and South. While there has been no critical consideration of house
removal’s role in Gaskell’s novel, Wendy Parkins does foreground Margaret’s movements in her discussion of the
novel, arguing that North and South “represents the cultural experience of modernity as movement” and that
“Margaret’s aptitude for re-location [suggests] that she is ultimately ‘at home’ in modernity” (22, 23). See Parkins’s
Mobility and Modernity in Women’s Novels, 1850s-1930s: Women Moving Dangerously (Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 22-33. More common to this branch of criticism on issues of
mobility in North and South are discussions of the novel’s depictions of the possibilities of public action for women.
See, for example, Barbara Leah Harman’s “In Promiscuous Company: Female Public Appearance in Elizabeth
Gaskell’s North and South” (Victorian Studies 31.3 [1988]: 351-374), Deborah Epstein Nord’s Walking the
Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), and
Elizabeth Starr’s “‘A Great Engine for Good’: The Industry of Fiction in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton and
North and South” (Studies in the Novel 34.4 [2002]: 385-402). For discussions of mobility not limited to the issue of
public action for women, see Abigail Dennis’s “Mobile Narrative, Spatial Mediation, and Gaskell’s Urban Rustics
in North and South” (Modern Humanities Research Association Working Papers in the Humanities 4 [2009]: 43-54)
and Sue Zemka’s “Brief Encounters: Street Scenes in Gaskell’s Manchester (English Literary History 76.3 [2009]:
793-819).
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psychologically and emotionally reckons with the end of her residence in a home. Unlike Charles
Dickens in Dombey and Son (1846-8), who concerns himself primarily with the act of emotional
removal, Gaskell is careful to represent the material realities of moving house. She details both
the physical and mental labor of removal, paying attention to everything from packing cases and
house-hunting to travel itineraries and rental prices as she does so. At the same time, in
representing the process of physical removal, Gaskell makes clear that each act of moving house
brings a fundamental upheaval with it. Indeed, in this novel, a change of address changes
everything—from the rules of domesticity to the immaterial sense of home that builds up in a
space over time. In this way, we are able to see the complexity of Gaskell’s depiction of the
private sphere, a complexity which has been largely overlooked in those readings of the novel
which focus on the scenes set in Milton. Reading North and South as a narrative of removal
reminds us that there is not one private sphere in the novel but many; that home is not the solid
space of marriage, family, and household goods but a fragile material and emotional construction
that takes work to build and to dismantle; and that each act of house removal requires a complete
renegotiation of one’s understandings, for nothing in the novel’s world proves stable.
At the same time that Gaskell represents in exquisite detail the material realities of
physical removal and explores removal’s uncanny effect on domestic space, she also investigates
the emotional toll of moving house on her heroine, Margaret Hale. Indeed, Gaskell’s primary
interest in North and South is her heroine’s subjective experience of removal.
4
While Gaskell

4
Other critics have certainly argued for the centrality of Margaret Hale’s interiority and development to North and
South. In Scheherezade in the Marketplace, Hilary Schor argues that North and South “is perhaps the most clearly
centered of all Gaskell’s novels in its heroine’s expanding consciousness” (120). See also Rosemarie Bodenheimer’s
“North and South: A Permanent State of Change” (Nineteenth-Century Fiction 34.3 [1979]: 281-301), Terence
Wright’s Elizabeth Gaskell ‘We Are Not Angels’: Realism, Gender, Values (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire
and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), Jill Matus’s Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), and Barbara Hardy’s “Two Women: Some Forms
of Feeling in North and South” (The Gaskell Society Journal 25 [2011]: 19-29).

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makes clear that removal entails sweeping change, her heroine can only experience removal as a
dangerous act, one that threatens to open a deep sense of loss and instability within herself. As an
unmarried middle-class Victorian woman who remains dependent on her family for much of the
novel, Margaret lacks control over her residence and her removals—and yet she continues to
hope that her private, subjective understandings of self, home, and movement will offer her
ballast amidst the sense of unsteadiness that moving house opens in her life. In attempting to
control and manipulate how she conceives of her identity, how she understands her relationship
to place, and how she understands what her departures mean, Margaret thus works to protect
herself. For much of the novel, she uses her understanding of her childhood home, Helstone, to
achieve a fragile sense of stability in her life and within herself, insisting that both her home and
self are unchanging even as she is moved around the country. As Margaret faces loss after loss,
however, this insistence gives way to an overwhelming sense of instability. Indeed, while near
the end of the novel Margaret is able to engage in a series of radical revisions to her sense of self,
finally landing on a self-understanding that allows her to move without feeling internal loss,
North and South is not Dombey and Son, a novel that ends in stable domesticity, and Gaskell
cannot promise her heroine a life free of instability and loss, as Dickens seems to promise Mr.
Dombey. Rather, the novel, in leaving Margaret on the verge of entering marriage and returning
to Milton, makes clear at its end that its heroine’s work is far from over, and while many
questions about Margaret’s future go unanswered, the one thing that seems certain is that she will
continue to be faced with change, and that she will cope with and adapt to this change.
If the novel is far more tolerant of instability than critics have recognized, this does not
mean that it is willing to explore truly extreme forms of loss and change. There is no denying
that Gaskell’s novel carefully chronicles the material and financial exigencies of home and
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moving home, but it never places Margaret Hale in any truly insecure position, and its
engagement with the many forms of social, financial, and material instability that other
characters face within its pages—especially the Milton millworker families—remains limited.
Margaret may represent new forms of gendered and psychological mobility, but the novel leaves
her securely housed within the middle class both financially and socially, and in doing so, it
misses an opportunity to place her sense of instability within a larger Victorian context.
Nonetheless, the novel’s confrontation with the unknown is perhaps its most striking feature, and
it is that with which we will begin.
*
“Only daughter of Helstone parsonage”: Removal and the Threat of Loss
When North and South opens, eighteen-year-old Margaret Hale has been living in
London with her Aunt Shaw and cousin Edith for the last nine years, serving as Edith’s
companion and receiving an education provided by “masters” and “governesses” (20). However,
Edith’s marriage to Captain Lennox and her aunt’s journey to Italy quickly signal the end of
Margaret’s long residence with them at 96 Harley Street. The novel’s second chapter thus finds
Margaret on a train with her father, moving back to the rural Helstone parsonage where her
parents reside. Margaret’s first move in North and South’s narrative is one that she very much
desires, for her childhood home is “the place and the life she had longed for for years” (16).
Nonetheless, she quickly begins to experience a sense of loss in the wake of her departure from
her aunt’s house. As the narrator notes, “The farewells so hurriedly taken, amongst all the other
good-byes, of those she had lived with so long, oppressed her now with a sad regret for the times
that were no more; it did not signify what those times had been, they were gone never to return”
(16). Margaret’s thinking here might simply indicate that she is mourning the end of a phase of
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her life: she will never be a resident of 96 Harley Street again, sharing the intimacies of daily life
with her aunt and cousin. But the narrator’s striking phrase “it did not signify what those times
had been” has much deeper and more unsteadying implications, the verb phrase “did not signify”
indicating that “those times” are so far “gone” that they no longer even have significance for
Margaret.
5

In particular, Margaret’s sense that “it did not signify what those times had been” reveals
the permanent sense of closure and loss that removal brings with it for Gaskell’s heroine (16).
Just days before the train ride to Helstone, Margaret is able to go upstairs to the “old nursery” at
the top of her aunt’s house and “[look] round,” recalling her arrival in its space:
She remembered the dark, dim look of the London nursery, presided over by an
austere and ceremonious nurse, who was terribly particular about clean hands and
torn frocks. She recollected the first tea up there—separate from her father and
aunt, who were dining somewhere down below an infinite depth of stairs […] Oh!
well did the tall stately girl of eighteen remember the tears shed with such wild
passion of grief by the little girl of nine, as she hid her face under the bed-clothes,
in that first night; and how she was bidden not to cry by the nurse, because it
would disturb Miss Edith; and how she had cried as bitterly, but more quietly, till
her newly-seen, grand, pretty aunt had come softly upstairs with Mr. Hale to show
him his little sleeping daughter. (8)

Though Margaret explicitly notes only her first lonely hours in her aunt’s house, the fact that the
narrator admits that Margaret “had got to love the old nursery” and “looked all round, with a
kind of cat-like regret, at the idea of leaving it for ever in three days” suggests that she also
remembers other assumedly happier memories that took place there as well (9). In the novel’s
first chapter, then, Margaret proves immediately able to recall nine years’ worth of memories in
the nursery—and yet her regret there “at the idea of leaving it for ever” already alerts readers to

5
Gaskell’s use of the verb “signify” comes from the Oxford English Dictionary’s fifth definition of the verb: “intr.
To be of importance or consequence; to have significance; to avail, matter. Chiefly in negative or interrogative
constructions” (“signify”).
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the danger of removal. After all, Margaret can hardly assume that she will never visit her aunt’s
house again; rather, her “cat-like regret, at the idea of leaving it for ever” involves what she will
lose in ending her residency there—which is the deep and familiar sense of her past that she feels
in the nursery (9). As the scene on the train clarifies, in Margaret’s sense that “it did not signify
what those times had been, they were gone never to return,” it is as if her history in her aunt’s
house has vanished from her memory, and the particularities of the nine years that she spent
there are now missing from her sense of self. In the remarkable contrast between the scene in the
nursery and the scene on the train, it becomes clear that removal for Margaret is an unsteadying
act full of loss. While this loss is expansive—sometimes felt internally, sometimes felt
externally—and varies with each of Margaret’s moves over the course of the novel, here it not
only launches her into movement, dividing her from the whole known world of a house that she
has inhabited for nine years, but it threatens to change and even erode her very self.

If Margaret’s first move in North and South makes clear how dangerous Margaret
perceives the act of removal to be, it also makes clear that she does not passively submit to this
threat but works to protect herself against it. At the very moment on the train when Margaret
begins to experience a sense of loss, she intentionally silences her “sad regret for those times that
were no more” and “[takes] her mind away with a wrench from the recollection of the past to the
bright serene contemplation of the hopeful future” at Helstone (16). This textual moment makes
clear that while Margaret’s physical removal—or the process by which she removes both her
body and material possessions from her aunt’s house—is well underway and cannot be stopped,
her emotional removal—or the process by which she psychologically and emotionally reckons
with the end of her tenancy in her aunt’s house—proves both malleable and within the realm of
Margaret’s control. Though Margaret is eighteen years old, her life is still very much defined by
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“the dependent element of a girl’s life,” as Judith Rowbotham puts it in her discussion of
Victorian girlhood (55). This “dependent element,” of course, is what it means to be a Victorian
daughter, “filial obedience” functioning as the “dominant ordering” of her days (54-5). While
most middle-class Victorian daughters stayed in their parents’ homes until marriage and thus
exercised their “filial obedience” under the family roof, Margaret’s “filial obedience” has been
tied to both place and movement since childhood: she has had and continues to have little control
over her place of residence or when that residence changes.
6
That was true when she was nine
years old—when her parents uprooted her from the Helstone parsonage and sent her to London;
that was true for the nine years that “her aunt’s house had been considered as her home,”
Gaskell’s use of the passive verb construction a subtle reminder of Margaret’s limited agency;
and that is true in the novel’s first chapters, Margaret’s move back to Helstone having been
spurred not by her own desire to return to her parents’ home but by her cousin Edith’s marriage
(6). While Margaret has no real ability to determine where she lives or when she moves, her
ability to “[take] her mind away with a wrench” from her “sad regret for the times that were no
more” thus offers her an important form of control, for it allows her to manipulate her emotional
removal and thus her private understanding of removal’s effects on the self (16).
In particular, Margaret’s mental strategy involves turning toward the end point of her
move—toward “the bright serene contemplation of the hopeful future” at Helstone—and using
her understanding of Helstone to make her emotional removal from Harley Street not only easier

6
As Patricia Branca writes, “Most middle-class women spent their entire lives in their mother’s home” until
marriage (5). Certainly some middle-class Victorian girls did move outside the family home—attending boarding
school, for example. As Deborah Goram notes, however, “Usually if a girl were sent to school, it would be for a
period of one or two years, when she was in her early teens” (22). In this way, what makes Margaret’s experience
unique from other Victorian girls’ experiences is both her absence from her parents’ home and the duration of her
absence, which is nine years in total.
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but even insignificant (16).
7
While the Helstone parsonage has existed as a distant, almost
peripheral home for the last nine years of her life—accessible only during holidays, when she
travelled there “with a great box of books,” and “at that time of all times for yearning and
longing, just before the sharp senses lose their outlines in sleep”—she nonetheless claims it as
“her own dear home” (20, 16). In part, there is nothing surprising about this: Helstone was
Margaret’s childhood home, and it is also the home to which she and her family must have
anticipated her returning—that is, if she did not accept a marriage proposal while she lived in
Harley Street (this eventual prospect certainly being one of the reasons that Mr. and Mrs. Hale
must have had for sending their daughter away). And yet this view of Helstone as “her own dear
home” also allows Margaret to believe that she inherently belongs to it and can effortlessly and
uncomplicatedly return to it after her long absence. According to Margaret’s view, this is a home
that has always been there, waiting for her to return to and resume “the important post of only
daughter of Helstone parsonage” (6). This is most likely not a new strategy for Margaret but
rather one that must have been important to her during the near decade that she lived in Harley
Street. Understanding the Helstone parsonage as a home that would eventually welcome her back
would have helped Margaret psychologically grapple with both the knowledge that her parents
sent her away in the first place and the fragile and temporary nature of her position as Edith’s
companion. And now that her role as Edith’s companion has finally come to an end, viewing

7
In a way, the novel has already made this exact gesture with her physical removal. Though her physical removal
occurs largely in silence (other than the mention of her train journey with her father, we are told little else about it),
it occurs in silence because it is easy for Margaret, and looking ahead to Helstone makes it easy for her. Certainly
Margaret has little portable property in 96 Harley Street to call her own and thus little to pack. But in addition to
this, Margaret is importantly returning to her parents’ fully-formed home—to her father’s study, to the dining room
with its sideboard, to her childhood bedroom, and to the “little drawing-room” with its chintz curtains and “well-
bound little-read English classics” on its “small book shelves” (23, 20). In this way, it matters very little to Margaret
what she brings with her or what she must leave behind in Harley Street because she is going to a home where she
will have everything that she needs.
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Helstone as her true and permanent home gives Margaret a reason not to dwell on the home and
the “times that were no more” that she has lost in Harley Street—or on the fact that her family
has set her in motion yet again (16). She can focus instead on the fact that this is a removal that
she ultimately welcomes: she is going to “her own dear home” to which she has always belonged
(16).
In addition to believing that Helstone is her permanent home, Margaret also understands
her childhood home to be an unchanging place—and one that can even return her to an
unchanged self. While still in Harley Street, Margaret tells Henry Lennox that Helstone is “like a
village […] in one of Tennyson’s poems,” turning it into a pastoral lyric setting “set out of time
altogether,” as Rosemarie Bodenheimer phrases it (Gaskell, N&S 12; Bodenheimer, “North and
South” 283). In viewing Helstone as a stable, unchanging place, Margaret allows herself to
believe that the Helstone she left is the same one to which she is returning—which allows her to
believe that she has not missed anything during her time away in London. At the same time,
believing that Helstone is a stable, unchanging place also allows Margaret to believe that she can
encounter and interact with it as she used to before she moved away. We see this most clearly,
upon Margaret’s return to Helstone, in the pleasure that Margaret takes in her freedom to move
through the New Forest. While in London Aunt Shaw “had circumscribed Margaret’s
independence,” requiring that “a footman should accompany Edith and Margaret, if they went
beyond Harley Street or the immediate neighbourhood,” Margaret now wanders the forest freely,
“[going] along there with a bounding fearless step, that occasionally broke into a run, if she were
in a hurry, and occasionally stilled into perfect repose” (71, 70, 71). These walks are the same
walks that Margaret took as a child when she “used to tramp along by her father’s side” and then
“out on the broad commons into the warm scented light, seeing multitudes of wild, free, living
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creatures, revelling in the sunshine” (17). In emphasizing that such walks “realised all
Margaret’s anticipations” for the resumption of her life in Helstone, the narrative makes clear
that Margaret believes her pleasure in and affinity with the landscape and customs of the place
are unchanged—which also means that she herself is in some fundamental way unchanged. In
other words, though Harley Street helped her grow into a “tall stately girl of eighteen,” she can
insist in these moments that she is still deep down the “untamed” girl “from the forest” that she
was at age nine (17).
In examining Margaret’s private understanding of her childhood home, in addition to her
understanding of her emotional removal from Harley Street, we come to see her self-
understanding. On one hand, in feeling the internal loss of those “times that were no more” on
the train, Margaret understands herself to be capable of eroding, of being internally eaten away
by the act of removal (16). But on the other hand, in believing that Helstone gives her access to
an unchanged self, she also believes that she can nonetheless maintain a stable, coherent core
across time—a kind of foundational self that is not in danger of changing or eroding, so long as
Helstone remains her “own dear home” (16). In this way, while her self-understanding leaves her
vulnerable to a certain degree of diminution, it also provides her with an important degree of
protection. In basing her sense of self in Helstone and believing that Helstone connects her with
a foundational self, she can use her childhood home both to minimalize the sense of loss that she
experienced through her removal from her aunt’s house and, more broadly, to assure herself that
she has not been too changed by her long residence in Harley Street.
As we can see, Margaret’s understanding of Helstone is deeply bound up with and
important to her understandings of both self and removal. At the same time, Margaret’s
understanding of Helstone remains just that—a subjective understanding, incapable of changing
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the external realities of her life. Gaskell makes this particularly clear when, not even three
months into Margaret’s residence there, she sets in motion her heroine’s second removal in the
novel—this time from Helstone itself. Just hours after Henry Lennox proposes to Margaret, Mr.
Hale confesses to her that he is leaving the Church of England, relinquishing his post as vicar
and the parsonage that accompanies that post, and moving the family to the northern industrial
city of Milton-Northern where he will work as a tutor. While readers have perhaps already
sensed the ways in which Margaret’s understanding of Helstone sits uneasily next to the external
realities of her life, Gaskell brings their incongruity into sharp relief, and part of the way she
does this is through narrative structure itself. In addition to the fact that Mr. Hale’s
announcement of the family’s impending removal comes only three months into Margaret’s
residence at Helstone, Gaskell also significantly collapses the representation of these three
months: Margaret returns home in the second chapter and her father makes his announcement at
the beginning of the fourth. While Gaskell’s method of hurrying readers through the time of
Margaret’s residence at Helstone likely contributes to the critical tendency to write about North
and South’s opening chapters as false starts or to ignore them altogether, it certainly makes
Margaret’s loss of her childhood home all the more sudden and profound. Though her parents
have lived in the parsonage for twenty years, it is not the family’s permanent home, and though
Margaret would like to believe that all is stable in her life and that she is securely settled in place,
that is not the actual case. Rather, thanks in part to her rejection of Henry Lennox’s proposal, she
remains an unmarried Victorian daughter who will have to move when her parents move—still
ruled as she is by “the dependent element of a girl’s life” (Rowbotham 55).
However, even as Gaskell brings the incongruity of Margaret’s subjective understanding
of Helstone and the external realities of her life into sharp relief, Gaskell also makes clear
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Margaret’s insistence on that subjective understanding, for Margaret clings to it in spite of her
family’s impending removal. Only two weeks after her father’s announcement, at the very
moment that Margaret and her parents drive away towards the train station and leave an empty
parsonage behind, Margaret notes that the parsonage looks “more homelike than ever in the
morning sun that glittered on its windows, each belonging to some well-loved room” (56). Here
she explicitly denies her experiences of the day before when movers emptied the parsonage of
the Hales’ portable property and Margaret found herself suddenly estranged from its space, the
house morphing around her into something other than home even when she was still technically
a resident and thus still technically at home. As the narrator noted, “The rooms had a strange
echoing sound in them,—and the light came harshly and strongly in through the uncurtained
windows,—seeming already unfamiliar and strange” (52). Indeed, this experience of watching
her beloved home turn uncanny around her was so traumatic that it resulted in physiological
distress, Margaret close to “crying out with pain” and her heart “aching all the time, with a heavy
pressure that no sighs could lift off or relieve” (53). Though on the next day Margaret feels “[a]
sting at [her] heart” when she and her parents drive away, this is not the intense bodily distress of
the day before when she began to feel the loss of her home (56). Rather, on the day of her
family’s departure, she reasserts the parsonage’s homeliness, calling it “more homelike than
ever,” as if she and her parents are leaving their home intact—as if they are only one return
journey away from sailing back “into the quiet harbour of home” (56, 51).
In turning away from the unfolding loss of the day before and anxiously reaffirming the
parsonage as her home even at the moment that she and her family drive away, Margaret repeats
the fundamental gesture that she made in the wake of her departure from Harley Street. Just as
she did on the train from London to Helstone, Margaret “[takes] her mind away with a wrench”
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from the sense of loss that removal is opening in her life, controlling her understanding of her
emotional removal in order to protect herself from that which is beyond her power (16). This
time, however, instead of revising her emotional removal, Margaret simply refuses to undergo it.
While Margaret was able to revise her emotional removal from Harley Street, making it easy and
insignificant and minimalizing the sense of internal loss that she felt as a result of it, she has no
way to revise this emotional removal, for it brings with it a far greater loss—the loss of “her own
dear home” (16). As we have seen, Margaret uses Helstone to feel anchored in the world and to
achieve an unchanged, undiminished sense of self. To give Helstone up would mean that
Margaret must accept that her home is not stable and, consequently, that she herself is not stable
either, but capable of eroding entirely with each movement of her life. Unprepared to rethink her
worldview and sense of self so entirely, she therefore simply refuses to undergo her emotional
removal from Helstone, shutting it down before she can feel the loss of “the times that were no
more” as she did on the train (16). Here, Margaret’s emotional and physical removals thus split
apart, her physical removal carrying on—for she has no choice in that matter—and her emotional
removal indefinitely postponed. While in Dombey and Son Mr. Dombey has the ability as an
upper-middle-class man to delay his physical removal, refusing to leave his mansion until he
figures out how to grapple with his emotional removal, Margaret is an unmarried woman
dependent on her father. Because of her social position, she does not have the privilege of
staying put until she figures out how to navigate the difficult process of emotional removal. She
must complete her physical removal with her family, so she does what she can to protect herself,
refusing to accept the emotional reality of her departure—refusing, indeed, to accept what she
admitted to herself the night before as she stood one last time in the garden: “And all so
changed!” (53).
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*
“How in the world are we to manage removal?”: The Labor of a Household Move
To say that Margaret must complete her physical removal with her family is, of course,
an understatement. More accurately, she must complete the physical removal for her family, as
so much of the labor falls on her shoulders. In this way, the narratives of North and South and
Dombey and Son both put the onus of the work of a physical removal on the daughter, Florence
Dombey planning and carrying out (albeit largely off the page) her father’s removal from his
mansion to her house “out of London, and away on the borders of a fresh heath,” and Margaret
planning and carrying out her family’s removal from the parsonage to Milton-Northern (Dickens,
D&S 927). In Gaskell’s novel, both of Margaret’s parents shy away from the work of removal:
Mr. Hale proves incapable of making just about any decision beyond that to leave the Church
and move the family to Milton-Northern, and Mrs. Hale—upon being told of the impending
move—is immediately resistant to the idea of “a manufacturing town, all chimneys and dirt,” and
overwhelmed by the logistics of removal, having lived in the parsonage for all twenty years of
her married life (45). She cries to Margaret, “How in the world are we to manage removal? I
never removed in my life, and only a fortnight to think about it!”—a sentiment that echoes one
Gaskell herself made just a few months into her marriage in 1832 as she was setting up house at
14 Dover Street (46). Writing to a friend and expressing sympathy for the family’s impending
removal, she wrote, “I am just now feeling so doubtful as to the success of my housekeeping, and
little daily cares, that the very idea of removal sounds alarming” (Gaskell, Further Letters 22).
With Mr. Hale avoiding his family’s removal and Mrs. Hale, like a young Gaskell,
“alarmed” by it, “the management of the affairs” is thus left to Margaret (Further Letters 22;
North and South 49). In part, such a narrative move is endemic to the plot of North and South, as
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Margaret is frequently forced to take charge of situations for her family, despite her own lack of
independence. As Rosemarie Bodenheimer writes, “The predominant sense of Margaret’s life—
one which makes it an unusual account of a Victorian heroine—is that of a person forced
continually into making decisions, alone and under pressure” (“North and South” 293). But this
narrative move also allows Gaskell to turn the attention of her realist novel to the process of
physical removal. While Gaskell is profoundly interested in representing and exploring
Margaret’s emotional process of removal, Gaskell’s narration of the Hales’ removal to Milton
makes clear that Gaskell is also profoundly interested in representing and exploring the process
of physical removal. With this cross-country move, Gaskell details both the mental and physical
labor that moving house entails—labor that is primarily performed by women and domestic
servants and labor that other Victorian narratives of removal often ignore. At the same time, in
these details of physical removal, the extent to which Gaskell limits the instability that the Hales
face, providing them with a crucial safety net during this cross-country move, is also made clear.
If we survey the novel’s fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth chapters, we are able to find
Margaret’s whole process of removal through the details that Gaskell weaves into her
narrative—a process that critics of the novel have largely ignored. This process begins with
planning. While Margaret’s physical removal from Harley Street presumably entailed the simple
packing of a trunk (one of Aunt Shaw’s servants no doubt carrying it to the train station for her),
Margaret quickly finds that this “serious” removal from the south of England to the industrial
north requires a great many more “arrangements,” for “every day brought some question,
momentous to her, and to those whom she loved, to be settled” (49, 51). Armed with only an
atlas, a candle, and her own will, Margaret eventually devises a plan “to pack up the furniture so
that it can be left at the railway station” and to go into lodgings at Heston, a seaside town near
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Milton where Mrs. Hale can convalesce while Margaret and her father house hunt (50-51). With
her plan in place, Margaret then begins to act. She instructs the cook and Charlotte, the
housemaid, in how to pack the family’s belongings into packing-cases and presumably hires the
four men who work as movers on moving day, carrying the Hales’ property out of the house
under Margaret’s direction and then off to the train station. We might also assume that she
arranges for the carriage that collects her family on the day of their departure, as well as the
London hotel in which they pass a night. Once the Hales travel north, Margaret then conducts the
house hunt in Milton by her father’s side as they “[go] through their list,” a list that Margaret no
doubt created (60). She even decides for her indecisive father which house to rent, telling him,
“We must go back to the second, I think. That one,—in Crampton” (60). In addition, Margaret
plans the use of each room in the Hale family’s new terrace house, making sure her parents will
each have the domestic spaces that they need, and she works with Dixon, her mother’s maid and
the only servant who accompanies the Hales to Milton, for multiple days after they move in,
“unpacking and arranging” the family’s portable property (65).
These details of Margaret’s planning and actions—slipped into the text, insinuated in the
text—certainly make North and South “realistic”—if part of realism in the novel is the inclusion
of such circumstantial detail. But it would do a disservice to Gaskell’s novel to say that such
details are only circumstantial. As Catherine Gallagher writes, “We know the details are
significant because they are given,” and here such details of movers and packing-cases and travel
itineraries allow Gaskell to highlight the mental and physical labor involved in moving a middle-
class household in mid-century Victorian England—labor, indeed, that other texts often obscure
(179). In Dombey and Son, for example, physical removal is frequently figured as the simple
crossing of a threshold, readers usually only seeing characters at the moment that they leave their
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homes. Little attention is given to the work of planning a move, packing, house hunting,
traveling between houses, or unpacking in the new house, rendering that work both illegible and
seemingly insignificant.
In the shorter narratives of removal published in the periodical press, on the other hand,
readers are given a fuller picture of the physical and material realities of moving house—and yet
even though the labor of removal is represented, the laborers themselves are remarkably
obscured. Frequently, this is a result of the (male) authors’ passive verb constructions. The
anonymous author of an 1866 Chambers’s Journal article entitled “Moving House” writes that
“[o]ne by one the carpets are stripped off” and “[o]ne by one the pictures are removed” without
ever telling his readers who is stripping off the carpets or removing the pictures (738). Similarly,
in his 1856 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine article, “Touching Temporalities,” G. C. Swayne
writes, “Your books have all been rammed into tea-chests and packed like sardines”—as if no
specific hand had actually “rammed” the books into the chests (593). The passive verb
constructions in these periodical pieces result, of course, from the fact that the male narrators or
characters are not the ones doing the work. Rather, the labor of preparing for and carrying out a
removal exists as an inconvenience that is occurring around them—a distressing annoyance to
complain about and lament rather than necessary work in which to participate. In both this
popular literature and in historical reality, it was the women of the family, the servants of the
household (many of whom are also women), and hired male day laborers who were actually
carrying out the work of middle-class removals, as the anonymous author of an 1852 Household
Words article entitled “Moving” inadvertently makes clear when he catalogues the “miseries of
moving” for male readers, the first of which is that “several days before you perceive any
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necessity, your wife orders the curtains to be removed from your study, and your Turkey carpet
to be carried away on the back of a sturdy fellow who promises to beat it” (Jerrold and Wills 62).
Instead of obscuring the labor or the laborers of physical removal, Gaskell’s novel
provides a realistic look at moving house. In those chapters which narrate the Hales’ removal
from the Helstone parsonage to a terrace house in Milton’s Crampton neighborhood, Gaskell
represents the mental and physical labor of removal, while also tying that work to the laborers
themselves—namely Margaret, whose work is mostly mental and organizational, and the cook,
housemaid, hired movers, and Dixon, whose work is physical.
8
She also represents the duration
of this work, subtly and repeatedly pointing to the time required by Margaret and others to carry
out this move. Indeed, this required time is precisely what Mr. Hale cannot see—but what is so
glaringly obvious to Margaret, to Mrs. Hale, and to Dixon, who all comment on the fact that—
thanks to Mr. Hale’s doing—they have only two weeks to plan a cross-country relocation of their
home and their lives. As the narrator notes, “A fortnight was a very short time to make
arrangements for so serious a removal”—something that “almost any one but Mr. Hale would
have had practical knowledge enough to see” (49). Indeed, a fortnight is so short a time that the
Hales can only use it to pack up and transport their belongings; their house hunt occupies
additional time beyond this fortnight. In addition, Gaskell also makes clear that the process of
physical removal does not end with the family’s arrival in their new home. After that comes the

8
This is not to say that Gaskell is alone among novelists in representing the labor and the laborers involved in a
physical removal. Anthony Trollope, for example, also renders the labor and the laborers of removal legible in The
Small House at Allington (1864). There Mrs. Dale and her daughters, Lily and Bell, begin to pack their possessions
in anticipation of their move. As the narrator notes:
The assistance of the village carpenter in filling certain cases that he had made was all that they
knew how to obtain beyond that of their own two servants. Every article had to pass through the
hands of some one of the family; and as they felt almost overwhelmed by the extent of the work to
be done, they began it much sooner than was necessary, so that it became evident as they
advanced in their work, that they would have to pass a dreadfully dull, stupid, uncomfortable week
at last, among their boxes and cases, in all the confusion of dismantled furniture. (538)
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work of “unpacking and arranging,” which is a serious labor in and of itself and which requires
its own time (65). As the narrator notes once the Hales have taken possession of their “Crampton
Crescent” terrace house, “Margaret and Dixon had been at work for two days […], but
everything inside the house still looked in disorder” (171, 65). The work of removal, as Gaskell
demonstrates in North and South, is no small feat—and certainly no fast feat. This is why the
whole process of physical removal unfolds over four chapters, the very structure of Gaskell’s
novel pointing to the fact moving house is not a singular narrative event but rather a sequence of
narrative events or labors that unfold over time.
As we can see, Gaskell renders visible the extraordinary time and effort that went into
moving a household—an event which is the first of its kind for the Hales and yet which
happened each quarter day for countless middle-class Victorian families.
9
The labor represented
in Gaskell’s novel no doubt chimed with readers’ own experiences of removal—and for the
original readers of North and South, it might have even uncannily mirrored their daily lives. Of
the original installments published in Dickens’s weekly magazine Household Words, those
chapters which narrate the planning and carrying out of the Hales’ removal from Helstone and
their Milton house hunt appeared in the September 16 and September 23, 1854, editions.
10
This
means that they were published in the days leading up to the September 29 Michaelmas quarter
day—a time when many of Household Words’ middle-class readers were no doubt preparing for
their own removals.
11
In addition, the chapter of North and South which narrates the unpacking

9
In Victorian England, the middle class typically rented properties on “yearly and quarterly tenancies,” and so the
four annual quarter days—which fall on March 25, June 24, September 29, and December 25—were common
moving days for middle-class renters (Daunton 138).
10
Chapter V was published as part of the third installment of North and South on September 16, 1854. Chapters VI
and VII appeared as the fourth installment on September 23, 1854.
11
We can assume this was very much intentional on Dickens’s part, as Household Words more than once featured
topical pieces on removal in the lead up to or aftermath of other quarter days. See, for example, “Moving,” which
appeared in Household Words on October 2, 1852—three days after the Michaelmas quarter day. Its anonymous
author concludes by wishing readers “health in that earthly paradise—the new home” (63).
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that Margaret and Dixon do in the Hales’ new house appeared in the September 30, 1854,
edition—when middle-class readers who had just moved were presumably also in their new
homes, overwhelmed with their own unpacking.
12
Regardless of whether Gaskell’s readers were
in the middle of a removal or simply reminded of their previous removals, they must have found
an honest look at the process of moving house in these chapters of North and South.
At the same time, it is also worth pointing out what Gaskell’s realism in these chapters
makes equally clear—namely, that the Hales’ removal is supported by a certain financial and
material stability which limits the difficulty and loss that the family faces. In the first place, the
Hales can afford to pay others, including both the domestic servants whom they employ at the
Helstone parsonage and the movers whom they hire as day laborers, to do the physical labor of
removal for them. This lessens both the time required for packing and the physical toll of
removal on Margaret in particular. But beyond this important paid labor, the Hales’ financial
means also provide them with a crucial safety net. During their interim between houses, they can
afford over two weeks of lodgings at seaside Heston and the storage of their goods at a railway
station while they house hunt in Milton. Though they do not have a house waiting for them in
their town of residence, they are in no danger of becoming the Durbeyfields in Thomas Hardy’s
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), who—when they discover that their new lodgings have been
given away—find both their bodies and their portable property dumped alongside a churchyard
wall, made temporarily homeless mid-removal. To be clear, the Hales are by no means
wealthy—with an annual budget of one hundred pounds, they can afford a rent of only thirty
pounds a year in Milton, and their removal “absorb[s] nearly all [Mr. Hale’s] little stock of ready
money” (66). Nonetheless, their financial means allow the Hales to get both themselves and their

12
This is Chapter VIII, and it appeared in the fifth installment of the novel.
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portable property (sans one “old piano” that they sell) safely into their new house, which is
located in “by far the most healthy suburb” of Milton (97, 64). In this way, the Hales’ move
involves a degree of success and stability that is important to acknowledge, and it highlights the
fact that the enormous instability that Margaret feels comes not out of a true financial or material
instability—she does not face eviction or the possibility of homelessness or the seizure and sale
of her family’s goods—but rather out of a social and psychological instability, related to how
movement affects the middle-class female self and how that self can feel at home when home is
always changing.
*
“How much of the original Margaret was left”: Change and Instability in Milton
With Margaret’s first two removals in North and South, Gaskell establishes her heroine’s
anxiety regarding the act of removal, particularly at it relates to her ideas of home and self. If that
anxiety ever begins to feel “much ado about nothing” to readers, Gaskell makes clear once the
Hales relocate to Milton that Margaret’s anxiety is by no means unfounded, for the reality, in
North and South, is that removal does in fact change everything. This is not the world of Dombey
and Son, where both a sense of home and the self can be turned into portable property, moved
around London or even shipped around the world, and then set up again in a new house,
unaltered. Here, in the world of Gaskell’s novel, to move house is to find that everything about
domestic life changes—from the immaterial sense of home that builds up in a house over time to
the very rules of housekeeping—just as it is to find, quite terrifyingly, that a great deal about the
self can change too.
We see these changes first in the Hales’ new house. While the Hales’ removal results in
no material loss, it nonetheless results in another kind of loss—particularly in the sweeping loss
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of the Hales’ whole sense of “home.” As Margaret, Mrs. Hale, and Dixon quickly find out, “the
accustomed household grooves” that residents establish in one house are not easily or quickly
repeated in the next (209). Rather, moving into a new house necessitates establishing new
“household grooves” in the form of rhythms and routines—a process that (like removal) takes
both time and effort and that can leave residents feeling quite uncomfortable in the interim.
Indeed, this is why, in the first days of their inhabitancy in Milton, Mrs. Hale asks her daughter
“in blank dismay,” “Oh, Margaret! are we to live here?” and Margaret herself looks out her new
bedroom window and finds that the back extension of the next terrace house “loomed through
the fog like a great barrier to hope” (65, 66). Gaskell’s novel thus demonstrates that, far from
being portable, a sense of “home” much be built with each new residence that a family inhabits.
Furthermore, Gaskell’s novel emphasizes that a family’s sense of “home” will change
from residence to residence, for the rules of domesticity change from place to place. This is
quickly apparent to the women of the Hale household, who find that living in a northern
manufacturing city increases the frequency and intensity of their domestic labor. As Mrs. Hale
complains to Mr. Thornton, a wealthy cotton manufacturer and Mr. Hale’s first pupil, “I only
know it is impossible to keep the muslin blinds here above a week together; and at Helstone we
have had them up for a month or more, and they have not looked dirty at the end of that time”
(82).
13
From the smoky air to “horrid east winds” to a lack of “soft water,” there are a plethora of
environmental conditions to which the women of the Hale household must adjust and which
result in “household grooves” different from those at Helstone (75). In addition, the rules of
domesticity change because Milton society—and the Hales’ position in it—proves very different

13
Like Mrs. Hale, Gaskell was also a transplant to the industrial city. As Jenny Uglow writes in her biography of
Gaskell, she “was often found puzzling over which garden flowers would survive the city smoke, and her picture of
Mrs Hale in North and South, despairing over the fate of the muslin curtains, has a heartfelt ring” (84). Gaskell
called her city of residence “dear old dull ugly smoky grim grey Manchester” (Chapple and Pollard 489).
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from Helstone society. In Helstone, where Mr. Hale was highly regarded as the vicar, the Hales
had no trouble employing servants in their home, but in Milton, they face difficulty in finding a
servant to “do all the rough work of the house” (70). They discover that those girls who do apply
“have doubts and fears of their own, as to the solvency of a family who lived in a house of thirty
pounds a-year, and yet gave themselves airs, and kept two servants,” and they run up against the
broader “difficulty of meeting with any one in a manufacturing town who did not prefer the
better wages and greater independence of working in a mill” (70). Margaret thus finds herself
clear starching and ironing, in addition to “washing dishes” and “scouring” floors—work that she
certainly did not do as the “only daughter of Helstone parsonage” (76, 6). In this way, from the
environmental to the social, the circumstances of home change with a change of address. In
insisting that readers acknowledge this, Gaskell’s novel thus reveals that home—far from being
stable and portable—is a fragile construction, prone to the destruction which removal brings and
to the sweeping changes which result from a family’s relocation to a new residence.
At the same time, Gaskell’s novel also reveals that, just as new environmental and social
factors change the Hales’ home, they also change Margaret herself. This, of course, goes against
Margaret’s desire for an unchanging self, and in her early days in Milton, she tries to cling to her
identity as “the only daughter of Helstone parsonage” (6). She acts towards the inhabitants of
Milton as she would have acted towards the inhabitants of her father’s parish, offending mill
worker Nicholas Higgins in the process by inviting herself to his home, and she declares her lack
of interest “in going over manufactories” when John Thornton’s mother, Mrs. Thornton, asks her
if she has visited any of Milton’s “factories” or “magnificent warehouses” (98). Indeed, she
declares Milton a “strange society,” marked by what she believes to be vulgar trade and a cruel
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industry that breeds antagonistic class relations and an impoverished and oppressed working
class (118).
But then, slowly, Margaret does find herself changing. Through her relationship with
Bessy Higgins, she discovers a new interest in her city of residence. The narrator notes of
Margaret several months into her life in Milton: “As she went along the crowded narrow streets,
she felt how much of interest they had gained by the simple fact of her having learnt to care for a
dweller in them” (99). As time passes, Margaret listens to her father and John Thornton and
Nicholas Higgins debate the merits and faults of Northern industry and the obligations of the
manufacturers to their workers, sometimes arguing her own points; she witnesses the suffering of
workers like Boucher and learns of “the gathering woe […] from Bessy”; and she slowly revises
her understandings of both her new place of residence and her old, her staunch defense of the
South eventually giving way to the admission that “I suppose each mode of life produces its own
trials and its own temptations” (153, 301). Indeed, by the time she attends a dinner party at John
Thornton and his mother’s home in August, nine months into her Milton life, she realizes that
“[s]he knew enough now to understand many local interests—nay, even some of the technical
words employed by the eager mill-owners,” and she finds herself appreciating “the exultation in
the sense of power which these Milton men had” (163). She can even tell her father, who accuses
her of still being “quite prejudiced against Mr. Thornton” on their walk home, “He is the first
specimen of a manufacturer—of a person engaged in trade—that I have ever had the opportunity
of studying, papa. He is my first olive: let me make a face while I swallow it. I know he is good
of his kind, and by and by I shall like the kind. I rather think I am already beginning to do so”
(167).
14
In this way, Margaret finds her opinions and thus herself changed by her inhabitancy in

14
For discussions of Margaret’s integration into Milton, see Rosemarie Bodenheimer’s “North and South: A
Permanent State of Change” (Nineteenth-Century Fiction 34.3 [1979]: 281-301), 284-286; Deirdre David’s Fictions
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Milton, Gaskell making clear that the self cannot help but evolve through movement and
relocation—and readers find Margaret surprisingly accepting of this. Here, Margaret seems to
understand that internal change does not have to entail only erosive loss, but can also involve
maturation and a broadening and deepening of one’s thinking.
However, Gaskell’s narrative quickly complicates Margaret’s tentative acceptance of
change, for Gaskell throws her heroine back into loss. Margaret’s experiences of loss in the
novel thus far have primarily involved acts of removal, and Margaret has been largely able to
mitigate or deny those losses by controlling her understandings of home, self, and movement.
But here Margaret begins to experience a new kind of loss—the loss of family—and this proves
to be a kind of loss from which she cannot “[take] her mind away with a wrench” (16). On the
very night of John Thornton’s August dinner party, Margaret and her father arrive home to learn
that Mrs. Hale is dying. Though Mrs. Hale has been ill for some time, Margaret and Mr. Hale
now see on her face that “Death had signed her for his own, and it was clear that ere long he
would return to take possession” (103, 168). Mrs. Hale passes away only two months later—in
October—but as devastating as this loss is for Margaret, it is hardly the only one that she faces.
In the same span of time as her mother’s final illness and death, Margaret gains her long-lost
brother back only to lose him as well. Summoned home from exile in Cadiz to see his mother
one last time, Frederick returns after years away from his family. However, at risk of arrest and
hanging at the hands of the Admiralty for leading a mutiny against his commanding officer,

of Resolution in Three Victorian Novels (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 36-37; Barbara Leah
Harman’s “In Promiscuous Company: Female Public Appearance in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South”
(Victorian Studies 31.3 [1988]: 351-374), 365-6; Hilary Schor’s Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell
and the Victorian Novel (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 126-136; Deborah Epstein Nord’s
Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
1995), 168-169; Mary Kuhlman’s “Education through Experience in North and South” (The Gaskell Society Journal
10:14 [1996]: 14-26), 17-19; and Susan Johnson’s Women and Domestic Experience in Victorian Political Fiction
(Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 2001), 109-111.
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Frederick must leave shortly after his mother’s death. As if this were not enough, in April, on a
brief visit to Oxford to see his college friend Mr. Bell, Mr. Hale passes away in his sleep (338).
In this way, over the course of only six months in the narrative, Margaret loses all the immediate
members of her family.
While Margaret’s losses of her parents and brother are substantial by any means, they are
also heightened by the history of the Hale family. With Margaret having left the parsonage at age
nine to live in Harley Street, and with Frederick having been away for “seven or eight years”—
first in the Royal Navy and then in exile—the four members of the Hale family have not lived
together in nearly a decade (248). For Margaret, this time apart from her family led her to feel
not only a lack of intimacy but even a terrifying sense of erasure and estrangement. Margaret
admits to her mother, “I used to fancy you would forget me while I was away at Aunt Shaw’s,
and cry myself to sleep at nights with that notion in my head,” and she also finds herself “afraid”
of Frederick before his arrival, sure that “his wild career […] must have almost substituted
another Frederick for the tall stripling in his middy’s uniform, whom she remembered looking up
to with such awe” (128, 248). However, against both these years of division and Margaret’s
fears, the novel does stitch the family together again, both Margaret and Frederick returning
home. Though Frederick arrives only two days before Mrs. Hale’s death, the Hales’ terrace
house nonetheless briefly holds all four members of the family.
But as Gaskell’s narrative makes clear, the Hales are hardly “the little society of the back
parlour” of Dombey and Son, whose members—though they are “scattered far and wide”—do
ultimately reunite around the domestic hearth (Dickens, D&S 497). Rather, in North and South,
the Hales come back together only to be ripped far more permanently apart, and in a way, the
family’s brief reunion makes Margaret’s losses more painful to bear, for she loses her mother
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and brother in particular at the very moment that she begins to re-cultivate her intimacy with
them. Margaret tells her brother, “Oh, Frederick! mamma was getting to love me so! And I was
getting to understand her. And now comes death to snap us asunder!” and the narrator expresses
a similar sentiment when Margaret faces her brother’s departure just days later, noting: “It was
evident that Frederick must go. Go, too, when he had so completely vaulted into his place in the
family, and promised to be such a stay and staff to his father and sister” (249, 255). In nearly the
same breath that the narrative gives Margaret a sense of familial intimacy and stability, then, it
takes that intimacy and stability permanently away from her, death and exile scattering the
Hales’ bodies across space. While Margaret spent her first days in Milton mapping which
members of the family would use which rooms of their terrace house, she is left in the wake of
her father’s death to map the permanently-disparate locations of her family members: Mrs. Hale
will remain buried in Milton; Mr. Hale, having died at Oxford, will “be interred, far away from
either of the homes he had known in life, and far away from the wife who lay lonely among
strangers”; Frederick, angry at learning from Henry Lennox that he will never be cleared at a
court-martial and wishing to “unnative himself,” will stay exiled in Spain; and Margaret herself,
because she is an unmarried woman and cannot stay in Milton alone, will return to Harley Street
to live with Edith, Captain Lennox, and her Aunt Shaw, who have returned from Europe (364,
343). In this way, nothing—not even a churchyard or family vault—will bring the Hales back
together again.
15

15
Here, we see again that the world of North and South is not the world of Dombey and Son. In Dickens’s novel, the
family vault holds Florence’s mother and Paul and will presumably one day hold the rest of the family, sans the
exiled Edith. In Dombey and Son, then, even the dead can be gathered and held together—but that is not the case in
North and South, where family members seem only further scattered in death, or in Gaskell’s fiction in general. In
Mary Barton, for example, Job Leigh is forced bury his daughter and son-in-law “in a big, crowded, lonely
churchyard in London,” where they lived (102). As Job explains, “I were loath to leave them there, as I thought,
when they rose again, they’d feel so strange at first away fra’ Manchester and all old friends; but it could na be
helped. Well, God watches o’er their graves there as well as here” (102).
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As we can see, at the very moment when Margaret seems to be learning a new way of
looking at change, the novel launches her into cumulative, overwhelming loss. These losses lead
Margaret to retreat from her brief acceptance of change and, indeed, result in a return of and
even an increase in Margaret’s sense of instability. Upon first learning that her mother’s death is
quickly approaching, Margaret thinks to herself, “What a vain show Life seemed! How
unsubstantial, and flickering, and flitting! It was as if from some aerial belfry, high up above the
stir and jar of the earth, there was a bell continually tolling, ‘All are shadows!—all are
passing!—all is past!’” (170). Here, Margaret’s sense of her mother’s mortality turns not only
her mother but everyone and everything into shadows that pass away from her—and in a way,
the novel confirms this for Margaret, for by the time she leaves Milton, just about everyone and
everything have passed away from her. But it is not just the external world that now feels
unsteady to Margaret: she also experiences this sense of instability internally, and it results in a
revised self-understanding. This becomes clear when Frederick arrives home in the leadup to
Mrs. Hale’s death and Margaret worries about “how much of the original Margaret was left”—as
if there has been so much erosive loss inside herself that her brother will not know her (248). In
part, this worry is a response to the fact that she has not seen her brother in nearly a decade, but it
is also very much a sign that her brief acceptance of change has given way to her former belief
that change entails only loss. Now, though, Margaret has no reassuring sense—as she did upon
leaving Harley Street and returning to Helstone—of having a core self that cannot be eroded.
Fully aware that her Milton residence has changed her, living far away from her beloved
Helstone and its ability to connect her with a stable, coherent self across time, Margaret can only
sense that her “original” self has been altered and eroded by the changes she has undergone and
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will continue being eaten away until there is nothing left of it—a terrifying self-understanding
indeed (248).
Against this backdrop, Margaret embraces her removal from Milton as the very thing that
will deliver her from the immense loss and instability that she feels, despite the fact that her
previous removals have only opened a sense of unsteadiness in her life. Indeed, the dissolution of
her family and the personal struggles that she has faced in Milton—including her misunderstood
intervention at the riot at John Thornton’s mill, her rejection of Thornton’s proposal, her lie to
the police inspector regarding her presence at the train station on the night of Frederick’s
departure, and Thornton’s misinterpretation of Frederick as her lover—lead her to name Milton
“a place where she had suffered so much” (357). While her other removals threatened her with
the loss of “those times that were no more,” this is exactly what she hopes her removal from
Milton will accomplish (16). She declares to her Aunt Shaw, who has come to fetch her back to
Harley Street, “Oh! let us go. I cannot be patient here. I shall not get well here. I want to forget”
(370). While Margaret “took her mind away with a wrench” from the pain that she experienced
in leaving both Harley Street and Helstone, here Margaret instead “[takes] her mind away with a
wrench” from Milton itself (16). In this way, Margaret insists that her emotional removal from
Milton is both necessary and easy, and she forecloses any real consideration of the more
complicated truth that, despite the pain that she has experienced, she has also been “very happy
here” (365).
But if Margaret’s experiences have taught her anything, it is that she can hardly count on
a removal to make her feel more secure. Indeed, despite Margaret’s insistence that leaving
Milton and returning to Harley Street will be the very best thing for her, Margaret’s third
removal in North and South only breeds further loss and instability in her life. In the first place,
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in leaving Milton, Margaret faces the material loss of her family’s belongings. Because she is a
young unmarried woman and cannot keep a house of her own, she cannot keep her family’s
portable property, and so it is to be sold off in a household sale once Margaret departs for
London. These material items, which Margaret has known since childhood, must have provided
Margaret with a sense of continuity, however small, through both her long residence in Harley
Street and through the difficult, cataclysmic change of her family’s move to Milton. Their loss,
then, “marks a sudden and bitter discontinuity with the past,” as Barbara Weiss writes of the
Tullivers’ loss of their possessions in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) (107). There,
Maggie Tulliver laments, “The end of our lives will have nothing in it like the beginning!”—and
this, indeed, is the reality that Margaret Hale faces (Eliot 239). Though Mr. Bell—who becomes
Margaret’s guardian—instructs Margaret to “select what things you wish reserved” from the
sale, the fact of the matter is that she cannot keep all of her family’s belongings, and so the day
of her father’s distant funeral in Oxford finds her “wandering from room to room, […] languidly
setting aside such articles as she wished to retain” (365-6). The narrative here remains evasive,
telling readers only that Margaret chooses certain of her father’s books for herself (366). We do
not know what these books are, nor are we privy to anything more specific afterwards than that
Margaret “set out again upon her travels through the house, turning over articles, known to her
from her childhood, with a sort of caressing reluctance to leave them—old-fashioned, worn and
shabby, as they might be” (366). While we might imagine these “articles” to be some of the
household pieces with which the narrative has acquainted us—Mrs. Hale’s “little japan cabinet,”
“the dear old Helstone chintz-curtains and chair covers”—we are closed out from knowing just
which “articles” Margaret lingers over because they are already lost (106, 79). Despite the
continuity that they have provided Margaret throughout her life, despite the emotional
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associations of family members that they must hold for Margaret, she cannot take her family’s
portable property with her (106, 79). Rather, she must enter this next phase of her life alone,
steadied by neither her immediate family members nor the familiar objects of home.
While Margaret feels the very tangible loss of her family’s belongings before she departs
Milton, she comes to sense the intangible loss that occurs through her act of moving only upon
her return to Harley Street. There, despite her insistence that she had nothing to lose by leaving
“a place where she had suffered so much,” she finds herself in Harley Street missing her Milton
friends and acquaintances, the “entire cessation of any news respecting the people amongst
whom she had lived so long” like “a sudden famine to her heart” (357, 374). In addition, she
senses her own erasure and her family’s erasure from Milton, “picturing the busy life out of
which her own had been taken and never missed; wondering if all went on in that whirl just as if
she and her father had never been; questioning within herself, if no one in all the crowd missed
her” (374). While Margaret’s removal from Harley Street at the beginning of Gaskell’s narrative
led Margaret to experience a sense of internal erasure, those “times that were no more”
seemingly gone from her memory, here we see that her removal from Milton leads her to worry
about a kind of external erasure, involving both her disappearance from others’ memories
(reminiscent of her concern that her mother would “forget” her when she lived away from
Helstone as a girl) and her effacement from the city itself, as if Milton is unable to hold a record
of her and her family’s time there (16, 128). Indeed, after her earlier removal from Harley Street,
Margaret came to much the same conclusion about that neighborhood, albeit months after
leaving her aunt’s house. While her effacement from the daily routines of her old neighborhood
mattered little to Margaret when she returned to “her own dear home” at Helstone, she
nonetheless sensed this effacement from Harley Street during her first days in Milton (16):
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The smooth sea of that old life closed up, without a mark left to tell where they
had all been. The habitual dinners, the calls, the shopping, the dancing evenings,
were all going on, going on for ever, though her Aunt Shaw and Edith were no
longer there; and she, of course, was even less missed. She doubted if any one of
that old set ever thought of her[.] (67)

Though Harley Street’s “smooth sea” and Milton’s “whirl” could not be more different,
Margaret’s sense that there is no “mark left to tell where they had all been” is also what she
senses when she thinks of Milton going on “just as if she and her father had never been there”
(67, 374). Here we see that this external erasure is yet another way that removal opens loss and
unsteadiness in Margaret’s life—and after the act of removal, at that.
In addition to dealing with this sense of external erasure, Margaret finds that she cannot
so easily settle back into “the placid tranquility of that old well-ordered, monotonous life” at
Harley Street, changed as she has been by her residence in Milton, and this also contributes to
her sense of unsteadiness (329). While Margaret had anticipated that “the old Harley Street
house” would provide her with a welcome “stagnation” after having been so “buffeted about,”
Harley Street life proves to be too stagnant, “[wearying her] with the inactivity of the day” and
leading her thoughts “back to Milton, with a strange sense of the contrast between the life there,
and here” (329, 374, 373). In comparison with the legibility of Milton’s class struggles, she now
finds the Harley Street house to be a sort of fortress of “pleasant comforts” through which none
of the world’s realities penetrate: “There might be toilers and moilers there in London, but she
never saw them; the very servants lived in an underground world of their own, of which she
knew neither the hopes nor the fears” (355, 373). While in the past she admittedly found Harley
Street life “occasionally tiresome,” she now feels herself entirely sealed off from the world of
work and effort that she learned to admire in Milton, and she worries that she will “become
sleepily deadened into forgetfulness of anything beyond the life which was lapping her round
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with luxury” (373). In this way, Margaret finds Harley Street’s stability to be false, the result of
obscuring the rest of the world from its view, just as she also again senses her own internal
instability. Not only has her Milton residence changed her, making her aware of and interested in
the “toilers and moilers” of London, but her second Harley Street residence threatens to change
her again, making her forget “anything beyond the life that was lapping her round with luxury”
and pushing her even further away from “the original Margaret” (373, 248).
*
“Helpless, homeless, friendless Margaret”: Social and Financial Stability in North and South
There is no denying that, in the second half of North and South, Gaskell introduces an
enormous sense of instability in Margaret’s life, resulting from the overwhelming losses that she
faces in Milton, from her sense of erasure from Milton, from her dissatisfaction with the false
stability of Harley Street life, and from her worries regarding “how much of the original
Margaret was left” (248). But just as Gaskell did with the Hales’ move from Helstone to Milton,
she also significantly limits the factors that could contribute to Margaret’s sense of instability.
Indeed, at the time of Margaret’s move from Milton back to Harley Street, just when her sense of
instability has reached a new height, Margaret simultaneously obtains a new degree of social and
financial stability. To some extent, this results from the fact that she is no longer a daughter
dependent on her family’s decisions and from the fact that she has a network of people who are
willing to help her—but in large part, it results from the fact that Mr. Bell names her as his
heiress and arranges to provide for her financially until the time of his death. Indeed, though Mr.
Bell calls her “helpless, homeless, friendless Margaret,” this is precisely what she is not (354). In
limiting the factors that could contribute to Margaret’s sense of instability, Gaskell powerfully
reveals that Margaret’s instability persists as a result of both her status as an unmarried middle-
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class woman and her own personal history of loss and removal. At the same time, however,
Gaskell also misses an opportunity in not allowing other characters’ experiences of instability to
affect Margaret’s sense of her own relative stability or instability.
Margaret’s new social and financial stability is first made clear through the help and
support that others provide her during her removal from Milton. Instead of having to conduct a
physical removal by herself as she did when her father decided to move their family away from
Helstone, Margaret is evacuated from Milton by her Aunt Shaw and thus has little responsibility
for or even involvement in the closing up of her family’s house. Rather, others handle both the
physical and mental labor of removal for her after her departure: Mr. Bell arranges for the house
sale and deals with the Hales’ landlord; Mr. Thornton finds another tenant to take over the lease
when the landlord “won’t take the house off [Mr. Bell’s] hands till next June twelvemonth”; and
Dixon stays behind after Margaret departs, “in charge of all the arrangements for paying bills,
disposing of furniture, and shutting up the house” (376, 364). As we saw with the Hales’ removal
from Helstone, moving a household takes significant time and work—but so does terminating a
lease prematurely, preparing for a sale, and dismantling a household. While the novel does not
narrate this work in the same thorough way that it narrates the work that goes into the Hales’
removal from Helstone, it does provide readers with telling details: Mr. Bell complains to
Margaret, “In Oxford, I could have managed all the landlords in the place, and had my own way,
with half the trouble your Milton landlord has given me,” and the narrative also makes clear that
Dixon does not arrive in London until after Margaret returns from her visit to Helstone with Mr.
Bell (376). In this way, though we cannot see all the work that others do for Margaret, we can
nonetheless see that Margaret is spared both difficult negotiations and weeks of physical and
mental labor.
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It is also worth noting that because Margaret leaves Milton before the house sale, she is
spared the emotional trauma of having to witness the sale of her family’s belongings. A house
sale or auction is a familiar scene in Victorian literature—and one that is depicted as a
particularly disturbing scene for the owners of the property to witness. In Dombey and Son, Mr.
Dombey is deeply pained by what he hears during the auction at his house, reflecting later on
“how much” he “suffered during that trial” (907). In Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895)
too, Jude, Sue, and Father Time wait in a bedroom during the sale of their belongings and are
forced to listen to the proceedings: “[T]hey could hear each familiar article knocked down, the
highly prized ones cheaply, the unconsidered at an unexpected price” (241). That Margaret is
spared this emotionally-difficult experience further attests to her increased stability at this
narrative moment; in being evacuated from Milton before the sale, she is able to maintain a
physical and emotional distance from an experience that would be hard to bear.
In addition to the circumstances of her departure from Milton, Margaret’s new social and
financial stability is made clear on the other side of her move. In the first place, she has three
invitations to live in three different places: she can move back to Harley Street, she can join Mr.
Bell in Oxford, or she can move abroad to live with Frederick in Spain. For the first time in the
novel, then, Margaret is able to choose where she will move, “filial obedience” not functioning
as the “dominant ordering” of her life, and she chooses the home with which she is familiar,
which prevents her from having to grapple with a new living situation in a new location
(Rowbotham 54-5). Once she arrives at 96 Harley Street, she also occupies a particularly secure
position there. Taking Mr. Bell’s advice, she has her own “formal agreement” in place to pay
Captain Lennox 250 pounds per year (nearly ten times that of her family’s rent in Milton) for
herself and Dixon to live there so that “[she] won’t be thrown adrift, if some day the captain
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wishes to have his house to himself” (364).
16
She becomes, in other words, a renter in a fully-
furnished and “luxurious” house with a lease of her own, which affords her more stability than
she has ever had (372). Indeed, here we see just how crucial Mr. Bell’s financial help is, for
without it, Margaret would be entirely dependent on her cousin’s husband. After all, Frederick
cannot offer her any real assistance from abroad. Dependence on extended family members was
the fate of many unmarried middle-class Victorian women, and it was hardly a stable one. As
Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall write, such women were often “forced to move from one
relative or friend to another,” and as Deborah Gorham notes, they could also find themselves “in
the position of an unpaid servant” (Davidoff and Hall 285, Gorham 27). Had this been
Margaret’s fate, she would have returned to 96 Harley Street as a female companion—but with
even less security than she had as Edith’s girlhood companion, for she would have had neither
Helstone nor her parents waiting for her. Instead, Margaret’s fate involves both money and a
“formal agreement” for her housing, which means that she has both protection and control. She
can no longer be suddenly set into motion as she was when she was a daughter, and even if she
and the Lennoxes decide to part ways, she now has the financial means to steer herself towards
her next home. As Mr. Bell explains to her, “[Y]ou can carry yourself and your two hundred and
fifty pounds off somewhere else” (364).
17

16
In Captain Lennox’s view, “two hundred fifty pounds a year was something ridiculous, considering that
[Margaret] did not take wine” (413).
17
Though Mr. Bell claims that Margaret “can carry [herself] and [her] two hundred and fifty pounds off somewhere
else” if she ever needs to part with the Lennoxes and her Aunt Shaw, it is still worth noting that living alone is never
presented as a realistic option for Margaret, which means that her place of residence and her movement between
residences is still affected by others and thus still exists beyond her total control (364). That living alone is never
presented as a realistic option for Margaret is most likely the result of her young (and still very marriable) age. Some
unmarried women did live alone, if they could afford it, but they were mostly older. As Leonore Davidoff and
Catherine Hall have noted of historical records, “In Edgbaston, virtually all the upper middle-class female household
heads were over 40, as were almost all in the town centres of Essex and Suffolk” (314).
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As the details surrounding Margaret’s third removal in North and South’s pages make
clear, Gaskell takes circumstances which would usually spell disaster for an unmarried Victorian
daughter—the deaths of parents, the loss of the family home, the lack of a sufficient income for
the daughter to inherit from her parents to live on—and revises those circumstances so that
Margaret is left in a far better position than before. There is no denying, of course, that Margaret
feels a great and even overwhelming sense of instability related to the familial losses that she has
experienced and to the three removals that she has undergone. Nonetheless, there is also no
denying that Gaskell keeps Margaret safe and even gives her a certain degree of privilege: she
does not have to dismantle her parents’ house and sell off her family’s property; she does not
have to negotiate the early termination of the lease; and she does not have to throw herself on the
good nature of her cousin’s husband, moving back to Harley Street to live as a financially-
dependent member of his family. In this way, while Gaskell certainly lets Margaret feel the
fragility of the middle-class constructions of “home,” “family,” and “self” through North and
South’s narrative, Gaskell does not let her heroine feel this fragility fully, and she certainly never
lets her become “helpless, homeless, friendless Margaret” (354).
The limits that Gaskell places on Margaret’s instability also point us to an inconsistency
in the novel—or at least a rough edge. In particular, it is not always clear to what extent Margaret
is aware of her relative privilege as a middle-class woman and, eventually, an heiress with
money and “lands and tenements” of her own (416). After Margaret leaves Milton, she does
prove able to gauge her own increased social and financial stability, understanding that her
family’s life in Milton was one of “comparative poverty” next to the luxury of her life at 96
Harley Street (372). But she is not always aware of her family’s relative stability while they live
in Milton, despite the fact that she spends a considerable amount of time with the Higgins family
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and, through them, also comes into contact with other millworkers’ families like the Bouchers.
Indeed, the only time she puts her family’s stability in relation to the social, economic, or
material instability of these working-class families occurs when she hears John Boucher tell
Nicholas Higgins that his family cannot survive on the five shillings a week that the union offers
workers during its strike—“it’s clemming to us,” he claims—and when she learns from Bessy
that the Boucher family has been suffering for some time (154). As Bessy explains, “[A]’ they
could pawn has gone this last twelvemonth” (156). Margaret finds herself so affected by the
Bouchers’ situation that she wonders, “How was she ever to go away into comfort and forget that
man’s voice, with that tone of unutterable agony, telling more by far than his words of what he
had to suffer?” (156). Here, in putting her family’s own situation in context with the Bouchers’,
she finds “comfort” instead of “comparative poverty,” and in doing so, she seems to recognize
the stability of her own life (156, 372).
Beyond this moment, however, Gaskell does not allow the experiences of these families
to affect Margaret’s sense of her family’s relative stability in this same deeply felt way. Part of
why this is true may be the novel itself. In the first place, the instability that millworkers and
their families face in North and South is limited. John Boucher’s speech to Nicholas Higgins—in
which he warns that his children face starvation and his wife death—gives us the most extreme
details of poverty in the novel, and even then, the novel does not let the Bouchers fall too hard.
Though John Boucher drowns himself after his involvement in the riot at John Thornton’s mill
and his failure to obtain work at another mill, his widow and orphaned children do not face
eviction, homelessness, or starvation. Rather, neighbors and the Hales offer financial help, in
addition to child care and advice, and after Mrs. Boucher passes away, Nicholas Higgins adopts
the children and moves them into his house, sending the eldest ones to “humble schools” (338).
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Likewise, though the Higginses are “pressed” for money during the strike, they do not seem to
struggle to pay their rent or put food on the table (156). Margaret even tells her mother, “I don’t
believe [the Higginses] are very poor,—at least, they don’t speak as if they were” (157). In
addition, whatever social, economic, and material instability that does appear in the novel also
remains limited through its means of representation. If we look again at John Boucher’s speech,
which is the novel’s most acute representation of poverty, we see that he only tells his listeners
of his family’s “clemming,” but the novel never actually shows his family’s dire poverty to
readers. As many critics have pointed out, North and South is not Mary Barton (1848), and this
novel does not offer the careful tracking of the living conditions, the erosive material loss, and
the physical decline of industrial workers and their families which we find in Gaskell’s first
Manchester novel. Rather, North and South’s focus lies more truly with the middle class.
Nevertheless, it is significant that, though Margaret frequently engages with the
Higginses and the Bouchers and witnesses the suffering of the working class, she does not
engage is the same comparative activity which marked her reflection on the Bouchers’ situation.
This textual gap is particularly obvious when we consider the comparisons that Margaret does
not make, including a comparison with Bessy Higgins. Margaret and Bessy are nearly the same
age, and Margaret spends a great deal of time with Bessy, witnessing her worsening illness and
learning of the conditions in the mills which led to that illness—and yet Margaret never
compares her situation with her friend’s. In addition, Gaskell also stops short of allowing
Margaret to be affected by other characters’ experiences which are similar to her own. Indeed,
though much of the novel is focalized through Margaret’s perspective, it also makes clear that
Margaret is not unique in many of her experiences which cause her to feel unstable. Like
Margaret, both Bessy and Mary Higgins lost their mother; like Margaret, Nicholas Higgins is a
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Milton transplant, telling Margaret that he originally came “fro’ Burnley-ways, and forty mile to
th’ North”
18
; and like Margaret, John Thornton experienced a traumatic removal early in life—
after his father’s suicide, which occurred when he was only fourteen years old, he and his mother
and sister removed to a small country town where they were required to live under very reduced
financial and material circumstances (73). Though Margaret is aware of all of this, Gaskell never
has Margaret make any comparison between herself and these other characters.
In holding Margaret’s sense of instability apart from the social, economic, and material
instability faced by many other characters in the novel, particularly the working-class characters
of Milton, Gaskell misses two opportunities. In the first place, in this narrative of the heroine’s
consciousness and ongoing maturation, Gaskell does not show Margaret’s character developing
as deeply and flexibly as it might have done. In not more often allowing Margaret’s sense of
instability to be affected by other characters’ experiences, Gaskell limits Margaret’s ability to
engage fully with her own sense of instability—to put it in the context of others’ experiences; to
gain a sense of stability, no matter how small, from recognizing her own privilege and security;
or to feel comfort from knowing she is not alone in the experiences that make her feel unstable.
On the other hand, if Gaskell’s point is that Margaret does not make these connections, this is
made too subtly, for it is not clear to readers whether Margaret’s lack of comparative activity is
part of Gaskell’s conscious design of her heroine—or actually a lapse on the author’s part. In
addition to this issue of character development, Gaskell also misses an opportunity in this
narrative of mid-century England to put Margaret’s sense of instability in its larger Victorian
context. After all, the social system that underlies this novel did not make only middle-class

18
Nicholas Higgins’s status as a transplant to Milton recalls Alice Wilson in Mary Barton, who left her childhood
home in the “north country” near Lancaster in order to work in Manchester and yet was never able to return to that
original home, despite longing to see it once again (30).
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women like Margaret Hale feel unstable, and in focusing so heavily on Margaret’s sense of
instability while nonetheless including so many representations of other forms of instability,
issues of gender and issues of class come to seem held artificially apart—an unfortunate thing in
a novel that is so astute in so much of its social commentary.
*
“Whirled on through all these phases of my life”: Internal Stability for a Body on the Move
As we have seen, despite Margaret’s significant social and financial stability, she
nonetheless finds herself in Harley Street experiencing a heightened degree of internal instability
related to the losses of her family members, her removal from Milton, and her sense of Harley
Street’s “stagnation” (329). When Mr. Bell proposes that they pay a visit to her father’s old
parish, Margaret thus jumps at the opportunity, sure that this space will offer her the stability that
she seeks. After all, in Margaret’s mind, Helstone is still her true home—and an unchanging
home at that, existing beyond the “bell continually tolling, ‘All are shadows!—all are passing!—
all is past!’” (170). She thus journeys there with Mr. Bell, confident that Helstone, by virtue of it
being an unchanged space, will reconnect her with an unchanged self—“the original Margaret,”
undiminished by loss (248). This, however, is not the case. Rather, Margaret instead finds that
Helstone is no longer either her home or the place it once was, and this realization in turn upsets
her whole self-understanding, which she has based so long in the idea of an unchanging
Helstone. The loss of Helstone thus leads Margaret to make a series of radical revisions to her
self-understanding at the end of North and South in an effort to find a self-conception—divorced
from any one place—that will keep her safe through the movement of her life.
Upon returning to Helstone, Margaret discovers that her childhood home is not, as she
once imagined, “like a village […] in one of Tennyson’s poems,” belonging to a timeless, lyric
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world; rather, she discovers that Helstone and its inhabitants belong to the narrative world of
time and change. Though she finds “every turn and every familiar tree so precisely the same in
its summer glory as it had been in former years” as she rides the fly from the train station
towards Helstone, she is nonetheless forced to acknowledge changes to the landscape once she
begins to move through it on foot (385). When she and Mr. Bell walk from the Lennard Arms
inn towards Helstone, the narrator notes: “Here and there old trees had been felled the autumn
before; or a squatter’s roughly-built and decaying cottage had disappeared. Margaret missed
them each and all, and grieved over them like old friends” (387-8). At a time when modernity
and industrialization were bringing dramatic visual shifts to both the rural countryside and the
urban metropolis, the changes that Margaret notes are admittedly limited. Nonetheless, these
changes cause her grief because she had expected even the details of Helstone to match the
details that she has carried with her in memory for the last two years.
19
In addition to these visual
alterations, Margaret also watches her own erasure from the minds of Helstone’s residents. At
the parochial school, she sees the local girls she once knew so well under the instruction of the
new Vicar’s wife, Mrs. Hepworth, and she realizes that they are “passing out of her recollection
in their rapid development, as she, by her three years’ absence, was vanishing from theirs” (392).
Though this erasure is still in progress, it is clear that eventually no one will remember Margaret
or her family. In other words, Helstone—Margaret’s “own dear home”—will soon go the way of
Harley Street, which forced her to “[doubt] if any one of the old set ever thought of her,” and

19
Margaret shares some of the details that she carries in memory with Bessy, telling her, for example, of the “great
trees standing all about it, with their branches stretching long and level, and making a deep shade of rest even at
noonday” (100). She also recollects other details when her father asks her if she remembers the currant bushes in
their old garden, upsetting Margaret by calling her own memory of Helstone (and thus her fidelity to it) into
question: “Did she not? Did she not remember every weather-stain on the old stone wall; the gray and yellow lichens
that marked it like a map; the little crane's-bill that grew in the crevices?” (216).
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Milton, which forced her to “[question] within herself, if no one in all the crowd missed her” (16,
67, 374).
While witnessing the visual alterations and her ongoing erasure from the local girls’
memories is painful for Margaret, what proves more painful is viewing the radical changes that
have transpired in the parsonage itself, for this experience finally leads Margaret to realize that
Helstone is no longer “her own dear home” (16). The Lennard Arms landlady forewarned
Margaret of the changes to the parsonage, telling her that, in addition to “new grates” and “a
plate-glass window in the drawing-room,” the “new Vicar has seven children, and is building a
nursery ready for more, just out where the arbour and tool-house used to be in old times” (387).
Nonetheless, upon Mrs. Hepworth’s invitation to visit the parsonage and see the “improvements”
that the new Vicar has made, Margaret is unready for what she finds—change so pervasive that
the parsonage “was not like the same place” (392). Outside, “[t]he garden, the grass-plat,
formerly so daintily trim that even a stray rose-leaf seemed like a fleck on its exquisite
arrangement and propriety, was strewed with children’s things,” and inside, Margaret finds that
“[e]very room in the house was changed” (392, 393). In seeing these overwhelming changes,
Margaret finally feels the loss of her former home. As we saw, Margaret refused to experience
her emotional removal from Helstone when she and her parents moved to Milton. At the moment
that she and her parents drove away, she “took her mind away with a wrench” from her loss and
insisted that the parsonage looked “more homelike than ever,” as if she and her parents were
leaving their home intact and would be able to return to it as travelers return home after a trip
(16, 56). In other words, Margaret wanted to believe that she and her parents were no different
than her Aunt Shaw and cousin Edith, who could depart for Europe, leaving 96 Harley Street
“looking dingy and dirty, and dull, and shut up” in their absence, but who could always return to
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the house as home (12). Indeed, Margaret even imagines their homecoming, which occurs while
she is still in Milton. She tells her father, “To-morrow—yes, to-morrow they will be back in
Harley Street. Oh, how strange it will be! I wonder what room they will make into the nursery?”
(341). Now, though, Margaret sees that she is not like her aunt and cousin, and she can no longer
postpone her emotional removal from her childhood home. Without the familiar arrangements of
her family’s belongings, without the “accustomed household grooves” in place, and especially
without her parents, the parsonage cannot be the home that it was (209). Margaret sensed this
when she watched the movers carry out her family’s portable property in preparation for their
removal, the rooms “already unfamiliar and strange,” but she cannot deny it now—for the
parsonage is truly no longer her family’s home (52). Rather, it is in the possession of the
Hepworths—to fill “with signs of merry healthy rough childhood” and to make “improvements”
on as they see fit (392).
In realizing this, Margaret joins a veritable chorus of Victorian characters who return to a
former home and, in feeling their estrangement from it, must grapple with the fact that it is no
longer their home but someone else’s. In a particularly poignant passage from Tess of the
D’Urbervilles, Tess revisits the house of her childhood and watches the new inhabitants: “They
walked about the garden paths with thoughts of their own concerns entirely uppermost, bringing
their actions at every moment in jarring collision with the dim ghosts behind them, talking as
though the time when Tess lived there were not one whit intenser in story than now. Even the
spring birds sang over their as if they thought there was nobody missing in particular” (Hardy,
Tess 294). It is this “jarring collision” between past and present that is so upsetting to Tess and
Margaret and other Victorian characters. That new residents can live in a home and not sense
“the dim ghosts” which are so obvious to a former resident reveals just how fragile and
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impermanent the former resident’s home really was, just as it also reveals what little trace the
former resident and her family have left on the space. While it is true that Margaret’s former
home has not been filled with complete strangers as is the usual case in these other texts, the
result is the same. Though Mr. and Mrs. Hepworth are familiar with the legacy of Mr. and Mrs.
Hale, they have made the parsonage their own and certainly are not haunted by any “dim
ghosts,” much as Margaret might like them to be.
In returning to Helstone and the parsonage, Margaret is thus forced to accept the fact that
Helstone is neither the stable, changeless space nor the permanent home that she wanted it to
be—and this fact has serious consequences for her sense of self. According to Margaret’s
understanding, Helstone was the one still point in her life, and as “her own dear home,” it was
supposed to provide her with access to a foundational self not in danger of eroding, no matter
what loss she might face elsewhere (16). In returning and finding not her familiar home but
“change everywhere; slight, yet pervading all,” Margaret has no choice but to acknowledge that
Helstone cannot function as this underlying stable foundation for her life (394). But this means
that she must continue to worry about “how much of the original Margaret was left,” for she now
has no way to understand her identity other than as eroding, changed irrevocably by each
removal that she undergoes and by each place of residence that she inhabits (248). No wonder,
then, that she sits before her window later that night at the inn, looking in the direction of the
parsonage, and feels “[a] sense of change, of individual nothingness, of perplexity and
disappointment” (400). She finds herself exhausted, admitting, “I am so tired—so tired of being
whirled on through all these phases of my life, in which nothing abides by me, no creature, no
place” (400). In Margaret’s sense of being “whirled on,” we sense her heightened instability. For
the first time in the novel, she cannot rely on Helstone to provide her with the promise of solid
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ground and a solid sense of self. Desperate, then, to step outside this pattern of increasing loss
and erosion, to find stasis and permanence, “[t]he same yesterday, to-day, and for ever,”
Margaret reaches the peak of her crisis: “in the mood in which women of another religion take
the veil,” seeking “heavenly steadfastness in earthly monotony,” she longs to be locked away
from time and the mutable world (Gaskell 400).
And yet, quite suddenly, Margaret radically revises her thinking about change, and this
leads her to replace her previous night’s notion of an eroding self with a new self-understanding.
Waking the next morning with a “brighter view of things,” she first accepts the changes that she
witnessed around her in her former home, determining, “After all it is right […] If the world
stood still, it would retrograde and become corrupt” (400). Here, Margaret comes to realize what
Gaskell herself has known all along—that, to use the final two lines of Chapter XVI’s epigraph,
we must “always be for changed prepared, / For the world’s law is ebb and flow” (124). While
Margaret has believed that change entails only loss—that it is nothing more than “a bell
continually tolling, ‘All are shadows!—all are passing!—all is past!’”—she now even accepts
change in the world as a positive and necessary force (170). This acceptance of external change
leads Margaret to seek a new way of understanding herself (400). After all, if there is no
unchanging place, then she can no longer base her sense of self in place and expect to gain a
solid sense of self from place. After viewing the parsonage one last time, Margaret decides to
extend her acceptance of change in the external world to herself, admitting: “And I too change
perpetually—now this, now that—now disappointed and peevish because all is not exactly as I
had pictured it, and now suddenly discovering that the reality is far more beautiful than I had
imagined it” (401). Here, Margaret trades her self-conception as an eroding self—an “original
Margaret” who is only ever diminished by change—for a new idea: a perpetually-changing self
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(248). While she has worked since the novel’s beginning to avoid feeling unstable, this is exactly
what she seems to embrace with this new and radical conception of her identity which is not
based in any particular place and which allows for and even appreciates continual change.
Instead of an “original Margaret” who belongs to Helstone but can be eroded by leaving
Helstone, then, she names herself an ever-evolving Margaret who exists in a constant state of
flux, becoming “now this, now that” from moment to moment (248, 401).
This new self-understanding, however, does not last, for Margaret quickly comes to
realize that she is not a perpetually-changing self after all, but a self with a past that is still very
much accessible and meaningful. Shortly after her return to London, Margaret sits before the
window of her Harley Street bedroom, “which had been the day nursery of her childhood,” and
suddenly remembers a moment from her first residence in her aunt’s house: “On some such night
as this she remembered promising to herself to live as brave and noble a life as any heroine she
ever read or heard of in romance, a life sans peur et sans reproche” (411, 411-2). Here, Margaret
finds herself reconnected to her past, her presence in the space of her old day nursery letting her
reach back in time to a moment from girlhood that took place in the same room. This scene links
itself back to North and South’s first chapter, where Margaret went upstairs to the “old nursery”
at the top of her aunt’s house and was able to access a whole slew of memories by “look[ing]
round” its space (8). While Margaret sensed that her departure from Harley Street resulted in the
permanent destruction of these memories, erasing them from her memory and turning them into
“times that were no more,” we see here that that was not the case: her past is still available to her
after all (16). In this way, Margaret’s act of remembrance proves that she is certainly not the
eroding self that she used to fear she was—but it also indicates that she is not a perpetually-
changing self either. After all, a perpetually-changing self, becoming “now this, now that,” has
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no real use for the past but rather exists in a continual and present-tense state of flux. Margaret,
on the other hand, does have a use for the past, as the scene in her Harley Street bedroom makes
clear. There, Margaret is still upset by the lie that she told the police inspector in Milton, and her
girlhood desire “to live […] a life sans peur et sans reproche” leads her resolve never to lie again
and to “[pray] that she might have strength to speak and act the truth for evermore” (412). Here,
to be clear, Margaret is not trying to revert back into her girlhood self, denying the movements,
changes, and experiences of her life like she used to do in believing that Helstone returned her to
an unchanged self. Rather, she is putting her girlhood self and her girlhood hopes in conversation
with what her subsequent experiences have taught her, using her memory of her girlhood self to
help her move forward.
Building on her experience in her Harley Street bedroom, Margaret thus revises her self-
understanding again, exchanging her idea of a perpetually-changing self for a whole self who can
carry her past forward. We see evidence of this revision at Cromer, where Margaret goes to
vacation with the Lennoxes and her Aunt Shaw. There, Margaret sits “long hours upon the
beach,” seemingly staring out to sea but actually “put[ting] events in their right places, as to
origin and significance, both as regarded her past life and her future” (415). Though the
narrator’s description here remains brief, Margaret’s internal ordering of the events of “her past
life” is telling, for it implies that she carries her past within herself. This means that—just as her
act of remembering in her Harley Street bedroom suggested—her past has not been eroded
through her many removals as she used to fear it had been. At the same time, it also means that
she does not have to be in the places of her past to access that past, as the scene in her Harley
Street bedroom might seem to imply. Rather, Margaret’s location on the beach at Cromer, a
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space free of personal and familial history, makes clear that Margaret carries her past within
herself, regardless of her location.
In conceiving of herself as a whole self, Margaret lands upon a self-understanding that
allows her to know herself and, as a result, to feel internally stable at last. In “put[ting] events in
their right places” within herself, Margaret recuperates the “phases of [her] life” through which
she has been “whirled”—phases, indeed, that she long viewed as having been eroded and erased
from her sense of self (415, 400). This recuperation finally allows her to understand herself as
having been shaped by all that has happened in her life, removals and returns included. She can
understand, in other words, that she is not “now this, now that” but rather “now this because of
that.” In this way, her act of “put[ting] events in their right places” is a way of coming to know
herself and a way of growing up and maturing—and, indeed, a way of achieving an important
degree of internal stability. For much of North and South’s narrative, Margaret anxiously tried to
use Helstone to gain a sense of stability within herself, and when she realized upon her return
that this was impossible, she seemed to give up on her hope for stability, embracing the notion of
a perpetually-changing self. Now, though, thanks to her notion of a whole self, Margaret can use
her past, carried and ordered within herself, as a kind of internal ballast. The narrator notes,
“Those hours by the sea-side were not lost, as any one might have seen who had the perception
to read, or the care to understand, the look that Margaret’s face was gradually acquiring” (415).
This look is the look of a whole and steady self who knows that she carries her history with her.
This new internal stability is hardly the only benefit of Margaret’s new self-
understanding. Indeed, as a result of this internal stability, Margaret’s new self-understanding
even enables her to use her past to direct her future. Just as Margaret’s memory of her girlhood
self in her Harley Street bedroom helped her commit to leading a truthful life, Margaret’s act of
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“put[ting] events in their right places […] both as regarded her past life and her future” allows
her to use all of her past—from Helstone, Harley Street, and Milton—to decide what she wants
for “the life that lay immediately before” (415, 414). We see this decision in action upon
Margaret’s return to London. Drawing on the sense of purpose that she gleaned from visiting her
father’s poor parishioners as “only daughter in Helstone parsonage,” her experiences with
Milton’s working-class residents, her appreciation for the world of work and effort that she
witnessed in Milton, and the “strange unsatisfied vacuum in her heart and mode of life” that she
feels in Harley Street, Margaret begins conducting charitable work among London’s working-
class residents—the very “toilers and moilers” who are hidden from her view in her aunt and
cousin’s house (6, 373). Certainly, part of Margaret’s ability to decide and then carry out what
she wants for “the life that lay immediately before” comes from the fact that Mr. Bell dies and
leaves her his money and his property, “the legacies being about two thousand pounds, and the
remainder about forty thousand, at the present value of property in Milton” (413). If she were
financially dependent on the Lennoxes and her Aunt Shaw, she would hardly be able to insist on
“her right to follow her own ideas of duty” but would rather probably still be stuck writing
Edith’s “endless number of notes” (417, 374). Margaret’s status as an heiress, however, does not
negate the importance of her new ability to create a future for herself. After all, while she has
spent much of her life responding to the changes that others set in motion in her life, her notion
of a whole self offers her a new kind of control. Here, as the details of Gaskell’s narrative make
clear, Margaret can put her past experiences in conversation with her present circumstances in
order to chart a forward course. This means that though there is much in her life that Margaret
cannot control, she can nonetheless navigate her way into her future with intention, “[taking] her
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life into her own hands” instead of passively “being whirled on through all these phases of [her]
life” (416, 400).
Finally, while Margaret’s ability to navigate her way into her future offers her a kind of
figurative mobility, her new self-understanding also offers her a much more literal mobility. In
being a whole self, she can finally move and not be so damaged by the act of removal. Unlike
her father, who could claim, “No—no more removals for me […] No more removals in this life,”
Margaret knows that she will not live at 96 Harley Street forever but will most likely move again
(258). But in understanding that she can carry her past forward, she no longer needs to worry
about the internal erosion that she sensed took place when she moved away from a home.
Though removal will still be painful and even unsteadying—for it will still signal the end of an
era of her life and the loss of a familiar home with all its comforting “household grooves”—she
can move on to her next home without having to worry “about how much of the original
Margaret was left” (209, 248). In addition, through all the changes that removal may bring, she
will still remain knowable to herself, for she will carry her past with her. This, indeed, is what
the notion of a perpetually-changing self could never offer Margaret. Without her history, she
would be only “now this, now that,” but as a whole self with her history, she can be Margaret
Hale, even on the move.
*
“Such strange unexpected changes”: Marriage, Milton, and Margaret’s Life Beyond the Novel’s
End
From an unchanging self to an eroding self to a perpetually-changing self to a whole self,
Margaret revises her self-understanding again and again before landing on one at the end of
North and South that will allow her to be both internally stable and mobile. But if Gaskell makes
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anything clear in North and South’s final pages, it is that Margaret’s work is far from over. In the
first place, the end of the novel emphasizes that Margaret’s development is not one-directional,
and what she learns, she can easily—and quickly—forget. This is especially true of her
acceptance of change. Over the course of the novel, Margaret saw again and again that whenever
she seemed sure of her future, her circumstances changed or she herself changed, her opinions
and views evolving over time and changed by her place of residence—and it seemed that
Margaret finally understood and indeed accepted this lesson during her return to Helstone. There,
she conceded that though often “all is not exactly as I had pictured it,” “the reality is far more
beautiful than I had imagined it” (401). However, at the end of the novel, we see Margaret
backtracking on her acceptance of change: she expresses her belief that she is “not likely ever to
see Mr. Thornton again,” and she declares to Edith that she “shall never marry” (398, 409). In
making these predictions, she seems to forget what all her experiences have shown her, which is
that, as she once told Frederick, “[t]here have been such strange unexpected changes in my life
during these last two years, that I feel more than ever that it is not worth while to calculate too
closely what I should do if any future event took place” (263).
To remind her heroine of what she already knows and to teach her again that she lives in
a world of unpredictable change, Gaskell thus makes sure to undo Margaret’s expectations one
more time before the novel ends, and in doing so, she gives readers a look at Margaret’s life
beyond the novel’s close. The spring after Margaret’s Cromer trip, Margaret does indeed meet
John Thornton again. Injured by business decisions made during the time of the strike and now
facing “one of those periods of bad trade,” Thornton finds that he must give up his
manufacturing business at Marlborough Mills, which, having been one of Mr. Bell’s properties,
is now Margaret’s, and so he travels to London to discuss subletting both the factory and his
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adjacent house, which are still under lease (421). Margaret proposes a loan so that Thornton can
keep his business open, and Thornton, having learnt from Nicholas Higgins of Margaret’s real
relationship with Frederick, in turn proposes marriage—which, this time, Margaret accepts. In
this way, Gaskell unsettles both of Margaret’s expectations: she not only makes sure that
Margaret sees John Thornton again, but she leaves her heroine engaged to him, on the verge of
marrying and moving back to Milton—a place to which she assumed that she would never
return. More broadly, in setting up Margaret’s expectations and in breaking those expectations,
Gaskell provides a glimpse into her heroine’s future beyond the novel, making it clear that
Margaret’s acceptance of change will never be permanent. Rather, she will have to relearn time
and time again that change is the way of the world and that she belongs to the world of change.
While sometimes this process of relearning will be pleasant and involve the realization that “the
reality is far more beautiful than I had imagined it,” this will not always be the case, as
Margaret’s experiences in North and South have demonstrated (401). Sometimes, indeed, this
process of relearning will be deeply painful.
In addition to emphasizing that Margaret’s acceptance of change is not behind her,
Gaskell also indicates in the final pages of North and South that, despite Margaret’s self-
protective notion of a whole self, she will still face great instability in her life. Indeed, while
ending with Margaret’s impending marriage is hardly a surprising turn of events in a Victorian
novel, this ending is by no means as conservative or as conventional as it might seem. After all,
in leaving Margaret on the verge of entering both marriage and Milton, Gaskell leaves her
heroine on the verge of entering a great many experiences that have the potential to make her
feel unstable.
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In particular, in sending Margaret back to Milton, Gaskell sends Margaret back to a place
of instability and radical change. On the one hand, yes, Margaret now understands herself to be a
whole self—an understanding that will presumably allow her to not to worry “how much of the
original Margaret is left” during her removal from Harley Street back to Milton (248). But her
notion of a whole self will not necessarily protect her from what she will face in this industrial
city modeled on Gaskell’s own steadily-growing Manchester.
20
As Mr. Bell told Henry Lennox,
“Milton! I go there ever four or five years—and I was born there—yet I do assure you, I often
lose my way—aye, among the very piles of warehouses that are built upon my father’s orchard”
(381). While Margaret was bothered by the small changes that she noticed upon her return to
Helstone—a tree felled here, a cottage torn down there—these changes will be nothing compared
to the changes that she will no doubt witness as a resident of Milton as the city continues to
expand and as industrial technology continues to advance. Nor will these changes just be visible.
In a city so heavily focused on the cotton industry, Margaret will most likely observe further
strikes on the part of the workers and further periods of bad trade too. Manchester’s own
millworkers, for example, experienced high rates of unemployment during the “cotton famine”
of the early 1860s, brought about by overproduction and low imports as a result of the American
Civil War. Indeed, while her inheritance from Mr. Bell saves John Thornton’s business at the end
of North and South, there may even come a time when her wealth and resources cannot prevent
catastrophe. In this way, Margaret is headed right back into what Gaskell so aptly terms Milton’s

20
Emma Griffin writes, “At the start of the 18th century, Manchester was a small, market town with a population of
fewer than 10,000. By the end of the century, it had grown almost tenfold, to 89,000 souls. In the 19th century, the
population continued to grow unabated, doubling between 1801 and the 1820s and then doubling again between then
and 1851, to 400,000 souls. […] Manchester continued to grow steadily down to the end of the century. In 1901 its
population stood at around 700,000.”
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“whirl,” and if anything is certain for Margaret, it is only that her life will not be lived on the
“smooth sea” as it was in Harley Street (374, 67).
In sending Margaret into marriage, Gaskell also sends her heroine into another kind of
“whirl” full of potential instability, for her marriage to John Thornton will require her to face far
greater difficulties than “keeping a piano in good tune (a difficulty which Edith seemed to
consider as one of the most formidable that could befall her in her married life)” (5). In the first
place, Margaret’s impending marriage throws into question her ability to maintain legal control
over her inherited money and “lands and tenements,” just as it throws into question her ability to
maintain control over herself (416). While she was able “to follow her own ideas of duty” as
Margaret Hale in London, it is not as clear that she will be able to do that as Mrs. John Thornton
in Milton, and she thus risks once again feeling “whirled on” through her life instead of feeling
that her life is in “her own hands” (416, 400, 416). In addition, the novel leaves open questions
of domestic space, for there is no concluding chapter that gives us a glimpse into Margaret’s
married life, as we find in Dickens’s Bleak House (1852-3) and so many other Victorian novels.
Though Gaskell considered having a fire burn down both Marlborough Mills and the adjacent
house, writing to Catherine Winkworth in October, 1854, “Then Margaret would rebuild them
larger & better & need not go & live there when she’s married,” this did not come to pass, and
the novel never specifies where Margaret and John Thornton will live once they are married—
and yet any situation that we might imagine certainly has the potential to leave Margaret feeling
unstable (Gaskell, Letters 310 [L211]). On one hand, if she and John Thornton establish their
own home away from the mill, she will be forced to repeat the process that she and her mother
and Dixon carried out upon her family’s initial move to Milton, slowly building a sense of home
by establishing “household grooves” and dealing in the meantime with an unhomely residence
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(209). Indeed, we can imagine that this process will take even longer, for Margaret and John
Thornton are not a long-established family but will be living together as husband and wife for the
first time. On the other hand, if Margaret moves into the house adjacent to Marlborough Mills,
she will enter into a fully-formed home, a home dominated not only by the “the continual clank
of machinery” but by her mother-in-law, whose “accustomed household grooves” may feel both
off-putting and, indeed, unhomely to Margaret (111, 209).
With Margaret on the verge of entering both Milton and marriage, it is as clear at the end
of North and South as it was at the beginning that Margaret’s subjective understandings of home,
self, and removal will only get her so far as a middle-class Victorian woman. While in Dombey
and Son Mr. Dombey makes his one great change and becomes infinitely portable—able to move
again and again without changing—Margaret Hale revises her understandings almost
continuously throughout North and South precisely because she is a woman on the move. While
she does land on a self-understanding near the novel’s end that will allow her to maintain her
sense of “the original Margaret” even as she moves, the novel indicates that her changes and
revisions—and, indeed, her sense of instability—are far from over (248). Rather, they will
continue as she moves through her life—and most certainly as she continues to move house.
203

Afterword
Moving House in the Later Nineteenth Century

Over the last three chapters, this critical dissertation project has considered two mid-
nineteenth-century novels and a body of male-authored nonfictional narratives which, though
they were published in the periodical press from the 1850s through the first decade of the
twentieth century, tell largely the same two stories again and again. But this focus on the mid-
nineteenth century is not meant to suggest that Victorian attitudes towards moving stayed the
same over the second half of the nineteenth century, as the male authors’ concern for their
perceived loss of control did. Rather, if we examine other narratives and removal-related pieces
published in the periodical press after the 1850s, in addition to later novels of removal, we find a
clear progression of Victorian attitudes towards moving. The afterword will sketch out this
progression, laying the groundwork for the next phase of this project in which I work to turn this
dissertation focused on mid-nineteenth-century narratives of removal into a book manuscript that
makes a historical argument about changing Victorian attitudes towards removal and changing
Victorian narratives of removal.
During the 1850s, the middle-class conversation about removal is marked by an emphasis
on Victorians’ continual circulation from home to home. The anonymous author of an advice
piece for women entitled “Moving House,” which was published in The National Magazine as
the 1857 Midsummer quarter day approached, captures the spirit of this mid-century moment
when she writes: “[A]nd behold here you have the two inseparable phases of house-moving at
once! the wane-phase, or that of the man who goes out; the crescent-phase, or that of the man
who comes in” (109-110). Here, the author of “Moving House” gives us an image for the frenetic
moves described in piece after piece published during the 1850s—one family departing a house
during the “wane-phase,” another family moving in during the “crescent-phase,” and the whole
204

cycle repeating itself with the next quarter day. In this image, though, is also the spirit of
possibility that characterizes the pieces about removal that appeared at this mid-century moment.
Certainly, these pieces make clear that house-hunters would most likely end up being dissatisfied
with the home that they selected and would want to move again, and certainly, these pieces make
clear that removal was “a discomfort to everybody,” as G. C. Swayne puts it in Blackwood’s
Edinburgh Magazine in 1856 (593). And yet these pieces also insist that a middle-class Victorian
family could find a new house to let. As Charles Manby Smith writes in “Moving House” in The
Leisure Hour (1854), each quarter day brought the “sudden apparition” of “to let” signs in the
windows of houses, indicating the many possible abodes opening up for families on the move,
and so Victorians needed only participate in the linked processes of house-hunting and house
removal, frustrating and exhausting though they may be, to rehouse themselves. This is the same
general cultural stance towards removal that we find in both Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1846-
8) and Gaskell’s North and South (1854-5). In these two mid-nineteenth-century novels, the
main characters experience difficulty when it comes to residential relocations: Mr. Dombey finds
himself frozen in his rented mansion even after his lease is terminated, and Margaret Hale finds
some part of herself erased with each removal into which her family thrusts her. And yet both
these main characters—and many other characters in the novels—are ultimately rehoused. In this
way, the novels implicitly assured their original readers that finding and reaching a new home
was possible.
This insistence, however, is a cultural stance that ultimately does not last. The optimism
of mid-nineteenth-century narratives like Dombey and Son and North and South—in which the
main characters do indeed find a new home—gives way, starting in the 1860s and continuing
into the 1880s, to an interest in not moving, in staying put and even maintaining a permanent
205

home. We can find one articulation of this attitude in Anthony Trollope’s The Small House at
Allington (1864). There, Hopkins, the opinionated gardener of Allington, expresses his
disapproval that Mrs. Dale and her daughters, Lily and Bell, are moving out of the Small House
and seeking lodgings in Guestwick as a result of a disagreement with the Squire. He tells Lily:
But why should your mamma be all for going away? She ain’t going to marry no
one. Here’s the house, and there’s she, and there’s t’ squire; and why should she
be for going away? So much going away all at once can’t be for any good. It’s
just a breaking up of everything, as though nothing wasn’t good enough for
nobody. I never went away, and I can’t abide it. (584)

Hopkins’s comment here—that “So much going away all at once can’t be for any good”—
represents the cultural attitude towards moving that developed after the mid-nineteenth century.
While many Victorians continued to move frequently, the middle-class conversation about
residential moves nonetheless contained a palpable interest in staying put, in having an enduring
home, and a wariness towards too much movement.
This new cultural attitude towards moving rears its head in a variety of forms in the print
conversation about removal. In the first place, it emerges in authors’ explicit thinking about
removal—particularly their resistance to it. After the mid-nineteenth century, moving is no
longer just “a discomfort to everybody” (Swayne 593); it is the ripping of a resident from his
home. As the author of “Moving House” writes in The Saturday Review in 1873, “A man grows
into a house as he grows into a pair of shoes; and he feels the change like a hermit crab dislodged
from the old shell to which his figure had gradually adapted itself” (343). In this author’s
formulation, moving is unnatural and painful and thus something to be avoided—a very different
idea than that put forward in Household Words in 1852: “When [a Victorian] is in a Terrace, he
has an insatiate longing for a Crescent; once removed to a Crescent, he feels that existence is
206

only worth having in a Square” (Jerrold and Wills 61). For the Saturday Review author of 1873,
a Terrace was just fine.
In addition to such direct articulations, the new interest in not moving, in remaining in a
residence, that we begin to see in the 1860s appeared in both the periodical press’s fictional
narratives and the novel, sometimes in the form of cancelled moves. In the short story “To Let;
Inquire Within,” published in The London Reader in 1866, the main character, a bachelor named
Mr. Nahum Briggs, decides to let his house and move elsewhere; however, by the end of the
piece, he has cancelled his move, for one of the house-hunters who knocked on his door was the
very woman with whom “he had quarrelled [sic] […] years and years ago, and whose blue eyes
had kept him a bachelor all his life long” (R. 219).
1
The story ends, “So the probabilities are that
neither Mr. Nahum Briggs nor his brown stone house will be in the market again as ‘To Let;
Inquire Within’” (219). This same plot of a cancelled move appears, albeit in more complex
forms, in the novel. In The Small House at Allington, even though they have already packed all
of their belongings in boxes, Mrs. Dale and her daughters “repent” of their decision to move and
part ways with the Squire, Lily declaring, “Then let it be undone,” the kitchenware and books put
back in place (585). So too in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), after the widowed
Gwendolen Grandcourt escapes her unhappy marriage, she arranges for her mother, her step-
sisters, and herself to move back to Offendene so that she can “piece back her life on to that time
when they first went there, and when everything was happiness about her, only she did not know
it” (661). In taking out a new lease on an old house, Gwendelen thus works to figuratively cancel

1
This is certainly a rare representation of a lone female house-hunter in the periodical press. This particular
character is house-hunting alone because she is widowed and is looking to rent a house that she can run as a
boarding house in order to make an income for herself.
207

her family’s earlier departure, and she also ends their previous itineracy, establishing a more
enduring family—and female—residence.
Of course, the most “enduring” family homes in both The Small House at Allington and
Daniel Deronda are the landed family homes, and both of these novels, in addition to featuring
plots of cancelled moves, are concerned with the notion—and the complicated reality—of
permanent homes with long histories. Trollope’s novel begins:
The squires of Allington had been squires of Allington since squires, such as
squires are now, were first known in England. From father to son, and from uncle
to nephew, and, in one instance, from second cousin to second cousin, the sceptre
had descended in the family of the Dales; and the acres had remained intact. (3)

Similarly, in Daniel Deronda, it is the Mallinger family which has held a position of
permanency: “[T]he Mallingers had the grant of Monk's Topping under Henry the Eighth, and
ages before had held the neighboring lands of King's Topping, tracing indeed their origin to a
certain Hugues le Malingre, who came in with the Conqueror” (140). However, both the current
Squire Dale and Sir Hugo Mallinger lack a son to inherit their money and property, for the
Squire is unmarried and Sir Hugo’s marriage has “produced nothing but girls” (75). Both of
these characters thus look to a nephew as heir, and both characters struggle with issues of
control, revealing that the very rules and practices which allow the family home to be inherited,
and thus made permanent, create difficulty for the individual who has not created a proper heir—
a son. At the heart of these novels, then, is an anxiety about who is able to keep a home over
time—an anxiety very much in line with cultural attitudes towards moving at this historical
moment.
Ultimately, both Trollope and Eliot’s novels end with a reinstatement of the fantasy of
the permanent home, any dawning realization of home’s impermanence re-shelved just like the
Dales’ possessions. In The Small House of Allington, Trollope emphasizes the importance of the
208

constancy of both home and heart in his novel: he keeps Mrs. Dale and Lily established in the
Small House (Bell having married) and smooths over their issues with the Squire, while also
emphasizing Lily’s continued devotion to Adolphus Crosbie. In addition, Trollope contrasts such
constancy with the character and storyline of Crosbie, who remains utterly inconstant throughout
the novel. Crosbie, having entered into a miserable marriage with Lady Alexandrina De Courcey
for social advantage, finds himself living alone, much as he did as a bachelor but under tighter
financial circumstances, the house and furniture he established with his wife at Princess Royal
Crescent given up, all the while regretting his loss of Lily Dale. On the other hand, in Daniel
Deronda, Eliot emphasizes the importance of finding an identity in which to root oneself, of
discovering one’s “hereditary armour” or “inherited yearning” apart from any financial or
material inheritance, though she certainly does not deny the practical importance of the latter
(639, 642). She accomplishes this by having Gwendolen work to reestablish Offendene as her
family’s home and by having Daniel Deronda discover his Jewish identity and dedicate his life to
Mordecai’s desire, which he believes he has inherited—namely, “that of restoring a political
existence to [his] people, making them a nation again, giving them a national center, such as the
English have, though they are too scattered over the face of the globe” (689).
The next step for this project will be to investigate why these particular cultural attitudes
towards moving develop during the 1860s and persist into the 1880s. It is noteworthy that these
views began to appear around the same time as the 2nd Reform Bill of 1867, which enfranchised
large numbers of working-class men who were “householders.” They also align with calls in the
1870s and 1880s to reform the leasehold system and with objections to English patterns of land
ownership which prevented individual home ownership from becoming widespread.
2
A

2
See Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories, pp. 108-111, for a discussion of calls in the 1870s and 1880s to reform the
leasehold system and objections to English patterns of land ownership which prevented individual home ownership
209

preliminary hypothesis is thus that the narratives of removal published during this time were
informed by a larger cultural interest in property and freehold and a desire for a sense of
permanency amid a rapidly-changing physical and social landscape.
After this major shift that occurs in the 1860s through the 1880s, cultural attitudes
towards removal shift once more around the turn of the twentieth century. Here, the print
conversation about removal actually begins to sound quite a bit like the print conversation about
removal from the mid-nineteenth century, authors emphasizing the heightened mobility and
frequent moves of middle-class Victorians and Edwardians. The author of Bow Bells’s
“Furnishing the Home” (1896) argues that “no house is a permanent dwelling place” (464); the
author of The Sketch’s “Frocks and Furbelows” (1902) declares, “We change our habitations, as
we change our habiliments” (197); and the author of The Saturday Review’s “Moving House”
(1905) proclaims, “We have lived into an age that scorns to be stationary” (587). At the same
time, the authors of the periodical press also put forward the idea that this residential mobility is
new to their generation. The author of The Saturday Review piece suggests, “Not so long ago, it
was common, among all classes, to find a man living where his grandfather lived. Now, how
many do so? It is barely respectable, it is at least dreadfully old-fashioned, to stop in one place
ten years” (“Moving House,” The Saturday Review [1905] 587). Likewise, the author of “Frocks
and Furbelows” seems to earnestly ask, “Who would have thought of moving house even twice
in a lifetime when early Victorian manners prevailed? Who thinks of living in any one place for
five consecutive years nowadays?” (197). In this way, the turn-of-the-century conversation about
removal that we find in the periodical press seems to ignore its own past, forgetting that, in the
1850s, every quarter day found middle-class Victorians “flitting backwards and forwards like

from becoming widespread. On the importance of landed property to English concepts of political rights, see Asa
Briggs, The Making of Modern England, 1783-1867: the Age of Improvement (New York: Harper and Row, 1965).
210

unquiet phantoms, and turning their heads constantly on this side and that, in search of a new
domicile” (Smith 508).
As for the novel, we certainly see the constant moving referred to in the periodical press’s
short pieces enacted in turn-of-the-century works like Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895)
and E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910), though these novels also contain a darker vision of the
dangers of repeated moves and, at times, an insistence on the impossibility of finding a
permanent home. In Jude the Obscure, whose six parts are organized around the towns and
villages where Jude Fawley and Sue Bridehead live or travel, the main characters move from
place to place, unsatisfied and socially excluded, and their ability to find a permanent home
remains an utter impossibility. In part, this is a result of what the narrator calls “the modern vice
of unrest,” but it is also the result of the social norms they come up against but cannot break:
once Jude and Sue begin living together and raising a family, their moves increase because they
are ostracized for being unmarried (69). They sell their furniture and move about, Jude “getting a
job here and a job there,” no end to their “shifting, almost nomadic life” in sight until their
family’s tragic end (235, 243).
On the other hand, Howards End seems to begin with a stronger sense of stasis and home
than Jude the Obscure—the Schlegel siblings comfortably settled in Wickham Place where they
have been since birth, the Wilcoxes living at Howards End where Mrs. Wilcox herself was
born—but this sense quickly implodes, with the Schlegels forced to find a new home and the
Wilcoxes moving from Howards End, to a Wickham Mansions flat, to a house in Ducie Street, to
Oniton Grange, and back again. This is the “Age of Property,” as the Schlegels phrase it, in
which households of furniture are moved around the country, in which people “are reverting to
the civilization of luggage, and historians of the future will note how the middle classes accreted
211

possessions without taking root in the earth” (128). Indeed, while Howards End does end with
home being found (and “founded) for Margaret, Helen, and Mr. Wilcox, both Margaret and
Helen know that “London’s creeping” towards them and that “London is only part of something
else” (289, 290). Howards End, then, exists as part of the past; it is a “survival[]” that will be
“melted down” when modernity fully reaches its doorstep (290). While Margaret nonetheless
hopes that the modern “craze for motion” will “be followed by a civilization that won’t be a
movement, because it will rest on earth” and believes in the ability of Howards End to be “the
future as well as the past,” there is still the sense in Forster’s novel that to have a home and to be
at home is to belong to the past (290).
From the optimism that a new home can be found or reached in the 1850s to an anxious
insistence that home can be kept or even reclaimed in the 1860s through the 1880s, cultural
attitudes towards removal came at the turn of the twentieth century to emphasize Victorians’ and
Edwardians’ continual residential movement and to express a skepticism regarding the
possibility of finding or keeping a lasting home. In this way, cultural attitudes towards removal
mirror the cynicism and pessimism that we more broadly associate with this historical moment.
The next step for this project will be to place these turn-of-the-century narratives of removal in
conversation with contemporaneous discussions about the rapid social, material, and physical
changes that turn-of-the-century England witnessed, but also with changing residential patterns,
for as historians have noted, the short-term leasehold culture of Victorian England ultimately
does not last. As Michael Anderson summarizes, “Certainly, as living standards rose over the
late nineteenth century, population turnover within towns seems to have declined and the arrival
of rented council housing, plus slow expansion of the previously small owner-occupied sector,
meant that, by the mid-twentieth century, house moving had become a much more infrequent
212

affair for the mass of the population” (“Social Implications” 13). Indeed, with slowing
population turnover and the rise of home ownership came the end of the conversation about
removal in the periodical press and the tapering off of plots of removal in short narratives and the
novel. The next phrase of this project will thus ask what happens to the home—and to narratives
of home—when residential space becomes more permanent? Is home made more lasting—or
more impossible—in the early twentieth century, and for whom?

213

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223

Heroine

(Poems)

Creative Dissertation

224

Table of Contents

In the Museum of the Nineteenth Century, the Lights Are Coming On 226
~
How to Write Your Own Victorian Sensation Novel 228
Domestic Sphere 229
Dangerous for Girls 230
Black Mountain 231
Matchgirl, East End 232
The Artist’s Model 234
Fog 235
Small As 236
Clockwise 237
~
How to Write Your Own Victorian Marriage Plot Novel 242
In a Season of Honeymooning 245
Idyll 246
Letter of Welcome to the New Mistress 247
Gears 249
This Is Not a Confession 250
The Novelist’s Children 251
A Brief History of the Train 254
~
Before Deep Mourning 256
Shopping List for a Season of Mourning 257
widow, n. 258
Letters to the Dead 259
~
At the Exhumation, the Coffin Speaks 267
The Clocks in All the Novels Have Paused 268
Pteridomaniac 269
Modern Marriage and How to Bear It 271
Letter of Notice to the Country House 272
Alchemy in the Field Behind the High House 273
How to Write Your Own Victorian Serial Novel 274
Rewrite 275
Portrait of the Artist Trying 276
Notice of Risks 277
Reasons to Destroy a Book 278
Ars Poetica Written Breathlessly 279

Notes 280
225

226

In the Museum of the Nineteenth Century, the Lights Are Coming On

Green moon of arsenic soap,
waning. Anti-masturbation rings
in nickel-plated steel. Scissors-grinders
and chimneysweeps. Whalebone corsetry.
In the orphan farm, cradle rows
of babies
teething on gin-soaked rags.
Girls selling watercress, girls
selling sex. Another lowered down
the coal-pit’s throat, bucket chained
to her wrist. Little curtain
over the keyhole
to keep out the dust.
A little chlorine in the drapes
to ward off the river’s stench.
In back-alley porno shops, photographs
of bare-legged women swinging
in ivy gardens. Cholera
in the slum water again,
a palace being built of glass. Pages
of a yellow-backed novel spilled
like maple leaves. On a mid-century
fainting couch, women’s pelvic massages.
Carefully-trimmed shrubbery, the front steps
scrubbed clean. Newsboys calling out
the latest smash. A dose
of cold beef tea jelly
and the marriage market’s meat:
Claras, Lavinias, Maudes.
Teeth chattering in the cotton mill’s
din. All-day admission to the freakshow
for sixpence. In a closet, a crinoline petticoat
stuffed tighter than a jack-in-the-box.

227

~

228

How to Write Your Own Victorian Sensation Novel

Start with a neighborhood you know
and the newspaper’s sins: divorce,

bankruptcy, the heir turned illegitimate.
Add a rumor of typhoid fever

to the lake, hints of a tryst on a rumpled
bed. Once the body’s found

at the bottom of a well, don’t forget
hypnosis or a train wreck.

Then a spy to twist the plot, a gnarled
limb. Letters stolen—

altered, then sent. Laudanum and pale
heroines. Hide a murderer

in the curtains, perch a woman listening
on a ledge.

229

Domestic Sphere

“Birds that get plenty of exercise beyond the doors of their cages become very
tame and most affectionate, and may easily be taught many pretty tricks.”
—Gordon Stables, “Girls’ Own Pets, Section Ninth: The Siskin and Canary”
(1882)

In the room, another room.
Ribbed and gilded dome,
open to the air. Inside,

lark, linnet, goldfinch, canary.
It doesn’t matter. A body
to peck at seeds, to sip beads

of water. Shiver, ruffle, shine.
Black eyes in a bright head
reflecting the hand that feeds.

Once a day, exposure to light.
Once a day, time to fly,
diamond points of the body

tracing the walls’ limits.
Beyond the window, a dozen
windows, an ornate cage in each.

In each, a perched body
rustling its wings, singing
its panic soundlessly.

230

Dangerous for Girls

“Romance-reading by young girls will, by this excitement of the bodily organs,
tend to create their premature development, and the child becomes physically a
woman months, or even years, before she should.”—Dr. Mary Wood-Allen,
What a Young Woman Ought to Know (1899)

Deep in the orchard of summer, you lie in the grass
and read, novel spread open on your knees, the parchment
of a bee’s wing snagged in your hair. The nearest man
hoes a field two miles east. Though your mother measures
your skirts longer each season, blades of grass can still itch
your ankles, the arches of your feet. You are almost to the story’s
turn, where the heroine must choose: the greying suitor’s clock-tick
house or the golden singer’s kisses scalding her skin. But is the choice
really a choice? For now, you are still a girl surrounded
by droning bees. Pink mouth open, paperback slack,
you lose your place under the apples’ ripening.

231

Black Mountain

The dust heap rises behind cottages,
slopes of cinders and ash and dust-hole
emptyings. Across this growing record
of the city’s waste, knots of thistle
and groundsel grow, and crows stitch
an invisible sieve. At the base, where pigs
root for bones, the pickers sort,
men pouring the dust as the women sift
to salvage what’s sellable—cinders separated
to sell to laundresses and brick-makers,
oyster shells to builders laying roads,
bottle shards and mustard pots to old-glass
shops, and the stiff bodies of cats
to dealers who pay most for white fur.
Ash clings to the to the pickers’ clothes
and hair. Somewhere in the heap
a coin or thimble waits, and more dust
arrives each day. Among the pickers,
there are stories of burning stars in the ash,
golden fire at the peak. As crows stitch
another line in their sieve, a boy shrieks
with his find, though when he opens
his palm, nothing but refuse remains.

232

Matchgirl, East End

“In 1831, French chemist Charles Sauria introduced the modification which
would ultimately cost the lives of untold numbers of matchworkers, substituting
white phosphorus for sulphide of antimony.” —Louise Raw, Striking a Light

No escape. Lucifer matches all day—
splits of wood attached to frames

and dipped in phosphorus paste.
Girls’ hands reaching to yank the splits

from the frames. Girls’ hands
stuffing boxes with matches cut to size.

All day Lucifers burst to light,
striking off anything. Flares flicked

to the floor and ground underfoot,
but fumes and smoke rise

to fill her mouth. A boy, Tom,
who dips the matches in paste, whispers

that when the gas is put out at shift’s end,
the factory walls glow white.

She’s seen the piles of florescent
vomit that spark along her homeward route.

Always at home, Mother’s matchboxes
drying on the table—seven shillings

a week. On the wall, marks where all
the Lucifers have tongued to life. A match

to light the candle, a match to start the fire.
One flick of the hand, over and over.

In the bedroom, she lays her dress
on the chair, watches it fluoresce.

233

She thinks of the woman next door—
first yellow skin and clumps of hair

in her hands. Then the face
green, then the face black. She thinks

of the girl who ate a box when she was
late, of the man who killed himself.

All night, she dreams sick light,
toothache. The sky a smattering of flames.

And the black beetles that scurry over her
in sleep—charred heads that will not die.

234

The Artist’s Model

—Lizzie Siddal posing for John Everett Millais’s Ophelia, Gower Street, London,
1852

When the heating lamp below the tub
snuffs out, I float in my swollen dress
like I have each afternoon for months.
The painter keeps at his brushwork:
fan of my red-gold hair, the silver
embroidery of flowers. For a long time,
there is only heat’s emptying—like the bruised
retreat of evening light on my walk
home. Even as the cold turns sharp blade

against my ankles, teeth, and skull,
I stay. I am not Ophelia, not a creature
native and indued unto that element, not
one incapable of her own distress, but I keep
my mouth in place so the painter sees:
on a mossy current, a girl drifting
to suicide, lips parted in mad-song.
The bathwater roars in and out of my ear.
Ophelia told Claudius we know what we are,

but I know what I may be, the fibers
of my costume growing heavy. I have
an artist’s singleness of vision,
and I choose a copper coin and my face
on this corpse painting. I choose more than
millinery shop days. When the painter hears
the bathwater shivering against the tub,
he drops his brush. I let him fish me out,
my fingers burning bright as bee stings.

235

Fog

I am yellow fingers swabbing
your face at dawn and a ghost
breath blown on your wife’s neck
when she’s alone. Just try and keep me
out. I wither houseplants, settle
in the little berries of your infant’s
lungs. Not even the spirits you pour
so generously will wash my phlegm
from the back of your throat.
That creeping premonition
that follows you, soot grazing
your cheeks like rotted snow?
That’s me. Go ahead and fire
your gun. Startle the ducks, all squawk
and wing. I thicken like cold soup.
I cling for weeks, streets you’ve known
your whole life turning strange
maze. Hands out, calling a name
I wipe from your tongue.

236

Small As

…small as mice
That run along a witch’s scarlet thread
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh

Small as heads
Of brussels sprouts that shiver in the fog

*

Small as birds
That hop and dart across a stubbled field

*

Small as words
Eroding from a gravestone’s lichened face

*

Small as sparks
That fly from the scissors-grinder’s wheel

237

Clockwise

I. Spin

Brontë sisters, 1846

Shutters barred to night,
the sisters set their pace
around the dining table—

three spokes on a wheel.
Each takes her turn, reading
aloud from pages held close

to shortsighted eyes. The sisters
walk counterclockwise.
Round and round they talk,

adjusting each other’s plots
until chapters spool in the lamplight.
So much remains to write.

Bound to their circle’s reach,
reeling around the hub
of speech, the sisters don’t hear

the wind wail—or the pulse
of the clock up the stairs,
whose own hands spin on.

238

II. Consume

Charlotte Brontë, December, 1848

Toward wherever a bloom of heather
might linger, I run,
crowberry tangling my feet. Each cough
eats my sister from inside.
Blood-red hips gleam on the briars.

Already brother lies in a dark
and narrow vault, the waste
of his winter face my nightmare,
and little sister, the youngest, feels scissors
twist in her side. Without end, they seem—

these hills, high and dusted with snow. One sprig
is all I need, so I search
past moss-blackened crags,
grouse crackling,
the wind dragging my sleeves,

when there—in a hollow, a spire of blossoms
hangs on, brittle heads faded to tea stain.

I carry her favorite flower home,
entire in my hand,
but my sister sees nothing,
and the churchyard still chokes with stones.

239

III. Revenant

Charlotte Brontë, 1849

I walk alone, round
and round the dining table.

Father and the servants
hours in their beds, the clock

rattles the parsonage.
Each morning, the dogs

whimper outside closed rooms,
waiting for owners who don’t

return. Each afternoon,
I cross the moors,

where larks’ nests unravel
in the wind and blue shadows

wave on the horizon.
I do not fool myself, at least:

no footsteps follow mine.
Here, through the long night,

I circle alone—
broken wheel, silent spoke.

240

IV. Kingdom

Brontë children, late 1820s

Stamping the moorland with their boots,
the children trail an illegible script.
Wind whips their hair. Though the grey
church tower calls them home

to tea and their father’s lesson, their lips
bubble with stories of toy soldiers
named the Young Men. They’ve mapped
and censused whole states for them,

slayed their heroes to have Genii
raise them to life again. Small figures
thrall to these vast hills, to the vaster sky,
the children stop to hold council

by a stunted hawthorn, fixed aslant,
straining its limbs. In fiction, the law
is theirs to invent, and no one—not mother,
not sister—dies without full agreement.

241

~
242

How to Write Your Own Victorian Marriage Plot Novel

Part I

Give the heroine
a shelf of books,
a willful mind,
at least one dead parent.

Give the man
a galloping horse
and a country estate he will inherit,
provided the right relatives die.

Then design the circumstances
that lead to their meeting—

Knock him from his mare.

Have a fat uncle make the introduction.

Twist the heroine’s ankle on a hillside in rain.

What matters is that, soon, he calls,

and when her hand pours him tea,
she hears her bracelets trembling.

What matters is that he comes back,

though the room they sit in is small,
the chintz curtains fraying.

243

Part II

Now enter the dark heart of the thing.

Set the women in the neighborhood loose
after the scent of a single man

with money. At the next town party,
turn his attention,
a crowd of shiny dresses

snickering at your heroine’s old-fashioned sleeves.

Or, if yours
is a bleaker tale of the late century,

light a rumor about the hero
like a match in a dry field—

the girl paid and hushed, cloistered

with the bastard child in a distant county.

You alone must determine how difficult this plot will be.

Will your heroine waver no, yes, no?

What about the shadow that crosses his face sometimes,
fast as bat wings?

And that pit of a stone fruit she feels inside?

What about the money she needs?
(A brother’s debt, perhaps.)

Will he follow her if she tries to walk away?

If he grabs her arm, how tight will his grip be?
244

Part III

Have her hold out for as long
as you wish—
for as long as she can.

Send her to relatives
in a London backstreet,
to a river spa
in Germany.

But there are only so many pages left

and even wet sand must slip
through the hourglass.

Wherever you tuck her away, ready her:
set her pace
before a midnight window,

churn her mind
under a cold lace of stars.

Then it’s time to give her up.

When the church bells peal and petals spin down through the air,

hang the bridal veil.

Through the netted fabric,
let us barely glimpse

the contours of your heroine’s face—

joyful,
tattered,
vanishing.
245

In a Season of Honeymooning

“I wandered by accident into a neighbourhood that is largely affected by newly-
married couples. There are many such districts in England, and there are
particular hotels, indeed, to which these young people inevitably go.”
—London Daily News, 25 August 1873

Beyond the hotel’s
hallway of doors, each room

is a hidden sea.
All night waves lick

the rain-pocked sand,
sea hollies clutching the beach.

Handfuls of unpinned hair,
bodies like undercurrents

turning beneath the sheets.
At dawn, the tide draws back,

seaweed tangled on the strandline.

246

Idyll

Let’s leave the City’s stench, its cholera
and violence. Our villa will be pattern-book,

like all the villas being built. We’ll grow
peas and nests of cabbage, plant borders

of campion and Canterbury bells—
the garden wall high, the privet hedge

sheared and dense. There will be no
soot, no gin, no slum streets, no ragged

children or heaps of oyster shells—
only our clean, wide lane and countryside

waving beyond, there where gate latches
hold their tongues. At night, we’ll draw

the curtains tight, our house sealed
like a house should be. We won’t

even hear the rain hissing in our sleep.

247

Letter of Welcome to the New Mistress

“[In Victorian London] St. John’s Wood was one place beyond all others where
gentlemen of discretion provided for their mistresses in a proper manner,
establishing them in quiet villas surrounded by sheltered gardens and high
walls.”—A.L. Shearn

This neighborhood can be a show, villas lit up
behind ivy-laced walls. Piano clank and soprano
trill, the rushing currents inside champagne flutes.
Those are the nights you’ll braid your hair
so his fingers can unravel it, nights you’ll bare
your diamond-heavy throat. Nights of nightingale
screech and swollen lips. But it’s not all sex here.
Most evenings, you’ll find yourself a wife
in all but name. Mistresses stifle yawns too,
and God knows there’s enough laundry
to make this like any other neighborhood.
We think, like us, you’ll find the Wood loveliest
in daytime—when the men leave for the City.
Then we do as we please. Wet cherries
in a white bowl and robes until noon, windows
thrown open to groves of lilac and almond trees.
We hold hours for gossip and trade what we need:
eggs for satin slippers, sheet music for leveled cups
of flour. There’s rarely a reason to leave.

You’re young, we see, still dazzled by silk dresses
and carriage rides in the Ring, but a long-term lease,
paid in full, written in your name, is what you need.
Too many houses in the Wood rent by the week—
so listen to those of us who’ve stayed. An actress
has lived in the villa to the right of yours for years,
having quit the stage to soothe her lover’s jealousy.
To the left, a woman who binds a banker’s wrists
because his wife refuses. Across the street, a doll
who cinches her waist so her duke can hold it
in his hands. Do what you need to keep a house:
draw your tongue up the length of him
while the oil lamps burn, let your ear become a shell
into which he can whisper his smallest words.
This life is one door after another slamming shut.
248

Make sure you have your own to shut you in—
sunlight filling the rooms that are yours to wander
through, cherry pits glistening in your white bowl.

249

Gears

The British census of 1891 found that there were 1.38 million indoor domestic
servants in Victorian England.

One girl climbing the stairs under the coal scuttle’s weight.
One girl placing a sufficiency of forks and knives.
One girl, with her chemistry of yellow soap and unslaked lime, churning the wash.
One girl mincing lemon peel for canny pudding.
One girl wiping her mistress’s kid boots (the trick for mud: a milky sponge).
One girl daydreaming in pigeon-gray light.
One girl handing from the left: turtle soup, roast loin of mutton, raisin pudding.
One girl strewing damp tea leaves on the carpet before sweeping.
One girl against the study’s wall, the master of the house pressing hard.
One girl humming a song her mother used to sing.
One girl, garden dirt under her fingernails, scrubbing.
One girl brushing more velvet bonnets than anyone could need.
One girl’s hand slapped with a stick (a coarse apron left on to serve tea).
One girl smashing cockroaches in the kitchen where she sleeps.
One girl rubbing each chair leg until it gleams.
Two girls turning a mattress, rain down their backs, the wallpaper a peacock-feathered storm.
One girl whitening the front steps before anyone comes.
One girl inhaling aired sheets that almost smell like spring.
One girl wiping the clock face behind which the gears don’t stop.
One girl sifting cinders from ash in her sleep.

250

This Is Not a Confession

“Books can be so bewitching that everything else is neglected for them. There
have been such things as periodicals, or small volumes, stowed away in the
pocket, to be snatched out and devoured every minute there was a chance, while
the untouched task and neglected duty arose condemningly before the eyes, and
almost hid the page.”—Marianne Farningham, Girlhood (1869)

So what your husband is due home, and your hair
isn’t brushed, and breakfast’s crumbs lie where they fell?
Sunk deep in the sofa, head bowed, you can’t stop
reading now. The husband in the novel holds his wife

by the throat of her floral dress. He knows
about the man’s flat she visited alone, can’t stop
her breathless pant from ringing in his head.
The sentences pull you further in, a tight hand

around the wrist. The fictional husband throws
his wife to her knees. Run, you scrawl in the margin
as your own husband’s key scratches in the lock.
You push back her hair, the room gone shadowy,

the cod uncooked, the houseplants’ leaves unstirring.
So what his footstep’s in the hall? Dig your fingernails
into the hardback’s purple cloth. He can wait.
In the novel, the wife rises, refusing to admit anything.

251

The Novelist’s Children

The study’s door shut
every morning at nine,
and the extra door
he added too. After that,

Father bore no more noise
than the flowers easing open
their vase-bound blooms
as his pen rivered the sheet.

*

Exiled to the rest
of the house, we gathered—
our row of faces peering
through the banister posts.

*

When the pen’s
blue ink faltered,
his feet paced
behind the double-door.

How we measured
the morning—
floorboards creaking
to the left, then right.

*

That shut room
like a sag in the house,
and all of us
tipping towards it.

*

At lunch, he emerged
to sit among us, lifting
252

cheese and bread
to his mouth. We watched

his eyes like a storm
in the distance.
Father with his own
private weather—

thunder, seasons
of drought, north wind.
Always, after eating,
he shut his doors again.

*

Riddle we never
solved: how can
we enter when
we know not to knock?

*

We heard voices
as he spoke them
into being
before his mirror.

We saw nothing,
though we liked to imagine
a skirt brushing by,
an elbow’s press.

Dozens of them
culled from his mind,
the room
humming like a hive.

*

Another riddle:
if he created them,
were they his children?
What did they make us?
253

*

At five, the doors
opened, a gust rippling
through the house,
his lips still mumbling.

Sometimes we played
a game, sliding out a finger,
a foot, a knee. If he
tripped, we could be seen.

*

Cobweb hair,
limbs of smoke,
our fog of faces
as he stalked by.

—after the children of Charles Dickens

254

A Brief History of the Train

Before the train, there was no station,
no stroke of rising steam. No black

engine waiting. No conductor’s orb
of lamplight. Before the train, there was

no parting, your face not yet framed
in the carriage window and my hand longing

across. No whistle, no jolt of the journey
beginning, no cars sliding past, my figure

platform-bound and small. Before the train,
no iron miles stretched ahead, no steeple

or reaped field marking your distance
from this city, soot falling above

no station’s glass roof. Before the train,
you were here, and we wandered

the rain-slick streets, your body like a rail—
hot and bound to mine with cross-ties.

255

~
256

Before Deep Mourning

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Christmas, 1860

She would remember later—the winter so cold
rooks froze on the trees, the legs of waterfowl
locked in iced-over lakes. At Windsor,

snow drifts swathed the castle’s stones,
the windows growing crystalline vines
of frost. But inside, beech logs burned,

and her husband’s Christmas trees bore up
their loads: sweetmeats, gilt walnuts, gingerbreads.
He sat with her then, watching the flakes fall

in white flocks across the garden. Only later
would she know this to be their last shared snow,
remembering how soldiers in bearskins kept watch

below the windows in shifts and the old rooms
held their heat against the storm. How gentle that bitter
winter would seem to the coming freeze, black and years-long.

257

Shopping List for a Season of Mourning

▪ a hearse, crowned with ostrich feathers
▪ the coachman and his wand
▪ a tray of gloves for mourners
▪ three dresses in black paramatta, covered in crape
▪ another two in bombazine
(in this period of sorrow, I must avoid shining)
▪ cypress branches weeping needle-leaves
▪ four jet horses at least, a velvet covering for each
▪ a cup of tea for the undertaker’s man
▪ black-edged envelopes bearing the announcement
of my black-edged grief
(the margins double-measured)
▪ two mutes to accompany the procession
▪ underwear, trimmed with sable ribbons
(so loss stays pressed to my hips)
▪ twenty empty carriages on hire to rattle behind
the hearse to the grave
▪ a cellar of wine for the guttered nights
▪ one can of coffin nails

258

widow, n.

a woman whose spouse has died and who has not
married again / an expiring or nearly extinguished flame /
any of the widowbirds; esp. the long-tailed / an extra hand
or number of cards dealt to the table in certain games /
a brand of champagne / a short line of text which falls
undesirably at the end of a paragraph, esp. one set
at the top of a page

—an erasure from the Oxford English Dictionary

259

Letters to the Dead

After Lady Jane Franklin, whose husband, Sir John Franklin, led a two-ship
expedition into the Canadian Arctic to chart and navigate a section of the
Northwest Passage in 1845. The entire expedition was lost. Searches for the HMS
Erebus, the HMS Terror, and their men began in 1848 and continued throughout
much of the 19
th
century. The HMS Erebus was finally located in 2014 and the
HMS Terror in 2016.

Dear Love,

What should I say?

That I cannot eat?

That the sun on my face
is a shame?

That I am
a sinking ship of grief?

In truth, I added a hall
to the house
so I could host
two dozen at a time.

My dinners consist
of julienne soup,
braised beef,
whitebait;

then quail,
strawberries,
cake, and wine.

260

*

For years after
you were lost,

sleep was a white waste
I staggered across—

searching
for your boot prints,

laying tins of meat
in the snow.

261

*

I tried, I did—
clairvoyants
and admiralty men.

Schooner
after dockyard lighter
after pilot boat.

Only relics trickled home.

Pieces of rope and canvas,
animal bones.

Then ribbons and gold
braid. A pocket watch.

A spoon engraved
with the conger eel’s head,

your crest—

like nothing in my hand.

Later, a prayer book
frozen shut

and, found inside a cairn,

the men’s penned announcement
of your death.

262

*

“Faithful Penelope,”
they call me—

but I
sent you off.

Your orders:

make a legend
in our name.

263

*

I’m glad you died—

watching the butler
at the sideboard
slicing breast
from bone.

I thank God you didn’t
live long enough
to suffer
hunger’s shame.

A cooking pot,

the corpses’ fingers
defleshed.

Marrow sucked
from splintered bones.

264

*

Never mind.

The Northwest Passage
is yours—
the inscription
I placed
on your monument

proclaims it so.

You grow
immortal, love.

I can almost believe
you’re still safe.

Shining tines
of forks
and the ship’s cold books
to fill your days

as you wait
for the ice to thaw.

265

*

Dear Love,

Haven’t I always told you

there is
what happens

and then

there is how
we choose to tell it?

Forgive

this drawer
of letters

at least.

I have nowhere
to send them.

Faithfully,
Yours

266

~

267

At the Exhumation, the Coffin Speaks
1

Close back the lid on her face.
Put out your lantern and shovel
glint. You couldn’t resettle
the careful folds of her dress,
the brittle red dust of her hair,
if you tried. In your shoes’
tread, the soft relics of mouse shit

that honored this shrine.

Don’t you see? The moss
will grow again to the stone’s
very lip. The leaves of hornbeam,
hazel, ash, and sweet chestnut
will sweep themselves back
to where they were. The faithful

will mourn. Under a white knuckle
of moon, moles with silver-raven
fur, the fox and her pups, tawny
owl. Pocket your rough hands
and lock the gate. Let me hold her
as we were under our winter
blanket of dirt. Don’t you see?

The pages you sought are filled
with holes. Holes shaped like pears,
like scythes, like a mouth
calling back, cackling. There,
a worm still wriggling through
the voweled heart of a word
you will never be able to read.

1
In February 1862, Lizzie Siddal died of a laudanum overdose, which may have been an intentional
suicide. Her husband, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, placed a journal of his poems in her coffin, telling a friend
that “I have often been writing at these poems when Lizzie was ill and suffering, and I might have been
attending to her, and now they shall go.” Several years later, in October 1869, Rossetti decided he
wanted the poems back so he could include them in a new volume of verse that he was about to publish.
268

The Clocks in All the Novels Have Paused

From low chairs in the grass,
the heroines pass tiers
of cucumber sandwiches
and raspberry sponge cake.
The usual characters have convened—
grown daughters in muslin
and ribbons, heiresses yawning
diamonds. Teenage housekeepers
whose cupboard keys chime.
Governesses and quiet nieces
weathering tempest minds.
Clouds morph like a story overhead,

but the women pay no heed.
They are on break from the uses
of narrative. Crumbs spilling
from their lips, they don’t talk about
the next scene or when their weddings
will be. Not even the ever after,
happily though it’s promised
to be. For this hour, no one
blushes, no one’s made
to weep. The heroines just steep
in the pale sun, and no narrator
takes his stab at what they think.

269

Pteridomaniac

“Your daughters, perhaps, have been seized with the prevailing ‘Pteridomania’,
and are collecting and buying ferns, […] and wrangling over unpronounceable
names of species, (which seem different in each new Fern-book that they buy), till
the Pteridomania seems to you somewhat of a bore: and yet you cannot deny that
they find enjoyment in it, and are more active, more cheerful, more self-forgetful
over it, than they would have been over novels and gossip, crochet and Berlin-
wool.”—Charles Kingsley, Glaucus (1855)

How I grub in the damp woods.
Trowel in one hand—

in the other, pocketbook of fronds.

Moonwort, bracken, broad buckler,

little adderstongue.

I tramp across meadow and hill and glen,

fingers combing gully and hedge bank.

Though I take only sparingly,
my cord’s ready for bundling.

My satchel’s lined with moss.

Brittle bladder fern, forked spleenwort.

How I bend for
rust-colored scales,
for the lemon scent of a native species.

How I crawl.

I reach into the crevice’s black heart
to finger a stalk.

Hard fern,
filmy fern,
lady fern.
270

Why shouldn’t my shoes be ooze-caked,
earth smeared on my cheeks?

I’ve slipped down muddy banks
and sidestepped along waterfalls,
my bonnet lost

chasing a ravine’s glint of evergreen.

Rue-leaved spleenwort,
tatting.

Magnifying glass clasped to my eye, I read cruciate forms,
tasseled tips, bipinnate leaves.

I classify—
serrated edges pressed to my tongue.

Bristle fern, holly fern, true maidenhair,
woodsia.

How I multiply,

blowing clusters
of cinnamon spores

from the fronds’ undersides.

(Far better use of a specimen than pressing it in a tight
little book and calling it mine.)

Royal fern,
rustyback,

soft prickly shield.

How I shiver in this wet dress,
the air sharp
with rain worms
and rotting stumps.

Yes, how I shine.
271

Modern Marriage and How to Bear It

“Of course the necessary moderation should be observed, as with all other good
things, and club nights [for the husband] once or twice a week should suffice. On
these occasions the wife can have a picnic dinner—always a joy to a woman—
with a book propped up before her, can let herself go and let her cook go out.”
—Maud Churton Brady, Modern Marriage and How to Bear It (1909)

Lying before the fireplace where you want
to lie, you push away your plate of cold meat
and read, looking for what the novelist

does not write. On the page, two men come
to woo the smooth-cheeked widow, her rich
and gouty husband finally dead. The widow invites

the suitors into her drawing-room one at a time,
leaving one man’s ear cocked at the door.
The next night, she brings them both inside

to see what they will do. You suck the grease
from your thumb and turn the page, searching
for your cue—the tremble in the velvet curtains,

a flower’s vulvular head swaying on its stem.
It’s there—in the thick, wet pause—that anything
might be happening. Blood thrums in your

wrists. You’re a good wife. You don’t wish
your husband away any longer than he’s away,
but the widow wants what the widow wants, and you rub

your toes against the carpet’s grain, reading between
each line. There—one man’s fingers like moths
on an arm’s hot skin. One man’s teeth around a button.

272

Letter of Notice to the Country House

You will not last. Can’t you see the swans circling
in the pond as if it were a drain? I know, I know,
you’re centuries in the making—Tudor courtyard,
Georgian façades, Gothic vaulting, a long-established
heronry. But one day the final carriage will drive away,

and already the servants are closing up a wing, stillness
creeping like a vine through the hallway. So consider this
your warning: your lawn parties of claret cup punch,
your fish knives and oyster forks, your cream soup spoons—
all of it’s doomed. That after-dinner hour

when your drawing room rustles with gossip? It will go up
in cigar smoke. Your foxhunts through autumn woods
will be scratched from the books, your yew trees felled,
the maids’ beds tucked like eggs among your attic eaves
ruined. After years of disuse, rain growing holes

in your roof, even your ghost will give up the ghost,
only sparrows to haunt your widow’s walk. Listen
carefully. You will be devastated, like every solid thing.
Can you hear the croquet mallet’s smack in the grass?
That’s the wrecking ball knocking on your door.

273

Alchemy in the Field Behind the High House

“We must all climb steadily up the mountain after the talking bird, the singing
tree, and the yellow water, and must all bear in mind that the previous climbers
who were scared into looking back got turned into black stone.”
—Charles Dickens in a letter to Mrs. Watson, September 1860

The novelist stokes the bonfire with twenty years
of correspondence, his children carrying basket
after basket of letters, obedient to his pull,
though they beg him to quit. But this is the one spell
for release that he knows, and all of it must go—
the years turned into words he can dissolve
and rewrite. The blaze climbs into afternoon,
sputtering ash and a heavy plume, and still he works,
magician, sorcerer, at his bright work. If only
he could summon back every letter sent, drawing
his admissions from deep drawers, conducting them
in fluttering currents across the air, then down
into the flames’ lick. His wife lives in the house
across town where he told her to stay. The girl
who is his daughter’s age lives in the river cottage
for which he paid. I have done nothing wrong,
the wood smoke scrawls. Whispers roar like wildfire
in his brain. To start again, unmarried and in love,
no dowdy wife holding back his hands from the girl’s
golden braid. There are limits to revision
once a story’s underway. Though the grasses wave like wands,
only the letters burn—no enchantment in paper made
wick made flame. When a cold, hard rain begins,
he knows it falls for him and walks away.
The children stay, roasting onions on the embers.

274

How to Write Your Own Victorian Serial Novel

Charge with a mare’s breakneck speed toward each serial part’s cliff,
then drop your pen. Leave the heroine

in the fever’s vice and the boy lost in the fens. Leave smoke roiling
where the duel’s shots rang out.

Anything, so long as church bells swing under your readers’ ribs.
Why else would anyone follow

your dark labyrinth of fascicles for a year and a half, two fog-ridden
winters at least? You don’t write

to be read. In a world of unresolved plots, you write for the afterwards—
newsstands empty and your story

still pulsing in women’s inky fingertips, in the dreams children thrash
their beds to escape. So learn this art

of cruelty and don’t let readers forget: leave thick hands clenching
the hero’s throat and the storm

on its purple way. Leave readers waiting for the boat that carries
the next installment, crying, Does she live?

275

Rewrite

—crossed out sections taken from George Clarke’s “The Novel-Reading Habit”
(1898)

“Standing not long ago at the entrance to a public library
in one of our cities, the present writer observed a young lady
leave the building with a novel she had just borrowed there.”

When you step out of the library’s paper rustle,
you know to keep the novel open in your hands,
head bowed. Reading for subtext and character,
you scan him on the periphery—trying to stare
through your dress to determine your paper, ink, and type.

“Evidently she had been suffering from a bad attack
of the craving, for she held the book
open in her hand, reading with avidity.”

Read this, you think, licking a finger to turn the page.
He must assume your craving for fainting heroines
is so unplumbably deep that you can’t feel his eyes
like oily fingers. But when he clears his throat
and you still don’t glance his way, you know
that he’s starting to feel less than a ligature of letters,
the tail of a q, the tittle hovering over an i. So small
he’s not even worth a fingernail’s flick. This
is the vengeance you have, and you take it.

“Then she walked, still reading, to where her bicycle rested
against the curb of the sidewalk; closed the book
for a moment while she mounted her wheel; reopened it
when she was safely launched, and placidly continued her reading
as she pedaled her way along a moderately busy thoroughfare.”

When you reach your bicycle, you mark your place, careful
of skirts and spokes. Pedaling off, you open
your book again, careful to look only at the page.
Give attention to a misprint, and it glares back.
276

Portrait of the Artist Trying

Claude Monet, London’s Savoy Hotel, 1901

The painter’s been at this work for weeks,
watching from his balcony, but nothing stays—
not the bristled olive patches of fog
or the Thames lifting in purple-white heaves. Not
the smoke stacks stretched into a rose madder sky

or the cadmium-yellow globs of lanterns
spanning the bridge at night. Stacked against the walls,
one hundred canvases underway, their weather
incomplete. It doesn’t matter that he studies their starts
and fits, their blank margins, before sleep.

Each morning opens chromatically, its oil-slick
iridescence matching none of the other scenes,
and neither finger nor eye gets it right before it shifts.
This malady, the painter writes home to his wife,
to always redo. Now, as the winter light burns through

the gloom, he seizes palette and brush, but the sun’s
no longer the orangey-red impasto mark he painted
an hour ago, and the flames on the river have died
to embers. What else is there to do? On an empty
canvas, he begins: amber rain trapped in smog.

277

Notice of Risks

“The great bulk of novel readers are females; and to them such impressions (as
are conveyed through fiction) are peculiarly mischievous.”—“Moral and
Political Tendency of the Modern Novels” (1842)

Once, when you were reading, a paper nest of wasps buzzed between your ears / Once, when you
were reading, a fishing knife sliced open your gleaming / hair curling in the humid words / Once,
you slipped free of your body like an omniscient fog / Once, fingertips throbbed / Once, when
you were reading, your brother ripped the book in two / Once, the story’s rain ruined your cheeks
and shoes / Once, your book locked behind glass / father holding the key / Once, when you were
reading, the sugar of syllables crunched between your teeth / Once, you wandered lost through
brambles and thorns / Once, snow drifts heaped in your bones / Once, thighs to chest: let her go
let her go let her go / Once, when you were reading, your mother burned the book / a flare, then
a smoldering / Once, when you were reading, your body was a wool coat and you could not
swim in its weight / Once, you slipped your book / inside another book to keep it safe / Once,
you spit out the words like sour wine / Once, an easterly wind blew from inside / Once, when
you were reading, early flowers rose on the fields of your arms / Once, there was only blight /
Once, you were a sopping sheet wrung dry

278

Reasons to Destroy a Book

“women are reduced […] to philistines who value a book for its material
properties”—Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

She rips the marriage negotiation scene
from the novel’s spine,
wrapping it around
a soft square of butter. With four chapters
of backstory
and some paste, she relines
her cupboard and traveling case.
From the resolution, she scissors out
the pattern
of a new dress’s sleeve. The crux
of the plot she saves for outhouse paper,
the frontispiece she stuffs
where the wind
gnaws through a plaster crack. One sheet
of rising action, ripped into strips, becomes
a handful of spills
to light her husband’s pipe.
Another she balls in her fist and tosses
to the cat. It doesn’t matter. She knows
the story—
ask her anything. When she lays
the title page over the apple pie, flies land
like letters and author new meanings.

279

Ars Poetica Written Breathlessly

I fasten the corset’s front, the steel busk
pressed hard and cold

through thin chemise. Sweet thumb of my embrace
in place, I begin

to gird my waist, tightening the laces row
by eyelet row, bound

and determined to be bound—shaped, curved
and held straight,

reformed. I like the cinch and throb, its stamina
all day. Backbone,

I say. It takes my breath away—so I strain
the laces till I’m faint,

a heaving breast, the body compressed, a shiver
loosed inside.

280

Notes

“Domestic Sphere”: The epigraph, which comes from Gordon Stables’s “Section Ninth: The
Siskin and Canary” of his series “Girls’ Own Pets,” appeared in The Girl’s Own Paper on
Saturday, 2 September 1882.

“Dangerous for Girls”: The poem’s epigraph is quoted in Catherine Golden’s Images of the
Woman Reader in Victorian British and American Fiction (Gainesville, FL: University Press of
Florida, 2003), p. 33. The novel alluded to is George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893).

“Black Mountain”: This poem is inspired by and takes many of its details from R. H. Horne’s
“Dust; or Ugliness Redeemed,” which was published in Household Words 1.16 (13 July 1850).

“Matchgirl, East End”: Details in the poem are taken from Louise Raw’s Striking a Light: the
Bryant and May Matchwomen and their Place in Labour History (London: Continuum, 2009).

“Fog”: This poem was inspired by James Arthur’s poem “Wind.”

“Small As”: The poem’s epigraph comes from Book One, lines 613-614, of Elizabeth Barrett
Browning’s Aurora Leigh.

“Clockwise”: Details in the poem are taken from Juliet Barker’s The Brontës (New York:
Pegasus Books, 2010) and Deborah Lutz’s The Brontë Cabinet (New York: W. W. Norton,
2015). Some of the details about the landscape, including the phrase “blood-red hips gleam on
the spiny briars,” come from J. A. Erskine Stuart’s The Brontë Country: Its Topographies,
Antiquities, and History (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1888). The detail “moss-blackened
crags” is borrowed from Charlottle Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847).

“Idyll”: The garden items in this poem come from a letter Elizabeth Gaskell wrote to her eldest
daughter Marianne in March, 1851, describing the garden at their new house at 42 Plymouth
Grove. From The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, ed. J.A.V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 831. The poem is informed more generally by Lara
Baker Whelan’s Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era (New York:
Routledge, 2010).

“Letter of Welcome to the New Mistress”: The epigraph to this poem comes from A.L. Shearn’s
“The Street and the Detective” (1957).

“Gears”: Most of the poem’s details, including the phrase “a sufficiency of forks and knifes,” are
taken from Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861), though I also consulted
Cassells Household Guide (c. 1880s) and Judith Flanders’s Inside the Victorian Home (Norton,
2003).

281

“This Is Not a Confession”: Some of the details in the poem, such as the unbrushed hair and
uncooked cod, are inspired by passages in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852-3) which
describe Mrs. Jellyby and her house. The plot of the novel referred to in the poem comes from
George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893). The epigraph also appears in Kate Flint’s The Woman
Reader (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 92, which inspired this poem.

“The Novelist’s Children”: Details in the poem are taken from Peter Ackroyd’s biography
Dickens (New York: Harper Collins, 1990) and Mary Dickens’s memoir My Father as I Recall
Him (New York: Dutton, 1896).

“A Brief History of the Train”: The phrase “iron miles” comes from Eavan Boland’s poem “The
Oral Tradition.”

“Before Deep Mourning”: Details in the poem are taken from A. N. Wilson’s Victoria: A Life
(New York: Penguin, 2014) and Helen Rappaport’s A Magnificent Obsession (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 2011).

“Letters to the Dead”: Details in the poem are taken from Ken McGoogan’s Lady Franklin’s
Revenge (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2005).

“At the Exhumation, the Coffin Speaks”: The quotation from Rossetti’s letter in the epigraph is
quoted by Jan Marsh in Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter and Poet (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1999), p. 244. “Moss to the stone’s very lip” owes a debt to Emily Dickinson’s poem
#449: “We talked between the rooms, / Until the moss had reached our lips.” “The white knuckle
of the moon” owes a debt to Sylvia Plath’s “The Moon and the Yew Tree”: “The moon is no
door. It is a face in its own right, / White as a knuckle and terribly upset.”

“Pteridomaniac”: This poem was inspired by Sarah Whittingham’s Fern Fever (London: Frances
Lincoln Limited, 2012). Certain details are taken from Francis George Heath’s pocketbook
British Ferns: A Pocket “Help” for the Collector (London: Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, 1911).

“Modern Marriage and How to Bear It”: The poem’s epigraph is quoted in Leah Price’s How to
Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), p.
61. The novel referenced in the poem is loosely based on Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive
Her? (1864-5). The poem takes its inspiration from Claire Jarvis’s scholarly work in Exquisite
Masochism: Marriage, Sex, and the Novel Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2016).

“Alchemy in the Field Behind the High House”: The poem’s epigraph comes from The Letters of
Charles Dickens, edited by Mamie Dickens and Georgina Hogarth (London: Macmillan and Co.,
1893), p. 502. Details in the poem are taken from Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens (New York: Harper
Collins, 1990) and Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2011).

282

“Rewrite”: George Clarke’s “The Novel-Reading Habit” appeared in Arena 19 (May 1898), p.
670-9. The phrase “paper, ink, and type” is borrowed from W.E. Gladstone’s phrase “paper,
type, and ink” in “On Books and the Housing of Them” in The Nineteenth Century 27 (1890), p.
385.

“Portrait of the Artist Trying”: The details in the poem, and the phrase “orangey-red impasto
mark,” are taken from Grace Seiberling’s Monet in London (Atlanta, GA: High Museum of Art,
1988). The quotation from Monet’s letter to his wife was dated February 1901 and is quoted by
Seiberling on page 72.

“Notice of Risks”: The poem’s epigraph comes from Church of England Quarterly Review 11
(1842): 287-8. It is also quoted in Kate Flint’s The Woman Reader (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1993), p. 12, which inspired this poem.

“Reasons to Destroy a Book”: The poem’s epigraph comes from Leah Price’s How to Do Things
with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 56.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Schroeder, Corinna McClanahan (author)

Core Title Between homes: moving house in the Victorian novel and popular culture; and, Heroine (poems)

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Publication Date 04/25/2021

Defense Date 03/07/2019

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag domesticity,OAI-PMH Harvest,residential moves,Victorian domestic ideal,Victorian home,Victorian middle class,victorian novel,Victorian periodical press

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Muske-Dukes, Carol (committee chair), Schor, Hilary (committee chair), Accampo, Elinor (committee member), Flint, Kate (committee member), St. John, David (committee member)

Creator Email cmschroe@usc.edu,mcclanahan.c@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-151866

Unique identifier UC11660972

Identifier etd-SchroederC-7296.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-151866 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-SchroederC-7296.pdf

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Document Type Dissertation

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