78 -
"Regency gone flabby", or some such scholarly phrase, was the one our distiguished
Honorary Editor, dr Andrew Sanders, used to describe Dickens's tastes in furniture. I think
he was right, Dickens never favoured the worst excesses of the Victorian cabinet-maker
and upholsterer. But I find it difficult to believe that his tatste was informed by any
positive principle or acuteness of perception. When he bought furniture, as he did in large
quantities when he moved to Devonshire Terrace in 1839, he did so with the energy and
decisiveness he brought to everything, but what he bought was no more and no less than
the fashion of the time. That the style of furniture in his homes changed little after the
late 1830's is to be put down to the fact that what he bought then was good, and he didn't
have to buy very much more subsequently. He disliked the high Victorian fashions, but
was not obliged to cast around for an alternative. If we look at the pictures of the rooms
in Gad's Hill, however, though we see that most of the furniture is in the style of the
thirties and forties, it is as crowded together as it was in any fashionable high Victorian
home.
Perhaps the feature of Dickens's taste that excited most comment among his
contemporaries, at least when he was a young man, was his taste in clothes. He was
evidently something of a dandy, favouring the dazzling in things like waistcoats, watch-
chains, tie-pins and rings. This sometimes shocked people, particularly Americans, in whom
you can detect, it's true, that rather nervous attention to propriety that often marks
provincial societies unsure of themselves, but even so, their response is only a few shades
more distinct than the British one. Dickens scandalized straight-laced Boston, the first
