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Maclise, as a peasant girl at a waterfall. The genre painters Dickens admired contrived to
inject a narrative element into almost everything. Look at a still life by a Dutch master
or by Cezanne and, if you're a tidy-minded person like me, you sometimes find yourself
wondering who could have left things in such an odd mess and why. Look at a still life
by Landseer and you know just what's happened: someone's been hunting, for instance;
he's had a good day; he's just put things down before seeing that everything is put away.
The work of the illustrators speaks for itself. Frith's painting of Dolly Varden was a slice
of Dickens's narrative imagination hanging on his dining-room wall.
The comic and sentimental songs Dickens liked also speak for themselves. They
are less to be thought of as music than as narrative vignettes with a musical boost. And
Dickens's preference for opera among the grander musical species needs no further
explanation. His taste in architecture, it is clear, excluded enjoyment of the superimposed
unity of design in favour of building that declared itself to be the result of men contriving
comfort and convenience for themselves as time went by, by exploiting and adapting
whatever was to hand. Many things in his work and life point towards this. The famous
description of Bleak House perhaps epitomizes it:
It was one of those delightfully irregular houses where you
go up and down steps out of one room into another, and where you
come upon more rooms when you think you have seen all there are,
and where there is a bountiful provision of little halls and passages,
and where you find still older cottagerooms in unexpected places, with
lattice windows and green growth pressing through them. Mine, which
we entered first, was of this kind, with an up-and-down roof, that
had more corners in it than I ever counted afterwards, and a chimney
(there was a wood-fire on the hearth) paved all around with pure
white tiles, in every one of which a bright miniature of the fire was
blazing.
The house doesn't only tell us something about its owner; it tells its own story of
easy organic growth and human ingenuity.
Dickens's tastes in furniture are perhaps less revealing than most of his tastes.
Yet in their own quiet way they continue the same theme. Though a great believer in
French polish and in having things sparkling about him, he was also, as we have seen, a
keeper of what he had. He didn't like throwing things away. He didn't succumb to the
pressure to have everything about him brand-new and fashionable. Though he moved house
often, the small second-hand pedestal table he bought with Mary Hogarth, the day his
son Charles was born, remained with him throughout his life. The Spanish mahogany
sideboard he bought in 1839 while still living in Doughty Street remained in use in the
dining-room of Gad's Hill on the day he died. Dickens despised newness for newness's
sake, as we see in the celebrated description of the Veneerings' furniture ("what was
observable in the furniture, was observable in the Veneerings - the surface smelt a little
too much of the workshop and was a trifle sticky"). As with architecture, though on a
narrower time-scale, he liked furniture that spoke to him of its and his past. The sentiment
