Content area
Full Text
Near the end of his life, Charles Dickens had a glass conservatory built at his country house, Gad's Hill Place, near Rochester, Kent, an addition that he had contemplated for years. He probably began to think about it soon after purchasing Gad's Hill in 1856; if so, his initial consideration of a conservatory for himself coincided with the writing of Little Dorrit, begun in the spring of 1855 and published in monthly parts between December, 1855, and June, 1857. Although he had used hot house plants metaphorically from the late 1830s, notably in his characterization of Mrs. Wititterly in Nicholas Nickleby, in Little Dorrit the attached glasshouse itself becomes the vehicle of the maid Tattycoram's character. Her waywardness, passion and unpredictability are imagined as an unstable glass annex to the conventional Meagles household:
There was even the later addition of a conservatory sheltering itself against [the Meagles house], uncertain of hue in its deep-stained glass, and in its more transparent portions flashing to the sun's rays, now like fire and now like harmless water drops; which might have stood for Tattycoram. (Little Dorrit 197; bk. 1, ch. 16)
Tattycoram's story recounts the fate of many of Dickens's angry young women; when she refuses passive acceptance of the companion/servant's role, there is no place for her at Mr. Meagles's house in Twickenham. She cannot be welcomed back until she renounces her rebellion. Neither adopted daughter nor employed servant, she does not fit until she quells her spirit and gives in. Likewise, considering Dickens's eventual addition of a conservatory to his country house can tell us more about his own instability, of the paradoxical struggles over control that ruled his life and presided over its end.1
Dickens's conservatory played the role in his life that we should expect from a space of necessity very different from the rest of the house, a space defined by paradox in its manipulation of nature. Since its atmosphere must meet the needs of plants first and people second, a conservatory, quite literally, both offers and defies control of both vegetable and human culture. A conservatory is a contradictory space, associated with protective nurture, yet also with artificiality, with atmospheric intensity; it offers and defies control on the metaphoric level as well...