Gower Street has been rearranged since that time (there is now no Gower Street North), and the houses are renumbered. No. 145, near Gower Street Chapel, and other houses adjoining, are now in the occupation of Messrs. Maple & Co.; and this No. 145 was the house then enumerated as No. 4 Gower Street North. Mrs. Dickens’s experience, it will be remembered, has been pleasantly referred to in the pages of “Our Mutual Friend;” the stately Mrs. Wilfer therein making a similar experiment, with the same result. In chapter 4 we read of Rumpty’s return home from business: when
“Something had gone wrong with the house door, for R. Wilfer stopped on the steps, staring at it, and cried ‘Hal-loa?’ ‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Wilfer, ‘the man came himself with a pair of pincers and took it off, and took it away. He said that as he had no expectation of ever being paid for it, and as he had an order for another Ladies’ School door-plate, it was better (burnished up) for the interests of all parties.’”
On the opposite corner of the street is the Gower Street Station of the Metropolitan Railway, at which train may be taken to Baker Street. On arrival, we turn to the right, by Marylebone Road, to Devonshire Terrace, consisting of three houses at the northern end of High Street, Marylebone. No. 1, now occupied by a legal firm, was for twelve years the residence of Charles Dickens (when in town). It is described by Forster as
“A handsome house with a garden of considerable size, shut out from the New Road by a brick wall, facing the York Gate into Regent’s Park.”
To quote the ironical dictum of its future tenant when the choice was made, it was “a house of great promise (and great premium), undeniable situation, and excessive splendour.” During the period of the author’s residence here several of his best-known books were given to the world—“Master Humphrey’s Clock,” Christmas Books, and “David Copperfield” included. Proceeding forwards and eastward past Devonshire Place, we may take our way, turning on the right down Harley Street, of which we read in “Little Dorrit” that,
“Like unexceptionable society, the opposing rows of houses in Harley Street were very grim with one another. Indeed, the mansions and their inhabitants were so much alike in that respect that the people were often to be found drawn up on opposite sides of dinner tables, in the shade of their own loftiness, staring at the other side of the way with the dulness of the houses. Everybody knows how like the street the two dinner-rows of people who take their stand by the street will be. The expressionless uniform twenty houses, all to be knocked at and rung at in the same form, all approachable by the same dull steps, all fended off by the same pattern of railing, all with the same impracticable fire-escapes, the same inconvenient fixtures in their heads, and everything, without exception, to be taken at a high valuation—who has not dined with these?”
In this street lived that great financier and swindler Mr. Merdle, who had his residence in one of the handsomest of these handsome houses; but it would be, perhaps, invidious to point out any particular location for the same, Dickens himself having purposely omitted an exact address. Following the course of Harley Street, we come in due time to Queen Anne Street, running east and west. Adopting the leftward turning (east), we may find at the next corner—Mansfield Street—on the north side, Mr. Dombey’s House, as described in chapter 3 of “Dombey and Son”—
“Mr. Dombey’s house was a large one, on the shady side of a tall, dark, dreadfully genteel street in the region between Portland Place and Bryanston Square. It was a corner house, with great wide areas containing cellars, frowned upon by barred windows, and leered at by crooked-eyed doors leading to dust-bins. It was a house of dismal state, with a circular back to it, containing a whole suite of drawing-rooms looking upon a gravelled yard.”
It will be observed that the position and character of this mansion exactly correspond to the above description, being in its general style noteworthy and unique. This, then, was the private establishment and “home department” of the Dombey family, where died the gentle Paul; the lonely house in which the neglected Florence grew to lovely womanhood; what time the second wife—the stately Edith—held temporary sway.
Hence a short distance southward leads to Cavendish Square. In this neighbourhood we read that Madame Mantalini’s fashionable dressmaking establishment was situated, at which Kate Nickleby was for some few weeks engaged, on the recommendation of her uncle. The house intended was probably in Wigmore Street, No. 11. In the days of the Mantalini régime the business was advertised