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extremely cautious in his hiring of servants. (Recall that he keeps a bust of an infamous criminal—hanged for killing his master.) When Pip and his friends are invited to dinner at the lawyer’s house, he lets them in, and throughout dinner, Pip notices, “he kept everything under his own hand, and distributed everything himself,” using a dumbwaiter near his seat at table, that is, he employs no butler. In fact, Jagger’s housekeeper is the only servant who appears. Wemmick describes her as resembling “a wild beast tamed,” which, as the novel eventually discloses, has to do with Jagger’s knowledge of her secret history.

Though Dickens’s late fictions do not abandon entirely the faithful servant figure, (the Boffins in Our Mutual Friend come immediately to mind), in Great Expectations, and through Pip’s first-person narration, Dickens unfailingly treats servants with disdain and even aversion. Pip’s attitude, alongside his acknowledged guilt for deserting Joe and his revulsion of Magwich, forms the novel’s complexly realized exploration of class antagonism as well as its critique of class snobbery.

Dickens Sites to Visit in England

Dickens’s Birthplace

393 Old Commercial Road

Portsmouth PO1 4QL

Hampshire

England

The house in which Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1812 is preserved as a museum furnished in the style of 1809, appropriate to the year when John and Elizabeth Dickens set up their first home. (John Dickens was transferred to Portsmouth from London when his job in the Navy Pay Office changed locations. The Dickens family stayed there until 1815, when they returned to London.)

According to the museum Web site, the furniture, ceramics, glass, household objects, and decorations are faithful to the Regency style. The museum includes three furnished rooms: the parlor, the dining room, and the bedroom where Charles was born. The exhibition room features a display on Charles Dickens and Portsmouth, as well as a small collection of memorabilia: the couch on which he died at his house in Kent, and personal effects, such as his snuff box, inkwell, and paper knife.

Dickens’s Childhood Home

No. 2 (now 11) Ordnance Terrace

Chatham, Kent

Dickens lived in this three-story Georgian house overlooking the river from 1817 to 1821. It was a favorite place for Dickens, where he learned to read and discovered his father’s collection of romantic fiction and adventure tales in the attic.

Dickens House Museum

48 Doughty Street

London WC1N 2LX

When Dickens began to have some success with his Pickwick Papers and as editor of Bentley’s Miscellany, he required a home that would reflect his rising social position. He moved in March of 1837 to a twelve-room house at 48 Doughty Street, Holborn, on a gated residential street, with his wife, Catherine, and his sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, who died there at the tragically young age of seventeen. He lived there until 1839.

Among the museum’s collection are Dickens’s desk from his Gad’s Hill Place study, a carefully restored drawing room, the Dickens family Bible, and the Dickens Reference Library, which includes rare editions and manuscripts. Original furniture and paintings are also on display.

Web site: www.dickensmuseum.com.

Dickens Residence, 1839–51

1 Devonshire Terrace

Marylebone Road

London

This home of Dickens’s, in which he completed five novels, was demolished in 1959. In its place is a bas-relief frieze depicting the author and the main characters from the novels he wrote while he lived there.

Dickens Residence, 1851–60

Tavistock House

London

A larger home than his Devonshire Terrace residence, Tavistock House had eighteen rooms and private grounds. Dickens had a large room that served as a study. His daughter recalled that its length gave Dickens plenty of space for pacing. During his tenure at this residence in fashionable west London, Dickens wrote some of his greatest novels, including Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, and A Tale of Two Cities. It is also where he and his friend Wilkie Collins first staged The