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By Root 177 0

described as “a house of great promise (and great premium), undeniable situation and excessive splendor” with the novelistic address of 1 Devonshire Terrace. That house is gone now, as is his later home, the Gad’s Hill Place house in which he died. Dickens’s wife Catherine was as fungible as those homes—a starter marriage, perhaps, mirrored in the unsatisfactory relationships with pretty and tractable young women in several of the novels. (David Copperfield, for one, extricates himself from his starter marriage through the fortuitous death of his “child wife,” Dora.) Dickens’s rise reads as though he was writing the original celebrity primer, minus the drugs: At the height of his fame, he left Catherine for a young actress.

Across the street from the Doughty Street house is another, almost identical building with one of the ubiquitous blue plaques. This one reads “Sydney Smith, 1771–1843, Author and Wit lived here.” How extraordinarily depressing it must have been for Sydney Smith, author and wit, as the career of the gangly man across the street inflated like a hot-air balloon until finally the four-story terrace house would no longer hold it: Pickwick in 1837, Oliver Twist in 1838, Nicholas Nickleby in 1839. Even a writer many decades removed is breathless with admiration and envy, especially after reading a visitor’s description of an evening at Doughty Street:

“What, you here?” he exclaimed; “I’ll bring down my work.” It was his monthly portion of “Oliver Twist” for Bentley’s. In a few minutes he returned, manuscript in hand, and while he was pleasantly discoursing he employed himself in carrying to the corner of the room a little table, at which he seated himself and recommenced his writing. We, at his bidding, went on talking our “little nothings”—he, every now and then (the feather of his pen still moving rapidly from side to side), put in a cheerful interlude.

Can this be true, writing and entertaining simultaneously? If so, the absence of effort was deceptive. Seeing Dickens’s original manuscripts on view in his first house is oddly cheering; they are heavily edited by the author himself, more obscuring loop-the-loops and censorious black cross outs than acceptable prose. I remember the first time I saw the manuscript of A Christmas Carol, which is in the Morgan Library in New York City, and realized how hard the man was on himself and how unsatisfactory he found his first drafts. There was that thrill of fellowship; even the greatest of writers can make terrible mistakes.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Turn off Oxford Street, that most generic of London thoroughfares, chockablock with the kind of dime-a-dozen tourist shops you can find in any American and most European cities: cheap luggage emporiums, bureaus de change, narrow stores that sell tee shirts and backpacks and the occasional hash pipe. Turn off Oxford Street, since there is really no reason to stay on it, and you will eventually find yourself on Baker Street. The simple utilitarian name produces a faint frisson of excitement, and your step quickens as you read the house numbers. Eventually there it is: 221.

Oh, my. A large office block called Abbey House stands on the spot, with a sign that reads: “Flexible lease available on first floor.” Next to it is a small metal plaque, much less handsome or compelling than the literary plaques on other buildings around town, with the bas-relief of a well-known profile. Note to those who have never read the books that detail the exploits of Sherlock Holmes: He didn’t actually wear a deerstalker hat. Although his image on the sign does.

Every once in a while a literary location in London is so deeply disappointing that it is scarcely tenable. Dickens’s house may be a little overwrought, and unless I read addresses very badly, the rooms in which Lord Peter Wimsey set up housekeeping before he married Harriet Vane are in fact precisely on the site of the Park Lane Hotel, which I suppose is as fitting a fictional bait and switch as you could imagine.

But the Baker Street location is probably the most disappointing