How to Live Together
This chapter discusses Dickens’s late career, reading the multi-authored Christmas numbers of Household Words and All the Year Round alongside Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and novels by Marmion Savage and WM Thackeray. For Dickens, Christmas is an opportunity to clarify and problematize definitions of ‘home’ and ‘family’. He compares three modes of dwelling: living alone in chambers, living with another person, and lodging. While chambers generate a particular kind of urban loneliness, Dickens suggests that sharing accommodation with a friend consolidates homosocial and homoerotic ties, turning rented space into queer space. Many of the Christmas numbers are set in rented spaces, and contemplate the joys and trials of cohabitation. These collections suggest that the dynamics of the lodging house capture the politics of Dickens’s circle. Here, Dickens and his collaborators reflect upon literary sociability, asking what it means to be territorial on the page.