When I was growing up, often on a Sunday afternoon we would travel down a dirt road, across the railroad tracks, then down a tiny dip the road took through a patch of swampy woods to reach two tar-paper houses far out in the country. First, the Deans’ house. The Deans: a scatty woman with a skinny husband and any number of puny, pale-lashed children, living in their small black shack.
I have set half the British novels I have read inside the Deans’ house. Dickens and Thackeray and Charlotte Brontë have all had poverty-clothed families living there; characters who lived and died and did not spend one night of their brief, blighted, if well-written, lives anywhere else.
