The house at No. 34 DeVere Gardens, in London, is just as charming as the name sounds. It has an elegance polished and aged, an elegance which offers itself to you as you approach the gray stone facade and which greets you again, as you enter, in old woodwork and a gilded lift-cage. It looks like a place where Henry James might have livedand in fact it is here that he lived and wrote from 1886 to 1897. I felt a real excitement as I mounted those steps. I was exploring London, and had been at some pains to find the place, for it was not a noted or well-marked monument. Among the landmarks of London it was frankly insignificant. But having found it, I was more moved than I had been by the towers of Parliament or by Stonehenge in the mist. Here was a portal into the Jamesian world. It brought to mind Mrs. Lowder and Mrs. Brook, Lord Deepmere and Isabel Archer; it recalled a world of order and privilege, of cruelty and good taste. It was like that Parisian balcony in The Ambassadors which Lambert Strether had contemplated so thoughtfully, or that garden in the Rue de Bac where Strether had met Mme. de Vionnet: a symbolic place. By contrast, the Dickens house on Doughty Street failed to interest me, because the Dickens House-like the Johnson House and the Cheshire Cheese-is advertised, obvious, and more than just a bit cluttered. I needed no imagination to find it and could not participate in the creativity that author stands for. Even Dingley Dell kitchen is reproduced in the basement. The entire place seems to lead away from the remembered works toward Dickens artifacts, not back into the works, and definitely leaves nothing for the literary traveler to bring to it. What has happened to the house Dickens lived in, I believe, is the