wife’s part. In essence, Dickens was demanding that his wife publicly apologise to his mistress—or at least to the woman he would soon choose to be his mistress when he worked up the courage to make the arrangements. Weeping, miserable, Catherine did as she was bid. She humiliated herself by making a social call on Ellen and Mrs Ternan.
It was not enough to assuage Dickens’s fury. He cast the mother of his ten children out.
He sent Charley, his eldest son, to live with Catherine. He kept the rest of the children to live with him at Tavistock House and eventually at Gad’sHill Place . (It was always my observation that Dickens enjoyed his children until they began to think and act for themselves in any way… in other words, when they ceased behaving like Little Nell or Paul Dombey or one of his other fictional constructs… and then he quickly grew very bored with them.)
There was more to this scandal, of course—protests by Catherine’s parents, public retractions of those protests forced by Dickens and his solicitors, bullying and misleading public statements by the author, legal manoeuvrings, much terrible publicity, and a final and irrevocable legal separation forced on his wife. He eventually refused to communicate with her at all, even about the well-being of their children.
All this from the man who epitomised, not just forEngland but for the world, the image of “the happy home.”
Of course Dickens still needed a woman in his house. He had many servants. He had nine children at home with whom he did not wish to be bothered except when he was in the mood to play with them or dangle them on his knee for photographs. He had social obligations. There were menus and shopping lists and florists’ orders to prepare. There was much cleaning and organising to oversee. Charles Dickens needed to be freed from all these details. He was, you must understand, the world’s greatest writer.
Dickens did the obvious thing, although it might not have seemed so obvious to you or to me. (Perhaps in this distant twentieth or twenty-first century to which I consign this memoir, it is the obvious thing. Or perhaps you have, if you are smart, abandoned the quaint and idiotic institution of marriage altogether. As you will see, I avoided matrimony in my time, choosing to live with one woman while having children with another, and some in my time, to my great pleasure, called me a scoundrel and a cad. But I digress.)
So Dickens did the obvious thing. He elevated Catherine’s spinster sister Georgina to the role of surrogate wife, mistress of his household, and discipline-mistress of his children, hostess at his many parties and dinners, not to mention Sergeant Major to the cook and servants.
When the inevitable rumours began—centred onGeorgina rather than on Ellen Ternan, who had receded, one might say, from the gaslights to the shadows—Dickens ordered a doctor to Tavistock House. The doctor was told to examineGeorgina and then was ordered to publish a statement, which he did, declaring to all and sundry that Miss Georgina Hogarth was virgo intacta.
And that, Charles Dickens assumed, would be that.
His younger daughter would later say to me, or at least say within my hearing, “My father was like a madman. This affair brought out all that was the worst—and all that was the weakest—in him. He did not care a damn what happened to any of us. Nothing could surpass the misery and unhappiness of our home.”
If Dickens was aware of their unhappiness, or if it mattered to him if he was indeed aware, he did not show it. Not to me, nor to his newer and ultimately closer friends.
And he was correct in his assumption that the crisis would pass without his readers’ abandoning him. If they knew of his domestic irregularities at all, they had obviously forgiven him. He was, after all, the English prophet of the happy home and the world’s greatest writer. Allowances must be made.
Our male literary peers and friends also forgave and forgot—with the exception of Thackeray, but that is another story—and I must admit that some of them, some of us, tacitly or privately, applauded Charles’s freeing himself of his domestic obligations to such an unattractive and perpetually dragging sea anchor. The break gave a glimmer of hope to the bleakest of married men and amused us bachelors with the thought that perhaps one could come back from that undiscovered matrimonial country from which it was said that no
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