Catherine Dickens
Feb. 1st, 2015 08:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
emma_in_dreamI was so obsessed with Catherine Dickens (Charles Dickens' abandoned wife) that I bought a biography. She might not have danced the night away after he left her, but she did stay out at parties, so hooray.
Dickens burnt her letters to him and wanted to destroy his to her, but she hung onto them and left them to her daughter with instructions that they go to the British Museum to prove her husband had loved her in their early days. Her daughter Katey nearly burned them, having accepted Dickens' version that they were always antipathetic to each other.
Luckily she consulted a friend, George Bernard Shaw, who said the letters were worth saving. Before reading them, he said 'that the sentimental sympathy of the nineteenth century with the man of genius tied to a commonplace wife had been rudely upset by a man named Ibsen' and that 'posterity might sympathise with a woman who was sacrificed to the genius's uxoriousness to the appalling extent of having had to bear eleven children [actually ten children and two miscarriages] in sixteen years than with a grievance which, after all, amounted only to the fact that she was not a female Charles Dickens'. [NB: the biography includes a chart of the relative time spent pregnant/not pregnant over the course of her marriage.]
After reading the letters he said: 'They prove with ridiculous obviousness that Dickens was quite as much in love when he married as nine hundred and ninety nine out of every thousand British bridegrooms.'
I like to think of this as Catherine Dickens getting the last laugh.
Dickens burnt her letters to him and wanted to destroy his to her, but she hung onto them and left them to her daughter with instructions that they go to the British Museum to prove her husband had loved her in their early days. Her daughter Katey nearly burned them, having accepted Dickens' version that they were always antipathetic to each other.
Luckily she consulted a friend, George Bernard Shaw, who said the letters were worth saving. Before reading them, he said 'that the sentimental sympathy of the nineteenth century with the man of genius tied to a commonplace wife had been rudely upset by a man named Ibsen' and that 'posterity might sympathise with a woman who was sacrificed to the genius's uxoriousness to the appalling extent of having had to bear eleven children [actually ten children and two miscarriages] in sixteen years than with a grievance which, after all, amounted only to the fact that she was not a female Charles Dickens'. [NB: the biography includes a chart of the relative time spent pregnant/not pregnant over the course of her marriage.]
After reading the letters he said: 'They prove with ridiculous obviousness that Dickens was quite as much in love when he married as nine hundred and ninety nine out of every thousand British bridegrooms.'
I like to think of this as Catherine Dickens getting the last laugh.
