Until now, most accounts of the break-up of Charles Dickens's marriage in 1858 have given his side of the story. A cache of letters recently discovered at Harvard tells it for the first time from the point of view of his abandoned wife Catherine – and the new information they contain is detailed and shocking. Biographers and scholars have known for years how badly Dickens behaved at this time: among other things, he blocked up the door between his and his wife's bedrooms and falsely claimed that Catherine “does not – and she never did – care for the children”. But it now seems that he even tried to place his wife and the mother of those children in a lunatic asylum, despite her evident sanity.
The accusation comes in a letter from Edward Dutton Cook, Catherine's next-door neighbour in Camden, north London, where she lived after her separation from Dickens. Dutton Cook was already a friend of Dickens's eldest son Charley, and he and his wife Lynda made a close friendship with Catherine. As Catherine was dying, she told them more and more about how Dickens had behaved twenty years earlier, after he met the young actress Ellen Ternan and decided to break up their long, hitherto happy marriage.
Read Full Article »