Charles Dickens... and Other Bad Men Who are Good Writers

Of course I knew that Charles Dickens had what was arguably the most brutal and public marital separation in literary history. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know that in 1858 he left his wife Catherine, to whom he had married for two decades and who had borne him ten children. The dissolution occurred partly because the marriage had essentially been arranged and had never been happy, and partly because Dickens—then in his late forties—had fallen obsessively in love with an eighteen-year-old actress, Ellen Ternan.