Catherine Dickens

Catherine Dickens bore ten children in fifteen years, was publicly repudiated by her husband in his own magazine, and kept his letters so that the world would know he had once loved her. She was the daughter of a Scottish journalist who had employed the young Dickens, and they married in 1836 in the month Pickwick began appearing. She ran his household through twenty-two years, several house moves, two American tours and the theatricals he filled his life with. In 1858, months after he met the eighteen-year-old actress Nelly Ternan, he separated from her, and did it in the worst way available: he published a statement in Household Words, his own weekly, and circulated another privately, presenting the marriage as a long incompatibility and hinting at a mental disorder in her. He took the children - all but the eldest son stayed with him - and her sister Georgina stayed too, running his house, which the public noticed. She lived alone in Gloucester Crescent for twenty years. On her deathbed she gave her daughter Kate the bundle of letters he had written her and asked that they go to the British Museum, so that the world might know he had loved her once. They are there. Kate said later that her father had behaved like a madman and that nothing had gone right since. She had suffered from what her daughters described as depression after several of the births. Her sister Mary had died in Dickens s arms at seventeen in 1837 and he wore her ring for the rest of his life. Catherine outlived him by nine years.

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