Gladys Storey

Gladys Storey published what Kate Perugini had told her about Charles Dickens, was disbelieved for thirty years, and was proved right. She was the daughter of the painter George Adolphus Storey, grew up in artistic London, and knew Kate Perugini - Dickens's second daughter - in Kate's old age. Over a long friendship Kate talked to her about the separation, about Nelly Ternan, about her father's conduct in the last years, and about her belief that a child had been born and died; and she made Storey promise to publish only after her death. Kate died in 1929. Storey brought Dickens and Daughter out in 1939, and the reception was hostile: the Dickens establishment regarded it as gossip at second hand from an old woman, the details were unverifiable, and it was easier to disbelieve. She deposited her notes with the Dickens House Museum, which is the decision that mattered. From the 1950s onward the documentary work - bank books, Staplehurst, the French rentals, the wills - caught up with almost everything the book had said, and Storey's account is now treated as a primary source. She wrote several other books and lived to ninety-one, long enough to see the scholarship turn. She had also written a life of her father and a book on Dickens s circle. Her papers at the Dickens House include Kate s own words in Storey s hand. She never married and outlived every principal in the story by decades. The book has never been out of print among Dickens scholars since the 1950s.

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