Kate Perugini

Kate Perugini was a professional painter who exhibited for fifty years, Charles Dickens's second daughter, and the person who made sure her mother's side of the marriage survived. She trained under her father's friend John Everett Millais, exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1877, and made her living from portraits, particularly of children - about three hundred exhibited works in all. She married Charles Collins, brother of Wilkie Collins, in 1860, which she admitted later was to get out of the house after the separation; he was ill for most of the marriage and died in 1873, and she then married the painter Charles Edward Perugini. On her mother's deathbed in 1879 Catherine gave her the letters Dickens had written during the courtship and asked that they go to the British Museum so the world would know he had loved her once, and Kate did it. Late in life she talked at length to the writer Gladys Storey about her father's conduct - that he had behaved like a madman, that nothing had gone right afterwards, and about Ternan - on condition it be published only after her death. Storey's Dickens and Daughter appeared in 1939 and was disbelieved for decades before the documentary evidence caught up with it. Her only child died in infancy. She was elected to the Society of Women Artists and exhibited into her eighties. Millais painted her as a young woman and the portrait hangs in a public collection. She was known as Katey in the family and was the model for several of her father s younger women. Gladys Storey left her own papers to the Dickens House Museum, where they corroborated the account.

• Lived: 1839 CE – 1929 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: artist