Mamie Dickens

Mamie Dickens was Charles Dickens's eldest daughter, stayed with him rather than her mother after the separation, and co-edited the letters that shaped his posthumous reputation. She never married - there was an engagement that came to nothing - and lived in her father's household until he died, presiding over it alongside her aunt Georgina Hogarth, which meant that two of the three women in the house were on his side of the quarrel and her mother was in Gloucester Crescent alone. She adored him without reservation and wrote two affectionate books about him, My Father as I Recall Him and Charles Dickens by His Eldest Daughter, which present a domestic idyll that her sister Kate later flatly contradicted. With Georgina she edited The Letters of Charles Dickens, published in three volumes from 1880, and the editing was substantial: material about the separation was cut, the name of Nelly Ternan does not appear, and some originals were destroyed once copied. For a century that edition was the evidence. After Georgina and she fell out, Mamie lived with a clergyman's family in Shropshire and drank; she died at fifty-eight in considerable obscurity, and Kate paid for the funeral. Her books are still quoted, usually without the caveat. She and Georgina published a further enlarged edition of the letters in 1893. Her father left her an annuity conditional on her not marrying, which has been read both as protection and as control. Kate said Mamie had worshipped him and could never see him plainly.

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