Weekend Economists Going to the Dickens December 16-18, 2011

[Tansy_Gold]

40. In more ways than one

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2074472/Charles-Dickens-books-suggest-idyllic-Christmases-new-TV-reveals-little-festive-cheer.html

Catherine was treated shockingly by an overbearing husband who craved for respectable family life, then felt trapped by it. He married a slim, innocent girl and didn’t like it when she turned into a well-upholstered mother of ten. Dickens adored his first son Charley, but babies kept on coming and Catherine was always pregnant.

Dickens felt the burden of supporting so many children, let alone all his impecunious relatives – but Christmases, in those early years of his marriage, must have been as cheery as anything in his fiction. At the heart of their home during the first year of their wedded life was Catherine’s angelic 16-year-old sister Mary, who came to live with them.


As the years went by, there was an increasing mis-match between the Christmas of Dickens’ fiction and the reality at home,’ says Sue Perkins. The final blow to the marriage came in 1857 when Dickens – now 45 and a disenchanted husband with a surplus of energy – met pretty 18-year-old actress Nelly Ternan, who appeared in one of his theatrical productions. She was only a few months older than his eldest daughter Kate and Dickens fell besottedly in love.

‘Poor Catherine and I are not made for each other, and there is no help for it,’ he complained, after two decades of marriage. To Catherine’s mortification, he blocked off the door between his dressing room and the marital bedroom. ‘Everyone in the house knew. All the servants, all the children. Catherine was profoundly wounded,’ says biographer Claire Tomalin, wrote an award-winning book about the novelist’s affair with Nelly.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Ternan


Dickens was forty-five when he met Ellen Ternan, and she was eighteen. He became passionately attached to her, but the relationship was kept secret from the general public. Dickens had become disillusioned with his wife, who lacked his energy and intellect. Ternan, in contrast, was clever and charming, forceful of character, undomesticated, and interested in literature, the theatre, and politics. Matters came to a head in 1858, when Catherine Dickens accidentally received a bracelet meant for Ternan, and the Dickenses separated that May.

Ternan left the stage in 1860, and was supported by Dickens from then on. She sometimes travelled with him, though he abandoned a plan to take her on his visit to America in 1867 for fear that their relationship would be publicised by the American press. She lived in houses he took under false names at Slough and later at Nunhead, and may have had a son by Dickens who died in infancy, although this isn't certain (neither Dickens, Ternan, nor Ternan's sisters left any account of the relationship, and most correspondence relevant to the relationship was destroyed). At his death Dickens provided her with a £1,000 legacy and sufficient income from a trust fund to ensure that she would never have to work again