Not long after Dickens built a partition through the marital bedroom, the young actress became Dickens’s mistress. There were always three in his marriage to Catherine Hogarth: first her sister Mary, who died aged 17 in Dickens’s arms, whereafter he plunged into a period of ecstatic grief then Georgina, who became his amanuensis and housekeeper and, during and after the divorce, sided not with her blood relative but the man who was, in effect, her creator.Īnd then there was Nelly Ternan. But domestically he surrounded himself with women. As she carefully illustrates, Dickens preferred the company of men - none more than his first biographer John Forster, to whom he confided the appalling story of the year he spent as a child in the infamous blacking factory.
One of the many virtues of Claire Tomalin’s compact life of Dickens – it just scoots past 400 pages – is the invigorating perspective she brings to a field dominated by the male line. Vanishingly few of those biographers have been women.
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