This engaging novel explores the relationship between Charles Dickens and his wife, Catherine Hogarth, partly through the eyes of her supportive but ultimately pragmatic maid/housekeeper, Anne Brown. And it reinforces my long held view that you can (and should) separate the personality of an artist from his or her work: think of Eric Gill, Wagner, Gesualdo and even Beethoven. Dickens is, in my view, the greatest novelist Britain has ever produced but, in his private life, he was unshakeably chauvinistic and very cruel. And that contradicts his public image, stemming mostly from the novels, of kindness, sympathy for the underdog, charity and the fight against injustice.
It’s a story which has passed into general knowledge – the marriage with the young Catherine, cast aside after she has given birth to ten children. His late life relationship with Ellen Ternan, many years younger than him, is well-worn territory too although Emily Howes doesn’t make much of this here. Ternan appears only three quarters of the way though the novel and even then is made light of by the family who are well used to Charles’s “innocent” (?) passion for young, diminutive people and things.
Howes’s structure is interesting. She presents her story in alternating Kate and Anne chapters. The Kate sections are written as third person narrative while we hear Anne’s first-person voice. Either way we come to understand the parallel dilemmas and agonies of both women.
As a young man, Dickens is charismatic, funny and adoring. Katherine is blown away by him and, once they’re married, Howes is very good at evoking the sensual magic that Mrs Dickens finds with her young husband. Interestingly, she enjoys the sex which is an unusual slant in a Victorian marriage but – of course – must have been common in the privacy of bedrooms across the land. Later when he’s hardening against her Dickens accuses her of clinging obsession and you remember that “expert” thinking at the time linked female desire with madness. I’ve long been fascinated by the word “hysteria” which comes from the Greek hystera meaning womb and says a great deal about misogynist thinking down the centuries. Poor Mrs Rochester (Jane Eyre 1847) springs to mind.
Katherine Dickens was very fertile and healthy. The ten Dickens children were born in 15 years between 1837 and 1852. All lived to adulthood except Dora who died aged seven months. Howes presents a woman who loved her children dearly and was a hands-on mother and a keen cook who published a recipe book. Dickens on the other hand was disappointed at the way some of his children turned out and blamed Catherine for continuing to produce them. This reader, not known for her violence, longed to hit him at that point.
Howes ably depicts the waning relationship and Dickens’s mercurial, complicated personality. In public he is charming, funny, theatrical and entertaining. And, of course he is hugely successful which means great wealth and pop star status at home and abroad. Howes mentions, in passing, a barber in America who sells locks of the Dickens’s hair after cutting it. He is also very hard working and provides amply for his large family including the purchase, eventually, of Gad’s Hill a substantial house near Rochester (now a school) which he had admired as a child. The cutting, belittling remarks Howes has him making to Catherine in front of others, however, are excruciating. And we sympathise when she turns to comfort eating and grows “stout”. Ten pregnancies can’t have done much for the poor woman’s figure either.
Anne meanwhile, like Dickens – but not Catherine whose father was a Scottish lawyer, newspaper editor and music critic – came from very humble beginnings and is thrilled to get into the Dickens household. It comes, though at the cost of deserting her only surviving sibling and she never forgives herself for that. We meet her as a woman with genuine conscience who knows what she ought to do but whose instinct for self- preservation is stronger. Close as she and Catherine are, when it comes to a choice between her and Charles, Anne does what’s best for herself and her child thereby adding to Kate’s unhappiness.
Ultimately, Howes finds a tranquil old age for poor abandoned Kate who outlives her estranged husband by nine years.
I really liked this novel and was intrigued to read Emily Howes’s end notes. She has changed a few historical details – but very few – for the purposes of narrative cohesion but most the story she tells is firmly rooted in fact. And the conversations she weaves imaginatively into the story feel very convincing.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Diaghilev – a Life by Sjeng Scheijen
