Catherine Hogarth, who came from a cultured Scots family, married Charles Dickens in 1836, the same year he began serializing his first novel. Together they traveled widely, entertained frequently, and raised ten children. In 1858, the celebrated writer pressured Catherine to leave their home, unjustly alleging that she was mentally disordered—unfit and unloved as wife and mother. Constructing a plotline nearly as powerful as his stories of Scrooge and Little Nell, Dickens created the image of his wife as a depressed and uninteresting figure, using two of her three sisters against her, by measuring her presumed weaknesses against their strengths. This self-serving fiction is still widely accepted.
In the first comprehensive biography of Catherine Dickens, Lillian Nayder debunks this tale in retelling it, wresting away from the famous novelist the power to shape his wife's story. Nayder demonstrates that the Dickenses' marriage was long a happy one; more important, she shows that the figure we know only as "Mrs. Charles Dickens" was also a daughter, sister, and friend, a loving mother and grandmother, a capable household manager, and an intelligent person whose company was valued and sought by a wide circle of women and men.
Making use of the Dickenses' banking records and legal papers as well as their correspondence with friends and family members, Nayder challenges the long-standing view of Catherine Dickens and offers unparalleled insights into the relations among the four Hogarth sisters, reclaiming those cherished by the famous novelist as Catherine's own and illuminating her special bond with her youngest sister, Helen, her staunchest ally during the marital breakdown. Drawing on little-known, unpublished material and forcing Catherine's husband from center stage, The Other Dickens revolutionizes our perception of the Dickens family dynamic, illuminates the legal and emotional ambiguities of Catherine's position as a "single" wife, and deepens our understanding of what it meant to be a woman in the Victorian age.
Lillian Nayder is Professor and Chair of English at Bates College. She is the author of Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Authorship, also from Cornell.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Constructing Catherine Dickens
1. "The Mind of Woman Occasionally Asserts Its Powers": Catherine Hogarth among Enlightened Patriarchs, 1815–1835
2. Becoming Galatea: Courtship and Marriage, 1835–1837
Interlude I. “The Girls Hogarth”: Catherine and Mary
3.“Their Voices, Mr. Dickens's Imperative”: Mesmerized, 1837–1842
Lillian Nayder's eagerly awaited biography uses Catherine’s voice and the voices of friends, family members, and other contemporaries to free the telling of her story from the distorting effects of its mediation by Dickens and his biographers. Catherine emerges from Nayder’s compelling account as a much more complex figure than she has hitherto been shown to be, defined not just by her marriage to Dickens, but by other relationships and as the mistress of a substantial middle-class establishment.
Robert L. Patten
Forensic in defense of Catherine and women's history, wary of the ways Dickens's biographers have characterized his wife, and extensively deploying wide original research, Lillian Nayder's justifiably partisan account recaptures Catherine's vital role in the Dickens family. The searching readings of the archive and the summoning of scientific, financial, cultural, and social evidence for the functionality and intimacy of Catherine's marriage and lasting friendships rehabilitate her. Not only that. They also force us to reconsider the dismissive accounts of her as wife and mother promulgated by Dickens and his admirers and to reassess his conception of domestic conjugality.
Eileen Gillooly
Lillian Nayder has accomplished what scores of literary critics and biographers have for more than a century held to be impossible: she has given us a highly readable life and times of Catherine Hogarth Dickens in which Catherine's celebrated husband, though far from playing a bit part, has been prevented from stealing the limelight.
Rosemarie Bodenheimer
Lillian Nayder set herself the difficult task of re-creating a historical woman whose quiet, polite voice was largely drowned out by the noisier voices around her. Through resourceful uses of meticulous research, her engaging narrative succeeds in making Catherine Hogarth Dickens a sympathetic figure in her own right. Nayder embeds Catherine in her family of origin and especially in her relationships with the three sisters who played major roles in her marriage and in her life after separation from Charles Dickens.
