Six Victorian marriages, part 4: Catherine Hogarth and Charles Dickens

Catherine Dickens, ca 1848 (detail). Engraving by Edwin Roffe, after Daniel Maclise, and after John Jabez Edwin Mayall. Image source: National Portrait Gallery, London

This is the fourth in a series of posts based on Phyllis Rose's Parallel Lives (Knopf, 1984) and Diane Johnson's True History of the First Mrs. Meredith (NY Review Books, 2020).

Catherine Hogarth and Charles Dickens

"'There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.'" 

—Charles Dickens [1]

Catherine Hogarth was not Charles Dickens' first love. That was Maria Beadnell; they met when he was 17 and she was 19. He pursued her for four years, but she ultimately rejected his marriage proposal because (in the thoughts of Jane Austen's Lady Russell in Persuasion regarding Anne Elliot):

. . .with all her claims of birth, beauty, and mind, to throw herself away at nineteen—involve herself at nineteen in an engagement with a young man, who had nothing but himself to recommend him, and no hopes of attaining affluence, but in the chances of a most uncertain profession, and no connexions to secure even his farther rise in the profession, would be, indeed, a throwing away, which she grieved to think of! [2]

By his twenty-third birthday in 1835 Dickens had begun to publish "Sketches by Boz," and was starting to be acclaimed in the London literary world. He began to frequent the home of a more established journalist colleague, George Hogarth, where he met his 20-year-old daughter Catherine. The two quickly became engaged, and married a year later. They moved into Dickens' rooms, along with Dickens' younger brother Frederick and Catherine's younger sister Mary.

Portrait of Catherine Dickens by Samuel Laurence, 1838. Image source: Charles Dickens Museum

Over the course of that first year of marriage Dickens published The Pickwick Papers and wrote much of Oliver Twist. In 1837, after he and Catherine had moved to a new address, Dickens would write, "I shall never be so happy again as in those Chambers three Stories high—never if I roll in wealth and fame." [3] By Mary's account, Catherine was "happy as the day is long—I think they are more devoted than ever since their marriage, if that is possible." [4] 

Portrait of Charles Dickens by Samuel Laurence, 1837. Image source: Charles Dickens Museum

But their early happiness did not last. After 1850, the year of the publication of David Copperfield and the birth of their ninth child in fourteen years (who would unfortunately only survive eight months), there was an increasing estrangement between Catherine and Charles. She had been almost constantly pregnant since their marriage (and would go on to give birth to one more child in 1852). She was worn out by childbearing, had grown overweight, was overcome by lethargy, and was probably suffering from depression. Meanwhile, he had become world-famous, was in constant demand, and enjoyed a highly active social life. They were growing ever further apart.

As Catherine sank into lassitude, her unmarried sister Georgina, who had been living with them since she was 15, began increasingly to take on Catherine's responsibilities: by the mid-1850s,

Georgina had effectively replaced Catherine both as head of the household and as Dickens's domestic partner. It was to their aunt Georgina that the children turned with their problems. Catherine, flattened by fatigue, lay on the sofa, increasingly irrelevant in her own house. [5]

Georgina Hogarth with Mamie Dickens, 1860s (detail). Carte-de-visite by Herbert Watkins. Image source: National Portrait Gallery, London

Catherine was only 40, while Georgina was in her 20s. There was speculation, both at the time and since, that Georgina had replaced Catherine in the marital bed as well as in the roles of mother and mistress of the house. However, no evidence of any sexual dimension to the relationship between Georgina and Charles has ever been discovered. And we do have evidence that Charles had definitely begun to look outside his marriage for affection and sex. 

In 1855 Dickens received a letter from a Mrs. Henry Winter, or, as he had once known her, Maria Beadnell, and they struck up an impassioned correspondence. He arranged for her to visit him at home without her husband at a time when he knew his wife would be absent for hours. But the young woman he had loved no longer existed; Dickens was dismayed to see that she had become a middle-aged matron.

Maria Beadnell Winter in the decade 1850-1860. Image source: Fórcola Ediciones

Perhaps worse, Maria's attempts at coquettishness struck him (as he wrote when he later used this incident as the basis of a scene in Little Dorrit) as "diffuse and silly. . .That was the fatal blow." After getting through what Rose imagines as "the painful interview he had unquestionably imagined as the beginning of a seduction," Dickens then had to make it through an awkward dinner where the former lovers were joined by their respective spouses. [6] This embarrassing incident may have chastened him, but not for long.

In 1857, when he was 45, Dickens met Ellen (Nelly) Ternan, the youngest daughter of a famous family of actors. Although according to Rose, Dickens did not immediately embark on a sexual affair with the 18-year-old Nelly, he fell in love and began sending her expensive gifts (one of which, a bracelet, came to his home by mistake and was opened by Catherine). He also began supporting Nelly and her family financially.

Ellen Ternan. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Within months Dickens decided to separate from Catherine. At their home he moved out of their bedroom and into his adjacent dressing room, replacing the connecting door with a wall and bookcases—a symbolic entombment of her, and of his once-loving feelings. By the next year he forced her to move out of their home and into a house he'd rented for her; only their eldest son Charley went with her, while the other children stayed with him and Georgina. And this is when, Rose believes, he and Nelly likely consummated their relationship. She retired from the stage in 1860, and was dependent on Dickens until his death a decade later. Dickens' daughter Kate, about the same age as Nelly, suspected that they had a son who died in infancy.

Portrait of Kate Dickens Perugini by Charles Perugini, ca. 1875. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Rose does not blame Dickens for the alteration in his feelings towards his wife. Catherine's constant childbearing narrowed her world; Dickens' increasing fame and deepening art enlarged his. His love had been diminishing for years before he met Nelly. But once he did, it brought the situation to a crisis. He wrote to a friend,

Poor Catherine and I are not made for each other, and there is no help for it. It is not only that she makes me uneasy and unhappy, but that I make her so too—and much more so. . .God knows she would have been a thousand times happier if she had married another kind of man, and that her avoidance of this destiny would have been at least equally good for us both. I am often cut to the heart by thinking what a pity it is, for her sake, that I ever fell in her way. . .What is now befalling me I have seen steadily coming. . .and I know too well that you cannot, and no one can, help me. [7]

He is writing about the woman who has borne him ten children, and whom he has condemned, in the words of Rose, to "a kind of living death." [8] Perhaps Dickens is not at fault for the change in his feelings, but his public repudiation of his wife and his isolation of her from their children seem needlessly cruel. 

Catherine outlived Dickens by nearly a decade. As she lay dying in the late fall of 1879, she gave her daughter Kate the letters Dickens had written her in their courtship and early marriage. "Give these to the British Museum," she told her, "that the world may know he loved me once." [9]

Next time: Harriet Hardy Taylor and John Stuart Mill
Last time: Mary Ellen Peacock Nicolls and George Meredith

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1. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, Volume 2, Chapman and Hall, 1866, Chapter XVI, p. 234.
2. Jane Austen, Persuasion, Chapter IV. https://archive.org/details/novelsofjaneaust00aust/page/35/mode/1up
3. Quoted in Rose, p. 149.
4. Quoted in Rose, p. 149.
5. Rose, p. 168.
   
6. Rose, p. 164-165.
7. Quoted in Rose, p. 175.
8. Rose, p. 190.
   
9. Michael Slater, Dickens and Women, Stanford University Press, 1983, p. 159.