Letters Show Charles Dickens Tried to Have Wife Committed
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Newly discovered letters show a different side of Charles Dickens, and it’s not pretty. His actions after starting an affair with a young actress included trying to get his wife, Catherine, committed to a mental asylum, a University of York professor who analyzed the 98 letters has found. “What I discovered was both detailed and shocking,” says John Bowen.
The letters were written by a friend and neighbor of Catherine’s after she and Dickens separated, and give Catherine’s side of the story. “He discovered at last that she had outgrown his liking. She had borne ten children and had lost many of her good looks, was growing old, in fact,” one letter said, adding, “He even tried to shut her up in a lunatic asylum, poor thing!” The asylum plan fell apart when a doctor refused to commit her.
As the marriage of two decades soured, Dickens legally separated from Catherine and divided their bedroom in two, per Smithsonian.com. It’s a far cry from their early days, when Dickens called her “my dearest Life,” and “dearest darling Pig” in letters of his own.
Bowen says the neighbor’s letters, which are kept at Harvard, made for “very uncomfortable reading” at times, though he found the courage of the doctor who stood up to Dickens to be one of the positive stories. “In some ways it is a ‘me too’ story about the power of elite men to coerce women,” he says. “It is also a gaslighting story, manipulating someone into doubting their own sanity.”
Edited from Newser.
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And why not? He was a champion of many liberal and important causes in a time when the abuses and failures of society were great enough to produce the writings of Karl Marx. Of course the need to publish and to seem to be singing from the hymnal of the Wokesters and metoolian Feminists prompts the author to twist the story to make it about powerful men being terrible to women rather than the creative geniuses they were. Reminds me a bit of listening to American history through the eyes of a Communist or a puritan or calling Mark Twain a racist because he accurately reflected the language of his characters.. No redemption no allowances for the realities of history.
Understanding Dickens works like Hard Times Which deals with being stuck in a horrible marriage at a time when divorce was unavailable may be aided by knowing about his letters, but the observation that Dickens was acting as so many great authors have done hardly adds to or takes away from understanding his place in literary or philosophical or political history. The English Divorce laws were indeed a cause for suffering to the working and middle classes of his time. Personal bias or not, the facts are the facts. Do we really know why his wife became abhorrent to him? Really? or do we just want the zealots to be kind to us?
The extreme popularity of trying to attack men as a gender for being terrible people: racists, and sexists is attracting writers trying to curry favor and publishing opportunities by refocusing attention on popular themes at the cost of objectivity.
T.S. Eliot in fact tried successfully to have his wife committed and his aversion to marriage may have had something to do with his homosexuality, which at the time was illegal and not a good idea to talk about. Yet his works changed everything, as did Dickens’ Artists of all sorts are infamous for mistreating people who love them, male and female, from Hemingway to Ted Hughes, but nowadays, what’s important to one’s knowledge of literature is listing the unforgivable and inevitable sins against feminist ideals. Was Shakespeare inattentive to Ann Hathaway, by going off to London, leaving her down on the farm? That’s what’s important you know.
Who cares? Was Picasso just awful to his women? Of course he was. Was Jackson Pollack unappreciative of Lee Krasner, sure and Ted Hughes could have been better to Sylvia Plath. Einstein’s treatment of various women was far from commendable, but I’m more interested in the accomplishments – and great accomplishments.
Perhaps I’m going too far, but too many males are me-tooing it up to excess. Can I call it pandering? Well perhaps some of it is but we’re not going to see a wave of re-examining great women in terms of how bad they may have been to their husbands or children. Trust me on that one. This is the age of the Scapegoat it’s not going away soon.
…and I still love his writings!