Dickens tried to send wife to an asylum, letters show
LONDON— As a great novelist and a master journalist, Charles Dickens maintained tight control over what the public learned about his 1858 separation from his wife, perhaps the most scandalous story in his eventful life.
But letters revealed this past week cast the episode in a new and cruel light. Dickens, they suggest, not only sought to banish Catherine, his companion of two decades and the mother of his 10 children, while pursuing an affair with a young actress Ellen Ternan — he also tried to have his wife imprisoned in an asylum.
“This is a stronger and more damning account of Dickens’ behaviour than any other,” John Bowen, a professor of19th century English literature at the University of York in northern England, wrote in The Times Literary Supplement on Tuesday.
Dickens, a celebrity in his own time, was careful of his image and legacy. In the 1860s, he burned the letters and papers of 20 years on a bonfire in his backyard. Many of his contemporaries acted similarly. Still, scholars and biographers continue efforts to pierce the privacy of his life and his relationship with women.
Catherine Dickens herself rarely spoke of the separation. Nearly a decade after her husband’s death, she confided in Edward Dutton Cook, a theatre critic and her neighbour in Camden, north London. The letters Bowen analyzed were based on those conversations and, according to the professor, are some of the first documents discovered that present her perspective. Charles Dickens fell out of love with his wife, Dutton Cook wrote in a letter.
“She had borne 10 children and had lost many of her good looks, was growing old, in fact. He even tried to shut her up in a lunatic asylum, poor thing!” Dutton Cook wrote. “But bad as the law is in regard to proof of insanity, he could not quite wrest it to his purpose.”
According to other letters in the same collection, Dickens also had what might have seemed an ideal connection: a friendship with Dr. Thomas Harrington Tuke, a psychiatrist who ran a private mental hospital near London. But correspondence suggests that Tuke rebuffed Dickens.