Letters reveal Charles Dickens’ dastardly plan for his wife

black and white in front of me. On the other hand it was a terrible discovery, so the hairs were going up on the back of my neck for two reasons. Here’s a different dimension to his character that has been hidden for 160 years.’’

He said there were good reasons to believe Cook’s assertion. Dickens had written a letter in 1858 that was leaked to newspapers in which he claimed that his wife was mentally ill. Helen Thomson, Mrs Dickens’s aunt, claimed that the novelist had tried to get a doctor to corroborate his accusation but he ‘‘sternly refused, saying he considered Mrs Dickens perfectly sound in mind’’.

Cook considered making his discovery public but concluded he ‘‘could not say what I thought just 1879 letter by Edward Dutton Cook without offending the family’’. He told his friend: ‘‘I have been discreet if not valorous or upright.’’

Claire Tomalin, author of Charles Dickens: A Life, said it was convincing evidence that Dickens did something ‘‘shameful’’.

‘‘This is a great man who set out to do good in life and he did do great things. But when he went off the rails, he started behaving very badly,’’ Tomalin said.

‘‘I think he did regret what he’d done. Katey, his daughter, said he went mad for a bit, which is what we do when we fall in love, and he behaved therefore like a madman. Catherine was such a defenceless, sweet-natured person and not very bright. It was terrible what he did to her.’’ – The Times

GETTY IMAGES A woman cleans a table next to Dickens’ death mask in a bedroom inside the Charles Dickens Museum in London. The museum is located in Charles Dickens’ house on Doughty St, where he lived from 1837 until 1839 and in which he wrote many novels including Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby.

Catherine Dickens, left, and Ellen Ternan, Charles Dickens’ young love.

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