MEET THE AUTHOR

Rosemary Collins speaks to LUCINDA HAWKSLEY – historian, lecturer and Charles Dickens’s 3x great granddaughter

Why did you want to write about Katey Dickens? She was somebody who I’d always been aware of since childhood. My parents used to own a painting of her which is sadly no longer in the family, and then when I was doing my Master’s degree she just kept appearing when I was researching other artists. She was friends with all of the major artists of her time, modelled for Millais twice and was a very well-respected artist herself, although she is completely forgotten about today. It’s extraordinary how people don’t remember her, even given that extra factor of being Charles Dicken’s daughter.

So I realised that this woman was somebody who needed a biography – her life was so fascinating and she was a really great artist as well. And it amazes me how few people except the most fervent Dickensians have ever heard of her name.

What’s it like writing a biography of someone that you’re related to? It’s a very different process to research a relation, as anybody who does genealogy will know. You feel that connection. I felt that I could understand more about Katey and her father, the way that they behaved, because of the family characteristics that relatives still have today. Frequently when I was researching her I’d think “Oh gosh, that’s just like so-and-so”, or “Oh wow, I can imagine what that would have been like because that’s what so-and-so does.”

How does the new edition of this book differ from the first edition from 2006?

A lot of Katey’s paintings are still owned by the families of the people who she painted. That’s why I updated the book, because so many people contacted me when the first book came out and said, “Wow, now I know who painted my great grandmother.” It was great that I was able to get a lot of information from them about paintings I’d seen that had been exhibited but I didn’t know where they’d gone to.