The Visible Woman

The reason I blogged about Nobles Park last month was because I was thinking about the relationship between walking and writing, and the reason I was thinking about the relationship between walking and writing was because I'd just finished reading Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World, which is a novelishly good biography of the great man by Simon Callow. (It might also explain why I've started writing interminably long sentences, containing interminable numbers of clauses, which is a dubious tendency even if you do happen to be Charles Dickens.) Anyway, the point is that Dickens not only wrote a lot; he also walked a lot. And I don't mean half hour rambles. 'Going for a walk' in Dickens-speak means pounding the streets of London for a minimum of three hours a day at an average pace of 4mph. And he did it because it nourished his writing. "It was," writes Simon Callow, "one of Dickens's maxims that a given amount of mental exertion should be counteracted by a commensurate amount of bodily fatigue...As he marched through the great metropolis, he drew energy from its energy and his absorption of its life replenished him."

The divine Mary Hogarth

Which is all well and good, only as I read I couldn't help wishing that Dickens had done a little less walking and put in a bit more time with his wife. I know you shouldn't judge other people's marriages, and I know Victorian women didn't lead the most dynamic lives at the best of times, but Catherine Dickens does seem to have put up with one hell of a lot. Not least bearing ten children to a man whose ideal woman was a virginal adolescent with angel's wings more or less sprouting from her shoulder-blades. As if such a generalised ideal weren't tiresome enough, Dickens had a specific tendresse for Catherine's very own younger sister, Mary Hogarth, who died aged seventeen, "the age at which for him a woman was at her most perfect: she never grew fat, dull, tired, tedious." Mary appeared in novel after novel (think Agnes Wicklow in David Copperfield, Rose Maylie in Oliver Twist, Amy Dorrit in Little Dorrit): ever youthful, attractive, gentle, pure...ever aggravating.



Catherine Dickens in 1852

So there's Catherine, in futile competition with one dead sister and another live one (Georgy, who came to live with the Dickenses at the age of sixteen, when Catherine was a mother of four heading into her thirties...) Dickens's genius - as generous and imaginative as it was in its effects on society at large - monopolised the lives of his family, especially his wife. Everything he did - from walking, to writing, to campaigning on behalf of the disadvantaged, to fathering children - he did with a sort of manic excess. No doubt he was an exhilarating friend, acquaintance or patron but he must have made an oppressive husband. I felt depressed on Catherine's behalf as she trudged stoically through life in his wake, putting up with his eccentricities and his massive popularity whilst bearing children right, left and centre. Finally, after twenty-two years of marriage, Dickens abandoned her in favour of eighteen year old Ellen Ternan.

Catherine doesn't seem to have interested biographers or historical novelists*, any more than she interested her husband. I suppose the bare bones of her story - from pretty and loved to old and unloved - is not exactly rom-com material. I see there's a new film about Ellen Ternan called The Invisible Woman, based on the biography by Claire Tomalin. I'm sure it will be fascinating - of course it will, the clue's in the title. Much better (in film and literature, if not in life) to be The Invisible Woman. All that sexy mystique. But you have to feel for Catherine. After all, somebody had to play the thankless role of Dickens's All-Too-Visible-Wife. I hope someone writes a sympathetic account of her life some time soon, if only on the basis that visible lives are every bit as mysterious as invisible ones.  

* With the exception of Lillian Nayder. The Other Dickens : a life of Catherine Hogarth was the only item of Catherine Dickens literature I could find.