Free Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin

blushes, tears and a ‘foolish, panting, frightened little heart’. Rose Maylie (in
Oliver Twist
) has no character at all beyond being virtuous and self-sacrificing. Little Em’ly, bold as a child on the beach, becomes another blank victim. Dora has more life, because Dickens can’t resist exaggerating her silliness so that she becomes a figure of high comedy before the pathos sets in. There are more capable young women. Louisa Gradgrind (in
Hard Times
) is no fool, but still a victim, while Sissy Jupe keeps enough of her professional training in the circus to show more strength of character than anyone around her, a working child who sets the middle class to rights. The Marchioness (in
The Old Curiosity Shop
) is another of her type, servant, child of the workhouse, abused and starved, who arises from her basement kitchen, shows strength of character and floors her wicked employers; but Dickens pretty well abandoned her halfway through her history, perhaps because Little Nell had to hold centre stage or because he did not know how to develop the Marchioness. Polly Toodle, Paul Dombey’s wet nurse, is also a young working woman whose instincts are surer than those of her employers. Where does Catherine Hogarth stand among these figures? Clearly, among the blank and blushing innocents, as a virtuous middle-class girl. She had no experience of anything but family life when he met her, and showed little evidence of being interested in anything outside the domestic world. Before their marriage he wrote to her to say how much he looked forward to exchanging solitude for fireside evenings in which her ‘kind looks and gentle manner’ would give him happiness, and assured her that her ‘future advancement and happiness’ was the mainspring of his labours. 9 Kind looks and gentle manner she doubtless had, and a wish to please – what she lacked was the strength of character needed to hold her own against her husband’s powerful will. She was incapable of establishing and defending any values of her own, of making her own safe situation from which she should rule within the home, let alone taking up any other interest. So little of her personality appears in any eyewitness account of the Dickens household that it seems fair to say there was not much more there to describe, and that whatever she brought to the marriage as a twenty-year-old hardly had a chance to develop and mature in the regime set up and ruled over by a husband who seemed omnipresent and always knew himself to be right. 10
    Marriage was for him at least a solution to the problem of sex, and for the next twenty-two years they would share a large double bed. ‘A winter’s night has its delight,/Well warmed to bed we go,’ wrote Dickens in a song for his opera this year, only to be told that any mention of bed was objectionable to the public. ‘If the young ladies are especially horrified at the bare notion of anybody’s going to bed,’ he wrote, he would change it, but ‘I will see them d—d before I make any further alteration.’ He added, ‘I am sure … we ought not to emasculate the very spirit of a song to suit boarding-schools.’ 11 The bare notion of going to bed pleased him, as it should please a new husband. Catherine was pregnant in the first month of the marriage.
    They were soon back in their newly furnished suite of rooms at Furnival’s. She was young to be entering into the responsibilities of a wife in charge of her husband’s domestic life – that is, insofar as Dickens allowed anyone to take charge of any aspect of his life. Her sixteen-year-old younger sister, Mary, was often with them, a trim and cheerful visitor who described Catherine as ‘a most capital housekeeper … happy as the day is long’. 12 Happy and also dealing with the physical changes of pregnancy, and when she felt sick or unsteady Mary gave Charles companionship.
Pickwick
was not selling as briskly as hoped, and the project was struck by disaster at the