Charles Dickens was a ruthless Victorian husband. Like my great-grandfather
Ian Jack/The Guardian, UK
My ancestor wanted to have his wife declared mad and locked up. Unlike the great writer, he succeeded.
Domestic tyranny was a fact of Victorian life: men who were saintly in public could behave very cruelly behind their front doors. In 1878, close to the end of her life, Catherine Dickens began to confide to her neighbours in Camden, north London, a few details of how her late husband had treated her. Charles was by now eight years dead, and the couple had last lived together in 1858, around the time the novelist began his long affair with the young actress Ellen Ternan. But the public knew nothing of this relationship.
Dickens’ worldwide reputation as a compassionate moralist – the enemy of humbug and suffering – continued to flourish untainted by the facts of his private life. Naturally the neighbours, Edward Dutton Cook and his wife, were shocked when Catherine told them how Charles had once tried to have her locked up as a madwoman.
The crucial evidence, which was disclosed this week, comes in a letter that Cook wrote to a friend and fellow journalist, William Moy Thomas. “He [Dickens] discovered at last that she had outgrown his liking,” Cook wrote of Catherine’s disclosures. “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! But bad as the law is in regard to proof of insanity he could not quite wrest it to his purpose.”
Despite the fact that this letter constituted a communication between the leakiest of vessels, two journalists, its contents remained unknown until the recent discovery by Prof John Bowen of a cache of 98 letters at Harvard University. “It was a moment that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up,” Prof Bowen, of the University of York, said this week. Thanks to Claire Tomalin, the biographer of both Dickens and Ternan, we already knew that Dickens’ behaviour was secretive and complicated; but now, if we believe Cook’s letter, we have his wife attesting to a ruthless degree of self-interest. If he could have her declared mad, and she could be confined to an asylum, he could live as he pleased and nobody would think badly of him. A malignant character in one of his novels would have behaved no worse.
But the real-life story has a hero. According to Bowen, the doctor who stood in Dickens’ way and refused to certify Catherine’s insanity was most probably Thomas Harrington Tuke, superintendent of Manor House asylum in Chiswick between 1849 and 1888. Tuke and Dickens were friends. They wrote to each other; Dickens attended the christening of Tuke’s son. Then the friendship seems to have turned sour, so that by 1864 Dickens was calling Tuke a “wretched being” and a “medical donkey”. Bowen speculates, reasonably, that it was Tuke’s refusal to certify Catherine that caused the breach.
If so, it was behaviour firmly in the Tuke tradition. The Tukes were Yorkshire Quakers who made a small fortune trading in coffee, chocolate and tea, and spent some of the profits on philanthropy, including support for the campaign to abolish the slave trade.