The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth (review)

Lesser men than Charles Dickens have discovered that their wives are fat and boring. I always assumed Charles was brutal but right about his wife Catherine, but her devoted biographer, Lillian Nayder, is not so sure. Nayder wants Catherine to be, like Charles, two incompatible people at once. Charles wanted to be both the jolly spirit of buoyant family life and the free spirit who escaped it. Nayder’s Catherine is at once a self-effacing wife and mother and her own, unappreciated, outspoken woman. We all want Catherine to be more than the torpid woman Charles traduced, but this biography doesn’t convince me that she was.

Catherine merits a biography, not because of anything she did, but because of what her husband did to her and the cryptic silence with which she responded. After irritating him by producing ten children, allegedly without his participation, he turned her big body into a monstrosity by insisting that the door between their bedrooms be nailed shut. Next, he banished her from the family home, intimidating the children away from her; only Charley, who was legally of age, could choose to live with his mother. According to Victorian dogma, family life was sacrosanct in its privacy, but Dickens could not refrain from staging his fraught household for the world. He published self-pitying essays about his misery with a wife who was incompetent, unnatural (she neither loved her children nor was loved by them), and even insane (shades, perhaps, of the mad wife in Jane Eyre [1847]?). He published these devastating accusations in his home-loving periodical Household Words.

Who was this woman who was publicly denounced by the most beloved author in the land? How did she feel? Did she ever affirm herself, at least in private? Nayder wants to unearth her, but never does. Her biography’s title and sub-title are as incompatible as the Dickens’ marriage was. “The Other Dickens” seems to name Charles’s parents or children rather than the wife who was distracted from the Great Man’s capers by childbearing and planning elaborate entertainments on his behalf. Catherine Hogarth might designate the independent woman Dickens could not touch, but it more likely pinions Catherine as her father’s daughter. George Hogarth was a dapper figure in Edinburgh, a lawyer who had represented the revered Walter Scott and an editor of the most sophisticated periodicals of his day. When the hustling young Charles began to court Catherine, he was equally courting her well-connected father. Like a good Victorian girl, as Mrs. Dickens or Miss Hogarth, Catherine was from the beginning less her own woman than a conduit from man to man.

Caught between ambitious men, Catherine Hogarth was no more autonomous than Catherine Dickens, but Nayder keeps reminding us that Catherine was also a sister, a privileged title in Victorian culture. Nineteenth-century literary sisters are often fountains of blessed energy; the March girls and the Brontë clan are paragons of art, selfhood, and love. Unfortunately for Catherine, however, Charles discovered her sisters and reinvented them. Nayder insists on a bond between the sisters that Charles could not touch, but she never shows this. Now as in their lifetimes, Mary Hogarth fades into the narrative her brother-in-law wrote: she was the angel-child who died suddenly in Charles’s arms, while Georgiana Hogarth became the angel-housekeeper who ran the family after Catherine’s expulsion. They may have diverged from these womanly postures, but in the indelible narrative Charles made of them, they exist to point up Catherine’s womanly failures. (There was a younger Hogarth sister, Helen, who was Catherine’s loyal companion after Charles banished her. Too young to have known Charles or to have been rewritten by him, Helen still recalls his faceless followers, his Little Nells and Little Dorrits.)

Nayder claims darkly that since few of the Hogarth sisters’ letters exist, there must be untold stories, if not an...