Letters show that Charles Dickens lied about having a bleak spouse

In the so-called Violated Letter, Dickens wrote that he and wife Catherine were ‘wonderfully unsuited to each other’ and that she had neglected their children.

Letters show that Charles Dickens lied about having a cold spouse who was an uncaring mother. Picture: Bill Leak

It is a chapter many fans of Charles Dickens prefer to overlook. When the author left his wife Catherine for a teenage actor, he did so while claiming he was leaving a woman who was a cold wife and an uncaring mother. It was a shocking characterisation by the author, and one we now have evidence of being untrue.

Letters uncovered from an archive and purchased by the Charles Dickens Museum have provided evidence that Catherine was far from the cold, uncaring woman her husband portrayed her as but was a loving mother who tried to care for her children even when they were half a world away.

The cache of letters has spent the past seven or eight decades in the Foyle collection, which was gathered by the founder of the famous London bookshop of the same name.

The cache of letters show Charles Dickens’s narrative was ‘far from the truth’.

They are a carefully collated set of letters that were sent to Edward Dickens, the youngest son in the family, who, for reasons that have never been made clear, was known in the family as Plornishmaroontigoonter, or Plorn for short.

They chart the letters received by Plorn after he moved to Australia aged 16, and the letters that stand out most are from his mother. They are warm, affectionate and written by someone who clearly misses her child.

“These letters show that Charles Dickens’s narrative was far from the truth,” said Emma Harper, curator at the Charles Dickens Museum.

The collection, which includes letters from other family and friends, begin in 1868, 10 years after Dickens had traduced his wife in writing. While the marriage may have been struggling for some time, it came to an end when Charles fell in love with an 18-year-old actor, Ellen Ternan.

In an attempt to prevent any public fallout, Dickens wrote the so-called Violated Letter for his manager to show people, and which was later published by The New York Tribune.

It spread around England, and in it he said he and Catherine were “wonderfully unsuited to each other” and that she had neglected their children.

However, the newly uncovered letters tell a different story. They were not frequent – communication to Australia being a very slow process at the time – but they contain real feeling from Catherine to both Plorn and his brother, Alfred, who had gone there before him.

“How I envy anyone who has seen either of you,” she wrote in August 1871.

Edward Dickens, the seventh son of Charles Dickens.

Most movingly, on Christmas Eve 1878, as she was dying from cancer, she wrote to apologise that the illness had prevented her from writing and of her hope that the sickness would still pass.

“I shall be all right again,” she wrote. “I must just express my most affectionate good wishes of the season although the New Year will be in some time before you receive this. I cannot tell you the devoted love and kindness I receive from all my dear children in my illness.” She died the following year.

Other than a cheque he sent to his son to help him get started in his new life, Charles Dickens is almost absent from the letters. However, he is mentioned and he was clearly still a very big part of his children’s lives even after his death.

The biggest mystery that remains, however, is why the parents nicknamed their child Plornishmaroontigoonter. Harper believes it may be down to Dickens naming his children much in the same way as he named his characters.

“We have a letter from Charles, which is the first instance of it, and I think that’s before Plorn is even a year old,” Harper said. “All his children got rather ridiculous nicknames at different points in their lives. With Plorn, I think it’s about sounds. Dickens was very keen on sounds and nonsense words like this, and Plornish is then used a few years after this in Little Dorrit.”

The letters are on display at the Charles Dickens Museum in Doughty Street, London, until November 10.

THE TIMES