Parallel Lives by Phyllis Rose

Author:Phyllis Rose
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Daunt Books
Published: 2020-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

paterfamilias

When he turned twenty-three, Charles Dickens, a young reporter for the Morning Chronicle, threw a birthday party for himself in his rooms in Furnival’s Inn. He had good reason to feel like celebrating, for he was beginning to attract attention as the author of sketches of London life being published in the Chronicle and the Monthly Magazine under the pen name ‘Boz’. Not long before, he had been jilted, because of his lack of ‘prospects’, by Maria Beadnell, a woman he had loved desperately. Young Dickens would not, on the strength of his mounting fame, with the growing acclaim for ‘Sketches by Boz’, renew his suit, but he could allow himself to gloat a little. He could offer himself a party. It was a Saturday night. There was dancing. His mother and his sisters presided, and the lovely and talented Fanny Dickens, one of his sisters, favoured the company with her singing.

Among the guests was George Hogarth, also a journalist on the Morning Chronicle, and some of his family. Dickens particularly respected this older man who was an accomplished writer, a genial person and had been, in his native Edinburgh, a friend and adviser to Sir Walter Scott. Dickens was the son of a navy pay clerk distinguished only by his inability to provide for his family. George Hogarth, by contrast, seemed confidently and even glamorously established in the literary world which Dickens aspired to enter. The young man was proud of his friendship and pleased to go to his colleague’s house. The eldest of the Hogarths’ children, twenty-year-old Catherine, particularly enjoyed Dickens’s birthday party. She also liked the host. ‘Mr Dickens improves very much upon acquaintance he is very gentlemanly and pleasant,’ she reported later to a Scottish relative.3

By the end of that spring, in the year 1835, Catherine Hogarth and Charles Dickens were engaged to be married. She was three years younger than he, pretty, with heavy-lidded blue eyes and fresh plump skin, good-natured and affectionate. He liked and esteemed her family. Although she did not elicit from him the passion that Maria Beadnell had, she seemed to suit him admirably. Dickens intended to make a place for himself in the world. He meant to live hard, and his pace was naturally fast. He wanted a wife and a family. His deeply passionate nature attached itself to his chosen mate. They were a team. She was ‘his better half’, ‘the missis’, ‘Mrs D’. In the early years of their marriage, he flung around those references to her with exuberant delight. He was evidently proud of her, and proud of himself for having acquired that dignifying satellite, a wife.

They were married in April 1836 and, in order to live as cheaply as possible, they decided to stay on in Dickens’s chambers in Furnival’s Inn, which were small, but tastefully furnished – the drawing room in rosewood and the dining room in mahogany. The household was lively and crowded, for Dickens’s younger brother, Frederick, came to stay with them, as did Catherine’s seventeen-year-old sister, Mary.

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