The other Dickens by Lillian Nayder

Author:Lillian Nayder [Nayder, Lillian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Women, Social Science, Women's Studies, History, Europe, Great Britain
ISBN: 9780801465147
Google: ViJ0DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2012-04-01T04:27:22+00:00

NOT SO BAD AS SHE SEEMS

For all their differences, Rosina Bulwer Lytton and Catherine Dickens shared common ground: both were unfairly charged with mental illness by their estranged husbands, charges echoed by critics and biographers well into the twentieth century. The case against Rosina depends in part on allegations that she was a woman “on whom maternity sat very lightly”—an unfeeling mother who wrote novels rather than caring for her children and heartlessly sent her babies out to nurse.46 The case against Catherine traces the “mental disorder” with which Dickens would charge her in 1858 to her supposed maternal difficulties in 1850 and 1851 —her reputed bout with a disabling postpartum depression following the birth of her ninth child, Dora, culminating in a “nervous breakdown” the following year. While Edgar Johnson, Peter Ackroyd, and most other Dickens biographers seem interested in the state of Catherine’s mind during her late childbearing period, when Dickens and the medical experts were increasingly focused on her body, they assume that a woman’s thoughts and behavior are governed by her allegedly unstable reproductive system and that, if Catherine was ailing or unhappy in the early 1850s, postpartum depression was necessarily the cause. To the extent that Catherine was “depressed” in 1851, her feelings resulted from the death of baby Dora, not from Dora’s birth. To understand Catherine’s difficulties properly, we need to consider her care for Dora during the baby’s illness and apparent recovery in February, followed by the baby’s sudden death in mid-April, and recognize her “breakdown” for what it was: a normal reaction of grief to the loss of her child, the first of three to predecease her.

Catherine must have conceived Dora toward the end of November 1849, ten months after the birth of Henry. In the interval, she and Dickens hosted large dinner and evening parties at Devonshire Terrace and spent the summer at Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight. Catherine’s circle of women acquaintances had broadened as she met Jane Carlyle, novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, and naturalist Phebe Lankester, and her friendships with Nelly Lemon and Annie Leech became more intimate.47

Although Dickens described her as “rather unwieldy for going out” within a month of her confinement (Pilgrim 6:132), Catherine remained active during her ninth full-term pregnancy. She went to the opera with the Hogarths, dined at the Macreadys’, and celebrated her fourteenth anniversary with Dickens and Forster in Richmond. The banking records reflect her household activity for 1849 and 1850 and show that the amount of money specifically allotted to her by her husband exceeded that allotted to himself for the first time since 1837:her £139. 18 to his £135. 16 in 1849, and her £193. 13. 6 to his £169. 5 in 1850.48 Busy with the eight children, Catherine invited guests to Charley’s thirteenth birthday party in January 1850 and prepared him to leave for Eton a few days later. Writing to Edward Chapman, she explained that she wanted “a nice Bible and Prayer Book for him,” asking the publisher to send several with a price list so that she could choose the one she thought best.

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