This is a terrific life of Dickens which goes some way to evaluating his works as well as telling the story of what he did. His childhood was blighted by having vey irresponsible parents. But he took to journalism and then to writing stories that would sell magazines. He was a very adventurous traveller. He loved putting on plays and he loved the theatre and the people of the theatre. He loved excursions, booze and parties, and had some great friends whom he loved. He had a great need to walk for 8 miles or so around London every day, or further - sometimes much further. And he was a great worker. When he really needed to work, he worked extremely hard.
Some of this endless action must have come from great sexual energy, and he kept his wife pregnant most of the time. She had 10 children who lived, and one baby died in infancy. Dickens seems not to have loved these children very much. He sent the boys to France to school all except the eldest, who was educated at Eton, where he didn't shine. Dickens could see the need for education but he couldn't find the kind that would be useful to his sons and daughters. Only one son seemed bright, and that was the youngest, called Henry, who went to Oxford, and became a lawyer. Dickens was really proud of him, and taught him shorthand, which he thought would be useful to him at lectures. The rest of his family was a flock of dependents. He had dependent parents, (his father was a scoundrel). dependent brothers and sisters, and a dependent wife and sister-in-law, and a huge brood of non-earning children.
On top of these, Dickens took on the care of fallen women, in a fallen women's home. He did this with a rich friend of his, Miss Coutts, and there was always a manager of the home too. The aim of the enterprise was to reform the fallen women, and teach them wifely skills and habits, so that they could go out to the colonies (including South Africa) and marry men who needed them. Claire Tomalin estimates that this was a very successful enterprise. Not all the women stayed to be reformed, and if they broke the rules they were forced to go, but the attempt at reform succeeded in many cases and the home did very useful work.
All this ended when Dickens was a rich and famous man in his fifties. Suddenly, he wanted more out of his sex life than his habitual life with Catherine. When he met the Ternan sisters - an acting family - but respectable - he changed his whole life. He left his wife. He risked becoming an outcast, and indeed, by the standards of the day he should have become an outcast. He blamed his wife for the ending of the marriage and he was very secretive about the exact nature of his relationship with Nelly Ternan.
The poor girl! She was 18 when she met the great man and clearly she wanted very much to say "No" to him. But he was so persistent and got the whole family so much in his debt by doing them all favours (especially having her sister's voice trained) that I suppose she felt that she must say Yes. So Dickens hid her away in France for a while (he loved France) and then he set her up in a house in Peckham. And she was his mistress for a few days a week until he died.
(She was then 32. Luckily she looked much younger, So she pretended she was much younger, and that she had known Dickens when she was a child (I suppose the whole family had to join in this deception) and she married a man 12 years younger than herself who didn't know her history of consorting with Dickens. He was a clergyman. )
So, Dickens. He was a great man. He was an extraordinary man. But at some point he decided he could have whatever he wanted, and therefore he behaved abominably to a young girl who had no man to defend her. Yes, in later years they must have had some happiness. But it involved him being intensely cruel to a wife who had done nothing whatever wrong, except bore him and grow quite fat. He made his cruel reasons for leaving her very public. He was also very heartless to his sons.
Fascinating man, and in many ways a very good one.
