Catherine Dickens - Marriage

Marriage

Born in Edinburgh in Scotland in 1815, Catherine came to England with her family in 1834. She was the eldest daughter of George Hogarth, who was a music critic for the Morning Chronicle where Dickens was a young journalist and later the editor of the Evening Chronicle. They became engaged in 1835 and were married on April 2, 1836 in St Luke's Church, Chelsea and honeymooned in Chalk, near Chatham in Kent. They set up a home in Bloomsbury, and went on to have ten children.

Catherine's sister Mary Hogarth entered Dickens's Doughty Street household to offer support to her newly married sister and brother-in-law. It was not unusual for the unwed sister of a new wife to live with and help a newly married couple. Dickens became very attached to Mary, and she died after a brief illness in his arms in 1837. She became a character in many of his books, and her death is fictionalized as the death of Little Nell.

Catherine's younger sister, Georgina Hogarth, joined the Dickens family household in 1842 when Dickens and Catherine sailed to America, caring for the young family they had left behind. In 1845 Charles Dickens produced the amateur theatrical Every Man in his Humour for the benefit of Leigh Hunt. In a subsequent performance, Catherine Dickens, who had a minor role, fell through a trap door injuring her ankle. In 1851, as 'Lady Maria Clutterbuck', Kate Dickens published a cookery book, 'What Shall we Have for Dinner? Satisfactorily Answered by Numerous Bills of Fare for from Two to Eighteen Persons'. It contained many suggested menus for meals of varying complexity together with a few recipes. It went through several editions until 1860. Also in 1851 she suffered a nervous collapse after the death of her daughter Dora Dickens, aged nearly 8 months.

Over the subsequent years Dickens found Catherine an increasingly incompetent mother and housekeeper and blamed her for the birth of their 10 children, which caused him financial worries. Their separation in May 1858, after Catherine Dickens accidentally received a bracelet meant for Ellen Ternan, was much publicized and rumours of Dickens' affairs were numerous, all of which he strenuously denied.