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.
Read more about this topic: Catherine Dickens
Famous quotes containing the word marriage:
“Christianity as an organized religion has not always had a harmonious relationship with the family. Unlike Judaism, it kept almost no rituals that took place in private homes. The esteem that monasticism and priestly celibacy enjoyed implied a denigration of marriage and parenthood.”
—Beatrice Gottlieb, U.S. historian. The Family in the Western World from the Black Death to the Industrial Age, ch. 12, Oxford University Press (1993)
“Our home has been nothing but a play-room. I’ve been your doll-wife here, just as at home I was Papa’s doll-child. And the children have been my dolls in their turn. I liked it when you came and played with me, just as they liked it when I came and played with them. That’s what our marriage has been, Torvald.”
—Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906)
“The parent who loves his child dearly but asks for nothing in return might qualify as a saint, but he will not qualify as a parent. For a child who can claim love without meeting any of the obligations of love will be a self-centered child and many such children have grown up in our time to become petulant lovers and sullen marriage partners because the promise of unconditional love has not been fulfilled.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)