Mrs Dickens
Mrs Dickens is a heartbreaking examination of the marriage of Charles Dickens and Catherine Hogarth, two different personalities who are joined by love in their younger years, but whose incompatibilities inexorably drive them apart.
The story is told from two perspectives: a first-person account from the viewpoint of the Dickenses’ servant, Anne Brown; and a third-person account focused on Catherine’s story. Howes presents Catherine as a wronged woman whose placid nature almost invites her mistreatment. But Dickens is not simply presented as a heartless monster. Rather, the novel is a tragic portrayal of two deeply mismatched people: Dickens, with his inexhaustible brilliance and wit; and Catherine, with her quiet indolence and tongue-tied passivity. What starts as an attraction of opposites becomes, over the years of gruelling childbirth, irritated aversion, and eventually repulsion.
The novel is a beautifully written evocation of character and dialogue, and there are scenes that have genuine emotional force. The choice of Anne Brown as a narrator is very effective, Anne’s inauspicious beginnings in the London slums and her fear of returning there having many parallels with Dickens. There are heart-rending betrayals, Howes never shying from the painful decisions that Anne faces. The image of the abandoned child here takes on a distressing significance.
We are left with a key question: how can a man, whose works contain such compassion, have treated his wife so shabbily? Howes suggests that the answer may lie in Dickens’s idealisation of women as delicate, emotionally undemanding creatures. Catherine, here, is very much a real woman who suffers mood swings, weight gain and irrational behaviour. Howes balances this with Dickens’s own insecurities and fears. Ultimately, though, what the novel gives is less an understanding of Dickens, and more a powerful, compelling and utterly moving voice to an ordinary woman ill-matched to an extraordinary man. Very highly recommended.
