Charles Dickens in Love

A Biography

Robert Garnett

• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781453271575
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

In celebration of the bicentennial of Charles Dickens's birth, here is Dickens as you have never seen him before: an intimate and engaging portrait of the great author and the women he loved."To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart." —Charles Dickens
When Charles Dickens died in 1870 he was the best-known man in the English-speaking world—the preeminentVictorian celebrity, universally mourned as both a noble spirit and the greatest of novelists. Yetwhen the first person named in his will turned out to be an unknown woman named Ellen Ternan, only ahandful of people had any idea who she was. Of his romance with Ellen, Dickens had written, "it belongsto my life and probably will only die out of the same with the proprietor, " and so it was—until his death sheremained the most important person in his life.
She was not the first woman who had fired his imagination. As a young man he had fallen deeply in lovewith a woman who "pervaded every chink and crevice" of his mind for three years, Maria Beadnell, andwhen she eventually jilted him he vowed that "I never can love any human creature but yourself." A fewyears later he was stunned by the sudden death of his young sister-in-law, Mary Scott Hogarth, and worshipedher memory for the rest of his life. "I solemnly believe that so perfect a creature never breathed, " hedeclared, and when he died over thirty years later he was still wearing her ring.
Charles Dickens has no rival as the most fertile creative imagination since William Shakespeare, and noone influenced his imagination more powerfully than these three women, his muses and teachers in theschool of love. Using hundreds of primary sources, Charles Dickens in Love narrates the story of the mostintense romances of Dickens's life and shows how his novels both testify to his own strongest affections andserve as memorials to the young women he loved all too well, if not always wisely.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• CHAPTER 1: No discourse, except it be of love
• CHAPTER 2: Deep as first love, and wild with all regret: Maria Beadnell
• CHAPTER 3: So perfect a creature never breathed: Mary Hogarth
• CHAPTER 4: Of all my books, I like this the best:
• CHAPTER 5: I counted up my years … and found that I should soon be grey
• CHAPTER 6: Enter the actress, stage left
• CHAPTER 7: The crisis
• CHAPTER 8: Mr. Tringham and the train crash
• CHAPTER 9: If I go, my dear; if I go
• CHAPTER 10: Four graves
• A NOTE ON SOURCES
• SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY
• NOTES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INDEX
• Copyright Page