He accused her of negligent, incompetent parenting. It was also in the early 1850s - around the time Dickens met and began his involvement with the young actress Ellen (Nelly) Ternan - that Dickens began an increasingly hostile and slanderous public campaign against Catherine. Over their 22-year marriage, which began in 1836, Charles and Catherine Dickens had 10 children together, the youngest born in 1852. I first read all about it in Claire Tomalin’s The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens(1990), and in the years since research has unearthed further details of the tangled relationships of Dickens and his two women. So successful was the subterfuge that the very existence of his paramour (and their baby, who died soon after birth) remained almost entirely unknown until the evidence Dickens had worked so hard to bury came to greater public knowledge in the 1980s. Photo by Getty Imagesīut this public image does not square with his own psychologically abusive treatment of his wife Catherine, or with the self-serving secrecy that characterized his dealings with a much younger mistress (when they met he was 45 and she 18, the same age as Dickens’ daughter Kate). A scene from a 1920 production of Oliver Twist. Dickens was also widely celebrated for his idealized depictions of domestic bliss and as a moralistic upholder of virtuous behavior. In his writing, Dickens was the champion of such physically abused women as the sympathetic prostitute Nancy in Oliver Twist (whom the smitten Oliver of the musical so sweetly serenades). Perhaps that is why, when I reopened it this time, I was not only surprised anew by Dickens’ demonization of Fagin “the Jew,” I also could not ignore the depth of a second disconnect between Dickens the author and Dickens the man: his treatment of women. I must also admit that I chose to mostly avoid being reminded of Fagin by only infrequently taking my copy of Oliver Twist off the shelf. In 1865, after being admonished for his anti-Jewish portrait of Fagin, Dickens created a very positive - and rather forgettable - Jewish character in his final complete novel, Our Mutual Friend.Īnd so, over the years, I came to regard Fagin as a stain but not an obstacle to my vast enjoyment and admiration of Dickens’ great literary genius. Still, I must also give Dickens credit for his late-in-life attempt to offset his demonic portrait of Fagin, even if it took almost 30 years ( Oliver Twist was published in 1838 as his second novel).

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