Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin Page A

to visit him at his home in Kensington. He was a man of wide cultural interests, had recently written and published
Musical History, Biography and Criticism
, and his career was worth hearing about: he had been a lawyer in Edinburgh, and a friend of Lockhart and Walter Scott, for whom he had acted professionally. In 1830 he decided to move south, using his knowledge of music and literature to help him find work as a journalist and critic, and made a success of his second profession. Dickens would not have been told that he had to leave Scotland for financial reasons, but he did learn that Mrs Hogarth came of a prosperous and hard-working family, and that her father had been a collector and publisher of songs, and an intimate of Robert Burns. Their recollections of such friendships with great men were important to the Hogarths, and impressed Dickens.
    They had a large and still growing family, and when he made his first visit to their house on the Fulham Road, surrounded by gardens and orchards, he met their eldest daughter, nineteen-year-old Catherine. Her unaffectedness appealed to him at once, and her being different from the young women he had known, not only in being Scottish but in coming from an educated family background with literary connections. The Hogarths, like the Beadnells, were a cut above the Dickens family, but they welcomed Dickens warmly as an equal, and George Hogarth’s enthusiasm for his work was flattering. 11 Catherine was slim, shapely and pleasant-looking, with a gentle manner and without any of Maria Beadnell’s sparkling beauty; but his experience with Maria’s beauty and unpredictable behaviour had marked him as a burn marks, and left its scar. Better less sparkle and no wound.
    His decision to marry her was quickly made, and he never afterwards gave any account of what had led him to it, perhaps because he came to regard it as the worst mistake in his life. We can see that the Hogarth family admired him and approved of his suit, and that Catherine was a nicely brought-up and uncomplicated young woman. She wrote to a cousin soon after meeting him, ‘Mamma and I were at a Ball on Saturday last and where do you think at Mr Dicken’s [
sic
]. It was in honour of his birthday. It was a batchelors party at his own chambers. His Mother and sisters presided. one of them a very pretty girl who sings beautifully … Mr Dickens improves very much on acquaintance he is very gentlemanly and pleasant.’ 12 Soon she was evidently in thrall to him. He saw in her the offer of affection, compliance and physical pleasure, and he believed he was in love with her. That was enough for him to ask her to be his wife. There were many protestations of enduring love in his letters. She was not clever or accomplished like his sister Fanny and could never be his intellectual equal, which may have been part of her charm: foolish little women are more often presented as sexually desirable in his writing than clever, competent ones. He wanted to be married. He did not want a wife who would compel his imagination.
    For the three summer months of 1835 he took rooms close to the Hogarth house, in Selwood Terrace, to be near Catherine, and you can feel the pressure of his need for her: ‘dear Mouse’, ‘darling Tatie’, ‘my own dearest darling Pig’ he calls her, and urges her to come round and make a late breakfast for him, after he has been working at the House into the small hours: ‘It’s a childish wish my dear love; but I am anxious to hear and see you the moment I wake – Will you indulge me by making breakfast for me this Morning? … it will be excellent practice for you against next Christmas,’ when he hoped they would be married, although he had to wait a few months more. 13
    Like all young men, he needed sexual excitement and comfort, and the London prostitutes so freely available were not what he wanted. He knew enough of them to pity them: the children put on the streets by their mothers, the