Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin Page B

girls driven by poverty to sell themselves, the young women who gave passionate loyalty to their criminal lovers, the theatrical ladies who stooped to frailty, the defiant young street sinners who refused to be ashamed of themselves. He admired some for their spirit, and if he was tempted and succumbed on occasion – something we don’t know – he was still against the system. He wanted to think well of women, and he wanted them to be good, not to be degraded, or to degrade their users. Marriage was the solution, for reasons of sexual hygiene, for domestic comfort, for companionship, and so within less than six months of meeting Catherine Hogarth he was engaged to her. One of his earliest letters tells her not to be capricious or trifle with him, warning her that although he is ‘warmly and deeply attached’ to her, he will give her up at once if her show of coldness means she has wearied of him. 14 There is never any doubt who is running the relationship. He was putting his life in order, and he would always be the one responsible for keeping it in order.
    The year of 1835 was even busier than the one before. If he was not at the House, which sat until 1.30 a.m., he was away covering the provinces, by-elections, Liberal dinners, the Home Secretary Lord John Russell’s speech in Exeter in May, when he strained every nerve to get his report in ahead of
The Times
, bribing post boys and taking dictation in pelting rain. He arrived back in London with rheumatism, deaf, worn out, without his bag or a clean shirt, but Beard sent him round a shirt, and he found the competition exhilarating. Writing his sketches had to be squeezed into odd moments, and was more than once put off in order to give him time with Catherine. She had to be introduced to his people, now reunited in lodgings in Bloomsbury. When Black decided he should be reviewing plays as well as reporting, he was suddenly in the theatre in the evenings again, and he had to sit down to finish his own writing when he got home afterwards, or start early the next morning with an editor waiting impatiently. Sometimes the strain was too much. He described to Catherine being ‘taken so extremely unwell when we got to Knightsbridge last night, that I really thought I should have been unable to proceed; my head was so extremely bad, and the dizziness affected my sight so much that I could scarcely see at all, in addition to which cheerful symptoms my tottering legs gave me the appearance of being particularly drunk’. He treated himself with a large pill of calomel, a purgative made from mercury which acted on the liver and produced ‘such singular evolutions in my interior that I am unable to leave home’. 15 But he threw off illness when he had to, and the next day he was keeping an appointment to visit Newgate Prison.
    In November he was looking at houses in Pentonville, finding them pretty but extremely dear at £55 a year. He was sent to Hatfield in December, where a fire had destroyed part of the great house and incinerated the Dowager Marchioness: ‘Here I am, waiting until the remains of the Marchioness of Salisbury are dug from the remains of her Ancestor’s Castle.’ A week later he was in Kettering, where ‘we had a slight flare here yesterday morning, just stopping short of murder and riot’ – this was a by-election. Catherine – often Kate or Katie now – was treated to an account of the Tories, ‘a ruthless set of bloody-minded villains … perfect savages … superlative blackguards … Would you believe that a large body of horsemen, mounted and armed, who galloped on a defenceless crowd yesterday, striking about them in all directions, and protecting a man who cocked a loaded pistol, were
led
by Clergymen, and Magistrates?’ 16 Two days later he described the dinner he had ordered for himself and four fellow journalists: ‘cod and oyster sauce, Roast beef, and a pair of ducks, plum pudding, and Mince Pies’. Having survived this he was