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Revision as of 11:23, 14 November 2011
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After a brief affair with Maria Beadnell, the daughter of a London banker, he fell in love with Catherine Hogarth and married her in 1836. By this time he was beginning to establish himself as a writer of short stories, and novels soon thereafter. Her younger sister Mary moved in with them for a while after their wedding. Dickens was devoted to her, and he and his wife were equally grief-stricken when Mary died suddenly, probably of heart disease.
His wife bore him ten children, but husband and wife soon drifted apart. He was by no means immune to the charms of other women, and at the age of 45 he made the acquaintance of Nelly Ternan, an actress who was still then in her teens. He was immediately smitten, and the rift in the Dickens' marriage eventually widened into separation and a public statement by him in The Times, although any thought of divorce was out of the question. It caused considerable bitterness within the family, and according to his daughter Katey, ""''He did not care a damn about what happened to any of us. Nothing could surpass the misery and unhappiness of our home.""''
For some time, a certain amount of mystery surrounded his liaison with Ternan. Was it a full-blown love affair between two people, or was Dickens merely the protector and platonic lover of an innocent young girl, and one who helped to look after her widowed mother and fatherless sisters? According to Katey, the couple had a son in secret who died in infancy. Ternan later admitted to the local parish priest that she had indeed been the author’s mistress, but remorse made them both miserable, and that she now ""loathed the very thought of this intimacy"". This information was kept a closely-guarded secret, and did not find its way into print until 1935, after the last of Dickens’s children had died.
