Mrs Dickens' Family Christmas

FESTIVE MUSIC

It's that time of the year again.

-That festive season...

-Fabulous.

..that family, home and hearth time.

If there's one man responsible for our notion of the modern Christmas,

it's quill-wielding, polymath, Charles Dickens.

He romanticised and popularised our notion of Christmas.

in a series of stories he released every year,

the most loved of which launched a thousand Muppets -

A Christmas Carol.

Dickens loved acting and all year round

he read out his Christmas Carol to packed theatres.

He was the English Santa.

The audiences saw Charles Dickens as the epitome of Yuletide spirit.

They warmed to his descriptions of the Cratchit family,

huddled around their meagre goose and Christmas pudding.

"Mrs Cratchit entered, flushed, but smiling proudly with the pudding

"like a speckled cannonball, so hard and firm,

"blazing in half of half-a-quarter of ignited brandy

"with Christmas holly stuck into the top.

"'Oh, what a wonderful pudding,' Bob Cratchit said.

"He regarded it as the greatest success achieved by Mrs Cratchit

"since their marriage.

"'A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears.

"'God bless us.' Which all the family re-echoed.

"'God bless us every one,' said Tiny Tim, the last of all."

We all know the fiction - puddings the size of space hoppers,

cheeky Cockneys made good by the patronage of their class overlords.

But what about the truth behind the fiction?

And that is that Dickens spent over two decades

with his loyal wife Catherine,

who's largely been air-brushed from his history.

It's a great irony that this country's greatest author

couldn't simply write himself the happy ending

he created for his characters.

Instead his marriage collapsed in heartbreak and betrayal.

Welcome to Mrs Dickens' family Christmas.

Cheers!

Ooh, I love a cold tea.

I think that one's a '72.

Middle class London in the early 1830s.

The tail end of the Georgian era, soon to see the dawn of Victorian England.

Genteel, safe. Not a bad place for a respectable young woman

on the hunt for a husband.

Like the future Mrs Dickens.

Catherine Thompson Hogarth came from a large

sophisticated Scottish family that had settled in the capital.

Wife, mother, home-maker, domestic goddess.

Just four of the things least likely to be inscribed on my tombstone.

But for Catherine they were vital.

While men could disport themselves in the public sphere,

women had to shine in the private sphere,

where they created a happy and harmonious household

full of kids - the ultimate in middle class respectability.

19-year-old Catherine had been well-trained.

She could sew, speak French, play the piano

and her family was a "good" one.

A literary editor, her papa had been friends

with one of Britain's greatest novelists, Sir Walter Scott.

Catherine wasn't a genius.

How could she be, she didn't have advantage of an education

and she wasn't a stunner either.

But she was blue-eyed, and bonny, well-informed and witty

and her family had excellent literary connections.

All in all, for a man looking for a secure and cultured life

she was the perfect catch.

Enter Charles Dickens.

No, not this one. That was later on.

No, in 1835, when Catherine met him,

Charles John Huffam Dickens looked like this.

No one would have guessed he was the son

of an obscure naval clerk with money problems.

A campaigning journalist and budding playwright,

Dickens was a dandy and man about town.

In his early 20s,

Dickens decided he wanted to achieve a look as sparkling as his wit.

And so he invested in a brand new outfit.

It was an image that would serve him very well.

This is the young Dickens getting dressed up for a night on the town

or maybe just a day's shopping.

-It's a little big.

-It is.

-We can take that in...

-You can do that?

-..to suit your svelte self.

Don't worry. I can always take this out! Always a battle!

We want something like this, we want something...

..like this.

Oh, yes. That's very dashing.

So this is the uniform he adopts when he's young

and he sticks with it for the rest of his life.

What's interesting is when he's younger

he does a lot of amateur theatricals and this is like a costume.

This is the young Dickens on the verge of moving from amateur actor

to a professional writer. This is what covers that transition.

But he sticks with it?

So basically it's like the stonewash denim of a Top Gear presenter.

They will never alter, you know, fashion cannot change them.

Exactly. This is the Dickens' brand.

He was confident.

He was borderline cocky but it was a shell.

It was something he could hide behind like a suit of armour.

Inside Dickens, there is this wounded child whose wounds never heal,

who is the 12-year-old sent to work in a blacking factory

where he spends maybe a year, maybe more, maybe less,

slapping labels on pots of shoe polish.

He feels he will never escape, finally he does,

but there's always that great fear, that anxiety

he's never going to make it and that's what is inside the waistcoat.

Charles was only just middle class.

He'd fought his way to respectability.

Catherine, his social superior, knew nothing of this.

No one did.

"Mr Dickens improves very much on acquaintance," she wrote,

"He is very gentlemanly and pleasant."

Judging by his early letters to her, now in the British Library,

they were very much in love.

He adoringly calls her, "Dearest Mouse",

"Darling Tattie",

"Darling Pig".

What is so exciting about reading these letters

is that although we don't get her voice, we get their relationship.

There is definite love and affection here.

He's not trying to convince an audience of anything at this point.

Whatever he writes here is for one person's eyes only.

"I have never ceased to love you for one moment,

"since I knew you," he writes, "Nor shall I."

There's a page which leaps out at you

because, firstly, there's this ridiculous, grotesquely florid signature,

and underneath it he's written 99 zero, zero, zero.

There are 33 zero kisses.

I didn't realise there was a number bigger than the American national debt.

But if there is, it's here.

It's the sort of handwritten equivalent of,

You put the phone down, no you put the phone down!

I don't believe he's in his 20s, I don't believe it.

but here he is. To me it says, 13-year-old boy.

"If you knew how much delight it would afford me

"to be able to turn round to you at our own fireside

"when my work is done, and to seek in your kind looks and gentle manner

"the recreation and happiness

"which the moping solitude of chambers can never afford."

I'm almost jealous.

Most of the time all I have to show after my relationships

even the long ones, is a couple of e-mails and a writ.

There you go.

On 2 April 1836, Catherine and Charles married in style

at Chelsea's cathedral, the new mock Gothic marvel of St Luke's.

She told Charles she'd be happy anywhere with him

and they set up home in his bachelor pad

at this fashionable block in Holborn, London.

With them a cook, a maid and Catherine's younger sister (!)

Mary Hogarth was blue-eyed and red lipped, 16 and very sweet.

For Dickens, there was definitely something about Mary.

I think the best deal for him was when he could have a wife and sister

in the same home as he did with Mary Hogarth.

Which is normal for the time but it's odd with him.

I think the way he deals with that is odd, psychologically.

The way he refers to it too.

"My pair of petticoats" he calls them.

That's his wife and his sister-in-law.

I think he would have been happiest as a Pharaoh in Ancient Egypt.

I think they married their sisters regularly.

Christmas 1836 was the Dickens' first as a married couple

and one of their happiest.

Charles had the home, wife and sister of his dreams.

Catherine was expecting their first child

and another new arrival had burst upon the world -

The Pickwick Papers.

Completed in 1837, this runaway bestseller contains a blueprint

for the cheery family Christmas Dickens had never had as a child,

the Pickwick Club's visit to the Wardle family

for a splendid seasonal knees-up.

APPLAUSE

Happy, happy Christmas!

CHEERS

"This," said Mr Pickwick looking round him,

"This is, indeed, comfort.

"Our invariable custom," replied Mr Wardle

"Everybody sits down with us on Christmas Eve,

"servants and all, and here we wait, until the clock strikes twelve,

"to usher Christmas in, and beguile the time with forfeits and stories.

"Trundle, my boy, rake up the fire."

Up flew the bright sparks in myriads as the logs were stirred.

The deep red blaze sent forth a rich glow,

that penetrated into the furthest corner of the room,

and cast its cheerful tint on every face.

APPLAUSE

Family reality and public fiction were perfectly matched.

On the 12th night of that first Christmas,

Catherine gave birth to their first child, Charley.

The birth, in the home, as usual in those days, went smoothly.

But not the aftermath.

Catherine was unable to breastfeed.

She just cried whenever she saw Charley.

She was subject to the medical thoughts and views of the time.

This is Thomas Bull's Hints To Mothers

which suggests that all new mothers should lie prone

between two to four weeks, in case their wombs fell out.

Bored now!

After just a few minutes,

I would have got up and created a fallopian tube landslide.

In all seriousness,

it's very easy to put yourself in the place of Catherine.

There were so few roles given to Victorian women

and she's failed already at the first hurdle of the primary one,

that of being a mum.

Imagine her here lying in the silence

listening to the sound of her child cry

wanting to help it but not being able to do anything.

Meanwhile, her husband is gallivanting and shopping

with her younger sister.

It's so easy to understand how she could have succumbed

to the black dog of depression.

BABY CRIES

In his fiction, Dickens made a joke of it.

When Little Dombey has no mother to breastfeed him

in Dombey And Son of 1848, Mr Chick asks,

"Couldn't something be done with a teapot?"

In real life, Charles later claimed that a mental disorder

made Catherine a bad wife and mother.

A travesty of the truth, according to recent scholarship.

You have to remember she's locked up in her room for a month

but only with the first two deliveries.

After the first two deliveries when she gets out of confinement earlier,

she has no depression at all.

Biographers and critics are still talking about

how Catherine was weak, and talking about how she was a nonentity,

and talking about how she had a nervous disability,

and the rest of it, and they've bought it hook line and sinker.

There's no indication at any point she had some nervous disturbance,

that she was mentally ill, that she was incompetent.

The fact is, they were a happy couple and he loved her.

In 1837 they moved to a bigger home, 48 Doughty Street.

Fully recovered, Catherine was a loving mother.

"My darling boy," she wrote, "grows sweeter and lovelier every day."

The couple were avid theatre-goers.

In May 1837, accompanied by Mary, they went to see a one-act farce

which Charles had recently completed on their second honeymoon.

Called Is She His Wife?

it features the newly-married Mr Lovetown already bored stiff with his missus.

I repeat, my dear, that I am very dull in this out of the way villa,

-confoundedly dull, horridly dull.

-LAUGHTER

And I repeat that if you took any pleasure in your wife's society,

or felt for her as you once professed to feel,

you would have no cause to make such a complaint.

If I did not know you to be one of the sweetest creatures in existence, my dear,

I should be strongly disposed to say that you were a very close imitation

of an aggravating female.

That's very curious, my dear, for I declare that,

if I hadn't known you to be such an exquisite, good-tempered,

attentive husband, I should have mistaken you for a very great brute.

LAUGHTER

My dear, you're offensive.

My love, you're intolerable.

CHEERS AND APPLAUSE

In the marriage, as in Dickens' books,

comedy and calamity were often bedfellows.

That night, back home, Catherine's sister Mary

unaccountably collapsed, never to recover.

Catherine was so shocked by Mary's sudden death

she ended up having a miscarriage.

"We've often said," she wrote, "we had too much happiness to last."

She probably would have written it in this very room

which up until then had been full of so much promise.

With a newborn baby and another on the way, his career taking off

and her loyally by his side, and in one night that is wiped from them

and this place becomes transformed into a place of sadness and bereavement.

Charles' reaction was, well, very odd.

Rather dramatic and self-centred.

Dickens said, "Thank God she died in my arms,

"and the last words she whispered were of me."

Which I think remains the most singularly narcissistic statement

I have ever heard in my entire life.

As if the greater tragedy would have been

she died and Charles wasn't there to hold her

or that she died and hadn't managed in her final and dying breaths to mention him.

Mary was laid to rest at the then brand new cemetery

at Kensal Green, North London.

"Young, beautiful and good, God in His mercy,

"numbered her with His angels at the early age of seventeen."

Wrote Charles Dickens.

He wanted to be buried in the same grave lying above her for eternity.

Unfortunately, Mary's brother was given the slot instead.

Now Mary was dead, it seemed in some strange way

to give Charles permission to be in love with her.

Very odd, even by Victorian standards.

Thank God she died before she did anything as grubby and fun

as actually having sex.

He idealised her, he was obsessed with her.

In fact a family friend remarked,

"One cannot doubt that his romantic love was given to Mary."

He'd call her "his ideal" to anyone who'd listen,

including his own wife.

Nice!

Mary was replaced in the home by Georgina,

another of Catherine's little sisters.

Virgins played a big role in the Dickens's marriage

and in Charles's fiction.

In 1841, he completed The Old Curiosity Shop starring Little Nell.

This virtuous young maiden looks after her ailing grandpapa

while she's lusted after by one of Dickens's

most creepy creations - the oversexed dwarf, Mr Quilp.

"When the child looked up again

"she found that he was regarding her with extraordinary favour and complacency.

"'You look very pretty today, Nelly, charmingly pretty.

"'Are you tired, Nelly?'

"'No, sir, I'm in a hurry to get back,

"'for he will be anxious while I am away.

"'No hurry, Little Nell, no hurry at all,' said Quilp.

"'How should you like to be my number two, Nelly?'

"'To be what, sir?'

"'My number two, Nelly, my second, my Mrs Quilp,' said the dwarf.

"The child looked frightened, but seemed not to understand him,

"which Mr Quilp observing, hastened to make his meaning more distinctly.

"'To be Mrs Quilp the second, when Mrs Quilp the first is dead, sweet Nell,' said Quilp

"wrinkling up his eyes and luring her towards him with his bent forefinger.

"'To be my wife, my little cherry-cheeked, red-lipped wife.

"'Say that Mrs Quilp lives five year, or only four,

"'You'll be just the proper age for me.'"

When Little Nell dies, her grandfather keeps her clothes.

In real life, Dickens kept Mary's, saying,

"They will moulder away in their secret places."

A troubled, mercurial soul, for now he held his demons at bay

often by transmuting them into great fiction.

In the 1830s and '40s,

Charles Dickens became the most famous writer on earth.

From Oliver Twist to Martin Chuzzlewit,

from Nicholas Nickleby to David Copperfield,

Catherine's husband produced some of English literature's masterpieces.

He explodes onto the scene. Nobody had seen anything like it.

He became a public celebrity, there were commercial spin offs

like sweets, pastries and a certain kind of trousers

which you could buy, all of which were adverts for his novels.

He's like a modern rock star. He has that kind of recognition.

"The fame of his talents," wrote Catherine,

"are now known all over the world,

"but his kind, affectionate heart is dearer to me than all."

She, in her own way, was equally productive.

Catherine had another child, and another, then another and another,

and another, so that by 1852, she'd spent nearly half her married life pregnant.

That's nearly 3,000 days up the duff. Ouch!

First up, Charley.

Mary. Katey.

Walter. Francis. Alfred. Sydney.

Henry. Dora.

And, at number ten, Edward.

Or as their father liked to nickname them -

Flaster Floby.

Mild Gloster. Lucifer Box.

Young Skull. Chickenstalker.

Skittle. The Ocean Spectre.

Mr H. Dora.

Plornish Maroon.

To fit them all in, in 1851, they moved to Tavistock House,

a spacious North London mansion.

Now broods of this size were not entirely unusual

because couples didn't really do contraception.

The vulcanisation of rubber in 1844 meant condoms more widely available

but they were thick and had heavy seams and they were reusable.

Think of them as intimate wellies.

Gentlemen wore them when they visited prostitutes

but they didn't want to present that kind of grotesque inner tube

to their spouses in the more intimate environments of the home

which meant everybody from the Archbishop of Canterbury

to the Queen had large families.

But how should Victorian mothers feed their huge clans

not to mention their guests?

Domestic goddess Catherine came up with the answer.

Before anyone had heard of Mrs Beeton,

Mrs Dickens wrote a successful book on entertaining in the home,

the very sensibly titled, What Shall We Have For Dinner?

Written under the theatrical pseudonym of Lady Maria Clutterbuck,

it's still in print today.

She produced this incredible series of menus which are very inventive.

Some of them were for a mere six or eight people.

Bt these menus for 20 people, five courses,

very incident packed,

lots of character and colour.

In a way, they're her version of her husband's novels, really.

We're going to make something from the book, which is what?

It's a leg of mutton stuffed with oysters and some herbs.

Interestingly, with the oysters it says take off beard and horny parts

because this is Victorian England and there's no horny parts allowed!

No horny parts. These are lovely cleaned oysters...

Wholesome oysters.

What should I do to start?

If you wanted to chop some chervil, some marjoram...

This was one of Charles' favourites and according to Lady Clutterbuck,

"Good food is a sure-fire way to a husband's heart.

"My attention to the requirements of his appetite" she wrote,

"secured me the possession of his esteem until the last".

And then these amazing oysters. I know it's fantastic, isn't it?

The way Catherine uses them in her recipes,

we'd find probably quite extravagant.

She's got recipes for oyster curry, and oyster sauce.

I'm tempted to just throw half of them down my throat.

For me, this dish is the perfect metaphor for Victorian life,

the aphrodisiac, the sexy, kind of sheathed in the wholesome.

-So I, sort of, I think it's perfect.

-Dickens knew their reputation.

When Catherine was pregnant, he said, "I'd better stop eating oysters."

So, here's this lovely, beautifully jointed mutton.

If I spoon there, do you want to invade the cavity,

-in politest way possible?

-Yes!

-We can have some down here as well.

-Oh, yeah.

So this is the fun bit. We need to tie it up.

I'll think of it as a Christmas parcel.

Do a little bow on the top, or something.

Ladies were warned at the time that gentlemen had clubs to go to,

-if didn't give proper hot meal when they cam home.

-Right.

-You know that expression, "The cold shoulder"?

-I do.

That's where that comes from.

So give your husband the cold shoulder of mutton, you won't see him.

Simply because you provided a cold cut, that would be it?

Well, we've done some great Japanese rope bondage that should keep any husband happy there, I think.

-Right, let's give it a go, shall we?

-Yes.

Delicious.

Well done, Mrs Dickens.

-Well done. She does know what she's talking about.

-That is good.

I feel gout forming in my big toe as I eat it.

Every Christmas, the family ate Twelfth Night Cake,

which doubled as Charley's birthday cake.

The more children his parents had, the bigger it got.

This a very old trick, a Tudor trick.

-If you get the bean in the cake, you're the king for the evening.

-Right.

And a pea, which would make you the queen for the evening.

-And the king and the queen decide who does what for the celebrations.

-OK.

And then if you're a little less lucky, you might get the clove.

The nave, the naughty boy.

What does it mean when you got this windsock in your cake?

-This rag means you're the slut.

-Surely not in Victorian England.

So you'd have your slut, your king, your queen, your servant.

That's a party. Right, OK.

-Get creaming.

-Yep.

I mean, you'd have forearms like Vin Diesel doing this, would you?

The scullery maid would have been a real beefcake, wouldn't she?

-Cooks became a real beefcakes.

-Yeah.

I think they became quite tough ladies, really.

-There we go, exhausting.

-Yeah.

There are 14 pounds weight of ingredients in this one.

Probably big enough even for the Dickens' tribe at its peak.

-That's for the king.

-The king.

-The queen.

-The queen.

-That's the nave going in. Finally, the old slag rag.

-Slag rag!

-So I'm going to just embed that like that?

-I think so.

We just mix it all up a bit.

-Happy days.

-Yeah, put it in.

Looks so angelic. Who'd have thought there's a slut inside?

That goes in the oven for about four hours.

So, how is it? Is it delicious?

-It really is good.

-Well, that is Christmas.

It really is great.

-Look at that.

-One Twelfth cake.

-That's an incredible thing.

Twelfth Night cake morphed into Christmas cake

and that's because Dickens,

I wouldn't say single-handedly created the Christmas meal we know about,

but everything, all the food that was in a Christmas Carol,

so roast turkey and plum pudding,

that became the standard idea of Christmas food

whereas before then goose would have been much more common for poor people, for example.

So he's the bane of every poor woman's life

as she contemplates putting the turkey on

at nine o'clock in the morning?

(Just finish that bit off there.)

This is incredible.

This is Mr and Mrs Dickens and you can buy it and there the are.

Happy and in love.

Happily married. On their Twelfth cake.

Right, shall we see who gets to be slag?

As Catherine's husband grew ever more famous,

the Dickens family Christmas became an integral part of his brand.

Dickens was a wonderful Father Christmas father figure

for the nation because of the Christmas Carol, above all,

then after the Carol, he went on writing every Christmas

as some rather fed-up reviewer said, "The appearance of Mr Dickens

"on the publishing stage every Christmas is as predictable and inevitable

"as the appearance of Mr Grimaldi the clown in the pantomime."

So there's always repeats at Christmas?

Yes, yes. I mean, Dickens was like the pantomime.

He came back at Christmas.

He always wrote a Christmas story, a Christmas book or story,

until within a couple of years of the end of his life, then he got fed up.

For many years, the Dickens family Christmases

were just as cheery as anything in his fiction.

With his first love, theatre, right at the heart of it.

For most people, exerting yourself at Christmas

means rolling off the sofa headlong into an aluminium tin of chocolate.

But for Dickens it was an entirely different affair.

By the early 1850s, he was corralling his entire family

into appearing in these vast theatrical productions.

Himself, surprise, surprise, centre stage.

Of course! It's Dickens.

He was the ultimate ham.

He did everything, from lights, lyrics, stage management.

He even handed out the tickets.

They'd have these stellar family theatricals

and Dickens would work on these for months.

It was wonderful.

They had carpenters appear in the house

and turn the children's schoolroom

into what Dickens called The Smallest Theatre in the World.

-So no expense spared.

-No expense! He even hired a policeman

to check people's invitations to prevent gate-crashing.

But how wonderful that family time!

Here, people sit around the television. Imagine the whole family for weeks on end...

-We'd kill each other.

-..building towards this. I was thinking more of the camaraderie

and the joy but you're right.

I'm exhausted just hearing about it!

But the sad thing was, as the years went by,

there was an increasing mismatch between the Christmas

of Charles' fiction, and the reality at home with Catherine.

16 relentless years of childbearing,

no doubt topped off by all that good food, had changed her from this,

to this.

In her matronly mid-30s,

the bloom of her youth was a thing of the past.

It's hard to say just how much weight she'd gained,

but she was certainly heavy.

Charles made barbed jokes about it to his friends.

He reported that the carriage transporting her around town "staggered"

under the weight of her and she "nearly killed herself"

after gorging herself on a meal in Paris.

If it was me, I'd call him a repressed Rasputin look-alike with an over-fondness for adverbs.

But this was the 19th century.

Catherine did what she was supposed to do. She put up and demurely shut up.

Bleak House, please!

Poor Catherine. And Poor Charles.

It wasn't just Celebrity First Wife Syndrome.

It was far more deep-seated than that.

The core diagnosis you would probably make of him

is that he has an attachment disorder.

That is that he feels very insecure

in the moment he starts to depend on anyone.

I strongly smell neglect here

that his mother didn't tune in to him when he was a baby,

didn't meet his needs, didn't respond to him,

wasn't connected, so he's somebody who feels a bit needy and unloved.

There's a lot of repressed anger there.

What's the prognosis for someone who can't let it go?

He can't deal with the idea of a three-dimensional woman,

certainly not of a strong independent, mature one,

sexually mature or emotionally,

so I think any woman that is with him,

as she ages, will increasingly come to be confused with his mother.

Somewhere in that brilliant and complicated mind of his,

Charles was still a child.

A child who blamed his mother for that early trauma,

slaving away in the blacking-factory.

As he himself wrote,

he couldn't and wouldn't ever forgive her for sending him there.

Woe betide anyone who reminded him of his mother.

And in his novels, middle-aged women are usually ridiculous

and never romantic. Like Mrs Gamp,

the boozy eccentric midwife in Martin Chuzzlewit of 1844.

The ultimate frump.

So Catherine is sharing her home

with a man who only really understands two types of women.

The virgin or the frump.

And everything in between those two polar opposites

is pretty much a mystery to him.

In that regard, he's like most Victorian men

who can only really hope to understand the wonders

of the feminine psyche by applying blunt archetypes.

But the problem is because he only understands that and that,

there's a woeful lack of real women in his books,

and there's potential nightmares lurking in his marriage.

By giving Charles the family life he craved,

Catherine was always doomed in his eyes to turn from angel to frump.

His disenchantment intensified in 1854,

when an old flame from before the marriage got in touch.

Maria Winter.

Charles, who'd so loved Catherine, then Mary,

now convinced himself that in fact, he'd loved Maria all the time.

I think she'd just written the sort of thing, "Remember me?"

And then she gets these passionate letters back from one of the most famous men in England,

married with umpteen children

saying, "I never loved anybody as I loved you," and, you know,

"See what I've carried in my heart through all these years and all these changes," and so on.

She gets nervous and she writes and says,

"Well, I'm toothless, fat and 40," and so forth.

He says, "I don't believe it! You're exactly as I remembered you."

Um...And then he meets her.

Maria was just as she'd described.

All these passionate letters, "To my dearest Maria."

And then the minute after he's met her, the next letter is "My dear Mrs Winter," you know.

Somehow that image of this pure love that he had once for Maria

having cherished it in his heart all this time,

it somehow made the marriage tolerable, more than tolerable,

made it work, but when that is smashed,

within a couple of years he's writing to Forster

saying, "Why is it with me, like poor David Copperfield,

"I always feel this old unhappy loss or want of something,

"the one friend and companion I've never made."

And that the marriage is doomed, really.

With the fat middle-aged gossip Flora Finching in Little Dorrit,

started the following year,

Dickens lampooned Maria.

And, perhaps, Catherine herself.

The final death-blow to the marriage was delivered by a romantic melodrama

that started out as just another Dickens family Christmas theatrical production.

The Frozen Deep.

Starring Dickens, it won glowing reviews. In 1857, it went on tour.

Family amateurs were replaced by professionals.

One was Ellen Ternan.

A slim 18-year-old actress.

Everything Catherine was not.

She wasn't a great actress,

but as Mrs Crayford,

she had a prophetic encounter with Dickens,

the Arctic explorer, Wardour.

Who is it you want to find? Your wife?

Who, then? What is she like?

Young with a fair, sad face, with kind, tender eyes,

with a soft, clear voice. Young and loving and merciful.

I must wander, wander, wander restless, sleepless,

homeless over the ice and over the snow.

Tossing on the sea, tramping the land,

awake all night, awake all day,

wander, wander...

wander, till I find her!

"You have no idea," he wrote about Ellen, "how intensely I love her!"

From the racy theatrical world he so adored,

Ellen was small and pretty.

He called her Nelly.

And he pursued her with all the vigour of Mr Quilp.

"Be my wife, my little cherry-cheeked, red-lipped wife.

"Say that Mrs Quilp lives five year, or only four,

"you'll be just the proper age for me."

The marriage was now in deep crisis.

That October, Dickens ordered "some little changes"

to be made at Tavistock House,

namely the conversion of his dressing-room into HIS bedroom,

thereby effectively sealing him off from Catherine.

It was D-I-V-O-R-C-E, DIY.

He no longer wanted to play the part of her husband,

and she was no longer required to play the part of wife.

Everyone in the house knew, all the servants, all the children,

everybody knew, it's an extraordinary thing to have done.

I mean, she was profoundly wounded, obviously,

and she was bewildered, I think.

What must she have thought when, a week or so later,

Dickens' The Lazy Tour Of The Two Idle Apprentices was published?

It features a disenchanted husband

trying to hypnotise his wife into an early grave.

APPLAUSE

"He had nothing but contempt for her.

"She'd been long been in the way and he had long been weary.

"He sat before her, day after day, night after night,

"looking the word at her when he did not utter it.

"As often as her large unmeaning eyes were raised from her hands

"in which she rocked her head,

"towards the stern figure,

"sitting with crossed arms and knitted forehead in the chair,

"they read in it, 'Die!'

"When she fell upon her old entreaty to be pardoned,

"she was answered, 'Die!'

"When she'd out-watched and out-suffered the long night, and the rising sun

"flamed into the sombre room, she heard it hailed with,

"'Another day and not dead?'

"Die!"

It's hard to look at Catherine and not feel sadness

because ultimately she did exactly what it said on the tin.

She was an ideal wife and mother, she looked after hearth and home,

she was the ultimate domestic manager.

Perhaps it was Catherine more than Charles

that created all those elements formalised in the pages of A Christmas Carol.

For Christmas 1857,

Tavistock House just wasn't the same.

There was no party. No family play. And no Twelfth Night Cake.

It was Catherine's last Christmas with the family.

Salacious rumours about Dickens and his Other Woman swept literary London.

To prove it wasn't HER, Catherine's sister Georgina had a virginity test.

The knives were out.

And for Charles, there was only one villain in the piece.

You see this in marriages all the time.

Charles projects onto his wife a lot of the problems that he has.

He uses her as a garbage truck, basically, for all the bad things in him,

and the consequence is

once you've created somebody who's this ogre,

you can't live with an ogre any more.

Charles went for the kill, making Catherine look bad and mad,

to make himself look good.

Dickens intimated that the children loathed their mother,

and she in turn wasn't too fond of them either.

And any appearance of them having affection for her was merely that,

an appearance or performance. He wrote to a family friend,

"The little play that is acted in the drawing-room is not the truth,

"and the less the children play it, the better for themselves."

The Tavistock family drama was truly unravelling.

"My father was like a madman," wrote the Dickens' eldest daughter Kate.

"He did not care a damn what happened to any of us.

"Nothing could surpass the misery and unhappiness of our home."

Charles wrote a statement, later leaked to the American Press.

In it, he made the outrageous claim that Catherine

had "a mental disorder" and that she wanted to leave the family.

He addressed his British public with protestations of innocence.

Now, everybody knows the best way to deflect attention from a scandal,

to draw fire away,

is to print a major denial in a national newspaper.

The bigger, the better, louder and more furious.

That way, everyone will absolutely know you've done nothing wrong.

Nothing to be ashamed of. Dickens did exactly this.

This The Times of London,

which my manservant has woefully forgotten to iron.

June 7th, 1858.

And this is the retraction that gentlemen across London

would be waking up to read.

"I most solemnly declare,

"and this I do both in my own name and my wife's name,

"that all the lately whispered rumours touching the trouble at which I have glanced,

"are abominably false!"

You can hear the righteous indignation.

"Whoever repeats one of them after this denial,

"will lie as wilfully and foully as it is possible

"for any false witness to lie, before heaven and earth.

"Charles Dickens."

I think that's the dictionary definition of protesting too much.

On the very day Charles publicly denied

"any anger or ill-will" towards Catherine,

behind the scenes, his lawyers were drawing up a telling document.

It's now kept at Doughty Street, once the couple's happy home.

This is the deed of separation, which is, you know,

impenetrable, almost, full of legalese.

And deeply intimidating.

Decades of marriage ends not with a bang or a whimper

but with this, sort of, austere legal document.

It says here, "The said Catherine Dickens shall not and will not

"at any time or times hereafter molest or disturb the said Charles Dickens.

"Nor shall commence or prosecute

"any suit or suits in any court or courts

"for compelling or obliging him,

"the said Charles Dickens, to cohabit or live with her."

She signs that and she signs the end of her marriage.

Under Victorian law, he couldn't divorce her

because she hadn't committed adultery.

So Charles pushed through the separation,

paying Catherine the substantial sum of £600 a year

to get her out of his life.

She's not free to remarry.

She has no role.

She has no role as wife, she has no role as mother.

What role is she to have as an uneducated woman,

who has spent the entirety of her life supporting her husband?

It's extraordinarily powerful.

And she's been somebody pivotal

in the role of wife for decades and now...

sidelined.

It folds up to something almost negligible

but in the effect it has,

it must have been like a whirlwind, wrecking her life.

It's a pretty poor show from our national treasure, isn't it?

Forced out of the family home by Charles,

Catherine began her new life here in Camden, North London.

Under Victorian law, the children stayed with their father.

Only Charley, now an adult, could opt to stay with her.

The Dickens' two daughters took piano and singing lessons opposite.

But in thrall to their father, they never visited Catherine.

"I have now, God help me, only one course to pursue,"

Catherine wrote to a friend.

"One day, I may be able to tell you how hardly I have been used."

In the Victorian age, men had all the power.

Wives had absolutely no rights at all. So when he kept the children,

when he separated, that was what would have happened at the time.

There would have been no suggestion to anybody that she'd have kept them.

The suggestion was she should not have been forced out in the first place.

Some of his closest friends openly ran a mistress as well as a wife.

But, as the nation's Father Christmas and family icon,

Dickens could do no such thing.

Even now, he couldn't be seen with a mistress.

In 1858, he forced Ellen off the stage and out of the public eye.

Just as he ended HER theatrical career, Dickens started a new one,

propelling himself into the spotlight as never before.

APPLAUSE

He began touring the nation,

performing extracts from his novels in dazzling one-man shows.

CHEERING

APPLAUSE

He did so, he wrote, "to wear and tear my storm away."

Now he was back with the family he hadn't cut in two - his audience, the great British public.

APPLAUSE

He felt terrible, he knew he'd done something wrong.

He's a guilty man who's haunted by his wrongdoing

and he tries to make amends...

six times a week with matinees.

Criss-crossing the country

also gave him perfect cover for seeing Ellen Ternan.

Dickens was SO odd,

some biographers believe they never consummated their relationship,

although two of his children said Ellen had a baby by him.

If so, it seems it died young.

Whatever the truth, he now led a crazy itinerant life,

with multiple addresses and several identities.

One was Charles Tringham, named after his local tobacconist.

I find it ridiculous that basically a man

who was so accomplished at creating great names for his characters

couldn't think of a decent one for his own nom de plume.

I mean, that's pathetic. It just shows a total lack of imagination.

It's like me calling myself Sue Costcutter.

His late novels are imaginative triumphs that reflect his torment.

In Great Expectations of 1861,

it's the torture of unrequited sexual longing.

In The Mystery Of Edwin Drood of 1870,

it's a murderous guilty secret that no-one must discover.

These were also dark years

for the woman he'd driven out of their home.

Catherine referred to the 1860s as her period of widowhood.

And also claimed that if she saw Dickens, it would kill her.

And in fact, she did see him - she saw him at the theatre.

She was so distressed, she was taken home in floods of tears.

In her self-styled widowhood,

Catherine couldn't share Christmas with most of her children.

She used to hold parties for local youngsters,

as if trying to recreate the family she'd lost.

The rest of the family spent their Christmases here,

at the new home in Kent, run by Catherine's sister Georgina.

A dozen years' manic writing and performing aged Dickens fast.

By 1870, only 58, he was a sick man.

That March, his last-ever public readings

included one of his audience's favourites,

Sykes and Nancy, the prostitute's brutal murder by her lover.

Over 30 years before,

Catherine had been the first person ever to hear him read it.

She'd wept and wept.

The girl was lying, half-dress'd upon the bed.

"Get up!"

The girl rose to withdraw the curtain.

"Let it be.

"There's light enough for what I've got to do."

"Bill, dear Bill, you cannot have the heart to kill me.

"Think of all I've given up, for you. Bill.

"Bill, for dear God's sake, for your own, for mine,

"stop before you spill my blood!"

The housebreaker freed one arm,

grasped his pistol

and beat it twice upon the upturned face that almost touched his own.

She staggered and fell,

but raising herself to her knees breathed one prayer,

for mercy to her Maker.

The murderer staggering backward to the wall, and shutting out the light with his hand,

seized a heavy club, and struck her down!

On June 9th, 1870, Dickens died, with Ellen Ternan at his side.

Catherine was kept away.

A friend wrote, "Her sorrow was overwhelming."

Dickens was buried at Westminster Abbey,

mourned by the public he'd courted all his life.

It was said one devastated little girl asked,

"Will Father Christmas die, too?"

His daughter Kate was relieved he was dead

as she was convinced he was going insane.

Published soon after his death,

an early biography contains an astonishing appendix. His will.

The first thing that strikes me is the first bequest.

"I give the sum of £1,000 to Miss Ellen Lawless Ternan."

And then after all the various provisions for his children, we get this.

"I desire to record that fact that my wife since our separation

"by consent has been in receipt of me of an annual income of £600

"while all the great charges of a numerous and expensive family have devolved wholly upon myself."

Even on his deathbed, he's saying, "I did everything I could,

"it wasn't my fault, I gave her loads of money, massive income,

"I had to look after all the kids." Oh, poor you, Charles!

The great shame is, you know,

even at the end, even as he calls her his wife,

he humiliates her one last and final time.

After Charles' death,

Catherine got her family Christmas back.

But most of her children had now flown the nest.

Many of her sons were far overseas,

sent to the colonies by their father.

"Young Skull" had already died there.

How the Ghosts of Christmas Past must have haunted her,

especially on Twelfth Night.

"Oh, What a wonderful pudding!"

LAUGHTER

"Happy, happy Christmas."

As for The Other Woman,

Ellen finally had her family Christmases, too.

She married a vicar and, as Mrs Robinson,

had two children.

Catherine never remarried.

Charles had burnt her letters to him but on her deathbed in 1879,

she left the British Museum his letters to her.

"That the world may know," she said,

"he once...loved me."

She inhabited two completely different Christmases.

Firstly, the technicolour morality play of the Christmas Carol,

with its plum puddings and goodwill amongst men and turkey dinners.

But she also experienced a much more modern Christmas,

one that's certainly familiar to me,

full of family bitterness and recrimination,

of cold shoulders, and silence and awkwardness.

But the sad and bitter irony for her

was that it could se said both of those experiences

were authored by her husband, Charles Dickens.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

It was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well,

if any man alive possessed the knowledge.

May that be truly said of us, all of us!

And as Tiny Tim observed, "God bless us, every one!"

APPLAUSE

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

E-mail: [email protected]