‘THE SKELETON IN MY DOMESTIC CLOSET’

Writing from Paris in 1856, where he was attempting to assuage his chronic restlessness with travel, Dickens confided his marital unhappiness in a letter to John Forster. The comment is thoroughly characteristic in its perverse animation of the inanimate: ‘I find that the skeleton in my domestic closet is becoming a pretty big one.’ At the time when Dickens made this allusion to the dreadful secret lurking within his home, he could hardly have anticipated the public scandal that would attend his separation from Catherine two years later. As his friend Percy Fitzgerald wrote afterwards, ‘Who … could have conceived or prophesied that in the year of grace 1858 the whole fabric should have begun to totter … Who could have fancied that … so disturbing a revelation of his domestic life should have been abruptly placed before the astonished public?’

The growth of speculation and innuendo concerning the break-up of his marriage prompted Dickens to attempt a public repudiation of these increasingly prurient narratives. On 12 June 1858, habitual readers of Household Words were amazed to find a proclamation on the front page announcing the editor's separation from his wife, and attempting to controvert rumours about the differences which had occasioned it. Dickens addressed himself to the public under the heading ‘PERSONAL’.