Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on the texts
- 1 Introduction: the making and breaking of the family
- 2 Fractured families in the early novels: Oliver Twist and Dombey and Son
- 3 Dickens, Christmas and the family
- 4 Little Dorrit
- 5 A Tale of Two Cities
- 6 Great Expectations
- 7 Our Mutual Friend
- Postscript
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
1 - Introduction: the making and breaking of the family
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on the texts
- 1 Introduction: the making and breaking of the family
- 2 Fractured families in the early novels: Oliver Twist and Dombey and Son
- 3 Dickens, Christmas and the family
- 4 Little Dorrit
- 5 A Tale of Two Cities
- 6 Great Expectations
- 7 Our Mutual Friend
- Postscript
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
‘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’.
Some domestic trouble of mine, of long-standing, on which I will make no further remark than that it claims to be respected, as being of a sacredly private nature, has lately been brought to an arrangement, which involves no anger or ill-will of any kind, and the whole origin, progress, and surrounding circumstances of which have been, throughout, within the knowledge of my children.
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- Dickens and the Politics of the Family , pp. 1 - 27Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997