History has not been kind to Catherine Dickens, which is why Lillian Nayder’s new biography is such an essential piece of scholarship. Tracing Catherine’s life through a wealth of letters, journals, and legal documents, Nayder takes issue with generations of biographers who have unthinkingly followed Dickens’s lead in dismissing Catherine as a slow, clumsy, indolent figure, justifiably discarded for her inability to keep pace with her husband’s genius. The Catherine who emerges from Nayder’s biography is, by contrast, capable, vibrant, and funny. She is a companion and an equal, a valued critic of her husband’s work and an author (of a cookery book) in her own right.

Nobody knows exactly what went wrong with the Dickens’ apparently harmonious marriage. While some chroniclers, most notably Edgar Johnson, have blamed what they perceive as Catherine’s susceptibility to post-natal depression, others (including Nayder) have argued that Dickens experienced a particularly dramatic and destructive mid-life crisis in his forties. The death of their baby daughter Dora in 1851 may also have played some part, although existing evidence suggests that Dickens was solicitous and kind in its aftermath. His behaviour here is in direct contrast to his heavy-handedness in the final months of his marriage, when he compelled his distraught wife to pay a call on the woman who would become his mistress.

Dickens’s second daughter, Katey, who famously described her father as ‘a wicked man – a very wicked man’ (quoted in Gladys Storey, Dickens and Daughter [1939]), wrote an account of the marriage breakdown, which she later burned, commenting that she did so because it was ‘only half the truth about [her] father’. Of all Dickens’s children, Katey seems to have been closest to her father in temperament. Although she adored him, she never forgave Dickens for his treatment of her mother. Keen to set the record straight, Katey also knew that she was too involved in events to be able to offer an objective version, so she left matters to posterity, refusing to exploit her parents’ troubles for commercial gain.

Catherine Dickens was notably more restrained than her daughter in her efforts to convey her side of the story. Shocked and upset by her husband’s conduct, Catherine behaved with remarkable loyalty and dignity, continuing to read his novels and to attend performances based on his work. Towards the end of her life, Catherine entrusted her letters from Dickens to Katey, asking her to give them to the British Museum after her death as proof that her marriage had once been a happy one. The letters Catherine wrote to Dickens were themselves destroyed in 1860, when, concerned about the interpretations of future biographers, the novelist burned all of his correspondence. Dickens’s letters to his wife almost met the same fate, since Katey believed that their publication would be detrimental to her mother’s memory. It was only the timely intervention of George Bernard Shaw, who understood that future generations might view the papers differently, that prevented their destruction.

In reclaiming Catherine’s story, Nayder pits herself against the authority of Charles Dickens himself. Unable to confess that he had fallen out of love with his wife and succumbed to the charms of the young actress Ellen Ternan, Dickens embarked upon a revisionist account of his life with Catherine. Desperate to explain his dismissal of the mother of his children, he wrote to mutual friends of a long-standing incompatibility, asserting that the pair had seldom been happy together, even going so far as to suggest that Catherine suffered from a ‘mental disorder’.

Building a picture of Catherine from her girlhood in Edinburgh, Nayder analyses Dickens’s courtship, pointing out his attempts to shape his fiancée’s conduct and highlighting what we might today term his obsessive-compulsive behaviour. Nayder’s study is particularly valuable for its detailed examination of Catherine’s relationship with her sisters: Mary, who went to live with the Dickenses after their marriage and who died suddenly in 1837; Georgina, who moved in with the family to assist in running the home and who, controversially, remained in the Dickens household after Catherine’s departure; and Helen, who, although just a child at the time of Catherine’s marriage, became a mainstay of support to her sister after she was jettisoned from Dickens’s life. Nayder presents a fresh perspective on Dickens’s relationship with Mary, whom he came to idealise as the epitome of womanly purity, and demonstrates that, while the pair certainly enjoyed a close friendship, the witty, lively Mary was far from the ethereal being memorialised by Dickens.

While on the whole Nayder’s portrait of Catherine is an engaging reassessment of a woman whose story has been silenced, there are places in this biography where she tries a little too hard to demonise Dickens. Catherine experienced a complicated, painful breech delivery with the birth of her son Sydney in 1847, so Dickens arranged for Catherine to receive chloroform when in labour with her eighth child. Its usage during childbirth was a new and controversial development pioneered by the Scottish obstetrician James Young Simpson in 1847. As Nayder notes, Dickens wrote in a letter to a friend, the actor W.C. Macready, that he ‘promised [Catherine] that she should have it’. Dickens’s words here suggest that it was Catherine who initiated the request for anaesthesia, yet for Nayder the birth becomes a conspiracy between Dickens and the medical professionals:

Following her seventh delivery, Catherine became a proving ground for therapeutic innovation … she was not ‘present’ for the delivery, entering a temporary state of unconsciousness in which the disassociation of her mind from her body liberated her from pain but was itself symptomatic of troubling new ways in which she was being perceived.

Building on her analysis a few pages later, Nayder – following Mary Poovey’s work on chloroform in Uneven Developments (1989) – suggests that Catherine’s experience of childbirth was ‘compromised’ because her mind and body became disconnected. She continues to argue that Catherine’s birthing experiences were symptomatic of her narrative disempowerment, thus downplaying the importance of pain relief to a woman who had suffered excessively in the past, and reading her unconsciousness as a ‘narrative gap’ to be filled by a husband who is all too eager to usurp her role as storyteller.

Like Dickens at the height of his revisionism, Nayder is at times over-eager to see signs of trouble in the marriage before they actually appeared. While it is clear that Dickens could be a difficult and exacting husband, it is also obvious from his letters to Catherine and from accounts by those who knew them that they were what Tim Linkinwater in Nicholas Nickleby (1839) would term a ‘comfortable couple’ for many years. Nevertheless, in places Nayder wilfully misreads Dickens’s playful irony, most notably in a letter from the 1840s where he jokes about the ‘Anti-Malthusian state’ of his expanding family.

Nayder’s analysis is most successful when she deals with the disintegration of the marriage and with Dickens’s outrageous behaviour towards his bewildered wife. Nayder revisits the notorious ‘violated letter’, represented by Dickens as a piece of private correspondence that was published on both sides of the Atlantic, ostensibly without his permission, but which he obviously intended to become public property. The letter cast aspersions on Catherine’s abilities as a mother, alleging that a ‘peculiarity of her character ha[d] thrown the children on someone else’. Along with an indignant public rebuttal of rumours surrounding his morality, which he published in Household Words, the letter represented a public attack on Catherine to which she could not respond. Nevertheless, as Nayder shows, a number of prominent public figures leapt to her defence, including Dickens’s rival, Thackeray.

Outliving her husband by nine years, Catherine enjoyed a wide and active social life. She continued to mourn the death of her marriage, and she suffered great sadness as Dickens restricted her access to her children and placed a number of her sons in careers in the colonies to minimise her influence. In May 1858 she wrote to Angela Burdett Coutts, ‘One day though not now I may be able to tell you how hardly I have been used.’ While history does not relate what Catherine was eventually able to tell Miss Coutts, Lillian Nayder has succeeded in bringing her story to life and providing an important reassessment of the wife and mother banished by Dickens.