Features

The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth by Lillian Nayder

by Grace Moore •

March 2011, no. 329

Cornell University Press, $59.95 hb, 373 pp

Features

The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth by Lillian Nayder

by Grace Moore •

March 2011, no. 329

In September 1857, after twenty-one years of marriage, Charles Dickens began the eight-month long process of separating himself from his wife, Catherine. At forty-two years of age, Catherine had given birth to ten children and managed Dickens’s large household. Until the mid 1850s she and Dickens seemed to enjoy a happy partnership, yet by 1858 Catherine was exiled from the family home and cut off from all but one of her children.

Grace Moore

Grace Moore’s Dickens and Empire (Ashgate, 2004) was shortlisted for the 2006 NSW Premier’s Award for Literary Scholarship. She is the editor of Pirates and Mutineers of the Nineteenth Century (Ashgate, 2011) and the co-editor (with Andrew Maunder) of Victorian Crime, Madness and Sensation, as well as a number of articles on Victorian and Neo-Victorian literature. She is at present working on a guide to the Victorian novel (Continuum, 2012) and a book-length study of bushfires in nineteenth-century settler literature. She teaches at the University of Melbourne, Australia.