28 Facts About Catherine Dickens

Catherine Thomson "Kate" Dickens was the Scottish wife of English novelist Charles Dickens, the mother of his ten children, and a writer of domestic management.

Catherine Dickens was the eldest daughter of ten children to George Hogarth and Georgina Thomson.

Catherine Dickens's father was a journalist for the Edinburgh Courant, and later became a writer and music critic for the Morning Chronicle, where Dickens was a young journalist, and later the editor of the Evening Chronicle.

Dickens immediately took a liking to the 19-year-old Catherine and invited her to his 23rd birthday party.

Catherine Dickens was attractive, intelligent, kind and a gifted musician.

Catherine and Dickens became engaged in 1835 and he had his likeness painted on ivory by Rose Emma Drummond as an engagement present.

Catherine Dickens became pregnant almost immediately and the couple went on to have ten children over the next 15 years, and at least two miscarriages.

Catherine Dickens became very attached to Mary, with historians debating the nature of the relationship, and she died in his arms after a brief illness in 1837.

Catherine Dickens became a character in many of his books, and her death is fictionalised as the death of Little Nell.

Catherine's younger sister, Georgina Hogarth, joined the Dickens family household in 1842 when Dickens and Catherine sailed to the United States, caring for the young family they had left behind.

In 1845, Charles Catherine Dickens produced the amateur theatrical Every Man in his Humour for the benefit of Leigh Hunt.

Catherine Dickens blamed her for the birth of their ten children, which caused him financial worries.

Catherine Dickens had hoped to have no more after the birth of their fourth child Walter, and he claimed that her coming from a large family had caused so many children to be born.

Catherine Dickens tried to have her falsely diagnosed as mentally ill in order to commit her to an asylum.

In May 1858, Charles and Catherine Dickens separated, and she moved into a property on Gloucester Crescent in Camden Town.

Catherine Dickens had no custody rights to her children under English law, but was promised "free access to all or any of her children at all places" in the deed.

Dickens's friend, William Makepeace Thackeray, asserted that Dickens's separation from Catherine was due to a liaison with Ternan, rather than with Georgina Hogarth as had been put to him.

Many other friends, relations and society figures commented on the separation, with most supporting Catherine Dickens and rallying to her defence.

On 12 June 1858, Catherine Dickens published an article in his journal, Household Words, denying rumours about the separation while neither articulating them nor clarifying the situation.

Catherine Dickens sent this statement to the newspapers, including The Times, and many reprinted it.

Catherine Dickens fell out with Bradbury and Evans, his publishers, because they refused to publish his statement in Punch as they thought it unsuitable for a humorous periodical.

Catherine Dickens has remonstrated, reasoned, suffered, and toiled, again and again, to prevent a separation between Mrs Dickens and me.

The separation, and Dickens's rewriting of it, would shape how Catherine would be seen up until her death in 1879, and in the following decades.

Dickens and Catherine had little correspondence after their separation, communicating by letter only three times and meeting only once, accidentally, outside a theatre.

Dickens arranged for their sons to take up jobs in the British colonies without consulting their mother, and Catherine was deeply upset by their departures from England.

Catherine Dickens died of cancer and was buried in Highgate Cemetery in London with her infant daughter Dora, who had died in 1851, aged seven months.

Catherine Dickens's grave is far from Dickens' own grave in Westminster Abbey.

Catherine Dickens was the subject of the sixty-minute BBC Two documentary Mrs Dickens' Family Christmas, broadcast on 30 December 2011 and performed and presented by Sue Perkins, and which looked at the marriage of Charles Dickens through the eyes of Catherine.