A man who had grown up in a financially unstable household, he worried about supporting so many kids.Īs his children grew up, Dickens was openly disappointed in them. Worse, as Bright Side notes, Dickens became resentful of his large family and blamed his wife's "fertility" for her near-constant state of pregnancy. As The Daily Beast notes, he grew distant as they aged and often worked to settle his children in careers or other situations far from home when they were still teenagers. But as they grew older, he began to sour on his kids. He lavished attention on his children, giving them whimsical nicknames and playing with them. Luckily for Catherine, he failed.Īs The Observer notes, Dickens was initially a doting and enthusiastic father. But as Smithsonian Magazine notes, he wasn't content just to drive her away - he actually tried to have her committed to an insane asylum. So he needed an excuse to send his wife of 20 years packing. He was born in Portsmouth on 7 February 1812, to John and Elizabeth Dickens. Dickens orchestrated a campaign to discredit Catherine's mental health to justify his decision to leave her and kick her out of his house.Īs Nayder makes clear, Dickens did all this because he'd fallen in love with a younger woman and wanted to pursue the relationship - but he was mindful of his image as a family man and a morally upright public figure.
The second of eight children of a family continually plagued by debt, the young Dickens came to know not only hunger and privation,but also the horror of the. As historian Lillian Nayder points out, Dickens wrote a letter to a newspaper claiming that Catherine had become a danger to her own children to the extent that her sisters had to take over caring for them. Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Landport, Portsea, England. Dickens took pains to promote this idea in public. When Dickens separated from his wife, Catherine, in the 1850s, it was initially believed that she had suffered a nervous breakdown stemming from the death of their young daughter Dora.