ABSTRACT
It is now widely known that, by the time he was 40, Dickens was manifesting increasing restlessness and accelerating dissatisfaction with his marriage. According to Forster’s dating, it was early in February 1855 – just before his 43rd birthday – that Dickens famously lamented that ‘as with poor David [Copperfield], a sense comes always crushing on me now, when I fall into low spirits, as of one happiness I have missed in life, and one friend and companion I have never made’ (P VII, p. 523). The form of that as yet undiscovered being would necessarily be slender, like Dickens’s fictional young heroines. Catherine and his first significant love, Maria Beadnell (now Mrs Winter), seemed to become somehow conflated after romantic hopes – preposterously rekindled by a letter from the now 44-year-old Maria, received only a few days after that lamentation – were extinguished when he was confronted by the physical woman. Catherine’s lot as the nearly 40-year-old, no longer lissom wife, whose company Dickens now found uncongenial, could not have been alleviated by the fact that her predecessor, with whom he had been more passionately in love than he had ever been with her, had also transformed herself into a stout matron whose ways had ceased to be winning. 1 1 Doubly disenchanted, he was emotionally primed to succumb two years later, during his performance as Richard Wardour in the August, 1857 Manchester production of Wilkie Collins’s The Frozen Deep, to the youthful charms of a member of the cast, the trim 18-year-old he was to refer to as the ‘little riddle’, 2 2 Ellen (Nelly) Ternan. Meanwhile, he could at least savour the fulfilment of his dream of purchasing Gad’s Hill Place near Rochester in Kent, and throw himself into the processes of equipping it and supervising ambitious improvements to it. But, standing as it did on a high road which, as his eldest daughter Mamie put it, was ‘frequented by tramps of a wild and low order’, 3 3 the property needed imposing, potentially fierce dogs to guard it; and so, during the earlier part of the year, he had the added diversion of introducing to his rural establishment the first two of the large dogs who were to remain a feature of it until he died.
