Charles Dickens and Georgina Hogarth: A Curious and Enduring Relationship by Christine Skelton (review)

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• Charles Dickens and Georgina Hogarth: A Curious and Enduring Relationship by Christine Skelton
• Lillian Nayder (bio)

Christine Skelton. Charles Dickens and Georgina Hogarth: A Curious and Enduring Relationship. Manchester UP, 2023. Pp. xiv + 298. £20.00. ISBN: 978-1-5261-6608-1 (hb).

"Servant housekeeper": with these two words, Georgina Hogarth – a younger sister of Catherine Dickens and the sister-in-law of Catherine's estranged husband – is identified on the 1861 census returns for 3, Hanover Terrace, Marylebone, presumably by Charles Dickens himself (133). In her engaging book on the relationship between Georgina and her famous brother-in-law, Christine Skelton uses this phrase to underscore the anomalous and evolving position of Miss Hogarth within the novelist's family, its members lodged in temporary quarters at the time. More precisely, the phrase registers Georgina's oddly "reduced" position in the 1861 household (133), nearly three years after Catherine, the original Miss Hogarth, had been pressured to leave the family home by Dickens, and Georgina stayed behind. Having been the "little pet" of the novelist when she first moved in with the couple in 1842 (47) and, in the later 1840s and the 1850s, the novelist's vivacious and attractive companion and assistant, Georgina now appeared a figure who seemed to emerge from "below stairs" (134). Her servant-like status points to the complexities and contradictions of her "favored" position as the alleged surrogate of her older sister, long the mistress of the house, and it underscores the price she paid for what her father considered her "mistaken sense of duty" to the novelist (Nayder 261, qtd. Skelton 124).

As Skelton repeatedly shows us, Georgina's service to Dickens as well as the tone in which he sometimes issued his "edicts" to her (160), make the tag of "servant housekeeper" seem apt: "In the middle drawer of my wardrobe are a dress coat and a pair of dress trousers," the novelist wrote her in January 1867. "Will you with the end of a clean towel and Eau de Cologne from my scent case – cleanse them, by daylight, where they are splashed" (Letters 11: 296–97; qtd. Skelton 161). Skelton provides a telling list of such duties and instructions, as Dickens increasingly curtailed what had once been Georgina's greater autonomy, subjecting her to criticism and surveillance.

Skelton prepares readers for her analysis of this "curious" and lasting relationship with an opening chapter on the first years of the Dickenses' marriage, and then another focused largely on the writer's flirtatious behavior [End Page 271] toward young women other than his wife. Arranged in chronological order, seven of the eight chapters that follow cover specific (and presumably distinct) periods in Georgina's life with (and finally without) Dickens, the number of years that each covers varying widely: from the two years (1857–58) examined in chapter 6, on the separation of Charles and Catherine and Georgina's desire to forestall it, to the nearly fifty years considered in chapter 9, between Dickens's death in 1870 and Georgina's in 1917. A final chapter, "Aftermath," discusses Georgina's "impugned" reputation in the twentieth century (218), persistent beliefs about her being the novelist's mistress, and "polarized opinions" of her character (220).

Skelton's division of time into chapters gives structural support to her stated aims, since she is primarily interested in the relationship between Georgina and Dickens, not in Georgina as a stand-alone figure. Having moved in with her married sister at the age of fifteen, Georgina lived in the novelist's household for twenty-eight years – and then survived him by another forty-seven. Skelton compresses more than half of Georgina's long life into a single (albeit lengthy) chapter.

One of the most interesting aspects of Skelton's book is the way it charts, in detail, the shifting roles that Georgina performed in the novelist's household, as she grew into womanhood and middle age. In the process, Skelton not only illuminates Georgina's adaptability to changing circumstances but also Dickens's evolving needs, which his sister-in-law sought to meet to win his approbation. In her teens and twenties, Georgina flourished, meeting writers and...