"The wife who has plagued him … & … is rather lunatical": A Contemporary Private Reference to the Dickens Scandal

Abstract:

A short commentary by the poet Arthur Hugh Clough on the gossip surrounding the breakdown of the Dickens marriage in a letter to an American friend in June 1858 provides a glimpse of how it appeared to one literary Londoner not having a close personal acquaintance with the family. The information (and misinformation) Clough drew on appears to include material derived from Dickens's as then unpublished (later "violated") letter of 25 May. Unlike accounts transmitted to American newspapers by London correspondents which propagated stories concerning an actress, Clough's account mentions Georgina Hogarth as the subject of the "scandalous rumours." He thus tenders a version of the gossip which seems otherwise to have been largely transmitted orally. Clough's characterization of Catherine as "lunatical," well before Dickens's letter of 25 May with its reference to his wife's alleged "mental disorder," comprises the earliest known written reference to this aspect of Dickens's narrative.