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Catherine Dickens (1815-1879), née Hogarth, married Dickens on 2 April 1836. They set up home at 48 Doughty Street (now the Charles Dickens Museum, London) and had ten children. In May 1858, they separated after Catherine discovered Dickens’s infidelities with actress Ellen Ternan. In 1879, just before she died, Catherine gifted letters from Dickens with the note to her daughter Kate: ‘Give these to the British Museum, that the world may know he loved me once’. Catherine was also an author. In 1851, she published under the name ‘Lady Maria Clutterbuck’, What shall we have for dinner? Satisfactorily answered by numerous bills of fare for from two to eighteen persons (1851), a cookbook that was very popular, going through several editions.

[Page 46-47 from a facsimile of Lady Maria Clutterbuck's What shall we have for Dinner? Satisfactorily answered by numerous bills of fare for from two to eighteen persons.]

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Lady Maria Clutterbuck (pseudonym for Catherine Thomson Dickens)]]>

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What shall we have for dinner? Satisfactorily answered by numerous bills of fare for from two to eighteen persons (1851), a cookbook that was very popular, going through several editions.]]> Daniel Maclise]]>



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This delightful sketch of (right to left) Dickens, his wife Catherine, and sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth was executed by Dickens’s friend Daniel Maclise. Catherine became Dickens’s wife, and Georgina became Dickens’s household organiser, and sided with him during the separation scandal. One Hogarth is missing: Mary, who moved into Dickens’s household in 1836. A year later, this ‘young, beautiful and good’ girl died in Dickens’s arms. Many scholars have suggested that Mary was the model for Little Nell, in The Old Curiosity Shop.

[Copy of original from Forster Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.]

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Daniel Maclise]]>