Catherine Dickens

1847

No call number

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Portrait in oils of Catherine Dickens, 1847. Copy of original at Charles Dickens Museum, London. 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.