To have once lived and then be utterly forgotten is one thing. To have lived and then be remembered in a way that is a cruel distortion — of who you were and how you loved — is quite another. Perhaps worst of all is to have that distortion purposefully fabricated by the love of your life.

Such a story has rich potential as a plotline in the hands of a master storyteller; someone writing, say, in the Victorian Age, an era when love was notoriously repressed and distorted. It would have made great creative fodder for Charles Dickens, arguably the greatest writer in English literature since William Shakespeare.

It is, in fact, a Dickens tale. But the real tragedy here is that it is truth, not fiction.

Such is the main premise of Lillian Nayder’s new biography of Dickens’ wife, “The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth.”

“This plotline is largely the creation of Charles Dickens, and a self-serving fiction at best,” Nayder declares early. “But it has proved nearly as powerful and timeless as the tales of Scrooge, Oliver Twist and Little Nell.”

It is instructive that Nayder, English Department chair at Bates College, qualifies the title as “a life.” The author’s goal is to offer an alternative portrait to what Dickens himself very publicly fabricated after separating from the woman who bore him 10 children.

Catherine Hogarth Dickens is not certifiably guilty of any offense or infidelity other than desiring to assert her own independence of mind early in their marriage. Yet literary critics and Dickens’ biographers have long accepted her husband’s assessment of her failings as a mother and helpmate. Most of the evidence for this view comes from Dickens’ private letters and from those he sought to widely publish to deflect criticism of his own, graver infidelity.

Dickens was prompted to seek the emotional, if not sexual, affection of younger women, according to Nayder, by a mid-life crisis — an affliction apparently not limited to our own day alone. Aware that the passion of youth was fast receding, Dickens wanted more than devotion from a stoutly matron — his wife, who was lithe and fair before 12 pregnancies in 22 years.

Professor Nayder makes a compelling case against Dickens despite the paucity of writings in his wife’s hand. All her letters to him he burned; she preserved his letters to her to have them archived in the British Museum after her death, wanting to counter his late claims that they were dreadfully mismatched from the start and that he never loved her.

Nayder painstakingly builds a defense for “the other Dickens,” long presumed guilty until proven innocent. Although it is largely grounded in circumstantial evidence, absent Mrs. Dickens’ first-person testimony, Nayder does offer damning confirmation from individuals personally knowledgeable of the truth.

“What crime, for a man to use his genius as a cudgel against the woman he promised to protect tenderly . . . taking advantage of his hold with the public to turn public opinion against her,” the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning reported to a friend.

Novelist William Makepeace Thackeray was sympathetic to “the poor matron,” forced out of her home “after 22 years of marriage.” Ultimately, Thackeray deemed Dickens’ shameless behavior “a fatal story for our trade.”

Nayder clearly respects and admires her subject — especially for how Catherine Hogarth carried herself in the face of the slanderous assault by her husband. But I wish she could have sustained the vibrancy of the portrait she crafts of Hogarth as a lively young girl throughout the rest of the story.

Ironically, this shortcoming may be the most damning evidence of the “crime” plotted by Charles Dickens after Hogarth became his wife. 

Frank O Smith is a Maine writer whose novel “Dream Singer” was a finalist for the Bellwether Prize.

 

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