Domestic tyranny was a fact of Victorian life: men who were saintly in public could behave very cruelly behind their front doors. In 1878, close to the end of her life, Catherine Dickens began to confide to her neighbours in Camden, north London, a few details of how her late husband had treated her. Charles was by now eight years dead, and the couple had last lived together in 1858, around the time the novelist began his long affair with the young actress Ellen Ternan. But the public knew nothing of this relationship.
Dickens’ worldwide reputation as a compassionate moralist – the enemy of humbug and suffering – continued to flourish untainted by the facts of his private life. Naturally the neighbours, Edward Dutton Cook and his wife, were shocked when Catherine told them how Charles had once tried to have her locked up as a madwoman.
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