Dickens And Daughter

As the daughter of the most famous writer of the time, Katey Dickens enjoyed a high profile in Victorian society. She pursued her love of painting, acted in her father’s plays, socialized with the Thackerays, and modeled for painter John Everett Millais. This riveting biography finally sheds light on her extraordinary life both as a Dickens and an artist. The turbulent family life in the Dickens household drove Katey to marry young. Her first husband was the chronically ailing Charlie Collins, brother of the famous author Wilkie Collins. After Charlie’s untimely demise, the widowed Katey fell in love and married the handsome Italian artist Carlo Perugini. Charles Dickens lovingly nicknamed Katey “Lucifer Box” because of her fiery temper. In many ways, Katey was ahead of her time; she refused to be eclipsed by her father and fought to establish herself as an artist. She became renowned as a portrait painter and exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy. Katey lived to be almost ninety and her artistic prestige, which flourished during her lifetime, still persists to this day.

Katey Dickens was a nineteenth-century artist and socialite, and the beautiful daughter of Charles Dickens. In this illuminating biography, Lucinda Hawksley, herself Dickens's great-great-great-granddaughter, recreates the life of an extraordinarily determined girl who defied Victorian convention to live and love as an independent woman. Blessed with a privileged upbringing in an family that moved between London, France, Switzerland and Italy, Katey pursued her love of painting, acted in her father's plays, modelled for John Everett Millais and, as the daughter of the most famous writer of the time, enjoyed a high profile in Victorian society. Yet she refused to be eclipsed by her father and fought to establish herself as an artist in her own right. Family life in the Dickens household was turbulent and the unhappy atmosphere that followed the eventual breakdown of her parents' marriage drove Katey to marry young. Her first husband was the chronically ailing Charlie Collins, brother of the famous author Wilkie Collins, and theirs was a sexless but otherwise companionable union, while Katey threw herself into a passionate and very un-Victorian affair with celebrated artist Val Prinsep. After Charlie's untimely demise, the widowed Katey married the handsome Italian artist Carlo Perugini, with whom she had fallen deeply in love. Despite the happiness she finally found in her second marriage, Katey often suffered from deep depression, particularly following the death of her beloved father and of her baby. But she remained active, pursuing her career as a painter, championing Charles Dickens's works, and befriending such eminent figures as J. M. Barrie and George Bernard Shaw. Katey Perugini lived to be almost ninety and her artistic prestige, which flourished during her lifetime, still persists to this day. Author of the acclaimed LIZZIE SIDDAL: THE TRAGEDY OF A PRE-RAPHAELITE SUPERMODEL, Linda Hawksley has delved deep into her own family history to research this fascinating new biography, which intimately remembers the life of a supremely independent Victorian woman.

Feminist criticism has not been kind to Charles Dickens. The characters George Orwell referred to as 'legless angels' - Little Nell, Agnes Wickfield, Esther Summerson and others - have been conjured as evidence of Dickens' inability to create 'real' women. Critics wishing to rescue him have turned to the dark, angry women - Nancy, Lady Dedlock, Miss Wade - who disrupt the calm surface of some of Dickens' novels. In this book Hilary M. Schor argues that the role of the good daughter is interwoven with that of her angry double in Dickens' fiction, and is the centre of narrative authority in the Dickens' novel. As the good daughters must leave their father's house and enter the world of the marketplace, they transform and rewrite the stories they are empowered to tell. The daughter's uncertain legal status and her power of narrative gave Dickens a way of reading and writing his own culture differently.

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The strange and varied lives of the ten children of the world's most beloved novelist Charles Dickens, famous for the indelible child characters he created—from Little Nell to Oliver Twist and David Copperfield—was also the father of ten children (and a possible eleventh). What happened to those children is the fascinating subject of Robert Gottlieb's Great Expectations. With sympathy and understanding he narrates the highly various and surprising stories of each of Dickens's sons and daughters, from Kate, who became a successful artist, to Frank, who died in Moline, Illinois, after serving a grim stretch in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Each of these lives is fascinating on its own. Together they comprise a unique window on Victorian England as well as a moving and disturbing study of Dickens as a father and as a man.

The motivations behind Dickens' novels and the poverty-stricken world of 19th century London.

Catherine Hogarth, who came from a cultured Scots family, married Charles Dickens in 1836, the same year he began serializing his first novel. Together they traveled widely, entertained frequently, and raised ten children. In 1858, the celebrated writer pressured Catherine to leave their home, unjustly alleging that she was mentally disordered-unfit and unloved as wife and mother. Constructing a plotline nearly as powerful as his stories of Scrooge and Little Nell, Dickens created the image of his wife as a depressed and uninteresting figure, using two of her three sisters against her, by measuring her presumed weaknesses against their strengths. This self-serving fiction is still widely accepted. In the first comprehensive biography of Catherine Dickens, Lillian Nayder debunks this tale in retelling it, wresting away from the famous novelist the power to shape his wife's story. Nayder demonstrates that the Dickenses' marriage was long a happy one; more important, she shows that the figure we know only as "Mrs. Charles Dickens" was also a daughter, sister, and friend, a loving mother and grandmother, a capable household manager, and an intelligent person whose company was valued and sought by a wide circle of women and men. Making use of the Dickenses' banking records and legal papers as well as their correspondence with friends and family members, Nayder challenges the long-standing view of Catherine Dickens and offers unparalleled insights into the relations among the four Hogarth sisters, reclaiming those cherished by the famous novelist as Catherine's own and illuminating her special bond with her youngest sister, Helen, her staunchest ally during the marital breakdown. Drawing on little-known, unpublished material and forcing Catherine's husband from center stage, The Other Dickens revolutionizes our perception of the Dickens family dynamic, illuminates the legal and emotional ambiguities of Catherine's position as a "single" wife, and deepens our understanding of what it meant to be a woman in the Victorian age.