The Dickens Monument
Georgina. Hogarth and the Dickens Circle. By Arthur A. Adrian. (0.U:P., 30s.) DICKENS soon grew to hate his wife, but there was no legal separation till 1858, by which time her 'uninteresting conditions,' as he called them, had supplied him with a large and trying family.
Mrs. Dickens's only known attempt at self- assertion was a little book entitled What Shall We Have For Dinner? Long before the separation she
had been removed from all her responsibilities and they had been taken over by her sister,
Georgina Hogarth. This movement from the silly woman to the high-minded was rather glossily dramatised in David Copperfield.
Miss Hogarth mothered both the novelist and his children, accepted his liaison with Ellen Ter- nan, saw to the voice jujubes for his readings and to everything else besides. Tilt his .death in 1870, which takes us half way through the book, he thought of her as 'a strong, simple, noble, devoted creature.' After his death, for the remaining forty- seven years of her life, she was his vestal virgin, the unrelenting trustee of his reputation who per- formed such tasks as rescuing the chalet where he wrote his novels from being auctioned off by more enterprising relatives. The second half of the book, with all the true Victorian devotion to grief and remembrance, unrolls at one like a band of crape. When most of the children turned out badly, she was There to register disappointment, which appears to have developed into real dislike, though she was never less than dutiful.
While the author regards the recent life of Dickens by Edgar Johnson as full and definitive, he also seems to see himself as making a necessary contribution to the biographical background. He wishes to kill the old impression that Miss Hogarth was a ruthless interloper and to give her an exemplary place in Dickens's life. Since on his own admission this has already been done by Professor Johnson, however, and since the present book has little fresh to offer on Dickens or his work, it must rely for its appeal on the interest generated as a person by the subject herself. And all the author's researches have been unable to bring her to life.
Dickens was greatly in her debt. But what their relationship really was remains an open question. The way she turned eventually into a kind of Patience, on the Dickens monument, all-hallow- ing and vestal to the last, suggests that it may have been fairly limited at the best of times.
The book's literary interest, therefore, it lean indeed. And although its scholarly interest as a book about Dickent is scarcely more substantial, it will speed in its trim Victorian format, at thirty sober shillings a time; to the archives of the English-speaking world—a conscientious book that need never have been written.
KARL MILLER
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