![]() Again, this aspect of Dickens's life has been much pored over, most convincingly in Claire Tomalin's biography of Ellen Ternan, ambiguous object of Dickens's crippling middle-aged passion. The crisis is Alfred's meeting with Ricketts and her mother, whom Dorothea imagines "in brass, two vulgar images, side by side". She remains at home dosed with laudanum while he moves among his adoring public. ![]() ![]() With a sequence of unasked-for pregnancies and Alfred's growing fame, the Gibsons' marriage slowly deteriorates. Dickens displayed similar desolation at the death of his sister-in-law Mary Hogarth like the fictional Alice, she served as a model for idealised womanhood in subsequent books. When she suddenly dies, his grief is manifested in an astonishing, disabling manner. Alfred treats the girl with a playful yet intense regard. Most unnerving for the bride is Alfred's interest in Alice, Dorothea's teenage sister, who moves in with them at Alfred's insistence. Sentimental early recollections of the determined, witty young clerk's importunate wooing of the fair-haired "girl in a blue dress", her prosperous parents' disapproval, and their whirlwind wedding are coupled with admiration and resentment at Alfred's prodigious work ethic and overwhelming ambition. Uninvited, Dorothea reflects on their 20 years together before the humiliating separation. The story opens on the day of Gibson's funeral at Westminster Abbey. Contact with Alfred and with Dorothea's other children has been abruptly severed. Her occasional visitors include wilful Kitty, the Gibsons' eldest, and Kitty's ineffectual husband Augustus, constantly pursued by creditors. With Dorothea's sister, Sissy, ensconced as housekeeper and surrogate mother, the docile "Dodo" (the abbreviation implies extinction) is dispatched to a dingy basement with no company save a wheezing dog and a servant. Ten years earlier, with tactical cruelty, he had ousted Dorothea - passive, eternally with child - from their home to indulge his infatuation with a young actress, Wilhemina Ricketts. Alfred, symbol of the Victorian age, the self-styled One and Only, is to be buried, his last work unfinished, to a deafening chorus of national mourning. The pair appear here in the guise of hugely popular writer Alfred Gibson and his wife Dorothea. G aynor Arnold's first novel is a plump, enthusiastic retelling of Charles Dickens's life from the viewpoint of his estranged wife, Catherine.
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