Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
Shortly before her death in 1929, Kate Perugini, Charles Dickens's second daughter, described her father to her friend Gladys Storey. Kate returned repeatedly to the time after Dickens's separation from his wife Catherine, when all the children (except the oldest, Charley, the only child given a choice) had remained with their father, and Catherine had been forced out of the family house. She recounted how their father would send his daughters to their music lessons across the street from where their mother lived, and Catherine Dickens would watch them from the windows of her house. “They would drive up and drive away,” Storey reports, “but never call to see their mother.” Haunted by the “recollection of other lost opportunities to be kind to her mother,” Kate turned back to those years, and the fear they all felt of their father: “My father was a wicked man – a very wicked man,” she said; “We were all very wicked not to take her part.”
It is tempting to invoke Kate Perugini as one of a series of witnesses against Charles Dickens, those readers (not least among them feminist critics) who have deplored his treatment of women, not only as a sign of the flatness and unrealistic nature of his fiction more generally, but as the signature mark of his inability to confront the complexity of adult (and particularly sexual) relations.
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- Dickens and the Daughter of the House , pp. 1 - 16Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000
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