Dickens and sexuality is a relatively recent conceptual combination. For many years the sex in Dickens's own life and in his fiction and journalism was disavowed in a widespread sanitising of his public image neatly symbolised by the use of Dickens and Catherine's bedroom at their house in Broadstairs for a display of Victorian christening gowns. A timeline of scholarly and popular perceptions of Dickens's presentation of the erotic presents a pronounced, magnified form of the broader critical trajectory of thinking about the Victorians and sex. Shortly after Dickens's death, Wilkie Collins voiced his dissent to the already powerful image of Dickensian piety, repudiating the idea, still propounded to some extent today, that Dickens's fiction entirely avoids discussion of adult sexuality. Collins responded angrily in the margins of his copy of John Forster's influential biography of Dickens to Forster's statement that there is scarcely a page of Dickens's work that ‘might not be put into the hand of a child’: