Mr and Mrs Charles Dickens

After 22 years of marriage, the novelist Charles Dickens banished his wife Kate from their family home and spun the press a tale to conceal his affair with an 18-year-old actress. A master storyteller, Dickens was able to shape the public record so completely that it has endured for almost two centuries. But now, Annie Elliot reclaims the truth of their relationship, observing its ups and downs but also noting true moments of warmth that allowed Kate to say, on her deathbed, “He loved me once.” Tragic, poignant but with pangs of heartfelt humour.

On her deathbed, Charles Dickens’s wife asked her daughter to give his letters to the British Museum “so the world may know he loved me once”.

That the world might doubt it is not a surprise. In his later years Dickens built a wall in their bedroom to keep her out, forced her to visit his teenage mistress to silence gossip, and even tried to have her confined to an asylum. He went on to ban her from their home and children, and publicly destroyed her reputation to protect his own.

For nearly two centuries this version of their marriage—crafted by Dickens himself—has gone unchallenged. Yet his letters reveal another truth: Catherine was once his “ever-dearest Kate”, the object of a love “which no alteration of time or circumstance can ever abate”.

In her revelatory new book, Annie Elliot lets Kate speak at last. Set in the twenty-four hours after Dickens’s death in 1870, Mr & Mrs Charles Dickens follows her as she revisits their life together, reliving its joys and betrayals, and reclaiming her voice.

Based on extensive research, it fulfils Kate’s last wish—restoring her to history as more than Dickens’s wronged wife, and revealing the woman behind the myth.