CHARLES DICKENS AND HIS WIFE.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume VI, Issue 652, 17 March 1879, Page 2

CHARLES DICKENS AND HIS WIFE.

The Dickens separation (remarks the New York Times, m reference to Charles Dickens' domestic troubles) seems to be one of the scandals that flourish perennially. It comes up every once m a while m fresh form, and at each reappearance is shown m a new light. Perhaps, if the novelist had lived till now, he and his wife might have been reconciled, as Miss Hogarth, who sympathised with him at the separation, and Mrs Dickens, her sister, are said to have been. They are now, it is reported, on the best of terms, and engaged m compiling a memoir of the dead author. A London correspondent now writes that the late George Cruikshank told him that the cause of the matrimonial trouble grew out of Mrs Dickens' frequent criticism on her husband's literary characters ; that he was annoyed by it at first, and incensed at last. The novelist thought his creations exclusively his own property, and that her expressed opinion of them was an unwarrantable liberty. Nothing would be more apt to render an author an intolerable husband than his wife's disparagement of his work. This is particularly true of Dickens, who was very vain, and who would have been extremely impatient of connubial criticism. There must have been, however, m his case other reasons than thosa of a literary nature. There is very little doubt that Mrs Dickens was jealous of some of her husband's women friends —whether justly or unjustly, iB matter of opinion—and her jealousy might very naturally have engendered a sense of wrong and bitterness which might vent itself upon his works, conscious that they were his most sensitive point. As writers are constituted, hardly any one of them could endure a woman who should wound his literary vanity.