92 KNOWING DICKENS
those between men and women. In life and in writing, relations among men
allowed for expressions of affection, aggressive energy, rivalry, competition,
and class anxiety that were, at least until the later novels, less evident in the
realm of heterosexual romance.
While Dickens’s romantic and sexual life was directed toward women, it
took conventional Victorian forms. His idealizations of virginal young girls,
as well as his fascination with fallen women, formed a structure of feel-
ing shared by many of his contemporaries. His assumption that wives were
meant to serve husbands, bring up children, and oversee the social life of the
household was in tune with the general expectations of his culture. When
he mentioned his marriage to Catherine Hogarth in response to a request for
biographical information, Dickens described her only as “the eldest daughter
of Mr Hogarth of Edinburgh, a gentleman who has published two well-
known Works on Music, and was a great friend and companion of Sir Walter
Scott’s” (1.424); he repeated the formula eighteen years later in a biographi-
cal sketch written for Wilkie Collins (8.131). It is clear that he wanted to
imagine his marriage as a guarantee of the genteel status that always seemed
to elude him, and as a connection to an aristocracy of male writers in which
he was always trying to enlist himself.
A reader of Dickens’s letters readily sees that his most genial affective life
was engaged with his friends. Men are his confidants, his companions in play
and in travel, his ways of measuring himself. When he is away from London
it is his male friends who receive passionate declarations of friendship and
urgent invitations to join Dickens and his family wherever they are. The
presence of a Hogarth sister—first Mary, later Georgina—in the Dickens
household may well have been initiated as a way of providing Catherine
with female companionship while Dickens spent many of his leisure hours
with friends.
The larger part of the correspondence of a Victorian literary man would
normally have been addressed to other men, but the exceptions are quite easy
to summarize in Dickens’s case. Many family letters, as well as the letters to
Ellen Ternan, are lost to us; but apart from the modest group of extant let-
ters to his wife, daughters, and sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth, Dickens’s
major female correspondent was the wealthy philanthropist Angela Burdett-
Coutts. He was the active partner in their social reform efforts as well as
the recipient of her help in educating two of his sons, and he took pains to
present himself in ways that would retain her good opinion. He also wrote
to Lavinia (the Hon. Mrs. Richard) Watson at Rockingham Castle, whom
he met in the English circle at Lausanne in 1846, and to Annie Fields, the
wife of his Boston publisher James Fields; both women became fond of