MANAGER OF THE HOUSE 161it, or making the worst of it, any longer. It is all despairingly over. Have no
lingering hope of, or for, me in this association. A dismal failure has to be
borne, and there an end” (8.539). According to a letter written by Cathe-
rine’s aunt Helen Thomson, Dickens at one point proposed that Catherine
should continue to live at Tavistock House, keeping to her own apartments
but appearing on social occasions as “mistress of the house” (8.746). By
early May, however, the decision to separate had been made, and the battle of
rumor, accusation, and mediated negotiation began. In response to specula-
tions that he was sexually involved with Georgina or with an actress (neither
was probably true at the time), Dickens felt compelled to fabricate explana-
tions for the consumption of his friends and for the public he wished so
desperately to keep on his side. Ever since Michael Slater published his judi-
cious account of the marriage and separation in Dickens and Women (1983),
it has been generally accepted that Dickens invented a distorted retrospective
account of a marriage troubled from its very beginnings, and of Catherine as
an unfit, emotionally disturbed mother. That would, of course, have been his
way of treating any situation in which he could be accused of bad feeling or
wrongdoing; the pattern I have described in “Language on the Loose” came
naturally to hand in the most important severance of his life.
It has become common in biographical accounts to link Dickens’s choice
of the “bad mother” story with anger at his own mother, and to find in the
episode a regression to the feelings of the child in the blacking warehouse.
It seems to me, however, that there were more immediate situations that
helped to determine the particular cover story he told. Dickens tried out a
version of the story for Miss Coutts on 9 May before he toned it down in
the so-called “Violated Letter,” written on 25 May and given to his reading
tour manager Arthur Smith with the injunction to show it “to any one who
may have been misled into doing me wrong” (8.568). (Smith gave a copy to
the New York Tribune, where it was published on 16 August and reprinted in
other American and British papers.) Dickens knew that Miss Coutts would
disapprove of the decision, and he wrote to prepare her for the news, try-
ing to summon the voice of his most thoughtful self for her sensitive ears
(8.558–60). “You know me too well to suppose that I have the faintest
thought of influencing you on either side,” he said. “I merely mention a
fact which may induce you to pity us both, when I tell you that she is the
only person I have ever known with whom I could not get on somehow or
other.” He was especially concerned to ward off Miss Coutts’s quite accurate
perception that he was willful and impulsive: “I am patient and considerate
at heart, and would have beaten out a path to a better journey’s end than
we have come to, if I could.”