162 KNOWING DICKENS
His next move was to suggest that the separation was an acknowledgment
of a long-standing situation: “We have been virtually separated for a long
time. We must put a wider space between us now, than can be found in one
house.” Now, as the appeal heats up, the children appear in the story as the
prime victims, and Catherine grows ever more Gothic: “It is her misery to
live in some fatal atmosphere which slays every one to whom she should be
dearest”; in her aura her daughters “harden into stone figures of girls” and
“have their hearts shut up in her presence as if they closed by some horrid
spring.” Oddly, Dickens represented the children’s alleged lack of love for
their mother as a fact that made the separation more rather than less difficult.
Perhaps he meant, consciously or not, that it would have been easier had
he simply walked away from the family altogether. Unable to tolerate that
picture of himself as the abandoner, his inventive pen created instead a wife
of “confused mind” harboring “miserable weaknesses and jealousies”—in
short, a mad wife who had to be ejected from a sane household.
Miss Coutts knew better than to give the letter the “kind construction”
Dickens pleaded for; their cordial relations began to fade. From our distant
perspective, kinder constructions may be possible. Few conscientious people
leave marriages without constructing temporarily oversimplified stories for
themselves, though few have quite the imaginative resources of a Dickens or
the need to display those stories in public. By the time he wrote the “Vio-
lated Letter” on 25 May Dickens had boiled down the bad mother fantasy
to a single main clause: “the peculiarity of her character has thrown all the
children on someone else.” By this time his effort was to defend Georgy from
scandal by highlighting her devotion “to our home and our children,” and to
defend himself by attributing the break to Catherine’s own sense of unfitness
as his wife, and her long-held wish to separate (8.740).
The evil Dickens did may lie less in the exaggerated fiction that allowed
him to make the break than in the way he continued to impose it on his
children. The separation agreement gave Catherine full access to them, but
Dickens’s disapproval clouded their rare visits to her. After what he had
done, he did not want to know about Catherine’s existence, and he hated to
be reminded that she was in fact the mother of his children. Supported
by Dickens’s 600 pounds a year, Catherine took a house at 70 Gloucester
Crescent near the northeast corner of Regent’s Park, where she lived until
her death in 1879. Not long after she was resettled, Dickens found that
sending his wife out of the house was not enough; he had to get rid of the
house as well. In the summer of 1860 he sold the lease on Tavistock House,
moved the family permanently to Gad’s Hill, and burned a lifetime of past
correspondence.