MANAGER OF THE HOUSE 163Although Dickens invented a retrospective story about Catherine’s char-
acter, the feelings that made the separation necessary to him did have a long
history. Catherine had always appeared to him as a kind of management
problem. During their engagement, Dickens was training her to be the wife
he needed. His letters of 1835–36 are intimate and expressive, but they make
it clear that she is not to complain when his work comes first, that she is to
appear punctually at appointed times, and that she must control her feelings
in the light of his sensitivities. Taken together, his later letters attest to the
understandings of a deeply married couple: he writes with affection, full
of detail about the physical comfort or discomfort of his travels, married
gossip about their acquaintances, and references to their shared views of his
own character. When Dora died during Catherine’s nervous illness in April
1851, Dickens was kindly and carefully solicitous in breaking the news step
by step.
Yet there is very often a strain of distrust; he is never entirely sure that
Catherine will behave with the social grace or the emotional control he
thinks appropriate. He was enraged at her betrayal of a perfectly natural
jealousy of his mesmeric relationship with Mme. de la Rue, and at every sign
of jealousy thereafter; he could not bear to see in her response that there was
anything amiss in what he was doing. In the Dora letter he writes, “I can-
not close it without putting the strongest entreaty and injunction upon you
to come home with perfect composure.” Should she hear on her arrival that
Dora is dead (as Dickens already knew she was), “you are to do your duty to
the rest [of the children], and to shew yourself worthy of the great trust you
hold in them” (6.353). His insistence that she control even the expression of
a loss that the children shared suggests his intolerance of freely demonstrated
feeling, as well as his self-appointed role as the manager of household emo-
tions.
However well he may have succeeded in bending Catherine to his will, he
could not control her body or her emotional being. He kept his own body
in rigorous health, but he could do nothing about the process of swelling
and suffering that Catherine displayed before him for seventeen consecutive
years. After the birth of Walter, the fourth child, Dickens seems to have been
satisfied with the size of his family. Letters to friends after each successive
birth regularly suggest, lightly enough, that Catherine had presented him
with a child he did not need or want. The births themselves were antici-
pated with dread, because they were difficult for Catherine and threats to
her health. He was solicitous for her, but he did seem to feel that he might
have had a right to sexual relations without quite so many consequences.
For someone of Dickens’s passionate and idealistic nature methods of birth