164 KNOWING DICKENS
control may not have presented themselves as possibilities, but we cannot
know about that; perhaps he was actually bragging about his own virility
when he complained about new babies. All of this is speculation, of course,
but it is meant to suggest that Catherine had by the 1850s come to represent
everything, physical and emotional, in himself and in others, that Dickens
could not manage to his satisfaction. She was the flaw in his imaginary sys-
tem of household Order.
Anxiety about the futures of all those boys was also a factor in Dickens’s
state of mind during and after the marriage crisis. In 1858 the seven sons
ranged in age from six to twenty-one. The two youngest, Henry and Plorn,
were at home; the middle boys, Frank, Alfred, and Sydney, were at school
in Boulogne and came home for holidays. Seventeen-year-old Walter was
serving with the 42nd Highlanders in India, where he was to die of disease
at twenty-two. Charley, the first-born child, had received more of Dickens’s
attention than the rest, but at twenty-one he was working at a bank, not quite
living up to the hopes he had raised when Miss Coutts paid for his Eton
education. At the time of the separation he put a distance between himself
and Dickens by choosing to live with his mother. At twenty and eighteen,
Mamie and Katie were still Dickens’s favorites, Mamie because she idolized
him and Katie because she had an independent temperament and did not
fear him as the others did. Dickens thrilled Mamie’s heart by appointing her
as mistress of his house when Catherine left; her memoir suggests that she
had no trouble with the idea that she could replace her mother. Katie, more
divided in her feelings about her parents, married Charles Collins in 1860
and left her father’s house.
The sense that daughters were easier to manage and more gratifying as
companions may well have been at play when Dickens became involved with
the all-female Ternan household. A family consisting of a self-reliant profes-
sional mother and three close but independent professional daughters could
appear as a dreamlike alternative to his large household of dependents. When
he met them in 1857, mother and daughters had all had quite successful
careers on the stage since early childhood. Frances Ternan’s husband had died
in 1847; her daughters were in the age range of Dickens’s three eldest chil-
dren: Fanny was twenty-two, Maria twenty, and Ellen eighteen—the same
age as Katie. Dickens first entered this hard-working but financially insecure
family in the role of the fairy godfather. He used his connections to find
work for the young actresses. In 1858 he sent Fanny and Mrs. Ternan to
Florence so that Fanny could train as a singer. Maria and Ellen now turned
up in a West End lodging near the theaters where they were employed; pos-
sibly Dickens helped pay the rent. In March 1859 Dickens put the family