Dickens Part V

After his separation from Catherine, Dickens’ life took a new turn.  He seems to have spent a lot of time with Ellen Ternan abroad.  He visited Paris frequently and it is possible that she had gone to live there, so that they could spend time together discreetly.  There have been rumours, that they had a child who died in infancy. 

Georgina Hogarth looked after his family home and children, as she had been doing for some time and the Hogarths felt that she was betraying her sister by staying with Charles, after the separation.  Charley, Dicken’s eldest son, seems to have taken his mother’s side most.  But the younger children were a trial to Dickens.  He found that most of his sons were not very clever or hard working – rather like his own father.  He seems to have been irritable and resentful of the need to help them get started in careers and very cross when he found that he had to bail them out financially or that they did badly in the jobs he had put them into.   He began to seem like a selfish and harsh father, complaining that he had so many children, when he had been the one who produced such a large family… It was as if he blamed Catherine for saddling him with them.

In 1865 Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst rail crash.  He was coming back from France with Ellen and her mother, when the train plunged off a bridge and hung there.  
Dickens’ carriage was still on the rail and he was saved, but he had almost been “caught” with his mistress and she and Mrs. Ternan were discreetly gotten away.  He must have been concerned about the possibility of scandal, because he had tried so hard to blame Catherine for their separation, even to the point of saying that she didn’t get on well with her own children.

In the last 12 years of his life, Dickens did less direct charity work, and wrote less.  
He now took to giving reading tours, travelling around reading shortened versions of the exciting scenes in his most popular novels.  It was lucrative and he enjoyed it because he had always wanted to act and this gave him a chance to do so.  He threw himself into the work, but it was hard work and he “gave his all” during his performances. It also meant that he had less time for writing his novels and he only wrote 2 more books.