The Tragic Lives Of Charles Dickens’ Children

If you were a Dickens child, life was rough. You were a disappointment. That was your life in a nutshell. Your father had risen out of poverty to become the world’s most famous living man, his heart already scarred by the poverty and blacking factory of his youth. He wrote books about love and family and became, himself, a global symbol of these things. And yet he looked at his kids, and…

Dickens repeatedly complained to friends about a lack of ‘energy’ and ‘purpose’ that he saw in his sons.

Dickens was in love with the eighteen-year-old actress, Ellen Ternan. Amid this, after 22 years of marriage, Dickens and his wife, Catherine, separated. After the separation, Dickens treated her atrociously. He issued a cryptic statement in The Times in an effort to protect his reputation, and he wrote a highly personal letter accusing her of being mentally unstable and not fit to raise their children, which was leaked to the press.

When Charles and Catherine’s marriage fell apart, Dickens made sure the children knew that visiting her would make him upset. Only Charley, then twenty-one and legally an adult, went to live with his mother, but Katey often visited her mother in defiance of Dickens’s wishes.

Catherine, the children’s mother, was exiled to a separate house and visits with the children were severely limited. The children’s upbringing fell for the most part to Georgina Hogarth, Catherine’s younger sister, who chose to stay on with Dickens. His younger children suffered a childhood without a mother.

Charles’s eldest son, “Charley” Dickens, was educated at Eton and went on to have an unsuccessful career in business. By the age of 31, Charley was bankrupt, and his father later offered him a job as sub-editor on the staff of his magazine. Upon Dickens’s death, Charley, who had inherited the controlling interest in his father’s publication, assumed the position of the magazine’s owner and editor.

The eldest daughter, Mamie Dickens, was devoted to her father and became his hostess after the exile of her mother. His great emotional hold on her kept her out of marriage and prevented her from forming an independent life, and after his death she suffered financially, as well as from a long depression.

Katey Dickens took after her father in both his fiery temper and his artistic talent. After her parents separated, Katey made a hasty marriage to artist Charles Allston Collins, largely to escape the stifling atmosphere of her father’s home.

Walter Landor Dickens went to India when he was 16. He became a cadet in the East India Company and incurred massive debts, which he was too ashamed and afraid to tell his father about. He died of an aortic aneurysm at the age of 22, and his father was left to pay them off.

Francis Dickens had wanted to become a doctor, and his father supported his move to Hamburg, Germany, to study medicine — but after suffering a severe stammer, he gave up the course. He was later sent to work for the Bengal Mounted Police in India, struggling also with alcoholism.

In 1865, Dickens finally recognized a pattern in his son’s financial problems and sent him to Australia, where Alfred lived for decades, struggling to make a living. Alfred did not return home until long after his father’s death.

Sydney Dickens, the small, wide-eyed boy his father fondly nicknamed ‘Ocean Spectre,’ joined the Royal Navy at the age of 13. Like his brothers, Sydney soon fell into debt, this time deeply, which led to Dickens’s fury and disinheritance. He was not even allowed to enter the family home. They were never reconciled, and Sydney died at sea at only 25 while on sick leave.

Henry Dickens maintained a warm relationship with his father, demonstrated through public readings of Dickens’s work and memoirs celebrating him. Henry stood out among his brothers for his lasting professional success, receiving his Cambridge degree and establishing himself as a highly respected judge.

Dora Annie Dickens, Dickens’s ninth child, was named after the doomed heroine in David Copperfield. Born during a period of much marital friction, she was a frail baby who suffered convulsions and died in 1851 at just eight months of age, while Dickens was out.

Dickens insisted that his 16-year-old son, Edward “Plorn” Dickens, make his own way in the world. Being his youngest and widely considered his mother’s favorite, Edward was shipped off in 1868 to join his brother Alfred in Australia.

Dickens reacted harshly to his sons for making any money-related blunders, because his own father had been incarcerated in a debtor’s prison. He thought of his sons’ financial missteps as something more than just teenage mistakes, as these blunders threatened his reputation and the legacy of his family.

Several of the Dickens children suffered from serious depression and alcohol addiction in their adult lives. Historians and biographers have attributed these problems to the highly-publicized and acrimonious split between their parents and to the pressures associated with bearing the famous “Dickens” name.

Dickens was hard on his children throughout their lives, and yet, decades later, his exiled son Alfred took to the stage in Australia and abroad, giving lectures that praised his father as a magical and loving man.

Dickens was a complicated father. He raised his children under severe expectations and harsh judgment. More than one child suffered from their upbringing, in one way or another, for life. All this must be kept in mind when we consider his work, for Dickens forever changed the literary landscape.

Charles Dickens is often seen as the cozy, saintly champion of family values, but he was in fact a fascinating, deeply flawed paradox. Perhaps we can separate the man from the artist, Dickens the brilliant artist from Dickens the deeply broken man.

This content was created with the help of AI.