And so following on from last fat shaming post imagine my horror when I discovered one of my ultimate favourite authors Charles Dickens was a kind of fat shamer! Uggh! Really? Not another of my favourite authors falling off their perch. You see a few years back on watching a documentary about Enid Blyton I was stunned to find in her personal life that as a mother to her won children she was lacking. Almost cold and and unfeeling. And that she made poor life choices which questioned her moral compass. How could she write such happy magical stories for children yet be this other creature in real life? It baffles me still today. I still like her books. Very much so. And I love to collect the. But it's a different kind of like now knowing what I know about her.
Well imagine finding out that another of my favourites Charles Dickens who wrote such fantastically wonderful victorian stories was a cruel man. Almost all his tales are ones where good overcomes evil and call upon people to reach into their hearts and to reach out to humanity regardless of the strict victorian rules of society which bound and constrained them. Were he alive today you might be mistaken in thinking that Charles Dickens would be a supporter of the last remaining element of society such as fat shaming and oppressing/surprising the plus size. Why not? That is what he wrote in almost all of his stories. Support for the person needlessly harrased. Mistaken you surely would be when you look a little deeper than his carefully manicured image.
I read that Charles Dickens was in fact a terrible husband to hiss long suffering wife Catherine Hogarth Dickens and whilst he cared for his children there is little evidence of his great devotion for them. His wife was a plus size woman especially after having borne him 10 children and suffering many more miscarriages. The toll this took on her body, her emotions and her psychological state cannot be told or imagined. And while she was bearing his children he was indulging in extra marital excursions with a young 18 year old actress. The actress is rumoured not to have been his first adulterous affair and it is thought he had affairs with two of Catherine's sisters as well, first a young Mary Hogarth who died and then Georgina Hogarth. Catherine was the victorian "good wife" of the time and endured his scathing disdain and disgust of her. And how was she repaid? He publicly divorced her.citing that she was a bad mother and made disparaging remarks about her weight to friends. In victorian times doing this was like killing her. The divorce shame was always on the woman. But it was not enough for him. He had to add insult to injury by fat shaming her!
"In April 1856 Dickens wrote to John Forster in reference to his wife: "I find that the skeleton in my domestic closet is becoming a pretty big one." He also said that he feared that "one happiness I have missed in life, and one friend and companion I have never made." Dickens began to question Catherine's intelligence in front of friends. He wrote to a female acquaintance: "It is more clear to me more than ever that Kate (his own daughter) is as near being a Donkey, as one of that sex... can be." Dickens also disliked the way his wife had put on weight. He told Wilkie Collins how he had taken her to his favourite Paris restaurant where she ate so much that she "nearly killed herself".
Well maybe she ate because she was so unhappy or she just enjoyed her food. A lot of us are emotional eaters aren't we? But even after all this Catherine Dickens never shamed Charles in return. Though she must have had plenty of 'fodder' for the rumour mills of the time. She could have destroyed him! But it appears she still cared for him and on her passing handed over letters to her daughter for the British Museum from Charles showing that he loved her once.
So, fat as he might have felt her to have become which he claimed made her so unappealing in his eyes he was the true loser in this scenario for failing to see the depth of his wife's love for him and not recognising her true strength of character. Another woman would have revenged herself and watched his demise which would have been in her control given the antics he got up to when he wasn't writing.
You can read the full sad story here:
http://spartacus-educational.com/PRhogarthC2.htm
A film about Dickens call The Invisble woman starring Ralph Fiennes and Joanna Scanlan as Catherine if not already showing will show in Cinemas soon.
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/thick-of-it-star-joanna-scanlan-says-its-clear-why-she-is-charles-dickens-invisible-woman-8886175.html
So here's to you Catherine Dickens, victorian plus size heroine. And to you Charles Dickens? Shame on you!
Stay beyoutiful bigyoutiful!
RayRay xx
PS - Jane Austen is another of my favourite authors of that time. I will not be reading her biography - I don't want to know! ;)
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