13 Jun 2026
issue 13 June 2026
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For every smog-spitting chimney in Victorian London there was a woman tasked with keeping the hearth clean, both physically and morally. This ‘angel in the house’, as Coventry Patmore dubbed her, lived entirely for her family, but above all for her husband. With her organs tightly compressed beneath a whalebone corset, she ministered to his every need and forgave him all his worldly sins. She was, in short, not a real woman but an ideal.
In Mrs Dickens, Emily Howes exercises the novelist’s prerogative to flesh out an ideal, to show how the real woman beneath her halo of thorns suffered. We meet Catherine Hogarth on the cusp of her engagement to the novelist Charles Dickens, whose veneration of women as ‘the better sex’, ‘the tenderer, the purer of heart’, stirs in her a desire ‘always to be kind’, to be his ‘balm’ – the Little Dorrit to his inimitable Boz. As if writing her into being like one of his heroines, Charles moulds Kate into a doting wife, whose hair is styled according to his preference and whose feelings are always secondary to his own.
