Dicken’s Fur Coat and Charlotte’s Unanswered Letters: The Rows and Romances of England’s Great Victorian Novelists, by Daniel Pool

Retrieved from: the library
(0060183659)


Lots of minutiae about Dickens and the Brontës along with Thackeray, Eliot, Hardy, Trollope and all the “lesser lights.” I remember learning in high school that Dickens dumped his wife (my term, by the way); this gets into some more detail, but not much. I still don’t get it completely, and it’s shocking that Victorian novelists were apparently less concerned with propriety as a whole: Dickens leaves his wife to hang about with an actress much younger than he, Thackeray put his wife in an asylum, George Eliot was living in sin with a married man (which is why she wrote under a man’s name--it wasn’t exactly a secret who she was), and so on. Charlotte Brontë was in love with her (younger) publisher and when scorned by him married her father’s rector and then almost immediately died. What a group of characters. Almost enough to get a novel from their lives alone! It’s a good reminder that those uptight 19th century Brits weren’t actually as disciplined as we'd think. At least some of them weren’t!