In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein assumes the voice of her life's companion. “Before I decided to write this book my twenty-five years with Gertrude Stein,” Toklas/Stein writes, “I had often said that I would write, The wives of geniuses I have sat with. I have sat with so many” (Vintage, 1960, 14). Had Alice been able to sit with Emma Darwin or Catherine Dickens, she would quickly have acquired a more vivid sense of each woman than belated biographers can muster, however dedicated they are to mulling over what evidence remains. She would have been able to tell if Emma Darwin's blunt outspoken voice was laced with humor and emotion, or whether Catherine Dickens ever uttered an unpredictable or original word. Deprived of such opportunities, biographers of the wives of geniuses are forced to adopt other strategies in their attempts to reanimate the stories of those whose claim on public memory depends on their roles as intimate domestic partners of famous men.
Born just seven years apart, Emma Darwin (1808–96) and Catherine Dickens (1815–79) shared some situations common to middle- and upper-class Victorian women. Both were married to men who worked compulsively, leaving their wives to run the household, entertain professional friends and colleagues, and raise children. Both women gave birth to ten children. Emma lost three of hers in infancy or childhood; Catherine lost one. For years each woman was constantly pregnant, with their enthusiasm noticeably waning after the births of the first four children. (Lillian Nayder actually provides a series of charts showing how many months and days of Catherine's married life were passed in pregnancy.) Both women came from large families in which this kind of heroic childbearing was considered perfectly normal, but the biographies underscore the physical and psychological tolls exacted by repeated labor and, especially, by the deaths of children.
Nonetheless, the differences between the subjects and the biographers' strategies loom large. The Loys, a husband and wife team who come to the Darwins from previous work in primate studies and evolution, offer a broad family chronicle of an exceptional branch of the English landed gentry, the closely intermarried Wedgwood-Darwin-Allen clan. Lillian Nayder, writing from a feminist literary perspective, has a more polemical agenda: to work against the bad press Catherine suffered from her husband and from subsequent Dickens biographers. The Loys have the advantage of letters and diaries that allow us to hear Emma Darwin's intelligent voice, along with the notable silences at painful points of her life. Even so, they confess their difficulties. Taking stock of Emma's life after twenty years of marriage, they add up her gains and losses, admitting that they “provide frustratingly little substance as regards Emma's persona at middle age” (165). It is difficult for many biographers to find their subjects after the love and work dramas of youthful life are past.
The midlife separation Dickens forced on his wife in her early forties has long established her as a victim of the Inimitable's terrifying will, yet we know virtually nothing about Catherine's own reactions beyond her compliance with Dickens's arrangements to blot her out of his life and her continuing interest in his career. Soon after the separation, Dickens burned all the letters Catherine had written to him; what's left are a few fragments of polite, unexceptionable sentences to other correspondents. Yet Nayder insists on Catherine's individual agency, and she tries to make us believe in it largely by attesting to her relationships with family members other than Dickens himself. Unfortunately, the bulk of her information comes from letters of Charles Dickens, so the book often reads as an act of resistance to Dickens and some of his male biographers rather than the resurrection of a “real” Catherine Dickens.
The Loys have a happier story to tell, and they approach it in good humor, with an unbending adherence to chronology. In the second, more diffuse part of the book, chronology seems to take over entirely: we get year-by-year summaries of what happened in the immediate family; births, marriages, and deaths in the extended family; and what was prominent in national news. Aimed at readers who know little about nineteenth-century British history, the narrative provides succinct general descriptions of major political and cultural events—whether the Darwins were directly involved or not.
One of the Loys' best decisions was to include the full texts of certain important letters or journal entries written by Emma and Charles Darwin at various stages of their lives together. The intelligence of both voices comes through loud and clear, free from the diminishment of excerpting. Emma's two letters to her husband about his work and her religious belief tell us a great deal about her love and admiration for Charles, as well as her ability to express her own position and leave him to his own. Her liberal politics are part of her Wedgwood inheritance, as is her bluntness; the Loys enjoy her “take-no-prisoners” approach when she's reviewing books for her daughter Henrietta or commenting on concerts or political affairs (333). However feisty and intelligent she may have been in her own right, this Emma finds her happiness in marriage, through an intimacy sealed by mutual respect and her willing embrace of her role as caregiver to Charles's chronic illnesses.
Illness plays a large role in the biography; we hear in some detail about Charles Darwin's hydropathic cures and “the cult of ill health” in the family as a whole (157). The Loys make us aware of the potential dangers of Victorian remedies (such as mercury treatments) and suggest modern diagnoses of family illnesses. Although Emma Darwin's children were frequently ill, her role as nurse is not overplayed. Rather, the lives of the children are developed so that each young Darwin becomes a character for the reader as well as a particular kind of relationship for Emma. There are stretches of the narrative in which Emma is barely visible amid the various family stories we follow. Her life, presumably, was so thoroughly drenched in the large society provided by her extended family that we are expected to understand all family doings as germane to the tenor and substance of her being. In the Loys' narrative, this is understood as a token of her success as the stalwart matriarch of a talented clan.
Lillian Nayder's effort to present Catherine Hogarth Dickens as a person apart from her husband's sway is most successful when she describes Catherine's life before and after her marriage. The musical, literate Scottish Hogarths are well described, and their eldest daughter at twenty is imagined as “cultured and intelligent, happy among her siblings, and accustomed to caring for them” (48). The last third of Catherine's life was passed in the pleasant house to which Dickens had consigned her after the separation in 1858. Here Nayder takes us well beyond the point at which Catherine drops out of other Dickens biographies, to witness her ongoing attention to family, friends, and cultural life in London before and after Dickens's death in 1870—an event that liberated Catherine by allowing her to inhabit the status of widowhood. In the post-Dickens era, Catherine's much younger sister Helen Hogarth Roney enters the picture as a new companion and friend; the discovery of this late-life sibling relationship is one of the triumphs of Nayder's extensive research. Sisterhood is a central theme throughout, emphasized by three “interludes” that slow down the narrative to meditate on the importance of Catherine's relationships with Mary, Georgina, and Helen Hogarth apart from each sister's impact on Charles Dickens's fantasy life. Catherine comes into being most persuasively through those sororal ties.
The long middle section about the Dickens marriage is a more complicated affair. Nayder strives to liberate Catherine from Dickens's representations, matching her own narrative voice against his. She insists on Catherine's independent friendships with women in the Dickens circle, most notably Christiana Weller Thompson, a musician with whom Dickens was briefly infatuated and then professed to scorn. Because there is no real evidence of anything but polite visiting between the two women, the case for Catherine's independent judgment is hard to make. At the same time, Nayder sets up a series of interlocking thematic metaphors that represent the many ways in which Catherine was mastered and controlled by her husband: coverture, mesmerism, conjuring, and even—despite its mitigation of labor pain—chloroform become keywords evoking Dickens's undermining of Catherine's agency. No reader of Dickens's letters would contest his fatal will to dominance in every detail of domestic life; Nayder's picture is accurate. The problem is strategic: the interlocking metaphors only enhance the picture of Catherine's hapless submission. Nor does Nayder tell a story about what it meant for a conventional young girl to be faced with the discovery that she had married a control freak, and how she accommodated herself to that uneasy position. Of course, such a story would be speculative. But so is most of what Catherine Dickens allowed others to imagine about her.
