The question, prompted by two Charles Dickens novels, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, being named to Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, prompted The Wall Street Journal to put the issue to two Dickens scholars: Bates Professor of English Lillian Nayder and Michael Slater, a Dickens biographer and professor emeritus of Victorian literature at Birkbeck College in London.

Said Nayder, “There’s no doubt that A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations will speak to our own concerns with social inequity, mismanagement and greed.” And, she added, “any recent college graduate still living at home and looking for work is also likely to relate to Pip, with his thwarted ambitions and his modest career.”

Nayder is author of The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth (Cornell University Press, 2010), the first comprehensive portrait of the woman whom Charles Dickens married and then repudiated as unfit after 22 years of marriage and 10 children. Nayder’s book demonstrates that Catherine Dickens was a competent woman and her marriage a happy one for much of its duration.

Related stories about The Other Dickens:

• From The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 12, 2010
• Review of The Other Dickens by the WSJ
• Q&A with Portland Press Herald writer Ray Routhier
• Story by the Sun Journal‘s David Sargent ’62

Professor of English Lillian Nayder’s new biography The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth –the first comprehensive portrait of the woman whom Charles Dickens married and then repudiated — is now available online and in bookstores from Cornell University Press.

The book explains that after 22 years of marriage and 10 children, Charles pressured Catherine to leave their home, unjustly alleging that she was mentally disordered — unfit and unloved as wife and mother. The novelist’s version of events remains widely held, but Nayder’s book debunks it, demonstrating that Catherine Dickens was a competent woman and her marriage a happy one for much of its duration.

“Her story is interesting on a variety of levels,” says Nayder, “and I felt she deserved to have it told in a way that questioned Dickens’ own allegations about her, because they have been accepted even though there was plenty of evidence to suggest that they were false.”

Drawing on personal correspondence, banking records and other documentary materials, Nayder has painted the first well-rounded portrait of a figure heretofore known only as “Mrs. Charles Dickens” — a daughter, sister and friend; loving mother and grandmother; capable household manager; and an intelligent person whose company was valued and sought by a wide circle of women and men.

Nayder also offers new insights into the relations among the four Hogarth sisters, and along the way draws larger lessons about family relationships and the legal and social status of women during the Victorian era.

It’s telling, Nayder points out, that Charles used hypnotism, then called mesmerism, on his wife. “I focus on mesmerism as a motif for their marriage,” she says. “I consider the relationship between mesmerism and matrimony for Catherine, and that suspension of self that’s a part of mesmerism and was also a part of marriage at that time.”

A Dickens scholar, Nayder is the author of Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Authorship, published by Cornell in 2002. A resident of New Gloucester, she began teaching at Bates in 1989 and is chair of the English department.