The Wine Shop in A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
19th era / Alamy Stock Photo
His biographer Claire Tomalin, author of Charles Dickens: a Life, wrote that on his final tour of America, two years before his death of a stroke aged 58, Dickens was ‘heavily fortified by alcohol’. She writes that on his ‘reading days’ he would have ‘fresh cream and two tablespoons of rum at seven in the morning, a sherry cobbler — sherry, sugar and slices of orange — with a biscuit at midday, a pint of champagne at three and an egg beaten into a glass of sherry before his evening performance’.
Tomalin also said of Dickens: ‘He was a really good man but at the same time he could be very cruel – a tyrant’. In 1836, at the age of 24, he married 20-year-old Catherine Hogarth who, over the next 15 years, gave birth to 10 children. ‘The obsessive nature of his work had a terrible effect on his home life. He spread darkness all around him’, suggests Tomalin. ‘Catherine was desperately unhappy but she accepted it because she loved him and because he was successful’. During the later years of their marriage, Dickens reportedly built ‘a wall’ in their bedroom, in order to separate himself and his wife.
