Literature: - Britain -The dark heart of Dickens: How writer was an abusive husband who seduced a woman 26 years his junior - by Simon Heffer

Look at some Christmas cards and one feature will link many of them: a scene with snow, in the England before the railways, with a coach and horses charging up to a cosy house or inn, and red-faced men in top hats sitting inside and on top of the vehicle.


If it is not Mr Pickwick arriving at Dingley Dell on the Muggleton coach, with his codfish and his six barrels of oysters, and fortified by hot brandy and water, it is inspired by the idea of it.

Charles Dickens’s novel of 1836, like his Christmas Carol of 1843, has in 175 years lost none of its power to describe the perfect English festivities. As Dickens wrote: ‘How many old recollections, and how many dormant sympathies, does Christmas time awaken?’


It is not the least of Dickens’s achievements that millions who have never read a word of his novels know so much about his world.

Yet, as we near his bicentenary, we should remember that this was a man tortured by the memory of poverty as a child, thin-skinned, cruel to his wife, dismissive of his children, a slave to overwork and, ultimately, victim of an early death, worn out not least in the effort to support himself, his estranged wife, and his mistress and her family. 

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