to assist his memory and his imagination. He began to long for
solitude. He would take long, aimless rambles into the country,
returning at no particular time or season. He once wrote to Forster:

I have had dreadful thoughts of getting away somewhere altogether by
myself. If I could have managed it, I think I might have gone to the
Pyrenees for six months. I have visions of living for half a year or so
in all sorts of inaccessible places, and of opening a new book therein.
A floating idea of going up above the snow-line, and living in some
astonishing convent, hovers over me.

What do these cryptic utterances mean? At first, both in his novel and
in his letters, they are obscure; but before long, in each, they become
very definite. In 1856, we find these sentences among his letters:

The old days--the old days! Shall I ever, I wonder, get the frame of
mind back as it used to be then? Something of it, perhaps, but never
quite as it used to be.

I find that the skeleton in my domestic closet is becoming a pretty big
one.

His next letter draws the veil and shows plainly what he means:

Poor Catherine and I are not made for each other, and there is no help
for it. It is not only that she makes me uneasy and unhappy, but that I
make her so, too--and much more so. We are strangely ill-assorted for
the bond that exists between us.

Then he goes on to say that she would have been a thousand times
happier if she had been married to another man. He speaks of
"incompatibility," and a "difference of temperaments." In fact, it is
the same old story with which we have become so familiar, and which is
both as old as the hills and as new as this morning's newspaper.

Naturally, also, things grow worse, rather than better. Dickens comes
to speak half jocularly of "the plunge," and calculates as to what
effect it will have on his public readings. He kept back the
announcement of "the plunge" until after he had given several readings;
then, on April 29, 1858, Mrs. Dickens left his home. His eldest son
went to live with the mother, but the rest of the children remained
with their father, while his daughter Mary nominally presided over the
house. In the background, however, Georgina Hogarth, who seemed all
through her life to have cared for Dickens more than for her sister,
remained as a sort of guide and guardian for his children.

This arrangement was a private matter, and should not have been brought
to public attention; but