rgy was the same; but it
was accompanied by something of feverishness and disease. He could not
be quiet. In the autumn of 1857 he wrote to Forster, "I have now no
relief but in action. I am become incapable of rest. I am quite
confident I should rust, break, and die if I spared myself. Much
better to die doing." And again, a little later, "If I couldn't walk
fast and far, I should just explode and perish." It was the
foreshadowing of such utterances as these, and the constant wanderings
to and fro for readings and theatricals and what not, that led Harriet
Martineau, who had known and greatly liked Dickens, to say after
perusing the second volume of his life, "I am much struck by his
hysterical restlessness. It must have been terribly wearing to his
wife." On the other hand, there can be no manner of doubt that his
wife wore _him_. "Why is it," he had said to Forster in one of the
letters from which I have just quoted, "that, as with poor David
(Copperfield), a sense comes always crushing on me now, when I fall
into low spirits, as of one happiness I have missed in life, and one
friend and companion I have never made?" And again: "I find that the
skeleton in my domestic closet is becoming a pretty big one." Then
come even sadder confidences: "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.
She is exactly what you know in the way of being amiable and
complying; but we are strangely ill-assorted for the bond there is
between us.... Her temperament will not go with mine." And at last, in
March, 1858, two months before the end: "It is not with me a matter of
will, or trial, or sufferance, or good humour, or making the best of
it, or making the worst of it, any longer. It is all despairingly
over." So, after living together for twenty years, these two went
their several ways in May, 1858. Dickens allowed to his wife an income
of L600 a year, and the eldest son went to live with her. The other
children and their aunt, Miss Hogarth, remained with Dickens himself.

Scandal has not only a poisonous, but a busy tongue, and when a
well-known public man and his wife agree to live apart, the beldame
seldom neglects to give her special version of the affair. So it
happened here. Some miserable rumour was whispered about to the
detriment of Dickens' morals. He was at the time, as we have seen, in
an utter