Letters: Charles Dickens wanted to send his wife to an asylum

Letters written by a friend of Charles Dickens’s wife shed new light on the couple’s separation.

John Bowen, a professor of nineteenth-century English literature at the University of York, described what Catherine Dickens told her neighbor about their marital struggles to The Times Literary Supplement.

The neighbor, Edward Dutton Cook, wrote of Catherine and Charles: “He even tried to shut her up in a lunatic asylum, poor thing! But bad as the law is in regard to proof of insanity he could not quite wrest it to his purpose.”

Read more about the Dickenses’ troubled relationship and the uncovered letters in the New York Times.