Charles Dickens: the first gaslighter
Being married to the Victorian author Charles Dickens was definitely not the best of times.
Long-hidden letters reveal that Dickens tried to put his sane wife in a mental institution.
Edward Dutton Cook, Catherine's next-door neighbour, wrote this to a journalist: "She had borne 10 children and had lost many of her good looks, was growing old, in fact. He even tried to shut her up in a lunatic asylum, poor thing!" Dr Thomas Harrington Tuke, superintendent of Manor House Asylum, stood up to Dickens, refusing to section his wife.
The friendship cooled after that with Dickens bad-mouthing him. John Bowen, a professor of 19th century literature at the University of York in the United Kingdom, recently uncovered 98 letters that were kept at Harvard University but never transcribed or analysed.
