Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Sex Life & Scandal of Charles Dickens

Episode Date: December 24, 2024

Like it or not, there's no escaping Charles Dickens at this time of year.But who was the man behind classics such as A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist and of course, A Christmas Carol?His life is as rich as many of the characters' stories in one of his books, including a brutal Victorian upbringing and rumours of sex and scandal.Joining us in this re-run to explore the controversy of the man is Charles Dickens super-fan Miriam Margolyes - a national treasure in her own right.Having written and starred in the play, Dickens Women, Miriam knows better than most the complicated relationships he had in his life: from his mother who took him out of school to work in a rat-infested blacking factory aged 12, to his wife whom he had a bookcase wall built to separate her from him.This episode was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.All music from Epidemic Sounds/All3 Media.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixtners. It's me, Kate Lister, and a very merry, happy Christmas or whatever the hell it is that you are celebrating to you. I'm so glad that you could join us once again for this episode of Betwixt the Sheets, but before we can get going, I have to tell you,

this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things and an adulty way covering a range of adult subjects and you should be an adult too. And you feel safer? I know I feel safer. Everyone feels safer. Right, on with the show. It is a damp winter morning near the banks of the Thames in 1823.

As this bustling city comes to life, throngs of people make their way to another hard day's work in the factories that line the river. Among them is a shy, 11-year-old Charles Dickens, who's about to start his first day of work at a blacking factory, having been taken out of school by his parents to help pay off their debts. Towards the end of his life, he would describe. the rotting building as literally overrun with old grey rats whose squeaking and scuffing would come up the stairs at all times. But it's here that the young Dickens is exposed to the cruelty young children faced in Victorian Britain, and many of the characters here

will inspire some of his most popular and famous stories. In fact, it's on this day that a boy dressed in a ragged apron and a paper cap shows Dickens how to tie a knot with string, and he introduces himself as Bob Fagan. Sound familiar? The seeds of resentment towards his parents for being taken out of school were sewn deep, though particularly towards his mother.

And as we will find out from today's very special guest, this and other relationships with the women in his life had a profound effect on Dickens and his work. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the money. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

Goodness, my beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Terry. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister. When we think of Yule Tide in the UK, surely only one man springs to mind. No, not Santa, not even Jesus, Charles Dickens. I mean, without Charles Dickens, we wouldn't have a Muppets Christmas Carol, would we? And for that alone, I am eternally grateful. His work speaks for himself.

But what about the man? For today's episode, we are revisiting a festive favourite from last year where none of the, the National Treasure, Miriam Margulies, spoke to us about her love of Dickens. What was he really like as a father? A husband? And, well, a lover. Miriam doesn't know that firsthand, but she certainly knows a lot about his love life.

So without further ado, let's do it. Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Miriam Margulies. How are you doing? I'm in the sun in Tuscany, so I'm doing very well and loving it. Doing much better than us over in Britain. It is fucking miserable over here. Miserable, cold and foggy.

Boo. Well, it's none of those things here, although it was cold this morning when we got up. But now the sun is really warm and I'm happy. And like all English people, we're talking about the weather before anything else. I know, I know. But we're going to make a sharp turn into more interesting topics because you have very kindly agreed to talk to me about one of your great loves and something that I am hugely passionate about.

Mr. Charles Dickens, and in particular his relationship with, the women in his life, the women in his works, just women. So I suppose my first question to you is one that you've probably answered many times, but what was it that made you so interested in this aspect of Dickens? At what point did you go, he's got some things to say about women, this chap? I didn't know about his attitude to women at all. I started with Dickens when I was 11 and I read Oliver Twist at school and I immediately became drawn into that vibrant passionate world which whatever world he creates for you it's irresistible and in of course with Oliver Twist it was all the crims and I love criminals I can't help myself and my grandfather my great-grandfather was a criminal

he was in the Isle of White prison he was there for seven years hard labour that was fascinating to me. And so I just stayed with the world of Charles Dickens ever afterwards, and I'm still with it. And by the way, when we were talking about weather, it makes me think of the weather that he was experiencing in London, because this is the opening of Bleak House. And it's not about women, but I've just got to read you this first paragraph, because it's so thrilling. And it uses the technique that he always uses of grabbing you and pulling you into the world.

So the first word, London, full stop. Mickel was term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had been newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a megalosaurus, 40 feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up open hill. Now that's an example of his technique because the megalosaurus remains had just been discovered. And he was fascinated by that.

And so he put it into his book. I didn't know that. Yeah. That's what Dickens did. All of Dickens' life went into his works. He used his life. It was all grist to the mill. And of course the experiences he had with women, which were not altogether satisfactory, shall we say.

they went into his books as well. And I think it was at Cambridge that I really was studying him. And after Cambridge, I realised he'd wanted to be an actor. I was an actor. I'd read all his books. Couldn't I somehow present him to an audience through the characters that he had invented? And he invented over 2000. And when I say invented, they didn't just come out of nothing.

He fashioned them out of his life. So he'd met someone like Wilkins McCorber. What a brilliant name, by the way. But he made a twist to the characters. So they weren't just copies of what he'd known, but they were adjusted, added to, and made deeper and more interesting. So I think he's just the business.

and the women that he depicted, I think it was through Professor Michael Slater, wrote a book on it. And he decided that they were divided into three sorts of women. They were the prepubescent with no tits. Right. So he wouldn't have liked me or you come to that. They were the unattainable sexual object like Estella

in great expectations. Little Nell. And the grotesque, yes. Well, little Nell would have been one of the prepubescence. A lot of his women were little. He described them as little as an adjective of regard of approval. But Fatt was not one of his words of approval. Still isn't, of course, in the world.

And the last of the divisions of women that Michael Slater observes, and what I think is true is the, grotesque, the snarling, the evil, or the incredibly funny. And there are great many of those. And I think all that is because of his peculiar relationship with his mother. She wasn't cruel, but she was unfeeling. She didn't smother him with kisses. She didn't make him happy. And I think your central relationship is always with your mother, isn't it? Well, it was in my case. all your relationships are based in some way or another on the relationship you have with your parents and your siblings. Now, he had lots of siblings and mostly he was on very good terms with him.

But with his mother, he was not. And I think she put him against women. She made him not a natural lover of women. Sexually, he was a lover of women. And many of them, I think, in fact, there is now. a book that's just been written that says that he might have had syphilis, which is a, I believe you call it an STD. When I was little was subscriber trunk dialing, but which is now a sexually transmitted disease. Wow. Do you know what evidence they're using to say that? I wonder why,

I mean, everyone had syphilis back in the day, didn't they? But I wonder why they're saying they're quite a common illness, but you'll have to read the book and I haven't read it yet, so I can't tell you. But it's quite likely because he did go off, you know, on joints, even though he was married. But his relationship with his wife was not a happy one after a while. It started off well, but not after a while. But the thing with his mother was that he loved being at school. He loved his school. He loved his fellow pupils.

and when she suggested that he left school and went to work, he couldn't bear it. And the work that she'd found for him was in a blacking factory. Quite a famous story now. And he was sent to work there, pasting the labels on the blacking bottles, people looking at him through the window. And he was a shy boy. So he felt miserable about that.

And his father took him away. He said, no, we're not going to let him work like that. but she, as he writes in what they call the autobiographical fragment, which was never published, but it exists. And he said in that, but my mother was warm for my being sent back. In other words, his mother wanted him to go back to work, and indeed he did go back to work.

And he never forgave her, I think. In his heart, he never forgave her. Was his mum a big woman? I'm interested in what you were saying about him, not liking bigger women, fat women. No, she was slender. She was not a large woman. But she was ambitious.

She wanted to open her own school. And she was a bit of a social climber, and so was he. In fact, I think he was probably the best social climber there's ever been. I don't hold that against her. Actually, my mother was a social climber. too. But she didn't give him love. And that's what all children want. She just didn't give him the sense that he was loved. And his father was famously in debtors prison, which must have had a profound impact on him growing up, this weird system that they had for hundreds of years, where if you get

in debt, they'll throw you in jail, then you have to work out how to pay the money in order to leave the jail and it's all, now we just have clana and it's a lot simpler. But that must have been horrendous for young Dickens. Well, it was the reason that he had to go to work because they didn't just put the debtor in prison. They put his whole family. So the whole family, except for his sister, Fannie who was a very brilliant pianist and she was sent to the Royal College of Music. She had a scholarship there.

So she was allowed not to have to work, but he had to work for the whole family. And he had to work to feed them because debtors' prisons didn't feed the people. So he had to work in the blacking factory and then walk right across London and bring them food. And then walk back across London

in the very steamyest, miserablyest part of London with people fucking up against a wall being sick in the street, kids yawling and crying and screaming and fights and wives and husbands beating each other. He saw all that when he was 11 and he went back to Little College Street, Camden Town, where he was in lodgings. That would absolutely mess you. And you can see that in his works, that the fear of London. London is this animal that is just kind of wild and violent and exists in all of his books like that. Yes, it was like that.

And I mean, it still is to some extent. London still is a fearsome place. But it was also somewhere that he loved. He went back to it in his mind. He was never exiled from London. He always wandered about the streets.

He knew the streets. I think you could say he fell to Londoner. In the end, he went. to live in Kent where he died. But his books are set in London. His life was in London. His imaginative life was in London. And he wrote a lot about women.

Because of course, here we are. You can't deny we're part of the world. We don't get a fair suck of the sauce bottle, I don't think. I don't think so. But there it was. And he loved, he loved, London and he loved women. But he took his revenge

through some of the portraits that he made. He took revenge on women. When he was first in love, he was mad about a pert little madam called Mariah Bidno. She was very pretty and sweet

and kind of coquettish and she led him a proper old dance. Oh dear. And in the end, she turned him down. And he never got over that. But she didn't either. The pain of it, the hurt, the shame.

Well, many years later, of course, he had the last laugh. I mean, fucking dead. Because she became a fatal bidding aged before her time. And he was the most famous writer in the world. And she wrote to him 25 years. years later. And he said when he saw her handwriting on the envelope

but he recognised it immediately. His heart flamed and he became very excited and very naughtily he made an appointment to see her again. Right. And so he made sure that

nobody was home. His wife was out. Charles. And then she came into the room and she got old and fat and lost her teeth. And he just hated her for disappointing him again. Not just for the fact that she turned him down, but that she'd gone old and lost her looks.

And so her feelings about herself had transformed her. And he decided when he wrote about her again, and she comes back in Little Dorrit as Flora Finching and it's one of the great characters. So women mattered to him as they do to all men but he used them in his books and you can see it when you read, you can tell that he's passionate

with disgust for this fat old lady. If I'm right in thinking when she first turned him down, when she was still young and with all of her teeth, what she did is she dismissed him as a quote, mere boy. And that's always interested me because that's the same word as Stella uses towards Pip repeatedly. Boy, boy, boy, common boy, labouring boy. And I've always wondered if that was, was that that shame that he felt being played out there? Well, I think so. I mean, I've always said that I think, you know, people say that Estella could have been either Mariah Beignal or Elintern.

But Miss Havisham, I think, was Dickings. Really? And I'm going to read you a bit of Miss Havisham, one of my favourite characters, definitely one of the grotesques. She isn't exactly a grotesque, but she's one of those. Well, you wouldn't want to meet her on a dark night. No. So this is how he describes her in the beginning. In an armchair, with an elbow resting on the table and her head leaning on that hand,

sat the strangest lady I have ever seen or shall ever see. She was dressed in rich materials, satins and lace and silks, all of white. Her shoes were white, and she had a long white veil and bright, and bridle flowers in her hair. But her hair was white. She'd not quite finished dressing for she had but one shoe on. The other was on the table near her hand.

I saw that everything within my sight which ought to be white had been white long ago and had lost its luster and was faded and yellow. I saw that the dress had been put upon the rounded figure of a young woman

and that the figure upon which it now hung loose had shrunk to skin and bone. Who is it? A pip, ma'am? Pip? Mr. Pumblechok's boy, ma'am.

Come to play. Come near. Let me look at you. Come close. When I stood before her, avoiding her eyes, I took note of some of the surrounding objects in detail. I saw that her watch had stopped at 20 minutes to nine, and that a clock in the room had stopped at 20 minutes to nine.

Look at me! You're not afraid to look at a woman who has not seen the sun, since you were born? Do you know what I touch? Here? Yes, ma'am. What do I touch? Your heart, Mom?

I'm tired. I want diversion and I have done with men and women. I sometimes have sick fancies. And I have a sick fancy. I should like to see some play. They are there. Play. Play, play.

Could call Estella at the door. To stand in the dark, in a mysterious. passage of an unknown house, bawling Estella to a young lady neither visible nor responsive. So she brings Estella onto the stage, as it were. Estella answered at last, and her light came along the dark passage, like a star. Miss Havisham beckoned her to come close and took up a jewel from the table and tried its effect upon her fair young bosom and against her pretty brown hair.

Let me see you play at cards with this boy. With this boy? Why, he's a common labouring boy. Well, you can break his heart. What do you play, boy? Nothing but...

Beggar my neighbour, Miss. Begher him, said Miss Harrison to Estella. So he sat down to cards. I played the game to an end with Estella, and she beggared. You see, that's quite a scene. As we head into the break and you put your kettle on, why not mull over the extreme sides to Dickens' personality?

Yes, there is his remarkable. talent. He invented all these characters. 2000, more than anybody else in history. Out of his head, but not just, not just out of his head, but out of his life, out of his experience. For me, his books bubble with life. And that's what I adore. But my goodness, was he a man with flaws? Here's how Miriam squares the art and the artist. I think it's one of the things I've had to learn as I've learned more about Dickens, more about men, I suppose, and more about artists that you have to decide, can you cope with an horrible part of them? Or do you just want to dwell on the successes, the strengths, the genius?

And I'll be back with Miriam and Charlie Boy after this short break. I'd always thought of Miss Havisham as quite aspirational really Like you know she's she earned her own property She's got a lot of money Everyone just leaves her alone To destroy the patriarchy in her own time But she's actually quite terrified Isn't she? She's like the witch in this castle

Just destroying everything around her Well that was how I think Women could be for Dickens destructive It's an interesting view It's an interesting attitude towards women. But I think that is, he was using her as an instrument of revenge. Why do you think that Miss Havisham was Dickens himself?

Because later on she says, she actually admits to this. Ms. Havisham turned to me and said in a whisper, Is she beautiful, graceful, well-grown? Do you admire her? Love her, love her, love her. If she favours you, love her, if she wounds you, love her, if she tears your heart to pieces, and as it grows older and stronger, it will tear deeper. Love her, love her, love her.

Hear me, Pip, I adopted her to be loved. I bred her and educated her to be loved. I developed her into what she is, that she might be loved. Love her. I'll tell you what real love is. It is blind devotion. Unquestioning self-humiliation. Utter submission.

Trust and belief against yourself. and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter as I did. And that's why I think that Miss Havisham is Dickens, because that's how he thought of himself. He'd given up his whole heart and soul,

and it was destroyed. And this is his revenge. In other words, Miss Havisham is his agent of revenge. We should talk about his wife because she... We've got to. It's not a happy story. No, no. She was another one who, when they first met,

she was petite with a lovely little waist and she was all nymph-like and svelt. And another one he just didn't seem to forgive for getting older. But please, tell us the story of poor old Mrs. Dickens. It's such a sad story and he comes out of it very... Really does. Yes. Well, Catherine Hogarth was Scottish and she had a Scottish accent.

I think he was always making fun of it. I rather like a Scottish accent. I didn't know she was Scottish. Right, okay. And I think they loved each other to begin with. And she gave him 12 children. three of them miscarriages. So she was basically always pregnant. And that's what happened to a lot of women at that time.

That's what they were there for. They were a machine for producing children, which she did, loyally and faithful. And he fell out of love with her. And he did something incredibly cruel. When they moved to Kent, to this lovely house that his father had pointed out to him when he was a boy, when they went for a walk. And he looked at that house and he thought,

I want to own that house. I want to be in that house. I want it to be my house. And it was. He got there, he made it. So they were in that house. And when he started up that relationship that he did with Ellen Turnan, who was an actress, Nelly, she was called,

a not particularly good actress, but just someone that he had the hots for, and he couldn't bear his wife physically anymore. I mean, sometimes I think that does happen that you just can't bear to be touched by the person that you can't bear to be touched by. So he built a wall of a bookcase between his bedroom and house.

Oh, my God. So that she could not get to him at all. And he didn't tell her he was going to do it. It was done very quickly by a local handyman. Fuck. The salt that you hope you get yourself, a man who couldn't do a job like that very quickly in a day. And he built a bookcase so that she was effectively cut off day and night from him.

Who does that? Well, I think Dickens was a pathology. What? I mean, I don't know a whole heap about his wife. I know that, I now know she was Scottish. I know that she wrote a cookery. book, which I've read through. And if she was making these kind of meals on a daily, I would want to marry her. The woman can do amazing things with potatoes. But to be locked out of your husband's room by a book,

what a dick. Yeah. Well, his daughter, his favorite daughter, Katie, said my father was a very wicked man. Ah, right. But she loved him. Everybody loved him. He was the biggest celebrity in the world. He was like the Beatles. You know, when he went to America for the first time in 1842 and again 25 years later, people queued just to watch him go into a room or come out of a room. They were looking at him the whole time. And he couldn't bear it.

He found it absolutely yucky. And in fact, although he was very interested in America at the beginning, because then it was a new republic. It was a risk-taking place, and he liked taking risks. But when he came back, he said, it is not the republic of my imagination. So it disappointed him. A lot of things disappoint Dickens.

He has this vivid imagination of what things are supposed to be, and then when things aren't exactly like that, he reacts quite badly to it. That's absolutely true. One person he didn't react too badly to was Ellen Ternan, the young actress. As you said, she wasn't very well known, but she was very young and very thin and girlish.

So she caught his attention. And he had an affair with her. Was it for a number of years that he had a sort of stashed away? Yes. I mean, the worst part of it is that when he fell in love with her and decided that he wanted to throw in his lot with her, he tried to put his wife in a mental home. Oh, my God.

Yeah. He tried to say that was quite a common ploy of those Victorian and pre-Victorian men. They made out that their wives were mental. But of course, she wasn't mental. She was just fat. That was really the problem. She's diagnosed the doctor writing down, not mental, just fat. And poor Catherine's there with her potato recipes.

Oh my God. And he wrote about her. He wrote a letter to several newspapers. the Times, the Morning Post, and to an American paper saying that she was a bad mother, which was not true. She was not a bad mother. And that her children didn't like her and didn't get on with her,

trying to exonerate himself from the crime of lying about her, of introducing her and ultimately deserting her. In 1857, they separated. and once he'd left the marital home, she never saw him again. Wow. And it was heartbreaking, really, really heartbreaking. And he got the children to support Dickens. And that, I think, is one of the saddest of all stories.

It really is. I've looked at some of the newspaper reports from the time. and I have to say they're very Victorian and so they're quite guarded in what they're saying but the press does seem to be very team Catherine the subtext of it seems to be this guy's writing all these letters

to the press about how shit his wife is and they don't seem to be on his side about this at all no I think most people knew what was going on but it wasn't quite like the newspapers of today when poor

Prince Charles as he was there his love letters were put in the paper and his phone was tapped and all that kind of stuff. I mean, they didn't do that. But it's a story that he really comes out of very badly and deserves to. And that's why my feeling about him is so mixed. Because I love the work. I love the invention, the comedy, the brilliant prose. But I loathe what he actually did.

Yeah. And the interesting thing is, Kathleen's buried in Highgate Cemetery next to her baby daughter, Dora. The letters that Dickens wrote to her, she gave to the British Museum. She said she would and she did. And Ellen Turnan married a clergyman eventually. And she lived on till 1914. So she was quite an old lady when she died. And by an extraordinary, She's buried in South Sea in the same graveyard as Dickens' first love, Mariah Biedwell. Oh, look at that. But Mariah had a pauper's grave. It's now been given a gravestone. I think the local people, the Dickens Society there, erected a gravestone. But at the time, it was just a pauper's grave. Wow.

So, you know, it's such an example of the way that women were treated, I think, in those days. I think so. Because Catherine was just, you know, dumped. And Mariah did the dumping of Dickens. But he took his revenge when he wrote about Flora Finchie. And Ellen Turner, the funny thing about Ellen Turner is she didn't really approve of being a mistress. She didn't want to be his mistress. Oh.

She said that she told somebody that it disgusted her. Oh dear. So she was unwilling. And she excised the 12 years that they were together from her life. It just kind of disappeared. Nobody knew about it. Wow. So she was always considered to be 12 years younger than she really was.

Wow. And they had a son, the clergyman that she married, and he didn't find out about it until he was 70. and he had a breakdown because it was so shocking to him that his mother had behaved like that. So I don't think anybody but Catherine comes out of it well, really. Do you know who else doesn't come out of this very well?

Catherine's sister, that part of the story surprised me because she stayed living with Charles Dickens after he'd built this wall between him and his wife and had tried to have a committed to a mental institution and then a dump her, the sister stayed with him. What? Yes, it's quite interesting. Georgina, I don't think that there was a romantic relationship with her.

Okay. It's possible that she fancied Dickens because he was quite fanciable, certainly in his earlier days, but she was very good to the children. She took over the running of the house and all that sort of thing. But in Catherine's will, she left Georgina her snake ring. Interesting. You think that's like a little bit of shade. That's like a you bitch, I see you.

Well, I think it might mean I know what you did. So who knows? I mean, all right, a man's being a prick. He's behaved appallingly. But that's letting the sister hunt down surely, isn't it? I do feel quite disappointed with her for doing that. Well, maybe on the other hand, it's possible that Catherine said to Georgina, look after the family for me.

Oh, that's true. But all the children went with Charles, except for one. I think it was Plorn who stayed with her. One child stayed with her, a boy, and all the others went with Dickens. And that was a betrayal. That was something that they could have not done that. But he was fascinating. He was full of stories.

He was full of laughter. He made Christmases. made gaiety. He had plays. He knew all the right people. He was in with the top people. And so he was fascinating and irresistible. And Catherine was just a plain, old, fat, disappointed, dumped lady. With potatoes. And she didn't have that. Yes, she had potatoes. Not children. Nothing else. One of my favorite characters, female characters. characters of Dickens is Nancy. I'm endlessly fascinated by Nancy. And I think because mostly what I research is 19th century sex and particular sex work. And Dickens was actually the patron of a

house of fallen women, which was very fashionable in the 19th century, was to save fallen women. And one of my favorite things about Dickens, just talking about like the way he imagined things and then things aren't the same. There was a series of letters that were written to the Times in 1858 called From An Unfortunate. And it was actually a woman that wrote in to be very cross at people that are very patronising to women selling sex. She was really angry with them. She was angry at like this this faux morality and how dare you judge me for doing this. Dickens saw the title but didn't read the letter. But he wrote to the Times, urgently desperately trying to help this poor woman. And then someone explained to him

what was in the letter and he urgently retracted all help because she was. wasn't as penitent and as desperate in need of his help as he'd wanted her to be. And I kind of get the feeling that isn't that... Isn't that revealing? Yeah, he couldn't deal with it at all. He hadn't read it properly. He needed the women in this home to be very penitent and very full of regret and remorse. And please help me, Mr. Dickens. And if they weren't like that, he didn't, he didn't really know what to do with them. Yes, I think that's true. But Urania Cottage, which was the name of this... That's the one.

I don't know what you call home for fallen women. It had a practical purpose because it was to teach them to be servants. And many of them, I think, went out to Australia. And I actually met somebody who was the descendant of one of those women. Wow. Who had got married and done pretty well. And so, you know, it did have some good results. I was kind of pleased, I sort of forgave him for his attitude a bit,

was because he made sure they were taught piano. They were all taught to play the piano, which they probably called piano in those days. But I think that's interesting because, you know, why would a pantry maid or a scullery made or even a housekeeper need to know how to play the piano? but he thought that it was important. And so that was one of the things they were taught.

I love that. I didn't know that, actually. I absolutely love that. His depiction of Nancy, the kind of the original Tart with a Heart type of, do you think that she fits into this silt-like nymph, almost prepubescent, or is she a grotesque?

Or what do you make of Nancy? Because I'm fascinated by this character. I think she's an idealised version. of a prostitute because she speaks very grammatical English. And I don't think that they did particularly. I may be wronging them, but I think that she's a sexual being. That's very clear. And I applaud that because I think that sex is something that Dickens found difficult to put into a book.

Yes. In those days it was. But I think successfully, I mean, there's no descriptions of, you know, hot stuff. in Dickens, you don't get that. But there is an intensity, and you absolutely know that she adores Bill Sykes. Yes. That they fuck all the time, and that she longs for him.

That, I think, is very well depicted. Yeah. But she's a bit idealised. What I do like very much is that she and, as it, Rose, when they meet the last time that Nancy meets her, on the bridge, and they have this sweet girl conversation. And it's so loving and lovely and honest. And I think he was able to show two women talking to each other,

which is not an easy thing for a bloke to do. Many times they don't manage it. But I think that conversation is a triumph of literary accuracy. I think it is, actually. And I think that that would pass the so-called Bechdale test. just about, I think. Who do you think is the sexiest character from Dickens? Who do you think is kind of, you know, like fizzing away beneath the surface?

Who's the sexiest one? Gosh, I never thought in it like that. Well, I mean, probably Nancy. Because it wasn't proper. Sex was not something that women were supposed to take part in. They were subjected to it, but they didn't have fun themselves. I mean, I do love Miss Wade, and who was, you know, the lesbian character. And she said, when we were alone in our bedroom at night,

I would reproach her with my perfect knowledge of her baseness, and she would cry and cry and say I was cruel, and I would hold her in my arms, till morning, loving her as much as ever, and often feeling as if rather than suffer so, i could so hold her in my arms and plunge to the bottom of a river where i would still hold her after we both were dead there's a lot of passion in that and that's lesbian sex he was a man of the world that one wasn't he that it's a dark horse mr dickens well he must have known some one who told him yeah that such things occur and probably when he went to Paris with him Wilkie Collins,

he would have seen them having at it, you know? I think he probably would have done. My final question to you, and I know this is one that you've pondered considerably, but I'm going to ask it of you again anyway. How did you separate the art from the artist? Because he could be a complete prick, this man. He did horrible things,

but his work is undeniably. He's a genius. How do you do that? How do you square that? Ultimately, I don't think you can. You have to just take a choice. And you say, would I rather that Dickens had been a model man, a model husband, a fine father, a faithful human being? Or would I rather have his works to read and enjoy? And I have to say, I would sacrifice Catherine to be able to be able to.

to read Little Dorrit, Bleak House, Great Expectations. In the long run, you have to take the work and let the man go hang. Now, Miriam, before I release you, I have actually got a present for you to say thank you very, very much for coming on this show, because Lord knows you have far more illustrious and lucrative offers. This present is actually from my mum, and we've been speaking about mums. This is from my mum, whose name is Sally. And Sally taught textiles and fashion for her entire career. And when I told her that, I was talking to you, she was so happy. She just thinks that you are incredible. You bring so much joy into her life. And so she thought to herself, what would Miriam Marguerle's really, really like? And this is what she came up with, Miriam. She has handmade you

a vulva cushion. Well, I've never had a vulva. cushion before. Where do I put it? You could put it anywhere you like, Miriam. She's made it tartan because she knows that you've got Scottish connections and she's made the bell into a clitoris. That's a fantastic present and I thank, thanks Sally, thank you Sally very, very much. It's a slightly bigger vulva than I actually own. It's enormous. But I take it as a comprehensive. I take it as a And I am very, very thrilled. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Miriam for joining me.

And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like review and follow along whatever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. We've got episodes on everything from the history of sex toys to the history of boob jobs all coming your way, just because we like to keep it festive over here on betwixt. This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The Senior Producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheet, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit.

This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.