From Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley:

“Every novel is a logical argument —an assertion of the author’s sense of what life is, embodied in characters, plots, and images.”

Dickens “took up the habit of long, vigorous daily walks that seem almost unimaginable today for an otherwise very busy man with many obligations. At a pace of twelve to fifteen minutes per mile, he regularly covered twenty and sometimes thirty miles.” Unimaginable, indeed! Those were four to six hour walks!

“Dickens’s letters increasingly betray dissatisfaction with Catherine’s ‘slowness’ and her invariable postpartum depressions. It seems not to have occurred to him that curbing his own appetites and relieving her from an endless cycle of pregnancy and parturition was a possibility.” The Dickenses had nine children in fifteen years; then Mr. Dickens divorced his wife in a fit of what we would now probably call midlife crisis.

Ah, but he wrote wonderful novels!