A lot of gossip has been spread over the years about Charles Dickens' domestic life, but a number of facts remain clear. After an unhappy love affair with Maria Beadnell, young Charles quickly rebounded and in 1836 married Catherine Hogarth, his boss's eldest daughter. It was a cozy arrangement at first; Catherine, Charles, and Catherine's sister Mary lived together and seemed quite happy until Mary's tragic, untimely death in 1837. Over the course of many years of childbearing, Catherine, not surprisingly, changed. Dickens expressed to a friend that he and Catherine were "not made for each other" and that she would have been "a thousand times happier" if she had married someone else. It wasn’t long before Dickens fell in love again—with a woman much younger than his wife. Learn more about the private life of one of the most iconic writers of the Victorian period in this article, made available by The World & I Online.