My Father As I Recall Him...

The Ladies' Home Journal - February 1892
Source: The Ladies' Home Journal

The Ladies' Home Journal, originally based in New York, is a long-running American women's monthly magazine, now published by the Meredith Corporation.
The Ladies' Home Journal began publication in 1883 as
"The Ladies' Home Journal and Practical Housekeeper".
It dropped the latter part of the name in the late 1880s.
In 2014, the Meredith Corporation announced that the magazine would no longer be a monthly
but a special interest magazine as of July 2014.
Production of these special issues is in the Meredith Corporation headquarters, Iowa.
Mary (Mamie) Dickens (1838-1896) was Dickens' eldest daughter.
She remained with her father until his death in 1870.
Mamie never married.
My Father As I Recall Him was not published as a book until shortly after Mamie's death in 1896.
Charles Dickens (1812-1870)



eldest of ten children
a father intent on writing
even being the characters in his novels
mirroring them

could there possibly be
any room for
a child

her father adored Gad's Hill
and animals

he felt intense compassion for
the sick and suffering

his own novels revealed
he had a great knowledge of
and sympathy for
children not his own


but
could there possibly be
any room for
any loving room
for one child


his child

his eldest daughter

MY GOOD READS REVIEW
My Father as I Recall Him by Mamie Dickens
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Mamie's writings are so sad and almost painful. Knowing other dimensions of her father Charles Dickens' life, there is a feeling that Mamie must be blind, must be in denial that her father could possibly be anything other than a just, a kind and loving man to all - even animals. Perhaps Mamie is recording the father that she would like Dickens to be. After all, Mamie never left her father when he separated from her mother, Catherine. Mamie was there when Dickens died of stroke. It almost seems that her whole life, her reason for being revolved around her father. Little routines - such as Christmas celebrations, being granted time in her father's study while he worked - become idolised moments. Mamie never seems to leave behind the child she was, longing for her father's love. That is so sad, so painful.

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MY AMAZON REVIEW
Mamie is the eldest of ten siblings. Her father is the respected writer Charles Dickens. Mamie seems to feel a sense of urgency to expel shady rumours about the life of her father. Nowhere in her writing does she judge her father, nor even mention some of the tensions with his wife Catherine Hogarth whom he publicly slandered. Mamie doesn't mention her father's separation from his wife in 1858 or his intimate relationship with actress Ellen Ternan. Mamie mentions a train crash which seemed to haunt her father's life, but does not mention that Ellen and Ellen's mother were on the train with her father at the time. For Mamie, Charles Dickens is the ideal father, a home man, kind, caring and good. Her book almost seems to be written from a child's perspective, in a child's words - so odd, because Mamie was just over 50 years old when her writing was first published in 'The Ladies Home Journal'. Mamie seems to blindly idolise her father. But then, is she a child desperate for love?