A passage or two may be quoted from the novel, so that we may set them beside passages in Dickens’s own life, which we know to have referred to his own wife, and not to any such nebulous person as Mrs. Winter.

The shadow I have mentioned that was not to be between us any more, but was to rest wholly on my heart—­how did that fall?  The old unhappy feeling pervaded my life.  It was deepened, if it were changed at all; but it was as undefined as ever, and addressed me like a strain of sorrowful music faintly heard in the night.  I loved my wife dearly; but the happiness I had vaguely anticipated, once, was not the happiness I enjoyed, and there was always something wanting.

What I missed I still regarded as something that had been a dream of my youthful fancy; that was incapable of realization; that I was now discovering to be so, with some natural pain, as all men did.  But that it would have been better for me if my wife could have helped me more, and shared the many thoughts in which I had no partner, and that this might have been I knew.

What I am describing slumbered and half awoke and slept again in the innermost recesses of my mind.  There was no evidence of it to me; I knew of no influence it had in anything I said or did.  I bore the weight of all our little cares and all my projects.

“There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.”  These words I remembered.  I had endeavored to adapt Dora to myself, and found it impracticable.  It remained for me to adapt myself to Dora; to share with her what I could, and be happy; to bear on my own shoulders what I must, and be still happy.

Thus wrote Dickens in his fictitious character, and of his fictitious wife.  Let us see how he wrote and how he acted in his own person, and of his real wife.

As early as 1856, he showed a curious and restless activity, as of one who was trying to rid himself of unpleasant thoughts.  Mr. Forster says that he began to feel a strain upon his invention, a certain disquietude, and a necessity for jotting down memoranda in note-books, so as to assist his memory and his imagination.  He began to long for solitude.  He would take long, aimless rambles into the country, returning at no particular time or season.  He once wrote to Forster: 

I have had dreadful thoughts of getting away somewhere altogether by myself.  If I could have managed it, I think I might have gone to the Pyrenees for six months.  I have visions of living for half a year or so in all sorts of inaccessible places, and of opening a new book therein.  A floating idea of going up above the snow-line, and living in some astonishing convent, hovers over me.

What do these cryptic utterances mean?  At first, both in his novel and in his letters, they are obscure; but before long, in each, they become very definite.  In 1856, we find these sentences among his letters: