The rag & bone shop

by Jeff Rackham

"At the height of his career Charles Dickens was arguably the most beloved man in all of Victorian England. While Dickens shared his public self with the former, only Wilkie Collins knew the great man's most private motives. Chief among these was his absolute need to keep secret his affair with Ellen Ternan, a childlike actress from a family of traveling players. Barely eighteen when she met him, Ellen Ternan was everything Dickens' wife Catherine was not: boyishly slim, discreet, self-possessed, and, despite a sometimes bawdy career on the London stage, quietly demure. Though it ranged over a dozen years and two continents, theirs was a secret successfully kept from the public for nearly a hundred years. The Rag & Bone Shop is a novel of Charles Dickens' very real, but little known, excursion outside the bounds of conventional Victorian morality; an engrossing tale that illuminates the warring demands of public propriety and private libertinism. Told in the alternating voices of Dicke