The
Times May
10 1929
MRS
PERUGINI
CHARLES
DICKENS’S DAUGHTER
We regret to
announce that Mrs Kate Perugini, the only surviving daughter of Charles
Dickens, died yesterday in her 90th year. She was a lady of rare charm and
humour, who if she had not been a painter would assuredly would have made a
name as a writer. From her early childhood she won the hearts of all who
knew her, beginning with her father’s literary and artistic circle, to the
youngest generations in her long life.
Mrs Perugini was the
second daughter and the third child of Charles Dickens, and was born at 18
Doughty-street, London on October 29, 1839, about the time her father was
completing “Nicholas Nickleby.” She was christened Katherine Elizabeth
Macready, her third name being after her father’s lifelong friend the
famous actor Macready, who stood godfather, an honour of which he was very
proud, as his references in his diary reveal. She did not care for any of
her Christian names, and at an early age adopted the simple on of Kate,
which she used all through her life, though she was also known as Kitty.
Dickens, in addition to furnishing each of his children with three names,
usually after his distinguished friends, also found a suitable nickname for
each, and accordingly in the family Mrs Perugini was always known as
“Lucifer Box,” “from a lurking propensity to Fieryness” as her
father explained. She soon became a great favourite with him by reason of
her bright, and merry disposition. And she took a prominent part in the
musical enjoyments and dancings, which formed a feature of her home. On one
occasion, indeed, when she was ten years old, she and her elder sister Mamie
had taken much pains to teach her father the polka, that he might dance it
with them at their brother’s birthday festivity. This they did with
complete success, because, according to John Forster, on the occasion of the
festivity he seems to have excelled even the youngest performer in untiring
vigour and vivacity.
Even in her teens she
was showing spirit and independence, for when Phance’s gorgeous extravaganza Fortunio
and the Seven Gifted Servants was acted at Dicken’s house at Tavistock-square
in 1855 the bill of the play announced that
the “Engagement of Miss Kate, who declined the munificent offers of
the management last season.” However, she also became a member of the
company of players in her father’s private theatricals, afterwards playing
Rosina in “Mr
Nightingale’s Diary” in the same year, and various other parts in
subsequent performances, and was a special favourite always, among the
distinguished company of authors, musicians, and artists who figured in the
casts. Three portraits of her are reproduced in Mr. Matz’s edition of
Forster’s Life of Dickens, one in a group of children drawn by Maclise in
1842, another as a young woman from a painting by Marcus Stone, and the
third from a painting by her second husband. She was also the model for the
girl in Millais’s “The Black Brunswicker,” which was exhibited in
1860.
In that year she
married Charles Alston Collins, youngest son of William Collins RA, and
brother of Wilkie Collins the novelist. He had been an artist of repute and
a keen follower of the Pre-Raphaelite school, exhibiting at the Royal
Academy, but his inclination led him finally to literature, in which he
showed much taste and humour. He was a frequent contributor to Dickens’s
paper Household Words, and
to other journals. Two of his works of substantial merit, “The New
Sentimental Journey” and “A Cruise Upon Wheels,” which is of
particular interest, because it was a humorous account of his and Kate’s
honeymoon, which they spent driving around France in a sort of French gig.
Unhappily Collins’s health broke down, and he died in 1873, in his 45th
year.
In about the year 1875
Mrs Collins married Carlo Perugini, who also born in 1839 of Italian
parents, was brought to England when an infant, and was entirely English by
habit and disposition. When a youth Perugini entered the studio of Ary
Scheffer in Paris, and curiously enough was there when Dickens was sitting
for his portrait to Scheffer, accompanied on each of these visits by his
daughter Kate, though the young artist did not see her then. If ever there
was a happy marriage, this was one. Perugini was a man of great charm,
somewhat of the Leighton school. He was a man of peculiar fascination, with
a quiet, refined manner which friends found most attractive. Mrs Perugini,
had been herself devoted to painting and drawing from her earliest youth,
and had begun her studies when quite a girl at Bedford College, London. She
now took art as her profession, and exhibited at the London galleries, many
portraits of children and young persons, with whom she was most successful.
She painted two pictures inspired by her father’s books-one exhibited at
the Royal Academy in 1893 entitled “Brother and Sister” (Paul and
Florence Dombey), and the other entitled “Little Nell.”
In their charming
house………………..where each had a studio, and each happy in their
own work, Mr and Mrs Perugini gathered round them a remarkable circle of
people eminent in literature, art, and music, and every one fell in love
with “Kitty” as most of them called her. Her charm and natural gift for
genuine friendship, and the happy companionship in which she and her husband
lived made a visit to their home a sheer delight. For Mrs Perugini inherited
her father’s characteristics of wit, whimsicality, common sense in all
things, and a broad outlook on life and humanity. She was a brilliant but at
the same time thoughtful talker. Her conversation was full of fun, her eyes
seemed to sparkle in the enjoyment of it, her radiant and honest smile
lighting up her beautiful face. Her marriage lasted till December 22, 1918,
when, to her intense grief Carlo Perugini died; he was one of the last of
the inner circle of eminent painters of the period which included Leighton,
Millais, Fred Walker, Marcus Stone, and Val Prinsep. There was only one
child of the marriage, who died in infancy.
Mrs Peugini possessed
the secret of growing old gracefully; indeed she seemed to grow more
beautiful and charming with the years. All her faculties were bright and
luminous to the end, and at her ripe age was as to the friends around her as
in those early exciting, youthful days in her father’s house, when she
captivated every one of his friends and
famous contemporaries. If she had adopted literature as a profession
she would have achieved distinction. She had a ready pen, was full of
romance, and expressed herself perfectly. And, although she did not publish
much-only an anthology of her father’s humour, a few articles and
occasional poems, she wrote much during her long life, but she could not be
prevailed upon to write her reminiscences. It is known that she wrote a book
about her father and his friends, but it is also known that when her husband
died she burnt the manuscript, after meditating whether she should publish
it or not. She loved her father, not primarily because he was a great
writer, but because he was a great Englishman whose qualities as a human
being she much preferred to talk about.
Of late years she had
lived secluded and never left her house, but she loved to have visits from
old friends, who themselves loved to go and see her and enjoy the charm of
her company for a short time. She was a lovable woman most fascinating in
manner, with a sense of humour that she must have inherited from her father,
an artist to the tips of her fingers, ever loyal to her friends and with a
wonderful patience in the physical discomforts of her later years. It is
given to few people to make as many loyal and loving friends as she did, and
to leave such kindly memories behind her as she will to those who survive
her.
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