Dickens and the festive season are now so synonymous that I often find myself rifling through his dusty old pages to check whether Tiny Tim had a secret recipe for giblet gravy or Mary Peerybingle novel ideas about seafood canapés. And most importantly what he, or rather they, had to say about cheese.
It’s one of the quirks of patriarchal literary history that so few of us know that Mrs Dickens (Catherine or ‘Kate’, née Hogarth) was herself a writer, most famously of What Shall We have For...
