But Dickens increasingly found her dull and passive, and when he was in his mid-forties he fell in love with a nineteen year old actress, Ellen Turner.
To even the little manliness his classical prototypes possessed, though, he can lay no claim whatever, being a listless effeminate noodle, on the shady side of forty.
She says, " And did you notice that woman in her early forties and the forty-ish man, each traveling alone? " " Early forties, " we've already described.