Charles Dickens was a man of many biographers. To create a fictional version of Ellen Ternan, I have drawn primarily on Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens and Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens: A Life. Of course, Tomalin is also Ternan’s biographer. Her groundbreaking 1990 book, The Invisible Woman, was part of what inspired me to imagine how exactly Nelly managed the compromises she did; a postscript to the paperback edition floats the intriguing hypothesis that Dickens suffered his final stroke not in his own home at Gad’s Hill but at Peckham with Nelly.
The neglected Catherine Dickens is the subject of an excellent biography and social history by Lillian Nayder, The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth. Nayder is the person who actually calculated that Dickens and his wife were probably practising abstinence around the period of his first American tour. Mrs. Dickens’ menu book was originally published as a pamphlet, but it can be found today, reproduced in full, in the culinary history Dinner for Dickens by Susan M. Rossi-Wilcox, a book that explains how the family ate and entertained.
We do know that in childhood Dickens read and enjoyed what he called The Arabian Nights; he makes numerous references to its characters and settings in his novels. He would have known the stories through popular English translations of the early eighteenth-century French translation by Antoine Galland. There are many versions of The Thousand and One Nights—the text is fluid and much disputed—and numerous contemporary reissues of the more scholarly English-language translations that began appearing in the mid-nineteenth century. (I used a recent Penguin edition of Richard Burton’s 1880 translation.) But for the contemporary reader who just wants to sample the tales, by far the most delectable taste is to be had in Hanan Al-Shaykh’s 2011 retelling, One Thousand and One Nights, which features a mere nineteen of Scheherazade’s stories.
When it came to fashioning the contemporary characters in Serial Monogamy, Hamid Sodeifi, Azar Masoumi and Pegatha Taylor helped me create Al by commenting on the section about his childhood in Tehran. Meanwhile Andrew Taylor advised about academic careers, Hannah Carolan provided information about triple-negative breast cancer and Jane Coults helped with proofreading. I am also indebted to the Toronto Arts Council for a grant that allowed me time to complete a first draft, while much of my research was conducted at various branches of the ever reliable Toronto Public Library.
My agent Dean Cooke was an enthusiastic advocate for the novel from the start, as was editor Nita Pronovost, who originally acquired an early draft for Doubleday Canada. There it was skilfully massaged by Martha Kanya Forstner, whose wisdom about fictional characters was indispensable. I am always indebted, for their loving support, to my parents, J.H. and Mary Taylor; my husband, Joel Sears; my son, Jed Sears; and my much-missed friend Teresa Mazzitelli, who died while I was researching this book.