Dickens left £1,000 to the actress he hid for 12 years, and burned 20 years of letters in his garden

Charles and Catherine Dickens separated in May 1858 after 22 years of marriage. A story of the time says Catherine opened a jeweller's packet holding a gold bracelet meant for Ellen Ternan, an actress then 18^†. Dickens told his lawyer to pay Catherine £600 a year. On 3 September 1860 he burned "the accumulated letters and papers of twenty years" at Gad's Hill; three of his children carried basket after basket to the fire. He rented houses under false names at Slough and at Nunhead, where Ternan and her mother lived. On 9 June 1865 Ternan and her mother were travelling with him when their train crashed at Staplehurst in Kent. His 1870 will left Ternan £1,000, the same sum he left his unmarried daughter, and he arranged trust income so she would never need to work. More bonfires of papers followed his funeral. In 1876 Ternan married George Wharton Robinson, 12 years her junior; she gave her age as 14 years younger than it was, and he knew nothing of Dickens. Her place in Dickens's life was not publicly established until the 20th century^†.