Background
Catherine, nicknamed Kate or Katey, was Dickens" youngest surviving daughter, and according to her siblings her father"s favourite child. He named her after his friend William Charles Macready.
Catherine, nicknamed Kate or Katey, was Dickens" youngest surviving daughter, and according to her siblings her father"s favourite child. He named her after his friend William Charles Macready.
As a girl, she also bore the nickname "Lucifer Box" for her hot temper. She travelled widely with her family as a child, and performed in her father"s elaborate amateur theatrical productions — including the 1857 performance of Wilkie Collins"s The Frozen Deep before Queen Victoria. Kate Dickens studied at Bedford College, the first institution of higher learning for women in Britain.
After his death from cancer in 1873, Kate married another artist, Charles Edward Perugini.
She became a successful painter of portraits and genre paintings, sometimes collaborating with Perugini. The Peruginis were active in artistic society, and maintained friendships with J. M. Barrie and George Bernard Shaw among other celebrities of their era.
In 1880 Sir John Everett Millais painted her in one of his "most striking portraits." Millais had previously used her as a model for his painting The Black Brunswicker (1860). She and Perugini had one child, Leonard Ralph Dickens Perugini.
He died on 24 July 1876, at the age of seven months.