The Tyrant Years

The Tyrant Years is a 1958 Australian radio play by Joy Hollyer about the last years in the life of Charles Dickens.

"At 45, (1857), Dickens was at the height of his powers.

But at home his personal life was beginning to break up.

His pallid wife, Catherine, was quite inadequate for him and his attention turned to a beautiful young actress, Ellen Ternan.

It is from this point that Joy Hollyer develops the complicated and absorbingly interesting pattern of a brilliantly successful and vital man growing old and unwilling to accept age.