Clearly, she could have given the world a unique account of his character and life, and her part in it. Yet, although she was intelligent, well educated and able to express herself in writing – among other things, she helped her sister research and write a literary biography in the 1890s – she never wrote a line about him. In fact, she left no written trace, and precious little spoken record, of the fact that she had even known him.
She was wholly excluded from the great biography of Dickens written by his friend John Forster, who knew her well. No letter to her from Dickens, or from her to Dickens, appears to have survived, and there is no mention of her in the first edition of his letters, which was prepared by two of her close friends, Georgina Hogarth, his sister-in-law, and Mary (Mamey) Dickens, his elder daughter. When in 1905 The Dickensian, a scholarly and celebratory magazine, was founded, and its editors were keen to publish reminiscences by anyone who had actually known the great man, no approach was made to Nelly or any other member of her family; and neither she nor her surviving sister Fanny volunteered any contribution.
Nelly was not the only member of her family to be blotted out. Fanny, a remarkable woman by any standards, who had also known Dickens well, got similar treatment in the three-volume autobiography of her own husband, Thomas Adolphus Trollope. She is there but only as a very shadowy figure. This was not spite, for he was devoted to her, and she to him. It was fear of gossip, of scandal, of disgrace. Thomas, born in 1810, was the elder brother of Anthony and as prolific as all the writing Trollopes; his autobiography is a book of considerable charm, studded with famous literary names. It appeared in the late 1880s and contained a particularly pleasant account of Dickens, whom he had known well. Trollope also knew his sister-in-law Nelly well; she stayed in his Italian and English houses on many occasions; but you would not guess as much from his book. Nor can you glean from it the names of Fanny’s parents and sisters, or anything about her hardworking professional past.
Nelly and Fanny Ternan were written out for two reasons. The first and obvious one is that Nelly was a blot on the good name of Dickens, and the Dickens machinery for public relations was unrivalled. Dickens wished to be, and was, generally worshipped – the word is not too strong for a person who evoked comparison with Christ at the time of his death – as a man of unblemished character, the incarnation of broad Christian virtue and at the same time of domestic harmony and conviviality. The jolly domestic part of his reputation had been acquired young, through his early novels and his notably exuberant and hospitable family life; it had been crowned by his Christmas stories and never dislodged. It came to exasperate his percipient daughter Kate, but the very fact of her exasperation shows how firmly the legend was established and sedulously kept going in the reminiscences of his more pious children. Amazing as it now seems, the break-up of his family left it unaffected; Dickens preserved his renown as the jovial keeper of hearth, home, children and dogs at Gad’s Hill even as he was ridding himself of wife and children.
The public swallowed the carefully maintained domestic image, but it would have been too much to expect it to accept the presence of Nelly in Dickens’s life. There is evidence that he himself wavered about this point once or twice, but his friends did not. They made him see the impossibility of any public acknowledgement of a relationship with her; they were also, as a body, remarkable for their loyal silence. Forster’s decision not to name or explain her in the biography has been mentioned; it left an emptiness in the chapters covering the last years of Dickens’s life which no subsequent biographer has been able to fill properly. Wilkie Collins, himself a master of the discreet irregular ménage, remained totally discreet about his friend, as did Frank Beard, who was doctor to both Collins and Dickens and can’t have failed to know their private circumstances. So did the other younger men who undoubtedly knew something, the journalists George Augustus Sala and Edmund Yates, and Dickens’s manager, George Dolby. So did Harry Wills, Dickens’s assistant on his weekly magazine and his confidant in all private matters. Wills and Collins failed only in not destroying all Dickens’s letters to them, some of which contained indiscreet remarks.
Dickens’s large circle of theatrical friends was also staunchly reticent. The best of these, the retired tragedian William Charles Macready, should, in theory at any rate, have particularly regretted the circumstances of the case, because Macready had struggled all his life to raise the tone of theatrical life and the reputation of actors and actresses; and yet here was Dickens involving himself with a young actress, to the danger of both their reputations. It confirmed all the stereotyped views of the profession. Not only that: Nelly was the daughter of an esteemed colleague of Macready. He had known her father and acted opposite her mother through many seasons.
This leads us to the other reason for the blotting out of the name of Ternan. The Ternans were a theatrical clan. Nelly, her two sisters, her mother, her aunt and her grandmother were all on the stage, mostly from infancy upwards. They were part of a subculture of British life which, throughout the nineteenth century, was viewed by the rest of society with at best equivocal feelings, at worst alarm. ‘And you knew that this person was on the stage, and you introduced her into my son’s family?’: the words are put by Thackeray into the mouth of a grandmother who discovers that the modest and blameless family governess was once on the stage. ‘Pack your trunks, viper! and quit the house this instant,’ she commands; and the governess’s admirer, a respectable young doctor, drops her at the same point, with bitter words of blame.1 Thackeray himself isn’t taking sides; the governess is a victim, but she is also deceitful, and the theatre is an immoral place. He lets her marry her widowed employer, but he’s a bit frightened of her cool ambition.
This jump from actress to governess to lady of the house was made in reality by Fanny Ternan six years after Thackeray’s story appeared; and Dickens was in some sense the agent of her change, since it was he who recommended her as governess to the child of his widowed friend Tom Trollope. After the marriage – which took place within five months of her appointment – neither Fanny nor anyone around her breathed a word about her past career again.
Deceitful perhaps. But the point is that they felt it as necessary to practise this deceit as Dickens felt it necessary to hide his association with Nelly. The Ternan sisters effaced their theatrical past, because it was such a liability; because it prevented them from being seen in any light but a theatrical light, and a theatrical light was one that blotted out everything else, disqualified them from any other consideration. Or so they believed. It may seem extraordinary – incomprehensible – to us now. It becomes less so if we go back and examine the world in which they were raised and the assumptions made by the people they lived among. The fact that Nelly always expressed particular dislike for the work of Thackeray suggests that she may have recognized and winced at the accuracy of his picture; and actresses, ex-actresses and the children of actresses make many appearances in his pages. The dancer turned governess has shared the stage with ladies who allowed themselves to be installed in cottages in Regent’s Park by rich men. Emily Fotheringay, star of the provinces, dazzles innocent young Pendennis and nearly leads him astray with the help of her scheming old Irish father. Morgiana Crump is the daughter of a dancer who has been married to her aristocratic lover’s valet, paid off in turn with a public house and a dowry for the child.2 Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair is also the child of theatrical folk and is herself a terrific mimic, a skill she uses to ingratiate herself on her upward social path. Thackeray loved the theatre and was fascinated by it for exactly the reasons which made the Ternan sisters escape from and deny it: it existed outside the world of Victorian middle-class values of careful self-respect and dignified self-improvement. It appeared to be sexually emancipated, in that it displayed women who were willing to show themselves off, tendering a promise of sophisticated pleasure. Its market values were also more down to earth – some would say more honest – than those of the drawing room.
Thackeray
, Dickens and Macready all belonged to a club named for the great eighteenth-century actor David Garrick, founded in 1831 with the particular purpose of ‘bringing together the patrons of the drama and its professors’ and becoming a place ‘in which actors and men of education and refinement might meet on equal terms’. This was certainly one of its chief attractions for Dickens, who had a passion for the theatre and made serious preparations to go on the stage professionally himself in 1832; he was an early member of the Garrick, elected in January 1837 when he was only twenty-four years old, already a successful and distinguished writer, and newly married.
The ‘professors of the drama’ mentioned in the prospectus of the club were all, of course, male, although David Garrick was never averse to the company of actresses. Yet the idea of a woman member of the Garrick Club was unthinkable (and still is today). For women patrons and professors of the drama, equal terms have meant simply that the walls of the club are hung with portraits of actresses. Pictures are one thing, people quite another. ‘Well, perhaps in the next world women will be more valued than they are in this,’ grumbled the great Mrs Sarah Siddons. She knew exactly how equivocal was the admiration accorded even to great actresses.
Nelly’s portrait is not on the walls of the Garrick, but she did at least reach the steps outside. It was on these steps of the old building that a group of members was standing together on a May evening in 1858, gossiping enjoyably. The subject of their gossip was their fellow member Charles Dickens, by then the best-known writer in England and, doubtless, in the world. Dickens had just separated formally from his wife Catherine after twenty-two years of marriage: an almost unheard-of action in high Victorian England. He had done it brutally and publicly. Catherine was not renowned for her beauty or her wit, but she was a clearly blameless mother of ten; and he had insisted on taking her children from her and keeping them under his own care and that of Catherine’s younger sister, Georgina Hogarth, who was so much in thrall to Dickens that she braved her family’s outrage and the disapproval of the public to remain with him. Only the eldest son, Charley, defied his father and declared he would make his home with his mother.
Dickens was now in the process of quarrelling with anyone who did not accept his version of the separation without question or murmur. He attributed it to a deep and long-established incompatability between himself and Catherine, made worse by her failure to take any interest in her own children; according to his account, which was backed by Georgina, she did not love them. Dickens went so far as to say that Catherine herself had long desired a separation and that she suffered from a ‘mental disorder’. This was flagrantly untrue, as anyone who knew the family could testify; but he was beyond the reach of reason at this point. Gossip had it that Georgina was the real cause of the trouble, and it was this that was being discussed at the Garrick. The idea of a member of the club so distinguished for his celebration of the domestic virtues being caught out in a love affair with a young sister-in-law was certainly scandalous enough to cause a stir of excitement.
As Dickens’s fellow author and member Thackeray arrived for the evening, he was asked for his opinion. At once and authoritatively he denied that the sister-in-law was the cause of the trouble. He had been told the truth at Epsom races. The affair was not with her at all: ‘No says I no such thing – it’s with an actress.’ Thackeray’s inner reaction, which he set down in a letter to his mother, was dismay at what such a lapse might do to the always slightly precarious reputation of literary men: ‘O dear me it’s a fatal story for our trade.’3
When Thackeray’s words were brought to Dickens, who was equally sensitive to the reputation of the literary trade, he sent him an angry denial. Thackeray obviously did not believe it, and the two men ceased to be friends; they had further reasons for falling out, but Thackeray made a point of being cordial to Mrs Dickens and showing her continuous courtesy and kindness; we hear of her dining at his house in later years. Dickens was left with his denial and Thackeray with the view that the man was frantic, ‘half mad about his domestic affairs’. Early in June the story reached The New York Times. Its London correspondent reported that ‘All London … had for some time been rife with legends concerning Dickens and an actress, with whom it was at last affirmed that the author of David Copperfield had eloped to Boulogne.’4 The paper went on to say it was all a lying scandal; this was probably not much comfort to its subject.
Dickens, as is well known, published a statement both in The Times and in his own magazine, Household Words – it appeared a few days after The New York Times story – in which he denied all the allegations against him. He also forced his in-laws to retract their accusations as a condition for making a proper settlement on Catherine, and he never acknowledged thereafter that he had any private connection with any actress. He was so successful in imposing his version of what had happened on the world that when, sixty years after his death, it was first publicly stated that he had kept a mistress and that she had been an actress, the British public was deeply upset and outraged, and there was a general tendency to protest that it could not be true. In my own family my grandmother’s distress is still remembered.
Nor was Nelly very kindly treated on her first appearances in print. From being too bad to be mentioned at all, she became mentionable chiefly to be blamed for her failure to give Dickens what he had hoped for. Wrong to succumb to Dickens, wrong in failing to make him happy, wrong finally because she said later she regretted the whole thing: this became one popular view of her. ‘Mercenary’ and ‘cold’ were two of the regular allegations made against her. Edmund Wilson, the most brilliant and influential of Dickens’s twentieth-century critics, saddled her with the character of Estella, the girl reared to torment the male sex in Great Expectations: he suggested Nelly was frigid, indifferent, petulant, spoiled and proud. He also wrote that money was ‘one of the things that Ellen got out of her liaison with Dickens’: true, though not necessarily as disgraceful as Wilson seemed to think. With a last glancing blow he added that ‘it seems to be the general opinion that Ellen was neither so fascinating nor so gifted as Dickens thought her’.5 He returned to the attack in 1952 in his Foreword to Ada Nisbet’s short, scholarly study of the evidence for the Dickens-Ternan affair; this time he called her ‘not very imaginative or sensitive and not very much interested in Dickens’ and held her responsible for leaving him ‘without human contacts’, though he did concede that ‘she may not have been so bad as that’ in his concluding sentence.6
Wilson’s remarks were followed by Edgar Johnson’s massive biography of 1952, which has become the standard one. Johnson approached Nelly more cautiously, in flutters of rhetorical questions: ‘Did he [Dickens] suspect her … of being calculating and mercenary? Was his tenderness … shot through with the bitterness of disillusion?’; he asked ‘in what abyss of personal agony’ Dickens learned about cold obduracy and love without tenderness or illusion; and whether the promised fictional struggle between Helena Landless and Jasper in Edwin Drood might refer to a real struggle between Dickens and Nelly. On some points Johnson was absolutely clear, though. Dickens had ‘won Ellen against her will, wearing down her resistance by sheer force of desperate determination’; and there was no doubt that she ‘failed his need’.7
In the scale of things Nelly is not an important person. No one would have begun to think about her were it not for Dickens, standing like a giant over the Victorian age, the creator of a dramatic language for his characters that fixes them forever in the mind, and of great set pieces that speak directly to the reader with a verve, a confidence, a springing rhythm, an individuality no other English novelist can rival. But just because Dickens chronicled and charted so much of the life of his generation and protested against so many of its wrongs, his failures and omissions seem all the more striking. He turned his attention on to his own childhood to such good effect that the vulnerability (and resilience) of children is one of his most common and confidently handled themes; against this his difficulty when it c
omes to creating credible women stands out sharply. Grotesques he can do, Sairey Gamp and Mrs Gummidge; before normal female flesh and blood he falters. As his own daughter Kate said, ‘My father did not understand women.’8
Whether Dickens understood the woman in his life about whom we know least any better than the others seemed a question worth looking into, even if the material was slender. That was my point of departure. Very soon the quest became something different, its connection with Dickens more tangential. I found, of course, that Nelly’s story starts long before her meeting with Dickens and continues long after his death. It is full of surprises and, in parts, is as curious as one of Dickens’s own plots. It casts light over a whole area of nineteenth-century life which is still very shadowy: first the world of professional actresses, then the world of women who knew themselves to be bad and were condemned by respectable people. These are not areas much explored by Dickens, perhaps because he felt them to be too painful, too raw, too dangerous; he knew that in fiction his readers had to be told that bad women came to bad ends. Nelly, flanked by her two remarkable sisters and her courageous mother, is a small piece of reality to set against the omissions and evasions of Victorian fiction: a complicated and resourceful young woman who was very nearly crushed by the huge weight of Dickens on her life, and who fought to save herself in the only way she knew.
Biographies of Dickens appear at a rate of rather more than one to the decade; there have been six major ones since the war, buttressed by a great many studies, two volumes of biographical reminiscences of his contemporaries, a Dickens Index and a complete chronology of his life. More important than any of these is the Pilgrim Edition of his letters which, as I write, has reached its sixth volume and the year 1852: a work of impeccable and exhaustive scholarship which offers not only the best key to Dickens’s personality but also, to any reader who cares to browse in its thick underlay of footnotes, a rich general impression of the age in which he lived. The great man and the great writer deserve no less. Yet no one can read Dickens without absorbing his interest in the apparently insignificant, the lesser figures at the edge of the picture, the unknown men, women and children inhabiting the uncharted areas of English society; the poor and the shabby genteel, those who thronged the packed, dirty London streets and the packed, dirty places of entertainment; those who hung on to respectability by their fingernails, and those who let go. One reason for his popularity was precisely this, that his sympathies were with the little people rather than the great. It provides as good a starting point as any for looking into the life of the small figure of the undistinguished actress half hidden at the edge of the Dickensian panorama, Wilson’s ‘commonplace’ person who has so far attracted little interest in her own right and still less sympathy.9
The Invisible Woman Page 2
