The Invisible Woman

by Claire Tomalin

  (illustration credit 3.1)

  So they made their calculations and laid their plans. For the last months of Mrs Ternan’s pregnancy they moved to Rochester. William Ternan was prospering at his barge business, and the two families were on friendly terms, so that it seemed a good place for the wanderers to settle as the birth of another child approached; and there the third Ternan daughter was born, on 3 March 1839, in a small house in Maidstone Road. She was taken to be christened at St Nicholas’s on the last day of the month; her parents named her Ellen Lawless.

  It’s a name with a marvellously dramatic ring, as though the child’s christening gift were a licence to defy order and convention; though the prosaic truth is that Ellen’s second name came from her great-grandfather, the Dublin brewer. Fanny, now three and a half, welcomed the blue-eyed, golden-haired baby from the start, and the bonds between the three little girls were tied fast from the earliest years. Probably none of them had too much parental attention at this point, and they made their own little world together. Their mother was acting at the Lyceum in London in the summer; nobody even remembered to register Ellen’s birth until the end of July, when it was done by a nursemaid. Soon afterwards the family set off for the north once more, leaving Rochester, with its castle over the Medway, its cathedral and cloister, ancient courts, picturesque houses and shabby little theatre, for the altogether livelier and more prosperous Newcastle.

  Newcastle gave the new actor-manager an enthusiastic welcome. Ternan determined to do things in style. He printed bills to announce his plans, begging ‘most respectfully to announce to the Nobility, Gentry, and the Public of Newcastle and its Vicinity’ that he was to be sole manager, with a special stage manager and another ‘melodramatic director’, a new wardrobe, a ‘full and efficient orchestra’ and a large company recruited from all the major theatres in the country.

  Among them was the Bullen family from Norwich: Mr Bullen was to be prompter, his wife was an actress, and their daughter took child parts. But the season had hardly got under way when Ternan and Bullen fell out; a performance of The Winter’s Tale was scheduled in January, with Miss Bullen as Leontes’s small son Mamillius. By then the Bullens were packing their bags. The situation was saved by little Fanny. Mrs Ternan had played the part herself as a child and was confident that her daughter could do the same. Ternan, never one to lose a chance of making a splash, told the printers to get out their biggest type and produced bills announcing the ‘first appearance on any stage’ of Miss Fanny Ternan, 27 January 1840. She went on with perfect aplomb, spoke her lines clearly and was enthusiastically applauded. She was three and a half, and her career as a genuine infant phenomenon was launched.

  Nelly’s earliest memories must have been connected with her sister’s stage career, for Fanny was kept very busy. Her father saw the value of her precocity, and her repertoire was constantly extended. By the time she was five, she danced, sang, recited her own poems, did male impersonations – they included Richard III – spoke in different accents – French, American, Scots – and appeared in sketches in which she played all the parts, holding the stage without support from anyone. With all this she was described as ‘unforced, wild and natural’; ‘her manner is pleasing, perfectly easy and confident, without any of that awkwardness too often observable in children brought upon the stage’.18 Her father was enormously proud of his little prodigy; he used to carry her about on his shoulder and invite her to improvise in verse, an accomplishment she added to her repertoire before she was eight.

  The picture of a father ambitious for his outstandingly gifted child and also warmly affectionate is an attractive one. In 1840 and 1841 the Ternans looked like a family that has come into good fortune and happiness. Ternan commissioned a bust of his eldest daughter from a local sculptor.19 The Newcastle audiences appreciated their new actor-manager; in 1840 Ternan also acquired the lease of the Doncaster Theatre and began negotiations for York and Hull. To add to his dignity, he had become a Freemason. The family moved to larger premises in Pilgrim Street. Mrs Ternan kept a devoted following; even the stage-door keeper sang her praises in verse. He laid particular emphasis on the fact that she performed with perfect regularity on alternate nights, perhaps to give herself the other nights at home with the children. The two younger sisters promised to follow in Fanny’s footsteps; Maria showed signs of a sharp wit, and Nelly was a little beauty. Fanny found her adorable enough to address some verses to her, invoking her blue eyes and golden hair, and rhapsodizing with more truth than she could know that:

  I love her now – I’ll love her then

  I’ll love her while I live

  And any thing that she may ask

  To her I’ll gladly give.20

  Not lines of genius, but Fanny was only just seven when she produced them in September 1842; and they were enough to make Maria jealous. Good Fanny obliged by producing a second poem for her, which I will not inflict on the reader.

  As stage children, their education was different from that of most girls of the period, less domestic and almost entirely concerned with professional achievement. In many ways this was an advantage, in that they were being educated to do something rather than simply to be something; they had to learn to compete, to strive for perfection, and they were tested in a real arena. Although some of their female contemporaries did receive a good education – Annie Besant, for instance, Barbara Bodichon and Marian Evans – they were very few. As an adult, Fanny wrote a biting account of the sort of girls’ school to which parents aspiring to gentility liked to send their daughters, and she was in no doubt that they did more harm than good.21 She, quite unschooled as far as we can tell, was taught her first letters by her mother from some bone counters that could be scattered on the floor, with simple pictures scratched into them; then, somehow, she was found books. She read whatever she could; she studied the elements of French, and later Italian and German, becoming in due course a notable linguist. She wrote reams of poetry, always clever and correct if never anything more. She learned to sing and dance, again under her mother’s tuition, to a high professional standard. The life of the theatre demanded a wide range of practical activities too. Fanny had to busy herself selling tickets for benefit nights, and she had to learn to be part of a team of workers. Actresses had to plan and sew their own costumes. There was undoubtedly an element of drudgery to being a child performer, which could have made her resentful; it was made worth while by fame and applause, if you were as successful as Fanny, and by the satisfaction of contributing to the finances of the family.

  Fanny appeared with the visiting stars, Macready, Charles Kean, the tenor John Braham. For a June race week she got up a new solo dance, the Cachucha; she did a Highland Fling during assize week, and as Maria progressed they performed the newly created polka together. At Christmas there was always a pantomime with terrific scenic effects, in which they appeared as sylphs, fairies, climbing boys, ocean nymphs or the Children in the Wood. The whole family must have spent as much time in the theatre as in their lodgings, giving all the children as their earliest memories the backstage world: parents and sisters changing into their costumes, rehearsing their lines, practising their dance routines; the gaslights and the buzz, or roar, or hush of the audience. This was the world in which Nelly first became conscious and in which she had her first lessons in life.

  In the winter of 1841 her mother was pregnant again; and in April 1842 she gave birth to a son. He was named Thomas for his father. This should have been a high point of happiness, yet it was not. Ternan was unwell, the wave of euphoria which had led him into ambitious theatrical management beginning to turn to doubt and depression. The finances of the Newcastle theatre were not as good as he had projected, and Doncaster was not doing much better; York and Hull had fallen through, perhaps fortunately under the circumstances. Theatre audiences were poor everywhere, because there was no money about. Trade was bad, workers were laid off; there were Chartist riots in England and there was famine in Ireland. The gap be
tween the masses of the urban poor and their industrial masters – between the gallery and the boxes and stalls – was stretching to a point which decent people found intolerable; this was the decade in which Disraeli published his novel Sybil, or The Two Nations and Engels his The Condition of the Working Class in England, whose common theme was the heartlessness of the rich and the unrelieved wretchedness of the poor. Even in hard times people must be amused; but if they were too hard up they couldn’t afford even that.

  The savings Ternan had made in America were melting away fast. In 1842 he realized he could not afford to go on paying the lease on the Newcastle theatre. A group of prominent Newcastle citizens organized a public dinner to express their appreciation and doubtless to cheer him up; it started at five in the evening and was still going strong in the small hours, with toasts, speeches and songs. A little wearily, perhaps, Mrs Ternan returned to the stage as her son reached three months; she was a mature but still touching Desdemona. Then the family packed up and moved to Sheffield.

  Now things looked much bleaker for them all. Ternan’s big attempt to become a manager had failed, probably taking most of the savings. Mrs Ternan would soon be too old to play the young heroines in which she had always specialized, and her mother was now too old to help her out much with the care of the children. The baby son was delicate and needed attention. Maria was a very competent dancer, and Nelly, aged three, went on stage for the first time in Sheffield on 15 November, in Kotzebue’s The Stranger; but they were still little more than babies and could not be worked too hard even if there were the audiences to make it financially worth while.

  Fanny’s talents offered the brightest prospect for the family. Her success was remarkable even for an age with a particular appetite for theatrical children. She combined genuine skill with a pleasant and unforced stage presence. Her performances sprang so clearly from her own intelligence and enthusiasm that nobody thought she was being forced by her parents. (It was a suspicion that occurred in other cases: Fanny Kemble spoke pityingly of a child actress she saw, ‘poor bright little thing!’; a generation later the young Henry James assumed that two little prodigies he watched off duty must have been ‘pinched and slapped’ into their performances.) But Fanny was a natural, and her appearances were so popular that her parents were able to extract very good money from provincial managers even in the bad times; and there were weeks when she was certainly the main support of the family. She was taken, sometimes just with one parent, to Scotland, to Liverpool, to Dublin and round the Irish provinces. She made a tremendous impression in Glasgow, playing six different characters in The Young Actress. This was in January 1843. In February her baby brother died.

  Many years later, at a charitable banquet for the Theatrical Fund, Dickens made a speech in which he referred to the hardships of actresses’ lives and told the story of one who, now married and comfortably off, confided to him how she had lost her baby brother at a time of real poverty:

  A lady who had been upon the stage from her earliest childhood till she was a blooming woman, once said to me when she was happily married; when she was rich, beloved, courted; when she was mistress of a fine house – once said to me at the head of her own table, surrounded by distinguished guests of every degree, ‘Oh, but I have never forgotten the hard time when I was on the stage, and when my baby brother died, and when my poor mother and I brought the little baby from Ireland to England, and acted three nights in England, as we had acted three nights in Ireland, with the pretty creature lying upon the only bed in our lodging before we got the money to pay for its funeral.22

  It’s possible that Dickens knew more than one actress who had been a child performer and lost her baby brother, although it’s likely that this is Fanny’s recollection of the death of little Thomas Ternan and the experience of her mother and herself, going out to give their bright performances night after night and returning to the cold small body lying in their lodging.

  For Ternan, too, much as he loved his daughters, the loss of the only boy was another cruel blow. Already dejected, he sank into an irritable torpor and seemed less in command of his parts, his old swagger and powerful delivery failing. The family set off for another Irish tour only to be faced with a country driven desperate. The potato crop had failed twice; the people were dying in the streets. Those who could crowded into boats to get to America – the America Ternan had described as being without poverty or hunger. Nobody could have made a success of a tour at that moment; the Ternans had little choice and toiled on. In Dublin, at least, they found themselves among old acquaintances, Vestris, Mathews her husband, and the comedian John Buckstone; then they returned to the north of England, Carlisle and Newcastle again, Doncaster, west to Ludlow.

  In September Fanny was given her first London show, at the Strand Theatre; she came on after some Hungarian dancers. By now she had her own scrapbook full of eulogies for her present accomplishments and prophecies of future greatness. The critics were enthusiastic – there was a good review in the Spectator – but there was no question of her settling in for a season. She was a prodigy, a spectacle, but not yet an actress in London eyes.

  Her father was having second thoughts about leaving Newcastle. He made an offer of £200 for the lease of the Theatre Royal again, but he was turned down in favour of a richer applicant. Fanny remained the family prop. In the summer of 1844 she earned £68 16s. 3d. in a single night in Newcastle, the accountant noting that this was second only to Helen Faucit’s payment (Macready expected £50 for one evening at the same period).

  For Christmas 1844 the family was again in Newcastle; Maria took over the part of Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale, danced a polka with Fanny and sang a duet with her in a melodrama, The Wandering Boys. Soon after this their father was taken ill. His collapse may have been precipitated by a scene with some drunken brawlers in the theatre; he attempted to deal with them, and they turned on him and gave him a cut cheek and a black eye. But his illness went much deeper than the few cuts and bruises he sustained in this episode. His wife was soon forced to acknowledge that the trouble was nervous as much as physical, and that she could not control, let alone nurse him. He was in a state of severe mental affliction, and there was a fear that he might attempt suicide.

  Somehow he was got to London, where, perhaps with his brother’s intervention, he was taken to the Insane Asylum at Bethnal Green. It was a grim place, and treatment of those with General Paralysis of the Insane – this was the diagnosis of Ternan’s condition – was necessarily dreadful and humiliating. Since there was no cure, restraint was the only course available; some patients were kept chained in the early stages, when they might be violent or suicidal, though as the disease took its course this became unnecessary. In the last stage they became emaciated, incontinent, unable to feed themselves, with contracted limbs and bedsores; and so died, either of a fit, pneumonia, diarrhoea or exhaustion. This was the well-known medical prognosis, and it meant that, to all intents and purposes, the man so afflicted was simply locked up to await death. It is unlikely that his wife knew or inquired the cause of his illness, which we know must have been syphilis.23 She was now not only deprived of his support but also responsible for the asylum fees, which meant finding two or three pounds a week from the family earnings.

  Hard times indeed. Nelly was not quite six. In all likelihood she never saw her father again. The little family of women drew closer together. In January 1845 ‘Mrs Ternan and her daughters’ were billed to appear in Hull.

  * A special performance whose takings went to a member of the company who chose the play. It was often the most important source of income for a performer.

  † The fact that no theatrical adaptation of that period included the Crummles episode may suggest that its accuracy cut too close for comfort.

  4

  Little Orphans

  1845–1855

  Nelly was five when her father disappeared from her life; less than two years later he was dead. An insane asylum was not a place to
which anyone in the 1840s would take a child to visit even a less severely afflicted patient than Thomas Ternan; nor was madness in your family something that could be mentioned in conversation. Fanny was old enough and quick enough to understand a good deal, but the two younger daughters must have been left with the impression that something mysterious, terrible and shameful had overtaken their father, leaving them semi-orphaned.

  The orphan was a common figure in Victorian life and a popular one in literature. The juxtaposition of innocence and vulnerability has always caught the imagination of writers; it exercised a particular fascination for Dickens, who could hardly present a child without depriving it of one or both parents. Orphaned or motherless boys and girls crop up in almost every book; and although both his parents lived into and – in the case of his mother – even beyond ripe maturity, he made both his alter-egos, David Copperfield and Pip, lose their parents at tender ages. In real life he was much concerned with the fate of orphaned girls and zealous in helping them; and in his books he drew admiring portraits of little stalwarts like Charley Neckett in Bleak House, left at thirteen in sole charge of her younger siblings, whom she supports by doing washing. He also drew warning portraits, the most famous being David Copperfield’s pretty, passive Little Em’ly, whose character is fatally undermined by the desire to become a lady; it is this that allows her to become the victim of an unscrupulous gentleman.

  The Ternans, unpretentious and hard-working, were exactly what Dickens would have approved. Their family finances were precarious, their future was uncertain, and they were going to have to work a hard grind to keep body and soul together; but they were active and courageous in setting about it. Like Dickens’s Little Nell, they were homeless; on the other hand they had their mother and one another, and were already part of a community that offered some support; and they were used to constant travel and to the rigours of training and learning lines. Their mother was well able to organize their lives so that they remained together; in fact, as soon as Ternan collapsed, she made an arrangement for herself and all the children with an old friend from Dublin and Edinburgh, John Pritchard, now managing the York circuit. They wasted no time. In January they were in Hull, in March in York, in June in Leeds.