The Invisible Woman

by Claire Tomalin

  All this allows Fanny to describe the world she knows and to insist on its virtues and dignity. She is at pains to show the good qualities of theatre people and to mock the prejudice of those who see a career on the stage as nothing but exhibitionism and sin. She gives a vivid account of working in Ireland with a country company and then in a London theatre, with no glossing over the dirty lodgings with black beetles on the brick floors, the shared beds, the inevitable diet of bread, cold meat and beer, the hard slog of learning four new parts in a week while making costumes, and rehearsing all day and acting long hours in the evening; or the squalor and grime of the London streets, and the condescension of the theatre goers, one of whom insults Mabel by referring to her as a ‘nice young person’. Mabel has to wear shabby old clothes and threadbare gloves. She has to act in farces and melodramas and a great deal of trash, and try to make it seem not trash; she has to accept that a tightrope act will mean more to most managements than Shakespeare, and that even if she does appear in Shakespeare she will be asked to perform not the text she knows but a very different acting version.

  It is a convincing account of learning her trade, which includes an understanding of the characters of her fellow players; there is a nice portrait of the thin, anxious leading lady, who has a husband and three growing children and has seen many hardships but carefully preserves her juvenile ringlets; and there is sympathy for the poverty of the old members of the company, who face a very bleak future. Mabel is kindly welcomed and offered good advice. She is taught not to allow herself the wasteful luxury of real tears on stage but to calculate all her effects: ‘Your voice, and your face, and your figure are the tools you have to work with, and you can’t carve out your own ideas unless you’ve first learnt to handle your tools properly.’

  Acting gives her, she finds, slightly more freedom and – once she is successful – a better income than teaching in a provincial girls’ school had done. She also discovers that, despite condescension and disapproval, ‘the frank recognition of her professional position was agreeable to her’. She views acting ‘in the matter-of-fact light of an honourable means of employing her faculties to win a subsistence for herself and for those dear to her’. Here is a real stage heroine in the making, the reader feels; and after these fine words, it is disappointing to find Mabel making such rapid progress that she becomes a London star, with a house in Highgate for good measure, only to retire from the stage forever, marrying for love as she does so. It may be that Fanny thought this was the correct way to end a novel about a young woman; it may also have represented a strictly honest account of the sort of fantasy entertained by the young women at Park Cottage.

  * The Keans paid Ellen Terry 15s. a week for her Puck until one night when her toe was caught in the trap and Mrs Kean promised to double her salary if she would stop screaming and finish her speech. She did stop screaming, and she did have her salary doubled. Mrs Ternan was paid £3 10s. by the Keans at this time, and Maria Ternan, playing a small part, 30s.

  PART TWO

  6

  The Amateur: Dickens in 1857

  The real situation at Park Cottage in July 1857 was not cheerful. Mrs Ternan and Maria were both out of work, and Atalanta was closing, leaving Nelly also at a loose end. Fanny had a few more weeks at the Princess’s, though her heart was hardly in it; her dream of becoming a singer seemed as distant as ever, and nothing more interesting presented itself. Mrs Ternan had to face the fact that she could expect little more than understudying and occasional work now that she was fifty-five. None of her daughters showed any sign of equalling her early success. They were well-tutored professionals, but they were not stars; no one had invited any of them to play Juliet. The whole family had one firm engagement in prospect, for two weeks in mid-September in Doncaster, where all the girls had played as children. Until then they had the prospect of being cooped up together in the little house through the discomforts of a hot, unhealthy London summer. News of mutiny and massacre from India was the chief, unwelcome distraction of the season.

  Maria at least found a better diversion. She got herself a ticket for the theatrical sensation of the summer. It was a melodrama called The Frozen Deep, got up by its author, Wilkie Collins, with his famous fellow writer Charles Dickens. Both men fancied themselves as amateur actors and were giving a few performances at the Gallery of Illustrations in Regent Street. All the cast were Dickens’s friends or members of his family, and they included his sisters-in-law and two daughters; the whole thing had begun as a private entertainment, which had now burgeoned. The settings were spectacular, and the story was of a man who triumphs over his own murderous impulses; this part was played by Dickens, who died on stage to a specially written orchestral accompaniment. In the best theatrical tradition he rose again immediately to play the farce that concluded the entertainment. He did it with great relish and much impromptu gagging; and in this he was partnered by his pretty seventeen-year-old daughter Katey.

  Maria found the whole experience overwhelming. So did the press. Dickens might be an amateur but not so as to fail to send out invitations to the critics to see his work. The Saturday Review said nothing else currently on the stage equalled it, and the Athenaeum declared that Dickens’s acting ‘might open a new era for the stage’. The ladies in the cast were particularly commended: ‘Everyone accustomed to professional theatricals must, on this occasion, have felt how novel a charm it was to hear the ladies of a play talk like ladies.’1 The Queen herself asked to see The Frozen Deep and was persuaded to come to the Gallery of Illustrations by Dickens, who said he preferred not to take his ladies to the palace ‘in the quality of actresses’.2 She came accompanied by Prince Leopold of Belgium and Prince Frederick of Prussia, and they all expressed themselves delighted. Dickens, summoned for a private word, refused the Queen not once but twice, on the grounds that he did not want to appear before her in his costume: a further triumph of his will over hers, for which she graciously and, under the circumstances, very sensibly forgave him. When Dickens chose to be unbudgeable, not even a queen could move him.

  The Frozen Deep had begun as pure amusement but was now the means of raising money for the family of the playwright Douglas Jerrold, a friend of Dickens who had lately died. The generosity with his time and energy was typical; the chance to hurl himself body and soul into directing and acting meant still more. He needed relief from the loneliness of writing and told friends it gave him a marvellous feeling of liberation from his usual activities, that it was like ‘writing a book in company’. So he was well disposed to listen to an invitation to present the production in Manchester in August. Anyone else might have quailed, but he was in a mood to take on the challenge. He agreed to go with his company for two performances to be given in the Free Trade Hall.

  At this point he began to worry about the ladies in the cast. Jessie Wills, who played the old Scottish nurse, had already suffered a sprain and could not go on; and, once he had refused to take his ladies to the palace on the grounds of delicacy, he began to think it might be still more indelicate for them to appear in a public performance on the scale of the Manchester one. Would their voices carry in the spaces of the Free Trade Hall, which was vast? The men would manage, but the women’s parts, he decided, had best be taken over by professionals. Collins said he knew of some, though he failed to come up with any, and at the beginning of August Dickens wrote to the actress Emmeline Montague, an old friend, inviting her to take over the main female part.

  When she declined – she had recently married – Dickens turned to another professional friend for advice, the actor and playwright Alfred Wigan. They had known one another for over twenty years, since the 1830s, when Wigan had played in Dickens’s own farce, The Strange Gentleman; since then Mrs Wigan had also acted in one of his fund-raising productions in Manchester.3 Wigan was currently managing the Olympic Theatre. Fanny Ternan had worked there recently; he knew her mother and sisters, too, and felt able to recommend them to Dickens, and Dickens to them. In this
way they were brought together early in August.

  Mrs Ternan was invited to take over Jessie Wills’s part of the Scottish nurse. Maria was to be the heroine, Clara: this was the part Mamey Dickens, who was the same age as Maria, had played. Nelly was to have the small part played by Mrs Dickens’s younger sister, Georgina Hogarth. All three were also to be in the farce, Buckstone’s Uncle John, in which Dickens acted the old man ludicrously in love with a young girl he has educated. Nelly was to take over the girl’s part from Katey Dickens, and at this stage Dickens planned to withdraw and hand over his part to a friend.

  It was a standard procedure, as we have seen, for professional actresses to be invited to appear with amateur gentlemen, and Mrs Ternan agreed to the proposal readily enough. The chance of working with a man of acknowledged genius, of getting away for a few days and taking her girls for a trip to the north, of being involved with an already successful enterprise and introduced into a circle of people who might further their careers – all these things must have made the offer, coming at this difficult time, something of a godsend.

  *

  To the Ternan girls, Mr Charles Dickens was, before he was anything else, the old friend of their benefactor Macready, who had acted with their father and behaved kindly at the time of his death. That was a good start. They also knew – as did everyone in the profession – that he had been personally involved with the theatre himself for many years. Alfred Wigan was not the only one to recall The Strange Gentleman; old John Pritt Harley also remembered acting alongside Dickens in it one evening twenty years ago. In fact, he had been a close friend, frequently dining at Dickens’s house, and even attending the christening of little Katey with her godfather, Macready, in 1840.4 Although Dickens had not gone on writing for the stage, he had maintained a special relationship with the theatrical world. Not only were some of his closest friends in the theatre, but he was regularly seen in audiences, London and provincial, for everything from Shakespeare to burlesque. He was also a constant and generous supporter of theatrical charities, which kept him in contact with Ben Webster and John Buckstone, both at different times managers of the Haymarket. When Macready’s friend, the actor Edward Elston, drowned, leaving six daughters and one son, Dickens devoted himself to raising enough capital to ensure the children an income and made sure they all received professional training.5 Generosity of this kind did not go unnoticed in the acting community.

  All this gave the Ternans reason to look forward to the encounter with their new amateur manager. For his part, although there was nothing new for him about meeting professional actresses, they had the particular charm of being natives of a world to which he was drawn by something stronger than a purely rational appreciation of what it had to offer. There was no time of his life when he was not fascinated by the stage and by the idea of performance. As a tiny boy his parents had stood him with his sister on a table in a Rochester inn to give a song to the company, much like any other infant prodigy; and before he was ten, he was taken to the Theatre Royal in Rochester. He may even have seen Thomas Ternan acting there, perhaps in Macbeth, as one of the witches whose male clothes Dickens noticed clearly showing through their ragged costumes. At this same period he wrote his own tragedy, Misnar, The Sultan of India, and joined in amateur theatricals with his Aunt Fanny’s family.

  Dickens’s very first taste of the dramatic monologue had come still earlier, from his mother, who was renowned for her powers of mimicry. Then, when his father was in the Marshalsea Prison, Charles would ask his mother to ‘do’ Mr Dickens’s fellow debtors, each of whom she could hit off to perfection; later, of course, he ‘did’ them himself. Although as an adult Dickens often said unkind things about her and showed embarrassment at her boisterous spirits, it’s noticeable that women with her characteristics pleased him, and that he especially admired female mimics; his sister-in-law Georgina was one, and all the Ternans excelled at mimicry. And he was a superb mimic himself, something he must have first learnt from his mother, and the basis for the dramatic monologues which became a central device in his writing.

  London school friends claimed to remember him begging in the streets of Camden Town for the sheer fun of impersonating a real beggar boy, as well as organizing more formal theatricals at Wellington House School. His much loved elder sister Fanny trained as a singer, and the two of them got up at least one of the popular musical plays of the period together in their parents’ house: Clari, The Maid of Milan. When he began to work as a clerk, his stage fever was such that for several years he went to the theatre almost every night of the week. At twenty he resolved to become a professional actor. It was not a light-hearted decision but carefully thought out and planned. He applied for an audition at Covent Garden, which was granted; he was to be seen by the manager George Bartley and by no less a personage than the actor Charles Kemble.

  Dickens prepared for his audition with characteristic intensity. Through his regular theatre-going he had already studied the techniques of many actors and sensed that his own strength would lie in comedy. He decided to concentrate on imitating the comedian Charles Mathews, who had himself learned from Tate Wilkinson and become a phenomenal impersonator and ventriloquist. Mathews’s best act was to play a farce in which he took every part, dashing behind a screen to reappear in a few seconds as someone different. Another trick was to take his audiences on conducted ‘trips’ to Paris or America, describing the scenery and encountering a whole gallery of other travellers on the way; he called these picaresque performances ‘monopolylogues’. Dickens copied Mathews’s act night after night in front of a mirror. His sister Fanny helped by accompanying him in his songs; but when the day arrived Dickens had a cold in the head which made it impossible for him to perform. The audition was postponed, and before another opportunity arose, he had begun his triumphant career as a writer, using picaresque narratives not entirely unlike those of Mathews. He never ceased to dream of the stage, and the techniques mastered in 1832 were not forgotten; he brought them out twenty-five years later, when he began reading from his own works.6

  The theatre remained a focus of intense interest. He always relished green room gossip, and for several years he acted as an occasional theatre critic. On the death of the clown Grimaldi in 1836, he undertook to edit his memoirs, an inchoate but fascinating jumble of anecdotes of the London theatres and provincial circuits. While he was working on the memoirs, Fanny seemed to be headed for a career as an opera singer and became engaged to a fellow student, Henry Burnett, with the same ambition. Burnett, however, developed religious scruples that made him turn against the theatre, and Fanny was docile enough to accept his verdict. Dickens remained devoted to her, but he was contemptuous of his brother-in-law and more than once referred to him as an imbecile for his bigotry and prejudice.

  Another of Fanny’s student friends, John Hullah, collaborated with Dickens on an operetta, The Village Coquettes, performed in 1836, the same year that The Strange Gentleman was put on. Both had moderate success, but his dramatic writing was so completely eclipsed by Pickwick that there was no doubt about his future direction. Ironically, once he had abandoned any idea of writing for the stage himself, his novels were adapted one after another, in countless versions and almost always without permission or profit for him. He would sometimes stumble on one of these adaptations and was observed rolling on the floor of his box in mock agony at what had been made of his work. Yet he bore curiously little malice; his pleasure in the theatre made him view even its gross failings with tolerance. And within less than a decade, busy and successful as he was, he began to get up his own amateur theatricals on a lavish scale.

  The Frozen Deep was a continuation of this long run of theatrical ventures, organized up to – and often beyond – the standard of professional productions, Dickens involving himself in every detail of the business, script, casting, carpentry, costumes, programmes, lighting, music, even publicity. He co-opted and marshalled friends, family and professionals with irresistible force; and those
who left a record of the experience seem to have found it enjoyable and extraordinarily impressive. In the last months of his life he said that his great dream was to be an actor-manager, with supreme control of a theatre in all its aspects; both the amateur productions and his readings owed something to this dream. Yet his warmth towards the stage did not lead him to sentimentalize it, either in his writing or in life. When he described a theatrical troupe in Nickleby, it was done with good humour – they are likeable people – but no glossing over their falsehood and absurdity, or their ineptitude as performers. When his daughter Katey told him she had been offered the opportunity of earning good money as an actress, he warned her off as too sensitive to be able to bear the life: ‘Although there are nice people on the stage, there are some who would make your hair stand on end,’ he told her.7

  With a man so versed in the theatre as Dickens, the Ternans might expect to feel at home – to a degree but not entirely. A certain awe was in order, too, because he was a great man, and as famous as any in England. For the past twenty-five years – since before the births of Nelly, Maria or Fanny – he had been the supreme entertainer of the nation. Pickwick, Sam Weller, Mrs Gamp, Oliver Twist, Tiny Tim and Little Nell were all household names, signifying laughter or tears wherever they were invoked, through all classes of society. Even the illiterate knew Dickens through the theatre.

  Dickens was to rehearse his new ladies himself. From early August he spent more time in London than at his Kentish country house, Gad’s Hill Place, where the children remained with their Aunt Georgina and their mother, who was not well. His London dwelling, Tavistock House, had been stripped for the summer, making plenty of room in which to work: a very imposing place on the Bedford Estate in Bloomsbury, a few blocks south of Euston Station. The Ternans had been sent their parts to study at home. When they presented themselves for their first rehearsal, they found themselves in a large, light, very clean, dust-sheeted house and face to face with a most businesslike man. It was plain from the start that he knew exactly what he was about professionally.