The Invisible Woman

by Claire Tomalin

  There is another female artist in the story who is neither sweet nor simple, and who in a sense avenges the dead singer. This is Fanny Dorrit, who has learnt the lessons of the world so well that she despises her own art, regards her fellow dancers as common, and makes her way into rich society with ruthless skill. Fanny attracts the attention of a well-off young man, rejects his initial dishonourable advances and so brings him to the point of proposing marriage. The young man’s mother, Mrs Merdle, alarmed at the thought of this mésalliance, visits Fanny with the idea of simultaneously bribing her to give him up and warning her that if she does marry him, he will be cut off without a penny. Fanny’s view of the young man is that he is ‘almost an idiot’, and that she has no wish to marry him in any event. She tells Mrs Merdle so and adds that her family is as good as his, only slightly spoiling the effect by accepting gifts of jewellery and dresses. Mrs Merdle voices her scorn of a professional dancer: ‘I pointed out … the impossibility of the Society in which we moved recognizing the Society in which she moved – though charming, I have no doubt.’ Mrs Merdle knows that contempt and social abhorrence are the correct responses to professional theatrical ladies; but so does Fanny.

  Dickens makes Fanny Dorrit into something of a monster, so bent on avenging herself against Mrs Merdle that she does later marry her son, dooming herself to a life of riches, vacuity and permanent warfare with her mother-in-law (which may indeed have been the fate of some actresses who married into Society). But there is no suggestion that Fanny’s defects of character are part of her professional armour, or that Dickens holds the stage responsible for them. In fact, the one backstage scene in which she is shown with her fellow dancers (‘young ladies’ or ‘darlings’, depending on who is addressing them) is written with quite striking warmth; you believe it is drawn from life. Fanny Dorrit is made mercenary not by the theatre but by her experience of poverty and humiliation; and as Dickens’s young fictional women go, she is almost believable. It is Fanny’s younger sister, Amy (‘Little Dorrit’ herself), who is mysteriously immune to the experiences that corrupt Fanny. Amy is a practical girl rather than an artist, and although she has been born and bred inside the Marshalsea Prison, her moral sense is flawless; so much so that she becomes a touchstone for everyone else in the book. Still a child, she supports her family. She is thoroughly familiar with the seedy, seamy side of London yet walks through it unscathed.

  Dickens finds it easier to locate this virtue in a little girl than a woman, and he keeps her looking like a child even when she is fully grown: as ‘a woman … of not less than two and twenty, she might have been passed in the street for little more than half that age,’ he writes. It has been suggested that Little Dorrit is also little Dickens, fixed for ever as the good child at the centre of an evil world, which is how he remembered the worst part of his own boyhood. This innocent child is a recurring figure in his novels up to Little Dorrit, though after this it appears no more. When Dickens came to write Great Expectations, three years after Little Dorrit, he had become a different man and drew for the first time a child who is realistically vulnerable and flawed: not innocent but easily corrupted through conceit, ambition, snobbery and sick, obsessive infatuation.

  But Great Expectations was still in the future. There is something else in Little Dorrit that has a bearing on Dickens’s state of mind in 1857. The reader senses that Amy has an extra significance for her creator. She is not just the innocent child but also the child bride of middle-aged fantasy, the unlooked-for reprieve, the new start in life for the hero whose own youth lies behind him. When Little Dorrit loses her father, she finds a husband who becomes a second father to her. He is eighteen years older than her and reluctant to believe in her love. And when finally he acknowledges it, Dickens puts it like this: ‘He took her in his arms, as if she had been his daughter.’

  As though to match his latest fiction, he was now confronted with a real girl who could be seen as the embodiment of two of his themes. Nelly, her sisters and mother were all actresses; they inhabited the world of art and imagination, had the joyous freedom of manners that went with it, and for their pains they were slighted and despised by conventional people. At the same time the theatre was part of the seamy side of London, in which this young, fresh, fair girl, living in poverty, earning her own bread, obliged to walk through the dark, corrupting streets and appear before sometimes ignoble audiences, seemed to preserve a childlike innocence. She was fatherless. She had been born in the same year as his own daughter Katey and was stepping into Katey’s part in Uncle John. Dickens had an exact memory for his own phrases. ‘He took her in his arms, as if she had been his daughter’ may have rung alarmingly in his mind when, if only for the purposes of the drama, he did just that.

  * By a nicely ironic touch, Miss Coutts’s enormous fortune came to her through a bequest from a notorious (and exceptionally good-natured) Regency actress, Harriot Mellon, who married her grandfather, the banker Thomas Coutts, in his extreme old age, inherited his entire fortune, went on to marry the Duke of St Albans, and then returned the money to the Coutts family. Miss Coutts, later Baroness Burdett-Coutts, devoted herself to good works, many of them under the guidance of Dickens.

  † For example, J. F. Stephen held Dickens to task, in his review of Little Dorrit, for pouring ‘contempt on all the institutions of the country’.

  7

  Manchester, Doncaster and Scandal

  1857–1858

  A bright, penniless girl of eighteen who found herself admired by a rich older man had good reason to be excited. The roles laid down by her society were suddenly reversed: having been always powerless, she now began to be in command. In Nelly’s case the man she might command was also brilliant and famous, a charming and entertaining companion, and in a position to transform her life, which in any case held few counter-attractions. The trip to Manchester may have been the most exciting thing that had yet happened to her.

  The whole company of The Frozen Deep, with various wives and families – both Mrs Dickens and her sister Georgina were included in the party – took the Manchester train from Euston on the morning of 20 August. They filled several specially reserved carriages and were all in high spirits, at any rate according to Francesco Berger, the young composer and conductor of the incidental music, who was in the carriage next to ‘the Manager’ himself and was the only person present who left an account of the trip. Dickens’s theatrical expeditions were organized on an impressive scale; the Ternans must have felt the contrast with their own usual modest arrangements. No question of lodgings over a shop for them this time. Twenty-three rooms had been taken at the Great Western Hotel, with a special private dining and sitting room for the use of the company. Lavish meals had also been ordered in advance for everyone. Dickens’s pleasure in planning menus was celebrated; the beef, pies, tarts, cold fowls, jellies, beer and punch ordered for the suppers that would follow the performances make them sound like schoolboy feasts. In fact, the whole affair seems to have had something of the atmosphere of a school outing. When the train was delayed and there were complaints of hunger, Dickens proposed a game of Conundrums. They had to be passed from window to window on sticks and umbrellas; it sounds dangerous, and produced almost hysterical hilarity. Travel put Dickens into good humour; on other railway journeys we hear of him playing Twenty Questions, singing drinking songs and dancing the hornpipe in a moving carriage, a feat that even a much younger man might hesitate to perform. Catherine, who had travelled all round America, Canada and Europe with him, knew what to expect; she was probably thankful if she did not get a poke in the eye from a Conundrum-bearing walking-stick. Her spirits may have been rather damper than those of the rest of the party.

  The performances were scheduled for Friday and Saturday. The Ternans knew the city, but they had never before experienced the delights of a large luxury hotel. Manchester – Cottonopolis, they called it – was crowded to bursting point with visitors from all over the world to an enormous summer exhibition of W
orld Masters of Painting.1 Dickens was eager to fit in an educational visit; whether he took his company along is not known. He developed an attack of neuralgia in his face on arrival, and was busy supervising the staging and lighting effects on which so much of the show’s success depended. His own performance offered him the least worry; he knew how easily he could step inside the skin of the suffering, misunderstood and fundamentally noble Richard Wardour.

  The Frozen Deep was written by Wilkie Collins, although it was Dickens who had suggested the plot; he participated enthusiastically in revising the text and supervised the painting of the elaborately realistic scenery and the complicated lighting. Unfortunately it carries no trace of his genius in the dialogue, and to modern readers it’s almost impossible to see how it made its appeal. Yet it did, hugely, helped perhaps by its theme of absent suffering men and anxiously awaiting women, which found an echo in so many Victorian households in the heyday of the Empire and the year of the Indian mutiny.* Voyages like those of Darwin with the Beagle and Sir John Franklin to the Arctic naturally aroused tremendous interest and excitement; it was, in fact, the Franklin expedition, which had run into trouble and led to allegations of cannibalism, that provided some of the inspiration for The Frozen Deep. Waiting, fearing the worst, and wondering about the state of mind of men under stress was an experience familiar in many families, though you can’t help hoping that the young ladies who stayed behind were not all as vacuous as those depicted by Collins.

  The curtain rises on a group of these young women in an English country house drawing room. They are chaperoned by their old nurse (Mrs Ternan) and have been cooped up together with nothing to do for three years, while their menfolk make an expedition to the Arctic. The hinge of the plot is provided by Clara (Maria Ternan), wasting away because she realizes that her rejected suitor Richard Wardour (Dickens), a man of erratic temper, may find out that another member of the Arctic party is now engaged to her. She fears that Wardour will seek to murder him out of jealousy. Wardour’s parting words to her, she tells her friend Lucy (Nelly), were: ‘The time may come when I shall forgive you, but the man who has robbed me of you shall rue the day when you and he first met.’ Nurse Esther talks of her second sight, which warns her of bloody scenes taking place in the ‘the land o’ ice and snaw’; ‘Oh my bairn, my bairn,’ she addresses Clara, ‘the stain o’ that bluid is on you!’

  The second act takes us into the ice and snaw, where the explorers are stranded. Two men are needed for a dangerous relief expedition. It is no surprise to find Wardour and his rival Aldersley (Wilkie Collins) are the two chosen. In the last act the ladies have travelled to Newfoundland to seek the men. Wardour enters, half dead and apparently deranged; Clara recognizes him and fears he has murdered Aldersley. Instead he staggers off, to reappear carrying his rival, weak but alive. He blesses the reunited lovers and dies of exhaustion as the curtain falls – a man who has triumphed over his evil tendencies, sacrificed himself and become an example to all. Dickens was so pleased with this role that he used it when he came to write his next novel: Sydney Carton is a variant on Wardour.

  Real life proved more complicated. The Manchester performances were a triumphant success. According to Collins, Dickens gave new meaning to the phrase ‘he electrified the audience’. His fellow players felt the electricity, too. Maria Ternan was overcome on stage. Dickens’s accounts of her storm of emotion, which he described more than once, make her palpable as few of his fictional women are. Perhaps this is why he chose to write about himself in the third person – as Wardour, not Charles Dickens – when he described the effect of the girl holding him in her arms, with tears dropping straight into his mouth, in a letter to Miss Coutts:

  At night when she came out of the cave and Wardour recognized her, I never saw anything like the distress and agitation of her face – a very good little pale face, with large black eyes; – it had a natural emotion in it (though it was turned away from the audience) which was quite a study of expression. But when she had to kneel over Wardour dying, and be taken leave of, the tears streamed out of her eyes into his mouth, down his beard, all over his rags – down his arms as he held her by the hair. At the same time she sobbed as if she were breaking her heart, and was quite convulsed with grief. It was of no use for the compassionate Wardour to whisper ‘My dear child, it will be over in two minutes – there is nothing the matter – don’t be so distressed!’ She could only sob out ‘O! It’s so sad, O it’s so sad!’ and set Mr Lemon (the softest hearted of men) crying too. By the time the curtain fell, we were all crying together, and then her mother and sister used to come and put her in a chair and comfort her, before taking her away to be dressed for the Farce.2

  The choice of Miss Coutts as confidante was curious, since she disapproved of his theatrical ventures; but Dickens could not help himself. Too much electricity had been generated to contain the intensity of his emotions within the confines of the performance; at least, by naming Maria rather than Nelly, he could present it as an innocent intensity.

  The Manchester Courier heaped praises on Dickens, commended Mrs Ternan for her clever performance and allowed that the other ladies’ parts were ‘very well filled’.3 On the Saturday night there was a triumphant supper after the performance; it continued for the young men of the party into the small hours, long after the ladies and the Manager had retired. The noise brought him back, in dressing-gown and slippers, candlestick in hand; he put his finger to his lips silently and retired again. But he was not as calm as he appeared to the young men; he seems to have been in one of his near-manic states, struck not only with neuralgia but with a violent, as yet imperfectly defined excitement. He was easily persuaded by the Mancunians to put on a third, unscheduled performance on the Monday, brushing aside all the extra organizational problems and hotel bills involved.

  The Monday performance was another triumph, and afterwards he told Maria he was sure she ‘had one of the most genuine and feeling hearts in the world; and I don’t think I ever saw anything more prettily simple and unaffected’.4 It wasn’t quite what he’d expected from an actress ‘born in a country theatre’.5 He still did not know quite how to place the Ternans.

  On Tuesday the whole party returned south, this time without Conundrums. At some point Dickens elicited the information he wanted about the Ternans’ next engagement, which was to be in Doncaster in mid-September, the time of the St Leger Day race. He returned to Gad’s Hill with this secret knowledge like a talisman. The sight of the Kentish countryside, with steadily falling rain signalling the onset of autumn, threw him into gloom.6 Further sadness came with the news that Macready’s son Henry had died of tuberculosis, the disease that picked off his large family of children one after another; Dickens wrote him a letter of comfort, sending Catherine’s love. It was the last such message. A few days later he wrote to Miss Coutts’s companion, Mrs William Brown, saying,

  The restlessness which is the penalty of an imaginative life and constitution – we all hold whatever we possess, on the strict tenure that it must and shall be used – so besets me just now, that I feel as if the scaling of all the Mountains in Switzerland, or the doing of any wild thing until I dropped, would be but a slight relief.7

  This was from Gad’s Hill. The next day, a Saturday, he was back in Bloomsbury, confessing to Collins that he wanted to escape from himself: ‘my blankness is inconceivable – indescribable – my misery amazing’. ‘Shall we talk at Gad’s Hill?’ he asked, saying he was on his way back there, but would be in town again on Monday. Dickens sometimes claimed he was forced into perpetual travel by his work, as though to excuse the craving for movement, change, freedom and anonymity that was met by an empty carriage and a fast-moving steam engine. The truth was he very quickly grasped the possibilities opened up by the new speed and availed himself of them to the utmost. To the end of his life he behaved like a Flying Dutchman of the railways, movement always more necessary to him than repose.

  (illustration credit 7.1)

 
The talk with Collins resulted in their agreeing to go away together, to write a sketch for Household Words. So Dickens told Forster. In the same letter he reverted to something he’d seen at the Zoo earlier in the year and been back to watch again – the feeding of live guinea pigs and mice to the snakes. The sight revolted but also fascinated him; perhaps he felt half guinea pig, half snake, and hardly knew which was more painful.

  A few days later he and Collins set off on their ‘walking tour’. The plan was to write it up humorously as the ‘Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices’. They made for Carlisle; but their real destination was Doncaster. For the sake of appearances the two men did a little walking, in the rain. Collins slipped and sprained his ankle. Dickens used the enforced leisure to write to Forster on a theme he had already touched on more than once, saying that ‘Poor Catherine and I are not made for each other, and there is no help for it. What is now befalling I have seen steadily coming.’8 To Catherine he neither wrote nor sent any message.

  They found Doncaster bursting at the seams with race-goers; even the railway station had taken on a score of extra porters to deal with them. Dickens had booked rooms at the Angel Hotel in the city centre and also engaged an open carriage and pair for the races. He lost no time in setting off for the Theatre Royal with Wilkie, himself a considerable connoisseur of little actresses, and without a doubt encouraging his friend in his pursuit. Their presence was immediately noted, the Doncaster Gazette reporting that

  During the performance this evening Mr Charles Dickens and Mr Wilkie Collins entered the Boxes and both gentlemen (especially the former) at once became objects of the most marked attention and conversation. In fact the distinguished author of The Pickwick Papers – his greatest work – was evidently the lion of the evening.