On this particular evening no Ternans appeared on stage. Instead there was a performance of his friend Bulwer-Lytton’s Money, enlivened with young ladies in jockey costume doing a dance in which they put their whips into their mouths and worked imaginary winners up to the float; ‘an immense success’ noted Dickens drily. He was back in the theatre the following evening, which ‘introduced three young ladies who have, in former years, been distinguished as juvenile actresses. We allude to Misses Maria and Ellen Ternan, daughters of the late Mr Ternan, lessee of this theatre, and to Miss Fanny Addison, daughter of the present lessee.’ Maria sang to her guitar and played Mrs Major Mortar in a Mark Lemon play; Nelly was in The Pet of the Petticoats. The audience was rowdy. When Dickens came to write up the occasion in ‘Lazy Tour’, he said the town was full of lunatics and drunkards, and singled out one drunken theatre-goer who made remarks about the actresses so offensive that he wanted to fling him into the pit. The offender saved himself from Dickens’s indignant assault by falling asleep; Dickens remained brooding as to whether ‘that is a wholesome Art, which sets women apart on a high floor before such a thing as this, though as good as its own sisters, or its own mother’.9 The drunken sot was evidently not fit to look at Nelly and Maria up on the ‘high floor’. He may of course have given Dickens himself a passing moment of unease about his own motives in being in that particular audience. If the Ternans were surprised to see him after the show, they could not fail to be pleased and excited to have drawn the great man.
Wednesday was St Leger Day, and Dickens went to the races. He picked three winners, rather to his own surprise. The account he gave in the ‘Lazy Tour’ describes how one of the apprentices falls into
a dreadful state concerning a pair of little lilac gloves and a little bonnet that he saw there. Mr Idle asserts, that he did afterwards repeat at the Angel, with an appearance of being lunatically seized, some rhapsody to the following effect: ‘O little lilac gloves! And O winning little bonnet, making in conjunction with her golden hair quite a Glory in the sunlight round the pretty head, why anything in the world but you and me! Why may not this day’s running – of horses, to all the rest: of precious sands of life to me – be prolonged through an everlasting autumn-sunshine, without a sunset! Slave of the Lamp, or Ring, strike me yonder gallant equestrian Clerk of the Course, in the scarlet coat, motionless on the green grass for ages!… Arab drums, powerful of old to summon Genii in the desert, sound of yourselves and raise a troop for me in the desert of my heart, which shall so enchant this dusty barouche … that I, within it, loving the little lilac gloves, the winning little bonnet, and the dear unknown-wearer with the golden hair, may wait by her side for ever, to see a Great St Leger that shall never be run!’10
Perhaps Dickens wrote this with his tongue in his cheek, or perhaps he only hoped his readers would think so; in any case the piece was unsigned and written after he had left Doncaster. But the lilac gloves, golden hair and little bonnet suggest that Nelly was at the St Leger Day race and possibly in the Dickens carriage. In a letter to his assistant Harry Wills,† Dickens confessed that ‘the strongest parts of your present correspondent’s heart are made up of weaknesses. And he just come to be here at all (if you knew it) along of his Richard Wardour! Guess that riddle, Mr Wills!’11 The mixture of club room jocularity and apology suggests how uncertain Dickens was of his own emotional ground. A few days later, on Sunday 20 September, he wrote again, ‘I am going to take the little – riddle – into the country this morning. I think I shall leave here on Tuesday, but I cannot positively say … I did intend to return home tomorrow, but have no idea now of doing that … So let the riddle and the riddler go their own wild way, and no harm come of it!’12
Dickens is telling Wills that he is in pursuit of Nelly, and hopeful enough of success to be postponing his return south. But he had misunderstood the situation. For Nelly, thrilled as she was by his devotion, any idea that he hoped to seduce her must have seemed at this stage as unlikely as the transformation of Father Christmas into a satyr. The trip into the country in his open carriage took place, and the local newspaper reported the distinguished visitor’s viewing of the ruins of Roche Abbey and his walk in its beautiful grounds; whatever else happened – a Dickensian meal, laughter, flattery and flirtation – there can have been nothing very wild about it. Either Nelly’s own manner or a warning from her mother made him draw back from his headlong wooing and understand that she and her sisters were not easy game, not the type of little actresses he and Collins and Wills might make admiring jokes about, accompanied by manly winks and encouraging nudges. Yes, they were working girls, and born into an equivocal profession; but they had been brought up by a virtuous mother to be virtuous themselves. The little riddle, even if she gave every sign of being dazzled by Dickens and pleased by his attentions, could not simply be swept off her feet and carried away wherever and whenever he chose. When he understood this, if part of him was disappointed, another part exulted in her innocence. His feelings seem to have become more complex, more painful and more intense.
So he left Doncaster on the Monday after all, and Nelly continued to fulfil her engagements at the theatre.13 She acted with her mother in a Tom Taylor play, Victims, while Maria appeared as Jessica in The Merchant of Venice, Fanny as Gertrude in The Loan of a Lover. A benefit under the aegis of the Freemasons followed, at which Nelly and Maria starred in a farce called A Game of Romps, and Fanny sang ‘Lo, Hear the Gentle Lark’. Then Fanny set off alone for a tour of Ireland and Scotland, and the others returned to London and Park Cottage, where Mrs Ternan, who cannot have been unaware of the meaning of Dickens’s descent on Doncaster, had to do some hard thinking.
An instructive story of a young actress and her mother was told at exactly this time by a French writer, Edmond About, in his novel Tolla.‡ A young Roman aristocrat is sent on his travels to break an unsuitable attachment and is soon ensnared by a Parisian actress, Cornélie. About clearly knows the world he is describing and presents her with some sympathy. She is charming and cheerful, lives with her modest, respectable parents, and has friends who are journalists and painters as well as actors. On-stage she is obliged to show off her good points – there are special opportunities in different scenes for displaying in turn her legs, her hair, her shoulders – but off-stage she is a nice girl who enjoys picnics, family parties and good conversation. Her aristocratic friend calls on her at home and joins in several family occasions; when he makes his admiration plain by sending her presents, her mother explains the facts of life to her. ‘I should like to see you married to someone rich enough to provide for you and later, for your parents,’ she tells her, ‘but I realize this is hoping for a good deal. I don’t expect you to remain at home until you are thirty. If you tell me you have fallen in love with a well-to-do man, I shall begin by giving you a sermon on morality, and then visit the man in question to explain all the sacrifices I have made to educate you. Then, ‘S’il a bon coeur, il me laissera ma file, ou du moins il me remboursera mes dépenses.’§ Cornélie’s mother calls on the man, makes her little speech, and receives 20,000 francs for her daughter, who is in addition installed in an expensive apartment of her own. Her family and friends, far from being upset, are pleased.
The British liked to see Paris as a far more wicked place than London; that was part of its attraction. In practice it is unlikely that it was; it was only the manners and style of vice that differed. I am not suggesting that there was a moment at which Mrs Ternan thought of selling her daughter to Charles Dickens, any more than he thought of buying her, in so many brutal words. She was a good, self-respecting woman, and he had neither the insouciance nor the limitless funds of a lord. At the same time he had hurried to Doncaster in a state of obvious excitement about her, and she and her girls had to live, and manage as best they could in the circumstances in which they found themselves.
A prudent mother should have warned him off at this point, and warned her daughters against him, in the clearest terms. Yet
it’s obvious that she didn’t. It would have required something like heroism to send away the great and charming Charles Dickens with a flea in his ear, when he beamed attention and flattery on a woman whose life had been as harsh as Frances Ternan’s, and when she saw her daughters’ faces light up at the sight of his cheerful visits and generous gestures. A strict morality now demanded it. Yet looking back at her own life of impeccable virtue, she may have reflected that it had been ill rewarded. She may have persuaded herself that, with due care and subtlety, they could keep Dickens’s friendship on their own terms; or her daughters may have simply declared themselves unwilling to give up the prize fate had sent their way. Whatever agonies of conscience or family disagreements took place at Park Cottage, they were soon all meeting again in the friendliest way.
Dickens, too, found himself uncomfortably trapped in his own morality. He was faced with the example of Wilkie Collins setting up a cheerful ménage with Caroline Graves, the pretty young widow he had literally picked up in the street. Caroline acted as hostess, cook and mistress; she sometimes served dinner, appearing in a delightfully informal negligé, to Collins’s men friends, with whom she was on the most naturally friendly terms, though she was never, of course, introduced to their wives. Dickens liked her well enough; but that did not mean Nelly, now established as a chaste, if not entirely discouraging, young lady, could be put into the same category as Caroline. Nelly was not a widow but an untouched girl. If Dickens once touched her, he would become the villain who put her into the category of his own Little Em’ly or Mrs Gaskell’s Ruth, girls seduced by gentlemen and doomed never to be good wives and happy mothers.
This was not how he wanted things to be at all. What he wanted was to start life again as a romantic bachelor, in romantic purity. A few weeks after Doncaster he wrote to Lavinia Watson, a married woman friend to whom he could unburden some, at any rate, of his feelings. His letter contains a fantastical account of being in love with a beautiful Princess. It reads like a veiled confession, and the accents of tormented love are genuine and painful. Dickens sounds like a boy:
I wish an ogre with seven heads … had taken the Princess whom I adore – you have no idea how intensely I love her! – to his stronghold on the top of a high series of mountains, and there tied her up by the hair. Nothing would suit me half so well this day, as climbing after her, sword in hand, and either winning her or being killed. – There’s a state of mind for you, in 1857.14
But he was not a boy, and there were no ogres or mountains. He found relief in more prosaic gestures. One was to order the blocking of the door between his dressing room and what had been the marital bedroom at Tavistock House, and now became Catherine’s alone. This is the action of a romantic, not a worldly man, who would see no harm in continuing to sleep alongside his wife, however many mistresses he might pursue or take. It was also exquisitely hurtful to Catherine, being done without prior consultation or discreet agreement with her, so that she was humiliated in front of her servants. The cruelty is also romantic, suggesting a man in the grip of a force he can’t and doesn’t want to control.
Yet Dickens had not become consciously hostile to Catherine, and for some time he continued to acknowledge her affection for him; ‘She has a great tenderness for me,’ he told his solicitor.15 He only wanted to banish her from his presence and abolish her from his imagination. And thus driven he began to rewrite the history of their relations from the start, to claim that the marriage had always been unhappy, to insist on the acquiescence of his children and friends in the new version of history, and indeed to enrol his sister-in-law as his chief ally against her own sister. Georgina’s letter to Maria Winter is one of the nastier surviving documents from this episode:
… by some constitutional misfortune & incapacity, my sister always from their infancy, threw her children upon other people, consequently as they grew up, there was not the usual strong tie between them and her – in short, for many years, although we have put a good face upon it, we have been very miserable at home.16
This is the Georgina observed by Hans Christian Andersen, who had stayed with the Dickenses in the summer of 1857 at Gad’s Hill: ‘piquante, lively and gifted, but not kind’, he called her, and added that he had sometimes seen Catherine come out of her room with tears in her eyes.17 But Dickens was rapidly becoming blind to anything but his own dreams.
Throughout the autumn Nelly was acting at the Haymarket; and two days after the door blocking, Dickens wrote to Buckstone there, saying how pleased he was that she was working for him, and how much he hoped to hear of her being offered more work:
I need hardly tell you that my interest in the young lady does not cease with effecting this arrangement [i.e., her engagement], and that I shall always regard your taking of her and remembering her, as an act of personal friendship to me. On the termination of the present engagement, I hope you will tell me, before you tell her, what you see for her, ‘coming in the future’.18
After another two days he was so restless that he walked from London to Gad’s Hill, setting off at two in the morning: again, it is more like the action of a very young man than a middle-aged one. On 23 October he sent a cheque for £50, uncrossed, made out to Buckstone, with whom Nelly was now playing in Speed the Plough – a farce by Thomas Morton in which, appropriately enough, the figure of Mrs Grundy was first presented to the public.19
She continued playing in farces, sometimes at the Haymarket, sometimes the Lyceum; between mid-October and March 1858 she gave ninety performances. She was at last offered two parts worthy of her family name, as minor Shakespearean heroines: Hero in Much Ado, and Celia in As You Like It. At this point it must have seemed to her that she was establishing herself well in a London career: a busy, satisfying time, with the extra glitter of her admirer’s attentions over it.
In December Dickens reduced his household by sending Henry, eight years old, off to join his brothers at school in Boulogne. For the first time they all stayed at school over the Christmas holidays. So much for the children and the spirit of Christmas present. Only little Plorn, the girls and Charley were still at home, and there were no festivities or theatricals. Dickens and Collins had collaborated on a Christmas story called ‘The Perils of Certain English Prisoners’, an account of heroism in the face of foreign barbarians, intended as a tribute to the British who had suffered during the Indian mutiny; but it was a lack-lustre piece of narrative. No one has ever seen much merit in it except perhaps Nelly who, long after Dickens’s death, used to read aloud from it; which may suggest it had some special significance for her.
At the end of the year Dickens was still writing to friends about the stunning effect of Maria’s performance in The Frozen Deep. He gave Lavinia Watson the same details about her tears pouring ‘all over me like Rain’ and the effect on everyone else, tears, nose-blowing, drying of eyes and administering of sherry: ‘You would have remembered it for a long, long time,’ he finished.20 On New Year’s day 1858 he told Forster that, although he was making improvements at Gad’s Hill, ‘yet I have no interest in the place’.21 For his forty-sixth birthday in February, he summoned only Forster and Collins to a dinner at Gravesend. He was busy planning a series of readings from his works intended, for the first time, to make money for himself. For this he needed a manager. He appointed Arthur Smith, who came from the heart of the professional theatrical world; his brother Albert was a popular comedian, married to Mary Keeley, daughter of the Keeleys with whom Nelly was currently acting.
In March she was nineteen; she was alternating between Buckstone’s Shocking Events and Celia in As You Like It. Two days after her birthday Dickens was at the Lyceum to see Maria’s benefit performance. Later he wrote to Collins,
The Doncaster unhappiness remains so strong upon me that I can’t write, and (waking!) can’t rest, one minute. I have never known a moment’s peace or content since the last night of The Frozen Deep. I do suppose that there never was a man so seized and rended by one Spirit.22
At about this time poor Catherine Dickens is said to have received a bracelet ordered by her husband for Nelly and wrongly delivered to Tavistock House.23 Dickens made a habit of giving small presents to those who took part in his theatricals, but one can see why this particular offering might now be cruelly upsetting to his wife. Katey Dickens also reported finding her mother crying in her room because he had ordered her to call on the Ternans – a story that has a ring of truth to Dickens’s character as a man who imposed his will and his version of things on everyone around him.24 Catherine Dickens was too cowed not to obey her husband; it must have been an uncomfortable afternoon for all at Park Cottage, as the ladies did their best to exchange light conversation over the tea cups. If any of the Ternans felt compassion for their visitor, it was not enough to change the course of things.
Another glimpse of the situation comes in a letter of Thackeray’s daughter Anny, who knew the Dickens children well, in which she says she has heard that ‘Charley met his Father & Miss whatever the actress’ name out walking on Hampstead Heath.’ And although she adds stoutly, ‘But I dont believe a word of the scandal,’ this seems a plausible picture, Dickens striding along with a pretty, young and blessedly energetic companion at his side, eagerly listening, eagerly agreeing; and then the embarrassment of the father caught out, face to face with a son old enough to understand the significance of what he was seeing, older indeed than Nelly herself.25
A few weeks later, in May, as she was playing Maria in The School for Scandal, and Dickens began public readings from his own works in St Martin’s Hall in Longacre, he and Catherine separated. She left Tavistock House and never returned there or to Gad’s Hill. Her parents and the rest of her own family took her part indignantly, with the exception of Georgina, who remained in charge of both houses. For the sake of appearances Dickens also left Tavistock House for his lodgings in Wellington Street, though he continued to spend time at Gad’s Hill. This is likely to be the period at which he wrote a formal letter to his elder children accusing their mother of not having the character to appreciate his platonic attachment to Nelly; and of which Katey Dickens, then also nineteen, said, ‘nothing could surpass the misery and unhappiness of our home’.26 London gossiped, enthralled, and Dickens seemed to most of his friends to have gone half mad.
The Invisible Woman Page 13
