The Invisible Woman

by Claire Tomalin

  More mundanely, he may have brought her housekeeping money; at Gad’s Hill this was handed over to Georgina with the most exact regularity. If he had something to write during the day, he is likely to have settled down to read what he had written to her in the evening; and if she was sulky, he probably tried to tease her out of it, as he had teased his wife before their marriage, urging her not to be ‘coss’. As a young man he had called Catherine darling Tatie, dearest Pig, Wig, Mouse, Titmouse and old lady. No doubt he produced a similar range of lover’s endearments for Nelly; and perhaps his phrase ‘neuralgia flying about’ is a reference to her bouts of ill humour.

  It’s unlikely that it was all ease and pleasure for the man of fifty-four and the girl of twenty-seven. Long after his death she said she loathed the memory of his attentions; it’s not possible to know whether she found them loathsome at the time. There was always the fear of pregnancy. There was also the matter of how she saw herself mirrored in his eyes. In a society which divided women into the good and the bad, even the most cherished mistress could only be bad; it was her very badness that made her desirable to the man. Good women, it was widely agreed, were not sexually enthusiastic; coldness could thus become an assertion of virtue, a demand to be loved for something other, and better, than sex. If Nelly wished to see herself elevated into a platonic muse, and Dickens longed for the release of her embraces, it was a recipe for some miserable days and nights for them both.

  Yet whatever she felt about her position, her life was now bound to his in a permanent arrangement from which she could scarcely escape – for where was she to go, and what was she to do but wait on him? And he could be the most delightful of companions; there were things they enjoyed together unequivocally. In good weather she sometimes rode with him; or they walked to Datchet or Windsor through the meadows of Upton cum Chalvey, or by way of the playing fields of Eton. We know he took this route, because there is a letter to his new manager, George Dolby, in August 1866, headed ‘Eton’ and written ‘on a pause in a walk, while waiting for a train’; and we know Nelly sometimes went with him, because he noted the fact in his diary of 1867.14 Sometimes she even took the train with him as far as town, and occasionally they dined together in a restaurant in Regent Street or went to the theatre, though these were rare treats.

  Whether from the effects of Staplehurst, the bearing and loss of a child, or the sheer anxieties and uncertainties of her life, she was now, like Maria, ‘delicate’. All domestic tasks being out of the question, she took on a local girl, Jane Wheeler, as her maid; it was the start of a lifelong relationship, for Jane took a great liking to her mistress, and remained on affectionate and protective terms with her for the next fifty years.15

  What else did Nelly do with her days? She had her music; and her mother was often with her, bringing her St Bernard, Tell, to keep company with Nelly’s dog, named Lady Clara Vere de Vere after Tennyson’s blue-blooded heroine. It’s a relief to find her spirits were good enough for a mild joke of this kind, and no surprise to find her drawing on Tennyson; the commonplace book she kept later shows that she appreciated the poetry of the laureate. Other poets she enjoyed were Thomas Hood, John Greenleaf Whittier, the popular American author of ‘The Barefoot Boy’, and the Romantics – at any rate Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth – as well as, inevitably in an acting family, Shakespeare. Reading was perhaps her chief, most consoling occupation. Her circle and family connections must have kept her supplied with novels, and she can scarcely have avoided the bestseller of the decade, Mrs Henry Wood’s melodramatic East Lynne, with its adulterous but penitent heroine who practises an extraordinary deception upon her husband and children, faking her own death in a railway accident and returning, disguised, as a governess. She read her way through a good number of the historians, essayists, sociologists and biographers of the time, Carlyle, Buckle, Macaulay, Matthew Arnold, Froude, T. H. Huxley, Lecky, Crabb Robinson and Lockhart. She seems to have managed some Schiller and Goethe in German, and among French writers was acquainted with Victor Hugo, de Musset, Béranger, Beaumarchais, Rousseau and Michelet; and with George Sand, whose work Dickens was said to dislike, though not apparently with Balzac, whom he enjoyed. One must be careful not to overestimate the significance of an extract in a commonplace book, but the list suggests at the least a determined assault on culture which none of Dickens’s heroines can be remotely imagined undertaking; nor was Dickens himself renowned for his cultural range or breadth of reading.

  In late October she went with her mother to Paris to attend Fanny’s wedding. A few days before this Dickens’s accounts show a payment into something described as the ‘N trust’, followed up by other small sums over the next three months, when they apparently ceased: another glimpse into his byzantine procedures.16 Dickens was not of the wedding party, but Maria travelled from Florence with the bridal couple, and her husband came from England to join them. Mr and Mrs Anthony Trollope also came with their son Henry; Bice was left in Italy with friends. A delay to the train from Florence meant the ceremony was postponed for two days, during which Nelly did some shopping, or at least bought a blue collar with a silver bell for Lady Clara. Then, on 29 October at the British Embassy, Fanny became Mrs Trollope – Frances E. as opposed to her late mother-in-law Frances – and the new couple departed immediately for a long, rambling honeymoon through south-western France. Fanny, determined to be a good stepmother, sent off volleys of letters to Bice, laden with affectionate messages from herself and Papa – who sometimes contributed a short scrawl – and with educational descriptions of scenery, architecture and local costumes, backed by sketches. Although they were dutifully preserved by Bice, they did not prevent her from feeling that she had been pushed out of the nest, and from bitterly resenting the fact.17 But Fanny had at last found a life to her taste: and she was already half-way through a second novel for All the Year Round, this time a long one.

  Maria had taken to life in Italy and became interested in painting; but she had to make up her mind to return to Oxford with her prosperous, uninteresting but indubitably patient husband. Nelly was back in Slough by 1 November, and she reported on the wedding to Dickens. He wrote to Tom Trollope:

  I should have written immediately to congratulate you on your then approaching marriage, and to assure you of my most cordial and affectionate interest in all that nearly concerns you, but that I thought it best to wait until I should have seen Nelly and her mother on their return, and should have known from them how best to address you.18

  The easy reference to Nelly suggests that Trollope understood the existence of close ties between her and Dickens; linking her with her mother makes it a family matter, and leaves Trollope free to interpret the ties as he chooses. Dickens’s letter went on:

  No friend that you have can be more truly attached to you than I am. I congratulate you with all my heart, and believe that your marriage will stand high upon the list of happy ones. As to your wife’s winning a high reputation out of your house – if you care for that – it is not much, as an addition to the delights of love and peace and a suitable companion for life – I have not the least doubt of her power to make herself famous.

  I little thought what an important master of the ceremonies I was, when I first presented the late Fanny Ternan to you. Bear me in your mind ever as the unconscious instrument of your having given your best affections to a worthy object, and I shall be the best paid master of the ceremonies since Nash drove his coach and six through the streets of Bath.19

  (illustration credit 10.1)

  It’s a fine letter of congratulation, though its invocation of ‘love and peace and a suitable companion for life’ raises the ghost of his own sad marital history. As to Fanny, the tribute is to her intellectual power and strength of purpose; no mention now of her being a sympathetic confidante, as he had called her once. There is a hint that he finds Fanny formidable.

  Meanwhile he was preparing to serialize her second book, Mabel’s Progress. It was to be put out anonymously, like
Aunt Margaret’s Trouble, which had already led to some speculation. Even to so close a friend as Collins, who angled to know the name of the author, Dickens refused to divulge it.20 The reason for this defensiveness was presumably to be found in Slough. Collins, who had known the beginning of the secret of ‘E.L.T.’, could not be trusted at all now.

  Fanny’s attitude to the relations between Dickens and her sister appears to have changed upon her marriage, and within a year the change led to a quarrel. Dickens maintained friendly relations with Tom Trollope and continued to publish Fanny’s work, while at the same time hinting bitterly in private at her ingratitude and at the necessity of keeping quiet to her on the subject of Nelly’s recent history.21 Something had made Fanny hostile to him. The situation was awkward for her. There was nothing to be ashamed of in the fact that he had helped her and now paid her for her work; but for anyone to connect this with his relations with Nelly would be intolerable. Another thing that must have concerned her was the thought of any breath of scandal affecting her stepdaughter. Nelly’s name was often mentioned by Fanny in her letters, and at some point she was introduced to Bice; the introduction would be regarded as deplorable if Nelly’s position were known to be compromised.

  Fanny may have reasoned that as long as nothing spoilt the image of her sister as an unremarkable well-to-do young lady who travelled about with her mother and her sister, and lived a quiet life, not too much damage was done. Fanny had not been an actress for so many years for nothing. Appearances become the truth. Anything unfortunate that might have taken place during the past nine years could simply be effaced. It was essential, however, that no more unfortunate events should occur. This may have led Fanny, from the time of her marriage, to encourage Nelly towards detaching herself from Dickens’s close companionship or changing the nature of their tie. If so, Dickens, not unnaturally, would have viewed her attitude with furious resentment.

  11

  The Year of the Diary

  1867

  Nelly was kept hidden by an expert, but even Dickens could not prevent accidents like Staplehurst or the loss of his diary; and it’s because of this that we have, for one only of the twelve hidden years, a document which gives a clear picture of the pattern of their lives. The year is 1867, and the information is contained in a very small memorandum book which he used as a pocket diary from 1 January to 7 November, when he set off for America and stopped making notes. The diary escaped destruction, the annual fate of Dickens’s pocket books, only because it was lost or stolen, and someone thought it worth preserving. It went missing at the end of December 1867, when he was in New York; he reported its disappearance to Georgina in a letter, and though he was jocular about it, he was obviously slightly worried, too, saying the loss was one ‘ “which”, as Mr Pepys would add, “do trouble me mightily” ’.1 In fact, the daily entries were written in forms so abbreviated that they would have conveyed very little to the casual glance. A typical sequence of three days looks like this:

  at SL: To off: from Slo at 2.20. Dine Forster. Back aft.

  at SL:

  To off at 10.20 at SL

  Yet he was right to be perturbed, because the diary is pervaded by the one person he wished to keep out of sight. Here is ‘N’ – her illness and recovery, the possibility of her joining him in America, her presence in Slough, her visits to the theatre, her walks with him, their joint search for a house and move to Peckham. Once a few notations are understood, it offers a key to the private existence he guarded so carefully.2

  The diary surfaced in a New York auction-room sale in 1922, billed as coming from an unnamed private collector. The catalogue description suggested that its importance lay in the fact that it covered the period in which Dickens was preparing his American reading tour. It was bought by the brothers Berg with other Dickensiana, and then lay unremarked in their collection until the curator drew attention to its importance in 1943. Since then scholars have been squeezing it like a tiny sponge for every drop of information it can yield.3 It is a very small booklet – 10 × 5 1/2 centimetres – printed with meteorological and other information, bound in faded red leather and written in a cramped but mostly legible hand; some of the ink has weathered to brown, some is blue.

  What it reveals with perfect clarity is a man intent on a split life; a man almost demented in his determined pursuit of it, despite the exhaustion and illness we know of from his letters and the reports of friends. It shows how he used the growing railway system as an essential component of that split life, putting up with as much pressure and discomfort as any commercial traveller in pursuance of his elaborate system of divided days and weeks, hurrying between Gad’s Hill and Wellington Street, between Wellington Street and Slough; how Paddington, Waterloo, Windsor, Slough and Datchet stations were almost as familiar to him as his office and his home. He would go straight back to Slough from giving a reading in Bath before setting off to give another in Birmingham, and fit in four secret days there between readings in Cheltenham and his departure for Ireland. On at least two occasions he sent notes to Georgina making excuses about not coming to Gad’s Hill, putting it down to pressure of work or ill health, when in fact he was planning to spend the time with Nelly.4 He would leave a dinner at Forster’s decorous establishment to take the late-evening train back to Slough. He would travel from Gad’s Hill to London with his married son Charley and then straight on by another train to see Nelly. Whenever possible he fitted in two or three days, sometimes mid-week, sometimes at weekends, usually making it appear as if he were at his office. During the ten months covered by the diary, he spent one third of his time with, or near, Nelly; one third at Gad’s Hill; and one third serving his other love, the public. His perfect punctuality and grasp of timetables stood him in brilliant stead, and when he wrote to a friend that ‘I am here, there, everywhere, nowhere’, it was almost the literal truth.5 Small wonder that he paid the price in sleeplessness, faintness, piles and, as he described it himself, ‘soreness of the whole body’.

  Other men close to Dickens seem to have managed their double lives with less stress. Collins acquired a second mistress in 1867, established her in London round the corner from his first establishment, and began a family with her; when Caroline objected and made a defiant marriage to someone else, he took it calmly and equally calmly welcomed her back into residence later, continuing to maintain his second growing family; both women were given simultaneous seaside holidays in adjacent resorts. The artist George Cruikshank also kept two households and two families round the corner from one another near Mornington Crescent, and fathered ten children on his second ‘wife’, Edith Archibold. William Frith, the popular painter who did Dickens’s portrait in 1859, had a similar arrangement: his two establishments were also only ten minutes’ walk apart, in the Paddington area, and portraits of both women appear in his famous painting of Paddington, The Railway Station. His marriage produced twelve children and lasted thirty-five years; his mistress Mary Alford bore him another seven children, and when his wife died he married her. There was something cosy and domestic about these arrangements; the women involved were not femmes fatales or cocottes – concepts for which the English were obliged to turn to the French – but comfortable, everyday creatures who were grateful enough to have steady men to support them and their children, and modest about their own position and claims. A man, even if he was not a husband, was after all still the best available source of income for a woman.

  The difficulty for Dickens was not only that he felt more vulnerable to discovery and comment, as one whose fame was pre-eminent and tied to a virtuous image which he had ferociously defended at the time of the separation from Catherine; he had also uttered assertions about Nelly, both to his family and to the world, which made the position more difficult than it might otherwise have been. The further problem was that he had picked the wrong sort of woman to be his second ‘wife’. She was neither a modest girl of the people nor a grateful widow. If she had given up her professional ambitions, she sti
ll had social ones, and she was backed by an intelligent, aspiring and watchful family. Her mother’s tolerance of the situation with Dickens must have helped her, in practical ways and by keeping up reasonably correct appearances; but when her two elder sisters both made good marriages, they brought a circle of in-laws who were almost bound to meet her sooner or later, as indeed the Anthony Trollopes already had in 1866. Nelly was becoming more difficult to hide or perhaps more reluctant to remain hidden and accept the many drawbacks of her position.

  If Nelly went to Gad’s Hill, as both she and Dickens’s daughter later claimed, there is no indication of the fact in the 1867 diary. She may have been there with her mother, presented as a family friend, for large-scale entertainments such as cricket matches; and yet this doesn’t seem to square with the clandestine nature of his visits to her. Forster knew her, and Georgina and Mamey, too, and Dickens regarded them as trustworthy friends where she was concerned, but that does not mean they engaged in social activities together, and again there is no sign of this in 1867. She may have visited Maria in Oxford; made brief trips to the seaside with her or her mother; or seen her cousins in Rochester, not so far from Gad’s Hill. Mrs Ternan may have kept on Fanny’s lodgings in Mornington Crescent as a London base; if so, there is again no sign that Dickens saw any of the Ternans there at this time.

  The pattern of her life was that she was available when Dickens wanted her; in general she stayed put, awaited visits, and occupied herself as best she could when he was away working or living his official life at Gad’s Hill. There Georgina presided, there he saw his children and received guests. Collins, who had become part of the family when Katey married his brother Charles, saw Dickens at Gad’s Hill as much as at the office. So did George Dolby, the big, bluff manager who succeeded Arthur Smith, although Dolby did also dine with Dickens and Nelly in town.6 Wills is the only member of Dickens’s circle known to have gone to Slough with him. For Nelly, dinner with Wills or Dolby, both in Dickens’s employ, middle-aged, married men, neither of whom would have dreamed of introducing their wives to her, may not have been the greatest treat imaginable.