The Invisible Woman

by Claire Tomalin

  She was twenty-eight in the year of the diary; her mother was sixty-five, Dickens fifty-five. By now she must have begun to ask herself if her youth was to pass entirely while she lived this curious half-life with an elderly mother and an ageing gentleman friend, cut off from her own generation, unable to meet other young men and women or pursue ordinary social activities, unable to think of marriage. The elation she had felt during the early stages of his love for her was bound to flatten as the years passed; to be singled out by a great man became less wonderful if it had to be shrouded in mystery. Whatever benefits he had given her – the opportunity to travel, financial freedom, the leisure for study – were liable to turn sour when it became obvious they were leading nowhere. However cultivated she might become, there was not much to do with her cultivation if she was destined for a life of nervous isolation.

  The details tell the story. In a letter to a friend Dickens said he was going to Buckinghamshire from Sunday, 16 December, to Tuesday, 18 December (1866), very possibly to celebrate an early Christmas with Nelly (Slough was then in Bucks.)7 The season of domestic goodwill and festivity must have posed a problem to all good Victorian family men with more than one family to take care of, particularly when there were two lots of children to receive the demonstrations of paternal love. Dickens was at least spared this difficulty. Catherine must accept the absence of her children; Nelly had none, but she must also accept that Gad’s Hill had the first claim on him and make her own arrangements accordingly, which probably meant staying quietly in Slough with her mother and the pets for company. At Gad’s Hill Dickens acted the squire, organizing sports for the local villagers on Boxing Day; 2,000 people turned up to enjoy them. There were also house guests, including Katey and her husband, and doubtless games, dancing, plum pudding and general merriment. It’s possible Nelly saw Dickens again on Thursday, 3 January, when he slipped up to town for the day on the plea of office work and went to the Lyceum in the evening. Then he was back at Gad’s Hill until all his guests departed on Monday, 7 January, on which day he immediately set off for Slough, where he remained until Wednesday, 9 January, and probably returned again on Thursday.

  After another weekend of guests at Gad’s Hill, he was in Slough again on Monday, 14 January, looking in at the office on the way. On 17 January he departed for Liverpool, spent ten days giving public readings in the north and was back in Slough on Monday, 28 January, where he remained for two nights. On 30 January he was at the office, dined with Georgina and went on to visit Fechter, who was of course well known to the Ternans; and after another London reading departed on 1 February for a further tour of the north, from which he returned south three times, and three times spent nights in Slough.

  This is very much the pattern throughout the diary. The longest periods of his absence from Nelly were occasioned by his reading tours. He appears to have taken no real holidays; in marked contrast to his activities in the early sixties, there was not a single excursion to France. Nelly welcomed him back from the north of England for a long weekend from 8 to 11 March, then saw him off to Ireland, from which he returned straight to her for another four days and nights, from 23 to 27 March.

  During this time there is a diary entry ‘Houses’ and two days later ‘Meet for houses at 12 1/2. To Peckm: To SL:’ – the first indication that he and Nelly were considering moving on, this time to the southern suburbs of London. He was back in Slough on 27 March, and again on 30 and 31 March after reading in Cambridge and Norwich. During the whole month he was not at Gad’s Hill at all; the correspondent to whom he said he was spending only one night in London was being told the literal truth, for Slough is not London. And this may have been one of the reasons for moving, for the journey must have become particularly wearing in the winter months. Another could have been the difficulty and inconvenience of using two cottages, prudent as it may have seemed in a small place like Slough. In February there were public readings of the works of Charles Dickens in a hall in the High Street, which may have caused Mr Tringham to worry about being recognized.8

  Peckham was carefully chosen. It was wholly unlike the Peckham of the twentieth century, being still a pleasant, open rural area: ‘There is not in the immediate neighbourhood of London a more agreeable country than Peckham Rye, Nunhead and adjacent localities.’9 But what must have made it irresistible to Dickens was that it had just acquired a rail link with Waterloo; a fine new station appeared at Peckham Rye in 1865. Since Gad’s Hill was also on the London, Chatham and Dover line, Peckham became at a stroke easily accessible both from Dickens’s office and his country house.

  The move could not, however, be made immediately. The month of April is the most enigmatic in the diary, with its entry ‘(N. ill latter part of this month)’ across the bottom of the page, and its mysteriously prominent word ‘Arrival’ on Saturday, 13 April, followed by another large, square-bracketed word ‘Loss’ a week later. During this week (marked at the side ‘Holiday’) Dickens was at Slough on the nights of 13 and 14 April, at Gad’s Hill for the next three, then at Wellington Street on 18 April; and on 19 April he took Wills with him to Slough, leaving again on the next day, which is the one marked ‘Loss’.10

  These four items – ‘Arrival’ and ‘Loss’; the bringing of Wills, who is known to have been Dickens’s confidant and practical helper in all matters concerning Nelly; and her illness – raise for a second time the vexed question of a pregnancy. Do they indicate the birth and death of a child? Again, there is no documentary evidence that one was born or died under any recognizable name in this area at this time. Gladys Storey asserted, when asked by a Dickens scholar, that ‘no child was born’ in 1867.11 Felix Aylmer, who deciphered the place names in the diary in a brilliant piece of detective work, and who believed in the birth of a child, damaged his case by elaborating it into a tale of false names and adoption; but although the adoption story was swiftly disproved, the rest of his analysis remains good.12 No birth is proven, but none of the arguments against it is conclusive. Registration could have been avoided or arranged under a false name, by Wills for example; and if the birth were premature and followed by the death of the infant, it might easily have escaped notification of any kind.

  A second undocumented baby may simply seem too much to suggest to those who doubt there were any offspring at all, or indeed any carnal relations between Dickens and Nelly. But for those who can keep open minds on the subject, there is at least the possibility that she, like Frith’s Mary Alford, Collins’s Martha and Cruikshank’s Edith, could have become pregnant more than once. The era of the crinoline, when even large children were sometimes hidden beneath their mothers’ skirts, was the optimum era for concealing pregnancy to the very last moment; and Mrs Ternan, who had appeared on stage many times in such a condition, must have known just how to manage things.13 It would be wrong to dismiss the possibility out of hand as long as the ‘Arrival’ and ‘Loss’ entries stand in the diary unexplained.

  (illustration credit 11.1)

  The expectation of a birth also offers a reason for planning to move to a much larger and more comfortable house in a district where neither Tringham nor Ternan was known. It might also help to account for the hostility between Dickens and Fanny, ever protective of her younger sister. She arrived somewhat precipitately in England at the end of May, without her husband, who was left to follow later. By then Nelly was on her feet again: Dickens noted twice ‘N. walks’. She had even been to the theatre with him. On 8 May the entry is ‘Lyc: (N there too)’ and the following day ‘N and M’ (Nelly and either her mother or, possibly, Maria) dined with him at Verrey’s Restaurant, and he returned to Slough in the evening; this was the occasion on which he told Georgina he could not get to Gad’s Hill until Monday, 13 May, because of pressure of work. With Nelly convalescent, Georgina fussing on the one hand and Fanny on the other, things were delicate for Dickens. Someone made sure that his and Fanny’s visits to Slough did not coincide.14 If they met at Wellington Street to discuss her Mabel’s Progr
ess, appearing weekly in All the Year Round throughout the summer, neither recorded the fact. Fanny’s letters to Bice conveyed Nelly’s love and her mother’s, but gave no address or indication of where they were living.

  Plans for the move to Peckham were now proceeding. Dickens was also mulling over a renewed proposal that he should go to America for a reading tour in November. If he went, he wanted to take Nelly with him. On 6 June, when he was at Slough, he wrote to Wills, on paper headed with the monogram ‘E.T.’, about the proposed American trip: ‘The Patient, I ack. to be the gigantic difficulty. But you know I don’t like to give in before a difficulty, if it can be beaten.’15 This reluctance to give in before the difficulty of having her at his side in America grew no less as the weeks went by; and it can only be presumed that she was herself keen to make the journey. She had all her family’s love of travel and must often have heard her mother speak of her own transatlantic trip.

  While Dickens was revolving this plan, he expressed his hostility towards Fanny in a letter to a friend who had evidently asked some probing questions about his relations with the Ternan family. The friend was Frances Elliot, a Scottish heiress with literary aspirations, divorced under Scottish law from her first husband and now married to her second, the Dean of Bristol; she was known to both Anthony and Tom Trollope, and was on surprisingly close terms with Dickens, who later advised her about her second bout of marital problems. This is what he wrote to her:

  The ‘magic circle’ consists of but one member. I don’t in the least care for Mrs T.T. except that her share in the story is (as far as I am concerned) a remembrance impossible to swallow. Therefore, and for the magic sake, I scrupulously try to do her justice, and not to see her – out of my path – with a jaundiced vision …

  I feel your affectionate letter truly and deeply, but it would be inexpressibly painful to N to think that you knew her history. She has no suspicion that your assertion of your friend against the opposite powers ever brought you to the knowledge of it. She would not believe that you could see her with my eyes, or know her with my mind. Such a presentation is impossible. It would distress her for the rest of her life. I thank you none the less, but it is quite out of the question. If she could bear that, she could not have the pride and self-reliance which (mingled with the gentlest nature) has borne her alone, through so much.

  … Of course you will be very strictly on your guard, if you see Tom Trollope, or his wife, or both – to make no reference to me which either can piece into anything. She is infinitely sharper than the serpent’s Tooth. Mind that.16

  This is a reasonably, though not entirely, plain communication. To begin with, Dickens is declining absolutely to introduce Nelly to Mrs Elliot, on the grounds that Nelly would not wish it; Mrs Elliot has heard of Nelly through a friend who argued with the ‘opposite powers’, presumably the supporters of Catherine Dickens. His insistence that Nelly is the only member of his ‘magic circle’ is important; so are his remarks about Fanny, of whom he has had such a high opinion. Now, rather like the Hogarths, she has proved unworthy of all the benefits he has loaded on her; he finds her ungrateful and is, or pretends to be, nervous of her and what she and her husband might find out.

  But the chief purpose of the letter was to stop Mrs Elliot talking. Dickens did not break off his relations with Tom Trollope, who arrived in London at this point, and whom he immediately invited to a bachelor dinner; perhaps among men he felt better able to remain in control of what was said and what left silent. He also continued with the serialization of Fanny’s novel. Fanny sent a Dickens autograph to Bice. She was at Waltham Cross with the Anthony Trollopes in June and visited the Elliots with Tom in August. Dean Elliot acted as a steward at a farewell dinner given for Dickens before his departure to America in November, with Anthony Trollope as another.

  Only ‘N’ was in purdah. Whether Fanny approved her sister’s move to Peckham we don’t know; it was not mentioned in her letters. On 21 June Dickens wrote in his pocket book, ‘To temporary P. 1st Day’ and on 22 June, ‘at P. Long wait for N at house’. A few days later he was at P. again, working on a story, and on 26 June the name of the street in which the permanent house they had taken appears, ‘Linden’. Linden Grove, where a single row of large and handsome newly built villas stood, was across the fields to the south-east of the cluster of houses at Peckham Rye and close to Nunhead Cemetery, one of the great landscaped burial places established in the 1840s. All around was the Surrey countryside, still supporting farms, with streams, cornfields and grassland; where the houses were going up, it was to meet the needs of a new, floating, anonymous population. Nunhead itself, no more than a hamlet of a few hundred souls in 1840, expanded over the next half century to over 10,000 inhabitants. It was a place in which Nelly could be set up without risk of attracting attention, yet in considerable style. The house they had chosen was called Windsor Lodge; it had an imposing porch, gardens front and back with trees and lawns, and a view over the fields and up the slopes of Telegraph Hill.17 Dickens took a lease as he had done at Slough, and under the same name of Charles Tringham. The rates were paid by the usual assortment of Turnhams and Tringhams; in January 1868, when both Dickens and Nelly were abroad, the entry showed ‘Thomas Turnham’ altered to ‘Thomas Tringham’; perhaps it was the good Wills who paid and found himself confused.18

  At the beginning of August Dickens was suffering from his foot, which was painful enough to give him wretched nights and make him retreat to Wellington Street to endure them in solitude, though he returned to Peckham and then travelled to town with ‘N & M’ on 12 August. He was well enough for two cricket matches at Gad’s Hill, with visits to Peckham in between; but in September his foot was worse again. Now, as the American trip seemed more likely – Dolby had been sent across the Atlantic to sound things out – and Fanny had gone off to Germany with Tom, Dickens spent more nights at Peckham. On 29 September he wrote, ‘Decide to go’ in his diary and sent off a telegram to that effect to his American publisher.

  Just over a week later Fanny announced to Bice from Germany that she was expecting Nelly and her mother to come out to Florence at the end of October. Nelly must have communicated with her sister as soon as she heard Dickens’s decision. From 21 to 25 October he slept at Peckham and went in to the office each day; there was a farewell dinner at Verrey’s with N on 25 October, inscribed in large letters and boxed in by thick lines to indicate its importance. Then they parted, for Dickens had to go through much business, including a huge public farewell dinner on 2 November at which it would not, it seemed, be possible for her to join the hundred ladies watching the diners from a gallery. Instead she was on her way to Florence, where she arrived with her mother at the Villa Ricorboli in the evening of 30 October. She had with her secret instructions from Dickens about returning to England and following him to America in December.

  Still hoping that these instructions would be implemented, he embarked for Boston from Liverpool on 9 November. Wills was the appointed go-between. The arrangement was that Dickens would send him a coded telegram if everything looked propitious, which Wills would forward to Nelly in Florence. Wills was also to tell Forster and Gad’s Hill of any arrangements he made. Nelly was to expect the telegram, whose code she understood, on either Saturday, 23 November, or Saturday, 30 November, with the further expectation that she would be back in London by 10 December, ready to embark for America on 11 December. Dickens wrote the code in his pocket book, after the last diary entry, which was for 7 November; it read:

  In any case. Tel:

  Tel: all well means

  a You come

  Tel: Safe and well means

  You don’t come.

  At the side was written ‘expect it (thro’ Wills) – on Sat 23 or Sat 30th’. Beneath this are the words:

  To Wills who sends the Tel

  on c/o Villa Trollope

  fuori la porta

  S. Niccolo Florence.

  Below this again are the words:

  10 De
cember If R N in London

  11 If R N in Liverpool.

  With Wills he left a note that read:

  NELLY If she needs any help will come to you, or if she changes her address, you will immediately let me know if she changes. Until then it will be Villa Trollope, a Ricorboli, Firenze, Italy [he wrote this out again in capitals]. On the day after my arrival out I will send you a short Telegram at the office. Please copy its exact words, (as they will have a special meaning for her), and post them to her as above by the very next post after receiving my telegram. And also let Gad’s Hill know – and let Forster know – what the telegram is.

  In a further note Dickens wrote that Forster ‘knows Nelly as you do, and will do anything for her if you want anything done’.

  On 19 November Dickens arrived in Boston; he appears to have believed that Nelly was planning to leave Florence, because he wrote to Wills on 21 November, saying,

  After this present mail, I shall address Nelly’s letters to your care, for I do not quite know where she will be. But she will write to you, and instruct you where to forward them. In any interval between your receipt of one or more, and my Dear Girl’s so writing to you, keep them by you.19

  But in Florence there seemed to be no thought of the Dear Girl leaving. Whether she would have done had the summons come from Dickens, we don’t know; but on Friday, 22 November, Dickens sent the telegram indicating that there was no possibility of her joining him – ‘Safe and well expect good letter full of hope’.