The Invisible Woman

by Claire Tomalin

  More money matters: in June 1868 the first of a series of payments to a ‘Miss Thomas’ appears in Dickens’s Coutts account. Thereafter,

  sums varying between £7 12s. 6d. and £350, and practically never for the same amount, were paid, always on different days of the month, sometimes there being one payment a month, sometimes as many as three. In the year June 1868 to June 1869, Miss Thomas was paid £565. In the year June 1869 to June 1870 £332 2s. od.12

  It is not unreasonable to suppose that these may have been connected with the Peckham household. At the same period Wilkie Collins was paying a more modest £20 a month to his mistress Martha Rudd, installed in Bolsover Street under the name of Mrs Dawson, who bore her first child to him in the summer of 1869.13 Collins was at great pains to make proper financial provision for the women and children who depended on him, and there is no reason to think Dickens had a lesser sense of responsibility: his care for a whole range of sisters-in-law and assorted children of his brothers bears witness to this. As to the accusation that Nelly was mercenary because she accepted money from Dickens: it can hardly be taken seriously by anyone who considers what her position was, how many years they spent together, and the possibilities open to her after his death.

  Nelly’s involvement with Dickens lasted from 1857 until his death in 1870. During those thirteen years she changed from a girl – poor but petted by her family, healthy and pretty, with a good if not brilliant prospect of a professional career and, doubtless, a husband – into a woman approaching middle age, in delicate health, solitary and inured to dependence on a man who could give her neither an honourable position nor even steady companionship. Her experience of life was considerable but mostly rather grim. She lived the classic role of the Fallen Woman, held in particular public contempt by the Victorians, but she was not a Nana, not at all a successful demi-mondaine in the French style, enjoying sophisticated pleasures and milking her lover for luxuries while she deceived him. Instead, for much of the time she endured the drearier aspects of both domesticity and daughterhood, an outcast of the outer suburbs. Yet in one respect she managed an extraordinary feat. In contemporary English fiction the victims of seduction habitually begged their families to consider them as dead; Nelly, with the complicity and help of her mother and her sisters, kept alive an innocent personality in one section of society and a quite separate one with Dickens.

  This is the more of an achievement if, as seems likely, she bore one child, and possibly more than one. Death relieved her of the further problems they would have brought, but it was not surprising that her health deteriorated; grief, shame, anxiety, and the injuries she received at Staplehurst all seem likely to have played their part in this. The love of the great man, which must have seemed to promise so much when she was twenty, had become both destructive and a barrier cutting her off from any future of her own by this time. Her sisters were married, their past as actresses put behind them. Nelly, too, had acquired the manners and habits of a lady, but she was still officially in the care of her mother and unable to marry or move in any but the narrowest social circle. Whether she loved Dickens in simplicity of heart or whether her love was partly or mostly dependence on a kind, generous uncle or father-figure, whether she enjoyed his embraces or endured them as the unfortunate aspect of life with a kindly uncle, he had also become a millstone around her neck. Of this he was almost certainly aware.14 He could not marry her unless Catherine died, which she showed no sign of doing. There was no solution or release in prospect; on dark days she must have seen a long succession of years in Peckham stretching ahead, in which she was always ready for Mr Tringham, arriving in a hired carriage from the station, with his work, his cigars, his exact plans which allowed so much to her, so much to his public, so much to Gad’s Hill, Georgina and his official social world. When he departed in another hackney for the station, she was left with alternative fears of loneliness or pregnancy; and when not at Peckham she would be in Worthing, or Oxford, or even Florence, but always as poor, dear, delicate little spinster Nelly.

  Dickens remained a good patron to Fanny in Florence, whatever their private quarrel. In August 1869 a new story by her began to be serialized. It was called Veronica and was altogether bolder in its theme than anything she had produced before. Fanny made Veronica, a beautiful young orphan, elope to Italy with a man easily old enough to be her father, whom she has met and found fascinating during his convalescence from a hunting accident. The ageing seducer is not only married but – it transpires – married to Veronica’s aunt, thereby piling incest on adultery; and the whole story reads as though Fanny were determinedly supplying every sort of sensational effect she could think of; and just possibly indulging in a little malicious teasing of Nelly’s ageing lover. Unfortunately Veronica is a blunt rather than a sharp instrument. If Dickens read it, he may have allowed his feeling for Nelly’s family to overcome his judgement, or he may have convinced himself that it catered to a coarsening modern taste.

  He was, in any case, engrossed in planning a new novel of his own, the first since Our Mutual Friend. Edwin Drood was to be a murder story built around a man who leads a double life, half as a virtuous choirmaster, half as a drug-taker and criminal. It is set in the city of Dickens’s childhood and Nelly’s birth, Rochester, which he names Cloisterham for the purposes of his story. The descriptions of its ancient streets and cathedral are powerful, dark and vivid; it is hard not to read an elegiac note into them. Most of the characters, however, are Dickensian automata. They are well turned out, but they are turned out on pre-established patterns: the baby-sweet girl, the comic schoolmistress, the self-important conservative citizen, the sprightly young naval man, even the bad boy. The most striking feature of Drood – it’s been pointed out by most critics – is the link between the villain Jasper’s dual personality and Dickens’s own experience as one who used different identities in different sections of his life.

  The theme of a double identity was not new; but whereas in Our Mutual Friend he made John Harmon play a false part with benevolent intentions and effect, Jasper is wholly malign. Where Harmon wins the love of Bella through his trick, Jasper is only terrifying to the girl he loves and pursues. He subdues her will only through his hypnotic powers. Although fiction is not autobiography, it is tempting to read into this Dickens’s darkening view of himself, to relate it to his struggle against worsening health, and to connect it with his obsessive performances of the Sikes murder from Oliver Twist. If he sometimes thought ahead to his own death, he also perhaps acknowledged that he had been the agent of destruction in the lives of more than one woman and more than one of his own children too.

  This is as far as speculation can reasonably go. There is no key that will make the characters in the novel into equivalents of real people. Commentators eager to identify Nelly with the women in Dickens’s writing point out that Rosa is small and blonde, as Nelly had been in 1857, and that Dickens changed the name of another character from Olympia Heyridge (or Heyfort) in his notes to Helena Landless, which resembles Ellen Lawless: the first coincidence tells us nothing at all, the second little more than that he took pleasure in incorporating echoes of Nelly’s striking name into his work. No doubt it was a private amusement for them both.

  As the winter of 1869 drew on, Dickens became absorbed in his writing. In November he wrote to Tom Trollope, saying he had started on the book, responding humorously to his suggestion that he might take a walking trip across the Alps, and mentioning that he’d seen Fanny in connection with a financial arrangement, though he sent her no greeting.15 In January he was doing a few London readings again and wrote to Wills, sending Nelly’s greetings: ‘The patient was in attendance and missed you. I was charged with all manner of good and kind remembrance.’16 A month later he wrote to Wills again about their annual celebration of her birthday. This year she would be thirty-one: ‘You know that you are expected at a certain small dinner of four, next Thursday, the 3rd March, at Blanchard’s in Regent Street at 6 sharp? Don’t you?�
�17 It is the last letter he wrote to Wills.

  He had only three more months to live. Even they were packed with events to the end. He was received by the Queen and is said to have turned down the honour she offered him. He gave a tearful final reading in which he mispronounced his words; his own Pickwick became ‘Pickswick’ and ‘Pickwicks’. He continued to attend the theatre with obvious relish. He rented a large house in Hyde Park Place, for Mamey’s sake he said, and organized a reception there, rather in the style of the old days at Tavistock House, with Joachim and professional singers to entertain the guests. He breakfasted with Gladstone. He spoke at charitable dinners and addressed the Academy at the end of April, praising the literary and scientific achievements of women, ‘who even in their present oppressed condition can attain to quite as great distinction as men’.18 He helped direct some private theatricals with his daughters and London neighbours and the painter Millais. He had the sorrow of hearing of the death of his and Catherine’s old friend, the artist Maclise, and a few weeks later that of Mark Lemon, who had acted with him and Nelly at Manchester. Dickens was now white-haired and stooping, obliged to wear elastic stockings and bandages against the pain in his swollen foot, and suffering from disturbances of vision; he took laudanum to get a good night’s sleep.

  Nelly cannot have seen all this without a sense of what was to come; and yet he could still summon his energies and plan for the future. He told a young woman writer sent to him for advice by Bulwer-Lytton that he thought of going to live abroad in Germany – he specified Thuringia – for two years, in order to study the language thoroughly, accompanied by his daughter; perhaps this was a tactful version of the actual plan, since neither Mamey nor Katey seems to have heard of any such idea.19 To another intimate friend, Charles Kent, with whom he was in the habit of taking long walks in the southern suburbs of London, he made his confidence now about his most cherished dream of having the management and sole control of a great theatre: the lifelong fascination had never left him.20 He also wrote vehemently to his son Henry, deploring the ‘narrow-minded fanatics, who decry the theatre and defame its artists’.21

  And he continued to lead his double life and lay false trails; at the beginning of May he told a correspondent that he was ‘in attendance on a sick friend, at some distance’, without of course further explanation; it was an excuse he had used before.22 He declined many invitations on the justifiable grounds of his health, yet continued to divide his time between his many different addresses, writing to Georgina from Wellington Street in the old way. On 27 May he wrote to Fechter also from the office, while telling other friends he was in Kent. His last visit to Nelly in Peckham was probably made between Tuesday, 31 May, and Thursday, 2 June; on the Wednesday he had his usual lunch with Dolby near the office. Dolby found him in low spirits, even tearful. There is some conflicting testimony for the next night, which Charley Dickens says his father spent at Wellington Street, while others say he was involved in the amateur theatricals at a neighbour’s house in Hyde Park Place. But there is no doubt that he was at Gad’s Hill with Georgina and Mamey on the Friday evening.

  On the Saturday Katey joined them, and on the Sunday evening she had a long talk with her father in which he warned her off the theatrical career she had in mind. He then told her he felt his strength ebbing and doubted he would finish Drood, adding that he wished he had been a better father and a better man.23 On the Monday she left; he worked all morning and then walked into Rochester to post his letters. He wrote to Charles Kent on Wednesday, 8 June, saying, ‘I hope I may be ready for you at 3 o’clock.’24 He also told Georgina he would be going to the office as usual the next day, but in the evening he began to look ill over dinner. Suddenly he rose to his feet, saying he wished to go to London at once. Then he collapsed on the floor, muttering; he lost consciousness and never regained it or spoke again. The coachman and gardener came and lifted him on to a stiff, narrow sofa. Later Georgina had a bed brought into the dining room, hoping he might be moved into it if he improved, but it was a useless gesture.

  Doctors were sent for, and came. Charley, Katey and Mamey arrived. Harry was in Cambridge – he did not reach Gad’s Hill until the following evening – and all the other sons were out of reach. The following morning, when Dickens should have been in London, Nelly was sent for, while Katey went to tell her mother what had happened. Two separate accounts state that Nelly was present when Dickens died, at ten past six on the evening of Thursday, 9 June.25

  She left, presumably, that night or the next morning, either for Windsor Lodge or for her mother’s rooms in Pimlico, while the whole nation began its lamentations and tributes. Dickens had expressed a desire to be buried in the simplest manner in Rochester, in a small graveyard under the castle wall, but his wish was not respected. There was a strong sentiment in the government, the press and at Westminster Abbey itself that Poets’ Corner was the only fitting place for so great a national figure. Neither the executors nor the family were prepared to oppose this view. The Queen, at Balmoral, sent a telegram to Mrs Dickens in Gloucester Crescent, which perhaps consoled her for being excluded from the burial at the Abbey on 14 June. There appears to have been no invitation for Nelly either, although Collins, Forster, Beard and Frederic Ouvry, Dickens’s solicitor, joined the small family group. By chance a clergyman with business at the Abbey noticed the little procession and inquired about it; his name was William Benham, and he had a particular interest in Dickens which was to produce some unexpected results later.26 Outside, the public was already massing in its thousands to pay its respects.

  PART THREE

  13

  Another Life Begins

  1870–1876

  Nelly was now, for the first time in her life, free. She had an income of her own. She owed nothing to anyone, financially or emotionally. She no longer had to fear pregnancy. She no longer needed her mother as a shield against scandal; and indeed, as soon as she could, she set off for Paris accompanied only by her maid, Jane from Slough, like a well-to-do young widow who goes abroad to recover herself. She was no longer a girl; on the other hand she still looked remarkably young, and who was to inquire how old she was? An age could be chosen as well as a name; by deciding to be a much younger woman than she was, she could simply abolish the inconvenient years. A society which prized youth and innocence so highly in its women might excusably be given what it wanted. Nelly had not learnt deception from a master for nothing.

  As for her past: with any luck, it was sufficiently mysterious to be effaced. Who would want to tell on her? Not the wistful lady in Gloucester Crescent. Not any of Dickens’s devoted associates, Wills or Dolby; not Collins, who had his own secrets to juggle with. Not the Dickens family, all subject to the will of the master, or Forster, intent on giving the world an image of his friend which, if not sanctified, was at least most scrupulously sanitized.

  With money Nelly could travel and live as she pleased. If there were circles in which her name might raise an eyebrow, she should be able to avoid them. The care with which she had kept her two separate identities was now going to prove its value. Even the possible evil effects of being named in the will were lessened by a misprint in The Times when it was announced on 22 July: her name was given as ‘Miss Fernan’. The mistake was repeated in The New York Times; just possibly it was not a misprint but a misdirection from the executors. A small slip, particularly when it involved the first letter of a name, was an easy but effective device under the circumstances. If Dickens’s intention had been to make a posthumous affirmation of his love for Nelly, something or someone saw to it that the affirmation was bungled.

  While the nation mourned and sang Dickens’s praises through the hot June days that followed his death, Nelly packed up Windsor Lodge. The Bishop of Manchester proclaimed that Dickens was a teacher sent from God; the Doncaster Chronicle announced that he had helped to raise the moral standard of the whole human race; the chaplain of the House of Commons spoke of ‘a purity and healthiness in his writings whic
h were a natural consequence of his character’; and Dean Stanley declared that his grave would be a sacred spot and read out selected portions of his will from the pulpit in Westminster Abbey. Charles Tringham’s rates, due in July, were paid for the last time through a ghostly surrogate, but by the end of June the house in Linden Grove was empty, and Nelly had left Peckham for good. She was with Maria and her husband at The Lawn; before the end of the month Fanny also arrived in Oxford from Florence, and Mrs Ternan made up the family party.

  How frankly did they discuss Nelly’s situation? It’s impossible to know. Appearances had to be kept up, as always; the death of a famous friend of the family was to be mourned, decorously. Fanny wrote to Bice, telling her that Nelly had received ‘most affectionate’ letters from ‘the girls’ – she meant Mamey and Katey Dickens – expressing the hope that they might meet when they should all be in London. She herself had ‘a few lines from young Charles Dickens’: which was to be expected, since she was a contributor to the magazine, and he intended to keep it going. You can’t help wondering how interested Bice, then a rebellious sixteen-year-old, can have been in this sort of thing; but Fanny continued resolutely with a description of how she and her sisters and mother visited Westminster Abbey to pay their respects: ‘We went when in London to see Charles Dickens’s grave. He is buried in Westminster Abbey. The tomb-stone was strewn with flowers scattered there by different visitors. I was greatly affected, and so were we all.’1 She doesn’t say where they stayed in London, but does tell Bice that Georgina Hogarth called on them. Later Georgina sent remembrances of Dickens to both Trollopes (‘a little medal for Papa, and a paperweight for me’) and also to Maria and her husband. Fanny did love dropping names, but Georgina’s gesture indicates a genuine sense of intimacy between the two families at this moment. To Nelly she gave a pen with which Dickens had been writing on the last day of his life: this Fanny did not mention to Bice.