The Invisible Woman

by Claire Tomalin

  She also noted that the Tunisians did not believe the French would invade them, because it was contrary to the ‘law of Nations’; whereas she feared that the French desire for an African empire to match the English one in India would drive them on; and she was right. The French invaded just after her visit to the border, and by the summer of 1883 they controlled the whole country.

  Some Old Letters from North Africa gives a clear picture of a woman of curiosity and courage who would never let a good opportunity pass. At an age when many of her female contemporaries in England had settled permanently on the sofa, she kept the enthusiasm of a girl, always bobbing up insistently when a journey was suggested and sticking to her resolve through all discomforts and danger. She thought nothing of setting off for several days into the unknown with only a handbag for luggage. She rose cheerfully at three in the morning to the roar of a camel caravan. She got herself taken into the sacred city of Kairouan, where no Christian woman – and scarcely a white man – had ever been, and where there was a real risk of being stoned by an indignant populace.

  If her mind ever strayed back to The Lawn, with its flower gardens and croquet, its gardeners, coachman and paddock with her quiet horse prepared for a gentle outing, she obviously had no regrets. The contrasts of her life were even greater than those of Nelly’s, her course quite as unpredictable; and it afforded her at least equal satisfaction.

  15

  Nelly Tells

  In Margate Nelly gave charitable readings and recitations from A Christmas Carol, Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield (‘Our Housekeeping’) and Bleak House with the special authority of one whose family had boasted a friendship with the author. On her birthday in 1882 she received from Mamey a ‘Charles Dickens Birthday Book’, affectionately inscribed; and it is said that the infant Geoffrey played on the sands of Boulogne with the children of Henry Dickens, at the instance of Georgina, in 1882.1

  Any correspondence between Georgina and Nelly has disappeared, making it impossible to know the precise nature of the bond between them, but, however affectionate, it can hardly have been an entirely straightforward friendship. It seems likely that Georgina was keeping something of a watchful eye on Nelly, hoping for a measure of control over any letters she possessed or revelations she might, at some point, be tempted to make. For this very reason Georgina must have welcomed the changes in Nelly’s life; the advent of George, and then the children, made it almost unthinkable that she would ever be tempted to show (or sell) her letters or tell her true story.

  Yet Nelly did talk. Not very loudly, not very dangerously, not enough to alert Georgina yet; but just enough to produce trouble later. She was a risk taker; everything about her life up to this point makes this clear, and it looks as though something in her rebelled against the rigidly imposed secrecy covering her relations with Dickens, just as it had in Dickens when he came to write his will. She threw out hints about a secret to Rosalind Brown; she muttered darkly about visits to Gad’s Hill, and she could not resist mentioning that she had been in the Staplehurst railway accident to at least one friend in Margate, a Mrs Pyne Galton, who sometimes accompanied her singing at concerts. Mrs Pyne Galton gained the impression that Nelly had been Dickens’s god-daughter, and in that capacity had been with him on the train that crashed; the story made enough of an impression for her to pass it on to her own daughter.*

  Nelly’s chief confidant, however, became – very properly, one might think – her local parish priest, the Vicar of St John’s, the Revd William Benham. Benham was in his mid-forties when she met him, a jolly, kindly, dynamic man with literary tastes and a fluent pen, who had risen by his own talents from a humble background – a man, in fact, made in very much the same mould as Dickens and, as it happened, of the same age as Dickens when she first met him. In other ways he did not resemble Dickens; one of Benham’s particular fortes was said to be ‘stimulating character’, which seems to have meant a capacity to work with sinners, bracing and restoring them to Christian virtue. He was a disciple of F. D. Maurice and had taken over from Maurice as Professor of History at Queen’s College, Harley Street, and taught there for several years before being appointed to Margate; evidently he was at ease with young women and took an interest in advanced causes such as higher education for their sex. His literary work included editing the poems of Cowper, articles for the Church Times and lectures on Dickens, to whose work he was particularly devoted. He is the Benham who glimpsed the family group at Westminster Abbey in June 1870, and who would undoubtedly have been highly curious about Nelly’s friendship with his idol.

  At the time of the Wharton Robinsons’ arrival in Margate, Benham was established as the chief pillar of the community. He was chairman of the School Board. It was he who summoned an architect to restore the ancient structure of the parish church. He was a constant organizer of charity concerts; some of his busy evenings were passed in lecturing on Church history, others in throwing delightful supper parties at the Elephant Hotel for his church choir. He arranged special services of song so successful that they sound like the Victorian equivalent of pop concerts; there were occasions when 2,000 people tried to cram themselves into St John’s, built to hold only half that number, already an impressive size for a congregation.

  Benham was zealous and intelligent and, since he had done so well himself, a firm believer in the possibilities of self-improvement. His sermons had attracted the favourable attention of one Archbishop of Canterbury, and he became an intimate of the next, Archbishop Tait, who made him one of the regular preachers at Canterbury; Tait also appointed him to St John’s, Margate, where he had been for five years when George and Nelly made their appearance. He was bound to notice and take an interest in the arrival of a young schoolmaster and his wife; very soon we find Benham presenting the prizes at the High School Sports’ Day, encouraging Mrs Wharton Robinson to use her talents in the service of various Margate charities, and appearing alongside her on many platforms.

  If he ever had reason to think she had once been a professional actress, he undoubtedly took the view that all gifts were welcome to God when used in his service; he was sympathetic to a movement within the Church to establish links between it and the theatre. In the autumn of 1879 he invited a fellow clergyman to give a sermon on this subject; he spoke in favour of theatrical performances and expressed his disapproval of the isolated position into which actors and actresses were forced by society.2

  Holding the interests and views he did, it is not too surprising that Benham should have become Nelly’s confidant. She must sometimes have longed for someone to talk to; few people like their past to be entirely and permanently obliterated, and besides there was pride that Dickens had chosen and become dependent on her, as well as remorse that she had been put into a dishonourable situation. Benham was not narrow-minded but sympathetic, the warmth of his sympathy doubtless increased by his curiosity in this case. As a Christian he believed in the benefits to a sinner of owning up to sin and repenting, restoring herself inwardly as well as outwardly to the community of the good; at the same time he must sometimes have hugged himself with the knowledge of the secret entrusted to him, as he sat on the platforms of Margate raising money by giving ‘penny readings’ from the works of the great Charles Dickens, with Nelly beside him.

  We know she confided in him – although we don’t know exactly when – because some years later he passed on some of her confidences to a fellow Dickens enthusiast who was planning a new biography: not good behaviour in the clergyman, though some will think it excusable in the enthusiast. She told him, it seems, that she had been Dickens’s mistress; that he had set her up in the Ampthill Square house; that he had visited her two or three times a week; that she had come to feel remorse about her relations with him during his lifetime, and that her remorse had made them both miserable; and that she now ‘loathed the very thought of this intimacy’. Doubt has been cast on whether Nelly really said all this from the time her remarks were made public, which was not until t
he 1930s, right up to the present; but it is hard to imagine why two perfectly respectable men should choose to concoct such a story, which was later supported by independent corroboratory evidence. Beyond the basic assertion of her relations with Dickens, the most interesting aspect here concerns her remorse during his lifetime, which does contribute something to the impression of restless dissatisfaction conveyed during his last years. As to the loathing: we may think it would be more to her credit to say she remembered Dickens with affection and pleasure, but we are not Victorians, and it would have been surprising if a woman in her position, speaking to a clergyman, had uttered any other sentiment than the one he attributed to her. Her expression of loathing of her past must have seemed the only way she had of restoring herself to virtue and decency. Poor Nelly, she was not to know that fashions in sin change as much as other fashions.

  Whatever her contrition, it did not prevent her from continuing to recite and perform the works of Dickens. Shortly before Christmas 1885 her activities as an amateur actress reached their climax when she appeared on the stage of the Theatre Royal, playing in the farce The Obstinate Family, in a ‘comedietta’ called Orange Blossoms, and finally impersonating Mrs Jarley, the kindly owner of a waxworks display who gave employment to Little Nell and her grandfather in The Old Curiosity Shop. The waxworks on this occasion were played by children, one of whom naturally was Geoffrey. Nelly made a witty speech in which, referring to the current elections, she begged her audience to be conservative in preserving their charitable institutions and liberal when it came to their donations. She was again raising money for her favourite charity, the Margate crèche.

  This was almost the end of the busy, happy time. In March 1886 George took the chair at another charitable reading called ‘An Evening with Charles Dickens’. Almost immediately afterwards this hitherto active and energetic man of thirty-six suffered a breakdown of an unspecified kind. He was told he must rest. Why the breakdown should have necessitated leaving the healthy climate of Margate for London is a mystery, unless it was connected with an impending financial collapse. At all events, the school was sold; Nelly gave two ‘farewell readings’, eliciting a final burst of praise for ‘the lady artiste’ in the press; George gave up his magistracy, other appointments and activities, and prepared to take his family away. Whether he had other worries or griefs is not on record.

  The sale of the school was financially disastrous, and things became suddenly much bleaker for the Wharton Robinsons. They alighted in very modest lodgings in Artesian Road, Bayswater, living on the first floor while Nelly’s friend Rosalind Wickham, widowed for the second time, and now with a baby daughter the same age as Gladys, had the ground floor. The two stricken families took their meals together. For Geoffrey there were no more drives along the cliff tops with his mother and no more trips to Rome. His father was sick and bad tempered; he expected him to work at his Latin, even during the school holidays, and beat him when he failed to prepare his work to the standard he required. His mother took the child’s side and protected him from George’s anger. Geoffrey began to dislike his father, who seemed little disposed to look favourably on any plan to become either a clown or an artist.

  It was not a good time to be facing an uncertain future in London. In July 1887 the Queen celebrated her jubilee, but in November there was a near-riot in Trafalgar Square when the police attacked a meeting led by socialists; the misery of the poorest class was obvious, and even the respectable poor, the workers swarming to their daily labour in dark clothes and false collars, were not an inspiring spectacle to anyone who felt his grip on his social and professional standing might be slipping, as George must have done in his Bayswater lodging house. This was the grim, filthy-aired London described in the pages of George Gissing, Mark Rutherford and the Autobiography of H. G. Wells. In the lodging house run by Wells’s aunt in the 1880s an old clergyman lived with his wife on the top floor, earning a precarious income as a ‘supply’ vicar, and dying penniless and unmourned: ‘I had never dreamt that a clergyman could end so shabbily, or that the Establishment could discard its poor priests so heartlessly,’ wrote Wells. The first-floor lodgers must sometimes have been haunted by the spectres of the top floor; not only George, fearful of the future, but also Nelly, who could remember the ache of real poverty.

  From Artesian Road the Wharton Robinsons moved to Sutherland Avenue, and there in Maida Vale they sank into obscurity. Occasionally they moved from one address to another, though never very far. They made various attempts to set up some sort of coaching establishment or school; they faced a dwindling income and, in George’s case, an ever-increasing sense of failure and incapacity. He did not consider returning to Church work; in 1888 he took his name out of Crockford’s Clerical Directory. Fanny Trollope did what she could to help her brother-in-law. In 1890 she was seeking testimonials for a proposed new school, and a few years later she asked advice on his chances of getting a School Inspectorate; evidently they were not good enough.

  Whether or not Nelly ever felt at all responsible for their difficulties, she was not defeated by them. She was always prepared to turn to and give lessons in French, deportment, elocution or whatever was required. She had her children to absorb her attention. Gladys’s earliest memories resembled those of her brother: she was taught to recite and made to perform at tea parties. Nelly still had a small income; and she still owned the house in Ampthill Square. If George was a disappointment to her once the charm and promise of young manhood had gone and he revealed himself as impractical and ineffectual, she was quite prepared to take over the decision-making in the family. Those who knew the Wharton Robinsons were clear that she was the dominant force, and that ‘George made an absolute doormat of himself to Ellen’.3 If he ever asked himself whether he really knew his wife, or whether she had acted entirely straightforwardly in her dealings with him, he did not dare to make an issue of his doubts. In any case what could he do? There were the children to be considered, and their future lives; and they grew and flourished, innocent of the past.

  During 1887 Tom Trollope published the first two volumes of his memoirs, which he called What I Remember: an unpretentious title that suits the book, which is a rambling excursion through different topics and times, put together with more charm than method. The second volume contained a chapter on Dickens. It is a warm tribute to Trollope’s old friend, going back to their first meeting when the young novelist had called on him in Florence with his wife, and impressed him as singularly youthful in appearance, dandified, pretty-boy-looking, with a ‘slight flavour of the whipper-snapper’. The change that came over him in middle age was so striking, said Trollope, that he could have passed him in the street without recognizing him; but they remained friends, and he saw a good deal of him in his last years, laying stress on his continued personal appeal and greatness of heart:

  As I knew him afterwards, and to the end of his days, he was a strikingly manly man, not only in appearance but in bearing … Of the general charm of his manner I despair of giving any idea to those who have not seen or known him. This was a charm by no means dependent on his genius. He might have been the great writer he was and yet not have warmed the social atmosphere wherever he appeared with that summer glow which seemed to attend him … He was a hearty man, a large-hearted man that is to say. He was perhaps the largest-hearted man I ever knew. I think he made a nearer approach to obeying the divine precept, ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself,’ than one man in a hundred thousand. His benevolence, his active, energizing desire for good to all God’s creatures … were unceasing and busy in his heart ever and always.4

  Trollope had sought Georgina Hogarth’s permission to quote from Dickens’s letters; he carefully cut out a reference to Nelly. It must have been curious for her to read her brother-in-law’s account of the man she had known so much better than he had, and to be unable to make any comment. Privately she may have asked herself if Dickens’s much acclaimed greatness and goodness meant she must be responsible for his bad, u
nmentionable side.

  In the final volume of Trollope’s memoirs, which appeared a year later, he introduced Fanny, handling the subject cautiously. He gave her maiden name and mentioned that they had met during her first visit to Florence in 1858, when she had been a music student and hospitably entertained by his first wife and mother; but no other members of her family were named beyond passing references to an anonymous, occasionally visiting sister-in-law, an amalgam of Nelly and Maria. And although Trollope wrote proudly of Fanny’s literary success, he said nothing at all of her unusual – and indeed extraordinary – past. It was not only Nelly who had to excise a large chunk of her life; all three Ternan sisters effaced their working childhoods and theatrical background, bowing to a prejudice they were not strong enough to oppose. In the written record they were to exist only within certain particular limits.

  Tom Trollope’s praise of Dickens brought a protest from one woman writer who objected that it offended against the truth, that Dickens had been flagrantly immoral in his behaviour, and that she herself had observed him travelling on the Boulogne boat (and strutting about the deck ‘with an air of a man bristling with self-importance’) with a lady who was neither his wife nor his sister-in-law.5 This was the first of a trickle of references to his relations with Nelly that marked the 1890s, and which caused anxiety to both her and Georgina. In 1893 a moderately well-known biographer called Thomas Wright announced his intention of writing a new life of Dickens and made a public request for letters; George Augustus Sala, who had known Dickens well during the later years, objected to Wright’s proposal in a newspaper article that contrived to arouse rather than extinguish curiosity, by giving as his grounds that there were ‘circumstances connected with the later years of the illustrious novelist which should not and must not be revealed for fifty years to come at the very least’.6 At the same time Georgina Hogarth wrote to Wright asking him to desist from his plan.