For the time being he did desist, though he continued to look for material; and he had begun to discuss Dickens with Benham, now a canon of the church, living in London, and still friendly with Nelly. In this same year according to Wright, a collector of Dickensiana, W. R. Hughes, was offered letters from the novelist to Ellen Ternan; Hughes claimed, a shade improbably, that he advised the vendor to burn them, on the grounds that they could not have been acquired honestly.7 If this story is true and the letters were stolen, the theft must have put Nelly into a terrifyingly awkward situation; she could hardly raise a hue and cry for her property, however much she feared the thought of their being made public.
She could at least count on the powerful support of the Dickens family. Georgina succeeded in banning publication of Dickens’s letters to Maria Beadnell (in England, though not in America) a few years later, and, as we know, Henry Dickens destroyed letters that came into his possession through Wills’s heirs. Only Kate Perugini was not so dedicated to suppressing evidence. She told Bernard Shaw in 1897 that she believed there were letters of her father’s ‘in which the real man is revealed, minus his Sunday clothes and all shams, and with his heart and soul burning like jewels in a dark place! I say there may be such letters and they may be one day given to the world’; she had been assured the letters were all burnt, she went on, but did not believe it.8 They never surfaced, however. Perhaps Hughes was telling the truth; conceivably Nelly burnt them herself. Had they tended to establish the innocence of her friendship with Dickens, she had every interest in preserving them for eventual publication and the vindication of her good name. They were also worth a great deal of money. In 1900 a copy of The Frozen Deep with Dickens’s annotations was sold for £300 at Sotheby’s.
According to Wright, Benham made his revelations about what Nelly had told him in 1897: it was explosive stuff for Wright, who nevertheless handled it with great discretion for many years. It’s unlikely that she knew about Benham’s betrayal; but she was certainly aware of the remarks of Mrs Lynn Linton in her memoirs, published posthumously in 1899, in which she referred to Dickens’s secret history, his mad, passionate love and the way in which he was deceived, tricked and betrayed by one he never suspected or found out.9 Mrs Lynn Linton named no names, remained entirely vague, and even insisted that it was best that the whole truth should not now be written. She wielded a sharp pen, and she may have been romancing; but she had known Dickens well enough and been a close friend of Wills, and she claimed to have heard more than she saw. Dickens himself was ‘straight’, she declared, and suffered from ‘one cleverer, more astute, less straight than himself, who sailed round him and deceived him from start to finish’. We know that Dickens was far from straight, and that Nelly – it’s hard to see who else she can have meant – was caught in a web of deceit spun in the first instance by him. All the same, vague as they are, Mrs Lynn Linton’s are the most damaging remarks in the whole bundle of late Victorian gossip on this particular subject, because they are the only ones that contain the accusation of trickery by Nelly.
Thus the post-Margate years brought increasing troubles and anxieties on the Wharton Robinsons. Their compensation was always Geoffrey and Gladys. Enough money was found to send both of them off to boarding school, where they received rigorously conventional upbringings; and it was settled that Geoffrey should aim at a career as an army officer. Fanny and Tom were also devoted to the children; at the end of the eighties they settled in England, in a cottage on the Devon cliffs at Budleigh Salterton, where they frequently entertained Nelly and her family. Tom had been through his own tragedy when Bice died in childbirth a year after her marriage, in 1881; his grief was intense, but his robust nature never allowed him to repine for long, and it was mostly Fanny who kept the contact with Bice’s widower.
She continued to turn out novels; here and there was a gleam of genuine observation or a hint of authentic feeling, but they were spoilt by melodramatic plotting and pasteboard villains. None are good enough to be worth reviving; perhaps she wrote too fast to establish an individual voice and escape the fictional conventions of her day. She never equalled Mabel’s Progress, which was also the book in which she drew most on her own experience.10 The most interesting features of the last books are those that throw a glancing light on her family. Among Aliens (published in 1890) is set in Rome, the story of two expatriate English sisters earning their livings, the capable elder as an artist, the sweet and innocent younger as a governess; she is dismissed when the profligate son of her princely employers pays her attentions to which she unwisely responds. She finds her character blackened everywhere. ‘Social laws must be obeyed by those who wish to profit by their protection,’ her elder sister is admonished; ruefully she reflects that ‘a sister, even the fondest, has small chance against a lover, when they are weighed by a girl of eighteen in all the enchantment of a first romance of the heart’. Little blue-eyed Lucy is broken by love and scandal, fades away and dies. The better part of the book is the description of the daily lives of the working sisters, and the awkwardness of being dependent on the patronage of the rich and capricious, subjects well understood by the author and her sister Maria, its dedicatee. The worse part becomes the sort of melodrama to which Fanny so often resorted, in this case given over to the Italian characters, who run through the whole gamut of seduction, suicide, vows of vengeance and sensational murders.
Madame Leroux (also published in 1890) carries the melodrama into English life and has another sweet innocent Lucy as its heroine. She is an orphan who finds herself obliged to earn her bread by teaching in a London girls’ school. The headmistress, a woman of uncertain age but great fascination, is ‘Madame Leroux’. We soon learn she is not to be trusted; her name is a false one, she has ‘remarkable histrionic ability’ which allows her to ape the accents of the aristocracy successfully, and she goes secretly to the theatre in the evening, where she entertains foreign men in her private box. When Lucy is taken along for a treat, she naturally escapes in horror from this depraved scene. Madame Leroux drinks cognac from a travelling flask when she is alone and doses herself with chloral. She is financially calculating and, after the fiasco of the theatre visit, treats Lucy coldly and unkindly. Yet Madame Leroux is observed with some sympathy by her author. The story reveals that she has not always been so cold. In fact, ‘there had been a time, in her youth, when passion had carried her, as on a strong tide, beyond the limits of selfish prudence’. She had borne a child to a young man, refusing to marry him on the grounds of their poverty, and then given the child away. Lucy is, of course, her daughter; but before she can discover the truth, Madame Leroux, now facing financial ruin, kills herself with an overdose of chloral. Lucy learns the whole history and refuses to condemn her: ‘Poor mother!… She was so young … No wonder she was frightened! And how lonely!’ The use of the theatre to signal Madame Leroux’s bad character shows Fanny truckling to convention; her endorsement of Lucy’s forgiveness of her bad mother is more interesting. Both Fanny’s sisters had made themselves vulnerable to social censure by their behaviour in the past, in Maria’s case the abandonment of her husband, in Nelly’s the association with Dickens; the question of understanding and forgiveness, both by private individuals and society, must have raised itself in all their minds. Cautiously as her comments or themes must be applied to them, there does occasionally seem to be a thread of connection in her work.
Tom made himself a garden in the Florentine style on the English cliffs, and he and Fanny entertained in some style. Although some of the neighbours suspected that clever Mrs Trollope found Devon society rather slow after Rome, she and Tom were both notable conversationalists, he with his fund of reminiscences, she also ‘truly delightful … She was really intellectual, very bright and amusing and excellent company’.11 When her sister Mrs Wharton Robinson appeared, she was also judged a very charming woman by the local families, and very pretty too; and she was much admired for the verse speaking with which she entertained the guests at Cliff C
orner.12
Then in 1892 Tom died, suddenly and in his sleep, in the middle of a pleasure jaunt to Bristol with Fanny; he was eighty-two, had kept his wits and energy, and continued to visit Rome till the last year of his life. For twenty-six years, despite the difference in age, he and Fanny had made a congenial couple, and she had won the warm approval of all his family and friends. She grieved sincerely, but, like Tom himself at Bice’s death, she was too robust and practical to give way to grief. She turned to her sisters for support; Nelly came on the first train to be with her, and, as soon as the news reached Rome, Maria arranged for some Italian mosaics to be made and sent for Tom’s grave. Fanny sorted out her financial situation, quickly sold up the house in Budleigh Salterton and took another in Berkshire. She was awarded a civil list pension of £50 a year, and she had the money earned from her books and set aside over the years, which meant she was not too badly off; she kept two servants and was still able to travel on the Continent. But there were no more novels from her pen; either she had lost heart or her publishers had lost interest.
Instead, always willing to try something new, she turned biographer. Tom’s papers, which she had inherited, included many letters and diaries belonging to his mother, the original Frances Trollope; and with these she set to work to write her life. The story was a good and inspiring one, and had some parallels with her own mother’s; both women had travelled, worked, married, borne children and become the breadwinners for their families, though Mrs Trollope’s career was the more striking and had brought her great fame and success. Born in 1780, she had been a very sprightly girl, learning and delighting in organizing amateur theatricals, among them Molière’s Les Femmes savantes; she had made friends with Lafayette on a visit to France and travelled to America to join a utopian community a few years before Mrs Ternan’s transatlantic trip; and she had begun her career as a writer after she was fifty. Fanny told her story very well, with a touch of Victorian sententiousness; it can still be read with enjoyment. She quoted from her letters and diaries, and diligently sought personal impressions and anecdotes, including the one of old Samuel Rogers addressing her disconcertingly at a breakfast party with the words, ‘They told me Mrs Trollope was to be here. She has written a great deal of rubbish, hasn’t she?’ Fanny the younger disagreed with Rogers and claimed ‘intrinsic merit’ for her mother-in-law’s books, but what she most admired about her was undoubtedly her persistence as a worker, which she passed on to Anthony and Tom. The two volumes were dedicated to Tom when they appeared in 1895; it was Fanny’s last published book.
Nelly had been summoned to assist with the project, and her help is duly acknowledged at the front. The bonds between the two sisters were growing closer than ever as Fanny reached sixty and Nelly (officially at least) her mid-forties.
Nelly found her life in London dull and disappointing, and when George was advised by a doctor that he should give up any further attempts at brain work, she was glad to move to the country. Geoffrey was now at a crammer’s in Oxford; they were going to need money to put him through Sandhurst and establish him in a regiment. So, with whatever they could muster, they acquired a half share in a market garden at Calcot, near Reading.
They seem to have convinced themselves that the place was a small country estate which would run itself; and it was certainly very pretty, surrounded by fields and farms, and with the river near by. It gave them their own fruit, including grapes from a giant vine; it also gave work to a large staff of gardeners. Next to the main house, The Filberts, was a smaller one, The Bungalow; Fanny was invited to live there, and when Maria retired from Rome in the summer of 1898, she came to join her. They seem to have been livelier companions for Nelly than her husband, who, with no experience either of gardening or of managing men, now found himself in charge of the gardeners and their work.
In the summer of 1900 the three sisters were all at Calcot when a young visitor came who kept a vivid memory of their force of character and the range and liveliness of their conversation.13 This was Helen Wickham, the daughter of Nelly’s widowed friend Rosalind. She found Aunt Fanny enormously impressive; everything she did was done with panache, and she brimmed with vitality. Beside her, Aunt Maria seemed gentler, though Helen considered her the most eccentric of the sisters; ‘funny Aunt Maria’, Gladys called her. Possibly she had not adopted the respect for conventional behaviour and opinions increasingly shown by her sisters. Fanny and Nelly had both turned into true-blue conservatives, full of the horrors of socialism and radical ideas. They supported Lord Salisbury with great fervour and were some of the few to be delighted when he appointed their old friend Alfred Austin poet laureate in 1896.
To Helen, one of the most striking aspects of life at The Filberts was Nelly’s total lack of interest in the domestic arrangements. What she enjoyed was sitting talking with her sisters, about politics, books, music and the theatre; and when the talk ran out they organized anyone who happened to be there into playing intellectual parlour games. Helen remembered Nelly saying that Fanny had been a lovely girl, and Maria had been handsome, but she herself had never made any claim to prettiness, with ‘a complexion like a copper saucepan and a figure like an oak tree’: mock modesty, perhaps, but the turn of phrase is arresting enough to make you believe in Nelly’s power to amuse and hold her own in conversation.
Helen was critical of her hostess’s moods, her tyranny over husband and daughter – she read all Gladys’s letters till she was in her twenties – her bouts of furious temper and ‘nerve storms’; but she loved and admired her nevertheless, and considered her a woman of exceptional charm, gifted, cultured and generous. Her own mother had warned her ‘not to bother Aunt Nelly about Dickens. She doesn’t wish to remember those days – it makes her so sad.’ Helen was obedient to her instructions, and indeed there was no sign of anything to do with Dickens about the house, nor was his name ever mentioned in general conversation. Not a single one of his books was in evidence, and when Aunt Nelly read aloud to Helen and Gladys, it was usually from her sister’s novels; never from Thackeray, whom she was known to detest, and certainly never from Dickens.
Yet there was a day when Nelly privately showed Helen a picture of Gad’s Hill and murmured the information that she had been there ‘many times’. She also told Helen on more than one occasion that she was going out to visit Miss Hogarth, without volunteering any further explanation or making any reference to the visits when she returned. The impression is again of a woman painfully divided, as though she needed to hold on to some thread, to keep alive some connection with her lost self, yet at the same time to banish the past altogether from her current life with George and ensure that their children would never uncover it.
Her pride in Geoffrey increased from year to year. He grew tall; he did well in his preparation for the army; and in 1898 he was commissioned as a second lieutenant. He was given a colonial posting and went straight off to Malta with an infantry regiment, the Lancashire Fusiliers. It was the best they could afford, with no pretensions to smartness, but money still had to be found. In those days young men did not beome officers in the expectation of earning a living; they were paid a purely nominal amount and relied on private income to settle their mess bills and pay a servant, keep a polo pony, and have their many elaborate uniforms made. In Geoffrey’s case this income had to come from parents already hard pressed themselves. It may explain why in 1901 Nelly decided to sell the house in Ampthill Square. Half its garden had been eaten away when extra railway lines were laid into Euston, but it was still a valuable property. Fanny protested furiously, but Nelly would not, or could not, take her sister’s advice in this instance; and the lease on the house she had owned since 1860 was sold. Whatever its origins and her penitence, she must have blessed heaven for the gift which now went to help her son.
* It finally appeared in print in 1928, only to be strenuously denied by Sir Henry Dickens in the pages of The Dickensian, although it was of course true, except for the god-daughter element; and it can on
ly have come from Nelly herself.
16
Southsea
In November 1903 the neat Georgian terrace house in which Dickens had been born in Mile End Terrace, Portsea, was purchased to be made into the Dickens Birthplace Museum; and the following July there was a gathering of dignitaries for the ceremonial opening. The rooms were furnished with appropriate-seeming furniture and relics in glass cases, a pen stand, a piece of the great man’s hair, a letter in his hand; on the walls were hung prints of the best-known characters from his books and a copy of the Maclise portrait, showing the handsome young author, clean-shaven and with long curls. Dickens himself had been unable to locate the house when he gave a reading in Southsea in 1866: not too surprisingly, considering he had been carried out of it when he was only five months old, after his father had run into financial trouble of the kind which dogged him ever afterwards. Still, it was the authentic place, and in its honour the nearest public house changed its name to the Oliver Twist; and a few years later free teas were provided for 1,000 Portsmouth children to celebrate the centenary of the local author’s birth.
It was a decade of burgeoning enthusiasm for Dickens. The year 1902 had seen the foundation of the Dickens Fellowship, a philanthropic society dedicated to promoting his social aims and also concerned to preserve Dickensiana. The Fellowship organized convivial dinners, as did another group of devotees, the Boz Club, at which solid-looking gentlemen and ladies gathered in formal clothes to toast the glorious memory. In 1905 The Dickensian, a magazine entirely devoted to the man and his works, was founded. Dickens was a public idol and a national institution. His books were not only loved, they were declared to be ennobling. He stood for the individual against the system, for merriment against gloom and, on the whole, for the poor against the rich; for generous indignation against everything mean, joyless, cruel, corrupt and hypocritical in British life. Several adjectives were derived from his name: Dickensy, Dickenesque, Dickensish, Dickensian. Shops and streets were named after him, complete editions of his works were regularly issued and dramatized versions of the novels and stories continued to be played in theatres up and down the land. There were Dickens dictionaries and a concordance. No writer since Shakespeare had conquered the public so absolutely. Its view of Dickens was firmly established in the form expressed by his daughter Katey in her private dissenting cry to Bernard Shaw: ‘If you could make the public understand that my father was not a joyous, jocose gentleman walking about the world with a plum pudding and a bowl of punch, you would greatly oblige me.’1 But this is how the public obstinately saw Dickens, as a Father Christmas figure, master of pathos and laughter, and celebrant of cheery and innocent domesticity.
The Invisible Woman Page 28
