The Invisible Woman

by Claire Tomalin

  Gladys Storey told Bernard Shaw that ‘poor Miss Ternan’ had lived nearly all her married life ‘in perpetual fear of her association with Dickens being revealed to her children’.5 She had at least died in time, and in peace. After his conversation with Sir Henry, Geoffrey had to endure a great deal in his self-imposed silence. In 1928 the daughter of one of his mother’s Margate friends published reminiscences in which she referred to her as Dickens’s goddaughter, and said she was involved in the Staplehurst crash: Sir Henry’s denial of both statements was given in The Dickensian, but before it appeared there was worse.6

  Still in 1928 a writer called C. E. Bechhofer Roberts published a fictional version of Dickens’s life up to the separation from Catherine. Roberts claimed that he was forced to fictionalize because of pressure from the Dickens family; whatever the reason, the results were lamentable. Ellen Ternan was described as ‘a dismal little person’ with a voice that failed to carry across the stage; Dickens’s friend Mark Lemon was made to comment, ‘I’ve seldom seen a more voluptuous figure’; and Catherine, ordered by Dickens to invite Nelly to her house, objected and uttered the dramatic parting words as she left him, ‘Go to your actress.’ Roberts was immediately taken to task by T. P. O’Connor in his magazine, T.P.’s Weekly. O’Connor was a friend of the Dickens family and, after consulting with Lady Dickens, he wrote as follows: ‘Of course Dickens sinned, and very few men of genius have not sinned in some way. Unhappy at home, he sought relief abroad. The story of Ellen Terman [sic] may one day be told.’7

  No further attempt to tell it was made until after the death of Dickens’s last surviving child. Kate Perugini died in 1929, and Sir Henry in December 1933; in 1934 the Daily Express printed an article by the now elderly Thomas Wright – he was in his midseventies – stating that Miss Ellen Ternan had been the mistress of Dickens. There was uproar and scandal in the press at this attack on the novelist; but the story was taken up by Hugh Kingsmill in the same year in his biography, The Sentimental Journey: A Life of Charles Dickens. Kingsmill said Miss Ternan became ‘the object of the sensuality with which he [Dickens] tried to drug the unhappiness of his later years’; being an actress, he suggested, she ‘knew how to make her resentment against poverty appealing to Dickens, and her resentment against Dickens harrowing to Canon Benham’.8 Kingsmill’s book was quickly followed in 1935 by Thomas Wright’s long-postponed Life of Charles Dickens, with his account of what Canon Benham had told him. The book was not well written, and Wright failed to back his assertions in a scholarly fashion (it must be said that few biographers did in the 1930s). He was attacked with venomous fury by those who saw themselves as defenders of Dickens’s reputation, and they accused him of having fabricated the whole story. He died shortly afterwards, leaving an autobiography which revealed evidence from the Peckham rate books about Windsor Lodge and Charles Tringham. One ardent Dickensian, J. W. T. Ley, was prompted to seek out Nelly’s children in order to refute what Wright had written. Gladys was co-operative, but her evidence was vague and inaccurate, if anything tending to confirm Wright’s story; at the same time she put pressure on researchers to insist on her mother’s ‘innocence’.9 Geoffrey was entirely uncommunicative.

  Gladys Storey’s Dickens and Daughter, based on information given by Kate Perugini, appeared in 1939.10 The Dickensians did not feel able to dismiss the reported words of Dickens’s daughter as they had Wright’s book; and Una Pope-Hennessy drew on it for her 1945 biography of Dickens, which again named Ellen Ternan and held her responsible for the breakdown of his marriage. Pope-Hennessy mentioned Georgina’s friendship with Nelly; she also suggested that the relationship with Dickens had been largely happy for both of them, seeing that it had lasted until his death; like Perugini and Storey, she was less inclined to find fault with Nelly than male biographers. Meanwhile the Nonesuch Edition of Dickens’s letters contained several references to the Ternans, clearly establishing the family’s intimacy with him.11

  The next characterization of Nelly was the very hostile one of Edmund Wilson, already described in Chapter 1; it was followed by Edgar Johnson’s magisterial conclusion that she had failed Dickens’s need. Her son endured all this in silence. He kept the same silence when Ada Nisbet published her Dickens and Ellen Ternan in 1952, bringing new evidence from her reading of Dickens letters held in California; in these were passages that had been inked out and restored through infra-red light. Felix Aylmer’s Dickens Incognito attempted to take the story further; just before it appeared in 1959 Geoffrey died, and it was, perhaps fortunately, to his widow that Aylmer had to make his retraction. Geoffrey had suffered increasingly from nervous afflictions as he grew older, and it’s hard not to think that his life had been effectively poisoned, with whatever happy memories left of his childhood rendered bitter by scandal.

  Such papers as were left in his study were sold to American university collections; there was not a scrap in them that could link his mother with Dickens. His sister, now widowed, had entered into correspondence with various Dickens scholars. She was keen to establish her mother’s blamelessness, saying that if she had sinned with Dickens, it must have been through love; and she seems to have enjoyed the excitement of being asked for letters and information; but she possessed almost nothing that could throw light on the subject.12 She sank into senility in her last years and died in 1973, childless like her brother.

  There is one other surprising aspect to Geoffrey that deserves to be noticed. For a brief period in the 1930s he attempted to become a professional actor. He took a pseudonym, ‘Terence Clibburn’, and appeared in a few small parts in a few small productions at the Grafton Theatre in the Tottenham Court Road: they were modern plays with unpromising titles, What the Doctor Thought and Sharper than the Sword, and they have not survived. It was fifty years since his appearance as a clown in a Roman carnival, young Macduff or one of Mrs Jarley’s waxworks at the Theatre Royal, Margate, so it’s hardly surprising that he did not rise to stardom now, or even to better parts or more ambitious productions. He retreated to the countryside again, this time Hampshire, where Eva died; but the alternative personality of Terence Clibburn evidently appealed to him. His second wife never called her husband Geoffrey. He told her he preferred to be known by his stage name of Terence, and for a while after the marriage he devoted considerable time and energy to organizing plays and pageants in the village hall. He gave that up, too, as he became more reclusive, but he made some notes on the stage career of his Ternan grandfather and kept his membership of the British Drama League, always under the name of Terence Clibburn, till the end of his life.

  It looks as though he would have relished becoming an actor – a clown rather than a soldier – if only he had been brought up to it; and that he would have been proud of the careers of his mother, aunts, grandparents and great-grandparents, had he known about them at the right time. But his life was knocked into the wrong shape early on, and after that nothing could set it quite right. Of all the participants in the story of Nelly and Dickens, Geoffrey appears to have been the most cruelly damaged.

  18

  Myths and Morals

  Geoffrey became a casualty of his mother’s history because he had so faithfully absorbed and accepted the view of women generally put about in his youth and wholly subscribed to – as far as he could tell – in his family. It was also a view deeply embedded in the works of Dickens, who, as we have seen, had difficulty with a whole range of female characters. It is one of the things that makes the loss of his letters to Nelly so deplorable. It would be good to have them for the hidden history of years of his life and for the revelation of a missing facet of his character, but most of all for the light they could throw on this particular failure of his art: how much it owes to ignorance, how much to deliberate omission and suppression.

  Dickens himself would not have welcomed our curiosity. He would have been happier to have every letter he ever wrote dealt with as Nelly – or whoever may have acquired his letters to her – dealt with the bundl
es of twelve years’ intimate correspondence; likewise every volume of the Pilgrim Edition. He was wrong by any standards. Kate Perugini, when she ensured that the letters he wrote to her mother should be preserved, helped to set the record of their marriage straight and prevented history from being rewritten entirely, as he attempted to have it done, abetted by Georgina. The rewriting of history is a central theme in this whole story, since Nelly, too, almost succeeded in her attempt, also abetted by Georgina and with the support of her sisters. Likewise many Dickensians, from Forster on, have been determined to maintain the version of Dickens they regard as acceptable, even – as in Forster’s case – when they know it to be untrue.

  The problem arises in people’s shifting view of morality: what constitutes innocence or guilt, what makes a man or woman good or bad, who is to blame when someone is shocked, or outraged, or exposed. Marian Evans’s (fairly) frank adultery began to be overlooked even in the nineteenth century; some of her friends even called her ‘Madonna’; but in a recent biography of her contemporary Emily Davies it was again held against her. Within the last few years Wilkie Collins’s illegitimate descendants have decided to become proud of their great-grandfather; it took three generations. Dickens’s treatment of his wife was for years glossed over and excused, his version accepted blandly (and blindly) by the most eminent critics and biographers; today even his warmest admirers find it hard to summon excuses for it. Shifting the blame on to Nelly was one shrewd move. Yet Nelly can’t really take the blame for his outrageous behaviour towards Catherine. Should we blame her for allowing Dickens to provide for her? For giving up her career? For telling Benham, or for saying she regretted the whole thing? Was Benham worse than Nelly, and Wright worse than Benham? What about Forster and Georgina? Opinions will continue to differ. Geoffrey and Gladys could have taken the view that their mother was to be congratulated on her long association with Dickens instead of accepting that she should be branded as wicked and shameful. It’s possible indeed that Gladys did take a less strict line than her brother, though she hadn’t the wit to do or say much of interest on the subject. Nobody has yet come forward claiming to be descended from Nelly, but who knows whether one may not yet appear: perhaps even the grandchild of an orphan from the Margate boys’ orphanage?

  There are Dickens scholars and biographers who still reject the idea that Nelly was his mistress. They rest their case on the lack of written proof, and they tend to buttress it by suggesting that both Thomas Wright and Gladys Storey were liars, he spurred on by prurience, she by self-importance; and that they must have invented or misunderstood what Benham, Kate Perugini and Sir Henry Dickens (each quite independently) told them. Wright and Storey were, of course, the wrong sort of people, and it’s easy to make them appear foolish. They were not scholars, they put off publishing until they were old, and they failed to produce conclusive documentation. But if they were both lying or exaggerating – if they were both simply foolish scandalmongers, as they have been called – a great many questions are left hanging in the air. How could Wright have invented a story that fitted so neatly with facts discovered only after his death, such as the evidence of Dickens’s 1867 diary and his letters to Wills and others; the discrepancy between his arrival in England and his return to Gad’s Hill in the spring of 1868; the discovery of a Tringham in Slough as well as Peckham; and Dickens’s further secret financial provision for Nelly in addition to that made in his will? If Gladys Storey was as silly and unreliable as some allege, how should we view Bernard Shaw’s support of her account, or the statement of T.P. O’Connor that Dickens ‘sinned’ with ‘Ellen Terman’, or Geoffrey’s distress and failure to defend his mother’s reputation? Above all, what are we to make of Nelly’s own silence and the destruction of the letters Dickens wrote to her?

  Now that it is no longer possible to dispute the fact that Dickens, at any rate, behaved as though Nelly were his mistress, the argument has shifted to other ground. Miss Katharine M. Longley, who spent years researching the subject, is in the strongest position to make the case against. She believes that Dickens wanted to give the impression to Wills that there was a sexual element to his relations with Nelly out of masculine pride. She has suggested that the Ternans may have had other sources of income which enabled them to buy a house and alter their way of life, though no evidence of this has come to light. She also attributes the many meetings between Dickens and Nelly to her giving him elocution lessons to help him with his readings. Miss Longley doesn’t doubt that he was obsessed with her, and that they were on terms of warm friendship, but thinks it out of the question that she would have succumbed to his advances.1

  Human behaviour does not always run to a formula, and Dickens was an extraordinary man in many respects; but to me there is an element of strain about the attempts to maintain that his relations with Nelly were not those of lover and mistress. Granted that we do not know for certain, and are driven back to personal response and interpretation, I simply say that, in the light of everything I have read, it seems most likely to me that it was so.

  *

  One implication of this book has been that it was no accident that Dickens fell in love with an actress, since the stage and performance were from his earliest days the other life, the other love, the other ambition; and one object has been to stress just how closely the bonds between his world and Nelly’s were established long before they met. It has also concerned itself with her and her family’s ambivalence about the status of actresses. All the evidence suggests that there really were two sets of standards that came into conflict where the theatrical world met the world outside. Women in the theatre could, as we have seen, live less like Victorian and more like modern women; they could be managers and arrange their own salaries and finances; they often initiated separation and divorce; they bore and reared children outside marriage and lived openly with men other than their husbands; marriage between older women and younger men was not uncommon. (All these were found outside the theatre, too, but they were strikingly concentrated within it.) There are many indications that Dickens was well aware of this freedom; part of him enjoyed the idea, while part of him found it too much to handle. He chose the youngest and weakest of the Ternan sisters, and removed her from her profession; and he fell out with the eldest and strongest.

  Whitwell Elwin, the friend of both Dickens and Forster – he was also Forster’s executor and probably responsible for destroying some of the Dickens papers – wrote that ‘vulgarity belonged to the class from which Dickens sprung and was deeply ingrained in him. He never got rid of it. He could not even relish the company of gentlemen. His chosen associates, the people with whom he hob-nobbed, were nearly all of the type he describes in his books.’2 This is perhaps to us not quite the put-down the Revd Elwin intended; and no doubt it helped to give him and Nelly the makings of a good couple, since if he was never quite a gentleman, she was never quite a lady, though both had the true Victorian passion for claiming that they were. Both were reared in traditions of hard work and hard play; both had a large capacity for merriment; both knew how to stand on their dignity; and both were subject to bursts of temper and bouts of melancholy and remorse. As Chesterton said, Dickens’s behaviour sometimes resembled that of a child who has been kept up enjoying himself at a party too late and is on the edge of tears of excitement and exhaustion: ‘His literary life was a triumphal procession; he died drunken with glory. And behind all … the thing we really see is the flushed face of a little boy singing music-hall songs to a circle of aunts and uncles.’3 A perfect circle joined the small boy singing in the Rochester pub and the man who spoke at death’s door of his ambition to be manager of a great theatre; and within that circle also lay the history of his relations with the Ternans.

  Mrs Ternan saw herself standing for virtue and gentility within the theatre, but she too found herself accepting its more usual standards when she failed to forbid Dickens the company of her daughters in 1858, an action which would have protected them and ended at once a
ny possible speculation or scandal. After that, Dickens being as famous as he was, Nelly was embarked on a path which necessitated either concealment or disgrace outside the theatre. Again outside the theatre, it became difficult for her to see herself as anything but culpable; and with her removal from the theatre she lost much of the context and support which might have helped her.

  If you read Kate Perugini’s account of the life of a young middle-class Victorian woman, with its hours of enforced idleness in which the only distractions were embroidery, letter writing, long walks, reading and possibly good works, you can see that her father may not have known what to do with Nelly once he had got hold of her.4 Kate threw herself into work with great determination, became a proficient painter and always spoke up for working women. Leaving the stage made Nelly into neither a good housekeeper nor a busy mother, and left her protector with a problem. He could only love her, worry about her, keep her hidden, show her his writing, and arrange little treats and holidays, which were not enough to satisfy someone brought up to be busy and gregarious and always on the move.

  He didn’t know what to do with her artistically either. Pace Edmund Wilson, the most striking thing about Nelly and Dickens’s fiction is her absence from it. There have been many attempts to incorporate her into his late heroines, as Adelina Fareway in George Silverman’s Explanation, as cruel Estella in Great Expectations, as capricious but fundamentally cosy Bella Wilfer in Our Mutual Friend, and even as the passionate, enigmatic Helena Landless in Edwin Drood: none stands up to examination. Bella may be the best candidate, because she represents the interchangeability of daughter and mistress, always powerfully seductive to Dickens. She makes us think of him dancing through the whole evening with Kate in the last year of his life, and of Kate’s interest in becoming an actress; she reminds us that Kate and Nelly were born in the same year and were in some respects conscious rivals for Dickens’s affection and attention. Some of Nelly’s charm no doubt lay in her daughterliness, and Bella is at her most erotic with her father; yet nothing about Bella’s background, and nothing about the development of her character from mercenary girl to good little wife who wants nothing better than to sit poring over her copy of The Complete British Family Housewife, answers to Nelly.