The Invisible Woman

by Claire Tomalin

  Nelly’s only convincing appearance is the physical one, as Lucie, in A Tale of Two Cities, such an undeniable likeness to the girl in the Florentine photograph that, once you have seen it, the nothingness of Lucie’s character becomes all the more maddening. But Dickens was never a portraitist, as his most perceptive critics have pointed out; he was a mythologizer. Chesterton claimed that he had to make a character humorous before he could make it human, and John Carey made a similar point, saying that when too much feeling got in the way of his comic invention, Dickens ceased to write well.5 Perhaps there was always too much raw feeling surrounding Nelly for him to begin the process of mythologizing her. Mrs Nickleby – partly drawn from his mother – and Flora Finching – partly drawn from his first love Maria Beadnell, later Mrs Winter – are wildly alive, because he has made them into mythical, surreal figures; so, rather surprisingly, is Dora – again based on Maria Beadnell – precisely because he has moved her so far beyond credibility. She has the body of an adult woman with the mental age of a three-year-old, and there is not the remotest chance that she will ever learn to control a servant or supervise the cooking of a meal. Enough comic energy has gone into Dora to immortalize her; whereas Agnes, cased in stained-glass radiance and unassailable gentility, is never anything but a perfect blank, like Lucie. Lizzie Hexam has no real character either, any more than Little Em’ly, Ada Clare, Florence Dombey, Rosa Bud or any of the young ladies Dickens piously preserves from his own magical distorting glass.

  From time to time you notice him in his letters at work on his own womenfolk, converting them into figures of comedy a little larger and stranger than life: his mother is a beneficiary of this treatment, when in her senility he describes her wanting to be ‘got up in sables like a female Hamlet’ or, at the sight of him, plucking up her spirit and asking for ‘a pound’.6 His wife is also quickly promoted from ‘dearest Kate’ to Mouse and then to Pig; then she is the butt of affectionate enough teasing on the subject of her clumsiness and her pregnancies; by the last stages of the marriage she too has taken off into myth. She is ‘excruciatingly jealous, and has obtained positive proof of my being on the most intimate terms with, at least fifteen thousand women of various conditions of life.’7 Not only this: she is now so dangerous to Dickens that she has to be locked out of his bedroom. Her family, too, has become a family of monsters, and presently she is transmuted into a madwoman and accused of cunningly putting on a performance of loving her children in Miss Coutts’s drawing room.

  By contrast the few surviving references to the Ternans in his letters are nearly all couched in tones of respect, deep feeling or anguish. What could he do with that great stereotype, the Fallen Woman, with a bad girl who was bad through his fault and also beloved? The nearest he comes to a touch of my thologizing humour is in his nickname for Nelly, the Patient; there may be a joke intended in the phrase ‘neuralgia flying about’ (i.e., perhaps quarrels or fights with Nelly). He could be working towards something in an account he gave of the Staplehurst accident in which he said his carriage had contained two ‘unknown women’ who became ‘wholly engrossed by some missing bonnet boxes’ (while other passengers were dead and dying around them): there is the germ of a comic transformation here at least.8 But it is a meagre offering. What one would relish would be a late Dickensian farce, a second Strange Gentleman or Is She His Wife? in which all the secret addresses, the train journeys, the false names, the private boxes at the theatre, the code messages in the notebook, would be built up into a glorious explosion of comic embarrassment: with Dickens himself appearing as an amalgam of Pecksniff and Quilp, and with Little Nell in an entirely new role.

  Nelly Ternan went through some times almost as bad as Little Nell’s, when her father was in the lunatic asylum and she travelled the length and breadth of the country with her sad mother and her sisters, all obliged to work for their bread. Just as it was no accident that Dickens fell in love with an actress, so it was no accident that the fatherless child responded to a lover who could also play the father and offer her the pleasures she had missed as a girl, as well as a way out of what was sometimes demeaning and depressing work. She had the sensibility to suffer from the obvious drawbacks of her profession but, in 1857, no obvious means of doing so until an escape route was offered by the man who must have seemed all-powerful, all-wise and as celebrated as her real father’s literary idol, Lord Byron.

  Everything else in Nelly’s life flowed from her decision to accept what Dickens offered. Once her mother had allowed the first step, she was, at any rate, kinder and more sensible than the classic Victorian parent. This shielded Nelly to a degree; her sisters helped to provide more protective cover. Still, over the years there was anxiety, guilt and pain, enough to make her ill. There was also a good deal of merriment and pleasure: birthday dinners and music, rides, walks and theatre visits, happy excursions to Greenwich, or Paris, or Boulogne, even if the great American trip had to be abandoned. Nelly can’t have failed to enjoy her power and position with a man of Dickens’s charm and standing; indeed, it is probably one of the things she missed and was casting about to retrieve in her dealings with Alfred Austin and George Smith. The girl who had seemed to fit the only womanly pattern Dickens found desirable – small, pretty, passive – grew, changed and developed into a more formidable creature than he can have expected.

  The most extraordinary aspect of Nelly must be her phoenix-like renewal from the ashes of one life to become an entirely new person. By the 1880s she looks like a heroine culled from the pages of Thomas Hardy, a writer who was her contemporary and understood secretiveness about origins and early experiences as well as she did: two thoroughgoing children of their time. Her story, with its vulnerability, secrets and guilt, its spirited attempt to reject guilt, its settling into south-coast respectability, with a schoolmaster husband and a son destined for the most conventionally glorious career in the imperial army, would have appealed to him greatly; it would have made a curious plot for a novel, full of improbabilities, awkwardly moving between pathos, comedy and passion.

  But the plotting of Nelly’s life was her own personal achievement. Unlike her valiant and productive sisters, who acted, sang, painted and turned out journalism and a great many books between them, she did almost nothing except struggle for her survival, using the weapons she had been taught to use and doing her best to bend circumstances to her will. From one point of view the result may be seen as a classic Awful Warning, with retribution laid posthumously on the son she loved. From another she appears as the obstinate representative of all the erring women who must have kicked against the fate decreed for them in Victorian England. A few were able to surmount it by sheer brilliance and audacity: Ellen Terry was one. Nelly Ternan never had that strength; her resort, when she was rendered invisible by a consensus of the respectable, was to turn herself into someone quite different.

  Invisible Nelly has had to be tracked across many old maps and through many heaps of playbills, letters, album and address books, miscellaneous papers, wills and photographs. She has taken me to her birthplace, Rochester, passing Gad’s Hill on the way; to Newcastle with its magnificent theatre where her father was manager, and to York and Hull where all the family played. I have pursued her between Slough and Windsor, past Upton Church and into the fields where you can still walk the way she and Dickens must have gone, though the path is now cut by the motorway and a farmer may object to your passing; and through Nunhead and Peckham, where almost nothing would be recognizable to her, the quince and the sumac tree under which Mr Tringham sat gone with the house, and Telegraph Hill entirely built over.

  In Boulogne and its suburb of Condette, I was warmly welcomed by French Dickensians delighted to believe Nelly must have put in an appearance at the simple one-storey house Dickens rented from Monsieur Beaucourt, whose very gravestone bears a reference to his famous tenant. In Rome, I saw her in my mind’s eye, flitting up the steps of the Barberini Palace with Mrs Tilton and leading her small son in his clown’s co
stume through the carnival crowds.

  Ampthill Square and the streets between Mornington Crescent and Regent’s Park have suffered much the same fate as Nunhead: tower blocks, factories, railway lines, the disappearance of old houses, gardens and green spaces. Park Cottage, on the other hand, is more delightful now than it can have been when she slept in its unwholesome basement room and gave poor Catherine Dickens a cup of tea in the drawing room. Margate has changed for the worse since the cheerful young Wharton Robinsons lived there; the school was bombed, although the church Benham restored and some of the halls in which he gave penny readings with her can still be seen; and the theatre where she appeared as Mrs Jarley has been reopened. In Southsea Fanny and Nelly’s houses are in good order; so in its own way is the old Highland Road Cemetery where the three sisters are buried, fittingly close together after their wandering lives. It is a rough grassy expanse near the sea, surrounded by low houses and crossed by irregular paths, with a few trees, a small grey chapel and here and there a stone angel standing above the stones. Some of the graves go back to the early years of the nineteenth century; most are falling into more or less picturesque decay, and you are likely to need the help of a friendly gravedigger in finding a particular grave. The names of Frances Eleanor Trollope and Maria Susanna Taylor are faint but still legible on their shared headstone, with no dates and no eulogies, just a stone edging around the narrow plot. Two rows to the south Nelly lies with her husband.

  In the hot summer of 1989 the graves were mere oblongs of powdery dust; the cross that once surmounted Nelly’s had broken off and vanished, and the only greenery was a single encroaching arm of bramble, like an admonishment. Quite soon, by the look of it, the grave was likely to disappear altogether. It seemed a good moment to start putting something on paper which might restore Nelly to visibility.

  POSTSCRIPT, NOTES, BIBLIOGRAPHY, AND INDEX

  A Postscript: The Death of Dickens

  Three months after this book was first published in the hardback edition, I received a letter from a Mr J. C. Leeson who had read it with particular interest because of a story that had been passed down in his family, originating with his highly respectable great-grandfather, a Nonconformist minister (‘a man of gentle spirit, and deeply spiritual life’, according to a study of Congregationalism). He sent me a copy of a letter written by his late father, D. C. Leeson, in 1959, which reads as follows:

  My grandfather, the Revd J. Chetwode Postans, who became pastor of Linden Grove Congregational Church in 1872, was subsequently told by the caretaker that Charles Dickens did not die at Gad’s Hill, as was generally supposed, but at another house ‘in compromising circumstances’.

  My father told me that the old man had emphatically repeated this allegation to him many years later, but had refused to divulge any details as to where the death occurred. He did, however, admit that he, personally, had been involved in the secret removal of the body to Gad’s Hill in order to avoid scandal.

  At this time nothing was known of Dickens’s association with the neighbourhood of Peckham, and the story appeared fantastic in view of John Forster’s circumstantial account of the events preceding the novelist’s death. The revelation that Ellen Ternan was living at Windsor Lodge – almost opposite the church – at the time of Dickens’s death makes it less easy to dismiss the allegation. Some research into this incident might be rewarding.1

  Linden Grove Congregational Church, Peckham, as it appeared in 1870, surrounded by fields.

  In a second letter, to Felix Aylmer, D. C. Leeson had written:

  Although my maternal grandfather moved to Peckham only two years after the death of Dickens, I am certain that he had no knowledge of the latter’s association with Ellen Ternan or with Windsor Lodge. If he had heard rumours of this I do not think that he would have tolerated any of Dickens’s works in his house, but I still possess some volumes that he gave to his young son. They were not broad-minded times, and a Nonconformist pastor was likely to be less tolerant than most!

  This seems to indicate that the secret of the liaison was well kept, even in the neighbourhood in which it had flourished.

  When my father told me that the old caretaker of Linden Grove Church had maintained that Dickens had not died at Gad’s Hill but in compromising circumstances, neither of us had heard of the novelist’s association with Windsor Lodge. I think that he, like myself, thought that if there was anything in this strange allegation it probably referred to the possible death of Dickens whilst visiting an opium den in search of local colour for Edwin Drood. We neither of us endowed it with any local significance, and the suggestion that the informant had been involved in the removal of the body seemed very fantastic.

  Mr Leeson saw, as soon as he looked at the standard biographies, that the caretaker was obviously wrong in maintaining that he had helped transport the dead body of Dickens: there were too many witnesses to his actual death at Gad’s Hill. On the other hand, Dickens might have been unconscious, since we know he was unconscious for twenty-four hours preceding his death, and so conveyed to Gad’s Hill.

  Biographers are on their guard against receiving strange stories that turn out to be spurious, but this one seemed at least worth looking into. Mr J. C. Leeson agreed at once to my suggestion that we should consult a leading Dickens scholar for his opinion before proceeding any further. I sent all his material off to Professor Philip Collins of Leicester, who has an unrivalled knowledge of Dickens and biographical material relating to him. Mr Leeson agreed that if Professor Collins thought the matter not worth pursuing, we would abandon it. In fact he responded with interest and encouraged us to do more research; although it seemed ‘too good to be true’, he wrote,

  I can’t see any fatal flaw in the Leeson family story if one assumes, as you do and I would agree, that, if such embarrassing circumstances had occurred, Georgina would have been willing and able to create (and Forster would accept) a suitable cover story.

  Collins pointed out that the weak link seemed to be the servants at Linden Grove and Gad’s Hill, and the driver of the carriage; but the story could certainly not be immediately ruled out. He thought it worth publishing in the hope that it might stir some other memories of family stories; such reminiscences had surfaced in 1968 in New Zealand, for instance, to confirm that, as Felix Aylmer had argued, Dickens had a hide-out in Slough.

  I now worked through every piece of evidence I could find relating to Dickens’s final days. He was last seen conscious by his daughters Katey and Mamey on the morning of Monday, 6 June, when they departed for London, not expecting to see him again until the following weekend (see this page). Until now it has been generally accepted that after his daughters’ departure he was alone with his sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth until the arrival of the local doctor, Stephen Steele, at about six thirty on the evening of Wednesday, 8 June. One of the maids testified in 1888 that he ordered breakfast to be served early that week, at seven thirty, because he had so much to do; she left to be married on the morning of 8th June.2 According to Georgina, Dickens worked as usual on Monday morning in his chalet, which was situated in the ‘Wilderness’, a piece of land reached through a tunnel under the road; it was here that Katey kissed him goodbye before she left. Later he walked into Rochester to post letters. On Tuesday he worked in the morning, and he and Georgina took the carriage into Cobham Park in the afternoon, Dickens alighting and walking back alone; in the evening they sat in the conservatory, admiring some newly installed Chinese lanterns. On Wednesday he seemed unwell; despite this, he broke his normal habit of working in the morning only and returned to the chalet after lunch, coming back to the house at about five to write letters before dinner. When he came to the dinner table at six, Georgina was so worried by his appearance that she suggested sending for a doctor; he refused, muttered some half coherent words about going to London, and then, when she tried to take his arm and suggested he should go and lie down, he said, ‘On the ground,’ and collapsed heavily on his left side on the dining-room flo
or. He did not speak again, and he did not regain consciousness.

  After Dickens’s collapse, Georgina says she had a couch fetched and Dickens lifted on to it, then sent a servant on horseback to fetch Dr Steele – who knew and liked Dickens – and to deliver telegrams summoning his daughters and his London physician and good friend, Frank Beard. The servant was, according to an account given over sixty years later in The Dickensian magazine, Isaac Armatage, who was reported as saying he was present in the dining room; he also spoke of riding for Steele on the pony Newman Noggs, but his memory must have grown dim, because Noggs had been put down in 1869, the year before Dickens died.3 According to Steele’s testimony, he arrived at Gad’s Hill about six thirty and found Dickens lying on the floor of the dining room, to the right of the door.4 He says he sent a servant for a couch, and, once Dickens had been lifted on to it, he began treatment, cutting away some of his clothes and applying clysters (enemas) and other unavailing remedies. He was precise in his memory, and remained in sole charge, with Georgina, for five and a half hours; Katey and Mamey arrived with Dr Beard only around midnight, when Steele went home, leaving them to keep vigil and apply hot bricks to the patient’s feet.