The Invisible Woman

by Claire Tomalin

  6. Edmund Wilson’s Foreword to Ada Nisbet, Dickens and Ellen Ternan (1952), p. xii.

  7. Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (1953), Vol. II, pp. 992, 1007 and 1104.

  8. Reported by Gladys Storey, Dickens and Daughter (1939), p. 100.

  9. Edmund Wilson’s Foreword to Ada Nisbet, Dickens and Ellen Ternan, pp. xi–xii.

  2 ‘AGREEABLE AND BEAUTIFUL TALENTS’

  Information for this chapter comes from playbills studied chiefly in the Minster Library, York, and the Newcastle upon Tyne Public Library; from the DNB; and from many theatrical memoirs and biographies. They include A. Aspinall’s Mrs Jordan and Her Family (1951), John Bernard’s Retrospections of the Stage (1830), James Boaden’s Life of Mrs Jordan (1831), Alan S. Downer’s The Eminent Tragedian: William Charles Macready (1966), Basil Francis’s Fanny Kelly of Drury Lane (1950), L. E. Holman’s Lamb’s Barbara S. (also about Fanny Kelly; 1935), Frances Kemble’s Record of a Girlhood (1878), Anne Mathews’s Memoirs of Charles Mathews (1838-9) and Tate Wilkinson’s Memoirs (1790).

  1. As late as 1881 Walter Donaldson’s Fifty Years of Green-room Gossip still recommended the stage as ‘the only position where woman is perfectly independent of man, and where, by her talent and conduct, she obtains the favour of the public.’

  2. See Alan S. Downer, The Eminent Tragedian: William Charles Macready (1966), p. 151.

  3. See William J. Carlton, ‘Dickens as Dramatic Critic’, The Dickensian (1960). An unsigned article in the Morning Chronicle in November 1835 is convincingly attributed to Dickens by Carlton, along with a good many other theatre reviews in which he praises Lucia Vestris, Mrs Keeley, Charles Mathews Junior and a John Buckstone farce.

  4. See Alan S. Downer, The Eminent Tragedian: William Charles Macready, pp. 42 and 82.

  5. From the diary of Margaretta Grey (1853) quoted in Josephine Butler, Memoir of John Grey of Dilston (1869), p. 326n. (My source here is McGregor’s Divorce in England, 1957.)

  6. Mrs Jordan’s letters are quoted in A. Aspinall, Mrs Jordan and Her Family (1951).

  7. See Philip Ziegler, King William IV (1971), p. 80.

  8. ‘Arthur Griffinhoofe’, John Duncombe’s edition of the Memoirs of the Life, Public and Private Adventures of Madame Vestris (n.d. but British Library suggests 1839).

  9. This was the American actress Mary Anderson in her memoirs A Few Memories (1896).

  10. This warning was given to Mrs Patrick Campbell by her Aunt Kate in 1889, quoted in Michael Sanderson, From Irving to Olivier (1984), p. 8.

  11. G. F. Watts to Lady Constance Leslie, quoted in Joy Melville, Ellen and Edie (1987), p. 26, from letter in the Watts Gallery, Compton, Surrey.

  12. F. C. Burnand in 1884, quoted in Michael Sanderson, From Irving to Olivier, p. 32.

  13. Quoted in Michael Sanderson, From Irving to Olivier, p. 11.

  14. See Frances Marshall (editor), A Travelling Actress in the North and Scotland (1984), which reprints the Memoirs of Mrs Charlotte Deans 1768–1859, published in Wigton in 1837: an extraordinarily interesting memoir and an outstanding piece of editing.

  3 FAMILY SAGA

  1. Information about the marriage of John Jarman and Martha Maria Mottershed from Miss K. M. Longley, who obtained it from parish register transcripts in the Borthwick Institute, York. Other information from my own study of playbills in Minster Library, York, and from Tate Wilkinson’s The Wandering Patentee; or, A History of the Yorkshire Theatres from 1770 to the Present Time (York, 1795).

  2. All the quotations given here come from Mrs Jordan’s letters to her lover, the Duke of Clarence, as quoted in A. Aspinall, Mrs Jordan and Her Family.

  3. See James Boaden, Life of Mrs Jordan (1831), Vol. I, p. 360.

  4. Oxberry’s New Series of Dramatic Biography (1827), p. 171.

  5. Charles E. Pearce, Madame Vestris and Her Times (n.d.), p. 148.

  6. Cutting in the Ternan family scrapbook, Morris L. Parrish Collection of Victorian Novelists, Princeton University Library.

  7. From the Noctes Ambrosianae by ‘Christopher North’ (i.e., John Wilson) published in Blackwood’s magazine and in book form in 1855, Vol. II, p. 392. I am indebted for this reference and the next to Miss K. M. Longley.

  8. ibid., Vol. III, p. 361.

  9. Cutting from the Ternan family scrapbook, Princeton.

  10. History of the Theatre Royal, Dublin (Dublin, 1870), p. 89.

  11. 3 April 1833, William Charles Macready, Diaries 1833–1851 (1912), Vol. I, p. III.

  12. Some of his letters and poems were carefully preserved by her. They are now held at Princeton.

  13. Frances Ann Kemble, Record of a Girlhood (1878), Vol. III, p. 230. She gives a detailed, vivid and highly entertaining account of her first transatlantic crossing.

  14. From the Ternan family scrapbook, Princeton.

  15. Thomas Ternan to unnamed Dublin friend, letter dated ‘26th February Philadelphia’, Princeton.

  16. A certificate stating that ‘Mr and Mrs Lawless Ternan’ made the visit and went behind the falls on 18 June 1835 and a leaf plucked from a nearby tree were preserved in the family; Princeton.

  17. Frances Ternan the younger gave her place of birth as Philadelphia on her marriage certificate.

  18. All these tributes come from cuttings in the Ternan family scrapbook, Princeton.

  19. The sculptor was R. G. Davies, a well-known Newcastle artist; unfortunately the bust has disappeared.

  20. From the Ternan family scrapbook, Princeton.

  21. In her novel Mabel’s Progress.

  22. The speech was made on 14 February 1866, when Dickens spoke for the Dramatic, Equestrian and Musical Sick Fund Association on its tenth anniversary, with the actress Fanny Stirling beside him. See K. J. Fielding (editor), The Speeches of Charles Dickens (1988).

  23. General Paralysis of the Insane (paresis) was then known as a disease of middle life and the male sex, especially ‘vigorous, energetic, successful men, who have lived full, active, busy lives in cities; who are married; who have indulged freely in eating and drinking, and in sexuality; and in whom an hereditary disposition to insanity is absent’ (C. A. Mercier, A Text-Book of Insanity, 1902). At the time of Ternan’s illness the cause was ‘thought to be’ syphilis in 80 per cent of the cases; by the twentieth century it was known to be in all cases. No doubt Ternan contracted the disease during his bachelor days and was unaware of the fact.

  4 LITTLE ORPHANS

  1. Frances Ann Kemble, Record of a Girlhood, Vol. I, p. 31.

  2. See the account by Fanny in her novel Mabel’s Progress.

  3. Information from Miss K. M. Longley, derived from a letter by Tom Trollope to his nephew Harry, May 1889, Rare Book and Special Collections Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

  4. Dickens to Madame de la Rue, 27 September 1845, Madeline House, Kathleen Tillotson and Graham Storey (editors), the Pilgrim Edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens (1965), Vol. IV, p. 389.

  5. See Pilgrim Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. IV, p. 39on, for an account of Macready’s somewhat natural resentment.

  6. Fanny’s description of the Blackfriars area comes in her novel Mabel’s Progress.

  7. 19 October 1846, William Charles Macready, Diaries 1833–1851, Vol. II, p. 347.

  8. ibid.

  9. From the Ternan family scrapbook, Princeton.

  10. ibid.

  11. ibid.

  12. Newcastle Chronicle, 23 March 1849.

  13. According to Malcolm Morley in The Dickensian (1958).

  14. Fred Belton, Random Recollections of an Old Actor (1880), p. 74.

  15. The description is taken from Fanny Trollope’s account of the house in Barnsbury in Mabel’s Progress.

  16. Dickens’s word is ‘unwholesome’: see his letter to Wills, 25 October 1858, quoted in Ada Nisbet, Dickens and Ellen Ternan, p. 49.

  5 GASLIGHT FAIRIES

  1. The deeds of the house, 28 Rochester Road, Camden Road Villas, wer
e kindly shown me by the present owners. They indicate that the house was quite new and was owned by ‘William Hayman’, almost certainly the brother of Mrs William Ternan in Rochester. Haymen was a thriving businessman with a wide range of interests who became mayor of Rochester. The Haymens and the Ternans were on very friendly terms, and it seems likely that he allowed a house in his possession to be used by Fanny and Maria for their intended school, no doubt with the proviso that they would pay rent once it prospered.

  2. Harley had been a friend of Dickens since the 1830s; there is a picture of him playing Pickwick in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library; and see Pilgrim Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, p. 598.

  3. Buckstone was also well known to Dickens over a period of many years; see Pilgrim Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, passim.

  4. I am indebted for this Thackeray reference to John Carey’s Thackeray: Prodigal Genius (1977), p. 104.

  5. It was actually a couple of years earlier: see Household Words (1855).

  6. Mabel’s Progress appeared in weekly instalments in All the Year Round from April to November 1867 and was first published in book form by Chapman & Hall in the same year.

  6 THE AMATEUR: DICKENS IN 1857

  1. Saturday Review, 1 August 1857.

  2. The phrase is given by Arthur A. Adrian in Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle (1957), p. 37.

  3. For Wigan’s playing in The Strange Gentleman see the DNB. For Mrs Wigan’s participation in Dickens’s 1847 production, see Pilgrim Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. V, pp. 126n and 133.

  4. On 29 September 1836 Dickens played in his own The Strange Gentleman with John Pritt Harley, according to Theodore Taylor writing in 1870; see T. E. Pemberton, Dickens and the Stage (1888), etc. See also Dickens’s diary note for 7 February 1839, which records Harley’s presence at his birthday party, Pilgrim Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. I, p. 640; his letter to Harley, inviting him to christening, 17 August 1840, Pilgrim Edition, Vol. II, p. 117; and Dickens’s letter inviting Harley to dinner, 3 April 1841, Pilgrim Edition, Vol. II, p. 250, etc.

  5. Elston died in 1843, three years before Thomas Ternan; the help given by Dickens to the orphans enabled one to train as a teacher, one as a singer, one as a wood engraver; the boy became an actor in due course.

  6. Paul Schlicke’s Dickens and Popular Entertainment (1985) contains a fine account of Charles Mathews and Dickens’s use of his techniques.

  7. Gladys Storey, Dickens and Daughter, p. 133.

  8. Mary Cowden Clarke in a letter to Frederic Kitton, 13 December 1886, which appeared in Dickens by Pen and Pencil (1890), p. 171, quoted by Philip Collins in his invaluable Dickens Interviews and Recollections (1981), Vol. I, p. 96.

  9. Information about Dickens’s way of organizing rehearsals comes from various accounts, among them those of Francesco Berger and Mary Cowden Clarke.

  10. This can be deduced from his later insistence on their leaving, explained in a letter to Wills, 25 October 1858, quoted in Ada Nisbet, Dickens and Ellen Ternan, p. 49, from a letter in the Huntington Library.

  11. Thackeray to his mother, 7 January 1848, and to Mrs Brookfield, 24 July 1849, quoted in Philip Collins, Dickens Interviews and Recollections, Vol. I, p. 68.

  12. John Forster, Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, p. 160.

  13. 26 August 1851 and 24 October 1851, Pilgrim Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. VI, pp. 472 and 528.

  14. ‘Two Views of a Cheap Theatre’, All the Year Round (1860), reprinted as No. 4 in The Uncommercial Traveller.

  15. Dickens to Daniel Maclise, probably 16 August 1841, letter shown at Sotheby’s prior to a sale in July 1987.

  16. Dickens to Catherine, 28 June 1850, Pilgrim Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. VI, pp. 119–20.

  17. Dickens described the episode in 1861 in ‘Some Recollections of Mortality’, All the Year Round, placing it twenty-five years earlier, when he was twenty-three, before his marriage; it is reprinted as No. 19 in The Uncommercial Traveller.

  18. See George Curry, Charles Dickens and Annie Fields (1988), p. 25.

  19. Dickens to Miss Coutts, 11 December 1854, Edgar Johnson (editor) Letters from Charles Dickens to Angela Burdett-Coutts 1841–1865 (1953), p. 280.

  20. ibid.

  21. ibid., 16 November 1854, p. 279.

  22. ibid., 20 May 1856, p. 317.

  7 MANCHESTER, DONCASTER AND SCANDAL

  1. Mrs Gaskell’s letters contain complaints about the exhaustion induced by a constant flow of house visitors wanting to see the exhibition. Despite her friendship with Dickens there is no mention of his visit to Manchester or of The Frozen Deep.

  2. Dickens to Miss Coutts, 5 September 1857, Edgar Johnson (editor), Letters from Charles Dickens to Angela Burdett-Coutts 1841–1865, p. 347.

  3. Manchester Courier, 22 August 1857. I am indebted to Miss K. M. Longley for this reference.

  4. Dickens to Miss Coutts, 5 September 1857, Edgar Johnson (editor), Letters from Charles Dickens to Angela Burdett-Coutts 1841–1865, p. 347.

  5. ibid.

  6. See his letter to Hans Christian Andersen, 2 September 1857: ‘The corn-fields that were golden when you were here, are ploughed up, brown; the hops are being picked; the leaves on the trees are just beginning to turn; and the rain is falling as I write – very sadly – very steadily.’ Elias Bredsdorff, Hans Andersen and Charles Dickens: A Friendship and Its Dissolution (Copenhagen, 1956).

  7. Dickens to Mrs William Brown, 28 August 1857, Edgar Johnson (editor), Letters from Charles Dickens to Angela Burdett-Coutts 1841–1865, p. 346.

  8. Dickens to Forster, quoted by him in Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, p. 162.

  9. Chapter 5, ‘Lazy Tour’, Household Words (1857). As Miss K. M. Longley has pointed out, Forster stated that this chapter was the work of Collins; in fact, it is clearly by Dickens.

  10. ibid.

  11. Quoted in Ada Nisbet, Dickens and Ellen Ternan, p. 57, from letter in Huntington Library, punctuation corrected by editors of Pilgrim Edition.

  12. ibid.

  13. According to the Doncaster Chronicle, 25 September 1857, he left on the Monday; information from Miss K. M. Longley.

  14. 7 December 1857, letter printed in The Dickensian (1942).

  15. Dickens to Frederic Ouvry, 26 May 1858, letter held by Messrs Farrer.

  16. 31 May 1858, quoted in Adrian A. Arthur, Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle, p. 57, from letter in Huntington Library.

  17. Elias Bredsdorff, Hans Andersen and Charles Dickens: A Friendship and Its Dissolution, quoted in Michael Slater, Dickens and Women (1983), p. 137.

  18. Unpublished letter, 13 October 1857, quoted in Michael Slater, Dickens and Women, p. 207.

  19. The cheque to Buckstone is among letters currently being edited for the Pilgrim Edition; I am indebted to Graham Storey for allowing me to see these.

  20. Dickens to Lavinia Watson, 7 December 1857, in The Dickensian (1942).

  21. January 1858, Nonesuch Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. II, p. 888.

  22. 21 March 1858, Nonesuch Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, p. 14.

  23. The story was told by several people and appears in an unpublished paper of 1935 by J. W. T. Ley, held at Dickens House. Ley says it was first told ‘about thirty years ago in a book of reminiscences by the daughter of one of Dickens’s friends … who knew the household quite well’. Thomas Wright told the same story without giving a source, and Mrs Thomas Whiffen’s Keeping off the Shelf (New York, 1928) also gave the story, referring to Nelly as Dickens’s god-daughter.

  24. Gladys Storey, Dickens and Daughter, pp. 96 and 133–4.

  25. Undated letter from Anny Thackeray to Amy Crowe, Gordon N. Ray (editor), The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, p. 478n.

  26. For Dickens’s alleged letter to his elder children, see letter, probably 30 August 1858, from Catherine Dickens’s aunt Helen Thomson
to her friend, Mrs Stark, the text of which is given by K. J. Fielding in Études anglaises (1955); Fielding argues convincingly for the authenticity of the letter, which was at one time said to be a forgery. For Katey’s recollection, see Gladys Storey, Dickens and Daughter, pp. 93f.

  27. The so-called ‘violated letter’ is printed in the Nonesuch Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, pp. 21–3, and also in Michael Slater, Dickens and Women, pp. 373–5.

  28. These are paragraphs 5, 6 and 8 from the front page of Household Words for Saturday, 12 June 1858, headed ‘Personal’ and signed ‘Charles Dickens’.

  29. 15 July 1858, quoted in Ada Nisbet, Dickens and Ellen Ternan, pp. 51–2, from letter in Pierpont Morgan Library.

  30. The Liverpool Mercury was one paper which accused Dickens of ‘unmanly selfishness and heartlessness’; see Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (1953), p. 925.

  8 MORNINGTON CRESCENT

  1. Dickens to Wills 25 October 1858, quoted in Ada Nisbet, Dickens and Ellen Ternan, pp. 48–9.

  2. Dickens to Miss Coutts, 28 October 1847, Pilgrim Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. V, p. 178.

  3. It closed in 1862.

  4. This was Eleanor Christian, the girl he had soaked in sea water on the pier at Broadstairs many years earlier, quoted here in Philip Collins, Dickens Interviews and Recollections, Vol. I, pp. 33ff.

  5. See letter to Miss Gibson of Birmingham, 20 October 1858, printed in The Dickensian (1912).

  6. Coutts account, 18 December 1858: ‘C.D.E.T. £10’.

  7. Speech in Coventry, 4 December 1858, K. J. Fielding, The Speeches of Charles Dickens, p. 288.

  8. Forster to Dickens, 14 January 1859, R. C. Lehmann (editor), Charles Dickens as an Editor: Being Letters Written by Him to William Henry Wills (1912), pp. 263–4. Dickens’s letter to Wills of the same day is written on the back of Forster’s letter.

  9. The area deteriorated when the railway cutting to Euston was enlarged but did not lose its public gardens until the 1920s. The house was inhabited by Spencer Gore, who painted the view from the back in 1912, but it was destroyed by a bomb in the Second World War.