The Invisible Woman

by Claire Tomalin

  10. Thomas Wright reported Canon Benham as saying Nelly told him Dickens took the Ampthill Square house for her, though in her mother’s name. It is likely to have cost between £1,000 and £1,500, a sum quite out of the reach of the Ternans; I am indebted for information about house prices in the area at this time to Professor Eric Hobsbawm.

  11. He applied these words to her in his letter of 4 July 1867 to Mrs Frances Elliot, Nonesuch Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, pp. 475–6 (see note 15 to Chapter 9 on misdating of this letter).

  12. Information for this presentation of Nelly comes from several sources, the most important of which is the testimony gathered by Miss K. M. Longley from Helen Wickham, the daughter of Nelly’s friend Rosalind Brown, some of which appears in her article ‘The Real Ellen Ternan’, The Dickensian (1985); some in her unpublished typescript ‘A Pardoner’s Tale: Charles Dickens and the Ternan Family’; and some is derived from private conversation with Miss Longley. See also the talk given by Constance Clinton-Baddeley, part of which appears in note 12, Chapter 15; letters by Fanny Trollope (née Ternan) held at Princeton and Illinois, and by Robert Cecil Esq.; the Gladys Storey papers at Dickens House; etc.

  13. The story is told by Carl Dolmetsch in The Dickensian (1959). Watts Phillips, also inspired by Carlyle, wrote a play called The Dead Heart two years before Dickens wrote his Tale of Two Cities. Phillips’s play had no Sydney Carton character, but did turn on one person substituting himself for another at the guillotine. Phillips sold his play to Ben Webster, who read it aloud to Dickens in Brighton one weekend, probably the one he spent there with Collins in March 1857. Webster delayed putting on Phillips’s play, and Phillips wrote lamenting this when he began to read the Dickens serial; this provoked Webster into putting it on. Mark Lemon then attacked Phillips for plagiarism, but Webster testified to The Dead Heart being the earlier work and to the fact that he had read it to Dickens. The story was not taken up, and Phillips’s play was killed stone dead when A Tale of Two Cities opened at the Lyceum in a dramatized version in January 1860, with Madame Celeste in the lead.

  14. Dickens to Wills, 1 July 1859, quoted in Ada Nisbet, Dickens and Ellen Ternan, p. 50.

  15. A Tale of Two Cities, Chapter 4.

  16. Dickens’s contemporary, Flaubert, was advised by his doctor in 1868 that he was suffering from a condition frequent among ecclesiastics, produced by not ejaculating often enough.

  17. 12 June 1859, Nonesuch Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, p. 106.

  18. 30 June 1859, Nonesuch Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, p. 109.

  19. Dickens to James Fields, June 1859, Nonesuch Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, p. 108; Dickens to Arthur Smith, quoted in Ada Nisbet, Dickens and Ellen Ternan, p. 54, from letter in Pierpont Morgan Library; and Dickens to Forster, Nonesuch Edition, Vol. III, p. 112.

  20. Sylvère Monod, ‘Charles Dickens and Philoclès Régnier’, Études anglaises (1958). Régnier and Dickens were old friends from 1845 – Macready introduced them – but after the two letters Dickens wrote him in 1859 about Fanny Ternan, the friendship lapsed; Monod believes Régnier disapproved of Dickens’s separation from his wife. Later Dickens referred to him as a ‘shifty little man’.

  Dickens’s first letter, dated Saturday, 17 September 1859, from Tavistock House, reads:

  My dear Régnier, I am particularly anxious to present to you a young lady in whom I have a great interest, who comes to Paris with her mother, on a matter in which I hope your advice and experience as an artist may be of service to her.

  Miss Fanny Ternan is a young lady of great accomplishments, who has been studying music – lately in Italy, under the best master – with a view, both to concert-singing and the stage. She belongs to a family of theatrical artists; and is thoroughly acquainted with her art. She has not quite decided whether she shall now come home to England, or remain in Paris for a time under such a master as Duprez. It is in the consideration of this question, and in helping her to know what kind of man Duprez is, and what hopes there may be of his being really serviceable to such a pupil, that I trust you may be able to advise Miss Ternan. And if you can help her, I am sure, you will – for my sake in the first instance, and then for your own. I cannot easily tell you how much I shall feel obliged to you.

  His second letter is quoted in the text, p. 127.

  21. Coutts account, 31 October 1859.

  22. See John Bigelow, Retrospections of an Active Life (1910), in which he reports a conversation of 10 March 1860 at Thackeray’s, where he had dinner with Mrs Dickens. ‘Miss Teman – I think that is the name – was the source of the difficulty between Mrs D and her husband. She played in private theatricals with D.’ ‘Teman’ looks like an obvious misreading of his own handwriting. Bigelow says he went to see her act at the Haymarket and commented, ‘She seemed rather a small cause for such a serious result – passably pretty and not much of an actress’ – but it must have been Maria he saw.

  23. 6 May 1860, the diary of Annie Fields, quoted in George Curry, Charles Dickens and Annie Fields (1988), p. 5.

  24. Gladys Storey, Dickens and Daughter, pp. 105–6.

  25. Note by Andrew de Ternant, reporting his friend Francesco Berger, Notes and Queries (1933).

  26. Dickens to Bulwer-Lytton, 15 May 1861, Nonesuch Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, p. 220.

  27. See ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’ by Robert Allbut in The Dickensian (1910).

  28. Dickens to Mary Boyle, 28 December 1860, Nonesuch Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, p. 196.

  29. The age of Macready’s second wife, Cecile Spencer, at the time of their marriage is given as twenty-three by Macready’s biographer, Alan S. Downer, though I note that Arthur A. Adrian gives it as thirty-four.

  30. Edmund Wilson, The Wound and the Bow, p. 64.

  31. These are the words of his granddaughter, Mrs Lisa Puckle, who read his diaries before they were destroyed. The published versions are known to be bowdlerized, and she was of the opinion that Dickens was ‘not really so strait-laced as he made out publicly’. See account by Philip Collins, who interviewed her, in Dickens Studies (1966).

  32. June 1862, Nonesuch Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, p. 297.

  33. See ‘Some Recollections of Mortality’, All the Year Round (1863), reprinted as No. 19 in The Uncommercial Traveller; here Dickens gives the date of the incident as the winter of 1861.

  9 VANISHING INTO SPACE

  1. See ‘A Flight’ in Household Words (1851).

  2. Dickens to William de Cerjat, October 1864, Nonesuch Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, p. 403.

  3. Dickens to P. W. Proctor, 31 December 1864, Nonesuch Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, p. 407.

  4. Dickens to Mary Cowden Clarke, 7 July 1862, Nonesuch Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, p. 299.

  5. Dickens to J. Sheridan Knowles, 7 July 1862, Nonesuch Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, p. 299.

  6. Dickens to Collins, Nonesuch Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, p. 333.

  7. Dickens to Mamey Dickens, 1 February 1863, Nonesuch Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, p. 338.

  8. Dickens to Collins, August 1863, Nonesuch Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, p. 360.

  9. See Norman Page, A Dickens Chronology (1988), p. 115, entry for June 1864.

  10. See Herbert Lottman, Flaubert (1989), p. 190: Flaubert made a clandestine visit to London to see Juliet, his English governess friend, in late June 1865, thus narrowly avoiding the Staplehurst accident.

  11. Nonesuch Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, pp. 304–5.

  12. Arthur A. Adrian, Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle, p. 76–81.

  13. 1 February 1863, quoted in Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, p. 1008, note 87, from letter in the Huntington Library; Johnson adds a note that the
phrase was cut by Georgina and Mamey in their edition of the letters.

  14. 19 February 1863, Nonesuch Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, pp. 342–3.

  15. Dickens to Mrs Frances Elliot, 4 July 1867, Nonesuch Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, pp. 475–6 (the letter is misdated in the Nonesuch, as has been pointed out by many Dickens scholars). Frances Elliot was the wife of the Dean of Bristol and a friend of the Trollopes.

  16. According to Gladys Storey, in her unpublished papers at Dickens House, in which she says she discussed the matter of Ellen Ternan with Sir Henry Dickens in 1928. See David Parker and Michael Slater, ‘The Gladys Storey Papers’, The Dickensian (1980).

  17. Thomas Wright also stated that ‘there were children’ born to Dickens and Nelly in an unpublished letter written in 1935 to J. W. T. Ley and Walter Dexter, now at Dickens House; he died without substantiating his claim.

  18. Madeline House to Sir Rupert Hart-Davis, 16 March 1959, letter in Dickens House, quoted by permission of Dr John House. Madeline House later wrote of a subsequent conversation with Gladys Storey: ‘Gladys S’s “coming baby” was uttered in a very die-away voice. I took the tone to be that of someone saying something secret, but I see now that it could have been the voice of someone saying something she wasn’t confident about, i.e., though say it she did, it is not something to be unquestioningly accepted.’ (This is an extract from a letter of 8 January 1968 to Miss K. M. Longley, to whom I am indebted for permission to quote it here. I have not seen the rest of this correspondence.)

  19. See William M. Clarke, The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins (1988), pp. 122 and note 39, and p. 219.

  20. Arthur Munby’s diary for 10 May 1864, quoted in Philip Collins, Dickens Interviews and Recollections, Vol. I, p. xviii.

  21. Dickens to Thomas Mitton, 13 June 1865. The letter has been printed in its uncut version only once, by A. H. Joline in Rambles in Autograph Land, published by Putnam’s in 1913, p. 196. All other editions of Dickens’s letters, and all biographies, have so far quoted the version given by Georgina Hogarth and Mamey Dickens in their edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens (second edition, 1880), Vol. II, p. 229, which excludes the remark by the young lady. The full text, to which Dr David Parker first drew my attention, is here given by permission of Dr Graham Storey. Georgina is known to have burned several letters to Mitton, who had been intimate with Dickens in his youth. We may assume that Dickens felt less constrained by the need for discretion with this distant and reclusive old friend than with others, without going so far as to name them.

  22. She was slow to recover from the accident; she seems to be wearing a bandage over her upper arm in some subsequent photographs; and it is possible that the surgery she underwent in 1874 could have arisen from a badly set bone which needed resetting.

  23. Nonesuch Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, p. 429.

  24. 12 June 1865, Nonesuch Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, p. 424.

  25. Quoted in Ada Nisbet, Dickens and Ellen Ternan, p. 57, from letter in the Huntington Library.

  26. The theory has been advanced that Dickens sometimes took Nelly to Condette, near Boulogne, where he used a small country house belonging to his French landlord, Ferdinand Beaucourt, and is said to have spent holidays in 1864. See William J. Carlton, ‘Dickens’s Forgotten Retreat in France’, The Dickensian (1966).

  10 FANNY AND MARIA GET MARRIED

  1. 10 July 1857, Edgar Johnson (editor), Letters from Charles Dickens to Angela Burdett-Coutts, p. 343.

  2. Dickens to Webster, 9 September 1861, Nonesuch Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, p. 235; and Dickens to Edmund Yates and Charles Fechter, Nonesuch Edition, Vol. III, p. 291.

  3. Tom Trollope to Bice, 7 May 1865, asking her to tell her uncle (Anthony) ‘that it seems to me putting the cart before the horse, to ask how much I should be content to pay for Miss Ternan’s instructions as he proposes. But it seems to me, that for a run down to Waltham every other Saturday, so as to give you three lessons, one on Saturday, one on Sunday, and one on Monday, £2 would be about the mark – and I should be very willing to pay it. But I know little of the prices of such services; and it may be that is too little.’ Letter quoted by kind permission of Robert Cecil Esq.

  4. See N. John Hall (editor), Letters of Anthony Trollope, Vol. I (1983), p. 321n, for the comments of Lady Rose Fane, who admired Trollope’s work but regretted meeting him in person.

  5. Another example of Trollope’s kindness is found in a letter of 12 July 1865, in which he asks Samuel Laurence to advise him in the matter of helping a poor girl, Miss Hughes of Camden Town, who is trying to earn her living by copying lithographs; see N. John Hall (editor), Letters of Anthony Trollope, Vol. I, p. 310.

  6. I am grateful to Professor Eric Hobsbawm for information about rents in the area. Nelly’s tenant, who paid the rates from then on, was Walter McGee: information provided by Miss K. M. Longley, from Camden Libraries. Nelly kept the house until 1901; see below, Chapter 15.

  7. See T. E. Pemberton, Dickens and the Stage, p. 235.

  8. Dickens to Ernest Hart, Secretary of the Association for the improvement of Infirmaries and London workhouses, Nonesuch Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, p. 462.

  9. Dickens’s friend George Augustus Sala, who lived at Slough in 1862, notes its speedy train service from Slough in his memoirs, and Felix Aylmer gives the details about the other stations in his Dickens Incognito (1959); see Chapter 11.

  10. Miss K. M. Longley points out that Mrs Mary Tringham was the name of Dickens’s tobacconist at 2 Brydges Street; he gave her a cheque for £50 on his Coutts account on 13 June 1862, just before setting off for France. Miss Longley also notes that there was a humorous poem by Thomas Hood, possibly known to Dickens, about the dangers of gossip, set in a village called Tringham.

  11. Felix Aylmer cites the Windsor Express for 11 May 1889. Reporting on a fire that destroyed Elizabeth Cottage, it states that ‘Charles Dickens lodged for some time’ there. Note also a letter to The Dickensian in 1968 from J. C. Reid, quoting Gerald Dunn, a New Zealander, whose father Henry worked as a carpenter in Slough. He remembered working for Mr Tringham about 1866 and being told that Tringham was, in fact, Charles Dickens.

  12. See Alfred Austin, Autobiography (1911).

  13. Percy Fitzgerald, Memories of Charles Dickens (1913), pp. 220 and 312.

  14. Dickens to George Dolby, 2 August 1866, Nonesuch Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, p. 480. For the diary, see Chapter 11.

  15. This is confirmed by her daughter Mrs Gladys Reece, in an unpublished letter to T. Hill, held at Dickens House, dated 13 June 1950, which says ‘Jane first went into the service of Mrs Ternan (my grandmother) at Slough in 1866. Mrs Ternan and my mother were then living there together.’ Jane later worked for Maria and also for Georgina Hogarth, and returned to Nelly’s service in the later years of her life.

  16. The sums totalled £128 in January 1867, and the end of the entries may mean only that they were then noted in a more private account. They are found in Dickens’s accounts with Messrs Coutts, discussed by Veronica Stokes in The Dickensian (1972).

  17. According to Muriel Trollope, daughter of Henry, Bice adored Fanny as a governess, but ‘war broke out’ for a time when she became her stepmother; see ‘What I was Told’, The Trollopian (1948).

  18. 2 November 1866. This letter was among the papers left by Mrs Gladys Reece to Miss Helen Wickham, and undoubtedly came to her through her mother, who inherited it from Fanny Trollope. Miss Wickham gave the letter to Miss K. M. Longley, who generously gave me a photocopy, and has in turn presented the original to Robert Cecil Esq.

  19. Letter in possession of Robert Cecil Esq. and quoted here by his permission.

  20. Dickens to Collins, 10 July 1866, Nonesuch Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, p. 477.

  21. Dickens to Mrs Frances Elliot, 4 July 1867, Nonesuch Edition, The Letters of C
harles Dickens, Vol. III, pp. 475–6.

  11 THE YEAR OF THE DIARY

  1. December 1867, Nonesuch Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, p. 601.

  2. Felix Aylmer was the first to make sense of much of it in his Dickens Incognito, a brilliant deciphering of most of the diary.

  3. Information on the history of the diary from Francis O. Mattson, Curator of the Berg Collection.

  4. On Wednesday, 8 May, he wrote to Georgina saying he could not get down to Gad’s Hill until the following Monday because of pressure of work; in fact, he was at the Lyceum with ‘N’ in the evening and spent more time at Slough than at the office during the next few days. On Friday, 2 August, he wrote to Georgina from Liverpool, saying he would not come to Gad’s Hill until Monday on the 12.10 train, because of his bad foot; the diary shows he spent the weekend at Peckham. To confuse things further, he used Gad’s Hill headed paper for the letter he wrote from his office on the Monday.

  5. Dickens to Mrs Frances Elliot, 4 March 1867, Nonesuch Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, p. 513. He instructed her to reply to him at his office, marking her letter ‘Private’.

  6. So the diary notes on 9 October.

  7. Dickens to George Russell, 14 December 1866, unpublished letter quoted by permission of the editors of Pilgrim Edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens.

  8. The existence of the second cottage was established by Miss K. M. Longley from the rate books. It may have been a separate working establishment for Dickens or simply an overflow when more space was needed; either way it may give credence to the assertion by the sisters of Nelly’s maid Jane that she had never ‘lived’ with ‘Mr Dickens’ in answer to a written question put by Nelly’s daughter in 1936.

  9. Tallis’s Illustrated London (1850).