Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives

by John Sutherland

  In one major respect, Forster does not supply the information for which one must turn to later biographers – namely Dickens’s ‘Invisible Woman’. The shilling-life facts about Ellen Ternan are well known – but little else is. She was born twenty-eight years later than Dickens, into an acting family. An ‘infant phenomenon’, she was appearing on the stage almost as soon as she could walk, aged three. Ellen’s subsequent career was anything but phenomenal. Fifteen years later, she was a for-hire actress, available to add some professional class to the amateur theatricals which were all the rage at the time. In the late 1850s, Dickens had embarked on a series of such performances to raise money for authors unluckier than himself.

  The eighteen-year-old Nelly was contracted to appear in The Frozen Deep, a melodrama written by Dickens himself and Wilkie Collins, and the forty-five-year-old novelist fell in love with her. He promptly removed his wife, Kate, the mother of his many children, with the (wholly Dickensian) explanation that she was ‘dull’. After 1859 Charles was a bachelor again. As for his love life – not dull, we may deduce. But we can deduce little more. It is a matter of record that Dickens gave substantial sums of money to the Ternan family and left ‘Nelly’ £1,000 in his will. She gave up the stage in 1860, shortly after the couple’s first encounter and must have been supported by someone. She may have lived in France, in a ‘mistress’s villa’ he paid for. In June 1865, in the terrible Staplehurst train crash, Dickens, Nelly and her mother were travelling together on the ‘boat train’ from Calais. Dickens went to furious lengths to keep the identity of his companions out of the press reports of the accident and himself out of the coroner’s court looking into the disaster.

  Was Mrs Ternan a chaperone, protecting her daughter’s virtue? Or a genteel bawd, profiting from her daughter’s being the kept woman of the most famous man in England? A child, still-born in France, has been fantasised about. At a later period Nelly was placed, under a false name, in houses at Slough and at Nunhead, where one of the few surviving Dickens diaries logs visits to her. Nelly took the secrets of her relationship with Dickens to the grave. She shares that grave with the clergyman she later married; most of her later life was given over to ostentatiously good works. In short, the Dickens relationship with Nelly is a black hole. It sucks in speculation, and returns not the slightest glimmer of light.

  In his later years, Dickens quarrelled with Thackeray and with Bradbury and Evans, breaking with them to edit a new weekly paper, All the Year Round, which he got off the ground with A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations (whose Estella may be viewed as a pen-portrait of Ellen). After the Staplehurst crash, his creative energies notably waned and in his last nine years he completed only two more full-length novels. They continued the journey into the dark begun by Dombey. At this stage of his life Dickens was afflicted with gout and, his doctors perceived, early signs of an impending stroke.

  Despite their dire warnings, Dickens committed himself to gruelling lecture tours, reading his own work to large audiences. The most exhausting was to America in 1867–8. It netted him £19,000 but more important than the money was the emotional thrill of the readings. He never felt closer to his readers. He collapsed in the dining room of his house at Gad’s Hill in 1870 with a fatal cerebral aneurysm, the ink barely dry on his morning session on The Mystery of Edwin Drood. A mystery indeed, no one has ever been able to work out how it would end. Dickens left a very un-Micawberish £80,000 on his death.

  FN

  Charles John Huffam Dickens (‘Boz’)

  MRT

  Great Expectations

  Biog

  M. Slater, Charles Dickens (2009)

  39. Mrs Henry Wood 1814–1887

  Dead! Dead! and never called me Mother!

  Ellen Price was born in Worcester where her father, a cultivated and musical man, manufactured gloves: the locality and the industry are reflected in the ‘Helstonleigh’ sections of the author’s later fiction. The Price household was strongly Anglican and pillars of the town’s cathedral congregation. Ellen spent much of her childhood with her grandmother and while still a girl developed severe curvature of the spine. The disorder, partially remedied by the cruel ‘backboards’ loved by Victorians with round-shouldered offspring, rendered her a total invalid for four years, and a semi-invalid for the rest of her life. Tiny, she was under five feet tall, fully grown, and the most she could lift throughout life was ‘a small book or a parasol’. Her own books (three-deckers, most of them) were anything but small.

  In 1836 Ellen Price married a banker, shipping merchant and former consular official, Henry Wood, whose name she always subsequently adopted in her writing. He himself was wholly unliterary and, according to his son, never so much as read a novel – not even his wife’s. The couple lived abroad, mainly in France, until 1856, when they returned to Norwood, south London, to live in a rented house. France was the favoured residence of those English people unable to meet their debts and one can presume financial difficulties. Norwood, then as now, was not Mayfair.

  There were several children, although the exact number is unclear, some of whom died in childhood. For someone of her physical frame and infirmity, motherhood must have been onerous. Henry Wood, never a steady provider, seems to have lost the family fortune, obliging his wife to earn money to keep bread on the family table. Her first novel, Danesbury House (1860) was written in twenty-eight days for the prize offered by the Scottish Temperance League. A wild tract, it chronicles the downfall of the Danesburys who cut their throats, fatally crash their barouches, expire horribly with delirium tremens, and bankrupt themselves all in consequence of their incurable love of the bottle. The Temperance League loved it, and awarded the tyro novelist the £100 prize. Some of the more vivid descriptions suggest that Henry may have had a certain weakness of the Danesbury sort – but family accounts are loyally discreet.

  Wood had become known as a good prospect to the editor Harrison Ainsworth and to the publisher Richard Bentley. The latter, on the recommendation of the former, published East Lynne in 1861, giving the still novice author the unusually high price of £600 for the copyright. Melodrama was the taste of the day, and none is more full-blooded than East Lynne. The heroine, Isabel Carlyle, elopes from her noble husband (‘a blind leap in a moment of passion’) with a heartless cad. Divorce follows. Isabel is thought killed in a train crash, but has in fact survived, disfigured. Now white-haired and disguised with green glasses, she returns, unrecognised, to serve as governess to her own children, one of whom dies in her arms, not knowing her as his mother (in the dramatic version of East Lynne, she screams the much mocked ‘Dead! Dead! And never called me mother!’). The novel embodies Wood’s stern belief that for a married woman, adultery is ‘far worse than death’. Death, none the less, is what Isabel gets.

  Bentley’s £600 proved as shrewd as it was generous. Wood’s ripe melodrama was a hit with the public – particularly those who patronised the circulating libraries where such three-volume novels were the staple fare. By 1876 Bentley had printed 65,000 copies of the work. Mrs Wood followed up with the equally melodramatic Mrs Halliburton’s Troubles (1862), the story of a widow who brings up her young brood successfully, despite poverty and in contrast to the wealthy Dare family, whose lawyer head has cheated her out of her inheritance. Given the paucity of biographical evidence, one again suspects elements of the writer’s own life are embedded in the plot.

  Now a bestselling novelist, Wood rang the changes on all the varieties of melodramatic fiction: family sagas, bigamy and moral dilemmas. There were fifteen novels in seven years after East Lynne: she made a lot of money. Henry Wood died in 1866 and the following year his widow, now living in style in St John’s Wood, took over editorship of the Argosy, the journal in which most of her later fiction appeared, including her ‘Johnny Ludlow’ papers which recall her childhood in rural Worcester.

  Mrs Henry Wood lived her later years in Hampstead. Her son took over editorship of the Argosy from his formidable mother in 188
7, and wrote a memorial, published in 1894. She died of heart failure, leaving an estate of over £36,000, not having started in serious authorship until her fifties.

  FN

  Ellen Wood (née Price)

  MRT

  East Lynne

  Biog

  C. W. Wood, Memorials of Mrs. Henry Wood (1894)

  40. Anthony Trollope 1815–1882

  But this I protest: – that nothing that I say shall be untrue. Trollope, An Autobiography

  Born in London, Anthony was the youngest son of the novelist Frances, a woman of legendary resourcefulness, and a lawyer father, Thomas, a man given to fits of suicidal melancholy and financial recklessness. In the year of his birth the family moved to Harrow, where Thomas tried his hand, unsuccessfully, at farming. The farm, which was leased, proved the grave of the Trollopes’ prosperity and the family’s misfortunes translated into a grossly inadequate and disturbed schooling for Anthony. From 1823 to 1825 he was a day boy at Harrow School; from 1825 to 1827 a pupil at a private school at Sunbury. Thereafter, until 1830, he was at Winchester College (his father’s school), but was forced to leave when his fees were not paid. In 1831 he returned to Harrow as a day boy. During this period he was ‘always in disgrace’ and exquisitely miserable. He never lost his wounding sense of resentment at not going to university, as did his elder brothers and schoolmates, despite being no cleverer than him. Recent scholarship suggests that in the Autobiography Anthony exaggerated his schoolboy miseries; but he did not, one may be sure, exaggerate the hurt he felt at the time and later.

  Meanwhile the family fortunes went from bad to worse. In 1827 his mother made her ill-fated attempt to set up a bazaar (a proto-mall) in the United States. Three years later she returned penniless with the older children in the family who had accompanied her. Trollope’s father was by now eccentric to the point of mania. Anthony’s elder brothers, Tom and Henry, had managed to make some decent start in life but his own future seemed irreparably blighted. The family finances improved temporarily with the runaway success of Mrs Trollope’s first book, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832). Nevertheless the Trollopes were obliged to flee from their creditors to Bruges – the last refuge of English middle-class indigence – in 1834. In this domestic exile Henry, the beloved older son, died of consumption. In the same year Trollope’s by now unbeloved father died. Meanwhile Anthony tried his hand, without great success, as classical usher at a private school in Brussels. It may have worked for the Brontë sisters, but it did not work for him. The asthma, which would afflict him throughout life, came near to killing him, and in November 1834, through family influence, a place was procured for him in the General Post Office in London, at £90 a year.

  During Trollope’s seven formative years in the GPO, much happened that posterity will never know about. What we are allowed to know is narrated in one of the jolliest of his early novels, The Three Clerks (1857) and its ‘hobbledehoy’ hero, Charley Tudor. Over these years the young clerk was mired in what he calls ‘the lowest pits’. He alludes, darkly, to ‘dirt’ and ‘looseness’. What coded information do these words contain? Trollope’s most sympathetic biographer, N. John Hall, chances his arm with some plausible speculation:

  All the talk in the Autobiography about ‘dirt’ and ‘debauchery’ and the temptations of a ‘loose’ life surely meant more than smoking cigars and drinking gin and bitters. Trollope would have thought it unbecoming to go into further details, but gives obvious hints that he was involved with loose women; perhaps when he could afford it he went with prostitutes.

  One can probe Hall’s ‘perhaps’ a little more closely. Trollopians will be familiar with the description in Chapter 3 of the Autobiography of the novelist’s ‘worst moment’:

  I was always in trouble. A young woman down in the country had taken it into her head that she would like to marry me … the mother appeared at the Post Office. My hair almost stands on my head now as I remember the figure of the woman walking into the big room in which I sat with six or seven other clerks, having a large basket on her arm and an immense bonnet on her head. The messenger had vainly endeavoured to persuade her to remain in the ante-room. She followed the man in, and walking up the centre of the room, addressed me in a loud voice: “Anthony Trollope, when are you going to marry my daughter?” We have all had our worst moments, and that was one of my worst. [my italics]

  A strikingly similar scene recurs in a number of the novels – in An Eye for an Eye, for example, when the enraged mother, uttering the same question as to marital intentions, has a pregnant daughter. Did Trollope misconduct himself that badly? The standard remedy for young men who got young girls into trouble, and could not marry them (on £90 p.a.?) was to send them abroad. Whether this was the reason he was packed off to Ireland in 1841 to take up the post of surveyor’s clerk in that country’s postal service we shall never know. All he says is that he left ‘twenty-six years of suffering, disgrace, and inward remorse’ behind him. Whether he left a bastard behind him is, perhaps, unworthy speculation. He would spend seventeen years in Ireland – where he found a wife, Rose Heseltine, a lifelong devotion to hunting, and his vocation as a novelist. Meanwhile, in the background, some four million Irish were perishing or taking to the coffin boats – a detail Trollope does not mention in An Autobiography, concentrating rather on the excellent fox-hunting.

  He began writing his first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847), in 1843. Despite help from his mother – whose name could not but help him – his first efforts foundered, largely because he fell into the toils of some of the most unscrupulous publishers in literary London. He tried his hand at the Irish novel (but who wanted to read those during the starving mid-1840s?) and historical romance. Plays and a strange anatomy of Britain, The New Zealander (1856), similarly failed to hit the mark. Meanwhile his Post Office career was going from strength to strength. Over the period 1851–2 he was dispatched to the west of England. He rode a bracing forty miles a day, helping to lay down a postal system which was the envy of the civilised world. Among his many achievements was the introduction of the pillar box into England.

  His career as a novelist finally took off with his first Barsetshire novel, The Warden (1855), a quiet comedy of ecclesiastical infighting. He had, at last, found his groove. Now based in England, he was travelling widely around the Empire – anywhere letters went he went – and writing travel books. A family man, he set up home with his wife and two growing sons in a fine house at Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire, where he could enjoy some of the best hunting in England. His novel-writing career took a great leap forward when – Thackeray not being able to come up to the mark – he was offered lead position in George Smith’s magnificent new monthly magazine, Cornhill. Framley Parsonage (1861), illustrated by Millais, established Anthony Trollope as a leading literary figure and it also brought him a four-figure payment – a level which he would not fall below for the next twenty years and thirty novels.

  His energy at this stage of his life was fabulous. Visiting his brother in Florence in October 1860, he began what was to be a lifelong (and probably platonic) relationship with a young American girl, Kate Field, twenty-five years his junior, a feminist and an actress. She was very different from Mrs Rose Trollope of whom posterity knows little more than her two surnames and that she married who she did. Judging by his pungent travel book, North America (1862), Kate was one of the few things to come out of that country that he had time for. She was the inspiration for many of his later fragrant heroines and the occasional feminist.

  Trollope was elected to the Athenaeum Club in 1864. He was instrumental in founding the politically influential Fortnightly Review and edited St Paul’s Magazine, which he used as the vehicle for his finest short stories. Fiction cascaded from his pen, written in the everyday before-breakfast sessions which he describes in the Autobiography. The Barchester sequence came to an end in 1867 with The Last Chronicle of Barset, a powerful study of monomania which critics have seen as ushering i
n a ‘dark phase’ in his fiction. It coincided with changes in his life. Trollope had for some time felt stalled in his Post Office career. As a wealthy man of letters, with parliamentary ambitions, he resigned, effective October 1867. At the same time he kicked off his ‘Palliser’ sequence of parliamentary novels with Can You Forgive Her? (1864), followed by Phineas Finn (1867). Like the amiable Phineas, Trollope intended to go far in politics. During the course of the novel’s serialisation in St Paul’s (pulling in a cool £3,000 for its author-editor), Trollope took the plunge and stood as Liberal candidate at the Beverley election of November 1868. He was defeated in an egregiously dirty contest immortalised in Ralph The Heir (1871).

  At this stage in his life, Trollope’s fortunes began to wane somewhat. St Paul’s never did as well as expected and Trollope was obliged to give up the remunerative editorship in 1870. He had produced too many novels too quickly for the public’s appetite. Sales and payments fell – not catastrophically but palpably. The Palliser sequence continued ever more darkly towards its conclusion, The Duke’s Children (1880). Trollope’s gloom found magnificent expression in his mordant satire on the morals of his age, and the decay of Englishness, The Way We Live Now (1875). The title points to a salient feature of Trollopian art. Thackeray, Dickens and George Eliot consistently antedated the action of their novels by decades; Trollope invariably writes about ‘now’. Sic vivitur, as his favourite Latin proverb put it – thus we live. His fiction, as The Times observed in their obituary, would offer a ‘photogravure’ of the times he lived in for posterity.