Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  It was Wardour’s good fortune that his “her” appeared in time to console him in his dying moments. Dickens’s savior remained notional—a memory, a dream, a wistful fantasy.

  Even before The Frozen Deep’s first London performances in July, Dickens received invitations to stage it in Birmingham and Manchester. Taking the play on the road would be expensive, however, and he feared that the stage sets, designed for the cozy scale of a private house, would be swallowed up in a large hall: “It cannot be done in any very large place.” Instead, he scheduled additional performances in London, in the small Gallery of Illustration, “in effect but a great Drawing Room.” Even after these extra performances, however, and after an additional reading of A Christmas Carol in Manchester, the Jerrold Fund stood short of two thousand pounds. Urged again to take The Frozen Deep to Manchester and lured by the Manchester Free Trade Hall’s two thousand seats, Dickens agreed to perform the play there on two consecutive nights in August. The logistical difficulties of transferring the play to a large hall could be overcome, he concluded, and after the first night’s performance had covered all the expenses, the second night would be “sheer profit.”

  One further difficulty remained, however: the amateur actresses—his daughters, his sisters-in-law, and the wife of his Household Words sub-editor W. H. Wills. The large Manchester hall was “out of the question for my girls,” he declared; “their action could not be seen, and their voices could not be heard.” He also felt the impropriety of gentlewomen performing before an indiscriminate multitude: “The Free Trade Hall is too large and difficult, and altogether too public for my girls.” For all his love of the theater, he did not wish his daughters to be mistaken for professional actresses.

  Deciding that professionals must take the women’s roles in Manchester, he engaged five actresses, among them Mrs. Frances Ternan and her two younger daughters.

  The widow of an actor and theater manager, Mrs. Ternan was a veteran actress, and a habitual theater-goer like Dickens would have seen her on London stages. He had seen at least one and possibly all three of her daughters on stage as well, for they had been acting since they were very young; Ellen had been less than four when she made her first appearance. The Ternans were a close-knit, respectable, well-conducted theatrical family. The two younger daughters were now twenty and eighteen; Ellen, the youngest, had just begun playing adult roles.

  Dickens had their parts copied out and delivered to them, and arranged to rehearse them twice in London. The Ternans were thoroughly professional; two days’ drilling under his magisterial direction would sufficiently prepare them for a quick rehearsal of the climactic third act with the rest of the company before the entire troupe entrained for Manchester. There, in the Free Trade Hall, he would conduct a single full rehearsal with the entire cast and all the sets and stage machinery, before the opening performance in the evening.

  Possibly Dickens had met Ellen Ternan before The Frozen Deep; an early biographer, citing no source, claims that several months earlier they had met backstage just after Ellen had played her first adult role, and that Dickens had found her there weeping in shame over her scanty costume. More likely, he first met her when he hired the Ternans for the Manchester performances.

  In early August, Mrs. Ternan and her daughters attended the final London staging of The Frozen Deep at the Gallery of Illustration to see just what they had signed on for. Then a few days before the opening in Manchester, Dickens gathered the Ternans and the other actresses in the Gallery of Illustration for their first rehearsal. Of this notable occasion, probably his first extended acquaintance with the Ternans, no record exists, and so with due caution we must imagine it for ourselves.

  Dickens genially puts the ladies at their ease, but after a few prefatory remarks on the heroic action of The Frozen Deep, he sets them to work. He is a busy and brisk man; at rehearsals “he was all business and attention—a martinet” (one of his amateur actors would testify), “and threw himself into every part in turn—either low comedian or old man.” Professional actresses, the Ternans come to the rehearsal well prepared; somewhat in awe of the great man, they have conned their parts with special care. Mrs. Ternan’s heart perhaps sinks when she discovers that her lines are to be delivered in Scots dialect (such as “I see you and all around you crying bluid! The stain is on you! Oh my bairn, my bairn, the stain o’ that bluid is on you!”).

  Any misgivings she might feel, however, she prudently conceals. Not only Dickens’s iron will and forceful personality, but also his strong proprietary feeling, would have been quite evident. Wilkie Collins might claim authorship of The Frozen Deep, but Dickens had assumed moral ownership of the hero’s role: Richard Wardour was his part—Wardour was almost Dickens himself. Nonetheless, he is cheerful and encouraging with his actresses: he is always courteous to women; he is never so happy as when busy with theatricals; and the quick grasp and proficiency of intelligent professional actresses please him, for he is used to directing amateurs. He would not fail to notice that the two Ternan sisters are attractive.

  But there is much to do and small leisure for ogling or idling. With all good humor, he leads his actresses through the first act, which the play’s female characters have wholly to themselves. We can safely imagine him energetically drilling them in their roles, maneuvering them about the stage, coaching them on how to deliver their lines, how to react. They skip the second act, in which only the male characters are on stage; but in the final act all the characters converge. Rehearsing this act with just the women, Dickens takes on each of the male roles himself, in rapid succession, dashing about the stage with prompt book in hand, though he knows everyone else’s lines as well as he knows his own. At the very end, in his own role as the dying Wardour, he gasps his poignant farewell, “Kiss me, sister, kiss me before I die!” as he looks up into the dark eyes of the heroine kneeling over him—not Ellen Ternan, but her sister Maria.

  Maria Ternan, in fact, very much struck his fancy. When on the morning of the Manchester opening he held a full-cast rehearsal, she approached him apologetically. “She came to see the play beforehand at the Gallery of Illustration,” he recalled, “and when we rehearsed it [in Manchester], she said, ‘I am afraid, Mr. Dickens, I shall never be able to bear it; it affected me so much when I saw it, that I hope you will excuse my trembling this morning, for I am afraid of myself.’” Nothing could have pleased him more than this ingenuous remark, for he heartily approved of sympathetic tears and relished his own power to evoke them. During the final scene of the actual performances, Maria dissolved in tears—as Dickens gleefully informed his wealthy friend Miss Coutts, telling her “how much impressed I was at Manchester by the womanly tenderness of a very gentle and good little girl who acted Mary’s part [the heroine’s role, played in London by his daughter Mary]:

  At night when she came out of the cave and Wardour recognized her, I never saw any thing like the distress and agitation of her face—a very good little pale face, with large black eyes;—it had a natural emotion in it (though it was turned away from the audience) which was quite a study of expression. But when she had to kneel over Wardour dying, and be taken leave of, the tears streamed out of her eyes into his mouth, down his beard, all over his rags—down his arms as he held her by the hair. At the same time she sobbed as if she were breaking her heart, and was quite convulsed with grief. It was of no use for the compassionate Wardour [that is, Dickens] to whisper “My dear child, it will be over in two minutes—there is nothing the matter—don’t be so distressed!” She could only sob out, “O! It’s so sad, O it’s so sad!”… By the time the Curtain fell, we were all crying together, and then her mother and sister used to come and put her in a chair and comfort her, before taking her away to be dressed for the Farce. I told her on the last night that I was sure she had one of the most genuine and feeling hearts in the world; and I don’t think I ever saw any thing more prettily simple and unaffected.

  Ellen rates scarcely a mention in this luxuriant accoun
t, except as the sister who maintained her composure while grown men wept all round her.

  The two scheduled Manchester performances, on Friday and Saturday nights, were so successful that Dickens added a third on the following Monday. With the additional night and a final bath of tears, the Jerrold Fund reached the goal of two thousand pounds.

  This was fortunate, for Dickens’s interest in the Jerrold business had evaporated, and he had acquired a new and less philanthropic enthusiasm.

  Did his patroness Miss Coutts, reading his raptures about the girl with “one of the most genuine and feeling hearts in the world,” detect signs of a dangerous infatuation?

  However percipient, she could scarcely have guessed that his life had just altered dramatically and irreversibly. He himself could scarcely have known. When Little Dorrit’s Arthur Clennam was rejected by young Pet Meagles, he became “in his own eyes, as to any similar hope or prospect, a very much older man who had done with that part of life.” Clennam’s middle-aged despair of amorous fulfillment may have echoed Dickens’s own. He was now closer to fifty than forty.

  At sixty, however—older than Dickens would live to be—Yeats would defy “decrepit age,” proclaiming “Never had I more/Excited, passionate, fantastical/Imagination, nor an ear and eye/That more expected the impossible” (“The Tower”). If Dickens in his bleaker moods was the gray-spirited Clennam, he was also the excited, passionate man who had once loved Maria Beadnell. The sleeping lions now awoke. Soon after Manchester his letters began to betray turbulent emotions. “The restlessness which is the penalty of an imaginative life and constitution … so besets me just now, that I feel as if the scaling of all the Mountains in Switzerland, or the doing of any wild thing until I dropped, would be but a slight relief,” he told one correspondent. “I want to escape from myself,” he told Wilkie Collins. “For, when I do start up and stare myself seedily in the face, as happens to be my case at present, my blankness is inconceivable—indescribable—my misery, amazing.”

  During his theatrical productions, and especially during The Frozen Deep, his spirits and energies rose to such a pitch that the abrupt return to the mundane was bound to seem a heavy drop. Yet soon it became evident that his amazing misery now was more than routine post-play deflation. The first mention of the Ternans in his surviving correspondence does not occur until almost two weeks after the last Manchester performance, in the letter to Miss Coutts describing Maria Ternan’s weeping. Yet his thoughts in the meantime had dwelt on the two sisters. In Manchester, his amateur company had stayed at the Royal Hotel with their own sitting room, dining room, and twenty-three bedrooms (not counting rooms for the “professional ladies,” discreetly segregated from the amateurs). The bustle of preparations and rehearsals, the holiday atmosphere of the train to Manchester and of the Royal Hotel, the glare of the gaslights in the Free Trade Hall, the intense pathos of his death on stage, the applause and tears of two thousand spectators—all this excitement threw a heightened luster on the two pretty young actresses on stage when Wardour expired so heroically. In Manchester, Wilkie Collins recalled, “Dickens surpassed himself.” To return to the domestic routine of Tavistock House, with his plump lethargic wife and all those children, was a death. The busy, convivial, animating, gratifying weeks of The Frozen Deep, above all his own stirring role, were so emotionally charged that Dickens was left exceptionally susceptible.

  His letter to Miss Coutts describing Maria’s tears, written two weeks later, suggests that as yet he had no reason to disguise his interest in the Ternans; for in his dealings with Miss Coutts, a lady of strict propriety, he was always on his best behavior. When did his fascination with the Ternan girls become something to conceal? And when did his interest, centered first on Maria, fix itself on Ellen?

  The answers to these questions begin to emerge from an expedition he made to the north of England two weeks after The Frozen Deep closed in Manchester.

  The trip began with an invitation to Wilkie Collins. “Partly in the grim despair and restlessness of this subsidence from excitement, and partly for the sake of Household Words,” Dickens suggested a few days after Manchester, “I want to cast about whether you and I can go anywhere—take any tour—see any thing—whereon we could write something together.” Meeting a day or two later, he and Collins decided on a bachelor ramble often or twelve days “to out-of-the way places, to do (in inns and coast-corners) a little tour in search of an article and in avoidance of railroads.” He was vague about their itinerary, mentioning only “odd corners of England” and declaring that “we have not the least idea where we are going.”

  These evasions are the earliest surviving evidence of questionable intentions, for Dickens had firmly in mind from the start a destination: Doncaster, in Yorkshire. Their arrival there would coincide with Doncaster’s well-known Race Week, but horses were not the attraction. Some time during or after Manchester, he had learned that the Ternans had an acting engagement in Doncaster during Race Week, and even as he was declaring that he and Collins would be wandering about England aimlessly and randomly, he wrote to book rooms at the Angel Hotel in Doncaster. Perhaps in mentioning their engagement in Doncaster the Ternans had casually invited him to attend; if so, he may have startled them with a prompt acceptance. Or perhaps he received no invitation, but decided to intercept them at Doncaster anyway. To a risk-taking adventurer in David Copperfield he had given the name “Steerforth,” and Dickens himself now resolved to steer boldly, risking the rocky coasts, even welcoming hazards.

  It is difficult to know how serious he was about either of the younger Ternan sisters before Doncaster. He may have set out to see them simply as a whim, a careless flirtation. But if so, he was dry tinder flirting with a lighted match, for shortly before departing on the bachelor travels leading to Doncaster he informed Forster that his marriage to Catherine was effectively defunct. “Poor Catherine and I are not made for each other; and there is no help for it,” he declared. It was “all but hopeless that we should try to struggle on. What is now befalling me I have seen steadily coming, ever since the days you remember when Mary was born.” As he had been married less than two years when his daughter Mary was born, he was essentially claiming that the marriage had been doomed from the beginning. Dickens scholars generally dismiss this assertion—the editors of his letters, for example, assert that “there is no sign whatever of their incompatibility at that date [March 1838], or for long after.” Yet Dickens’s reference to Mary’s birth suggests some specific recollection of that time. He had parted from Maria Beadnell less than three years before marrying Catherine, and perhaps the memory of Maria cast an early shadow over a marriage that was now to founder with the advent of the Ternans.

  Restless, miserable, despairing of his marriage, infatuated with one or both of the Ternan sisters—in this inflammable state of mind, Dickens set off to the north with Collins, visiting Carlisle and other Cumberland towns before making their way to Doncaster. In his letters home, addressed to Georgina and signed “Ever affectionately, my dearest Georgy,” he sent his love to her and the children, neglecting to mention Catherine at all.

  He soon found good material for both his letters and Household Words. On a climbing expedition on “a gloomy old mountain” in Cumberland, he and Collins became lost; then as they descended, Collins tumbled into a rocky creek and sprained his ankle. “I don’t believe he will stand for a month to come!” Dickens informed Georgina, almost gleefully, adding that “I doubt very much whether he can go on to Doncaster.” Collins’s misfortune was not going to keep Dickens himself from a rendezvous with the Ternans, however: “Of course I shall go to Doncaster, whether or no.” His readiness to abandon his crippled friend betrays his eagerness to see the young actresses.

  Collins rallied sufficiently to accompany Dickens to Doncaster, however, where they arrived for the beginning of Race Week.

  Dickens arrived in Doncaster intrigued by the Ternan sisters. A week later, he was engrossed by Ellen alone and determined at al
l costs to pursue her. Flirtation had turned into fixation.

  His week in Doncaster is well documented. He wrote several letters to confidants like Georgina and his Household Words sub-editor W. H. Wills, detailing his activities and hinting at his amorous adventuring. An impressionistic and colored account of Race Week that he wrote for Household Words gives further details. Nonetheless, to the question of “what changed Dickens’s flirtatious curiosity into an obsession?”—the answer is unclear.

  Race Week attracted a large and unsavory crowd, filling the streets with “horse jockeys, bettors, drunkards, and other blackguards, from morning to night—and all night.” With Collins hobbled by his ankle sprain, Dickens was free to roam. On their fourth day in Doncaster, he informed Wills that Collins “can’t walk out, but can limp about the room and has had two Doncaster rides in a carriage.” A vigorous and indefatigable walker and eager to see as much of the Ternans as possible, Dickens hardly intended to loiter in his hotel nursing an invalid, or to confine his outings to a few carriage rides.

  On his very first evening in Doncaster, in fact, he went to a play at the Theatre Royal, alone and, he thought, unrecognized:

  I was at the Theatre, where I had been behaving excessively ill in the way of gaping and rubbing my head wearily, from 7 to 11, without the slightest idea that anybody knew me; and I was slouching out at the fall of the Curtain, with my hands in my pockets and a general expression upon me of total want of dignity, when the Pit suddenly got up without the slightest warning, and cried out “Three cheers for Charles Dickens Esquire!”

  The Ternan sisters were not acting this night, accounting for his slouching indifference. The next day, a Tuesday, the races began, but he avoided the track and instead took what he described as a solitary walk through town and out into the countryside. In his Household Words account, he calls himself, ironically, “Mr. Goodchild” and describes his stroll as a whimsical vagary: “A walk in the wrong direction may be a better thing for Mr Goodchild today than the Course, so he walks in the wrong direction.” The curious insistence on “wrong direction” suggests that far from walking alone, he had companions, some or all of the Ternans, and that the allure of one of them, at least, was leading him astray.