Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  During the course of this walk in the wrong direction, or some other time that day, he invited the Ternans to attend the next day’s races with him in his rented carriage. Next morning he wrote to Mrs. Ternan to settle the details: “We will be with you at quarter past one to day,” he promised, and was at pains to place himself entirely at her disposal: “We will come away from the course at whatever time suits you best; and pray do me the favor to have no ceremony with me, but [be] quite sure that your convenience is mine.” Such solicitude was perhaps motivated by something other than pure chivalry. Impressed by the attentions of the famous man, Mrs. Ternan saved this brief note—apparently the only letter he wrote to her that survives. She was certainly astute enough to recognize that she herself was not the attraction, but was evidently willing to overlook the impropriety of the great man’s flirting with one or both of her younger daughters.

  Dickens himself was not only conscious of the impropriety, but flaunted it. To Georgina, he described his routine with Collins in Doncaster: “We breakfast at half-past eight, and fall to work for H. W. [Household Words] afterwards. Then I go out, and—hem! look for subjects.” That Georgina was expected to understand this coy jest reveals that she was from the outset a confidante in the Ternan affair—and we may be surprised to find that he so freely announced his incipient infidelity to his wife’s sister, a young unmarried woman, only thirty, who herself loved him deeply.

  To Wills, too, he was both coy and candid about his Doncaster misbehavior. “But Lord bless you,” he wrote, “the strongest parts of your present correspondent’s heart are made up of weaknesses. And he just come to be here at all (if you knew it) along of his Richard Wardour! Guess that riddle, Mr. Wills!” Wills in responding must have mentioned the “riddle,” for in his next note Dickens reverted to this code word: “I am going to take the little—riddle—into the country this morning,” and “So let the riddle and the riddler go their own wild way, and no harm come of it!”—in a curious mixture of schoolgirl giddiness and manly knowingness. As his involvement with Ellen Ternan progressed from flirtation to intrigue, he would grow more circumspect.

  In the meantime, his galloping infatuation is evident in the alteration of his plans for Race Week. Originally he contemplated only a brief stay in Doncaster, perhaps just a day or two. Writing (in third person) to book rooms at the Angel Hotel, he was “not certain that he may remain all through race week.” In the event, not only did he remain through Race Week; he stayed beyond. Still in Doncaster on Sunday, two days after the last race, he wrote Wills that “I think I shall leave here on Tuesday, but I can’t positively say.… I did intend to return home tomorrow, but have no idea now of doing that.” Already he was reluctant to leave Ellen.

  In the travel journal on which he and Collins were collaborating for Household Words, Dickens reflected on his own impetuosity. In a dialogue between himself in the person of Goodchild and his companion Thomas Idle (that is, Collins), Idle complains:

  “… to me you are an absolutely terrible fellow. You do nothing like another man. Where another fellow would fall into a footbath of action or emotion, you fall into a mine. Where any other fellow would be a painted butterfly, you are a fiery dragon. Where another man would stake a sixpence, you stake your existence. If you were to go up in a balloon, you would make for Heaven; and if you were to dive into the depths of the earth, nothing short of the other place would content you. What a fellow you are, Francis!”

  The cheerful Goodchild laughed.

  “It’s all very well to laugh, but I wonder you don’t feel it to be serious,” said Idle. “A man who can do nothing by halves appears to me to be a fearful man.”

  Perhaps this dialogue echoed an actual exchange with Collins; whether or no, it shows that Dickens knew himself to be a man of extremes, and that his feelings about Ellen were likely to carry him to either heaven or hell, perhaps both. For a man not given to self-analysis it was an accurate insight which events would confirm. He had traveled to Doncaster for sixpence of flirtation, and departed totally invested in a young woman.

  Why, despite his Manchester admiration for Maria, who had wept so piteously for Richard Wardour, did he become enamored of her sister Ellen?—for by the end of Race Week in Doncaster, Maria’s affecting tears had been displaced by Ellen’s less lachrymose charms.

  The closest we may get to understanding Ellen’s conquest is an exuberant passage Dickens wrote not for a confidant, but for the large audience of Household Words. The final installment of his travel journal consists of a colorful account of Doncaster during Race Week, expatiating on the degeneracy of the racing and gambling set but at one point digressing from this theme to describe Mr. Goodchild’s susceptibility to a young woman:

  He is suspected by Mr Idle to have fallen into a dreadful state concerning a pair of little lilac gloves and a little bonnet that he saw there. Mr Idle asserts, that he did afterwards repeat at the Angel, with an appearance of being lunatically seized, some rhapsody to the following effect: “O little lilac gloves! And O winning little bonnet, making in conjunction with her golden hair quite a Glory in the sunlight round the pretty head, why anything in the world but you and me!”

  For years, he had treasured the recollection of Maria Beadnell’s blue gloves; now lilac gloves dazzled him. That they belonged to a girl with golden hair shows another shift, for while Maria Beadnell probably had dark hair, Ellen was fair.

  The lilac-glove rhapsody continues with Mr. Goodchild wishing that the races might never end: “Why may not this day’s running—of horses, to all the rest: of precious sands of life to me—be prolonged through an everlasting autumn-sunshine, without a sunset!” The intoxicating excitement of new love: such moments of intense joy come rarely enough. But Dickens’s ode to lilac gloves evinces not only a surge of boyish exuberance, but also erotic excitement. Mary Hogarth he had idealized and rarefied; Ellen is celebrated in more tangible, sensuous terms. Her halo is not of pure light, but golden hair.

  He was surely attracted by more than just her golden hair, but it may have been a factor, for while the dangerously erotic women of his novels are always dark, he was fascinated by Ellen’s fair hair and blue eyes. In his 1859 Christmas story, “The Haunted House,” the narrator admits to a boyish infatuation with “curly light hair and blue eyes.” In the novel he was writing at the same time, A Tale of Two Cities, Ellen’s blue eyes, light hair, and expressive countenance appear in the heroine Lucie Manette, “a young lady of not more than seventeen,… a short, slight, pretty figure, a quantity of golden hair, a pair of blue eyes … with an inquiring look, and a forehead with a singular capacity (remembering how young and smooth it was) of lifting and knitting itself into an expression that was not quite one of perplexity, or wonder, or alarm, or merely of a bright fixed attention, though it included all the four expressions.” Some mysterious combination of youth, vitality, alert prettiness, an innocent and ingenuous air, a willingness to please, September sunlight on golden hair—and who knows what else—operated powerfully on his eager sensibility.

  Though the youngest of the Ternan sisters, moreover, Ellen was probably the most daring of them, and perhaps Dickens was drawn by hints of quiet audacity. Her eldest sister Fanny later related an anecdote of Ellen and her other sister Maria flouting railway regulations:

  They have each a little pet dog.… They had a coupé [a compartment for two] reserved for them on the railway and brought the dogs to St. Leonards in triumph under the very noses of the authorities. You know it is contrary to rule to have dogs in passenger carriages.

  That the smuggled dogs were more likely Ellen’s idea is suggested by a later compliment on her riding skills: “Ellen is a first-rate horsewoman. Mia [her sister Maria] rides well but not so well as Ellen, as she is more timid,” Fanny observed. Ellen’s riding master “said very solemnly one day ‘Well, there’s one thing I’m thankful for; she (meaning Nelly) can ride as straight to hounds as any woman in Sussex’!” Dickens would have admired such hedge-cle
aring mettle; perhaps he sensed Ellen’s willingness to risk a perilous involvement.

  Even as he was stirred amorously, however, he cherished Ellen’s innocence and waxed indignant when it was insulted. Watching her act at Doncaster’s Theatre Royal, he was offended by the boorish race-crowd spectators, louts exhibiting “a most odious tendency … to put vile constructions on sufficiently innocent phrases in the play, and then to applaud them in a Satyr-like manner.” One spectator in particular, “more depraved, more foolish, more ignorant, more unable to believe in any noble or good thing of any kind, than the stupidest Bosjeman [Bushman]… inflames Mr Goodchild with a burning ardour to fling it into the pit.” But the indignities to which the Ternan girls were subjected on stage also made him wonder, more philosophically, “whether that is a wholesome Art, which sets women apart on a high floor before such a thing as this”—that is, the worst of the louts. He had refused to expose his daughters even to a sober audience in Manchester; with his patronage, Ellen would soon abandon the stage.

  Did Dickens, a forty-five-year-old model citizen with a faithful wife and many children, feel guilty pursuing a virginal eighteen-year-old? Soon after Doncaster, he wrote a “grim” ghost story, “a bit of Diablerie,” as he described it, untitled but usually called “The Bride’s Chamber,” in which a young woman is hypnotically dominated and driven to her death by an insanely vengeful older man, who then commits a more violent murder yet and lives tormented by fear of discovery until, detected and condemned, he is hanged. One scholar, Harry Stone, has argued that “The Bride’s Chamber,” suffused with magical and fairy-tale elements, expresses self-recrimination: “The dream of felicity [with Ellen], Dickens seems to be saying to himself, is only a dream. Whether he turns to his wife or his princess or his ineffable dream, he feels thwarted, sinful, guilty, a haunted, self-convicted, self-condemned murderer … unable to shrive himself.” Certainly Dickens should have felt some uneasiness in pursuing Ellen. But Stone’s argument, floridly elaborated through many pages, transforms a fireside ghost tale into Crime and Punishment, and Dickens himself into a Raskolnikov. That the bride in “The Bride’s Chamber” is named Ellen is surely no accident; there is also a character named “Dick.” A conjunction of names fraught with significance? Perhaps; or perhaps just a playful allusion, comprehensible only to himself, Wilkie Collins, and the Ternans.

  What did Ellen think when the renowned author traveled to Doncaster to intercept her family, and when it became evident that his attentions had focused on her? Alas, all the evidence of Race Week comes from Dickens himself, and Ellen’s feelings can only be conjectured. Dickens’s daughter Katie came to know Ellen well, and years later reflected on the young Ellen’s response to her father’s interest: “Who could blame her? He had the world at his feet. She was a young girl of eighteen, elated and proud to be noticed by him.” This is likely enough; what girl would not be flattered by the attentions of a man of Dickens’s genius and celebrity? Yet it seems unlikely that Ellen was enamored to the same degree, if at all, and while he might discard caution—“So let the riddle and the riddler go their own wild way”—the riddle herself, no matter how daring, might well have hesitated to abandon herself to his wild way. Where, she must have wondered, might this excitable man’s infatuation lead him, and what might be the consequences for her?

  Ellen’s mother, too, must have wondered about their attentive new friend. Ten years older than Dickens, she had been born into a theatrical family, had acted professionally since she was two, had married an actor, and had raised a family of actresses. She could have been neither surprised nor scandalized by Dickens’s quixotic courtship of her youngest daughter; there was a long tradition of actresses attracting prominent admirers. Dickens was no doubt ingratiating, too—charming, attentive, generous. As the Ternans were by no means wealthy, Mrs. Ternan need not have been mercenary to recognize the advantages of such an influential and affluent connection. But the Ternan women did not indulge in casual liaisons. “Although there are nice people on the stage,” Dickens would later tell his daughter Katie, “there are some who would make your hair stand on end.” The Ternans were among the nice. Mrs. Ternan actively superintended her daughters, and Ellen was undoubtedly well chaperoned during Race Week. Though anyone with eyes could have noticed Dickens’s fascination, the Ternans probably maintained the polite pretense that he was simply a kindly family friend.

  He left Doncaster in a tumult of emotions. On one hand, he was wretched. Even six months later, “the Doncaster unhappiness remains so strong upon me that I can’t write, and (waking) can’t rest, one minute.” Yet he was also euphoric. Just after Doncaster, he had written of his day at the races with Ellen:

  … Arab drums, powerful of old to summon Genii in the desert, sound of yourselves and raise a troop for me in the desert of my heart, which shall so enchant this dusty barouche … that I, within it, loving the little lilac gloves, the winning little bonnet, and the dear unknown wearer with the golden hair, may wait by her side for ever, to see a Great St Leger [one of the Doncaster races] that shall never be run!”

  Unhappiness and enchantment together: love flooded the desert of his heart—but love for that which was forbidden.

  A quarter century earlier, Maria Beadnell had made him “wretchedly happy.” Now he must have recognized the signs of that same tumult of feelings.

  By 1857, the famous author was ripe for a shakeup. His restlessness of the 1850s coexisted with an unattractive complacency. Dickens was immensely self-assured.

  Despite his unsolved personal discontents, he felt he could have solved England’s discontents—and he was glad to share his insights. A few months before Ellen Ternan’s advent, for example, he confidently informed Sir Joseph Paxton, genius of the Crystal Palace and Member of Parliament, that Parliament was incapable of governing:

  The House of Commons seems to me to be getting worse every day. I solemnly declare to you that direfully against my will, I have come to the conclusion that representative Government is a miserable failure among us. See what you are all about, down at Westminster at this moment with the wretchedest party squabble.

  Perhaps Paxton was secretly gratified when with Ellen’s arrival Dickens’s own life swirled out of control, giving him less leisure for advising Parliament.

  Just a few weeks before meeting Ellen, Dickens received a presentation copy of a book on healthful living. Acknowledging the gift, he boasted of his own healthful routine:

  As you refer to my own habits, you may be interested to learn that for the last fifteen or twenty years they have been of the most exact and punctual nature. I portion out my time methodically, take a great deal of exercise and fresh air regularly, am probably as much in all the winds that blow as any country gentleman, bathe in large quantities of cold water all the year round, and can keep a Swiss guide on his mettle during a day’s journey.

  Given his superabundant vigor, this strenuous regimen was evidently effective, but his self-congratulatory tone suggests the vanity of some of his more repellent fictional characters. His letters and journalism sometimes give the impression that he had figured out life much to his own satisfaction, and that everyone else would do well to heed his example. For all his vivid and ranging fancy, his moral outlook was tidy, narrow and self-righteous. Lord Melbourne is said to have remarked of Macaulay the historian, “I wish I were as sure of anything as Tom Macaulay is of everything.” The same quip might have been applied to Dickens.

  If his moral certitudes needed a jolt, Ellen Ternan delivered it. His orderly life, that well-regulated system of clean living, cold showers, and moral certitude, went off the rails. By the following year, he was boasting not of “exact and punctual” habits, but of violent impetuosity: “I am a man full of passion and energy,” he advised a friend, “and my own wild way that I must go, is often—at the best—wild enough.” This plea of irresistible compulsion was self-serving, but his certainties had nonetheless been wholesomely shaken.

  The year following T
he Frozen Deep was the most troubled of his life. The well-known opening of his next novel, A Tale of Two Cities—“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”—describes Dickens himself as much as pre-revolutionary France. The poor boy in the blacking factory thirty-five years earlier could scarcely have been more wretched than the great novelist: wrenching himself out of his marriage, splitting his family, alienating friends, shattering a longstanding business partnership, provoking rumor and scandal. “I have now no relief but in action,” he told Forster a few weeks after Doncaster. “I am become incapable of rest. I am quite confident I should rust, break, and die, if I spared myself. Much better to die, doing. What I am in that way, nature made me first, and my way of life has of late, alas! confirmed.” One night that autumn, exasperated and sleepless, he stomped out the door of his house in London and hiked to Gad’s Hill in Kent, in what he described as “my celebrated feat of getting out of bed at 2 in the morning, and walking down there from Tavistock House—over 30 miles—through the dead night. I had been very much put-out; and I thought, ‘After all, it would be better to be up and doing something, than lying here.’ So I got up, and did that.” Several months later, he lamented that “I have never known a moment’s peace or content, since the last night of the Frozen Deep.”

  Shortly before he met Ellen, the Sepoy Mutiny broke out in India. When reports of violence, sieges, and atrocities began to arrive in England, Dickens (whose son Walter had just departed to join one of the East India Company’s regiments) raged against the mutineers: