Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  I wish I were Commander in Chief in India. The first thing I would do to strike that Oriental race with amazement … should be to proclaim to them, in their language, that I considered my holding that appointment by the leave of God, to mean that I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested; and that I begged them to do me the favor to observe that I was there for that purpose and no other, and was now proceeding, with all convenient dispatch and merciful swiftness of execution, to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the earth.

  A few years earlier, in the spirit of benevolent reform, he had argued against capital punishment; now he proposed genocide. As usual, his vehement rhetoric reflected personal frustrations more than any careful reflection. Mayhem and bloodshed in India mirrored his own mood, and blustering fantasies of violent revenge gratified his ferocity.

  In place of cheerful seasonal uplift, Dickens’s 1857 Christmas story offered more bellicosity. Inspired by reports of English courage during the Mutiny, especially that of the women, “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners” (written with Wilkie Collins) is a tale of pirates, silver, betrayal, hand-to-hand fighting, bravery, sharpshooting, and rescue, set on the coast of Central America, a region about which Dickens knew nothing. The most patriotic and martial work he ever wrote, “Perils” is essentially a boy’s adventure story, a Dickensian Treasure Island. Its belligerence springs from his wrath at the Indian mutineers. At one point, the hero rebukes a pompous official:

  Believing that I hold my commission by the allowance of God, and not that I have received it direct from the Devil, I shall certainly use it, with all avoidance of unnecessary suffering and with all merciful swiftness of execution, to exterminate these people [the pirates] from the face of the earth.

  —repeating almost verbatim Dickens’s fantasy of revenge against the Sepoy mutineers, quoted above, which he wrote at the same time.

  But his infatuation with Ellen also contributed to the heroic gallantry of “Perils.” Amatory excitement prompted violent St. George fantasies.

  I wish I had been born in the days of Ogres and Dragon-guarded Castles. I wish an Ogre with seven heads (and no particular evidence of brains in the whole lot of them) had taken the Princess whom I adore—you have no idea how intensely I love her!—to his stronghold on the top of a high series of Mountains, and there tied her up by the hair. Nothing would suit me half so well this day, as climbing after her, sword in hand, and either winning her or being killed.

  Both the Mutiny and the young actress kindled his bravado—chivalric in Ellen’s case, savage in the Mutiny’s.

  His immense delight with “Perils,” his confident predictions that it would “make a prodigious noise,” suggests how far his fervor outran his judgment in the autumn of 1857. But though it is an indifferent story, its boyish ardor reveals Dickens transformed; nothing could have been less youthfully ardent than the somber novel he had finished a few months earlier, Little Dorrit. The romantic pathos of “Perils,” springing from a soldier’s lifelong love for a lady socially beyond his reach, resonated so deeply with Dickens that he was “for days and days, really unable to approach the Proofs. As often as I tried to correct them, I turned them over, looked at the last page, and was so completely overcome, that I couldn’t bear to dwell upon it.”

  Within weeks of Doncaster, he used his theatrical connections to secure Ellen an acting engagement at the Haymarket, one of the oldest and most prosperous London theaters, specializing in comedies. Writing to convey his “cordial thanks” to the theater’s manager, James Baldwin Buckstone, Dickens added that “I need hardly tell you that my interest in the young lady does not cease with the effecting of this arrangement, and that I shall always regard your taking care of her and remembering her, as an act of personal friendship to me.” Along with his thanks, he enclosed a check for £50, probably to subsidize her wages.

  Probably about the same time there occurred (perhaps) an awkward incident. The source is a Mrs. Whiffen, an actress whose husband had a very slight acquaintance with Dickens. Years later, she recalled that her husband had “told me that Dickens’s god-daughter was one of the causes of [Mrs. Dickens’s] jealousy.” (Unless “god-daughter” was a polite euphemism, Mr. Whiffen was unaware of Ellen’s actual relationship with Dickens.) Mrs. Dickens called at a London jeweler’s shop one day (as Mrs. Whiffen recounted the story), “and the jeweler informed her that her bracelet was ready. She had ordered none.… It proved to be a bracelet belonging to the god-daughter, which Mr. Dickens had left to be repaired.” This anecdote, often repeated, may have some truth to it, though how much is unclear. “It was pretty generally conceded that Mrs. Dickens was needlessly jealous,” Mrs. Whiffen blithely observed—suggesting that she, at any rate, had no clue. Her ignorance, however, may actually enhance the story’s credibility.

  In May 1858, nine months after The Frozen Deep, Dickens separated from Catherine and exiled her from Tavistock House and her children. Her sister Georgina remained with Dickens, creating a suspicious ménage, a separated man living with his unmarried sister-in-law. Unseemly rumors circulated. Thackeray heard “all sorts of horrible stories buzzing about.” In denying them, the usually adroit Dickens made matters worse, and what might have been an ephemeral gossip item among the knowing became a protracted indignity. Though vague on details, Thackeray knew there was “some row about an actress in the case, & he denies with the utmost infuriation any charge against her or himself.” One of Thackeray’s sources told him of an unfortunate encounter between Dickens and his eldest son. Thackeray repeated the anecdote to his daughter Anne, who in turn relayed it to her governess: “Papa says the story is that Charley met his Father & Miss Whatsname Whatever the actress out walking on Hampstead Heath.”

  Dickens and his ally Georgina Hogarth vehemently denied the rumors. “I worked hard to prevent it [the separation], so long as I saw any possibility,” Georgina insisted, “but latterly I have come to the conviction that there was no other way out of the domestic misery of this house. For my sister and Charles have lived unhappily for years—they were totally unsuited to each other in almost every respect.” Curiously, this apologia was written for Maria Beadnell Winter, with whom Georgina still corresponded; learning of the separation, perhaps Maria recognized what a favor she had done both Dickens and herself by rejecting him a quarter century earlier. Georgina’s explanation continued: “So, by mutual consent and for the reasons I have told you and no other, they have come to this arrangement.” Unlike Thackeray, Mrs. Winter did not move in worldly circles and had very likely heard nothing about “Miss Whatsname Whatever the actress”; Georgina’s fiercely underscored claim that there was no other reason for the Dickens separation might have struck her as strangely overinsistent. It was also, of course, quite false. In the end, the scandal injured Dickens’s popularity little if at all—the reading tours on which he soon embarked attracted large friendly audiences—but he was thrown into rage and despondency. “I have been exquisitely distressed,” he wrote to a friend in September 1858, lamenting that he “had unwittingly brought the foulest lies” on “the innocent and good.… Sometimes I cannot bear it. I had one of those fits yesterday, and was utterly desolate and lost.” Always vexed when public affairs did not conform to his wishes, he had until now managed to command his private life, at least. Now it too boiled over.

  He did not handle the stress well. “My father was like a madman when my mother left home,” his daughter Katie recalled:

  This affair brought out all that was worst—all that was weakest in him. He did not care a damn what happened to any of us. Nothing could surpass the misery and unhappiness of our home.

  Lapsing into self-pity, he regarded himself as a victim rather than the cause of his problems: “If you could know how much I have felt within this last month, and what a sense of Wrong has been upon me, and what a strain and struggle I have lived under,” he confided to a friend in June 1858, “you would see that my heart is
so jagged and rent and out of shape, that it does not this day leave me hand enough to shape these words.” To another he sighed that “I have been heavily wounded, but I have covered the wound up, and left it to heal.”

  With his separation from Catherine, he left behind more than his marriage. Petulantly and acrimoniously he broke with Bradbury and Evans, his publishers of twenty years, and for good measure swore bitter personal enmity to one of the partners, Frederick Evans. When Dickens’s eldest son Charley wed Evans’s daughter a few years later, Dickens stayed home. He killed off his prosperous weekly journal Household Words, owned jointly with Bradbury and Evans, and launched a replacement, All the Year Round, owned entirely by himself and (with a much smaller share) his subeditor Wills. He dropped one of his oldest friends and a leading actor in The Frozen Deep, Mark Lemon, because of Lemon’s solicitude for Catherine, and managed to quarrel almost gratuitously with another old friend, William Makepeace Thackeray. Even his valuable association with Miss Coutts, whom he had long cultivated, lapsed, along with his involvement with their home for homeless women, Urania Cottage. Miss Coutts betrayed rather too much sympathy for Dickens’s wife; perhaps, too, she had heard the rumors about a young actress—rather at odds, it must have seemed, with their joint project to reclaim fallen women.

  Amidst all the turmoil generated by Ellen—where was Ellen herself?

  Dickens’s surviving letters say little about her, now or later. Even with twelve richly annotated volumes of letters documenting much of his life in detail, we glimpse her only occasionally.

  Certainly he saw her often. He was determined to do so, and the Ternans welcomed him. Morever, he made no secret of his infatuation among his own family, if the recollection of his daughter Katie is correct: “To Mrs. Dickens, to their elder children [including Katie herself], and to Georgina Hogarth and John Forster ‘all was open’ regarding the affair—he concealed nothing. It was his wish that things should be that way.” According to Katie, Dickens even demanded that Catherine, knowing Ellen to be “the girl with whom he had fallen in love,” nonetheless call on her. Small wonder that “nothing could surpass the misery and unhappiness of our home.”

  Dickens himself probably spent as little time in this unhappy home as he could manage, and as much as possible with Ellen. Between novels and with no other major projects in hand in the months after Doncaster, he had more leisure than usual. With Ellen acting at the Haymarket, an easy walk from his Household Words offices near Covent Garden and little more than a mile from Tavistock House, he may often have strolled to watch her rehearse or perform, and perhaps escort her home afterwards. It is easy to imagine him meeting her backstage at the Haymarket after the final curtain; and though he was too well known to escort a young woman about London without causing comment, it would have been difficult for her to decline a chivalrous offer to take her home from the theater late at night, when there was less chance of recognition. On her free nights he probably spent evenings at the Ternans’ house in Islington, several miles away; he was there often enough at any rate to judge it “unwholesome,” and he “strongly advised Mrs. Ternan to move.” No doubt he gave her not just advice but also financial help, and in September 1858, a year after Doncaster, the Ternans moved to Berners Street, closer to the theaters where both Ellen and Maria were acting—and closer to Dickens’s offices, as well.

  A rainy day in April 1858, eight months after The Frozen Deep. The “Doncaster unhappiness” still possesses him; he has been moody all winter, unhappy at home, occasionally frantic, working himself up to break free of his marriage. “Only last night, in my sleep, I was bent upon getting over a perspective of barriers, with my hands and feet bound,” he described a nightmare of this time. “Pretty much what we are all about, waking, I think?” But on this wet spring day, he is visiting Hampton Court with Ellen and his spirits are much improved; he is “in the best of humours with the Palace at Hampton Court.”

  It is a weekday. A dozen miles up the Thames from London, newly accessible by train as well as by river, Hampton Court has by 1858 become a popular spot for Sunday outings, and for his excursion with Ellen he deliberately avoids the holiday crowds. Perhaps the wet weather, too, has kept people away, though it offers the added pleasure of sharing an umbrella with her. Was Ellen’s mother or her sister Maria along to chaperone? According to Dickens, no: he and Ellen have the vast rambling palace to themselves: “There was only one other visitor (in very melancholy boots) at Hampton Court that blessed day: who soon went his long grave way … and was seen no more.” When he and Ellen depart, Dickens’s is the only umbrella in the rack at the door.

  As at Doncaster, he is combining business with pleasure, for afterwards he will write an essay for Household Words disparaging Hampton Court. The palace is dull and dreary. In particular he dislikes the paintings, not bright enough to suit him. He has little interest in antiquities, and narrow tastes in art; surveying the paintings, he comments with broad irony, “I find the moon to be really made of green cheese; the sun to be a yellow wafer or a little round blister; the deep wild sea to be a shallow series of slate-colored festoons turned upside down; the human face Divine to be a smear; the whole material and immaterial universe to be sticky with treacle and polished up with blacking.” With fine philistine confidence in his own “private judgment,” he deprecates not only the paintings but also the catalog extolling their merits. “Taste” is a tyrant, he proclaims: just as he must check his umbrella at the door (the article is titled “Please to Leave Your Umbrella”), the catalog asks him to leave behind his artistic discrimination.

  This may be Ellen’s first visit to Hampton Court—she is not a Londoner—but Dickens has been here before and he visits this rainy spring day not with any interest in palace or grounds, but for the pleasure of an outing with her, away from the Argus eyes of London. Reclaiming his umbrella, he departs with nothing pertinent to say about the palace, except to note that with Ellen it has acquired adventitious charms. By himself he might have observed more; with her he is too preoccupied to notice anything else. In “Please to Leave Your Umbrella,” he will wander from his criticisms of Hampton Court to other, unrelated grievances—judges and the House of Commons, for example, old horses he had been beating for years, surrogates for the discontent which now focused on his unhappy marriage.

  Thus Hampton Court, “Taste,” Parliament, the judicial system, and poor Catherine mingle as sources of annoyance. But against and overcoming this conspiracy of vexations shines Ellen. Her youth, freshness, and loveliness expose the lifeless dreariness of the palace’s art, darkened by age and gloom. For that matter, how could any cold canvas compete with warm Life—that is, with Ellen? As in his rhapsody on little lilac gloves at Doncaster, again he wishes that Time might stop, making life an eternal day with her: “I wonder whether, with this little reason in my bosom”—the “little reason” being Ellen herself—“I should ever want to get out of these same interminable suites of rooms, and return to noise and bustle! It seems to me that I could stay here very well until the grisly phantom on the pale horse came at a gallop up the staircase, seeking me.” Even amidst the dingy paintings, her presence creates “an encompassing universe of beauty and happiness.” Together they might “keep house here [at Hampton Court], all our lives, in perfect contentment; and when we died, our ghosts should make of this dull Palace the first building ever haunted happily!”

  The conflicting moods of this excursion reveal Dickens in the springtime of his love for Ellen—frustrated by the obstacles, yet exultant. By the time of the Hampton Court visit, he had determined to separate from Catherine, and the ending of “Please to Leave Your Umbrella” looks ahead to this release. “I gave back my ticket, and got back my Umbrella,” he writes, “and then I and my little reason went dreaming away under its shelter through the fast-falling spring rain, which had a sound in it that day like the rustle of the coming summer.” The drought of the past decade had broken, and a summer of happiness approached—he hoped. Ellen was an e
scape from his loveless prison, a rebirth … springtime, brightness, happiness, a shared umbrella, a hidden joy.

  Another glimpse of Dickens and Ellen together, six months later.

  Public readings from his own works given for charity—like his readings of A Christmas Carol for the Jerrold Fund—had shown that such performances might generate large profits for himself as well, and in the spring of 1858 he felt pressed for funds. Educating his sons and launching them in careers were expensive. The year before, he had bought a house in the countryside, Gad’s Hill in Kent, and he had begun making costly improvements. His separation from Catherine involved a generous allowance for her. He was also subsidizing the Ternans. With all these calls on his purse, he decided to begin giving readings for his own benefit.

  It was a fateful decision. To his two occupations of novelist and editor he now added a third, that of performer, and for the next dozen years public readings absorbed much of his time and energies at the expense of his writing and even his health.

  More immediately, the decision took him through England and Ireland on an tour of readings lasting from early August to mid-November 1858. The tour was immensely profitable, but exhausting. He seldom had more than a day or two off in a week; often Sunday was his only free day. Whenever possible, however, he returned from the provinces for a day or two, retreating to Gad’s Hill to relax and see his family, and to London to attend to business and see Ellen.

  In late October, he spent a week in the midlands—Birmingham, Nottingham, Derby, Manchester—giving six readings from Monday to Saturday; on the following Monday he was booked to read in York. By now he had been touring for almost three months, and was sick: “I have a bad cold all over me, pains in my back and limbs, and a very sensitive and uncomfortable throat.” Consequently he was by no means eager to rush to York early Monday morning after returning to London late Saturday night. From Derby he wrote to his daughter Mary on Friday, telling her “that if there is not a large let for York, I would rather give it up, and get Monday at Gad’s Hill.” With an appointment with his solicitor on Sunday “and having to start for York early on Monday, I fear I should not be able to get to Gad’s Hill at all.” Fortunately, ticket sales in York were weak enough to justify canceling the Monday reading, giving him an extra day off.