Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  After seeing his solicitor in London on Sunday, and very likely Ellen as well, he took a train to Gad’s Hill and spent the night there. He was back in London by late Monday, however, for he met with his sub-editor Wills in the evening, perhaps at the Household Words offices or perhaps for a working supper nearby.

  Then, having dispatched business and editorial duties, he hurried to pay a visit to the Ternans, now on Berners Street, a ten- or fifteen-minute walk from Covent Garden.

  Chances are he has made this walk before, though the Ternans have been on Berners Street for only a few weeks and he has been mostly out of town. This evening Maria and Ellen are home alone, as Dickens knows. He anticipates a pleasant, relaxing evening in the company of the two girls before catching a morning train to Hull for another week of readings. But there is no cheerful chat this evening, for Maria and Ellen have a distressing tale to recount.

  On a recent night, perhaps the night before, the two girls have been stopped and questioned by a policeman on Berners Street. They may have been accosted returning home together, late, from the theater. They are of course innocent of any misdeed, but the policeman had been inquisitive, asking probing questions: Where do they live? How long have they lived there? With whom? How do they live? Actresses, were they? And so on. Exactly why he is so curious is a “mystery.” Perhaps he suspected they were prostitutes. Dickens, however, forms his own dark theory: “My suspicion is, that the Policeman in question has been suborned to find out all about their domesticity by some ‘Swell.’” With more glamorous acting roles than Ellen, “Maria is a good deal looked after”—that is, has attracted unwelcome admirers among stage-door idlers. With fine presence of mind, the two girls noted the impertinent policeman’s badge number.

  Hearing their story, Dickens grows irate. The policeman had no cause to stop the girls in the first place. Worse, the implication that they are undesirables, perhaps tarts, is intolerable.

  He would be angered in any case by an insult to the Ternan girls, but there is additional cause for vexation. Mrs. Ternan is abroad with her eldest daughter, Fanny, and he has promised that in her absence he will look out for the two younger girls, living in London by themselves. Maria is twenty-one, Ellen only nineteen. “You are to understand, between you and me,” he explains to Wills, “that I have sent the eldest sister to Italy, to complete a musical education—that Mrs. Ternan is gone with her, to see her comfortably established in Florence; and that our two little friends are left together, in the meanwhile, in the family lodgings.” As their protector and temporary guardian, Dickens is especially sensitive to any threat or harm to them.

  In the Berners Street parlor he listens with rising anger to the tale related by the distressed girls, comforts them, and promises swift and decisive action. They will not be bothered again by any policeman on the Berners Street beat, he resolves; certainly not by the officer who has harassed them already. If he has been suborned, in fact, “there can be no doubt that the man ought to be dismissed.”

  Returning to Tavistock House after this unhappy interview, Dickens instantly sits down and writes to Wills. “Since I left you tonight,” he begins dramatically, “I have heard of a case of such extraordinary, and (apparently) dangerous and unwarrantable conduct in a Policeman, that I shall take it as a great kindness if you will go to Yardley in Scotland Yard when you know the facts for yourself, and ask him to enquire what it means.” The invaluable Wills is delegated to undertake this investigation because Dickens himself must catch an early train in the morning. There is a further advantage to delegating Wills to deal with Scotland Yard, however. After the scandal of his separation from his wife a few months earlier, with accompanying rumors about a young actress, even the impetuous Dickens can see the wisdom of walking cautiously in the case of the impertinent policeman. Scotland Yard might wonder about the famous novelist’s burning interest in two obscure young actresses.

  Working himself up to a high pitch of indignation, he tells Wills that “I am quite sure that if the circumstances as they stand were stated in the Times, there would be a most prodigious public uproar.” If this sensational possibility is meant as a threat to Scotland Yard, it is a hollow one. Any public interest in the case of the two young women would soon lead back to Dickens himself; and he is more vulnerable than Scotland Yard. On reflection, he recognizes as much. Undoubtedly he also recognizes that his fame and the notoriety of his separation have made the Ternan girls more vulnerable, too. People are inclined to make cynical assumptions about actresses, and any scandal concerning an actress will be presumed true. Dickens is uneasy about this peril, and instructs Wills to inform Scotland Yard that “you know the young ladies and can answer for them and for their being in all things most irreproachable in themselves and most respectably connected in all ways.” That the Ternans are new to Berners Street might suggest, unhappily, that they are birds of passage, and he points out that “they don’t live about in furnished lodgings, but have their own furniture”—a sign of gentility.

  Dickens’s letter directing Wills to visit Scotland Yard yields valuable clues to his relationship with Ellen as it had developed over the year since he had met her. She has become such a presence in his life that Wills has not only met her and her sister Maria, but knows them well enough (or so Dickens claims) that he “can answer for them.” As a reliable and confidential factotum, Wills has likely performed other tasks relating to Ellen and her family, and may have been invited to dinner or other social occasions with Ellen.

  But there is much that Wills does not know. He must be informed of the Ternans’ new address on Berners Street, so he can find them the next day. He must also be informed of Mrs. Ternan’s absence in Italy, encouraged and subsidized by Dickens, and of the Ternans’ recent move from Islington, also encouraged and subsidized. Though Dickens makes no attempt to conceal his interest in Ellen from his trusty sub-editor, even with Wills he keeps much to himself. This reserve will become the pattern. Many of his associates and friends know about Ellen—but they don’t know much. Even Wilkie Collins, his Doncaster traveling companion who himself openly keeps a mistress, is mostly in the dark. When Dickens walks out the door of the Household Words’ offices on Wellington Street and strides toward Berners Street, or to meet Ellen elsewhere, he disappears into another life, fully known only to him and the Ternans.

  One other notable point emerges. Dickens’s relations with Ellen remain chaste. On this, his one documented visit to 31 Berners Street, she and Maria are home together, and this is probably standard. In any case, no chaperone is necessary. Dickens places a high value on Ellen’s virtue and purity; he has stressed them repeatedly during the past year. “Upon my soul and honour,” he had declared a few months earlier, “there is not on this earth a more virtuous and spotless creature than this young lady. I know her to be innocent and pure, and as good as my own dear daughters.” That he has sent Ellen’s mother and sister to Florence, leaving the two younger girls on their own in London, might seem suspicious, but this apparently exploitable arrangement does not suggest disreputable intentions, but rather the opposite. For all his faults—and he has a sufficiency—Dickens is no cad, or predator, or rake. In Mrs. Ternan’s absence, he has assumed responsibility for Ellen and Maria as an almost sacred charge. If ever he is to take Ellen as a lover, it will not be when she is nineteen-yearsold and under his guardianship.

  Another glimpse of Dickens and Ellen.

  During the autumn of 1858 he enjoys robust health. The separation crisis with all its scandal and acrimony has been a strain, and the reading tour that carries him all over England and Ireland week after week is taxing. Nonetheless, “the fatigue, though sometimes very great indeed, hardly tells on me at all,” he reports in October. And although his readings manager and a crew of three “have given in, more or less, at times, I have never been in the least unequal to the work, though sometimes sufficiently disinclined for it.” One day the week before, he has walked thirteen miles between reading sites, from Durham to Su
nderland; the day after, he has walked another twelve miles, from Sunderland to Newcastle. In December, he declares “that I have been, and am, wonderfully well.”

  One Saturday six months later, however, he takes a train from Gad’s Hill to London to consult with his physician, Frank Beard, an old friend. Requesting an appointment, he has briefly and vaguely mentioned that “My bachelor state has engendered a small malady on which I want to see you.” From this cryptic allusion, Beard will have little doubt that Dickens has contracted a venereal infection.

  It persists through the summer of 1859. The week after seeing Beard, he tells Wills that “I don’t think I am any better today. I am rather disposed to feel it in my general health, and am languid and short of starch.” A month later, he can report to Beard only that “I am very little better—really very little.” The problem scarcely incapacitates him; he continues to turn out weekly installments of A Tale of Two Cities and one day goes rowing on the Medway, near Gad’s Hill, for “20 miles at a stretch.” But the malady persists. Two months after consulting Beard, he complains that “I am not quite well—can’t get quite well.” Sea air and salt water might help, he thinks, and he travels to Broadstairs on the Channel to try this remedy; but a bad cold keeps him out of the sea. Beard’s remedies, or one of them, is silver nitrate—commonly used for cauterizing chancres.

  Have he and Ellen become lovers?—and has he contracted a venereal infection from her?

  The evidence again suggests the opposite—that this is not a glimpse of Dickens and Ellen together. He has almost certainly acquired his “small malady” from another source. The Ternans are a respectable, close-knit, well-regulated matriarchy, the mother (now back from the continent) and two younger daughters living together (the eldest, Fanny, is still taking vocal lessons in Florence). Ellen, now twenty, is very unlikely to have acquired a venereal disease to pass on to Dickens. He in turn is unlikely to risk passing on his malady to his beloved Ellen.

  And the malady persists, intermittently, for another year and more. After Christmas 1859, he sends his family to Gad’s Hill, but after making a brief trip to Wales he returns to London and stays there, alone, several days longer, explaining that “Unfortunately I am in the Doctor’s hands for a few days, and am shut up here [in the Wellington Street offices of his new magazine, All the Year Round] after dark, by his orders.” This tale of a nocturnal quarantine is not entirely true, for he has gone to Drury Lane Theatre just the night before, and certainly he often slips off to see Ellen as well.

  These treatments in the first week of 1860 may or may not be connected with his malady, but a year later, while writing the early chapters of Great Expectations, he once again undergoes treatments in London after Christmas while his family stays at Gad’s Hill, and this time the treatments are certainly for the same problem that has now been nagging him off and on for eighteen months. The medical regime is scarcely spartan, for “I pass my time here (I am staying here alone [in London]) in working, taking physic, and taking a Stall at a Theatre every night,” he writes to a friend. At the same time he writes to Georgina, at Gad’s Hill: “Now understand, both you and Mary [his daughter], that there is not the least occasion to be anxious about me. I have no kind of pain—scarcely an uneasiness—but I am not rid of the disagreeables that affected me in that hot summer [of 1859], and they must be put right. I have delivered myself over to be physicked, and that is the long and short of it.” The euphemism (“the disagreeables”) and his refusal to elaborate (“that is the long and short of it”) reveal that he has not disclosed the precise nature of his ailment to his sister-in-law Georgina, and certainly not to his daughter. Scarcely an ingénue, though, Georgina must have her suspicions.

  What ill-advised liaison has brought about this malady? There is no guessing with any confidence. Wellington Street, where the offices of both Household Words and its successor All the Year Round were located, is close to Covent Garden, a well-known haunt of prostitutes. In Great Expectations, Pip remarks in a discreet parenthesis that a club of young debauchees called the Finches of the Grove “spent their money foolishly (the Hotel we dined at was in Covent-garden)”—hinting at the Finches’ whoring. Dickens frequents the West End theaters, moreover, and prostitutes notoriously circulate in and about them at night. His friendship with the Ternans now takes him to theaters more than ever, for Ellen and Maria have acting engagements at several, and meeting them there exposes him to a demi-monde rich with temptations.

  A letter to Wilkie Collins at the beginning of his 1858 reading tour is suggestive. A dozen years younger, unmarried and pleasure-loving, Collins has been Dickens’s companion on numerous bachelor jaunts. Now, embarking on his reading tour, Dickens has sent Collins his itinerary, with the name of the hotel where he expects to stay in each city. For several cities, however, no hotel is listed, a convenience address being given instead. Collins remarks suggestively on these omissions, and Dickens in turn responds:

  Your letter gives me great pleasure, as all letters that you write me are sure to do. But the mysterious addresses, O misconstructive one, merely refer to places where Arthur Smith [the readings manager] did not know aforehand the names of the best Hotels. As to that furtive and Don Giovanni purpose at which you hint—that may be all very well for your violent vigor, or that of the companions with whom you may have travelled continentally, or the Caliphs Haroon Alraschid with whom you have unbent metropolitanly; but Anchorites who read themselves red hot every night are chaste as Diana.

  Among Collins’s vigorous traveling companions had been Dickens himself, for they had spent time together on the continent and had probably “unbent” together in the metropolis as well. Thus, Dickens’s assertion of chastity is not absolute, for Collins knows better, but an ad hoc regime adopted for his reading tour. It is notable that he responds to Collins’s innuendo in a tone of light-hearted, facetious masculine banter, and that the exertions of the tour—and not fidelity to Ellen, let alone to his estranged wife—are adduced as the reason for his good behavior.

  One reason Ellen is not cited as having a claim on Dickens’s sexual fidelity is that their relationship remains chaste. Another is that Collins’s world of Don-Giovanni, Arabian-Nights adventure is alien to Dickens’s feelings about Ellen. Collins is part of his world of hearty masculine camaraderie and worldliness. Ellen appeals to a wholly different side of his nature; she excites desire, certainly, but she also awakes his chivalry, his protectiveness, his reverence for feminine innocence and purity, even—ironically—his strong domestic instincts. These are not feelings to be joked about with a voluptuary like Collins. Dickens’s venereal malady is a lingering result of adventuring that will be left behind with his growing loyalty to Ellen.

  As an indirect consequence of the rupture in Dickens’s marriage in the spring of 1858, he broke with Bradbury and Evans, the publishing firm with a half interest in his magazine Household Words. Shutting down Household Words, he inaugurated a new weekly, All the Year Round, the following year.

  The editorial texture of the new magazine suggests Ellen’s influence. Published through the 1850s, Household Words had been a pulpit for Dickens’s opinions on almost every topic. In All the Year Round, by contrast, “essays of topical sociopolitical interest were almost entirely tossed out.” While Ellen initially threw Dickens into near-frenzy, her effect on him was ultimately mellowing.

  Rather than topical articles, All the Year Round featured serial fiction. To launch the new magazine, he wrote A Tale of Two Cities, published in weekly numbers beginning with the magazine’s inaugural issue in April 1859.

  The plot of A Tale of Two Cities was inspired by The Frozen Deep: in both, an unhappy hero sacrifices himself for an inaccessible woman whom he has long loved, by giving his life for her husband (or fiancé). The idea of suffering and sacrificing for a beloved woman resonated with Dickens, and A Tale of Two Cities echoes not only The Frozen Deep but also the fairy-tale fancy of saving his Princess from the seven-headed Ogre on the mountaintop. As h
e wrote A Tale of Two Cities, the idea of the lover’s sacrifice took “complete possession” of him: “I have so far verified what is done and suffered in these pages, as that I have certainly done and suffered it all myself.” Sydney Carton’s hopeless but ultimately redemptive love for Lucie Manette re-enacted his own “wild way” of love, what he had “done and suffered” because of Ellen Ternan.

  We glimpse Ellen’s presence not only in Carton’s sacrifice for Lucie, however, but in a more mundane detail in Dickens’s correspondence. When in 1859 an American magazine offered him a handsome sum for a single story, he hastily accepted, though busy with both All the Year Round and A Tale of Two Cities. He then wrote the story, called “Hunted Down,” and dispatched it to New York. When the magazine’s editor wrote to praise the story, Dickens responded that “it gives me great pleasure to receive your letter.… I read the story to one or two friends here, at the time of its completion, and I found that it took strong possession of them.”

  Ellen was certainly one of the vaguely enumerated friends to whom he read the story—perhaps the only one. In this throwaway detail, we glimpse an evening with the Ternans. It is spring 1859, probably late April. Dickens carries his just-completed story to the Ternan house, eager to read it to Ellen. Nothing gives him greater pleasure than an appreciative, demonstrative audience, and no audience at all could give him greater pleasure than Ellen. He likes his own story and reads it with strong effect. Writing stories is his greatest gift, but his flair for dramatic reading is a gift as well, and he happily lays both gifts at her feet.