“Hunted Down” is something of a gift in another way as well. Writing to Wills the same week that he has written to the American editor about reading the story to friends, he mentions that he would like to see corrected proofs for the latest installment of A Tale of Two Cities. “Will you send round for them [at the printers],” he instructs Wills, “and post them to Miss Ellen Ternan, 2 Houghton Place, Ampthill Square, N.W.”
“Ellen,” as opposed to nicknames, abbreviations, and coded references, appears rarely in surviving documents in Dickens’s hand. This is one of the few instances; and, though brief, the instructions to Wills are revealing.
We learn, to begin, that the Ternans have moved yet again, for the second time since Dickens arrived in their lives less than two years earlier. Up to this point they have been renters. Now, however, Ellen’s older sisters Fanny and Maria have purchased an 84-year lease on a fourstory terrace house within a ten- or fifteen-minute walk from Dickens’s Tavistock House. The house on Houghton Place overlooks Ampthill Square, a recently developed residential area east of Regent’s Park.
It seems curious that a family of four journeyman actresses can afford to purchase a house in a pleasant residential district of London; even more curious that it should be purchased by the two older daughters rather than the head of the household, Mrs. Ternan. More curious yet—to look ahead—is that on March 3 the following year, Fanny and Maria Ternan sell the lease of 2 Houghton Place to Ellen, who at age twenty-one becomes sole owner of her own house. March 3, 1860, is in fact her twenty-first birthday when, coming of age, she can enter into legal contracts.
How did the young Ellen Ternan, who might in journalistic terms be called a “struggling” actress, come into enough money to buy a large, comfortable house in a good London neighborhood?
Undoubtedly through Dickens. He has provided the money for 2 Houghton Place and arranged the legal maneuvers by which it will come into her hands on her twenty-first birthday; no other explanation is plausible. Circumstantial details offer further evidence.
For example, in January 1859, two months before the older Ternan daughters purchase the house at 2 Houghton Place, Dickens writes a curious letter to Wills explaining an excellent idea that has occurred to him. Now that he owns a country retreat, Gad’s Hill, and also maintains bachelor quarters for himself in the offices of Household Words, his house in London has become redundant. Why not turn Tavistock House over to the Ternans—or more precisely, why not sell them a long-term lease for eight hundred pounds? (As he is subsidizing the Ternans, much of the eight hundred pounds would be coming from his own pocket.)
Both Wills and Forster discourage the idea, strongly. In Forster’s view, “such a step would most decidedly be very damaging indeed.” Forster no doubt fears a rekindling of the scandal of Dickens’s marital separation six months earlier; as a lawyer, moreover, Forster fears that Dickens’s letting his house to the family of a young woman in whom he is known to be interested might create a presumption of adultery, should his wife’s angry Hogarth relations persuade her to sue for divorce. “With you I say,” Forster admonishes him, “it is not matter of reasoning so much as of feeling.” Both Forster and Wills act as prudent checks on Dickens’s rashness. In a letter which does not survive, Wills writes to the same effect as Forster.
Faced with their opposition, Dickens retreats. “I will no longer doubt that you are right,” he writes in acknowledging Wills’s letter, “and I thank you heartily for the affectionate earnestness with which you have represented me to myself, as wrong.” Perhaps his daughters Mary and Katie have also objected; in any case, he cites them as obstacles. “Will you,” he directs Wills, “as early as practicable tomorrow morning, communicate to the agent, that I find my daughters so averse to the long term that I must withdraw from that proposal.”
With this idea squelched, Dickens resumes his quest for better housing for the Ternans. He would like to see them comfortably established in a genteel house of their own, rather than living in cramped hired lodgings. Moreover, he wishes to endow Ellen with property. In February, he directs his bankers, Coutts & Company, to sell fifteen hundred pounds worth of bonds in his name; the following month, Maria and Fanny purchase the lease of 2 Houghton Place.
Dickens’s readings the year before had been profitable, and his letters frequently talk of pounds and pence. Near the end of his reading tour, for example, he had boasted to Miss Coutts (foolishly, given her immense wealth) that “my clear profit—my own, after all deductions and expences—has been more than a Thousand Guineas a month”—for a tour of three and a half months. But as he has bought Gad’s Hill just two years earlier and is pouring money into its refurbishment, and as he is meanwhile funding his wife’s separate establishment, the purchase of yet another house puts a strain on his purse. In these circumstances, the American magazine’s 1859 offer of one thousand pounds for a story is especially welcome. If fifteen hundred pounds has bought the house at 2 Houghton Place, “Hunted Down” has paid for almost three of its four floors.
“Hunted Down” is a melodramatic study of a smooth villain who has poisoned one of his two young nieces and is about to poison the other, when the dead niece’s lover snatches the surviving niece from her peril and exposes the poisoner. Perhaps Dickens feels as if he has similarly rescued his beloved Ellen—not from death, of course, but from the scraping, precarious life of a nameless professional actress. Reading “Hunted Down” to her in the parlor of the fine house at 2 Houghton Place, he can reflect with satisfaction that the story not only allows him dramatic scope in performing, but has also helped make Ellen a young lady of property.
Accordingly, in August, just a few months after the Ternans’ move to Houghton Place, Ellen makes her last appearance as a professional actress. Her theatrical career has scarcely been flourishing, but as acting has been her only means of earning a livelihood, or at least of contributing to the Ternans’ collective income, abandoning the stage at twenty would seem a premature retirement—had she not acquired other means of support. Dickens’s attitude toward the stage is ambivalent; while a habitué of theaters, he regards actors and actresses as a dubious class. He wants Ellen on the stage no more than he would want his daughters on it. In her acquisition of 2 Houghton Place and retirement from acting, we see a decisive transition in his role, from that of a generous friend of the Ternans to that of Ellen’s acknowledged protector and patron.
Has she in turn become his mistress?
His generous subsidies to her and her family seem to create a presumption that she has granted favors to him in return. Dickens’s friend William Macready kept a diary which “contained startling revelations,” his granddaughter (who had read it) recalled. Excerpts were published after Macready’s death; the manuscript was then burned. The published selections contain no revelations about Dickens’s secret life, but expurgated entries (the granddaughter testified) revealed that Macready knew about it, and “took the Ellen Ternan affair, etc., calmly—as Dickens was not the celibate type—and the grandmother [Macready’s second wife], strict though she was about such things, had been brought up in Paris at a time when such things were not unusual!”
Such things were not unknown even in moral England, and Dickens, father of ten, plainly enjoys sexual intimacy, but in 1859 his relations with Ellen probably remain chaste. Even as the Ternans settle into 2 Houghton Place and Ellen leaves the stage, he acquires the “small malady” engendered by his bachelor condition, suggesting that he has sought pleasure from other, less respectable sources. And though Ellen at twenty is well beyond the age of consent (which was then only twelve), he would hesitate to deflower a young maiden to whose spotless innocence he has more than once testified. There are Mrs. Ternan’s views to consider, as well. For all Dickens’s patronage and solicitude, Ellen’s mother remains the governing presence in her life.
Most pertinent of all, and most uncertain, are Ellen’s feelings about her famous admirer—and they are a mystery.
During this sa
me eventful summer of 1859, Dickens contemplates a reading tour of the United States, where enormous profits allure. “I cannot help being much stirred and influenced by the golden prospects held before me,” he admits. But the promoter floating these enticing prospects before Dickens’s hungry eyes turns out to be a speculator offering ten thousand pounds that he doesn’t actually have. “Driven into a corner, I thought of signing it,” Dickens writes, “but Ouvry [his solicitor] was so strong against it, that I struck—refused—and knocked the whole thing on the head.”
Beyond contractual difficulties, a more fundamental problem glooms over the American proposal. Eighty readings would take him from England for nearly half a year. “How like a winter hath my absence been/From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year,” Shakespeare had lamented (Sonnet 97), and Dickens dreads a similar wintry exile from Ellen. “I should be one of the most unhappy of men if I were to go,” he tells Forster, without needing to elaborate. By the summer of 1859, two years after The Frozen Deep, she has become so indispensable that the prospect of six months’ separation from her weighs heavily against ten thousand pounds. Perhaps his failure to agree with the American promoter comes as a relief.
During 1859 and the two years following, Dickens’s feelings for Ellen change from excited infatuation into something deeper. She becomes the chief interest and affection of his life. Yet even as she grows in influence, documentary evidence of her presence dwindles. The diligent editors of Dickens’s correspondence have ferreted out over a thousand letters from the three critical years 1859 to 1861, but turning to “Ternan” in the index of the relevant volume, one finds only three references to Ellen—two of them in the footnotes. The strongest currents in Dickens’s feelings during these years flow unseen beneath the surface of his busy life.
In May 1860 he entertains American visitors, Mr. and Mrs. Fields of Boston, at Tavistock house. Mrs. Fields finds him an affable host: “Dickens talked very much and very pleasantly at dinner”—although the only conversational topic she mentions in her diary is some high-minded distress at “Catholic influence creeping into America,” Dickens politely airing prejudices congenial to the properly Protestant Fieldses. But evidently impressed by the gloomy tone of the conversation, Mrs. Fields observes that “a shadow has fallen on that house, making Dickens seem rather the man of labor and of sorrowful thought than the soul of gaiety we find in all he writes” (though “gaiety” seems a strange word for Dickens’s novels of the 1850s). Mrs. Fields knows about Dickens’s marriage, but likely nothing of Ellen Ternan. Also at dinner are Wilkie Collins and his brother Charles, both of whom know all about Ellen, and one wonders whether an awkward restraint hovers over the table, with everyone except the two guests of honor aware of Dickens’s secret life; and whether Dickens himself expatiates on grave topics like creeping Papism and “purification through pain” in order to avoid personal topics. (Later, Mrs. Fields will learn much more about Ellen.)
Dickens will not host many more dinners at Tavistock House.
He begins spending more of his time at Gad’s Hill, enjoying the refurbished house, to which he continues to make improvements; the countryside around it, where he takes long walks; and the role of host and squire. He enjoys smoking a cigar after dinner and strolling about to look at the flowers. Gad’s Hill’s is well located—in pleasant rural surroundings, but little over an hour from London by train. Above the ground-floor editorial offices of his new magazine, All the Year Round, on Wellington Street, he has an apartment of “5 very good rooms” fitted up: “a sitting-room and some bedrooms … to be used, when there was no house in London, as occasional town quarters by himself, his daughter, and sister-in-law.” With Gad’s Hill in the country and with his convenient flat in London, he sells Tavistock House in 1860, explaining that “I purpose living here [at Gad’s Hill] during seven months in the year and taking a small furnished house in town during the other five,” to give Georgina and his daughters sociable time in London. While his family is at Gad’s Hill, he spends two nights a week in London, free to occupy his evenings as he wishes—mostly with Ellen, one might guess. His quarters at All the Year Round’s offices are “as comfortable, cheerful, and private as anything of the kind can possibly be.” Their privacy perhaps makes it possible, after business hours, to entertain her there.
He alternates identities: most of the week he is a solid family man, presiding over the dinner table at Gad’s Hill; two days a week he becomes an amorous bachelor. With his family installed at Gad’s Hill most of the year, he can range at will during his weekly visits to London and disappear entirely when convenient. In August 1860, for example, he writes from London to Georgina at Gad’s Hill that “I think I shall run away tomorrow [a Wednesday], until Saturday,” to gather material for an article in All the Year Round. His destination remains suspiciously vague; and the next article he writes for All the Year Round, about his childhood hometown Chatham, would scarcely require him to “run away” for four days, as Chatham is only a few miles from Gad’s Hill. In all probability he has planned an out-of-town excursion with Ellen. Georgina is aware of the general nature of these disappearances, and must be content with his vagueness about particulars.
The 1861 census records all four Ternans—Ellen, her two sisters, and her mother—living together at 2 Houghton Place. If Ellen is a kept woman, she is at this point kept respectably en famille. Under occupation, Mrs. Ternan is described as “Annuitant,” her daughters Fanny as “Vocalist,” Maria as “Actress,” and Ellen as—blank. (“Retired Actress” would have seemed an absurd designation for a twenty-two-year-old, and her actual means of support was no business of the census taker.) The Ternans also kept a seventeen-year-old maid-of-all-work named Jane.
By one account, Ellen recalled (much later) that Dickens visited 2 Houghton Place two or three times a week. Another recollection testified to his enjoying pleasant at-home evenings with the Ternans, probably at Houghton Place. Francesco Berger, who as a young man composed the music and conducted the orchestra for The Frozen Deep, reportedly claimed that he “knew the Ternan family very well, and often during the ’sixties played games of cards at their house with the mother, daughter, and Dickens, on Sunday evenings” (“daughter” should perhaps be plural). “This was generally followed after supper by Ellen and Dickens singing duets to his [Berger’s] pianoforte accompaniment.” Though recorded long afterward and doubted by some, this picture of a convivial Victorian evening seems eminently plausible. If true, it shows the affair of Dickens and Ellen not scarlet with scandal but benignly domestic—sedate, harmonious, wholesome.
Evening entertainment includes more than cards and music. While the Ternans are living at Houghton Place, Dickens writes both A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations as weekly serials for All the Year Round, and often brings proof sheets along when he visits the Ternans. As he reads them aloud to Ellen, a painstaking chore becomes a cheerful occasion, and his reading of the latest number of his current novel becomes a weekly ritual at Houghton Place. On occasion, he brings proofs of works by other writers. In the spring of 1861, for example, Edward Bulwer-Lytton begins a novel for All the Year Round and seeks reassurance from Dickens about the early chapters. Would he show them to one or two other readers for their opinion? Dickens responds: “Your first request I had already anticipated. I had read the Proofs myself to a woman whom I could implicitly trust, and in whom I have frequently observed (in the case of my own proofs) an intuitive sense and discretion that I have set great store by.” Thus Ellen finds herself one of the first readers, or auditors, of Bulwer-Lytton’s occult fantasy A Strange Story.
In addition to confirming that Dickens “frequently” reads his proofs to Ellen, his note to Bulwer-Lytton suggests why he has become so attached to her. At Doncaster he had been struck giddy by her springtime loveliness: “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.” Three years later, he finds her no less lov
ely. But in his regard for her “sense and discretion,” we see her maturing into a discriminating young woman and earning Dickens’s admiration for her blossoming feminine wit.
Many years later, reminiscing to a friend named Gladys Storey, Dickens’s daughter Katie recalled the young Ellen Ternan as a “small fair-haired rather pretty actress” (“of no special attraction save her youth,” Storey added in her own words, presumably paraphrasing Katie); but in grudging tribute, Katie admitted that though “not a good actress,” Ellen “had brains, which she used to educate herself, to bring her mind more on a level with his own.” Long resentful of her father’s young inamorata (exactly her own age), Katie implies that Ellen’s program of self-education was artful, but it may be that with more leisure, now that she was no longer acting, Ellen simply enjoyed reading and had the wit to profit from what she read. Talking with Dickens one or two evenings every week about his novel-in-progress, or about what she has been reading on her own, or about articles or novels in All the Year Round, she gains an informal but unique literary education, making up for her slender formal schooling (Dickens himself had little more schooling than she).
Several months after the Ternans moved into 2 Houghton Place, Wilkie Collins’s “sensation novel” The Woman in White began to appear weekly in All the Year Round. Writing to Collins in January 1860 after reading the latest proofs, Dickens praised the early chapters as “a very great advance on all your former writing, and most especially in tenderness”; but he also criticized Collins’s “disposition to give an audience credit for nothing—which necessarily involves the forcing of points on their attention.” With byzantine plot and multiple twists and terrors, The Woman in White was a great success, and Dickens no doubt read the proofs of each installment to Ellen on his visits to Houghton Place. We can imagine the two of them, afterwards, discussing not only the tortuous plot but also the merits and demerits of Collins’s craftsmanship; Ellen is the first to hear Dickens’s criticisms and responds with feminine flair and insight. Enjoying his role as teacher and sage, he admires her natural good sense and increasingly refined taste.
Charles Dickens in Love Page 22
