Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  Earlier, just a few months after meeting Ellen, he had read George Eliot’s just-published Scenes of Clerical Life, and despite the misleading pen name he immediately detected a woman’s hand. “The exquisite truth and delicacy, both of the humour and pathos of those stories, I have never seen the like of,” he wrote to her in admiration. “… I have observed what seem to me to be such womanly touches, in those moving fictions, that the assurance on the title-page is insufficient to satisfy me, even now.” George Eliot, actually Marian Evans, was twenty years older than Ellen and a formidable intellectual, but Dickens’s quick and admiring detection of the feminine flavor of her stories—their “exquisite truth and delicacy” and “womanly touches”—suggests what he may have found attractive about Ellen’s response to books and to life more generally. He spent his days in London amidst beards and whiskers—there was no girl Friday at the offices of All the Year Round. Not only Ellen’s youthful charms but also her womanly “sense and discretion” deepened his attachment.

  Scattered about in his letters of these years are other hints of her attractions. In 1860, his old friend William Macready, a sixty-seven-year-old widower, married a woman of twenty-three. Ten years earlier, Dickens had seemed to authorize such a January-May union in the marriage of two characters, old Doctor Strong and his young wife Annie in David Copperfield. Now he wrote to congratulate Macready: “It is inexpressibly delightful and interesting to me, to picture you in a new home, with new life and movement and hope and pleasure about you.” The age gap between Macready and his new wife had obvious pertinence to Dickens himself, twenty-seven years older than Ellen, and in celebrating Macready’s domestic joy he must have thought of his own second home at 2 Houghton Place and its warming feminine influence. “Moreover,” he wrote, remembering himself before Ellen’s advent, “I do not believe that a heart like yours, was made to hold so large a waste-place as there has been in it. And this consideration, as one in the eternal nature of things, I put first of all”—by implication, giving his own love for Ellen a religious sanction.

  We glimpse Ellen again in a letter of six months later. Dickens has accepted an article for All the Year Round submitted by a friend, Marguerite Power, and tells her he will send a proof for her correction the following week. “Or,” he proposes, “would you like to come here next Monday and dine with us at 1, and go over to Madame Celeste’s opening?”—that is, to a play at the Lyceum Theatre. “The charmer is coming,” he continues, “and Georgy [Georgina] will be here [in London] all day.” “The charmer” is a characteristic epithet for Ellen, partly affectionate nickname, partly code; even as the manuscript of the letter itself shows her effacement from the documentary record, for the editors of Dickens’s letters note that the words “the charmer” are “heavily cancelled, not by CD; but sufficient tops of letters show to make ‘The charmer’… virtually certain.” (The censor was most likely Georgina, first editor of his letters; though enjoying cordial relations with Ellen after his death, she excised every reference to her in his letters.)

  In this almost-obliterated reference to “the charmer,” we glimpse one of many times when Dickens escorted Ellen to the theater. It was a natural outing for them. He loved the theater, and accompanied by her his pleasure would have been even greater; with her theatrical family and acting experience she would have been a perceptive and knowledgeable companion. He usually took a box at the theater, affording them relative privacy, and any stranger recognizing him might take the young woman at his side for a daughter or niece. One contemporary recalled an unhappy incident, however: “I well recollect being in a box at the theatre one evening with my mother and Mrs. Dickens; the latter burst into tears suddenly and went back into the box. Charles Dickens had come into the opposite box with some friends, and she could not bear it.” Another contemporary—his daughter Katie—heard of this same incident, probably from her mother: “On one occasion, when [Mrs. Dickens] was with the Misses Frith …, Dickens came into the box with Ellen Ternan (the only occasion she ever saw him after the separation), when she was so overcome that she was obliged to leave the theatre.”

  His invitation to Marguerite Power to a theatrical evening with Ellen and Georgina reveals that he did not hesitate to bring the latter two together. Such meetings might seem an awkward mingling of the two poles of his personal life, domestic and amorous, and perhaps awkward for the two women themselves; but Dickens could be insensitive enough, and, even should his sister-in-law and young protegée feel uncomfortable together, he would have his way. Probably neither felt she had any choice but to make the best of it. His inclusion of Georgina in this dinner-and-theater party corroborates her role as his confidante, even in the sensitive matter of his affair with Ellen. After the play at the Lyceum, Georgina would return to Gad’s Hill and his daughter Mary. How much of her evening with Dickens and “the charmer,” one wonders, did Georgina share with Mary?

  More curious than Georgina as a confidante is the recipient of this invitation, Marguerite Power, a longtime but not intimate friend who seems to have known already who “the charmer” was, and may already have met her. Dickens’s criteria for granting such a privilege are unclear. In writing to Bulwer-Lytton, another old friend, he identifies the person to whom he had read proofs of Bulwer’s novel only as “a woman whom I could implicitly trust.” Bulwer has certainly heard the gossip about Dickens and a young actress, and his own marriage is a notorious scandal—nonetheless, he evidently remains outside the circle of those invited to meet Ellen. Dickens seems to have been willing, even eager, to share her as freely with women he liked as with his worldly male friends. Respectable women were traditionally shielded from the women of irregular ménages; Georgina is unlikely ever to have met Wilkie Collins’s mistress, Caroline Graves, for example. But with his implicit trust in feminine sympathy and tact, Dickens was drawn to women as confidantes and was tempted, in the case of Ellen, to flout the conventions.

  Ultimately, letters and other scattered evidence yield only a fragmentary and superficial picture of Ellen’s impact in these early years of their affair. Another source which never mentions her at all yields a richer insight into Dickens’s feelings. In the autumn of 1860, three years after meeting her, he began writing Great Expectations. “You will find the hero to be a boy-child, like David [Copperfield],” he told Forster. “To be quite sure I had fallen into no unconscious repetitions, I read David Copperfield again the other day.” But he scarcely needed to worry; the feelings informing Great Expectations would be far different from those that had flowed into David Copperfield a dozen years earlier.

  Great Expectations has nothing directly to do with Ellen, and yet is very much about her—or about her impact on Dickens. Knowing that some would read the novel with gossipy curiosity, he carefully avoided details that might be applied to his own situation. The year before, casting about for a name for his new magazine, he had proposed Household Harmony; and when Forster discouraged the title as inapt, Dickens responded indignantly: “I am afraid we must not be too particular about the possibility of personal references and applications: otherwise it is manifest that I never can write another book.” On reflection, however, he recognized that Forster was correct, and with Great Expectations he needed no second reminder to be circumspect.

  The first biographer to unearth Dickens’s affair with Ellen Ternan, a schoolmaster and prolific writer named Thomas Wright, nonetheless identified her as the model for Great Expectations’ frigid heroine Estella. Many since have repeated the idea. Dickens would have been astonished and indignant at such a calumny; but, in suspecting Ellen’s influence on Great Expectations, Wright was half right. Estella owes little or nothing to Ellen, but the passions and anguish of the novel’s hero Pip owe much to Dickens’s emotional history since meeting Ellen.

  A greater error and equally common has been the insistence on reducing Great Expectations to a pamphlet denouncing snobbery and ingratitude. But readers who enjoy kettle-drum moralizing are likely to miss the novel’s q
uieter tragic rhythms. It speaks sadly, wistfully, regretfully. In a penetrating essay, Graham Greene praised “the tone of Dickens’s secret prose” in Great Expectations, “that sense of a mind speaking to itself with no one there to listen.” While Dickens speaks to himself and about himself, however, he speaks obliquely. Ellen had drawn him into a swamp of perplexities. His love for her had brought him an emotional reawakening, even rebirth, but at the same time it had led him to act with cruelty to people who deserved better. No fantasies of self-justification, at which he was adept, could excuse the selfishness of his “wild way” and his “madman” behavior to his family, above all to his wife. At the end of the 1859 story “The Haunted House,” the middle-aged narrator is haunted by “the ghost of my own childhood, the ghost of my own innocence, the ghost of my own airy belief.” The same ghostly disillusions and regrets wander through Great Expectations.

  But also infusing Great Expectations are his passion for Ellen and the frustrating impasse of his love for her. He would happily have married her, but marriage was impossible; Catherine was healthy and divorce out of the question. If he could not marry Ellen, what could he offer her? He could pour out gifts of money, jewelry, and a house—but he could not give her the respectability of “Mrs.,” or a home and family. Some other man might do so; was Dickens stealing her youth, and dooming her to a lonely spinsterhood after his death? Another woman, Georgina, had already forsworn marriage for him: “She would make the best wife in the world,” he wrote of Georgina, but “I doubt if she will ever marry. I don’t know whether to be glad of it or sorry for it—finding the subject perplexing.”

  Ellen’s future was even more perplexing. Two or three incidents illuminate the troubled feelings that infused Great Expectations. In the spring of 1860, his daughter Katie became engaged to Wilkie Collins’s younger brother Charles, an artist and writer in fragile health. Katie, “although she respected him and considered him the kindest and most sweet-tempered of men, was not in the least in love with him,” but saw in the marriage “an escape from ‘an unhappy home.’” Dickens too was unexcited: “I do not doubt that the young lady might have done much better.” Celebrated at Gad’s Hill in July, the wedding “went off with the greatest success from first to last, and had no drawback whatever,” he wrote with characteristic bravado—neglecting to mention a startling footnote:

  After the last of the guests not staying in the house had departed, Mamie [his daughter Mary] went up to her sister’s bedroom. Opening the door, she beheld her father upon his knees with his head buried in Katie’s wedding-gown, sobbing. She stood for some moments before he became aware of her presence; when at last he got up and saw her, he said in a broken voice:

  “But for me, Katey [Katie] would not have left home,” and walked out of the room.

  Ellen Ternan and his daughter Katie were the two women Dickens loved most, yet in a tragic irony his love for one had driven the other away from home and into an unhappy marriage: Charles Collins was a chronic invalid, and impotent (“never … a husband to her in the full meaning of the word,” Katie’s friend Gladys Storey revealed, “but of this subject she never spoke”).

  A few weeks after Katie’s wedding there was another ceremony at Gad’s Hill. “Yesterday I burnt, in the field at Gad’s Hill, the accumulated letters and papers of twenty years,” he jested darkly: “As it was an exquisite day when I began, and rained very heavily when I finished, I suspect my correspondence of having overcast the face of the Heavens.” These were all the letters he had packed up at Tavistock House when it had been sold a few weeks earlier. Much of his past went up in the smoke: not only letters from the notable and notorious, but a many-voiced record of the three decades since Maria Beadnell. More than just housecleaning, more even than a means to prevent private correspondence from falling into wrong hands, the bonfire was a defiance. The world might gape and gossip and wonder, but he would cling to Ellen, maintain silence, and leave no evidence to haunt her. “Would to God every letter I had ever written was on that pile,” he remarked as the last letters were tossed into the flames. Thereafter he burned every personal letter he received. The vast majority had nothing at all to do with Ellen, but no matter: all were sacrificed to his privacy, and hers.

  His love for her inspired the most impassioned rhapsody in his fiction, the narrator Pip’s declaration of love for Estella. “You will get me out of your thoughts in a week,” Estella tells him as she announces her engagement to the awful Drummle. “Out of my thoughts!” Pip exclaims:

  You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here.… You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since—on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made, are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil.

  The fervor, the absorption, the compulsion—all spring from Dickens’s feelings for Ellen, as does Pip’s recognition of Estella’s influence on him for both good and evil.

  For we hear the secret voice of Dickens, too, in Pip’s brooding, his somber reflections as, for example, when walking through the summer countryside to his old village for the funeral of the sister who raised him harshly, he is moved to forgiveness: “For now, the very breath of the beans and clover whispered to my heart that the day must come when it would be well for my memory that others walking in the sunshine should be softened as they thought of me.” Though reluctant to confess fault, Dickens recognized that “forgive us our sins, as we forgive others” might have some reference to himself. Soon after his separation from Catherine, his brother-in-law Henry Burnett, widowed a decade earlier on the death of Dickens’s sister Fanny, had written him about a rumor that Dickens disapproved of his remarrying. Replying, Dickens denied “the least unkindness or ill will”: “God knows, it is not in me—We must all go poor Fanny’s way, and we shall all want sorely the gentle construction that we cannot do better than give.” His moral complacency had been shaken, and from his weakness sprang much of Great Expectations’ power.

  For ultimately the value of Great Expectations is not that it preaches against the obvious evils of snobbery and ingratitude, but that from the most intense experience of Dickens’s maturity it creates a dramatic meditation on the ambiguities of erotic love—its power to move and exalt, its power to deform and destroy. Pip’s life shipwrecks on passion:

  The unqualified truth is, that when I loved Estella with the love of a man, I loved her simply because I found her irresistible. Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.

  Love for Estella propels Pip into foolish and caddish behavior and drags him through agonies of despondency, guilt, and remorse. Meanwhile, another young woman would have made an excellent wife for Pip, his childhood friend Biddy. Biddy is as much the sensible choice as Estella is the wrong one; but for Pip it is not a matter of choice. Better to pursue the passion, even as it crucifies, than settle for the merely safe. In Great Expectations, Dickens handed his hero Pip a problem without easy solution. Perhaps that, too, reflected his own situation as he saw it.

  Grieving for Cordelia, the daughter he has so fatally misused, King Lear weeps: “Thou’lt come no more,/Never never never never never.” Repenting his own errors, Pip echoes this throbbing lamentation: “I could never, never, never, undo what I had done.” (5.3) The word “never” occurs 317 times in Great Expectations. When Dickens began writing, he thought it would be “tragi-comic,” assuring
Forster that “you will not have to complain of the want of humour as in The Tale of Two Cities. I have made the opening … exceedingly droll.” But the drollery of the early chapters, featuring Pip’s termagant sister, her childlike husband Joe, and various village clowns, diminishes as his disastrous passion takes Pip by the throat. For Dickens, passion had brought joy as well as unhappiness, but Great Expectations explores only the unhappiness.

  He wrote two endings for the novel. The first was terse, austere, grave—too bleak for his friend Bulwer-Lytton, who after reading the last chapter in proof urged him to lighten it. Yielding to Bulwer-Lytton’s (and his own) sentimentality, Dickens wrote a second, more elaborate and romantic, conclusion, and this became the novel’s published ending.

  Alas that he let himself be swayed. Readers who are responsive to the tragic tolling of Great Expectations’ unforgiving “never” are likely to prefer the spare unsentimental earlier ending, which narrates a final brief encounter between Pip and Estella, a chance meeting on a London street years after he has lost her. “In her face and in her voice, and in her touch,” Pip concludes his story, “she gave me the assurance that suffering … had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be.” There is no strong love without suffering, but in the end there is a grace in suffering, too. Great Expectations owed this new understanding to Ellen Ternan.

  CHAPTER 7

  The crisis

  Two years after finishing Great Expectations, Dickens began writing his fourteenth novel, Our Mutual Friend.