Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  One of the climactic incidents in this novel occurs along the Thames, upstream from London, where the river flows through meadows and woodlands. On a pleasant summer evening, the debonair young Eugene Wrayburn loiters on the riverbank, wrestling with confused feelings about a beautiful and virtuous but lower-class girl, Lizzie Hexam. Since the earliest chapters, Dickens had been steering his wayward hero toward this crisis:

  The rippling of the river seemed to cause a correspondent stir in his uneasy reflections. He would have laid them asleep if he could, but they were in movement, like the stream, and all tending one way with a strong current. As the ripple under the moon broke unexpectedly now and then, and palely flashed in a new shape and with a new sound, so parts of his thoughts started, unbidden, from the rest, and revealed their wickedness. “Out of the question to marry her,” said Eugene, “and out of the question to leave her. The crisis!”

  Wrayburn’s dilemma echoes Dickens’s: he could not marry Ellen and he could not, or would not, relinquish her.

  Wrayburn’s crisis is unexpectedly resolved when, musing on the dark riverbank, he is surprised and bludgeoned by a rival suitor. Lizzie saves him from drowning, and his perplexities are swept away by her love. The crisis that sealed Dickens’s commitment to Ellen Ternan was less violent. From his fascination with “little lilac gloves” and his insistence that “there is not on this earth a more virtuous and spotless creature than this young lady,” he and Ellen had progressed to a dangerous intimacy, and in the spring of 1862 she became pregnant.

  The following months were the most challenging of their long liaison.

  The circumstances of Ellen’s pregnancy are obscure.

  During 1861 and the first half of 1862, Dickens remained in England. In October 1861 he launched a provincial reading tour that kept him away from London and Gad’s Hill for much of the autumn. In early November he read in Hastings, where Charles Darwin’s wife Emma happened to be visiting. She found the performance amusing, but Dickens himself repellent:

  I went one evening [she wrote to her son] to hear Dickens read the Christmas Carol & the Trial scene in Pickwick which last was very good fun.… Dickens himself is very horrid looking with a light coloured ragged beard which waggles up & down. He looks ruined & a roué which I don’t believe he is however.

  In 1861 Charles Darwin was clean-shaven, but Emma’s revulsion went beyond beards. Dickens’s “ruined” and “roué” appearance suggests that her perceptions were colored by disapproval. She was well aware of the scandal.

  His provincial reading tour concluded at the end of January 1862, and he spent the next few months settled in London, renting a house near Hyde Park where he established himself with Georgina and Mary. Beginning in March, he gave a series of fourteen readings in London, one every week, lasting through June.

  Ellen’s whereabouts during the spring of 1862 are a mystery, but as Dickens was content to remain in London, very likely she too was there, probably living at 2 Houghton Place, Ampthill Square. In early March, she turned twenty-three, an occasion Dickens would not have overlooked. The following month, he wrote a check to Garrard, the London jeweler, for fifteen pounds, four shillings, probably as payment for a gift for Ellen, perhaps for her birthday the month before (whatever he purchased, it cost more than the annual wage of his housemaids). Meanwhile, Ellen’s oldest sister Fanny was touring with an opera company while her other sister Maria had intermittent acting engagements in London until mid-April, when she joined Fanny’s company, then performing at King’s Lynn, Norfolk. Thus, in the last weeks of April 1862, Ellen was the only Ternan sister in London—perhaps the only Ternan there at all, if Mrs. Ternan accompanied Maria to Norfolk.

  Several weeks later, Dickens’s letters begin to speak of a worrisome problem.

  Ostensibly it involved not Ellen, but his loyal friend and chatelaine Georgina Hogarth. References to her ill health, “some affection of the heart,” first appear in his letters in June, and at the end of that month he traveled with her to France, supposedly for her health, but also for what he described as “a week’s wandering in the strangest towns in France”—which does not sound like a particularly restful regime for a bad heart—“and I go back again for another adventure next week.” This first week of wandering in picturesque French towns was unlikely to have been solely for Georgina’s health, and there was no pretense that the second “adventure” had anything at all to do with her, for she remained behind at Gad’s Hill. Some compelling business had begun drawing Dickens across the Channel.

  His explanations for his second French excursion were inconsistent and misleading. To one correspondent he wrote that it had been “some years since I was last across the channel” (it had actually been two weeks), and that he was visiting France for a “holiday” and “a little tour of observation”; he informed another that he was going “on a little Tour in Belgium”; his sister Letitia, meanwhile, was told simply that he was going to Paris. Then, back from this enigmatic excursion in mid-July, he was off again the following week, “obliged to go away on a distant engagement,” he explained vaguely. He disappeared again several times in August and September, on excursions visible only in such epistolary comments as “Coming home here on Saturday night from a visit at a distance,” or “I shall be away from next Monday to Thursday, both inclusive, probably.” To mask his movements, or sometimes to dodge invitations, he pursued a consistent policy of evasion and misinformation concerning his many trips to France, but by the evidence of his letters he visited France as many as eight times during the summer of 1862, “my French wanderings” as he termed his curious peripatetic activity. An essay he wrote the following year for All the Year Round, “The Calais Night Mail,” gives an impressionistic rendering of his many cross-channel trips during the previous twelvemonth.

  Several ideas emerge from his letters’ allusions to his French travels. The vagueness, the mystery, and the evasions almost certainly conceal their connection with Ellen; either he and she were crossing back and forth to France together, or she was fixed in France and he was visiting her. Letters early in the summer mention the “wandering” nature of his journeys, as if he had no fixed base—as if, perhaps, he were searching for somewhere to establish Ellen. Later, the trips become more businesslike, as if to an established destination.

  By early July, he had decided to settle in Paris for most of the autumn. He explained to an old friend that “The new cause of anxiety at which I have hinted is the sudden decline of the health and spirit of Georgina. She is labouring under degeneration of the heart.… My present project is, to remove to Paris early in the Autumn, for a couple of months of complete change.” It is unclear why crowded, busy Paris should be thought be better for a weak heart than the rural tranquility of Gad’s Hill; and if Georgina’s health had declined so precipitously in June, it seems strange that the restorative sojourn in Paris should be postponed for almost four months, until mid-October. By August, Georgina was reported “much better”; but notwithstanding her improved health, Dickens pushed ahead with the Paris plans. Announcing that he would “go over the water a day or two in advance” of Georgina and his daughter Mary in October, in fact he crossed three days ahead of them. He had already made hotel arrangements in Paris, and once in France he was not overbusy preparing for their arrival, writing his assistant Wills that he had “leisure for adventure before meeting Mary and Georgina”—“adventure” probably being code for Ellen.

  He now remained in Paris for more than two months, except for one or two brief visits to London. He had ample leisure. One friend later recalled dining at a “course of restaurants” with Dickens during these months, including “a wonderful dinner at the Café Voisin” with a party of six. Another friend, Arthur Sullivan, at the time a very young man who had not yet met his future collaborator W. S. Gilbert, visited Paris that November. He and Dickens had been introduced several months earlier, and in Paris they dined together one evening at the Café Brébant, afterwards taking in a show at the
Opera Comique. On another evening they went together to see the celebrated singer Madame Viardot in the opera Orphée et Eurydice. “She was intensely emotional,” Sullivan recalled: “We were so much moved by the performance … that the tears streamed down our faces.” Dickens spoke French poorly, according to Sullivan—“quite an Englishman’s French”—and “rushed about tremendously all the time.”

  Rushed about why? He had no particular business to conduct in Paris, and with each passing day Georgina’s health became a less plausible pretext for his presence there. Editing his letters after his death, Georgina declined to explain the prolonged stay. “At the end of October in this year [1862], Charles Dickens, accompanied by his daughter and sister-in-law, went to reside for a couple of months in Paris, taking an apartment in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honore,” she reported blandly, and “at the beginning of [1863], Charles Dickens was in Paris for the purpose of giving a reading at the English embassy. He remained in Paris until the beginning of February, staying with his servant ‘John’ at the Hotel du Helder.” Georgina surely recognized that a single reading—or even the three he actually gave—scarcely required his presence in Paris for a month after Christmas, but she disdained elaborate excuse-making.

  Dickens himself was equally reticent in explaining his months in France. He wrote from Paris in early November that “sundry ties and troubles confine my present oscillations to between this place and England.” In December, he returned with Georgina and Mary to Gad’s Hill for Christmas, with firm plans to return to Paris early in the new year, without Georgina and Mary: “There [Gad’s Hill], I remain until about the 8th. of January, when I return here alone for a month or six weeks,” he wrote from Paris before Christmas. He had scheduled public readings in Paris during January, but when he returned to France after the Christmas holidays he did not cite these readings but explained instead that he was going “to see a sick friend concerning whom I am anxious, and from whom I shall work my way round to Paris.” Every other year from 1861 to 1866, he rented a house in London for Georgina, Mary, and himself for several months in winter and spring. In 1863 he did not.

  Even making full allowance for Dickens’s fondness for France, one can scarcely doubt that some mysterious lodestone was drawing him across the Channel, insistently, repeatedly, and at length, during the eight months from mid-June 1862 to mid-February 1863. And despite Georgina’s ill health and low spirits, she was not the “sick friend” in France about whom he was so anxious—for she was usually left behind at Gad’s Hill. The unidentified invalid could only have been Ellen; and given Dickens’s almost continuous residence in Paris between October 1862 and the following February, it seems very likely that during those months she too, perhaps with her mother, was either in Paris or within easy reach, possibly on the rail line between Calais and Paris. With Ellen in France, Dickens’s visits would make sense even if she had been in perfect health, but his distress and anxiety during these months suggest that all was not well with her.

  About the specific sources of his distress and anxiety, he remained oblique. The first mention of them occurs in late May 1862 (before his anxiety about Georgina’s heart), when he told his sister Letitia that though he had been meaning to visit her, “I have been sorely worried and distressed of late.” In September, he told Wilkie Collins that “I have some rather miserable anxieties which I must impart one of these days.… I shall fight out of them, I dare say: being not easily beaten—but they have gathered and gathered.” Recurrent references to uncertainty, sleeplessness, “cares,” “troubles,” and “all this unsettled fluctuating distress in my mind” appear in his letters through the latter half of 1862 and into the early weeks of the new year. Concurrent with these anxieties were his numerous visits to, and then prolonged stays in, France. The editors of Dickens’s letters note that “There is no period in his life in which Dickens pays so many visits to France, generally alone: at least 10 separate visits are recorded in his letters; there were probably more.” But that he was “generally alone” is very unlikely.

  His “miserable anxieties” peaked early in 1863. When, in mid-January, Sir Joseph Olliffe, physician to the British embassy in Paris, inquired about his neuralgia, Dickens responded:

  I really have had no neuralgic pain worth mentioning, since I rubbed with your blessed mixture. But I have not been able to sleep. Some unstringing of the nerves—coupled with an anxiety not to be mentioned here—holds sleep from me.

  Two days later, he wrote to Wilkie Collins: “I had been meaning to write before now, but have been unsettled and made uncertain by ‘circumstances over which’ &c &c &c.” Still in France two weeks later, he wrote to Forster on February 7, Dickens’s fifty-first birthday: “An odd birthday, but I am as little out of heart as you would have me be—floored now and then, but coming up again at the call of Time.”

  All these curious facts—frequent and extended visits to France over eight months; a reluctance to commit details to writing, even to confidential friends who knew all about Ellen; and sleepless anxieties culminating early in 1863—lead irresistibly to the conclusion that Ellen was pregnant and due to give birth in late January. Her health alone might have made him anxious, particularly if she were suffering a difficult first pregnancy. But his sleepless nights might have been owing, even more, to the unhappy responsibility of having fathered an illegitimate child on an unmarried, much younger woman to whom he was deeply devoted but whom he could not marry. Ellen herself may have been depressed; nor would her mother, probably with her throughout, have been pleased at the “circumstances over which—” since Ellen’s pregnancy was scarcely a matter for which Dickens had no responsibility.

  A notable feature of his many trips to France during these months is that after they began abruptly, with a succession of quick dashes back and forth across the Channel, they became not only protracted but carefully scheduled, with their end foreseen well in advance. Before his initial crossing in June 1862, he had been so little drawn to France that it had been “some years since I was last across the channel.” But this first trip was rapidly followed by another, “at short notice,” and in the next few months by many more, an abrupt change in his habits strongly suggesting that Ellen herself had relocated to France. It is not clear why she should have done so unless for a compelling reason. For Dickens himself, the frequent trips across the Channel were time-consuming and costly: first-class round-trip fare from London to Paris cost four pounds seven shillings (at a time when a bank clerk might earn seventy-five or one hundred pounds a year, a housemaid fifteen). It could have been no light cause that sent him shuttling back and forth between London and France so often during the summer of 1862.

  On the other hand, his decision to settle in Paris with Georgina and Mary for the autumn had been made more than three months earlier; by early July, if not sooner, he knew that Ellen would be staying in France at least through the end of the year. His return to Paris after Christmas was also determined well in advance. As early as September, he wrote to Thomas Headland, his readings manager, that “I should like to have a little talk with you concerning the feasibility of some Paris Readings,” adding a caution: “Say nothing on the subject yet, to anyone.” The readings were fixed for January of the new year: he was confident that whatever was keeping Ellen in France would continue to keep her there at least through January. In early December, he wrote that he would be returning to Paris, alone, in early January, and staying for “a month or six weeks”: “I have some engagements to fulfil here [Paris] at that time, and have promised to read, at our Embassy, for a certain charitable British Society.” The “engagements” were left vague, and apart from the readings at the embassy he appears to have had no weighty obligations in Paris.

  Most suggestive of all is that the date of his departure from France was fixed weeks beforehand. Even before Christmas he was certain that his French sojourn would end by mid-February, but no sooner. “There is no likelihood of my going home again until, at the earliest, the middle of Feb
ruary,” he told his sister Letitia on December 20. Georgina had been given the same timetable. “Mr. Dickens is in Paris,” she told a correspondent in January. “The time of his absence is uncertain—but we do not expect him home before the middle of February.” Growing weary of his enforced stay in France, he eagerly anticipated his February liberation. Writing to Wilkie Collins on New Year’s Day, he suggested a bachelor ramble: “Who knows but that towards the end of February, I might be open to any foreign proposal whatsoever? Distance no object, climate of no importance, change the advertiser’s motive.” By the end of January, however, he had dropped the notion of a foreign jaunt and emphasized the permanence of his homecoming:

  I shall be at this address [in Paris] until Wednesday in next week, inclusive. After that, I shall be travelling for from ten days to a fortnight. After that, at the office and home for good.

  What is curious about these scheduling bulletins is Dickens’s confident foreknowledge of when he would return to England—curious because if Ellen had simply been ill, he could not possibly have known two months in advance, with apparent certainty, that she would recover by early February, at which time he could return home “for good,” even to the extent of proposing (inconsistently) an ambitious foreign outing with Collins at the same time.

  This pattern of activity—brief impromptu trips to France beginning in June 1862; extended stays beginning in October; and a final, predetermined departure in mid-February—suggests that after a flurry of activity getting Ellen settled in France, Dickens based his plans on a predictable timetable—that of pregnancy. If she had become pregnant in the spring of 1862, probably April, and became aware of it several weeks later, she might naturally have decided, on Dickens’s advice or insistence, to retire to France for the duration. If so, his earliest trips to France, in June and July, would have been to locate a suitable place for her and her mother to stay, to accompany them across, to help them get settled, to arrange medical attendance, and the like—requiring multiple crossings. In October, Ellen would enter the last trimester of her pregnancy; anticipating this, Dickens made plans to relocate to France in the autumn to be close to her. His return to Paris after New Year’s 1863 anticipated a confinement later in January, and the end of his stay in France, announced weeks in advance, likewise anticipated Ellen’s convalescing sufficiently to return to England by mid-February.