Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  She probably gave birth around January 20, 1863. On the seventeenth, he gave a charity reading at the British embassy in Paris which was so successful that he agreed to give two more, on the twenty-ninth and thirtieth. Before these latter readings, however, he quietly disappeared from Paris, telling Wilkie Collins on the twentieth that circumstances “serious enough … take me from Paris this evening, for a week.… My absence is entre nous.” During this week, he dropped out of touch almost completely. There are no surviving letters for seven consecutive days, and on returning to Paris on the twenty-eighth he apologized for a tardy response to a letter by explaining vaguely that he had “been visiting in the country these six days” and had neglected to have his letters forwarded. Now back in Paris, he gave notice of his final departure the following week and embarked on a succession of social engagements, complaining to his daughter Mary that “I have to dine out, to say nothing of breakfasting—think of me breakfasting!—every intervening day.” The editors of his letters observe that “having avoided almost all invitations when in Paris 18-21 Jan, he now felt bound to accept them.” But more likely, he now felt not so much “bound” to accept invitations as free to do so, for earlier, with Ellen’s due date approaching, he had kept his calendar clear. His mysterious disappearance from Paris on January 20 or 21 probably fixes within a few days the birth of their child, somewhere outside Paris.

  During Ellen’s pregnancy, Georgina’s defective heart somehow repaired itself. In July 1862, Dickens had consulted several physicians about her case, one of them pronouncing (in Dickens’s words) that “it is plainly a case of aneurism of the aorta, and that the swelling presses on a bronchial tube and roughens the breathing, and presses on the spinal cord and produces a slight tendency toward paralysis.” Georgina’s sister Mary and her brother George had both died young and suddenly, probably of aneurisms. By early November, however, Georgina was “wonderfully better” and by the following April “all but quite well now.” In fact, she lived another fifty-four years, past her ninetieth birthday. Her restored vigor and subsequent longevity, with no further hint of heart problems, suggest that there had been nothing wrong with her heart in the first place. Dickens’s concern for her drooping spirits in 1862 may have been genuine enough, but also conveniently masked his concern for Ellen.

  Ellen’s pregnancy itself may have caused Georgina’s “affection of the heart.” Georgina’s biographer, Arthur Adrian, suggests that her 1862 illness was caused by her disappointment that Ellen had failed to make Dickens happy—had, in fact, “submitted to his advances … coldly and with a worried sense of guilt.” Adrian surmises:

  Georgina, exempting her hero from the restrictions placed on ordinary men, had, very likely, entertained idealistic notions of his finding happiness at last in high romance—a Tristram-and-Iseult kind of love worthy of transcendent genius. In nothing less could she have found justification for accepting Ellen Ternan. Disillusionment would have dealt a shattering blow.

  More likely, however, Georgina’s low spirits had little to do with any disappointment of Dickens and much to do with her own. If Ellen became pregnant in April 1862, Dickens and his loyal confidante Georgina probably learned of it in May, perhaps June—just when he first reported a sudden decline in Georgina’s health. Her symptoms as he described them were more emotional than physical: “All that alacrity and ‘cheer of spirit’ that used to distinguish her, are gone … she is very low about herself, almost as soon as one has ceased to speak to her, after brightening her up.” On June 13, he reported that Georgina was “very far from well,” but just two days earlier a visitor to Gad’s Hill had enjoyed “a very long and most agreeable talk with Miss Hogarth,” who gave no signs of being an invalid: “a really delightful person, plain, unassuming, totally unaffected and of singularly pleasant and easy manner.”

  But the thirty-five-year-old spinster who had devoted herself to a celibate “marriage” with her idol might well have wilted in despondency when the younger woman who had captivated him now enjoyed the further happiness (from Georgina’s perspective) of carrying his child. In June 1862, Dickens wrote to his sister Letitia that “I have been so anxious and distressed about Georgina … that I have been altogether dazed.” Georgina might have felt flattered by his concern—except that, on the same day, he sufficiently overcame his distress to cross the Channel “on my way to Paris”—without her. Who could blame her, his faithful companion of twenty years and loyal ally during the separation imbroglio of 1858, if she felt low-spirited? The timing, symptoms, and total disappearance of Georgina’s heart problem all suggest an emotional crisis precipitated by a sudden, unhappy shock—the pregnancy of Dickens’s young mistress.

  Fortunately, he thrived on stress; for even as he fretted about Ellen during the summer and autumn of 1862, he was wrestling with another vexing issue. The War Between the States precluded a reading tour in America, but in June he was offered ten thousand pounds for an eight-month tour in Australia. After considering for several weeks, he rejected the offer; but when it was renewed with even better terms, he reconsidered, “constantly disturbed and dazzled by the great chances that seem to lie waiting over there.” The prospect of twelve thousand pounds, “supposed to be a low estimate,” was difficult to abandon, “with all the hands upon my skirts that I cannot fail to feel and see there, whenever I look round,” he told Forster. However, “if I were to go it would be a penance and a misery, and I dread the thought more than I can possibly express.… It is a struggle of no common sort, as you will suppose, you who know the circumstances of the struggler.” Weighing against the heavy demands on his purse, demands that were urging him to exile himself from England for many months, was Ellen. He “had a fancy,” Forster later remarked of the Australian proposal, “that it might be possible to take his eldest daughter with him.” But there was no reason in the world that his unattached daughter Mary could not have accompanied him (she had just spent two months with him in Paris), and “eldest daughter” is probably Forster’s discreet substitution for Ellen Ternan (who is never mentioned in Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens). “I cannot go now,” Dickens wrote about Australia in November 1862; “I don’t know that I ever can go.” If he were to go, he noted, it would not be until the following May or June—when Ellen would be fully recovered from childbirth; perhaps he hoped that she might then accompany him.

  Other remarks in his letters hint at the crisis of Ellen. On the last day of January 1863, he attended a performance of Charles Gounod’s opera Faust in Paris. To Georgina he wrote:

  I went … to hear Faust last night. It is a splendid work, in which that noble and sad story is most nobly and sadly rendered, and it perfectly delighted me.… I could hardly bear the thing; it affected me so, and sounded in my ears so like a mournful echo of things that lie in my own heart.

  Why did Faust move him so powerfully? The opera opens with the aging Faust moping in despair; soon Mephistopheles appears and offers him gold, glory, and power. Faust declines:

  No! I want a treasure

  Which includes them all; I want youth!

  For me, pleasures

  And young paramours!

  Mine, their caresses!

  Mine, their desires!

  Mine, the urgency

  Of strong feelings,

  And the wild revel

  Of the heart and the senses!

  In response to Faust’s desire for recharged erotic sensations, Mephistopheles grants him a vision of the lovely young Marguerite, for whom Faust promptly signs away his soul. In Faust’s exciting rejuvenescence, Dickens must have seen himself a few years earlier, in the first hectic flush of infatuation with Ellen. Faust’s subsequent seduction of Marguerite, who in a particularly sinister scene chooses his gift of jewels over a rival’s gift of flowers, might also have resonated “like a mournful echo of things that lie in my own heart.” What probably echoed most mournfully of all, however, was that Marguerite becomes pregnant.

  Faust repents. “I fear,” h
e says, hesitating at her doorstep, “that I bring back shame and misery here”—as Dickens himself might well have felt on Ellen’s doorstep.

  His confidante Georgina would need no gloss to understand why he found Faust so poignant. A little later, he described the same performance to the retired actor William Macready: “After Marguerite has taken the jewels placed in her way in the garden, a weird evening draws on, and the bloom fades from the flowers, and the leaves over-hang her chamber window which was innocently bright and gay at first. I couldn’t bear it, and gave in completely.” Dickens often wept at the theater—he had been “disfigured with crying” at Orphée et Eurydice two months earlier; and far from leaving him prostrate with gloom, Faust “perfectly delighted” him. But he felt a pointed personal application in Faust’s theme of seduction and lost innocence and in Marguerite’s illegitimate child. Small comfort that after murdering her infant in a frenzy of grief, the repentant Marguerite is drawn into heaven by a choir of angels—for her aging seducer Faust is left behind.

  In the same letter telling Georgina about Faust, Dickens also reported on his final two readings at the British embassy. He had rather dreaded them, telling Collins before the first that “I read tonight and tomorrow—horribly against the grain, as the grain is at present”: the “grain” no doubt being his worries about Ellen. But the readings went well after all, and he was as usual delighted with his own performance. “You have never heard me read yet!” he crowed to Georgina. “I have been twice goaded and lifted out of myself into a state that astonished me almost as much as the audience.” Then, in a brief medical bulletin incongruously appended to this braggadocio, he noted that “I have a cold, but no neuralgia, and am ‘as well as can be expected.’” The phrase “as well as can be expected” (according to Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang) is “almost obligatory on husbands speaking of wives within a week of parturition,” and Dickens’s first published use of the phrase, in a sketch written almost thirty years earlier, had explicitly referred to pregnancy:

  We saw that the knocker was tied up in an old white kid glove; and we, in our innocence (we were in a state of bachelorship then), wondered what on earth it all meant, until we heard the eldest Miss Willis, in propriâ personâ, say, with great dignity, in answer to the next inquiry, “My compliments, and Mrs Robinson’s doing as well as can be expected, and the little girl thrives wonderfully.”

  Already by the 1830s, then, “as well as can be expected” was a hackneyed phrase associated with pregnancy and childbirth; and in now using the phrase in reference to himself, Dickens was probably indulging in sly whimsy: given the circumstances, Georgina would grasp the allusion. Perhaps the phrase was in fact a coded bulletin on Ellen’s health: he avoided mentioning her in letters, but if she were recovering from childbirth Georgina would expect news of her.

  Leaving Paris in early February, he lingered in France before crossing the Channel, to “go on a little perfectly quiet tour for about ten days, touching the sea at Boulogne.” Again he dropped out of sight: “I don’t want to pin myself down to any particular place during the ten days,” he told Wills. After this holiday with Ellen, he planned to return to England “for good,” as he told several people; “I do not come back to Paris or near it,” he told another. In mid-February, as promised, he was back in London. Nothing had come of the proposed bachelor lark with Wilkie Collins; he had now decided, instead, to give public readings in London, declaring again that he had returned to England “for good.” He plainly had no wish or need to cross the Channel any time soon; whatever had drawn him to France so insistently for the previous eight months drew him no longer. One can safely infer that Ellen too was back in England. In March, confident that he was fixed in England indefinitely, Dickens began a series of fourteen public readings in London, extending into June.

  Yet scarcely a month after returning “for good,” and less than two weeks after the first of his London readings, he told his solicitor that “on coming to town” from a weekend at Gad’s Hill, he had discovered “strong reason” to think he would need to leave town in a few days: “I am very much afraid that some rather anxious business I have on hand (but it is not my own, I am happy to say), will take me across the Channel on Friday morning, and probably detain me four or five days.” The urgency and mystery of the summons point to Ellen again as the “anxious business” calling him away. Absent for five days, he returned to London, then immediately departed for another three or four days. A week later, he was gone yet again, obeying “a hasty summons to attend upon a sick friend at a distance” which “threw me out on Friday and Saturday in obliging me to prepare for a rush across the Channel.” He was again out of town the following week, when there are no surviving letters for six consecutive days, after which he reported to his sister Letitia that “I have been away for some days, and have only just now got your letter.”

  But there is no corroborating evidence that he actually crossed the Channel during these urgent out-of-town trips in March and April 1863, and he may not have left England. None of his extant letters from these weeks is dated from or makes any reference to France. Wherever these brief, hasty excursions may have taken him, however, they certainly took him to Ellen, and they hint at a second crisis: possibly the illness and death of their son, later reported by both his daughter Katie and son Henry to have died in infancy. At the end of March, Dickens commiserated with an ailing friend by remarking that “I am but in dull spirits myself just now.”

  His mysterious departures diminished or ceased after April. In mid-May he claimed that “I have been absent from England for some days,” but this was probably a polite falsehood to excuse a slow response to a correspondent. Ellen seems still to have been out of circulation, however; in June, her sister Maria was married in London, but Ellen is not on record as attending. Later in the summer she was mobile again. In August, claiming that “I have not been anywhere for ever and ever so long, but am thinking of evaporating for a fortnight on the 18th,” Dickens disappeared into France for ten days, and in November he spent another week abroad. Though he may have slipped across the Channel for other, briefer visits, these two occasions are the only times he can be placed with certainty in France during the latter half of 1863. These crossings were less urgent than those the year before, however. He made plans for the August trip some three weeks in advance, on the pretext of gathering material for All the Year Round—in other words, he intended simply to vanish—while he announced the November trip, the week prior, as “a short holiday.”

  Both excursions were most likely holidays with Ellen. His privacy in England was restricted by his fame: he had a wide circle of acquaintances and had been painted, engraved, photographed, and caricatured. He could go nowhere without the likelihood of being recognized. “I am a dangerous man to be seen with,” he had told Maria Beadnell Winter in 1855, “for so many people know me.” He was an even more dangerous companion in 1863, after tens of thousands had attended his public readings over the previous five years.

  Across the Channel, on the other hand, he could travel with Ellen in relative anonymity. Both liked France and spoke French: Ellen well, Dickens like a tourist. In 1864, he wrote to a Swiss friend:

  My being on the Dover line [at Gad’s Hill], and my being very fond of France, occasion me to cross the channel perpetually. Whenever I feel that I have worked too much, or am on the eve of over-doing it, and want a change, away I go by the Mail Train, and turn up in Paris, or anywhere else that suits my humour, next morning.

  Did the friend, who even in Switzerland might have heard whispers about a young actress, pause to wonder if there were more to Dickens’s frequent channel crossings than Francophilia and convenient rail connections? He surely did not go off on his holiday escapes solus, and his silence about his companion leaves no doubt who she was.

  On one occasion, at least, he and Ellen were recognized as they crossed the Channel together:

  Charles Dickens was once by chance my fellow-traveller on the Boulogne
packet; travelling with him was a lady not his wife, nor his sister-in-law, yet he strutted about the deck with the air of a man bristling with self-importance: every line of his face and every gesture of his limbs seemed haughtily to say—“Look at me; make the most of your chance. I am the great, the only Charles Dickens; whatever I may choose to do is justified by that fact.”

  This hostile but well-informed witness—widow of the editor of The Morning Post—plainly knew of Dickens’s connection with Ellen. We might interpret his strutting less censoriously, however, by imagining that as the packet boat cleared Folkestone harbor and his responsibilities and celebrity in England dropped astern, he felt a holiday exultation at the prospect of a leisurely week or two in France with “the lady not his wife.”

  The serial ordeals of Ellen’s pregnancy and the death of their child could scarcely fail to leave their imprint on Dickens’s next novel.

  He was loath to begin it. His public readings, he had discovered, earned more money, more quickly, than writing. A twenty-month serial novel, tying him to his desk for about two years, would scarcely earn as much as six or eight months of readings; his net income from his most profitable novel, Little Dorrit, had not reached twelve thousand pounds, the sum he had been offered for a reading tour in Australia. So long as an Australian tour seemed possible, he put off a novel. During his stay in Paris in the fall of 1862, he was “wavering between reading in Australia, and writing a book at home.” But the Australian idea was abandoned around Christmas that year: “I have had ambassadors, well backed with money, from Australia,” he summarized his decision. “But I couldn’t make up my mind to go.” The difficulty of taking Ellen along without scandal may have tipped the scale; possibly she herself was reluctant to go.