Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  How did they pass their time on their French holidays? Certainly they traveled about on the excellent French trains. The discomfort, bad food, and disobliging staff of refreshment rooms at British railway stations exasperated Dickens; and in an 1866 story, “Mugby Junction,” he ironically contrasted them with their superior French counterparts: “What would you say to a general decoration of everythink,” a British refreshment-room mistress disapprovingly describes French railway canteens, “to hangings (sometimes elegant), to easy velvet furniture, to abundance of little tables, to abundance of little seats, to brisk bright waiters, to great convenience, to a pervading cleanliness and tastefulness …?” Such hospitable arrangements might be encountered “three times … between the coast and Paris, and not counting either: at Hazebroucke, at Arras, at Amiens.” The listing of stations suggests Dickens’s familiarity with the route between Boulogne and Paris, which he probably traveled many times with Ellen. On occasion they went further, “south of Paris,” encountering even more impressive railway hospitality: “Fancy a guard coming round, with the train at full speed, to inquire how many for dinner,” the refreshment-room mistress continues. “Fancy his telegraphing forward the number of dinners. Fancy every one expected, and the table elegantly laid for the complete party. Fancy a charming dinner, in a charming room, and the head-cook, concerned for the honour of every dish, superintending in his clean white jacket and cap. Fancy … travelling six hundred miles on end, very fast, and with great punctuality, yet being taught to expect all this.” Six hundred miles would carry one from the English Channel all the way to the Mediterranean, and possibly one or more of Dickens’s disappearances took him and Ellen as far as Provence and the French Riviera.

  Once arrived at their destination, they would wander on foot or by carriage through the towns and view the local sights. Dickens was restless, curious, observant, always on the lookout for material and impressions for All the Year Round: “I will turn over this French ground with great care,” he remarked before one trip. Ellen was young, and would welcome the adventure and novelties of traveling, especially escorted by the capable Dickens, who would make all the arrangements and ensure that they lodged comfortably and drank good wines. Even if staying in Boulogne or Condette for a few days, they probably made day trips in the vicinity.

  But their French holidays would not have been frenetic sightseeing expeditions; no doubt they usually drifted, lounged, and loitered. Dickens may often have worked in the mornings on whatever writing or editing task he had in hand, before an afternoon of strolling about town, perhaps some shopping, a leisurely evening of dinner and conversation, later a play or other entertainment. In his 1864 Christmas story, “Mrs. Lirriper’s Legacy,” several of the story’s English characters visit Sens, southeast of Paris: “Every evening at a regular time we all three sat out in the balcony of the hotel at the end of the courtyard, looking up at the golden and rosy light as it changed on the great towers, and looking at the shadows of the towers as they changed on all about us ourselves included.” It is easy to believe that such particularity was indebted to mellow evenings that he and Ellen spent in Sens in the summer of 1864.

  Even the “we all three” of “Mrs. Lirriper’s Legacy” may reflect such evenings, for Ellen’s mother certainly accompanied Dickens and Ellen on at least one trip to France, and possibly on others, but in alluding to his “disappearances” Dickens’s letters never mention even Ellen, let alone her mother. Widowed and retired from the stage, Mrs. Ternan seems to have lived most of the time with Ellen; certainly mother and daughter were close. If she accompanied Dickens and Ellen abroad, one suspects that he would gladly have dispensed with the chaperonage. Though Mrs. Ternan plainly tolerated her daughter’s irregular status and was perhaps a pleasant traveling companion, who would not prefer to travel à deux with his beloved? For Ellen’s sake, Dickens made the best of it.

  Their disappearances in France continued through 1865. At the beginning of February that year, he was “away for a week’s run”; in writing from his London office to Georgina at Gad’s Hill, he congratulated himself: “The mysterious ‘arrangement’ is, I hope, by no means a bad one.” Though cryptic to us, the allusion would have been clear to Georgina, who was plainly well informed of his plans: a reminder of her extensive confidential knowledge of his life with Ellen. Had Georgina not plied her scissors vigorously when later editing his letters, we would know much more about his time with Ellen, and about Georgina’s complicity; but in many of his surviving letters to Georgina, passages have been clipped out, in most cases probably references to Ellen. Other compromising letters Georgina probably destroyed altogether. Her role in Dickens’s household—sister of his estranged wife, chatelaine of Gad’s Hill, devoted domestic factotum, caretaker of his children—in fact, unofficial wife in an unconsummated marriage—was curious even on the surface; stranger yet was her role as confidante, adjutante, and co-conspirator in his life with his other “wife,” Ellen.

  After the mysterious “arrangement” in February 1865, he was off again in March, “away for 6 days”; and away again for a week in early April. Week-long gaps in his correspondence suggest later disappearances in April; during the same month he cited “a little uncertainty regarding my movements” as an excuse for a tardy response to a letter. “There is nothing like the sea for a change,” he told a friend at the end of April, disingenuously: “I cross that Channel in all weathers, and thoroughly freshen myself with its air. (I am going over, tomorrow or next day).” Sea crossings refreshed him, to be sure—but the refreshment came less from the salty air than from his companion. Justifying this same trip as a relief from his labors on Our Mutual Friend, he told another friend that he was fleeing town for a week, adding: “I can throw anything off by going off myself.” But he seldom or never went off by himself.

  As promised, he stole away to France during the first week of May, and two weeks later disappeared yet again, explaining on his return simply that “I have been away for three days.” By the end of May he was eager for another escape. “Work and worry, without exercise, would soon make an end of me. If I were not going away now, I should break down,” he groaned as he reached the end of a monthly number of Our Mutual Friend, and at the beginning of June he was off to France for yet another restorative week. “The moment I got away, I began, thank God, to get well,” he wrote home during this trip. “I hope to profit by this experience, and to make future dashes from my desk before I want them.”

  This dash was to end very differently from all his previous French holidays, however.

  His many excursions to France in the early 1860s are visible in his letters, and random details emerge from the stories and journalistic pieces he wrote at the time, but his companion remains veiled.

  When the veil lifts on rare occasions, allowing us to glimpse Ellen at his side, it is a lightning bolt at night, illuminating the landscape for a startling moment before the darkness surges back.

  Such a revealing flash was the trip to France that he and Ellen made together in early June 1865.

  On the first or second day of June, they left London, accompanied by Mrs. Ternan. Dickens had just put his next-to-youngest son Alfred on a ship bound for Australia, hoping the unpromising youth might succeed at sheep farming. (He would never see Alfred again.) He was nearing the end of Our Mutual Friend, which he had been writing in monthly numbers for almost two years. Although the French excursion was a holiday, he took the manuscript with him and wrote in the mornings—we know exactly which episodes he wrote in France, because in an epilogue to the novel he specifies them.

  He and Ellen remained in France for a week. They returned on June 9, a Friday, crossing the Channel to Folkestone and there boarding the tidal express for London, occupying a private compartment in a first-class carriage near the front of the train. At a few minutes after two thirty in the afternoon, the train pulled away from Folkestone.

  It never reached London. Near the village of Staplehurst in Kent, a work crew had t
aken up the rails while making repairs to a viaduct over the river Beult, at that time of year a small muddy stream. The foreman had mistaken the time of the train’s arrival, and repairs were incomplete as the train approached at full speed, about fifty miles an hour. At the last minute the engineer saw a warning flag and braked hard—but too late. The locomotive and leading cars hurtled across the gap in the rails while most of the trailing cars dropped off the viaduct and fell into the stream and its marshy banks ten feet below. The coach carrying Dickens and the Ternans was at a hinge point. Still attached to the car ahead, which had reached the far side of the bridge, Dickens’s coach ended up canted at a steep angle between bridge and streambed. “The carriage was the first class carriage which was dragged aslant, but did not go over, being caught upon the turn,” as Dickens described it. “The Engine broke from it before, and the rest of the train broke from it behind and went into the stream below.” Ten passengers died in the crash; forty others were injured.

  Dickens was unhurt. Climbing out a window, he hailed a guard, secured a key to the carriage, enlisted a laborer to assist him, and helped the rest of the carriage’s passengers, including Ellen and her mother, to safety. Then he returned to his compartment for his brandy flask, made his way down to the jumble of derailed cars in the streambed, and succored the injured, carrying water from the stream in his hat and administering swigs of brandy. By good fortune, he had brought along a second bottle of brandy, and he returned to the tilted carriage to retrieve it. “I have a—I don’t know what to call it—constitutional (I suppose) presence of mind, and was not in the least fluttered at the time,” he observed modestly. In its account of the disaster, the next day’s Times mentioned Dickens’s presence on the train, and later a London weekly, The Pictorial Illustrated, carried an artist’s rendering of the wreck on its front page, showing Dickens in the foreground offering water from his hat to a swooning or dying young woman, with the caption: “Charles Dickens relieving the sufferers at the fatal railway accident, near Staplehurst.”

  This addition to his celebrity was all well enough; Dickens himself made no secret of his presence and relief activities at Staplehurst. But too much publicity was dangerous, for he scarcely wished to advertise the identity of his companions on the train. Were he summoned to testify at the inquest, as he feared, awkward questions might arise. That he was not asked to appear may indicate his ability to use connections and influence to cloak his private life.

  But though avoiding public testimony, he mentioned his traveling companions in several private letters. One in particular provides details of the drama in his compartment as the train braked hard and went off the rails, and as his carriage dropped off the viaduct:

  Two ladies were my fellow passengers; an old one [Mrs. Ternan], and a young one [Ellen].… Suddenly we were off the rail and beating the ground as the car of a half emptied balloon might. The old lady cried out “My God!” and the young one screamed. I caught hold of them both (the old lady sat opposite, and the young one on my left), and said: “We can’t help ourselves, but we can be quiet and composed. Pray don’t cry out.” The old lady immediately answered, “Thank you. Rely upon me. Upon my soul, I will be quiet.” The young lady said in a frantic way, “Let us join hands and die friends.” We were then all tilted down together in a corner of the carriage, and stopped. I said to them thereupon: “You may be sure nothing worse can happen. Our danger must be over. Will you remain here without stirring, while I get out of the window?” They both answered quite collectedly, “Yes,” and I got out without the least notion what had happened.

  This narrative offers a rare account of Ellen and Dickens together, and allows us to reconstruct the fateful afternoon …

  The tidal train from Folkestone chugs toward London at high speed on a sunny June afternoon, Dickens and Ellen in a comfortable private compartment, side by side, suggesting their intimacy as a couple, while “the old lady” opposite, Ellen’s mother, accompanies them as co-conspirator.

  Suddenly, “the breaks were applied most vigorously, accompanied by that hoarse staccato note of the break whistle.… Within 20 seconds the train made a sudden jump, and it became instantly apparent that we were off the metals … the jolting and plunging of the carriage … was terrific.” During the fearsome jolting and plunging, five or ten seconds which seem an eternity, Dickens and the frightened Ternans exchange hurried remarks. Mrs. Ternan’s response to his plea for calm is commendable; she instantly conquers her alarm and replies sensibly. It is “the young lady,” Ellen, who screams in panic. Twenty-six at the time, she is scarcely a girl, but in her reaction she seems distinctly youthful compared to her mother and Dickens. Her dramatic suggestion—“Let us join hands and die friends”—might reassure us of her self-command, had she not spoken it, Dickens reports, “in a frantic way.” Only after their coach bumps to a stop does she manage to speak “collectedly.”

  It is difficult to recall a sequence of remarks spoken hurriedly in a moment of crisis and fear, and Dickens’s account may be less accurate than his matter-of-fact narrative implies (he related the exchange somewhat differently in successive tellings). What we get, rather, are his impressions of the accident as it was occurring, and of his companions’ reactions. Predictably, he recalls himself as calm and practical throughout. Ellen on the other hand was terrified. Perhaps her girlish fright appealed to his protective masculine feelings; perhaps there is a suggestion that her nerves were fragile.

  After helping the two women clamber out of the tilted carriage and cross a plank to solid ground, Dickens led them to a shaded spot to recover their nerves while he circulated with water and brandy. Rescue trains soon arrived, bringing doctors and carrying the survivors to London. Taking one of these trains to Charing Cross, he escorted the Ternans home, then returned to his office on Wellington Street. Before leaving the site of the wreck he had remembered to retrieve the manuscript of his novel from the canting carriage in which he had been riding. Left behind in his compartment, however, were several other items.

  This oversight allows a further glimpse of Dickens and Ellen. The day after the accident, he returned to Gad’s Hill to reassure his worried family that he was intact. In the meantime, Ellen discovered that she was missing jewelry that she had been wearing or carrying on the train, and wrote to Dickens at Gad’s Hill to tell him. Not until the Monday after the Friday accident did he report the loss to the station master at Charing Cross:

  A lady who was in the carriage with me in the terrible accident on Friday, lost, in the struggle of being got out of the carriage, a gold watch-chain with a smaller gold watch chain attached, a bundle of charms, a gold watch-key, and a gold seal engraved “Ellen”.

  Most, probably all, of these “trinkets” (as he deprecated them) were gifts from Dickens himself. He liked to see Ellen handsomely dressed and richly adorned; her position might be irregular, but she would face the world as a lady of status and means. Jewelry, moreover, was “portable property” (as Great Expectations’ Wemmick would have said); all those gold trinkets would be assets after his death, to supplement the house he had given her, the trust fund established in her name, and perhaps other provisions as well.

  Ellen and her mother had naturally been shaken by the crash, but initially thought themselves unhurt. A week after the accident, however, both were reported convalescing from unspecified injuries. “I took to London in the carriage that conveyed me up from the scene of the disaster, two wounded passengers,” Dickens reported, “who have been lying ill ever since, and who had no notion at the time that there was much the matter with them.” Ellen’s injuries lingered. Dickens remained at Gad’s Hill for several days, resting but also writing and dictating dozens of notes to well-wishers. He was anxious about Ellen, however, and a week after the accident returned to London for the day, for visits to Miss Coutts and his doctor, as well as for “other errands of business”—certainly including a visit to the Ternans. He went up to London again a few days later, “on my cause of anxiety�
� (as he told Wills with typical circumspection when writing of Ellen), and stayed for several days, probably spending much of his time with Ellen, still convalescent.

  She was still on his mind when he returned to Gad’s Hill, and presently he dispatched a note to his servant John Thompson, stationed at the All the Year Round offices in London. During the twenty years Thompson was employed as Dickens’s servant, he must have received hundreds of notes from his master, most of which he discarded. Fortunately he saved this directive. “Dr. John,” the note begins (“Dr.” abbreviating not “Doctor” but “Dear”—Thompson did not rate the full spelling); it comprises two business-like sentences:

  Take Miss Ellen tomorrow morning, a little basket of fresh fruit, a jar of clotted cream from Tuckers, and a chicken, a pair of pigeons, or some nice little bird. Also on Wednesday morning, and on Friday morning, take her some other things of the same sort—making a little variety each day.