Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  Of the thousands of Dickens’s letters that survive, none expresses more affectionate solicitude than this brisk note dispatching his servant with a hamper of choice provisions to Ellen, a shower of delicacies serving as a metaphor for his affection, poured out generously, abundantly, richly—a cornucopia of love. (Meanwhile, he grudged every penny of his cast-off wife’s allowance, even grousing about it in his will.)

  More mundanely, in what it does not say, the note to Thompson reveals Thompson’s familiarity with “Miss Ellen”—for he needed no prefatory explanations, no identification of “Miss Ellen,” no instructions on where to find her. Having performed such tasks previously, he plainly knew all about her. The routine tone of Dickens’s instructions suggests how often Thompson had run similar errands connected with her. He was, in his menial way, a trusted confidant. When the following year, after long and apparently faithful service, he was caught pilfering from the office cash box, Dickens was startled, and perhaps alarmed as well, to discover that someone so closely involved with his secret life had proved so dangerously unreliable.

  Whatever her injuries, Ellen recuperated slowly. A month later, Dickens gave his sub-editor Wills a sanguine medical bulletin on Ellen, “Patient immensely better,” but a month later yet—almost ten weeks after the accident—she was still convalescent: “Patient much better, I am thankful to say, but not yet well,” and the following week, “Patient much the same.” Even after her recovery, “the Patient” remained Dickens’s code for Ellen in his correspondence with Wills.

  But while she may have suffered chronic or recurrent health problems consequent on the Staplehurst wreck, the evidence is slight and she was certainly no invalid. Eight months later we glimpse her primping for and enjoying with feminine zest a “very pleasant” ball with her sister Fanny: “Would you like to know our dresses?” Fanny recalled the occasion. “Well we were dressed quite alike in pale green silk covered with tarlatane of the same colour and trimmed with white blonde and dew-drops. We had scarlet geraniums & white heath in our hair.” Ellen took riding lessons and five years after Staplehurst was reported an excellent equestrian. She survived Dickens by many years, passing for a woman ten years younger than her actual age, marrying and bearing two healthy children, living actively.

  Dickens, however, though “scarcely shaken” at the time, suffered the effects of Staplehurst until his death. A few days after the wreck, he dictated to Georgina a succession of notes to well-wishers, explaining in each that “This is not at all in my own hand, because I am too much shaken to write many notes”; and he told Wills that “I write two or three notes, and turn faint and sick.” In London a week after the accident, he was rattled by the traffic: “The noise of the wheels of my Hansom, and of the London streets, was as much as I could bear. So I made all speed back here [Gad’s Hill] again—by a slow train, though, for I felt that I was not up to the Express.” For the rest of his life, express trains worried him. “My escape in the great Staplehurst accident of 3 years ago, is not to be obliterated from my nervous system,” he lamented in 1868. “To this hour I have sudden vague rushes of terror, even when riding in a Hansom Cab.… My Reading-Secretary and companion knows so well when one of these odd momentary seizures comes upon me in a Railway Carriage, that he instantly produces a dram of brandy, which rallies the blood to the heart and generally prevails.” As his reading tours took him on many long train rides, his brandy stock needed frequent replenishment. On one occasion, traveling from London to Edinburgh, he estimated “that the Railway travelling over such a distance involves something more than 30,000 shocks to the nerves” (apparently calculating a shock every second).

  The Staplehurst wreck provides a dramatic snapshot of Dickens and Ellen together. We catch another glimpse from a less violent source: his unusual friendship with a wealthy, trouble-prone heiress.

  In an age when marriages were seldom dissolved—Dickens, for example, never attempted to terminate his own marriage (simple conjugal discontent was no grounds for divorce)—his friend Frances Dickinson compiled a notable record of bad marriages. Her first, to a captain in the Light Dragoons, produced four daughters but eventually led to a scandalous suit in the Court of Arches, one of the Doctors’ Commons courts in which Dickens had begun as a shorthand reporter. Frances Dickinson, at that point Mrs. Geils, sued for a judicial separation on grounds of cruelty, adultery (her husband had invited his mistress to their wedding, to escort his new bride to his home in Scotland), and “unnatural practices”; the evidence on all three counts, replete with “offensive and disgusting details,” was explicit. (“I can hear no more,” the judge declared. “I am disgusted. It is quite disgraceful to the Court, the public, and the profession.”) The separation was granted; later Mrs. Geils, née Dickinson, obtained a full divorce from a Scottish court, dropped her married name, and became Mrs. Dickinson.

  The details of her second marriage are obscure. She confided them to Dickens, who later alluded to it as “that adventure with the Doctor.” The adventure may have occurred abroad—Mrs. Dickinson spent much time in Italy, and no record of the marriage has been located in England. It was an immediate failure—perhaps not a valid marriage at all: “the marriage (as no doubt he [the husband] very well knew at the time) is no marriage and is utterly void,” Dickens later reported, some legal or physical impediment apparently rendering the union null—but Dickens’s only source for this assertion would presumably have been Mrs. Dickinson herself. Like her first husband, the mysterious Doctor was likely attracted by her five thousand pounds per year.

  Omitting the formality of a legal annulment, the lady then proceeded to marry yet again, this time taking as her husband a handsome, progressive clergyman, Gilbert Elliot, Dean of Bristol. Dickens had by now known Mrs. Dickinson for several years, and happened to know Elliot as well, making it a marriage of “old friends of mine.” To have recovered from the scandal of her divorce (from her first husband; the adventure with the Doctor was concealed) sufficiently to marry a distinguished clergyman was a triumph; but even before the wedding, there were troubling omens. Mrs. Dickinson confided to Dickens that the dean lacked romantic ardor. Dickens diagnosed waning libido: “Are you quite sure that what you are disposed to resent as indifference, is not the stealing apathy of advanced age?” Elliot was twenty years older than Mrs. Dickinson, and recognizing the analogous situation with himself and Ellen, Dickens hastened to assert his own unimpaired virility: “Under other circumstances—say in your humble servant, for example—it would be affronting or idiotic; but not in these, I think?” He discreetly acknowledged the importance of sexual affinity, telling Mrs. Dickinson that “I might be very moral in my admonitions and didactic remarks—but you are a woman—and I am a man—and we should both know better, even if I were.” He was a man of the world, in other words, and Mrs. Dickinson no vestal; there was no point in feigning naïveté. Given the dean’s amorous lethargy, Dickens advised Mrs. Dickinson to drop him. Time confirmed the wisdom of his counsel. The unconventional heiress and the progressive clergyman married—and soon parted, upon which Dickens was drawn into their wrangling as a reluctant intermediary. It would have taken great self-restraint not to remind Mrs. Dickinson of his earlier advice.

  He had first met her only shortly before he met Ellen, during the 1857 production of The Frozen Deep for the Jerrold Fund. A friend of Wilkie Collins, Mrs. Dickinson had been recruited to take the role of Nurse Esther in the London performances, Collins recommending her because she could affect Nurse Esther’s Scots accent; though Mrs. Dickinson was English, her first husband, Geils the dragoon, had been Scots and they had lived together on his estate in Scotland. On the Frozen Deep playbill, she is “Miss Francis.” When Dickens took the play to Manchester and hired the Ternans, her role of Nurse Esther was taken by Mrs. Ternan.

  His friendship with Mrs. Dickinson persisted, though when or how often they saw each other is unclear. She submitted several articles to All the Year Round, but the friendship was much more than a busin
ess relationship. She visited Gad’s Hill and on one occasion, at least, Georgina stayed with her at her estate in Berkshire. Dickens always began his letters to her with “My Dear F”—a familiarity he accorded few. Other women, even old friends, he invariably saluted as “Mrs” rather than by their Christian name, let alone a diminutive. Among surviving letters, only those to Georgina—“My Dearest Georgy”—commence more affectionately. (Frances Dickinson’s complicated marital history perhaps made it simpler, as well, to address her as just “F.”)

  Their friendship, so far as it can be reconstructed, was ambiguous. “My Dear F” often annoyed him. At one point, for example, when she submitted an article for All the Year Round, he responded with vexation:

  My Dear F.

  … I can not read it. Pretty well accustomed to messes in the way of manuscript, I never saw such a mess. I very much doubt whether my printers can print from it, or will do so without protest.… I have been at work on a new work of my own, all day, and am half blinded and maddened by your unintelligibility.

  Even this petulant rebuke carries a note of familiarity, however, for he would not have berated a more casual friend so bluntly; he could apparently rely on Mrs. Dickinson taking his abuse in good spirit. The note closes “Ever affectionately/CD” (less intimate friends were dismissed more coolly, with some variant of “Faithfully yours”). Early in their acquaintance he characterized Mrs. Dickinson as “prononcée,” meaning forceful, strong-willed, and (in her case) exasperating. One friend recalled her as having “black hair done in a mass of thick plaits on the top of her head: a coiffure which, in very un-Victorian fashion, she loudly announced was a wig. ‘I wear a wig,’ she would say, puffing at her cigarette, ‘my daughters wear wigs. Everyone should. It saves a deal of time and trouble.’” Dickens once noted that “she takes a resentful bounce now and then, which is more naturally impulsive than wise.” In later life she became that rara avis, the intrepid Victorian female traveler, and wrote books about her wanderings.

  This unconventional and unlikely friend evoked Dickens’s lengthiest surviving letter about Ellen Ternan, a document both revealing and enigmatic.

  Early in 1866, Mrs. Dickinson (now Mrs. Elliot, the dean’s wife) invited Dickens to visit her in Bristol during a reading tour he was projecting for the spring. Evidently he had mentioned this tour in an earlier letter; now he informed her that his itinerary was uncertain, and “I have not yet decided upon going to Bristol at all.” His earlier letter does not survive, however, and his response to her invitation is known only from an extract printed in a bookseller’s catalog.

  This is unfortunate, for the extract concludes with a tantalizing allusion to Ellen. In her letter, Mrs. Dickinson had evidently made a remark or inquiry about his “romance.”

  “As to my romance,” Dickens now replied, “it belongs to my life and probably will only die out of the same with the proprietor.”

  What can we infer from this comment? Plainly, Mrs. Dickinson knew of Ellen, or at least of a mistress. She is unlikely to have learned of her from Dickens himself, but she was a friend of Wilkie Collins, who knew about Ellen; and no doubt he or some other knowing acquaintance had enlightened her. However Mrs. Dickinson had learned of Dickens’s romance, her prononcée personality now asserted itself. Most women would have been curious; few would have ventured to quiz the famous man himself on so private a matter. In Mrs. Dickinson’s boldly presuming to do so, we detect the easy assurance of her friendship with Dickens—but also her audacity and broad-mindedness. With her own interesting history, she could scarcely begrudge Dickens his own irregular arrangement.

  But his assurance that his romance was thriving suggests that while Mrs. Dickinson knew something about it, she did not know much. Was he still devoted to his young lady? she had apparently inquired—but no one in his inner circle of confidants would have had to ask. His response is candid but guarded. Acknowledging the romance, declaring it an integral and permanent part of his life, he nonetheless does not name Ellen or offer any details. Of course, the full letter might have disclosed more, omitted in the bookseller’s extract. But Dickens worried about private letters falling into indiscreet or unscrupulous hands, and was cautious when he dipped his quill in ink.

  The inquisitive Mrs. Dickinson persisted. His 1866 reading tour did not take him to Bristol, as it turned out, but he probably saw her elsewhere that year; in any event, they corresponded. The following year she again proposed to intercept him when another reading tour took him to Bath, a dozen miles from Bristol. Again, he discouraged her: “Don’t come to Bath,” he advised; he did not like the city, and accompanied by his readings entourage, he and she would have no privacy. Instead, “I think there is hardly a doubt of my coming to Clifton in the course of the trip. Then we shall do much better—you and I, I mean.” His anxious concern for privacy is curious. Did he anticipate a tête-à-tête on sensitive topics? Her marriage to the Dean of Bristol had already soured. “I shall be very glad to have a line from you,” he wrote, “… to tell me how, where, when, and why, the Times are hard, Bristolward.” Between her own problems and her curiosity about Dickens’s romance, conversation with Mrs. Dickinson was likely to gallop into personal matters.

  When his Clifton reading was scheduled, he duly apprised her, inviting her and the Dean to “a half hour’s supper with us” after his reading there. The invitation seems calculated to forestall any exchange of confidences: even if she contrived to leave the Dean at home, the supper party still included his readings manager George Dolby, while the brief time allotted would suffice to keep the conversation superficial. Further, he reminded Mrs. Dickinson that “of course I am away again the first thing next morning.” He was evidently chary of the lady’s penchant for personal topics. The supper in Clifton probably did not happen—to his relief, one suspects.

  But he could not evade the persistent Mrs. Dickinson forever. She visited Gad’s Hill a few weeks after his reading in Clifton, and in return invited him to her Berkshire estate, Farley Hill Court. Pleading deadlines, he declined, adding that among other things he was contemplating a trip to America: “Judge how much I have to do and think of just now.”

  Mrs. Dickinson responded immediately, complaining sharply of her husband, the Dean of Bristol, for his partiality to a daughter by his first marriage. Dickens in reply professed himself “really troubled” to hear of her grievance, and counseled patience.

  But she also mentioned that she had recently talked to someone about Dickens and Ellen. In recounting what she had heard, the forthright Mrs. Dickinson touched a wound, and Dickens responded with agitation. Of all surviving documents referring to Ellen, his letter replying to Mrs. Dickinson is the most intriguing, both in what it reveals and in what it hints.

  Mrs. Dickinson’s remarks involved Ellen’s eldest sister Frances, “Fanny” to her family. The year before, Fanny had married Thomas Trollope, the novelist Anthony’s older brother. A prolific writer, Thomas Trollope lived comfortably in a villa outside Florence, grinding out dull novels (twenty, more or less), many volumes on Italian history, and reams of journalism; he sometimes contributed articles about Italy to Dickens’s All the Year Round. Dickens had given Fanny Ternan a letter of introduction to Trollope when he had sent her to Italy for voice lessons nine years earlier. Later, when Trollope was widowed, Fanny was persuaded to return to Florence to act as governess for his young daughter, and presently the governess married the master, in Jane Eyre fashion—though the grizzled, deaf, bookish, and prolix Trollope little resembled the virile Rochester. Trollope was twenty-five years older than Fanny—a gap similar to that between Dickens and Ellen. Ellen and Mrs. Ternan attended the Trollopes’ wedding in Paris in October 1866. Mrs. Dickinson would have known all about the Trollopes’ marriage: she had good connections among the English community in Florence (a daughter by her first marriage was married to an Italian marquis) and knew both Anthony and Thomas Trollope.

  In her letter to Dickens, Mrs. Dickinson referred to the Ternan
s as Dickens’s “magic circle,” including in this circle Ellen’s sister Fanny, now Mrs. Thomas Trollope.

  In response, Dickens bluntly assured Mrs. Dickinson that she was much mistaken if she thought his affection for Ellen extended to the rest of the Ternans. “The ‘magic circle,’” he assured her, “consists of but one member.” Fanny had returned to England in May 1867 to make arrangements for serializing her second novel in Dickens’s All the Year Round, and Mrs. Dickinson may well have derived her news about Dickens and Ellen from Fanny herself. In any event, Dickens took aim in particular at Fanny. “I don’t in the least care for Mrs. T. T.,” he declared, referring to the new Mrs. Thomas Trollope, and added a mysterious qualifier—“except that her share in the story is (as far as I am concerned) a remembrance impossible to swallow.”

  In what “story” had Ellen’s sister Fanny played so malignant a part?

  His letter gives no specifics. Later it mentions “the history”—apparently referring to the same events. Mrs. Dickinson had earlier inquired about his “romance”; now her restless curiosity had been rewarded by the discovery of a fascinating saga concerning Dickens and Ellen, in which Ellen’s sister Fanny had behaved (in Dickens’s eyes) unforgivably. Mrs. Dickinson must have had her facts straight, for he neither corrected nor supplemented her account. He would have been reluctant to divulge further details, in any event; for while her letter would go straight into the fire, his response might fall into doubtful hands. Though well-disposed, Mrs. Dickinson was perhaps unreliable.

  We may never know what story she had heard. His use of terms like “history” and “remembrance” place it firmly in the past. But though Fanny’s offense lay behind, Dickens’s hostility lingered. Only for love of Ellen did he tolerate the objectionable Fanny: “For the magic sake, I scrupulously try to do her justice, and not to see her—out of my path—with a jaundiced vision.” He did not hesitate to break friendships when he felt injured, as he had during the separation crisis of 1858. One of the chief villains of that imbroglio had been, to his mind, Helen Hogarth, his wife’s younger sister. Now once again the villain was a sister; but this time he had to swallow his aversion. His tacit truce with Fanny was a tribute to Ellen’s sway.