Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  Not only was he obliged to tolerate Fanny as a virtual sister-in-law; he was publishing her novels in All the Year Round. Abandoning her singing career, she had begun writing. The previous year, he had serialized her short novel Aunt Margaret’s Trouble (“Affectionately dedicated to E. L. T.”—her sister Ellen) in All the Year Round; now, even as he denounced Fanny for her unforgivable “share in the story,” he was publishing another of her novels, Mabel’s Progress. All the Year Round required a steady supply of serial fiction and he couldn’t always contrive to find first-rate material; nonetheless, one skeptical observer suspected other motives for his publishing such indifferent novels as Fanny Trollope’s. Isa Blagden, a prominent hostess and gossip in the English community in Florence, knew the Trollopes and knew about Mrs. Trollope’s sister Ellen. She once teasingly asked her close friend Robert Browning if he wondered why Dickens serialized Fanny Trollope’s novels (which appeared in All the Year Round anonymously).

  Browning had lived in Italy for many years and knew Thomas Trollope well, but now back in England he had fallen out of touch with Florentine gossip. To Isa Blagden’s malicious question, “How it came to pass that D. paid such sums for such novels as Mrs T’s,” he was clueless: he “had no notion—but supposed there must be some reason beside the worth of the composition, if it were as poor as you assured me.” When Isa gleefully enlightened him on Dickens’s connection with Fanny Trollope, Browning admitted that the publication of her novels in All the Year Round seemed suspicious.

  After enlightening Mrs. Dickinson on his feelings about Fanny, Dickens turned with a polite shudder to an idea that the ever-forward lady had floated in her letter. Having learned of Ellen’s story, Mrs. Dickinson had apparently proposed that she be introduced to Ellen as a friendly sympathizer.

  Dickens flatly rejected this proposal. Such an introduction was “impossible.” Mrs. Dickinson had conveyed her disclosure with kindness—after all, who was she to be censorious?—and he acknowledged her good intentions. “I feel your affectionate letter truly and deeply,” he assured her, “but it would be inexpressibly painful to [Ellen] to think that you knew the history. She has no suspicion that your assertion of your friend against the opposite powers, ever brought you to the knowledge of it.” Neither the friend nor the opposite powers are identified. The friend might have been Dickens himself; the opposite powers perhaps included Fanny Trollope. In any case, his friend-andfoe language suggests that he regarded the mysterious disagreement as a feud between open belligerents.

  Only one secret seems adequate to explain his horror (and Ellen’s, prospectively) to Mrs. Dickinson’s proposal—namely, Ellen’s pregnancy five years earlier. Ellen’s discovery that Mrs. Dickinson had learned of her story, Dickens asserted, “would distress her for the rest of her life.” It is hard to imagine what other disclosure might cause her such intense, lifelong pain.

  The disturbing content of Mrs. Dickinson’s letter elicited Dickens’s warmest surviving homage to Ellen:

  She would not believe [he told Mrs. Dickinson] that you could see her with my eyes, or know her with my mind. Such a presentation is impossible.… I thank you none the less, but it is quite out of the question. If she could bear that, she could not have the pride and self-reliance which (mingled with the gentlest nature) has borne her, alone, through so much.

  This tribute reveals much. One notable feature is the intensity of Ellen’s shame at her secret history; any exposure outside her closest circle would mortify her, or so Dickens claims. A high regard for feminine purity, or at least the reputation of purity, was characteristic of her culture, but his emphasis on Ellen’s vulnerability may hint at a particularly keen sensibility, a “chastity of honour which felt a stain like a wound.”

  Curious too is the remark that Ellen had suffered “alone.” In literal terms, she was probably seldom alone: her mother was often with her; Dickens himself was a frequent and solicitous presence; she had two loyal sisters (though often at a distance). In his assertion that she bore her trials alone, does there lurk an implied disparagement of her family?—some of whom, Fanny in particular, may have urged her to break her connection with him. But by “alone” he may simply have meant unmarried. Though Ellen might be all in all to him, she had neither the comfort, security, nor distinction of being his wife, nor could he publicly acknowledge their connection; moreover, they were apart more than they were together. There was loneliness in being the clandestine mistress of a famous and busy man with a large family.

  Such conclusions are speculative; but Dickens’s affectionate admiration for Ellen—her gentleness, pride and self-reliance—is certain and striking. Ten years earlier, he had been infatuated by the freshness of the pretty eighteen-year-old girl with the little lilac gloves and little bonnet and golden hair. At twenty-eight, she was still attractive, but mature and womanly, and he had learned to appreciate more than just her girlish charms. He no longer extols her maidenly innocence, as he had in 1858, but rather her strength of character. His praise of her pride and self-reliance recalls his characterization of the heroine of Bleak House, Lady Dedlock—a woman also concealing the secret of an illegitimate child (“I must travel my dark road alone,” she had said); while his praise of Ellen’s gentle nature recalls heroines like David Copperfield’s Agnes Wickfield.

  Despite “the opposite powers,” Ellen had remained faithful for ten years; and though Dickens could not repay her with marriage, he gave her a wealth of fondness and attention. What woman would not be gratified by such devotion and homage? Two years before meeting Ellen, he had confessed a longstanding “habit of suppression” that made him “chary of shewing my affections.” She had evidently dissolved that inhibition.

  Dickens wrote his letter to Frances Dickinson about Ellen and her “history” on July 4, 1867.

  Though Ellen was much on his mind, he did not see her that day. He spent the entire day, a Thursday, at Gad’s Hill. Explaining his absence from a friend’s funeral, he cited “an American appointment of unusual importance” at Gad’s Hill, but there appear to have been no visitors of note. The mysterious appointment was probably a polite fiction: he dreaded funerals, and the funeral even of an admired friend would not draw him away from his holiday. The day before, the local cricket club had played a match on the grounds of Gad’s Hill, Dickens relishing his role as village squire; the day after, he plunged into work on a series of children’s stories commissioned by an American magazine (these stories may have been the important “American appointment”). But July 4 itself appears to have been spent quietly with Georgina. He wrote letters, perhaps took a walk with his large dogs, perhaps sat on the front lawn reading, with tiers of geraniums, his favorite flower, blooming scarlet around the house’s bay windows. Though urban in orientation, he had grown to enjoy the summer amenity of rural Kent. “This country is really beautiful when the corn and hops are growing,” he remarked a few days later. In a little pocket diary, he summarized the entire day with a simple note: “at G.H.”

  He probably kept a little diary each year for many years, but only one survives. He or his executors burned the others; but in the very last days of 1867, while in New York on a reading tour, he lost his diary for that year. “By-the-bye,” he wrote Georgina a few days later, “on the last Sunday in the old year, I lost my old year’s pocket-book, ‘which,’ as Mr. Pepys would add, ‘do trouble me mightily.’” In fact it was probably stolen, for whoever gained possession of it took care to preserve it, no doubt knowing it was Dickens’s (though his name appears nowhere in it). Eventually the diary made its way into the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. Well might Dickens have felt troubled at its loss, for despite its laconic, abbreviated one-line entries for each day, the diary betrays a great deal about Ellen Ternan’s central role in his life.

  The entries are written in a small, bound 1867 date calendar, about two by four inches, with two blank pages for each month; opposite each blank page is a printed page giving Church feasts, astronomical data,
and tides. On one blank page of each month Dickens made sporadic memoranda of upcoming engagements such as dinners and public readings; on the other blank page he jotted down an abbreviated record of his activities and locations, in a single cramped line for each day. He recorded where he began the day and where he ended it; he often noted train stations involved in his traveling; sometimes he noted without comment the names of visitors at Gad’s Hill, or people whom he saw or dined with in London.

  The entries are mostly mundane. He invariably recorded steam baths (“vapour baths”), an indulgence of which he had grown fond, and dinners at the Atheneum Club (some twenty-one during the ten months he was in England in 1867). The entries are also dryly factual. When a longtime and beloved friend, the painter Clarkson Stanfield, died, Dickens recorded: “Stanfield died yest:”; a few days later, after attending Stanfield’s funeral and burial at Kensal Green, where Mary Hogarth also lay, he noted simply: “Stanfield’s funeral.” For the most fanciful of novelists, the pocket diary is almost perversely prosaic; for the most exuberant and expressive of writers, it is tightly reticent. If one thinks of a diary as a record of impressions and reflections, the 1867 date book is no diary at all. Through almost an entire year—the entries end on December 28—there is no mention of anything that anyone (including Dickens himself) said; only general reference to what anyone else did (“Forsters come … Forsters go”); and no more than scattered and oblique hints of what Dickens thought or felt about anything.

  Nonetheless, the little pocket diary reveals his daily life with Ellen more fully than any other source. In the thousands of his letters that survive, his love for her flashes out at rare intervals; but the spare, clipped chronicle of those 362 days in 1867 shows her woven into the fabric of his life, day by day.

  Ellen’s name never occurs in the diary; she is always “N,” for Nelly. As “N,” she appears in the diary twenty-eight times. But the references to “N” tell only part of the story, for Dickens’s time with her is usually coded not “N,” but rather “Sl” or “P.” To decipher these letters, the story must go back a year or two.

  The Staplehurst crash in June 1865 had led to a major alteration in his routine with Ellen. For several years, he had found time and privacy with her in repeated trips to France. Their journeys across the Channel had begun with her pregnancy in 1862, but continued beyond that crisis. Plainly they both enjoyed their French escapes, but there were drawbacks. The visits required a prolonged block of free time, and took him away from home and business obligations for days at a time, interludes that could be undertaken only with careful planning, and infrequently—at best, every month or two. The journeying itself, with a Channel crossing each way, was burdensome; fares and lodgings were a drain on his purse. Staplehurst added another drawback to their French excursions: Dickens’s new express-train phobia. Every journey to France and back took him across the fatal bridge at Staplehurst, twice, on the speeding tidal express. He may have felt a surge of panic each time; Ellen, also injured in the crash, may have felt the same. They went to France together at least once more, perhaps twice, in the months after Staplehurst, but at some point he or they together must have decided that the drawbacks of the French holidays had become too great.

  Instead, they decided, they would find a retreat in England, outside London but within commuting range. Ellen would live there; Dickens would spend several days each week with her. The arrangement would regularize and domesticize their lives together; for the first time they would share a house.

  There were probably other factors involved in this decision, but they remain obscure. With Ellen retired from the stage, there was little reason for her to remain near West End theaters. Perhaps it was thought better for her health that she move from the crowded, noisy, and none-too-savory metropolis to a relatively rural town where she could ride and walk on nearby country lanes and paths.

  Whatever the reasons, in early 1866 she took up residence in Slough, Buckinghamshire.

  Slough lies just north of the Thames, twenty miles upriver from London; nearby is Eton College and across the river are Windsor and, looming above, Windsor Castle, where Queen Victoria was often in residence. Slough was still a coherent town, but beginning to sprawl; it had acquired a train station on the Great Western line in 1840 (in 1842, Queen Victoria’s first train ride had begun at Slough station), and by 1866 it was on its way to becoming an unlovely London suburb. Seventy years later, John Betjeman suggested violent demolition:

  Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough

  It isn’t fit for humans now,

  There isn’t grass to graze a cow

  Swarm over, Death!

  (“Slough”)

  In 1866, however, there was still ample grazing for cows in the fields around Slough. Its attraction for Dickens probably lay in its combination of remoteness and convenient rail service. Ellen would be well outside London, but accessible.

  So it happened that early in 1866, a certain Mr. Tringham, first name variable, began to pay the rates, or taxes, on a cottage on High Street in Slough. The rate collector went door to door, recording the householder’s name. Whoever happened to answer the door when he knocked provided the name for his ratebook. When the collector called at the modest High Street cottage in April 1866, he was informed that the head of the household was “John Tringham.” When he or another collector called again a month later (to collect another tax), “John Tringham” had become “Charles.” But this was not a case of two interchangeable brothers, as with the Cheeryble brothers in Nicholas Nickleby. Charles Tringham, alternately John, was in fact a single person: Charles Dickens (middle name, John).

  At about the same time, the mysterious Mr. Tringham began paying the rates on a second house in Slough, on nearby Church Street. Did Dickens, for the sake of comfort or propriety, rent one small house in Slough for himself, and another for Ellen and perhaps her mother? Or was the second cottage for Mrs. Ternan? On two occasions, the collector wrote down “Turnan” rather than Tringham as the occupant of the house on Church Street. When the collector appeared at the two Tringham residences, there was often a suspicious confusion about names.

  The rate books for Slough thus give limited and perplexing information. John or Charles Tringham—or sometimes a certain Turnan—paid the rates on two houses in Slough from early 1866 until the middle of 1867. The 1867 pocket diary, however, shows exactly when the slippery Tringham visited Slough that year.

  The year began with Dickens at Gad’s Hill, entertaining a party of family and friends as he did every year during the Christmas season. This traditional observance lasted until Twelfth Night. He slipped away to London for one day, January 3, working at his All the Year Round office and spending the night in his apartment there, but returned next day to Gad’s Hill to rejoin the house party, carrying along yet another guest with him. But the day after Twelfth Night, he noted in the pocket diary, perhaps with relief, “All go” from Gad’s Hill: he was liberated from family and hosting obligations. He himself departed with the last of the guests, or close on their heels, and sped to Ellen. The diary notes: “To Sl: at 2.” After two weeks’ enforced Christmas absence, he could scarcely wait to rejoin her.

  He spent that night, the next day, and the next night in Slough. Returning to London the following morning, he worked at his office, dined with John Forster, and slept at the office. The next morning he returned to Slough, and again spent the night.

  In the middle of January, Dickens began a series of fifty public readings in London, the provinces, Scotland, and Ireland. Except for Holy Week, he was out of town every week from mid-January to May. On Ellen’s twenty-eighth birthday, March 3, he was in York, but noted in his pocket diary “H.B.D.”—that is, “Her Birthday.” He returned to London on the eighth and promptly visited Slough. Several days later, he wrote a check to Garrard the London jeweler for seventeen pounds, eleven shillings—in all likelihood a birthday gift, perhaps more than usually expensive to compensate for its lateness.


  He somehow found Slough more easily accessible than Gad’s Hill. In April, using Gad’s Hill stationery, he wrote that “although I date from my Household Gods, I have not set eyes upon them since last Christmas Time, and am little likely to see them until my Fifty readings are finished. In the meanwhile I am here, there, everywhere, and (principally) nowhere.” The last line was a cryptic joke: “nowhere,” where he spent so much of his time, was in fact Slough, with his mistress. The jest had added savor in this case because he was writing to the wife of an Anglican bishop. During the early months of 1867, when he could never manage to find his way to Gad’s Hill, he made his way to Ellen in Slough almost every week, between reading engagements. She has been compared to Tennyson’s Mariana of the Moated Grange, pining in seclusion for her absent lover: “‘My heart is aweary, aweary,/He cometh not,’ she said.” But the neglected woman was in fact Georgina, at Gad’s Hill.

  One of the idiosyncracies of the 1867 pocket diary is its regular logging of what would seem an incidental detail, train stations. Logging his many trips to Gad’s Hill, to London, and to Slough, he frequently recorded the departure or arrival station, sometimes both. Since he always abbreviated station names, various letters in the diary—P, W, V, Gd, D—are at first sight mystifying. But almost a century later they were astutely deciphered by a distinguished English actor, Felix Aylmer (later Sir Felix), who came across the pocket diary at the New York Public Library. With Aylmer’s key, Dickens’s shuttling about becomes easy to track, and the diary’s precise record of his railway travels reveals much about the peripatetic life that his eagerness to see Ellen compelled him to lead.