Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  By this time, he had decided to relocate Ellen from Slough. The first hint of a move appears soon after he returned from Ireland in March, with a cryptic note “Houses.” Two days later: “Meet for houses at 12½. To Peckm”—that is, Peckham, a few miles south of London.

  Why the decision to leave Slough, and why Peckham? Ellen’s health may have been one reason; perhaps she had suffered other, unrecorded illnesses, causing him to regard Slough as too miasmal (as its name suggests), much as nine years earlier he had decided that the Ternans’ house in Islington was unwholesome. Or perhaps Slough had simply proved too distant from London. Going back and forth left Dickens, accustomed to dictate his own schedule, dependent on railway timetables; and while he was always punctual, trains were not. Traveling between Wellington Street and Slough probably took close to two hours each way: a walk or hansom cab to the station; a wait on the platform; the train journey itself; another walk or cab. During the winter and early spring of 1867 he was continually on trains carrying him all over Britain and Ireland for his public readings; the last thing he wanted to do, back in London, was board yet another train. He was too well known, moreover, to travel on trains without being recognized. Perhaps his frequent journeys to such an out-of-the-way spot as Slough had prompted unwelcome notice and curiosity—even impertinent speculation. The pocket diary reveals that Ellen herself often went into London. Perhaps after living in London she found Slough dull and remote.

  Behind such considerations perhaps lay another, more compelling motive: the notion that Ellen deserved something better than a cottage in Slough—deserved, rather, a home with spaciousness, comfort, elegance, and privacy. His daughter and sister-in-law were expensively maintained in a commodious country estate, while his mistress was consigned to a cramped house on a busy street. He could afford to do better for her. The year before he had augmented his income with a tour of readings earning fifteen hundred pounds; now in the early months of 1867 he was embarked on a tour that would earn even more, twenty-five hundred pounds. Ellen should live like a lady of means.

  Peckham, like Slough, was a once-rural village being absorbed by the metropolis. Nearby is Walworth, home of the prototypical suburban commuter, Wemmick of Great Expectations. Beyond Peckham, however, lay relatively open land: market gardens, a commons called Peckham Rye, a large field called on one contemporary map “Ploughed Garlick Hill.” Less than five miles from Charing Cross, Peckham is much closer than Slough to West-End London; there was regular horse-drawn omnibus service into the city, and Peckham Rye rail station had opened two years earlier. Better yet, perhaps, Dickens could walk out the door of his office near Covent Garden and be in Peckham in half an hour by hansom cab. On at least one occasion he certainly did so, the pocket diary recording: “P (Hansom).” Unlike Slough in the Thames valley, moreover, Peckham lay on high ground, and perhaps Dickens had decided that like his own family at Gad’s Hill, Ellen should be established on a salubrious height.

  The move was made in June. On the twenty-first, Dickens traveled from Gad’s Hill to London, dined at the Atheneum Club, then went on to Peckham and spent the night there, alone, to be on hand for Ellen’s arrival next day. Apparently they were for the moment between houses, the lease on the Slough cottages terminating on the quarter day and the permanent house in Peckham not yet available; in the interim Ellen stayed in a house the pocket diary calls “temporary P.” Next day she arrived at this house, late: “Long wait for N at house.” Over the next four weeks he spent nine nights with her in the interim house, “P (tem).” Earlier in June he had begun writing a story titled “George Silverman’s Explanation,” narrated as the memoir of a morbidly diffident young man; he finished this gloomy tale while staying with Ellen in the temporary Peckham house. A few weeks later, they spent their first night together in the permanent house, 16 Linden Grove, in Nunhead, just beyond Peckham, on a hillside below Nunhead Cemetery.

  In 1936, Thomas Wright, the biographer who first uncovered Dickens’s liaison with Ellen Ternan, tracked down the house in Linden Grove. When his Life of Charles Dickens had been published the year before, his account of the affair had been attacked as unsubstantiated scandal—as indeed much of it was. Fortunately for Wright, the biography prompted correspondence from several people with alarmingly good memories. One of them was a Mrs. M. R. Mackie, who wrote:

  For many years (from about 1880) my mother … had in her employ a woman of integrity (Mrs Maria Goldring) who in her younger days had worked for Mr Charles Dickens when he lived sub rosa at Linden Grove, Nunhead, S.E. As a child more than fifty years ago I was familiar with the house (Windsor Lodge, if I mistake not) standing in a large garden and always interesting because a great author had lived and worked there.

  In later years I learned from my mother that the unofficial wife was reputed to be a connection of Mr Trollope,—presumably the writer. Our informant, Mrs Maria Goldring, always spoke most highly of her employer, and of his kindness to her in her domestic troubles. The name by which he was known was Tringham—or something very like it and the time the sixties, but am not able to give any exact date.

  This anecdote, a distant recollection of an old servant’s gossip, was the lever that pried open the secret of Dickens’s clandestine hideaways. All of Mrs. Mackie’s details—Linden Grove, Windsor Lodge, the connection with Trollope the novelist, the 1860s—were accurate. Most decisive was her recollection of the pseudonym “Tringham.” It enabled Wright to check her information against the Peckham rate books, where he discovered that beginning in 1867 a certain Tringham was on record as paying the rates on 16 Linden Grove. Twenty years after Wright’s biography appeared, the Tringham pseudonym allowed Felix Aylmer, in turn, to confirm Dickens’s hideaway in Slough.

  Less than five months after her letter to Wright, Mrs. Mackie died. Had she not recalled the name Tringham and sent it along to Wright, Dickens’s pseudonym would have gone to the grave with her, and his hideaways with Ellen would have remained undiscovered, probably forever. The Peckham rate books which allowed Wright to corroborate her story were pulped a few years later, during the Second World War. The last-minute, almost accidental exposure of the long-buried secret was a novel-like plot that Dickens himself would have appreciated. When the local rate collector came knocking at the door of 16 Linden Grove in July 1867, Ellen’s first month in Peckham, he was informed that the householder was one “Frances Turnham.” Turnham was a common misspelling of Ternan, and Frances “Turnham” seems likely to have been Ellen’s mother Frances, though perhaps Ellen herself gave her mother’s name in order to conceal her own. Six months later, the collector was told that the house was occupied by another “Turnham,” this time Thomas. Ellen’s father, long dead, had been Thomas Ternan; but there was evidently a misunderstanding, for in the rate book “Thomas Turnham” was subsequently changed to “Thomas Tringham.” Mr. Tringham himself—Dickens—was in America at this point, and Ellen was in Italy; perhaps a servant answered the rate collector’s knock, and had forgotten Tringham’s name. As at Slough, there was often confusion when the collector called at Windsor Lodge. Six months later yet, in July 1868, “Thomas Tringham” was again the ratepayer; by now Dickens had returned to England, but there was still difficulty with the pseudonym. Not until the following January did Charles Tringham, late of Slough, emerge as the official occupant of Windsor Lodge, and the rates were thereafter paid in that name.

  Windsor Lodge has vanished, and if the shades of Dickens and Ellen should revisit the neighborhood of Linden Grove, they would recognize little; perhaps nothing apart from the leafy green slopes of nearby Nunhead Cemetery. When they first arrived in 1867, there were only a dozen or so detached houses spaced out along a quarter-mile sweep of road leading up to the cemetery. Across the road from Windsor Lodge stood Linden Grove Congregational Church, which Dickens assuredly never attended. Behind the church, fields stretched down a gentle slope toward Peckham Rye Common several hundred yards off. Despite a rising tide of new houses, there were still several
farms nearby. In the course of his researches into the shadowy Mr. Tringham, Thomas Wright visited Windsor Lodge, still standing in 1936, and described the setting as it would have looked in 1867: “Down the south side of Linden Grove ran a brook, called apparently ‘The Braid,’ which rose from the high ground in Nunhead Cemetery.… Facing the house occupied by Dickens was a cornfield. Indeed, the place had quite a rural aspect”—rather like Gad’s Hill, in fact.

  Windsor Lodge was new and up-to-date, and far more spacious than either of Tringham’s cottages in Slough. It stood alone in a large garden, with a dozen rooms on four floors. There were two servants. Behind the house were stables; perhaps a horse was kept for Ellen’s use. Small wonder if Dickens felt pressed for money. In May 1867, after the decision to relocate to Peckham, he groaned that his expenses were “enormous”; and Windsor Lodge no doubt contributed to his anxieties. Yet his resumption of public readings had opened a spigot of new income, and the extra expense of the new establishment must have seemed well worthwhile—with its easier access to London; its more open, wholesome setting; its greater space and comfort. As at Slough, he and Ellen could walk the rural lanes and footpaths around Linden Grove—when Dickens’s gouty foot permitted. Sometimes they rode, or at least Ellen did; she was a good equestrian, and for the fresh air and her company, Dickens, a less enthusiastic horseman, may have accompanied her.

  In fine weather, they could sit out in Windsor Lodge’s garden. The most specific and evocative image of Ellen and Dickens together at Windsor Lodge comes from a tradition recorded by Thomas Wright. Having located Windsor Lodge, he elicited an invitation to tea from its 1936 owners, Mr. and Mrs. Marshall, who “knew all about the tradition that Dickens had lived there.” Mrs. Marshall served quince preserves, and Wright and the Marshalls chatted about Dickens and Windsor Lodge. Some sliding Venetian shutters had, since his time, been removed from the back of the house, and Marshall and Wright examined the brackets, “which, as it happened, had never been removed.” Why Wright regarded this hardware item as especially noteworthy is unclear. More interestingly, however, Marshall “spoke of Dickens’s favourite seat which was under the shade of a sumach tree.”

  “A book of verses underneath the bough,/A jug of wine, a loaf of bread—and thou/Beside me singing in the wilderness …”—in Dickens’s case, paradise was a field of rye across the road, the shady garden of Windsor Lodge, and his beloved Ellen beside him: during the summer and early autumn of 1867, between mid-July when she moved to Linden Grove, and late October, he spent thirty-two nights with her in Windsor Lodge. After finishing his work on Wellington Street, he often hurried off to Peckham—as early as possible. The pocket diary regularly records his eager departures from his office for Linden Grove, frequently as early as three in the afternoon, once at one, once “early,” once at eleven in the morning. On August 2, a Friday, he was in Liverpool, and wrote to Georgina at Gad’s Hill that “with the view of keeping myself and my foot quiet, I think I will not come to Gad’s until Monday.” But his ailing foot did not prevent him from returning promptly to London and from there directly to Windsor Lodge for two nights.

  At Linden Grove, he no longer had to negotiate train schedules, train stations, and trains themselves. One long-time Linden Grover, a Mr. Buckeridge, recalled: “I employed a job-master [a livery stable proprietor] named Cox who stabled near the King’s Arms [across the road from Peckham Rye Common]. I remember him stating that he had often driven Dickens and fetched him from and to Linden Grove.” The 1867 pocket diary, which frequently detailed the stations involved in trips to and from Slough, makes no reference to train stations after the move to Peckham; rather than commuting by train, he probably hired Cox or another job-master, or took a hansom cab. In either case, the trip to Peckham was quicker and more private than the trains to and from Slough.

  Few of their Linden Grove neighbors could have been deceived about Mr. Tringham and his young “wife” at Windsor Lodge, but they were tactfully uninquisitive or at least unintrusive. Arriving from London, he was delivered directly to the front door and disappeared into the privacy of his villa, or spent a lingering summer evening with Ellen in the embowered garden.

  As he sits in the garden of Windsor Lodge on such an evening in August 1867, does he reflect that it has been exactly ten years since he escorted Mrs. Ternan and her two younger daughters to Manchester to act in The Frozen Deep? Very likely he does: he carefully observed birthdays and anniversaries, and his introduction to Ellen had been a fateful day.

  Even as he recalled and perhaps drank a toast to this tenth anniversary, however, he was meditating another momentous venture. Early in August he had sent his readings manager George Dolby on a steamer across the Atlantic to investigate the prospects for a reading tour in the United States.

  In September, as the sumac leaves at Windsor Lodge blazed scarlet, Dolby returned with his report.

  CHAPTER 9

  If I go, my dear; if I go

  Dickens was not an adventurous traveler. As he relaxed with Ellen under the sumac tree in the garden of Windsor Lodge, the missionary explorer David Livingstone, a man his own age, was hiking through unmapped regions of remotest Africa, while Sir Richard Burton trekked through the malarial rain forests of Amazonian Brazil. These were exceptional cases, of course, but not anomalous. It was an age of intrepid British travelers.

  As a young man, Dickens himself had made one ambitious journey, though nothing on the scale of Burton or Livingstone. In 1842, he had taken his wife to America for five months of touring, not only in the East but across the Alleghenies and down the Ohio River to the Mississippi, through rough, sparsely settled country. Finding the Americans boorish, he had in turn made himself a boorish guest, hectoring his hosts about a pet grievance, the lack of an international copyright agreement. Returning to England, he wrote a travel book detailing his American complaints, and then as a gratuitous insult detoured the action of his next novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, to America, portraying it as a literal and cultural swamp.

  Since his American journey in the early years of his celebrity, he had confined his travels to safe, conventional European locations. He had made extended sojourns in Italy and Switzerland, and frequently crossed the Channel to France, in later years invariably with Ellen. He went nowhere else abroad.

  Now, in 1867, fifty-five years old and in uncertain health, he contemplated the most ambitious trip of his life, a return journey across the Atlantic—this time not for adventure or discovery; not even for sightseeing. He had seen enough of America in 1842, and had no particular desire to see it again. The motive now was money.

  Resuming public readings the year before, he had made two profitable tours through Britain, giving a total of eighty readings. But Britain was not an inexhaustible market; even Dickens’s reputation could not fill halls in the same cities year after year. Meanwhile, his expenses were large and growing, as he complained to Wills: “my wife’s income to pay—a very expensive position to hold—and my boys with a curse of limpness on them.” There was no need to mention to Wills another expense, that of maintaining Ellen in Windsor Lodge. Dickens wanted to ensure that all his three unmarried women—Georgina, his daughter Mary, and Ellen—would be comfortably fixed after his death. “The greatest pressure of all,” his readings manager Dolby later explained, “came from his desire to do his duty in promoting the interests of an already expensive family, and his wish to leave them after his death as free as possible from monetary cares.” Dolby tactfully omitted to mention Dickens’s concern to provide for Ellen as well as his family. Early in 1868, for example, when he was out of the country, Dickens directed Georgina to draw a check on his account for one thousand pounds, payable to Wills, who “has my instructions on how to invest the money”—instructions to invest it for Ellen, almost certainly, with the early January date suggesting an annual contribution to a trust fund, the payment delegated to Wills in Dickens’s absence from England.

  As if in specific answer to his financial anxieties, E
l Dorado glistened across the Atlantic. By 1867, the United States had passed Great Britain in population and was surging further ahead. The War Between the States had ended two years earlier, and from Boston to Chicago the North battened in triumph. Dickens was dazzled by the potential profits from American readings. So was George Dolby, his constant companion on his British tours. Just the year before, Dickens had rejected the idea of America, for “I really do not know that any sum of money that could be laid down would induce me to cross the Atlantic to read.” Now he was reconsidering. Even before the last of his 1867 readings in England, he confided to Georgina “that I begin to feel myself drawn towards America, as Darnay in the Tale of Two Cities was drawn toward the Loadstone Rock, Paris.”

  The Darnay analogy was ominous, and Georgina was unexcited about the American idea, which left her with a “very miserable prospect for the coming winter.” Doubtful of his health, Dickens’s subeditor Wills and longtime adviser Forster were also opposed. Though professing to weigh their objections carefully, Dickens was strongly inclined to disregard them. “The prize looks so large!” he exclaimed. The figure scintillating in his imagination was ten thousand pounds. He reminded Wills that in England “it would take years to get ten thousand pounds. To get that sum in a heap so soon [in America] is an immense consideration to me.” He was increasingly mindful of the ticking clock, and of mortality. The time remaining for strenuous exertion like his public readings was dwindling. To his American friend J. T. Fields, he confided that “I am really endeavouring tooth and nail to make my way personally to the American Public, and … no light obstacles will turn me aside now that my hand is in.”