Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  Eight months after he departed Boston, she dreamed of him yet again. He had in the meantime begun a final reading tour in Britain and (as she knew) had added to his repertory Bill Sikes’s bludgeoning murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist. Annie decided to refresh her memory of the scene: “Read last night the murder scene from Oliver Twist before going to bed and dreamed of it and of Dickens all night.” Her dream strangely conflated her beloved Dickens with the brutal Sikes:

  I was seized firmly by the wrists, in my fancy, and led to where the body lay, & I turned my head away and would not look, but the grasp grew tighter and tighter until I gave one quick glance at the livid flaccid [?] mask of that wretched face upturned in the morning light and fled shuddering away. Then it seemed that Dickens came to speak to us, for J was always near, and in my joy at seeing him once more I did not faint but a fiery color suffused my whole face and I grew dizzy like one about to fall.

  What did “J” think when he read his wife’s account of this violently erotic fantasy, in which he himself stands by passively while she is seized and gripped by an overmastering strength (earlier Annie had admired Dickens’s “strong strong hands”); and in which her idol Dickens, mysteriously appearing, brings a flush of desire to her face, and sends her into an ecstatic swoon?

  Dreaming such dreams, Annie was naturally interested in Dickens’s actual lover, Ellen Ternan.

  While her journals seldom mention Ellen, they often glance at her presence in Dickens’s life.

  Annie probably knew little enough about Ellen when he arrived in Boston in November. But on Thanksgiving Day, a week after his arrival, he backed out of a dinner party, explaining that “he was overtaken by a sudden access of sadness wh. must prevent him from leaving the fire side and solitude of his own room,” Annie noted. Yet he had seemed in excellent spirits the day before, and the day after, sitting with Fields for four hours, “the tide of laughter ran so high they could only lay their heads down & laugh it out.” Observing these moody oscillations between gloom and hilarity, Annie grew intrigued by the private distresses and hidden griefs of this “noble spirit,” outwardly so cheerful.

  By the time he sailed for England in April, she knew much more, though just how much is uncertain. His disclosures to Fields during their long brisk walks were no doubt incomplete, and Fields perhaps edited them even further when passing them on to Annie. She was not straitlaced, but there were certain manly confidences a gentleman would hesitate to repeat to a lady, even were she his wife.

  Annie’s knowledge was certainly skewed in at least one respect. She heard much of Gad’s Hill, little of Ellen. One evening at a large dinner hosted by Dickens, for example, she sat at his right hand as he discoursed on a range of topics—spiritualism; dreams; writers creating characters out of airy nothing; his impressions of America. In particular, Annie noted, “He loves to talk of Gad’s Hill and stopped joyfully from other talk to tell me how his daughter Mary arranged his table with flowers.… ‘Sometimes she will have nothing but water-lilies,’ he said as if the memory were a fragrance.” His poetic appreciation of Mamie’s floral arrangements charmed Annie, who (he well knew) loved flowers; she was even more pleased by his strong attachment to home—to Gad’s Hill and its two ladies, Georgina and Mamie. “Georgina Hogarth he always speaks of in the most affectionate terms, such as ‘She has been a mother to my children’ ‘She keeps the list of the wine cellar.…’” For table companions, and perhaps especially for Annie, he stressed his domestic affections. Fields, too, faithfully relayed Dickens’s expressions of fondness for his “home circle.” “What a dear one it is to him can be seen whenever his thoughts turn that way,” Annie commented; “and if his letters do not come punctually he is in low spirits.” This journal entry celebrating Dickens’s attachment to his “dear” home was written, by coincidence, on Ellen Ternan’s birthday, March 3. Did Annie know, by now, that the letters he most eagerly anticipated were dated not from Gad’s Hill but from Villa Trollope, Florence?

  Perhaps discretion restrained her from open mention of Ellen in her journals, but as Dickens’s time in America drew to a close, she was less guarded in speculating about his life in England. During his last week, he was re-afflicted with gout and feared (Annie reported) that “the papers will telegraph news of his illness to England. This seems to disturb him more than anything else.” What disturbed him especially was that Ellen might hear of his affliction: “Ah!” Annie commented. “What a mystery these ties of love are—such pain—such ineffable happiness—the only happiness.” But this rhapsodic observation, squeezed between lines, is a later insertion. Was Annie when she wrote the initial entry, just days before Dickens’s departure, still unaware of the “ties of love” binding him to Ellen? Or was the commentary merely a later reflection on what she had known earlier?

  Only two days after he sailed, Annie’s journal again seems to glance at Ellen: “He goes to the English spring, to his own dear ones, to the tenderness of long tried love.” But does the tenderness of long-tried love refer, rather, to Georgina? Annie was intrigued by Georgina’s curious role as Dickens’s surrogate wife—housekeeper, companion, confidante, but not bedmate. “It is not an easy service in this world to live near such a man, to love him, to desire to do for him,” she reflected (though a service Annie herself would gladly have undertaken). Despite Georgina’s loyal attendance, he remained unhappy. “But even now,” Annie mused, “he might be lonely such is his nature. When I recall his lonely couch and lonely hours I feel he has had a strange lot.” His nature, presumably, yearned for sexual intimacy, and Annie’s insistence on his loneliness—especially his lonely couch—is intriguing. Did she imagine that he spent all his time at Gad’s Hill? and was she ignorant of his second home in Peckham, where his couch was probably less lonely?

  “The lonely couch” suggests that Annie was under the impression that Dickens saw Ellen either infrequently, or chastely, or both. Was this the idea he had conveyed to Fields?—or was this how Fields recast Dickens’s remarks for his wife?

  In any case, comments that Annie made a few days later reveal that even if she thought Dickens saw Ellen only occasionally, she did not doubt their intimacy.

  His ship, the Cunarder Russia, sailed from New York on April 22. Two days later, Ellen and her mother left Florence to return to London in time for his arrival. “If he could but confess to us all the rapture of his return!” Annie wished. “But I know this must not be.” On May 2, she imagined him landing in Liverpool (he had actually landed the day before): “I awoke this morning,” she wrote, “feeling that today was his day of joy. It rains here!!” The sun was shining for Dickens, she assumed, knowing that the first woman to greet him would be Ellen—not Georgina or his daughters. Fascinated with his reunion with Ellen, Annie imagined it, tellingly, from Ellen’s point of view:

  I cannot help rehearsing in my mind the intense joy of his beloved—It is too much to face, even in one’s imagination and too sacred. Yet I know today to be the day and these hours, his hours—Surely among the most painfully & joyfully intense of his whole life.

  Plainly, she assumed a highly charged encounter with “his beloved”—no “lonely couch.” In imagining their reunion as “too sacred” to contemplate, she evidently anticipated a nuptial consummation, a virtual wedding night. Annie entertained a sacramental, almost mystical conception of a woman’s love: “Sometimes when I reflect how true love can cause a woman to blossom and develop and bear perfect fruit not only of the body but the spirit … I pray God to bless all women, to make them more womanly, and to elevate only those things in their eyes which shall show them most truly their heavenly mission.” In embracing Dickens, Ellen was fulfilling her spiritual destiny—or so Annie apparently thought, perhaps with some envy.

  The next day, she learned that Russia had in fact landed safely in Liverpool, whence Dickens proceeded directly to London: “Yesterday as I felt sure C. D. was in London. What hours for him!! How can we be grateful enough for them!” After his joyous reunion
with Ellen in London, Annie expected, he would continue straight to Gad’s Hill. “This morning therefore dear C. D. is at Gad’s Hill,” she wrote on May 5, a Tuesday.

  Actually Dickens was still in London—or more likely in nearby Peckham, enjoying Ellen’s company and in no evident hurry to return to Gad’s Hill. On his first evening in London, he had taken a box at the Adelphi Theatre, no doubt with Ellen, to watch a dramatization of No Thoroughfare, the alpine melodrama he had written the year before with Wilkie Collins. There was much business to catch up on, too; his factotum and All the Year Round subeditor Wills had knocked his head in a riding accident several weeks earlier and was still convalescing. But Dickens’s reluctance to leave London had more to do with Ellen than with Wills. After six months apart, he was avid for her company; his dear home and the green tranquility of rural Kent could wait. He lingered with her for a full week before finding his way back to Gad’s Hill and the patient Georgina.

  He soon resumed the triangular life he had left behind six months earlier, shuttling among Ellen in Peckham, his family at Gad’s Hill, and his All the Year Round office in London.

  Gad’s Hill was his retreat and sanctuary. All his sons except the youngest, Plorn, were now gone, mostly at sea or overseas, and Plorn himself was soon dispatched to Australia (where his older brother Alfred had earlier emigrated). With Plorn’s departure, Dickens had effectively cleared his home of other males, leaving himself surrounded with loyal women: Georgina, Mary, and Katie, who though married and living in London frequently stayed at Gad’s Hill. Despite his fondness for masculine camaraderie and bonhomie, Dickens’s closest male friendships had dwindled: he had lost many friends to death, and drifted apart from others, like Forster, who had married and grown pompous and dull, and Wilkie Collins, who resented Dickens’s want of sympathy for his brother Charles, Katie’s invalid husband. At the end of the day, Dickens preferred the companionship and care of younger women (even “Aunty”—Georgina—was fifteen years younger than he). His novels’ partiality for young women expressed his own personal preferences exactly.

  Gad’s Hill itself he made more comfortable and gracious, hiring a new head gardener (making a total of four gardeners) and adding a new (and expensive) glass conservatory wing, his own little Crystal Palace. He continued to enjoy playing the squire: buying up neighboring fields, hosting the local cricket club, entertaining weekend guests. To write, he retreated in fair weather to his miniature chalet amidst the shrubs and trees across the road from Gad’s Hill; but on his return from America in 1868 he had no major writing project in hand.

  He was harassed by business affairs. “You may imagine what six months of arrear are to dispose of,” he complained; “added to this, Wills has received a concussion of the brain … and is sent away by the doctors.… Consequently, all the business and money details of All the Year Round devolve upon me. And I have to get them up, for I have never had experience of them.” At length, it became evident that Wills would never be able to resume his duties at All the Year Round. Making the best of Wills’s retirement and looking ahead to his own, Dickens installed his oldest son, Charles Junior, as his new sub-editor.

  Meanwhile, what of Ellen?

  After the pocket diary’s day-to-day record of Dickens and “N” in Slough, Peckham, and London in 1867, his life with her after his return from America again fades into twilight.

  But occasional flashes of evidence show that she remained his cynosure, and his chief destination away from home and office. He continued to spend time with her every week.

  Thursday in particular became an inviolable evening with Ellen, a routine beginning immediately upon his return. After their week-long reunion, he had spent two or three days at Gad’s Hill and then returned to London. That Thursday, he sent a quick note to Georgina informing her that “Tomorrow I will come to Gad’s by some train from New Cross”—the station on the South Eastern line closest to Peckham. He no doubt spent the night with Ellen at Windsor Lodge, and then a leisurely morning afterwards: “I will come … either by the train that leaves London about mid-day, or by afternoon train.”

  His readings manager Dolby described Dickens’s routine that summer: “The early days of the week were devoted to business purposes; Mr. Dickens, on these days, taking up his residence at the office in London, returning to ‘Gad’s’ with his guests, as a rule, on Friday, and remaining there until the following Monday, when all returned to London together in a saloon carriage.” But Dolby tactfully omitted mention of Dickens’s regular interlude between his business in London and weekend house parties at Gad’s Hill. Thursday was his regular day at All the Year Round; afterwards he invariably retreated to Windsor Lodge. His correspondence during the summer of 1868 is sprinkled with excuses for avoiding other engagements on Thursday:

  “I have a particular engagement at half past 5 to day [Thursday], but I pledge myself beforehand to any appointment you may make for tomorrow afternoon.” (June 25)

  “Unfortunately, although I come to town on Thursday next, I am engaged for that evening.…” (July 12)

  “On Thursday I have people to see and matters to attend to.…”(July 21)

  “I should have … ‘made an effort’ to come to you, but that I am engaged to dine out tomorrow [Thursday] at a semi-business dinner.…” (August 5)

  “Unfortunately I am obliged to dine in London on Thursday. It is a business engagement in association with my journal and I am specially bound to keep it.” (September 1)

  That these sacrosanct Thursday evenings had nothing to do with business, however, is made clear by a note he wrote Wills that summer, dated: “P Friday Thirty First July, 1868.” “P,” as Wills knew, was Peckham. “I had such a hard day at the office yesterday,” Dickens explained, “that I had not time to write you before I left”—and we can imagine him, after a tiring day of editorial labors, so eager to be off to Windsor Lodge on Thursday afternoon that he bolts from the Wellington Street office and takes a hansom cab straight to Linden Grove, Peckham, to enjoy the lingering July evening with his beloved Nelly, sitting together under the sumac tree in the garden, with the lindens throwing long shadows, “The Braid” purling nearby, and the ripening grain glowing in the late sun—paradise enough.

  Tennyson’s Ulysses, home from the Trojan War after his long odyssey, soon grows restless for further wandering:

  I cannot rest from travel.…

  How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

  To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!

  As though to breathe were life!

  (“Ulysses”)

  So too Dickens. Scarcely back from his exhausting readings in America, he and Dolby, who replaced Wills as his factotum and confidant, started to plan his next series of public readings, which he had decided on while still in America.

  Two strong and opposing impulses moved Dickens during his final years. One was love of Ellen; the other, restlessness. Ellen focused him, centered him, restored him; but he was driven as well to keep striving and wandering. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow later claimed to recall Dickens in America as “very restless, as if driven by fate—fato profugus” (quoting Virgil’s description of Aeneas). Perhaps the restlessness Longfellow detected was simply Dickens’s eagerness to return to Ellen; but in any case, once back in England he was soon restless again.

  After his exhausting months in America, Gad’s Hill seemed paradisal. “What with travelling, reading night after night, and speech-making day after day, I feel the peace of the country beyond all expression,” he wrote shortly after his return, and a few weeks later, in a high-spirited letter to Annie Fields, he extolled the bucolic charms of Gad’s Hill with Wordsworthian joy:

  Divers birds sing here all day, and the nightingales all night. The place is lovely, and in perfect order. I have put five mirrors in the Swiss châlet (where I write) and they reflect and refract in all kinds of ways the leaves that are quivering at the windows, and the great fields of waving corn, and the sail-dotted river. My room is up am
ong the branches of the trees; and the birds and the butterflies fly in and out, and the green branches shoot in, at the open windows, and the lights and shadows of the clouds come and go with the rest of the company. The scent of the flowers, and indeed of everything that is growing for miles and miles, is most delicious.

  Yet in the same letter he remarked that he was already planning a tour of farewell readings.

  He continued to improve Gad’s Hill, expensively, but spent less time there. During his final reading tour, he wrote to a Swiss friend:

  You wouldn’t recognize Gads Hill now; I have so changed it, and bought land about it. And yet I often think that if Mary were to marry (which she won’t), I should sell it, and go genteelly vagabondizing over the face of the earth.

  His responsibilities to his daughters, to Georgina, and to his sons were a strain. To a request for financial assistance, he replied that “the train I have to drag through life has become so long and heavy” that he could not oblige. He had discarded his wife, but he could not discard the rest of his family, nor did he wish to. Yet his obligations, both domestic and financial, competed with his time with Ellen.

  Novel-writing had become a secondary or even tertiary source of income, subordinate to the steady profits of All the Year Round, to reprints of his novels, and especially to the lucrative readings. He was eager to mine this latter vein of income while his health allowed. In October 1868, less than six months after returning from America, he began his final (“for ever and ever”) tour, with 103 “Farewell Readings” planned for England, Scotland, and Ireland, to extend through May the following year.

  During these months, he read in provincial cities three or four times each week, returning to London every week or two for a few days; every other Tuesday he gave a reading in London. He took extended breaks in November, during the Christmas season, in February, and during Holy Week. Otherwise, he went “tearing about the country,” giving multiple readings every week. In December he journeyed to Scotland for readings, in January to Ireland, in February back to Scotland. By the end he had read in twenty-five different cities and traveled many thousands of miles by rail, even while still subject to Staplehurst anxieties on fast trains.