Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  Sailing with the Fieldses (and also seasick) was twenty-year-old Mabel Lowell, the daughter of their friend the poet James Russell Lowell. Dickens had met her in Boston the year before and taken a flirtatious liking to her. “She is a charming little thing, and very retiring in manner and expression,” he told Georgina. However retiring in expression she may have seemed, her letters home from England were often quite tart, giving a vivid glimpse of mid-Victorian England—and Dickens—through the eyes of a literate, genteel, occasionally pert American girl.

  Annie Fields’s journals and letters also document their weeks in England. Curious to see her idol Dickens in his domestic setting and to meet the women closest to him, she was gratified to be introduced to Georgina and Mary on her first day in London; the following day she met his daughter Katie, too. In June, the Fieldses with Mabel visited Gad’s Hill for a week, and Dickens carried them around to the local sights: Rochester Castle and Cathedral; the army barracks and the trooping of the colors at Chatham; Cooling Church, out on the marshes, the setting for the opening scene of Great Expectations; Cobham Park, the handsome estate neighboring Gad’s Hill; and Canterbury. Though enjoying all this, Annie was more interested in seeing Dickens at home and getting to know Gad’s Hill’s female cadre, Georgina and his two daughters.

  Annie and Georgina had much in common: both were childless; both lived in a world of writers and publishing; both loved Dickens. “I have the deepest respect for her,” Annie wrote in her journal. “She has been able to do everything for C.D. in his home”—as Annie herself had tried to do for him in Boston. Her journals note various private conversations with Georgina. During a game of bowls on the lawn, “Miss Hogarth and I sat by while the game went forward”; later, “Miss Hogarth told me about the family, showed me the house, the cellar etc.”; another time, “Went to Chatham Wednesday—that night talked with Miss Hogarth.” Just as Dickens had adopted Fields as a confidant, Georgina began to confide in Annie. Apart from her own inclination to do so, she must have had Dickens’s implicit or explicit permission, perhaps in acknowledgment of Annie’s loyalty and discretion. When the Fieldses visited Gad’s Hill again in October, shortly before returning to America, Annie and Georgina occupied an afternoon walk with another private talk: “C.D. & dear J went together. Miss Hogarth & I, Mabel Katie & Mamie with the rest.…”

  As to what Georgina might have disclosed during these chats, Annie’s journals are silent; but it is difficult to imagine that these two Dickens devotees did not discuss the idol they shared. And once on that subject, how could they avoid Dickens’s own private cult of Ellen? While Annie’s journals seldom mention Ellen, when she is mentioned it is with abbreviated familiarity—as “Nelly,” as “E.L.T.,” as “N.T.”

  One moment of reticence betrays Ellen’s ghostly presence as the uncanny fifth member in a party of four. After a week at Gad’s Hill, the Fieldses and Mabel Lowell returned to London by train. Dickens accompanied them. Along the way, “conversation flagged,” Annie recalled, “and Jamie making a desperate attempt to revive it at one point C.D. laughed at what he called his wretched use of ‘mustard’ as a conversational aperient.” Perhaps all were exhausted by a week of busy conviviality, but perhaps too everyone was silently pondering Dickens’s impending exit—for he had announced that he was detraining early. “Dickens came in the cars with us nearly to London,” Annie reported. “We separated without words in the carriage and he jumped out alone.” Plainly he was not going to his Wellington Street office, for in that case he would have gone on to Charing Cross with the Fieldses. How did he explain his solitary, rather awkward departure? Or was no explanation needed? He had seen little or nothing of Ellen for a week, and no doubt left the train at New Cross station, within easy walking distance of Windsor Lodge.

  Annie’s tactful silence about his destination hints at a perfect awareness of where he was bound, and the sight of Dickens striding away from the station platform toward Windsor Lodge led her to melancholy reflections. “It is wonderful the fun and flow of spirits C. D. has for he is a sad man,” she commented. “Sleepless nights come too often, oftener than they ever would to a free heart.” Annie was very aware of Dickens’s love for Ellen—may even have met her by now—and her insights, plainly stated, would be invaluable. But she remains discreet and oblique even in her journal. Presumably Dickens’s sleepless nights were those spent on his “lonely couch” at Gad’s Hill, yearning for the absent mistress of his captive heart. Perhaps, despite her admiration for Georgina, Annie came to see Gad’s Hill as not simply a loving family home but also a prison. Whatever her analysis of Dickens’s situation, however, she proffered no solution and took no sides. “The sorrows of such a nature are many,” she concluded despairingly, “and must often seem more than he can bear.”

  Fascinated with Dickens and perhaps hearing much about the woman he loved, Annie would certainly have been glad to meet Ellen herself. Though scarcely bohemian, the Fieldses plainly condoned Dickens’s relationship. Two of Annie’s journal references to Ellen are sympathetic, even laudatory—her report, for example, that only Ellen noticed Dickens’s stumbling on stage during a public reading and dared to tell him.

  But there were problems with an introduction. Whatever the Fieldses’ tolerance, Victorian gentlemen did not introduce their wives and daughters to women of irregular status. Acting in loco parentis, moreover, the Fieldses could scarcely expose young Mabel Lowell, daughter of a good friend, to a kept woman. Even had Annie wished to meet Ellen with Mabel somehow out of the way, Dickens might have demurred; he had flatly refused to introduce the aggressive Mrs. Dickinson two years earlier.

  Nonetheless, he felt more warmly toward the Fieldses than toward Mrs. Dickinson, and might have wanted to bring together his closest American friends and his dear Nelly; they had heard much of each other. Obstacles crumbled before Dickens’s strong will. Two short notes he wrote after the Fieldses arrived in London suggest that he might, after all, have brought the Fieldses and Ellen together.

  The first note was to Fields, proposing a day of sightseeing:

  Suppose we give the weather a longer chance, and say Monday [24 May 1869] instead of Friday. I think we must be safer with that precaution. If Monday will suit you, I propose that we meet here [Dickens’s Wellington Street office] that day,—your ladies and you and I,—and cast ourselves upon the stonyhearted streets.… We will dine here at six, and meet here at half past two. So IF you should want to go elsewhere after dinner, it can be done, notwithstanding.

  The following day, he wrote a hasty and cryptic note to Georgina making further and overlapping plans for the same Monday:

  In case Monday next will do for you—to be taken up at 4, as last time—it will suit perfectly. I believe the Fields party dine with me at the office that day.… Let N know whether Monday is an engagement.

  Whether or how these two engagements were related to one another is unclear. The first note seems plain enough; the second is filled with shadows. By whom is Georgina being “taken up,” and where is she being taken? At four, Dickens himself will be out sightseeing with the Fieldses. Is Georgina to join them afterwards for dinner at his office apartments? Ellen’s plans are somehow linked with Georgina’s: is Ellen already engaged to dine with the Fields party, and is it Ellen who will pick up Georgina on her way to Wellington Street?

  Even with these questions left unresolved, Dickens’s note to Georgina shows Ellen at the center of his life, if not of the dinner. He has made his plans with her before inviting Georgina and without even being certain of the Fieldses: whatever the engagement, they and Georgina are contingent, Ellen primary. That Dickens can casually direct Georgina to communicate with “N” without needing to explain how to do so reveals that Ellen’s address or whereabouts is well known to Georgina; it may even be that she will soon see Ellen to confirm the engagement in person. They are plainly in touch with each other, perhaps even see each other frequently when Georgina is in London.

  Despite the obscuritie
s of Dickens’s laconic note to Georgina about the Monday plans, it suggests the possibility, even likelihood, that the Fieldses (with Mabel Lowell) dined that evening with Dickens and Ellen (and perhaps Georgina); the phrase “as last time” suggests that this would not even have been the first occasion. Dickens’s office quarters would be a pleasantly snug location for a confidential dinner party.

  Let’s imagine such a dinner.

  Dickens has spent the afternoon strolling through the Regent’s Park Zoo with the Fieldses and Mabel. The idolatrous Fields would later gush:

  What a treat it was to go with him to the London Zoölogical Gardens, a place he greatly delighted in at all times!… The delight he took in the hippopotamus family was most exhilarating. He entered familiarly into conversation with the huge, unwieldy creatures, and they seemed to understand him.… He chaffed with the monkeys, coaxed the tigers, and bamboozled the snakes, with a dexterity unapproachable.

  And so on. Harassed by such strenuous joviality, the zoo animals (“unphilological inhabitants,” in Fields’s facetious phrase) no doubt rejoice to see Dickens depart. The Fieldses and Mabel return to their hotel to change for dinner; Dickens proceeds to his office on Wellington Street, where Georgina and Ellen await him. With Ellen is Mrs. Ternan, sixty-six years old and distinguished in appearance and manner; she has played Lady Macbeth and Desdemona, and offstage could pass for a dowager duchess. “With a fine face and figure were associated great grace and intelligence,” an obituary notice would comment, “and her elocution was remarkably good.” She is introduced to the Fields party as a long-time friend of Dickens whom he met when she acted with his friend the celebrated Shakespearean actor William Macready. Mrs. Ternan’s visible refinement and connection to Macready recommend her. Introduced with her is Miss Ternan, her daughter, a great friend of Georgina and of Dickens’s daughters. Miss Ternan’s obvious familiarity with Georgina lends plausibility to this explanation. The Fieldses know how the case stands; young Mabel Lowell has no clue but thinks nothing about it; keen on good horses and old paintings, she cares not at all about old actresses and their spinster daughters. In her next letter home she will briefly mention the visit to the zoo with Mr. Dickens but ignore the dinner on Wellington Street. (In her journal, Annie Fields also passes over the dinner in silence.)

  There is no cook at Wellington Street; dinner is ordered from a nearby restaurant. At home, Dickens’s dinner always began with a glass of Chichester milk-punch and ended with a dish of toasted cheese. One guest at another dinner at Dickens’s office recalled, however, that “we began with oysters, brought in fresh from Old ‘Rule’s’ in Maiden Lane [near Covent Garden].… The principal dish was a baked leg of mutton, the bone of which had been taken out, and the space supplied with oysters and veal stuffing.” In the novel that Dickens began writing a few months after his dinner with the Fieldses, a lawyer named Grewgious orders dinner for himself and two guests in his bachelor chambers in London. Perhaps the dinner in Wellington Street followed the same lines:

  “And perhaps you wouldn’t mind,” said Mr. Grewgious [to his clerk], “stepping over to the hotel in Furnival’s, and asking them to send in materials for laying the cloth. For dinner we’ll have a tureen of the hottest and strongest soup available, and we’ll have the best made-dish that can be recommended, and we’ll have a joint (such as a haunch of mutton), and we’ll have a goose, or a turkey, or any little stuffed thing of that sort that may happen to be in the bill of fare—in short, we’ll have whatever there is on hand.”

  (Dickens’s arrangements would have been less extemporaneous; he has no doubt ordered the dinner in advance.)

  Bazzard [the clerk] returned, accompanied by two waiters—an immoveable waiter, and a flying waiter;… The flying waiter, who had brought everything on his shoulders, laid the cloth with amazing rapidity and dexterity; while the immoveable waiter, who had brought nothing, found fault with him in secret nudges. The flying waiter then highly polished all the glasses he had brought, and the immoveable waiter looked through them. The flying waiter then flew across Holborn for the soup, and flew back again, and then took another flight for the made-dish, and flew back again, and then took another flight for the joint and poultry, and flew back again, and between whiles took supplementary flights for a great variety of articles, as it was discovered from time to time that the immoveable waiter had forgotten them all.…

  Dinner conversation might flow in any of several directions: the theater; the Fieldses’ sightseeing in London and their plans for touring Europe during the next several months (Ellen and her mother have spent much time in France and Italy); Dickens’s reading tours in America and more recently in Britain and Ireland; Gad’s Hill, where the Fieldses and Mabel will soon visit; books and publishing; Alfred Tennyson, poet laureate, whom the Fieldses and Mabel are off to visit on the Isle of Wight the following day. There are no long silences: Dickens as host is eager to keep the party lively; the ladies are in good spirits; Fields is a great talker and storyteller.

  At the conclusion of the repast [in Grewgious’s chambers], by which time the flying waiter was severely blown, the immoveable waiter gathered up the tablecloth under his arm with a grand air, and … looked on at the flying waiter while he set clean glasses round.…

  The ladies rise and withdraw—although Dickens’s Wellington Street apartment has no drawing room—while Dickens and Fields remain at table with brandy and cigars. But not for long: a friend recalled that when Dickens was host, “there was no sitting by the men at the dinner-table after the ladies had left”—he was always quick to rise from the table and rejoin them. This evening he has assured Fields that the early dinner will allow the Fieldses and Mabel to go elsewhere that evening, but for them Dickens himself is the chief attraction, and after a tiring day of sightseeing and visiting they may be content to return to their hotel for the night.

  Did this notional dinner party actually occur? Did Annie Fields ever meet the woman so dearly loved by the man she herself worshiped?

  There is no certain answer, but one ambiguous footnote, to these questions. Two and a half years later, in December 1871, Annie recalled in her journal Dickens’s arrival in Boston for his reading tour, four years earlier—for her, a vanished golden age. He had been dead for a year and a half now, but she nursed her memory of him in a way that recalls Dickens’s own reveries about Mary Hogarth after her death. “Dear, dear Dickens,” she wrote: “as this season returns, come back not only thoughts of him but visions of his presence. I see him standing beside us. I see his eyes looking into mine.”

  But these visionary thoughts brought to mind a more specific news item: “I heard quite accidently to human eyes the other day of N.T. being in Rome.…” From Dickens, her thoughts have turned naturally to Ellen, the abbreviation “N.T.” suggesting friendly familiarity. From Dickens’s connection with Ellen, Annie’s thoughts then moved on to her own connection with Ellen, for both women had been widowed, in a way, by his death. “I feel the bond there is between us,” she wrote. “She must feel it too.”

  But why would Annie Fields expect Ellen to feel a bond with her, unless they were acquainted? How would Ellen know that Annie felt bereaved by Dickens’s death, unless she had learned of Annie’s affection for Dickens from Annie herself? If Ellen had known of Dickens’s most fervent American admirer only anecdotally, she would probably never have given Annie a second thought. Annie’s reflection that Ellen must feel the bond between them argues that they had met and talked together in London the year before Dickens’s death.

  “I wonder if we shall ever meet,” Annie mused finally, wistfully, pondering the mutual sympathy between herself and Ellen. But by “ever meet,” did she mean meet for a first time, or meet again, as sisters together wearing black for Dickens?

  This perplexing rumination in her journal is Annie Fields’s last surviving comment on Ellen Ternan.

  The Fieldses departed from London on a gray day in October 1869, Dickens bidding them farewell at the station as
they boarded a train for Liverpool. “I knew then,” Annie later wrote in her journal,”… that we should never meet again and though we shed no tears, the utter dreariness of that morning was something I remember with a shudder.” As the train started forward, Dickens ran a few steps along the platform to keep up with their carriage, and then “all was over—except eternity.” Fortunately, Annie’s grief was soon eclipsed by the more mundane misery of seasickness. Before their first night at sea, the Fieldses and Mabel “were wretched enough all of us, dear Mabel first and worst.”

  Back in Boston, Annie continued to dwell on Dickens—remembering him, wondering about him, hoping for letters from him, pitying him. On the last day of 1869, “I think of him much[,] indeed we both talk of him when alone continually and after waking in the night we follow him and look in his dear suffering face and long, long for what, we hardly know.”

  And of course she continued to revolve Ellen’s role in his life. Early in 1870 Dickens’s friend Charles Fechter arrived in America, and in February he was in Boston playing Hamlet. Lunching together one day, he and the Fieldses talked of Dickens and his sorrows—Annie’s leading theme in these latter days. Fechter attributed Dickens’s disappointments to his children, but Annie’s thoughts flew to his two women. “Poor Miss Hogarth spends her life hoping to comfort and care for him,” but to no avail. “I never felt more keenly her anomalous and unnatural position in the household.” Annie continued: “Not one [at the luncheon] mentioned her name; they could not dare, I suppose lest they might do her wrong.” Abruptly, the “her” seems no longer to refer to the steady, devoted sister-in-law, but to the disruptive mistress: the unnameable woman must be Ellen, for no one would hesitate to mention Georgina’s name (Dickens himself had talked of her frequently with the Fieldses). “Ah how sad a name it must be to those who love him best,” Annie lamented. “Dear dear Dickens!” This oblique comment is the only time that Annie Fields’s journals hint any disapproval of Ellen.