Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  One of these beautiful young heroines, Rosa, is a schoolgirl, her precise age unspecified but perhaps seventeen. Dickens stresses her diminutive cuteness and pampered immaturity. A painting of her on Jasper’s walls is said to show “a blooming schoolgirl … her flowing brown hair tied with a blue riband, and her beauty remarkable for a quite childish, almost babyish, touch of saucy discontent, comically conscious of itself.” She is “wonderfully pretty, wonderfully childish, wonderfully whimsical”; “a charming little apparition”; “an amiable, giddy, wilful, winning little creature.” Her blue ribbon betrays her origins in Maria Beadnell; Rosa is the last of Dickens’s many tributes to the girl who had enslaved him forty years earlier. He never lost his susceptibility to such girls.

  But much the more potent of the two heroines is Rosa’s counterpart, Helena Landless, a dark, tigerish character who could scarcely be less like the confectionery Rosa, or like David Copperfield’s mild, fair Agnes. The deepest mystery of The Mystery of Edwin Drood is in fact not what has happened to Drood, but how to account for this last Dickens heroine, the darkest, fiercest, most exotic of all his heroines.

  On her first appearance, Helena and her twin Neville are likened to feral animals, the clergyman Mr. Crisparkle noticing

  … something untamed about them both; a certain air upon them of hunter and huntress; yet withal a certain air of being the objects of the chase, rather than the followers. Slender, supple, quick of eye and limb; half shy, half defiant; fierce of look; an indefinable kind of pause coming and going on their whole expression, both of face and form, which might be equally likened to the pause before a crouch, or a bound.

  A little later we hear of a childhood attempt of the twins to escape their cruel stepfather, with Helena intending to disguise herself as a boy; but “when I lost the pocket-knife with which she was to have cut her hair short,” Neville recalls “how desperately she tried to tear it out, or bite it off.” Two decades earlier, David Copperfield’s Agnes had first appeared in a stained-glass glow of serenity, gentleness, and beatitude.

  But Agnes had distinctly lacked sexual fire. Not so Helena, whose darkness and ferocity, her “wild” and “intense” qualities, betray a strong erotic nature. “An unusually handsome, lithe girl,” she is “very dark, and very rich in color;… of almost the gipsy type.” In his working notes, Dickens noted:

  Neville and Helena Landless

  Mixture of Oriental blood—or imperceptibly acquired mixture in them.

  Yes

  “Oriental” here means Singhalese, the Landless twins having come from Ceylon. In Fildes’s illustrations, authorized by Dickens, the Landlesses are distinctly un-English in features and shading, Helena with thick dark hair, heavy eyebrows, long eyelashes, strong aquiline nose, and keen, intense features—all of which qualities are more striking in juxtaposition with the insipid features and lighter coloring of Rosa. The darkening of Dickens’s heroines over the years reveals his evolving fascination with the mysteries of erotic attraction. The domesticity, patience, mildness, and tranquility of David Copperfield’s Agnes had been embodied in fair coloring and stained-glass brightness; fifteen years later, Our Mutual Friend’s heroine Lizzie Hexam had been “a deep rich piece of colour, with the brown flush of her cheek and the shining lustre of her hair.” Helena Landless is darker yet. As Wuthering Heights’ Heathcliff embodied Emily Brontë’s fascination with dark, fierce, violent male power, so Helena embodies Dickens’s fascination with feminine eroticism.

  Helena is not just dark and fierce, however; she is also feminine in the more usual softer sense. She possesses “womanly feeling, sense, and courage.” Like most other Dickens heroines she nurtures a weak or troubled male, in Helena’s case her brother Neville. She also attaches herself affectionately to the girlish Rosa. Though they are roughly the same age, Helena at once assumes an older-sister, almost maternal responsibility; already in their first private conversation Helena calls Rosa “My pretty one” and “My child!” Her “sisterly earnestness” confirms her warm feminine spirit, for both “sisterly” and “earnest” convey Dickens’s strongest approbation. Rosa is a schoolgirl becoming womanly, but Helena, nominally a schoolgirl herself, is already a woman, gentle but formidable. When Rosa is overcome by Jasper’s hypnotic glare and swoons in fright, Helena’s nurturing qualities fuse with her ferocity:

  The lustrous gipsy-face drooped over the clinging arms and bosom, and the wild black hair fell down protectingly over the childish form. There was a slumbering gleam of fire in the intense dark eyes, though they were then softened with compassion and admiration. Let whomsoever it most concerned, look well to it!

  The menacing last line promises that Helena will triumph in a climactic melodramatic confrontation with the arch-villain Jasper.

  She is in fact paired with her antagonist Jasper, Dickens’s most Heathcliff-like character. Jasper and Helena are both emphatically dark; they may even be kin, as one of the novel’s proposed titles, “The Mystery in the Drood Family,” perhaps hints. A more certain affinity than any blood tie, however, is their burning intensity. In a single early paragraph, Jasper “looks on intently” and shows “a look of intentness and intensity—a look of hungry, exacting, watchful, and yet devoted affection” for his nephew Drood, whom he regards with an “always concentrated” face. Helena yields nothing to him in intensity; in the space of a few pages, her face is “intent” on Jasper, her “masterful look was intent” upon Rosa, and we see her “intense dark eyes.” They are matched against each other because they are so alike; but the sexual intensity that takes a violent turn in Jasper, in Helena is made fertile.

  Unlike Helena, Ellen Ternan was golden-haired and gentle-natured, and never defied a brutish stepfather or confronted a murderous villain. Yet the name “Helena Landless” echoes “Ellen Lawless” Ternan too closely to be accidental—perhaps Dickens and Ellen laughed at this private joke, and at the incongruity of the fierce Helena taking Ellen’s name. But we may wonder if in fact the heroine is not indebted to the mistress in more than just her name.

  Little is known about Ellen personally—her temperament, her manner, the flavor of her presence. What is certain, though, is that she had not only the youthful freshness and charms to captivate Dickens originally, but the intelligence and character to retain his affection beyond the first flush of his infatuation, and indeed until his death. In an 1867 letter, he had praised her “pride and self reliance which (mingled with the gentlest nature) has borne her, alone, through so much.” His tribute is echoed in Mr. Crisparkle’s praise of Helena:

  Every day and hour of her life since Edwin Drood’s disappearance, she has faced malignity and folly … as only a brave nature well directed can. So it will be with her to the end. Another and weaker kind of pride might sink brokenhearted, but never such a pride as hers: which knows no shrinking, and can get no mastery of her.

  As he gave these words to Helena’s admirer, Mr. Crisparkle, did Dickens have Ellen’s “pride and self-reliance” in mind? Very likely Helena’s courage, like her name, obliquely honors Ellen.

  Despite such glancing allusions, however, Helena resembles neither Ellen nor any other woman Dickens had ever known. For readers keen to identify the living originals of fictional characters, her character must prove a puzzle and an anomaly. She owes much to Ellen, certainly, but not in any straightforward likeness. Rather, like every Dickens heroine since Oliver Twist’s Rose Maylie three decades earlier, Helena embodies strong emotions and impulses within Dickens himself. If Rose had reflected his youthful adoration of a girl’s ethereal spirit, Helena reflects his mature love of a richly embodied feminine soul—a woman.

  Long after Dickens’s death, his daughter Katie claimed that should his missing letters to Ellen ever turn up, they would reveal “his heart and soul burning like jewels in a dark place.” In the absence of those jewel-like letters (not a single word Dickens wrote to Ellen is known to have survived), we have at any rate Helena Landless, his final and fiercest heroine, an embod
iment of his own passionate love.

  Helena seems destined for marriage to the robust, cheery, benevolent clergyman Mr. Crisparkle. Matched with such a worthy whiskered Victorian, could Helena have avoided tea-table respectability?—her gipsy shades blanched by his radiant virtues, her fiery passions quenched? Perhaps it was best for Helena, at least, that Dickens died before Drood’s final chapter married her to Crisparkle. Her unreconstructed character, dark and flaming, is a better monument to his love for Ellen Ternan.

  CHAPTER 10

  Four graves

  On June 8, 1870, after a full day’s work on The Mystery of Edwin Drood in the miniature chalet at Gad’s Hill, Dickens returned to the house, wrote several notes, and did up his accounts in the library. At about six he sat down to dinner with Georgina. They were the only family at home. Dickens looked alarmingly strange and distraught; Georgina asked if he were ill. Rising from the table, he staggered a few steps, then dropped to the floor. He was lifted to a sofa that was brought into the dining room; doctors and family were summoned. His daughters Mary and Katie arrived from London later that night and prepared themselves and others for the end. “My dear father has had a stroke of paralysis & lies insensible,” Mary briefly wrote a friend as she, Katie, and Georgina kept vigil.

  Dickens disliked farewells and his sudden collapse obviated the need for any. He remained unconscious until he died the following day. “We were most thankful” that he was insensible as he lay dying, Mary remarked afterwards. “His mind would have been troubled about so many things.”

  Just a few days before his stroke he had ordered “four boxes of his usual cigars”—probably two hundred cigars—making provision for many more after-dinner smokes. Yet by several accounts, he had a foreboding that the end was near and had already made some farewells. He knew himself to be unwell, and believed strongly in uncanny presentiments.

  The week before his death, he went to London for his regular day at the office of All the Year Round, Thursday, and had his usual Thursday lunch with George Dolby—but afterwards he said good-bye with unusual emotion. “Extending my hand to him across the table where he was writing,” Dolby recalled, “I was greatly shocked at a pained expression I detected in his features. His eyes … were becoming suffused with tears.” Dolby would never see him again.

  Dickens was at the office again the next day, Friday, and when his son Charles Junior, now his sub-editor, departed in the afternoon, his father seemed strangely abstracted—too dreamy even to register Charley’s departure. When Charley next saw him, he was unconscious and dying.

  After his Friday at the office, Dickens returned to Gad’s Hill, and the next day his daughter Katie visited. Among other things, she wanted to discuss the idea of going on stage professionally, for her chronically ill husband Charles Collins was unable to support them. On Saturday night, she and her father talked, the conversation wandering from Katie’s theatrical notion (which he discouraged) to other topics. He was gloomy, retrospective, and wistful. He wished he had been “a better father—a better man.” They talked through the night. When she left the next day to return to London, he was working in his chalet across the road. “My father disliked partings, so I … intended to go away without any farewell,” she recalled, but on impulse she hurried across to the chalet to say good-bye. She found him intent on his work. “On ordinary occasions he would just have raised his cheek for my kiss,… but on this morning, when he saw me, he pushed his chair from the writing-table, opened his arms, and took me into them.…” Three days later, she was summoned to his deathbed.

  And Ellen? Did he part from her too with a surge of anguish that final week—with some intimation of never-again? It would have been, perhaps, the most painful parting of all.

  Despite his lame foot, he spent many days with her during the month before his death. In May, for example, he put off a prospective caller with the excuse that “I have been much inconvenienced and pained this last week by a neuralgic attack in the foot.… The moment I can stand after such a seizure (which in the present case is this moment of writing), I have recourse to change of air”—a holiday of four or five days, he specified, and undoubtedly in the refreshing air of Peckham.

  Ordinarily, after his regular day at the office during the first week of June, he would have rejoined her at Windsor Lodge on Thursday afternoon and spent the night with her. The next day, he would have returned to London, or perhaps gone straight to Gad’s Hill—so that their final parting would have been on Friday morning, June 3. And perhaps it was. But the week before his death was not routine, and on that Thursday evening he was not at Windsor Lodge enjoying the warm June dusk with Ellen.

  Instead, he was on the other side of London, stage-managing a play at a large mansion, Cromwell House, in South Kensington. It was characteristic that he should be busily involved in a theatrical production in his final days.

  The occasion was an invitation-only charity performance of a comic drama, The Prima Donna. His daughters Mamie and Katie had roles in the play, and he too would have been acting but for the gouty foot, which was tormenting him. Nonetheless, he had earlier “directed all the rehearsals with a boy’s spirit,” one participant testified, and on the night of the performance “he was behind the scenes as prompter and stage manager, ringing all the bells and working all the lights, and went through the whole thing with infectious enjoyment.” Another friend, however, claimed to have heard that “after the play was over … he could not for a few moments be found, and was discovered … behind the scenes, seated in a corner in a dreamy state and abstracted. He thought, he said, he was at home.” Rousing himself from this reverie, did he take a hackney cab to Peckham and Ellen? Or was she herself in the drawing-room audience at Cromwell House?

  Much as he loved theatricals, it seems unlikely that he would have allowed The Prima Donna to supplant his weekly visit with her; but the last day for which there is almost certain evidence that he saw her was three days before the play and nine days before his fatal stroke. Very likely he saw her again before his death, but there is no hard evidence either way.

  He had intended to be in London that final week for his usual Thursday at the office and his usual evening in Peckham, to sit with Ellen in the garden of Windsor Lodge as the shadows lengthened in the lingering June evening.

  That Thursday evening, he died, however, at Gad’s Hill.

  After he had been stricken the day before, Ellen was invited to Gad’s Hill. She probably did not arrive in time to see him alive. By one report, her grief was “terrible.”

  Charles Dickens has died, suddenly.

  So one contemporary, Punch editor Shirley Brooks, headed his diary for June 10, the day after Dickens’s death. With its stark message and heavily inked mourning border, it was the most dramatic of Brooks’s 1870 diary entries. The night before, he had dreamed of talking “in the most affectionate manner” with a dead friend of Dickens, and the coincidence disturbed him: “I beg to assure myself … that I note merely a small—scarcely any ‘coincidence’—and have not the faintest idea that the death (unknown to me till next day) influenced my dream.” Digesting the news of Dickens’s death, the usually diligent Brooks was restless and perturbed all day—“disinclined to work—unsettled.”

  Meanwhile, hearing the news at his office in Boston, James T. Fields jotted a quick note to Annie at home:

  A telegram has just come from England to the Associated Press … saying that our dear dear friend Dickens died this morning.… I am terribly shocked by this blow, and know not how to believe the report. God help us all if it be true. A world without Dickens!

  Fields and Brooks were not alone in their shock. Dickens’s death “will be felt by millions as nothing less than a personal bereavement,” The Times of London declared. “Statesmen, men of science, philanthropists, the acknowledged benefactors of their race might pass away, and yet not leave the void which will be caused by the death of DICKENS.… We feel that we have lost one of the foremost Englishmen of the age.�
�

  The following week, Dickens was buried in Westminster Abbey. According to his friend and executor Forster, he would have preferred burial in a more modest location, “in the small graveyard under Rochester Castle wall, or in the little churches of Cobham or Shorne”—all near Gad’s Hill. But by failing to dictate any preference in his will, Dickens had left open, perhaps intentionally, the possibility of Westminster Abbey. The family first chose Shorne churchyard for burial and then accepted an offer of interment in Rochester Cathedral before consenting to “a general and very earnest desire” that he be buried in the Abbey.

  Characteristically, he had given careful thought to his funeral, and in his will he “emphatically” directed that he be buried “in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner” and “that no public announcement be made of the time or place of my burial.” In deference to his wish for a private service, his funeral was virtually clandestine. He had also put a strict limit on the number of mourners, stipulating that “at the utmost not more than three plain mourning coaches be employed.” “Our hands were … completely tied by the terms of the will,” his eldest son, Charles Junior, explained afterwards to Dickens’s “oldest friend,” Thomas Beard, apologizing for Beard’s omission from the funeral party. “We found it absolutely impossible, after anxious and careful consideration, to ask anyone but members of the family, and Forster, Ouvry, and your brother Frank, in their official capacities of executor, solicitor, and medical attendant.”