Charles Dickens: A Life

by Claire Tomalin

  What did Dickens hope for when he went to Doncaster to meet the Ternans? To revive some of the intense emotion of the Manchester performances, to make closer bonds of friendship with the family, and something more: he wanted Nelly, small, graceful and pretty as she was. She was eighteen years old. He thought he might have her, as his letters to Wills make clear. Hearing from Wills that young Jerrold had accused him of vanity in his charitable work, Dickens replied from Doncaster that he took no notice, adding, ‘I wish I was as good a boy in all things as I hope I have been, and mean to be, in this,’ and then, ‘But Lord bless you, the strongest parts of your present correspondent’s heart are made up of weaknesses. And he just come to be here at all (if you knew it) along of his Richard Wardour! Guess that riddle, Mr Wills! –’7 The words tell us he has an urgent need to confess to someone what is happening and what he is feeling, but finds it so difficult that he makes himself into a boy, talks of himself in the third person and uses a funny voice. A further letter to Wills tells more: ‘I am going to take the little – riddle – into the country this morning’ and ‘I think I shall leave here on Tuesday, but I cannot positively say. Collins and I part company tomorrow … I did intend to return home tomorrow, but have no idea now of doing that.’ He is expecting more from his little riddle. Reassuring Wills that he will nevertheless deliver his copy for Household Words as promised, he uses a favourite phrase, ‘So let the riddle and the riddler go their own wild way, and no harm come of it!’8

  It sounds as though he hoped to carry off Nelly Ternan, and with her mother’s consent. Collins, living an easy life with a mistress, could well have encouraged him. Dickens may also have thought of another friend, the actress Julia Fortescue, who for many years had a married lover, Lord Gardner, and how in 1856 he had heard at last of their being married and living ‘quietly and very happily’.9 But if Dickens believed he could set up a similar arrangement for himself he failed to make the right approach at Doncaster; and Mrs Ternan would have known more than he did about the drawbacks of Fortescue’s position: she had put on a brave face while Gardner lived almost entirely apart from her among his aristocratic sporting friends, lost her stage career and endured a lonely life, bringing up their children mostly on her own.

  Whatever took place at Doncaster, there was no seduction. He met and was impressed by the lively and ambitious eldest Ternan girl, Fanny, observed the closeness of the three sisters and declared his interest in helping all of them. Instantly, it seems, they became his dream family, the clever, pretty, poor, hard-working, fatherless sisters brought up in the theatre, where he was at ease and at home; and they could not fail to see the advantages of having such a friend as Dickens, or to feel his charm. At the same time Mrs Ternan could point out how young and pure her daughters were, how well brought up, how unsullied in spite of working in the theatre: she had seen to that. Friendship was established at any rate, and with that he returned to Tavistock House, excited and tormented. There, on 11 October, he instructed Catherine’s maid Anne to have a partition put up, making a separation between his wife’s bedroom and a dressing room where he would now sleep alone in a single bed. He was making clear to his wife – and inevitably to the rest of the household – that he was rejecting the proximity of her body in the marriage bed. It was his way of breaking a sexual habit that had been reduced to a humiliating form of relief, with no residue of tenderness. And now, in the ardour of his new love for Nelly, he wanted to be pure as a boy again.

  Pure as a boy was impossible. Instead, the darkest part of his character was summoned up. He was ready to be cruel to his defenceless wife. A raging anger broke out at any opposition to his wishes. He used lies as weapons of attack and defence. His displays of self-righteousness were shocking. He was determined to be in the right about everything. He must have known he was not, but he had lost his judgement. The spectacle of a man famous for his goodness and his attachment to domestic virtues suddenly losing his moral compass is dismaying.

  It would have been easier as well as pleasanter for him had Nelly fallen into his arms instead of requiring him to play out a charade of platonic friendship: a naughty girl could have made him happy. As it was, she remained unattainable, although elated by his attentions, and he yearned for her and suffered. And even as he was having his separate bedroom set up in October, he was writing to Buckstone, the theatre manager, expressing pleasure at his employing Nelly, urging him to give her more work (which Buckstone did, for two years) and enclosing an open cheque for £50, obviously intended for her.10 In the theatre world he could count on understanding and tolerance, and he was establishing himself in the role of patron. Then there was a letter to De La Rue, blackening Catherine’s character, saying she was unable to get on with her children, insanely jealous besides and incapable of happiness.11 The atmosphere at Tavistock House was grim for everyone, and on another October night, unable to bear it, he walked from there to Gad’s Hill, a good thirty miles. He got right away when he could, in December reading in the old way in Birmingham, Coventry and Chatham.

  In December he also sent Henry, eight years old, to join his elder brothers at the school in Boulogne, where they were to remain over Christmas.12 With four boys out of the way, five-year-old Plorn was the only child at home with his parents, his aunt Georgy, his big sisters and Charley. Miss Coutts and Mrs Brown were invited early in December to hear a reading of the Christmas story Dickens had written for Household Words with Collins, The Perils of Certain English Prisoners. It was meant as a tribute to the spirit of English soldiers and women who had suffered in the Mutiny in India, but set in the Caribbean and made into an encounter with pirates. Part boys’ adventure story and part sentimental business about a common soldier who falls in love with the sister of an officer, it is poor stuff. There were no Christmas parties and no celebration of Charley’s twenty-first birthday in January.

  You want to avert your eyes from a good deal of what happened during the next year, 1858. His daughter Katey said, decades later, that there was misery at home and that he behaved like a madman, although at the time she found it impossible to protest. She saw her mother humiliated, ordered to call on the Ternan family at Park Cottage, and urged her to refuse, to no effect, and Catherine went.13 There is another story of an engraved bracelet Dickens had made for Nelly being wrongly delivered to Catherine. Meanwhile he was absorbed in romantic dreams. He wrote semi-confessional letters to admiring women friends – one to Lady Duff Gordon, saying, ‘What am I doing? Tearing myself – My usual occupation, at most times … Nothing would satisfy me at this present writing, but the having to go up a tremendous mountain, magic spell in one hand and sword in the other, to find the girl of my heart (whom I never did find) surrounded by fifty Dragons – kill them all – and bear her off, triumphant. I might finish the story in the usual way, by settling down and living happily ever afterwards – Perhaps; I am not sure even of that.’ Something similar went to Mrs Watson, about wanting to rescue a princess he adores and wishing he had been born in the days of Ogres and Dragon-guarded Castles; and to her he also boasted of his night walk to Gad’s, ‘my celebrated feat’, saying ‘I had been very much put-out; and thought, “After all, it would be better to be up and doing something, than lying here.”’14

  His inner turmoil did not keep him from all good works, and in February he raised money for the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital with a speech so powerful that a building fund was started, for which he also did a reading in April. In March he made his last known visit to the Home in Shepherd’s Bush, went to Edinburgh to read and argued with Forster as to whether he should do paid public readings. Forster saw public performance as a lesser pursuit than writing, and also questioned whether it was quite gentlemanly. Dickens had no fears on either count, and insisted that many people already believed he was paid for his charitable readings. In any case, he had made up his mind. He told Collins that ‘The Doncaster unhappiness remains so strong upon me that I can’t write, and (waking!) can’t rest, one minute. I
have never known a moment’s peace or content since the last night of The Frozen Deep. I do suppose that there never was a man so seized and rended by one Spirit,’ and he believed that by doing public readings, ‘the mere physical effort and change … would be good, as another means of bearing it’.15 By the Doncaster unhappiness he meant his failure to seduce Nelly, and when he told Forster his mind was made up to do the readings, he reverted to the domestic situation, telling him, ‘It is all despairingly over … A dismal failure has to be borne, and there an end.’16 After this he asked Forster to act for him in negotiations with Catherine over a legal separation. He knew he could rely on him, and that whatever Forster felt about the readings, or about the marriage, nothing could change his love for Dickens or his willingness to serve him.

  The paid readings began on 29 April, at St Martin’s Hall, with The Cricket on the Hearth, and Dickens was greeted ‘with a roar of cheering which might have been heard at Charing Cross’.17 He began by saying he saw readings as a way of strengthening what he felt to be almost a personal friendship with his readers, and with that he was cheered again, and so it went on; and it was reported that hundreds had been turned away from the box office. He was after all the nation’s entertainer and known as the friend of the people. On 1 May he spoke briefly at the Royal Academy banquet, on 6 May he gave a second reading, and on 8 May he spoke for the Artists’ Benevolent Fund. On 9 May he wrote to Miss Coutts to tell her that he and Catherine were virtually separated, that the marriage had been ‘for years and years as miserable a one as ever was made’, and that he had moved out of Tavistock House into his office rooms ‘to leave her Mother free to do what she can at home, towards the getting of her away to some happier mode of existence if possible’. He said the children did not love her, and that her sister Georgina had observed this estrangement, as had her dead sister Mary, so many years ago. The letter ends with further accusations against Catherine of ‘weaknesses and jealousies’, adding that ‘her mind has, at times, been certainly confused besides.’18

  On Monday, 10 May, Dickens talked to Charley about the impending separation. Charley was taken by surprise and, not wanting to argue face to face – he must have remembered the arguments about his own future at Eton – he chose to write from his office at Barings to say that he had decided, clearly against his father’s wishes, to live with his mother. He explained that it was not that he did not love his father but that he felt it his duty to be with her. Dickens later told others that he had suggested this plan, but Charley’s letter makes it plain that it was not so. It was Charley’s own idea, and his finest hour, making him a credit to Eton and to Miss Coutts. Later in the year, when his father suggested they might take a holiday in Ireland together, Charley did not take up the offer.

  On this same 10 May, Georgina left for Gad’s Hill, having made clear to her sister that she did not intend to support her in any way. She would have taken Plorn with her, and it is likely that Mamie and Katey went too. Georgy was prudently removing herself from the field of battle, and from the rest of her own family, who could be expected to be shocked by her preference for staying with her sister’s unkind husband. They were indeed so outraged that they accused her of sexually supplanting Catherine, which was not the case.19 She loved Dickens, whose petted companion she had been for half her life, and was also shrewd enough to see that she would be better off staying with him than leaving for a dull and impecunious life as an unmarried daughter living with her parents. For his part, he loved her for her devotion to him, and was intensely grateful to her for taking his side and continuing to act as housekeeper. Dickens announced that his eldest daughter, Mary, would be in charge of his domestic arrangements, but it was Georgy – Miss Hogarth – who ran things.

  On 19 May, Catherine wrote to Miss Coutts as she prepared to leave Tavistock House, empty of all her children but Charley, and to go with her mother: ‘I have now – God help me – only one course to pursue. One day though not now I may be able to tell you how hardly I have been used.’20 Hers was a very quiet statement. Miss Coutts sent a message to Dickens asking him to call. Instead he wrote by return, ‘How far I love and honour you, you know in part, though you can never fully know. But nothing on earth – no, not even you, can move me from the resolution I have taken.’ He added, ‘If you have seen Mrs Dickens in company with her wicked mother, I cannot enter – no, not even with you – upon any question that was discussed in that woman’s presence.’21 The wickedness of Mrs Hogarth lay in her alleging that the reason for the separation was Dickens’s involvement with Nelly Ternan, and in casting doubt on Georgy’s virtue for good measure.

  Mark Lemon, as a close family friend, had agreed to act for Catherine, and, after another reading by Dickens on 20 May, negotiations began. Forster, Dickens and his lawyer Frederic Ouvry, who had taken over most of his legal business in 1856, reached a preliminary agreement with Lemon that Catherine should have £400 a year and a carriage.22 Dickens moved back into Tavistock House, where he composed a letter about the separation – it is discussed below – which he sent to his manager Arthur Smith, authorizing him to show it ‘to anyone who wishes to do me right’. Smith and his brother Albert were both at the heart of the theatrical world, good friends who could be relied on to support and if necessary protect Dickens. After another reading Dickens wrote to Ouvry about his mother-in-law and sister-in-law Helen, accusing them of ‘smashing slanders’ against him, but exonerating Catherine herself: ‘She has a great tenderness for me, and I sincerely believe would be glad to show it. I would not therefore add to her pain by a hair’s breadth.’23

  On 27 May his Coutts account shows a payment of four guineas to ‘N’. By now gossip was circulating round London. Annie Thackeray wrote to a friend, ‘Papa says the story is that Charley met his Father & Miss whatever the actress’ name out walking on Hampstead Heath. But I dont believe a word of the scandal.’24 And when Thackeray heard talk at the Garrick that Dickens was having an affair with Georgina he contradicted it, saying it was with an actress. Dickens wrote to him to deny everything. The two men fell out further over another dispute at the Garrick Club, where Dickens’s brash young friend Edmund Yates had insulted Thackeray, and the friendship between the two great novelists came to an end. The news of Dickens’s separation reached as far as Germany, where Marian Evans (George Eliot) and George Henry Lewes heard it, and perhaps disapproved less than others, being themselves an adulterous couple.

  More readings – with packed audiences – and on 1 June Dickens spoke for the Playground and General Recreation Society. After this he decided to publish a ‘Personal’ statement in the press. Forster did his best to get him to give up such a bad idea, but he was stubborn, even sending a copy of the statement to Catherine with a note saying he hoped all unkindness was over between them. The statement was cloudy, alluding to domestic troubles of long standing and now dealt with by an amicable arrangement, and to the wicked spreading of abominably false rumours involving ‘innocent persons dear to my heart’. It must have been incomprehensible to the public in general, and although The Times printed it, and Dickens himself put it into Household Words, Punch refused it. This was enough to make Dickens break furiously with the proprietors of Punch, who were also his publishers, Bradbury and Evans, and to quarrel with its editor, his old and dear friend and fellow actor in so many theatricals, Mark Lemon.25

  The quarrel was so fierce on his side that he insisted on his older children breaking off their long-established friendships with the Lemon and Evans children. Mamie’s and Katey’s friendships with Annie and Minnie Thackeray also became difficult, and even after Dickens had forced Mrs Hogarth and her daughter Helen to sign reluctant retractions of what they had said about his relations with Ternan – and with Georgina – he decreed that the children should not speak to their grandmother or aunt again. A letter to Charley warned him that he forbade them ‘to utter one word to their grandmother or to Helen Hogarth. If they are ever brought into the presence of either of these two, I charge th
em immediately to leave their mother’s house and come back to me.’26

  On 8 June he wrote to Yates, from Gad’s, where he had retreated: ‘If you could know how much I have felt within this last month, and what a sense of Wrong has been upon me, and what a strain and struggle I have lived under, you would see that my heart is so jagged and rent and out of shape, that it does not this day leave me hand enough to shape these words.’27 On 9 June the statement appeared in Household Words, on 10 June he read ‘Little Dombey’, his tightly condensed version of the life of Paul Dombey, to a weeping and cheering audience. On 12 July he resigned from the committee of the Garrick Club, and at the beginning of August set off on a provincial tour. Meanwhile Arthur Smith had given a copy of the letter Dickens had entrusted him with to the London correspondent of the New York Tribune, and on 16 August it appeared in print in New York, and was soon copied in the English papers. Harsher than the letter published in The Times, it presented the marriage as having been unhappy for many years, and Georgina Hogarth as responsible for long preventing a separation by her care for the children and her goodness. ‘She has remonstrated, reasoned, suffered and toiled, again and again to prevent a separation between Mrs Dickens and me.’ It went on to say Mrs Dickens herself had often suggested a separation, ‘that her always increasing estrangement made a mental disorder under which she sometimes labours – more, that she felt herself unfit for the life she had to lead as my wife and that she would be better far away.’ These remarks sound like ones made during a quarrel, when Catherine can well be imagined saying something along the lines of ‘If things are so bad …’ or ‘If you dislike me so much – it might be better if we were to separate.’ They are the sort of words a miserable wife might use, hoping to bring her husband to treat her more kindly. The letter goes on to boast of Dickens’s generosity in making the terms of the separation and adds a further testimony to Georgina, named as having ‘a higher claim on his affection, respect and gratitude than anybody in the world’. Then it speaks of how ‘Two wicked persons who should have spoken very differently of me … have … coupled with this separation the name of a young lady for whom I have a great attachment and regard. I will not repeat her name – I honour it too much. Upon my soul and honour, there is not on this earth a more virtuous and spotless creature than this young lady. I know her to be as innocent and pure, and as good as my own dear daughters.’ This was of course Nelly. Finally, he says his children ‘are perfectly certain that I would not deceive them, and the confidence among us is without fear’.28