Charles Dickens: A Life

by Claire Tomalin

  Days after the wedding he heard of the serious illness of his one respectable and hard-working brother, Alfred, travelled north to be with him and arrived to find he had died, like their sister Fanny, of tuberculosis of the lung. His widow, Helen, left with five young children, became his responsibility, and he brought them first to Gad’s, then found them a nearby farmhouse before settling them in a house in London and ensuring that the boys got an education. At the same time he was doing his best for his mother, who had reached ‘the strangest state of mind from senile decay … her desire to be got up in sables like a female Hamlet, illumines the dreary scene with a ghastly absurdity that is the chief relief I can find in it.’35 At least he was able to give her into the care of Helen, installing them all in a house together. He was now maintaining three households of women in North London: his wife in Gloucester Crescent, the Ternans, a few streets south in Houghton Place, and his mother in Grafton Terrace, Kentish Town, with Helen and her children. The sale of the lease of Tavistock House for 2,000 guineas in 1860 gave him some extra funds, and he took a town house for the season each year, to please Mamie and Georgina. In 1861 it was at Hanover Terrace, Regent’s Park, within walking distance of all the other North London houses in which his dependants lived. Furniture was moved from Tavistock House to Gad’s and to Wellington Street, where Dickens enjoyed showing off his ‘five very good rooms’ to friends who dined with him there; and where he had bedrooms for Georgy and Mamie should they ever need them.

  In September 1860 he performed a ritual act, ridding himself of the past by burning thousands of letters accumulated over the years on a bonfire at Gad’s Hill. His appointed biographer, Forster, was not consulted.36 Eleven-year-old Henry Dickens, who lent a hand with the bonfire, remembered roasting onions in the hot ashes.37 It was a good summer for him because he persuaded his father to let him leave the school in Boulogne and go to Rochester Grammar School instead.

  Dickens’s amusement for October was the sensational Road-Hill House murder in Somerset, much reported in the press, concerning a large and apparently respectable family and the discovery of the three-year-old son dead, suffocated and stabbed, in an outside privy. He had no doubt the murder had been committed by the child’s nursemaid and his father together, after the child woke up and found them in bed together, at their ‘blissful proceedings’ as Dickens put it, and they feared he would tell his mother. He relished the idea of such scandalous goings-on, damaging as they were to the sacred image of middle-class domestic respectability: for a moment he could look at the world with the cynicism of a Quilp or a Jaggers. But, although his belief that the father of the family was the murderer delighted him, it was not taken up by the prosecution.38

  His chief worry in the autumn was the falling circulation of All the Year Round, and it was this that decided him to change his plans for Great Expectations and make it a shorter book suitable for division into weekly parts, in the hope of boosting sales of the magazine. It started on 1 December 1860, and in the same month Chapman & Hall published the first volume of his Uncommercial Traveller pieces, which sold out and reprinted twice. The winter of 1860/61 was the coldest for many years, and this was when Dickens was unwell. He returned to London on Boxing Day, leaving Georgina to cope at Gad’s while he settled at Wellington Street, seeing his doctor, going out with Collins and to theatres in the evening, and writing. As the weather improved he took his long walks again, discovering the new Millbank Road beside the river, with factories and railway work along it, and the ‘strangest beginnings and ends of wealthy streets pushing themselves into the very Thames. When I was a rower on that river it was all broken ground and ditch, with here and there a public house or two, and old mill, and a tall chimney.’39 He enjoyed contrasting the old urban landscape with the new, and looking back to youthful jaunts and river outings on a very different river.

  Charley arrived home from China in February 1861, having seen Walter in Calcutta, and went to his mother’s just as Dickens moved to the Hanover Terrace house rented for the season. As well as being immersed in writing Great Expectations, he was preparing six readings to be given in London in March and April; and when he had done them, to great applause, and finished writing his book, he tried to be lazy at Gad’s. His sons Frank and Alfred both remembered rowing him on the Medway from Rochester to Maidstone, Dickens acting as cox, teasing and laughing with them, a river trip that must have given them a rare moment of shared enjoyment; and there were other expeditions on the Thames.40 But he found that the younger boys at home for the holidays disturbed him, and he had new readings, from Copperfield and Nickleby, to prepare for an autumn tour. Then the plans for the tour were thrown askew by the death of his manager Arthur Smith, and after that his brother-in-law and old friend Henry Austin also died, leaving his sister Letitia another widow dependant on him. He invited her to Gad’s, paid for the funeral, offered her money and set about vigorously applying for a pension for her through Lord Shaftesbury, citing the services Austin had given to public health. It took many letters and much insistence before he succeeded.

  The last family event of 1861 was Charley’s wedding. The bride, Bessie Evans, daughter of Dickens’s onetime publisher, had been his sweetheart from childhood, and there was nothing surprising about the marriage, but Dickens chose to be outraged, having cast Evans into outer darkness. He tried to stop friends from attending the wedding, or entering the Evans house; and he blamed Catherine, who was of course at the wedding, and was indeed fond of the bride. He spoke ill of Bessie and warned Charley against going into partnership with his brother-in-law, young Frederick Evans, in a paper-making company, advice Charley, understandably enough, chose to ignore. His father was in any case embarked on a colossal reading tour, and on the day of the wedding he was somewhere between Brighton and Newcastle-on-Tyne and on his way to Scotland, impersonating Mr Micawber and Wackford Squeers in front of enraptured audiences. His Squeers, according to one observer, ‘impresses us with the belief that he enjoys being a brute and is not an actor being brutal’.41

  In 1862 the Russian novelist Dostoevsky, an admirer of Dickens’s work – he had read Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield in prison – visited him at Wellington Street. Years later he wrote in a letter to a friend a remarkable account of what Dickens said in the course of their conversation about writing. Dostoevsky introduced Dickens’s words with his own:

  The person he [the writer] sees most of, most often, actually every day, is himself. When it comes to a question of why a man does something else, it’s the author’s own actions which make him understand, or fail to understand, the sources of human action. Dickens told me the same thing when I met him at the office of his magazine … in 1862. He told me that all the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge, are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. Only two people? I asked.42

  This is an amazing report, and if Dostoevsky remembered correctly it must be Dickens’s most profound statement about his inner life and his awareness of his own cruelty and bad behaviour. It is as though with Dostoevsky he could drop the appearance of perfect virtue he felt he had to keep up before the English public. It also suggests that he was aware of drawing his evil characters from a part of himself that he disapproved of and yet could not control. Dostoevsky’s Dickens reminds us of Eleanor Picken’s, now one sort of man, now another, the mood-swinging, the charm turning to aggression, the fun that gets out of hand.

  Whatever Dickens felt about how he ought to feel, he was guided by no one but himself at this time. What little
can be gleaned about his relations with the Ternans is that in September 1859 he wrote to his friend Régnier at the Comédie-Française to tell him that Fanny Ternan, ‘uncommonly clever and accomplished … as good and diligent as she is spirituelle’, would be in Paris with her mother in October.43 This was followed up by cheques for £50 to Mrs F. E. Ternan in Paris in October, and ‘£50 E. Ternan’s Bill’, so perhaps Nelly went to Paris to join her mother and sister. If Fanny had hoped to find work in Paris she was disappointed, but on her return she was engaged by the Eastern Opera House in the Mile End Road in London, and later joined the London Grand Opera Company, touring with them as Prima Donna. Maria was at the Lyceum acting with Madame Céleste and Mrs Keeley, both friends of Dickens, and Dickens went to see her perform more than once, but in February 1861 the Lyceum closed. The Census of April 1861 showed all the Ternans at Houghton Place with a seventeen-year-old servant, Jane, Mrs Ternan described as an ‘annuitant’, Fanny (25) a vocalist, Maria (23) an actress, and Ellen (22) without occupation.

  Nelly’s character remains clouded. A petted youngest daughter and little sister, she was now set apart, free of any necessity to earn her own living, but facing decisions that would determine her future. The words Dickens gave the adult Pip in Great Expectations to describe his feelings for Estella insisted that ‘I did not … invest her with any attributes save those she possessed.’44 If Dickens felt himself to be equally clear-sighted about Nelly’s motivation in their dealings, he also, like Pip, appears to have ‘loved her simply because I found her irresistible’. He makes Pip tell Estella, ‘You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read … You have been the graceful embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with … to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain a part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil.’45 These are memorable statements of obsessive love.

  In June 1861 Maria was acting at Rochester with the Windsor Strollers and in July she joined Fanny in the north, taking contralto parts with the touring opera company. In September Dickens wrote to Webster, manager of the Adelphi, asking him to give work to Maria and mentioning her mother at Houghton Place, but Webster did not oblige, and in December Maria was in Rochester again. It was depressing for Dickens, who tried so hard to help them, and still more for Fanny and Maria, both gifted and ready to take on anything, but unable to break through to real success. Perhaps they were not quite good enough. Perhaps their association with Dickens proved to be a disservice. While they struggled on, Nelly’s life took a dramatic new direction.

  22

  The Bebelle Life

  1862–1865

  Over the next three years Dickens divided his life between England and France, crossing the Channel at least sixty-eight times, at a rough reckoning, and only occasionally giving a reason for his journey. He had his fiftieth birthday in February 1862. Ten years earlier, reaching forty, he had spent 1852 writing Bleak House, and his youngest child had been born. In 1862 he wrote little more than a very short story for the Christmas number of his magazine. It was called ‘His Boots’, and it was about an Englishman, a middle-aged grandfather (as Dickens was), with a temper and unforgiving to those who cross him, who goes to France, stays in a northern garrison town, interests himself in an illegitimate and virtually abandoned baby girl known as Bebelle, and ultimately takes her back to England as his adopted child. The story is well told, tender and touching, but it is not a major piece. Clearly Dickens had other things than writing on his mind in 1862.

  One was the reading tour he had begun in the autumn of 1861, which had been interrupted by the death of Prince Albert in mid-December. He took it up again in Birmingham on 30 December and continued through January. ‘Success attends me everywhere, Thank God,’ he wrote to his sister Letitia, ‘and the great crowds I see every night all seem to regard me with affection as a personal friend.’1 So he pursued a triumphant way through Leamington, Cheltenham, Plymouth, Torquay and Exeter, stopping in Cheltenham with the Macreadys – he aged and infirm, but with a new and blooming young wife visibly preparing to present him with another child, and indeed she bore him a stout son in May. Then he returned north for what he described as an ‘absolutely dazzling’ close to the tour at Manchester and Liverpool.2

  Personal success was one thing, family life another, and two letters to Georgina in January show his exasperation, first with Alfred’s widow, Helen, bothering him at his office – would Georgy make it clear to her that she must negotiate with her, or with Mamie? – and then with Georgy herself, for sewing the wrong buttons on his coloured shirts. You hear the voice of a man who expects to be looked after efficiently and get a glimpse of his dictatorial mode.3 Another thing he disliked was having to exchange Gad’s for the ‘nastiest little house in London’ in order to give Georgy and Mamie their promised ‘season’.4 It was in Hyde Park Gate in Kensington, on the wrong side of the park for Dickens, and he told Forster it stifled and darkened his powers of invention, but he was stuck there until the end of May. He made a point of spending two days and nights of every week at Wellington Street.

  There were more readings in London through March and April, still mostly Copperfield and Nickleby, and he was able to boast to Forster of the money he was earning: ‘Think of £190 a night!’5 There was All the Year Round to occupy him, and much of his correspondence relates to articles commissioned and magazine business discussed with Wills. In other letters there are terse comments on public affairs. He refused to run anything about the proposed memorial to Prince Albert in his magazine, regarding him as a perfectly commonplace man and his son, the Prince of Wales, as ‘a poor dull idle fellow’.6 And he was cynical about the attitude of the Northern states to slavery in the American Civil War, which was bringing depression to England. It was also postponing any possibility of an American tour.

  In April he went to see Charles Fechter, an actor who had made his career in France and was now putting on spectacular performances in London, as a Hamlet unlike any seen before, and as Ruy Blas in Victor Hugo’s play, both admired by Dickens. Edmund Yates was working with Fechter’s company, and Dickens wrote to Yates:

  I wish Fechter would take among his young ladies, Miss Maria Ternan. Not because I have a great friendship for her and know her to be one of the best and bravest of little spirits and most virtuous of girls (for that would have nothing to do with it), but because I have acted with her, and believe her to have more aptitude in a minute than all the other people of her standing on the stage in a month. A lady besides, and pretty, and of a good figure, and always painstaking and perfect to the letter. Also (but this has never had a chance) a wonderful mimic. Whatever he showed her, she would do. When I first knew her, I looked her in the eyes one morning in Manchester, and she took the whole Frozen Deep out of one look and six words.7

  Few recommendations come better than this, although it did Maria no good, as Fechter’s company was about to be disbanded. But it tells us what Dickens saw in her – her courage, her professional quickness and conscientiousness, her good looks and her perfectly ladylike presence – and it says something about how Mrs Ternan had brought up her daughters, to pass as ladies even though they were working women. Only now Nelly was no longer a working woman.

  There is no certainty about where she was or what she was doing in 1862, 1863, 1864 and until June 1865, when she appears on a train carrying passengers from the cross-Channel boat from France in which she was travelling with Dickens and her mother. Otherwise it is only from Dickens’s letters that it is possible to conjecture that she was in France. But since we know he was her protector and closely concerned with her welfare, it is not a very bold assumption to make, given how much can be gleaned from his letters. Georgina’s role has something to tell us too, because it was at the time he made two trips to France in the summer of 1862 that she declared herself ill. A healthy 34-year-old, she suddenly seemed to be going into a decline, unable to run the house or perfor
m her usual duties. Dickens was anxious enough to call in two doctors, Frank Beard and Dr Elliotson, and she was diagnosed as having ‘degeneration of the heart’ and said to be in need of rest. He then offered to take her, with Mamie, to Paris for two months – only not until mid-October. This promise of a treat and a rest was enough to start her recovery, although she still spoke at times of feeling weak and of pains in the left breast. Once comfortably installed in Paris, and Dickens and Mamie in attendance, her heart regenerated itself spontaneously, and by the end of the two-month visit she was ‘almost quite well’. Back at Gad’s in 1863 she soon resumed her normal life. In fact she suffered no further illnesses and lived to be ninety. Degeneration of the heart had clearly been a misdiagnosis, and her biographer suggests politely that there may have been a psychosomatic element to her illness in 1862.8 It had certainly frightened Dickens, which was no doubt what was intended.

  There could have been a reason for Georgina putting on this performance. She may have feared that Dickens was going to make a further readjustment to his life – even perhaps to set up house with Nelly Ternan and to father more children – which would leave her without her pre-eminent place as his housekeeper, helper and best friend. Macready had after all just become a father again, in his sixties, with his new young wife. Georgina needed to be reassured, and Dickens evidently succeeded in reassuring her, by showing he was ready to take her to Paris, as in the old days, and by explaining the situation he was in regarding Nelly, and to some degree including her in it. It would help to explain Georgina’s behaviour, now and later. There is no proof that it was Nelly who took Dickens to France the summer of 1862, or that the reason for her being in France was that she was pregnant, but it would make sense of Georgina’s behaviour.