Charles Dickens: A Life

by Claire Tomalin

  Whatever mixture of watchdog and friendship there was in Georgina, she became genuinely and enduringly attached to Nelly and her children. In the summer of 1882, when she was holidaying in Boulogne with her nephew Henry’s family, Nelly was also there with three-year-old Geoffrey, and he played on the sands with little Enid, Hal, Gerald and Olive Dickens. Nelly wrote their names into her ‘Charles Dickens Birthday Book’, and Mrs Henry Dickens later said she had been introduced to Mrs Robinson by Georgina.16

  Henry had married in 1878 and he prospered as a lawyer. Also in 1878 Charley fell ill, worn out with the effort of keeping up his income and commuting between Kent and London. He had never learnt to be the businessman his father had tried so hard to make him, and he had to sell Gad’s Hill, move into the office in Wellington Street and farm out six of the seven children among relatives. In 1879 Catherine Dickens died. During her last illness she gave her carefully stored letters from Dickens to Katey, asking that they should be preserved as evidence that he had once loved her. Katey kept them for twenty years before deciding to hand them over to the British Museum in 1899, with an embargo on their being shown before 1925.

  In the year of Catherine’s death the first of a four-volume edition of Dickens’s letters, collected and edited by Georgina and Mamie, was published. Georgina wrote a biographical introduction to each year’s letters without mentioning the separation between Dickens and Catherine or the turmoil and complications in his life. It was an achievement to put the letters together, and another kind of achievement to simplify the story behind them. Like Forster’s biography, the letters were widely reviewed, read and admired. The last volume came out in 1882. Mamie’s devotion to her father’s memory was as great as her aunt’s. Towards the end of her life she wrote, ‘My love for my father has never been touched or approached by any other love. I hold him in my heart of hearts as a man apart from all other men, as one apart from all other beings.’17 This did not keep her close to the rest of the family. By the 1880s Georgina decided she preferred to live alone, Mamie being so erratic and inconsiderate. Mamie moved to Manchester, where she attached herself to a clergyman and his wife, doing good works and, Georgina feared, drinking too much. Georgina and Katey disapproved of the clergyman and made occasional trips north to keep an eye on Mamie.18

  Wills died in 1880. He wrote no memoir but he talked of the past with family and friends, and left letters from Dickens containing many references to Nelly. They were carefully gone through before being published in 1912, some wholly rejected, others cut or inked over.19 Wills was friendly with Eliza Lynn Linton, who had been a contributor to the magazines and known Dickens well, and Wills may have been partly responsible for remarks in her memoirs, in which she wrote of Dickens having a secret history, of loving ‘deeply, passionately, madly’ and being ‘tricked and betrayed’ by someone ‘cleverer, more astute, less straight than himself’. A straightforward woman herself, although reduced here to dropping hints, she said further that ‘no one could move him; and his nearest and dearest friends were as unwilling to face as they were unable to deflect the passionate pride which suffered neither counsel nor rebuke.’20 A different view of Dickens was given by Dolby in his charming Charles Dickens as I Knew Him of 1885, which entirely omitted his friendship with Madame, and indeed her existence. Leaving out the women in Dickens’s life made appreciation easier. In 1887 Thomas Trollope published his memoirs, with no mention of his own wife’s stage career or of his sister-in-law Nelly, but with a glowing tribute to Dickens: ‘Of the general charm of his manner I despair of giving any idea to those who have not seen or known him … His laugh was brimful of enjoyment … He was a hearty man, a large-hearted man that is to say. He was perhaps the largest-hearted man I ever knew.’21

  Charley went to America in October 1887 and had a success giving his father’s readings from Pickwick and ‘Dr Marigold’. ‘I don’t profess to like the idea of Charley’s reading his Father’s books, and I cannot believe it is anything remarkable,’ wrote Georgina to Annie Fields.22 On returning to England he gave up editing All the Year Round, went to work for the publishing house of Macmillan and served them well, writing biographical introductions to new editions of his father’s works. In 1893 he closed down All the Year Round, which had run for thirty-five years. He wrote various affectionate reminiscences of his father, describing his eager restless energy, his enjoyment of singing and dancing, his skill as an actor, his liking for toasted cheese at the end of a meal, how he played games as though his life depended on his success, how comfortable he made Gad’s Hill, and how he refused to allow advancing age to limit his activities.

  The 1880s saw the deaths of Carlyle, a very ancient Macready and Wilkie Collins, who was looked after by Frank Beard following a stroke; and early in the 1890s the two Beard brothers, Tom and Frank, both died. The ranks of those who had known Dickens were thinning, and none of these men left any formal account of him, although he appears in Macready’s diaries, published in 1912, and Carlyle had earlier expressed his love for ‘the good, the gentle, high-gifted, ever-friendly, noble Dickens – every inch of him an Honest Man’.23

  For some years the Robinsons’ school in Margate flourished. Anthony Trollope came to give the prizes one year, and Georgina Hogarth another, alongside a local clergyman, William Benham. Benham, a middle-aged man with literary and theatrical tastes and a great love for the work of Dickens, had exchanged brief letters with him in 1866, and also got himself into the Abbey for the funeral. He was active in many spheres: chairman of the Margate School Board, raiser of money for charities, restorer of the church, lecturer on church history as well as on Dickens, regular preacher at Canterbury Cathedral and friend of the Archbishop. Benham and Mrs Robinson worked together to raise money for good causes, giving readings and putting on concerts. This led to private conversations in which he pressed her on her friendship with Dickens, and somehow persuaded her to reveal part of the truth. According to Benham she said Dickens had set her up in the house in Ampthill Square and visited her two or three times a week, that she came to feel remorse about the relationship, and that her remorse had made them both unhappy. If this was all she said, it was a sharply abbreviated account of their twelve years. She said too that she now loathed the thought of their intimacy, which was no doubt what was expected of a woman telling her priest about an unsanctified sexual relationship.

  In 1886 George Robinson became ill or had a breakdown – it is hard not to think this was connected with Nelly’s indiscretions – and the school was given up. The family moved into lodgings in London, where he did some teaching, and the children were sent to boarding school. They were living in Sutherland Avenue in Maida Vale in 1892 when Thomas Trollope died, and after this Nelly helped her sister Fanny write a life of his mother, the earlier Frances Trollope, and also translated a travel book about Zermatt into English; they were both well done.24 Money was short, and in the mid-1890s the Robinsons moved to the country, near Reading (in 1897 she read A Christmas Carol in aid of poor relief at Tilehurst village hall). The next year Geoffrey, who had been prepared for the Army, got his commission and was posted to Malta. Later he served in Nigeria and Ireland.

  In 1893 Dickens’s last remaining sibling, Letitia Austin, died, aged eighty-four, a quiet and amiable old lady, leaving no written record of herself or her brother. Also in 1893 Benham met Thomas Wright, an established writer, who had announced he was doing research for a new biography of Dickens, and told him what he had gleaned from Nelly. Hearing of Wright’s intentions, Sala wrote an article in the Manchester Evening News objecting, on the grounds that Forster’s life said all that was needed except for ‘circumstances connected with the later years of the illustrious novelist which should not and must not be revealed for fifty years to come at the very least’.25 Georgina wrote to Wright asking him not to proceed with his life of Dickens. A collector of Dickens material, W. R. Hughes, told Wright he had been offered Dickens’s letters to Nelly by a private vendor and refused to buy them, saying th
ey could not have been acquired honestly and advising the vendor to burn them.26 The letters were much talked about but nobody appears to have seen them. In 1895 Sala’s autobiography mentioned the ‘secret’ and said that hardly anyone living knew of it now that Collins and Yates were dead. He should have known he was wrong. In 1897 Katey Perugini, who had been corresponding with Bernard Shaw about her mother’s letters, wrote of other letters ‘in which the real man is revealed, minus his Sunday clothes and all shams, and with his heart and soul burning like jewels in a dark place! I say there may be such letters and they may be one day given to the world’ – although she had been assured that they had been burnt.27 Katey doubted they had, but since the letters have never been found they must have been destroyed: bad for us, because his letters to Nelly would have explained a good many things and given us a clearer view of him, but Dickens would have approved. If he had had his way, no one would have seen any of his letters.

  Nelly could have done with the money. All three Ternan sisters grew poorer as they aged. Fanny Trollope published her last novel in 1892, the year her husband died, leaving very little. Maria, who had long since left her husband and taken up an adventurous life as a painter, writer and foreign correspondent in Italy, retired to England in 1898, and by 1900 she was living with Fanny in Southsea, a district of Portsmouth. In 1901 Nelly sold the Houghton Place house in Ampthill Square that Dickens had given her, over Fanny’s protests. Maria died in 1904, nursed by Fanny to the end, of cancer, which would kill both her sisters. The Robinsons moved to Southsea to be close to Fanny and kept their heads just above water by taking private pupils. Nelly was operated on for cancer in 1907 and recovered. Georgina Hogarth was a faithful correspondent, writing to Nelly and to her daughter Gladys.

  Money was also short with most of Dickens’s children now. Income from his books had been divided among them but it dried up as they came out of copyright.28 Katey and Carlo Perugini depended mostly on what they could earn by selling their pictures, and there were years when it was very little. In 1896 Charley and Mamie both died in their fifties, and Charley’s widow was left penniless, with five unmarried daughters; her son had been disowned by the family, allegedly for marrying a bar maid called Ella Dare, and was never mentioned again, although he lived until 1923. Bessie Dickens was given a Civil List pension of £100 a year, and when she died in 1908 the remaining four unmarried daughters were allowed to share it, giving them £25 a year apiece. Plorn, in Australia, went from failure to failure, first with the sheep station he bought, then as an MP, elected on his name, and after that in business. His wife left him and he took to gambling and asking for handouts, which Henry sent and got no thanks for, and he died in 1902, aged fifty, leaving unpaid debts. In 1900, incidentally, Dolby the faithful died in a paupers’ hospital, the Fulham Infirmary, in London.29 Georgina’s income was steadily reduced as she lived on through her eighties, and she had to sell letters and memorabilia to keep going, although Henry was always there to support her when necessary.

  Henry was the only one to prosper. He made a clear success of his legal career and brought up his seven children to follow in his industrious footsteps. He took a great interest in Dickensian institutions as they were established, first the all-male Boz Club in 1900, then the Dickens Fellowship in 1902, and then the Dickens’s Birthplace Museum, which was established in the Portsmouth house in which Dickens was born when it was purchased in 1903. In 1904 he did readings from his father’s work, and continued over the years to raise money for charitable causes in this way.30 The Dickensian periodical magazine was founded in 1905 and, like the Fellowship and the two museums (but not the Boz Club), it is still flourishing.

  Nelly was widowed in 1910 – the year Canon Benham also died – and moved in with her sister Fanny. In the same year Alfred Dickens returned to England from Australia, having lost whatever money he made in business there, intending to lecture on his father’s life and work. In 1911 Ethel Dickens, one of Charley’s daughters who had been earning her living running a typing agency in Wellington Street, collapsed with exhaustion and made a public appeal for money, saying she and her unmarried sisters were destitute. The Daily Telegraph took up the story and a Christmas Fund was organized, aiming to raise £10,000 for their relief. Other members of the Dickens family were outraged by Ethel’s cheek but the response was remarkable: £2,500 coming in from the United States, gifts from royalty, rich and poor proving how much the name of Dickens still meant to the public; and a trust fund was established for Charley’s daughters. Alfred went to New York to speak in the centenary year, 1912, and there he dropped dead on 2 January – yet another Dickens son with a weak heart; his funeral, like his brother Frank’s, was paid for by his American hosts. Celebrations in London were postponed, although in Portsmouth free teas for 1,000 children were given on Dickens’s birthday. In America, Kate Wiggin published her account of the conversation she had struck up with Dickens when she was twelve and sat down next to him on a train in 1868.31

  The friendship between Georgina and Nelly was important to both of them and strongly maintained. In 1913 Geoffrey was in Southsea with his mother when Fanny Trollope died, and Georgina, herself recovering from surgery, wrote to him:

  My dear Geoff, I must send a few words of sympathy to you as I know well what a loss you have sustained in the death of your Aunt … I am very thankful that you have been able to be with your dear Mother at this time of deepest sorrow to her – she tells me that you have been of the greatest help and comfort to her – God knows she must need both help and comfort! I hope you may be able to stay on with her for a little while longer – I don’t expect or wish her to make the effort of writing to me – But I shall be grateful if you will send me a note in a few days just to tell me how she is – and if she has as yet made any plans for the future.

  I should have liked to have sent some flowers as a form of my affectionate remembrance of dear Fanny. But I have not heard where – or when – the funeral was to be – and I fear that the time must be past! If it is not so, (although I can’t help hoping that the saddest of all days for your poor dear Mother is over) would you, dear Boy, be so very kind as to buy some flowers from me and place them on her coffin – and let me know later on what you paid for them. I won’t write any more – I have not been very well – and my head is not very strong – and my writing is bad – but you will give my dearest love to your Mother and to Gladys and your dear self from your very affectionate old friend Georgina Hogarth.32

  An eloquent letter for a woman of eighty-six, and it shows how close the bonds were between the two women who had shared their lives with Dickens, and shared his time and attention, fifty years before. Nelly died six months later, in April 1914, cared for by Geoffrey, who registered her age as sixty-five.33 Mother and son loved one another dearly, yet he had no idea of her real age or her early life, that she and her sisters had been actresses, or of her years with Dickens. He would find out none of these things until the 1920s, because he re-enlisted on 5 August 1914, fought a tough war and continued to serve in the Army with Dunsterforce in Persia until 1920. Only on his return did he go through his mother’s and aunt Fanny’s papers and begin to understand how they had deceived everyone.

  Georgina lived to be ninety-one, dying in April 1917, cared for by Henry and his wife. Katey’s husband died at Christmas 1918, a great sorrow for her. Henry and Katey were now the only Dickens children left alive. They were also the most intelligent. Katey, called ‘Lucifer Box’ as a child by her father for her tendency to fire up, had been the last of his wanted children, and Henry was the son who surprised and delighted him at the end of his life. It was Katey who was most intent on speaking out about their father. When in the 1890s she told Bernard Shaw what she knew of her parents’ separation, she said she wished someone would correct the prevailing view of Dickens as ‘a joyous, jocose gentleman walking about the world with a plum pudding and a bowl of punch’.34 In the 1920s, regretting that she had not written a proper account of him, cons
cious that she knew more about him than anyone else living, and that neither Nelly nor Georgina needed to be considered any longer, she decided to do something. Lucifer Box went into action.

  She asked a young woman friend, Gladys Storey, known to her since 1910, to take down what she had to say about her parents, and from 1923 Miss Storey made notes of their conversations. If there was not much method in their procedure, what Miss Storey put down makes good sense. Katey spoke out as no one had done before, mixing love and anger, but clear in what she said. One of her objects was to do justice to her mother and to atone for her own failure to give her support at the time of the separation; but she also loved her father and was not out to blacken his name, only to tell the truth as far as she was able. Sometimes she went too far for Miss Storey, who wrote down her remark ‘My father was not a gentleman – he was too mixed to be a gentleman’ in her notes, but did not quote it when she came to write her book.35