Charles Dickens: A Life (50 page)

Stormy Weather

Dickens’s meeting with the Ternan family in August 1857, a small professional encounter hastily set up, led to changes in every aspect of his life: the wing of a butterfly flapped, and a whole weather system was unsettled. The storm blew up, and broke with his separation from Catherine. In the wake of this, friendships were severed, publishers dismissed, and
Household Words
ceased publication, to be replaced by a new weekly, with Dickens now proprietor as well as editor, and run from a larger office. He parted with his best illustrator, Hablot Browne. There were no more large-scale amateur theatricals. There were no more family holidays. His charitable work with Miss Coutts came to an end. His connection with the Home at Shepherd’s Bush, over which he had presided with dedication for a decade, ceased in the spring of 1858, after which, lacking his involvement, the little community ran down, and by the early 1860s no more young women were taken in. In 1851, when he had purchased a fifty-year lease on Tavistock House, his intention had been to make it his home for the rest of his life, but now he lost interest in it, and in 1860 he sold it.
¹

Another great change was brought about by his decision to take up a second career as a professional reader. It was something he had thought of for several years, but a contributory reason for his decision to proceed with it was, at any rate as he explained it to Collins, his belief that the work involved would distract him from the pain of unsatisfied love – the Doncaster unhappiness, he called it.
²
The readings also gave him the extra income he needed in order to finance a growing number of dependants, the Ternans among them; and the constant travel required as he toured the provinces gave him a sort of freedom, making it hard for anyone to know whether he was at his rooms in the office in Wellington Street, or travelling to a reading, or at Gad’s Hill, or somewhere quite different. His relations with the public changed somewhat too, because the Dickens heard at the readings was not quite the same as Dickens read on the page. He made his scripts from only a few of his novels and stories, dramatizing them with much redrafting, condensing and cutting, and many divergences from the originals, and the result was something simpler and inevitably cruder – highlights of comedy and pathos.
³
The readings were of the greatest importance to him, not only because they brought in much needed money but because they gave him reassurance that he was loved. A huge and loyal public turned out to hear him almost everywhere he went, giving him ‘a roaring sea of response’, cheering him, nourishing his spirit and protecting him from his detractors and critics.
⁴
It was a comfort he was to need badly.

He was always able to sparkle, charm and command admiration, but he aged in appearance now and began to look older than his years. The keen and lustrous eyes were sinking in their sockets and losing their brilliance, lines appeared across his brow and his cheeks were cut across by diagonal furrows. His hair thinned, his beard grizzled: some photographs show this clearly, others suggest he may have had them touched up on occasion. He remained an indefatigable editor, always assisted by Wills, and he continued to write both journalism and novels; and the core of his being, the creative machine that threw up ideas, visions and characters, persisted in its work. There was another venture into historical romance,
A Tale of Two Cities
, a popular treatment of the French Revolution, with a self-sacrificing hero closely resembling Wardour, the role he so much relished in
The Frozen Deep
. After this came a return to his highest form with
Great Expectations.
It is an almost perfect novel, in part like a ballad, drawn out of early memories and dreams, full of monsters, terrors and puzzles to be solved. This was followed by
Our Mutual Friend
, a bulging bag of grotesques in which sharp working girls are seen to be cleverer than their fathers, and greedy middle-class Londoners are mocked and reviled at their mahogany dining tables. Through both books corruption and violence are woven, and in both the river runs through the narrative, shining, dark and dangerous, ‘stretching away to the great ocean, Death’, as Lizzie Hexham sees it.
⁵
And through these years bad health wore away Dickens’s strength, neuralgia, rheumatic pains, unspecified but unpleasant and persistent symptoms he associated with a bachelor life, trouble with his teeth and dental plates, piles. Then first his left foot, and then his right, took to swelling intermittently, becoming so painful that during each attack he became unable to take himself on the great walks that were an essential part and pleasure of his life.
⁶
Presently his hand too was affected. The decline was resisted, denied, fought against, but not to be stayed.

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.