Charles Dickens: A Life (56 page)

In January he also attended a performance of Gounod’s opera
Faust
, which shows the innocent Marguerite seduced with the help of a present of jewels, and he told both Georgina and Macready he had been badly upset by it. ‘I could hardly bear the thing, it affected me so, and sounded in my ears so like a mournful echo of things that lie in my own heart,’ he wrote to Georgina. He went on, ‘But, as a certain Frenchman said, “No weakness, Danton!” So I leave off.’
¹⁷
This is the closest thing to a confession, and defies any interpretation other than that he was talking of himself and Nelly. Again, describing the stage presentation of Marguerite’s loss of innocence to Macready, who had known the Ternans for years, he wrote again, ‘I couldn’t bear it, and gave in completely.’
¹⁸
It can’t have helped that, in the opera, Marguerite gives birth to a child who dies, is ostracized and accused of infanticide, and dies herself.

On 4 February he sent his manservant John back to England and embarked on some travelling alone, visiting both Arras and Amiens. He was in France again in March for ‘some rather anxious business’ that detained him ‘4 or 5 days’. In April he wrote of a ‘hasty summons to attend upon a sick friend’ and a ‘rush across the Channel’. These journeys had to be fitted round readings in London, three in March, four at the end of April, five in May and three in June 1863, the month of Maria Ternan’s wedding in London (she was marrying a well-to-do Oxford brewer, Rowland Taylor). Then in August he wrote of ‘evaporating for a fortnight’ in northern France, and again in November.
¹⁹
And so it went on, a pattern of activity that suggests he was always ready to go when sent for, and that he also set aside longer periods to be spent in France. This year he wrote some ‘Uncommercial Traveller’ pieces, and in the autumn he started on a full-length novel,
Our Mutual Friend
.
²⁰
He also embarked on his ‘Mrs Lirriper’ stories, which appeared at Christmas 1863 and in 1864 and are again centred on an illegitimate birth. Mrs Lirriper, a London lodging-house keeper, takes pity on a young woman, abandoned by her lover, who dies in childbirth; she brings up the baby boy and some years later takes him to France, where he meets his penitent and dying father in Sens.

There seem to have been fewer trips to France for Dickens in 1864, when he was writing
Our Mutual Friend
, which started as a monthly serial in April for Chapman & Hall. Still, in February his bank account notes ‘HBD [i.e., Her Birth Day] £3’, a small present for 3 March, and a week later he set off for France again. In June he told one correspondent that he was bound for Belgium, but wrote to Wills that he was working desperately hard to get away, going in the direction of Paris for his ‘Mysterious Disappearance’. He added, ‘I seem to have a sort of inspiration that may blend the undiminished attractions of Mrs Lirriper with those of the Bebelle life in Paris.’
²¹
His remark could indicate that Nelly and the child were in Paris. Dickens was away for ten days. In November there was another week or ten days in France. In March 1865 it was ‘HBD £3’ again.

A great many questions hang in the air, unanswered and mostly unanswerable. If there was a child, neither birth date nor death date is known, not too surprisingly, since the Paris records were burnt in 1871. An American scholar, Robert Garnett, has constructed an account that puts a birth in late January to early February 1863, and the death of the baby soon after, in April. The birth date looks plausible, suggesting as it does that the child was conceived in April or May 1862. The death date seems wrong, because the absence of both Mrs Ternan and Nelly from Maria’s wedding in June 1863 tells us that, in such a close family, there must have been a compelling reason for staying away. Besides, there were the many further visits to France by Dickens.

Here is another piece of evidence. Dickens wrote a letter in 1867 in which he spoke about Nelly in answer to a request from his friend Mrs Elliot, who was curious about the relationship and what she called the ‘magic circle’ inhabited by Nelly with Dickens; she boldly asked to be introduced to Nelly. Mrs Elliot was a strong-minded and somewhat raffish heiress with a history of divorce and dubious marriage, a friend of Wilkie Collins too; she acted briefly in
The Frozen Deep
in London, and she had ambitions as a writer. Dickens liked her, but he rebuffed her firmly over the matter of meeting Nelly. He told her that the magic circle was a circle of one only, and that ‘it would be inexpressibly painful to N to think that you knew the history … She would not believe that you could see her with my eyes, or know her with my mind. Such a presentation is impossible. It would distress her for the rest of her life. I thank you none the less, but it is quite out of the question. If she could bear that, she could not have the pride and self-reliance which (mingled with the gentlest nature) has borne her, alone, through so much.’
²²
Pride, self-reliance, a shrinking from exposure and a gentle nature that has carried her through ‘so much’ alone is Nelly’s character, according to Dickens. What, if not the birth and loss of a child, could have made such demands on her pride and self-reliance, and required her to bear a great deal alone?

From Nelly herself there is only negative evidence: that, with the support of her sisters, she went to extraordinary lengths to conceal her relationship with Dickens after his death, with a bold lie about her age and by destroying his letters, which would surely have demonstrated the innocence of the relationship had it been non-sexual. It is from Dickens’s own children that more positive evidence comes. His daughter Katey said that Nelly had borne a son to Dickens.
²³
This she told privately to Bernard Shaw in the 1890s and, after Nelly’s death, to her friend Gladys Storey with the intention that Storey should write and publish a book based on what she told her, as indeed she did. Miss Storey then noted that Henry Dickens confirmed what Katey had said: the child had been a boy, who had died early.
²⁴

If there was a child – an eighth son for Dickens – when did he die? After Dickens’s widely spaced visits to France in 1864 things changed again and in the early months of 1865 he made at least four visits, and this despite his own recurrent illness, with a gouty foot so painful and swollen that it was sometimes difficult for him to walk. He was working hard to keep up the instalments of
Our Mutual Friend
, and he told Forster he was close to breakdown, but he was in France in January, in March, at the end of April and again at the end of May.
²⁵
Such frequent trips could be an indication that the child was ill, and if he died in May, it would explain why the last of these visits ended with Nelly and Mrs Ternan travelling back to England with Dickens in June. The 9th of June 1865 is the first date on which Nelly can be definitely located again after three years of uncertainty, because it was when the ‘tidal train’ carrying them to Charing Cross in London hit a bridge with loosened plates and fell into the river below, at Staplehurst in Kent.

Dickens, Mrs Ternan and Nelly were alone in a first-class carriage near the front and escaped the worst, but Nelly thought they were all about to be killed and said, ‘Let us join hands and die friends’ – a remark that might suggest they were not at this moment on very friendly terms.
²⁶
She had injuries to her arm and neck, and had to be extracted from the train, losing a good deal of her jewellery in the process, and then discreetly and hastily removed from the scene with her mother, before anyone could become aware that they had been travelling with Dickens. He, shaken as he was, went to help other passengers with his brandy flask and his comforting and practical presence, while the Ternans returned to Houghton Place. If Nelly was already distressed by the death of her child, she now had two traumas to recover from. She was ill for weeks and remained delicate. Dickens had his trusted manservant John take ‘Miss Ellen’ delicious food to tempt her appetite: ‘tomorrow morning, a little basket of fresh fruit, a jar of clotted cream from Tuckers, and a chicken, a pair of pigeons, or some nice little bird. Also on Wednesday morning, and on Friday morning, take her some other things of the same sort – making a little variety each day.’
²⁷
He also began to call her ‘The Patient’ in his letters to Wills: and patient she was obliged to be.

In an earlier book,
The Invisible Woman
, I suggested that the Staplehurst crash was a moment of reckoning for Dickens and for Ternan. Even with Nelly injured Dickens put his determination to protect his reputation before his wish to look after her. Both of them were obliged to have an innocent version of their relationship which could be used by friends and family, and this was that he was a friendly uncle or quasi-godfather who took an interest in her education. I suggested that Fanny and Maria must have tried to believe this in order to square their own consciences over any suspicion that the help they received from him was paid for by their sister’s sexual favours. And whether or not Nelly had indeed borne and lost a child in France, and whether she was angry with Dickens for letting her go through a long ordeal with little support from him, the crash brought home to her the helplessness and humiliation of her position. It made clear to her and her sisters that, whether she was guilty or innocent, and whatever these terms meant, she was obliged to live her life in the gap between what could be said and what really happened – to be invisible.

For many years anyone who suggested publicly that there might have been a sexual affair between Dickens and Nelly Ternan was held to be a despicable scandal-monger by his admirers, although, curiously, his ill-treatment of Catherine did not worry them much. The Dickens family understandably wished to protect his reputation, and adultery was something for the law courts, unmentionable in decent society. When in 1935 Thomas Wright published a biography of Dickens that revealed a good deal about Ternan, he was attacked; and when Gladys Storey’s
Dickens and Daughter
, an account of her conversations with Katey Perugini, was being prepared for publication in 1939, the first printer refused to go ahead because he found her mention of Dickens’s separation and Ternan’s role in it objectionable, and seems to have feared it might be actionable, even though all those involved were dead. Then a serious Dickens scholar, an American, Ada Nisbet, published her groundbreaking research in
Dickens and Ellen Ternan
in 1952, giving passages from Dickens’s letters that had been omitted from Georgina and Mamie’s edition; she also included material from an edition of letters to Wills that had been inked over, but was now retrieved by infra-red photography. Things changed after this. Two scholarly and thorough Dickens experts, K. J. Fielding and Edgar Johnson, writing in the early 1950s, both accepted that there had been a sexual love-affair between Dickens and Ternan. Felix Aylmer’s 1959
Dickens Incognito
, half brilliant research and half off track, contributed further information. The
Pilgrim Edition
of the letters revealed more details over the years. Manuscript notes by Gladys Storey that turned up after her death in 1978 added to what she had published earlier, and much of what Wright had said found confirmation. Philip Collins, a scrupulous and deeply knowledgeable Dickens scholar, cited Gladys Storey’s account in his
Dickens:
Interviews and Recollections
(1981), saying he found it ‘substantially correct, and of great interest’, while acknowledging that others still rejected the idea that Ternan was Dickens’s mistress. He himself plainly believed that she was, since he wrote of Dickens ‘contravening the
mores
of his age by sleeping with Ellen Ternan’.
²⁸

Things changed again. In 1990, the year in which I published
The Invisible Woman
, an account of Nelly Ternan’s life, Peter Ackroyd wrote in his biography of Dickens that ‘it seems almost inconceivable that theirs was in any sense a “consummated” affair.’ Michael Slater’s
Charles Dickens
(2009) correctly insisted that there is no proof that it was, and pretty well left it at that. Both were impressed by an unpublished manuscript written by the late Katharine Longley, a carefully researched piece of work written to assert Nelly’s innocence.
²⁹
I knew and liked Miss Longley, learnt from her and studied her manuscript, but her arguments did not convince me; rather, they inclined me to believe the evidence of Dickens’s two children and Gladys Storey’s notes, Dickens’s own letters and the sequence of events described in this chapter – that he was Nelly’s lover, and that she bore him a child who died. Even without documentary proof, and with uncertainties remaining, the sum of evidence from many different sources cannot easily be written off.

After this long excursion into Bebelle country, there is some catching up to be done, and gaps to be filled in. In March 1863 Dickens’s onetime travelling companion, the artist Augustus Egg, who had proposed to Georgina, died in Algiers, where he had gone for his health. A sorrowing Dickens sat down and compiled a list of five other participants in
The Frozen Deep
who had died since 1858. Five months later Mrs Hogarth, his detested mother-in-law, died, eliciting a few impersonal lines to Catherine along with his authorization to the Kensal Green Cemetery Company to open the grave in which Mary Hogarth was laid, and where he had once hoped to join her; he did not offer a word of sympathy.
³⁰
A few weeks later, in September, his own mother died – ‘Her condition was frightful,’ he told Wills – and he saw her buried at Highgate. On Christmas Eve 1863 Thackeray died in his sleep. Although he and Dickens had exchanged friendly words a week before at the Athenaeum, they had been effectively estranged since 1858. Dickens was at the funeral at Kensal Green and wrote a memorial piece for the
Cornhill
, praising Thackeray’s character warmly, although he said nothing about his writing. His article appeared in February, the same month he heard of the death of his son Walter in India.