by A. N. Wilson
So in this exploration into the Mystery of Charles Dickens, we begin with the secret Muse, with Nelly, and we return to the bright June day in 1870 when she saw him fully alive for the last time.
He would die on 9 June. On Tuesday 7 June 1870, Charles Dickens was hard at work, in his house at Gad’s Hill, writing the next episode of his serial novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood. He wrote to Luke Fildes, the young artist who was illustrating the story, telling him that he would be at Gad’s Hill from Saturday 11 June onwards. That was to indicate, at the least, that he would be away from home for three days. The next day, on Wednesday 8 June, he breakfasted early, at 7.30 a.m. One of the maids in the house was to be married that day, but Dickens was not intending to be present at the ceremony. He wrote a few other letters, indicating that on the following day, Thursday, he would be in London. He looked in at the Falstaff Inn opposite his house, to cash a cheque for £22 from the landlord, Mr Trood, whose name surely half suggested that of the hero, or anti-hero, of his current fiction.
Dickens never reached London that Thursday. It was the day on which he was destined to die. His scrupulous sister-in-law Georgina, who had kept house for him ever since he separated from her sister Kate, wrote to the solicitor, Frederic Ouvry, on 9 June to relate that she had been through her brother-in-law’s pockets after his collapse from a stroke, and found six pounds, six shillings and threepence. In other words, on the previous day he had spent fifteen pounds, thirteen shillings and ninepence. Where had it gone?
The person who emerged from the Falstaff Inn, with £22 in his pocket, on the morning of the 8th was a small, trim, punctiliously neat, whiskery figure who would have been instantly recognized in almost any of the great cities of the world. He was a celebrity. The most famous novelist, but also one of the most famous human beings, alive. The fact that Dickens did not wish the world to know he had a mistress necessitated a life of constant subterfuge and deception, which had been the pattern of his existence for the previous thirteen years. Nelly Ternan could not live with him openly at Gad’s Hill. If she had kept rooms in the middle of London, likewise the secret would have been out immediately. He had bought her a house, in 1860, at Ampthill Square, near Mornington Crescent, on the edges of Camden Town. It became the family house of the Ternans, and it was not a place where Dickens could visit Nelly as a lover. It was technically bought by her mother and sisters, but Nelly afterwards admitted that Dickens had bought it himself. She herself had lived a twilit existence, in rented accommodation in France and England. When in England, she had lived in obscure places, villages turning into suburbs, such as Slough – easily reachable from London, but essentially dingy and out of the way; and now the village of Peckham in South London, still a village surrounded by trees and fields, but one that was fast being swallowed up by new jerry-built houses, quickly reachable by railway from the capital. The land of small farms and labourers was giving place to the mean dwellings of obscure clerks and shopkeepers, though the row of villas in which Nelly resided, built on spec because Peckham now had a railway station connecting it with ease to London and the Channel ports, was constructed for respectable professional people.
Dickens, for his own convenience, had moved Nelly (and her mother) from Slough to Peckham, whose new-built station, which connected with his own station of Higham in Kent, enabled him to reach her within less than an hour. They gambled on the fact that there was no one likely to encounter them in Peckham, but it was a risk.
On the morning in question – and if that sounds like the beginning of police evidence in court, how pleased Dickens would be, for if there was anything he liked more than the theatre, it was criminal courts, and if there was a profession that delighted him more than the theatrical profession, it was the police! – he had cashed the cheque, and with the £22 in his pocket he had left for Higham Station. ‘It’s a singler story, sir,’ as Inspector Wield says to him in his marvellous ‘Three “Detective” Anecdotes’.10
He was making his by now habitual journey, by cab and train and cab, to Windsor Lodge, Nelly’s house in Peckham. He did it most weeks. He paid her housekeeping money – which would account for the substantial sum of more than £15 missing from his pockets. Some time after this, he collapsed. One does not need to speculate on what brought on his seizure; clearly Dickens, the father of ten (nine living), was a highly sexed man who brought to the life of love the same exuberant hyper-energy that he also brought to love of life: to acting, writing, walking, charitable work and entertaining.
With the help of two maids, the resourceful Nelly Ternan – and her later life shows her to have been highly resourceful – had to act quickly. One maid was dispatched to the post office, to send a telegram to her friend, Georgina Hogarth, Dickens’s sister-in-law at Gad’s Hill Place, telling her to expect him back and to have a doctor on hand. She then engaged the help of the caretaker of the church opposite Windsor Lodge, and a hackney-cab driver, to heave the semi-conscious body into a large two-horse brougham. Though Dickens was a small man, inert bodies can appear to double in weight.
What happened after that is not quite clear. Nelly and Dickens, in the two-horse carriage, accomplished the journey of some twenty-four miles in the hot afternoon. They entered a house where the smell of cooking permeated. Dinner was being prepared. The next thing we know is that the famous novelist was lying on the dining-room floor, semi-conscious. A doctor had been sent for, and Georgina, his devoted sister-in-law and housekeeper, was kneeling by his side. Exit Nelly, stage left. She respectably departed, though she would come back the next day, when his family had assembled to watch him die. Two accounts state that she was in the room, with the children and Georgina, when Dickens died at ten past six on the evening of Thursday 9 June 1870. She had waited with them as the breath faded, as the awe-inspiring uncertainty of whether he was dead or alive continued.
Stay! Did that eyelid tremble?…
No.
Did that nostril twitch?
No…
See! A token of life! An indubitable token of life! The spark may smoulder and go out, or it may glow and expand, but see!… Neither Riderhood in this world, nor Riderhood in the other, could draw tears… but a striving human soul between the two can do it easily. [OMF III 3]
There would be many tears for Dickens, as there had been in his fictitious and dramatic renditions of death, but I quote that passage from Our Mutual Friend not because he was like Rogue Riderhood in the smallest degree; rather, that he had been to that No Man’s Land with the dying, and described what, for so many, is the most poignant part of witnessing the deathbed experience. And the day of his death altogether possessed that betwixt-and-between quality. Indeed, it may well be that the account just given of the circumstances of that death – the journey to Peckham with £15 in his pocket, and the seizure – did not in fact take place. We’ll approach this aspect of the mystery later. What we do know is that, when he died on 9 June in the dining room at Gad’s (as it was so often known in the Dickens family), Nelly was there. And we know that fifteen pounds, thirteen shillings and ninepence could not, by the punctilious Georgina, be accounted for.
There had been every reason why those who cared for Dickens’s reputation with the public – and that emphatically included his mistress Nelly Ternan, his sister-in-law Georgina and Dickens himself – should wish to create a death which, if not entirely fictitious, was at least a good deal more respectable than the one we just sketched out. That Dickens, the greatest English novelist, and celebrant of family innocence, should have collapsed in the bosom of his mistress in Peckham was not to be countenanced. Nelly was perpetually troubled by the possibility of disgrace. She was a ‘respectable’ person, and she hated the idea of their relationship being known or acknowledged.11 The great man must die instead at Gad’s Hill in the bosom of his family.
Nelly certainly shared Dickens’s wish that their relationship should remain a secret. Unlike Dickens’s raffish friend Wilkie Collins, who lived openly with his mistress, and unlike
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), who lived with her lover George Lewes as if she were his wife, Dickens was a ‘respectable’ man, and Nelly, although – no, because of – belonging to the theatrical profession, regarded herself as a respectable young woman. They had both had to struggle for their respectability. For many Victorians the acting profession was little better than the low world of the demi-monde. For the Dickens family, respectability was something that had had to be invented for themselves, and however much they clung to it, it had kept blowing away from them, like a flimsy umbrella lost in a gale. Dickens’s persistent claim to be a gentleman, a claim on which he had implausibly insisted since childhood, was the first of his great fictions. The English never escape their class. It is one of Dickens’s great themes. Social insecurity underpins his comedy and his tragedy, and much of his social life. The great rift with Thackeray, for example, was in part caused by the knowledge that Thackeray was a gentleman and Dickens was only a pretend gentleman, admitted to clubs, for example, because he was a genius, not because his father could ever have been on terms with his fellow clubmen’s fathers. With the ambivalences of theatre folk, whose people were professionally involved in pretence, he could feel safe.
Five years before, in June 1865, Nelly Ternan had been travelling with Dickens and her mother in a first-class railway carriage, coming back from France. Dickens had made no fewer than four visits to France to see her that spring, almost certainly because Nelly had gone abroad to give birth to a child. Claire Tomalin, who collected so much of the evidence for Nelly’s life with the novelist, shows it was possible that she had two children by Dickens. Gladys Storey, whose book Dickens and Daughter is about the author’s friendship with Dickens’s daughter Katey, states categorically that Nelly had a child, ‘a son, who died in infancy’. Storey left a note to say that Dickens’s daughter told her in February 1923 that a child had been born. And Madeline House, who spent long periods of conversation with Gladys Storey, left it on record that ‘I am convinced that Mrs T[ernan] was with Ellen at the time of the baby’s birth.’12
Storey, House and Tomalin all assume that Katey was correct in stating that the baby (or babies) died; and yet, as Tomalin wrote, one of the factors that has made people doubt the story is the non-existence of any death certificates, especially for the second supposed baby, born in Slough. There could be an obvious explanation for this. That is, that the baby (or babies) did not in fact die, but was given up for adoption. Nelly went on to have two healthy children, in her later, respectable existence as a clergyman’s wife. Why should it be assumed that Dickens’s babies died? Of his own ten known children, although his wife had some miscarriages, only one of the babies who lived to full term died in infancy, a very low statistic by nineteenth-century standards. Neither Nelly nor Dickens had a medical history of parenting weak children.
The month following the supposed birth of a child in France, accompanied by her mother, Nelly was coming back to England with Dickens in June 1865. The public face of their relationship, in so far as it had a public face at all, was that Dickens was a sort of uncle or godfather figure in her life. The train journey was to make clear to Nelly how completely determined Dickens was to protect his reputation and keep their relationship a secret.
As the train hurtled towards Staplehurst in Kent, it hit a bridge, slithered off the track and fell into the river below. The first-class carriage was at the front, so that although the three of them feared the worst, their lives were spared. They were hurled across the carriage. Nelly, fearing they were about to die, said to her mother and Dickens, ‘Let us join hands and die friends’, a remark that suggests that there had been an estrangement of some kind.
The evident ruction that the words imply gives the lie to Claire Tomalin’s notion that Nelly’s baby died in France. If the young woman had just lost a baby through death, her mother and Dickens would surely have been solicitous with a woman in grief. ‘Let us join hands and die friends’ suggests that Nelly had been angry with Dickens – justifiably angry – and is not the likeliest explanation for such anger that she had been forced, for the sake of appearances, to give away her baby for adoption?
They had to be helped out of the carriage through a window. Nelly’s arm and neck were injured and she was frail for weeks afterwards, and Dickens would send his manservant, John, to ‘take Miss Ellen’ tempting foods: a cold chicken, clotted cream and fruit. Aware of his public, and knowing that it would be impossible to conceal the fact that he had been aboard the train that crashed, he left Mrs Ternan and Nelly to be cared for by the paramedics while he went to offer succour to the second-class passengers. ‘I was in the carriage that did not go over, but went off the line, and hung over the bridge in an inexplicable manner. No words can describe the scene,’ he would write.13 Even more revealing (of his character, but unrevealing of the facts of the case) was his preface to Our Mutual Friend, the novel he was writing at the time of the accident, the manuscript of which he had in his luggage.
On Friday the ninth of June in the present year Mr and Mrs Boffin (in their manuscript dress of receiving Mr and Mrs Lammle at breakfast) were on the South-Eastern Railway with me, in a terribly destructive accident. When I had done what I could to help others, I climbed back into my carriage – nearly turned over a viaduct, and caught aslant upon the turn – to extricate the worthy couple. They were much soiled, but otherwise unhurt. The same happy result attended Miss Bella Wilfer on her wedding-day and Mr Riderhood inspecting Bradley Headstone’s red neckerchief as he lay asleep. I remember with devout thankfulness that I can never be much nearer parting company with my readers for ever, than I was then, until there shall be written against my life the two words with which I have this day closed this book – THE END.14
Clearly, Dickens was not going to share with his devoted public the knowledge that, at the time of the Staplehurst railway crash, he had been travelling with a much younger mistress who had borne his child. Nevertheless, given that this was what he had been doing – he was certainly with Nelly, whatever truth there is in the story of her having had his babies – there is something more than arch about his speaking about the characters in Our Mutual Friend as having been ‘on the South-Eastern Railway with me’. It is by no means clear, in the life of a novelist, who are the more ‘real’: the imagined characters in the books or those who share the supposedly real life of the writer. As we shall discover, the fictions of Dickens, which came from so deep a part of himself, were also capable of swallowing him up, so that in a sense he was absorbed into them. The majority of us have a life that ends in death; Dickens was living a story, whose conclusion was – to quote again from that preface to Our Mutual Friend – ‘the two words with which I have this day closed this book – THE END’.
After Dickens died, Nelly went to live in Oxford with her mother and sisters, in a house on the Banbury Road just south of the present-day St Hugh’s College, where for seven years I used to teach. (Maria the Infant Phenomenon had married an Oxford brewer.)
I often used to think of the Ternans as I cycled past the villa in the late 1970s. The fantasy question would flit in and out of my brain: what would it have been like to teach Nelly? She was the same age, wasn’t she, when she lived in that house as the undergraduates with whom I was about to read medieval poetry. Would I have fallen secretly in love with her, as Dickens did, or would she have been one of the pleasant, hard-working majority whose names and personalities one forgot the next year when a new batch of students arrived, clutching Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer?… Nelly at eighteen. But no! She was not, of course, the age of most of my students. Brilliant, loveable Nelly! She had cunningly changed and concealed her age. In The Life of Charles Dickens by John Forster, the Will of Charles Dickens is printed as an appendix. After revoking all former wills and codicils and declaring this to be his last Will and Testament, Dickens, with a candour and bravura that had been lacking in life, began: ‘I give the sum of £1,000 free of legacy duty to Miss Ellen Lawless Ternan, late of Houghton Pl
ace, Ampthill Square, in the county of Middlesex.’
With an inventiveness to match his own, Nelly, who was by now more than thirty, decided to chop a decade or so off her age. Six years later she would marry one of the undergraduates who had visited her mother’s house in Oxford, George Wharton Robinson, who had by then become a clergyman. He was twelve years younger than she was, so he had only been eighteen or so when he met the thirty-year-old Nelly. By the time of the 1881 census, she had reduced her age still further, declaring herself to be twenty-eight, when in fact she was forty-two. By now the respectable wife of a clerical schoolmaster, she had left behind the invisible Nelly of Windsor Lodge, Peckham – a figure of the 1860s. Those years had been discarded like a novel, unopened for years. As the years rolled by, she grew ever younger and more respectable.
They had been married, she and Mr Robinson, at St Mary Abbots Church in Kensington. White-clad, virginal Nelly, with flowers in her hair, was by now thirty-seven to her husband’s twenty-three. They honeymooned in Italy, and returned to England to run a school in Margate. They had two children, Geoffrey, born in 1879, and Gladys, born in 1884. Nelly helped her husband to run the school, organizing concerts and plays and reading aloud from her favourite novels: David Copperfield, The Old Curiosity Shop, A Tale of Two Cities, Nicholas Nickleby, Bleak House. She retained her friendships with Georgina Hogarth and Dickens’s eldest daughter Mary (Mamie), neither of whom betrayed the secret of her true age. In 1877 Georgina came to have a holiday in Margate and presented the prizes at the school run by Mr Robinson, and in 1882 she had a holiday with Nelly and Mamie.
Nelly Robinson was widowed in 1910 and lived until April 1914, nursed by her son Geoffrey, who subsequently fought a gallant war and remained in the army until 1920, fighting in Persia with Dunsterforce. It was only after her death, going through his mother’s papers, that he began to piece together the truth. He was horrified by what he discovered and destroyed as many of his mother’s letters and papers as he could find. He lived until 1959.