The Hoydens and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  “Oh no, not really,” she laughed. “Many try to escape. Some find their former life on the streets much more exciting.”

  “Ah, but others,” Dickens knifed into our conversation, “are utterly changed for the better, learn to respect and consider themselves in a whole new way.”

  “Oh, Charles,” she hurried on as she led us down a long, shining wooden corridor leading to the rear of the house, “I must talk with you quite briefly before you go to her. She is all packed, one small bag, since she came here with nothing. She is quite enthusiastic about our arrangements.”

  Dickens nodded attentively, but seemed eager to get to his Ellen, disinclined to tarry to talk trivialities with Miss Burdett-Coutts. From all I could infer, we had come in our coach to liberate Miss Ternan, transport her back to London to begin her new life.

  “What is it, Angela? Can it not wait? We can meet to talk at the bank in the city at any time this coming week.” Dickens in his nervousness was somewhat short with her.

  “Oh yes, Charles, I know, but I’ve just found it so distressing since it arrived that I wanted you to see it and tell me what to do,” she said, and for the first time, she revealed her own agitation.

  The anxious tone of her voice brought Dickens up short and he sensed her fear.

  “Angela, what is it? I’m sorry. What is wrong?”

  “Oh, probably nothing. It is probably some sick prank.” Her hands fluttered in the air like startled birds. “But it frightened me when it came, a threat like that.”

  “What threat?” Dickens had become quite intent upon her distress.

  “This letter, it came yesterday.” She handed a coarse envelope to him.

  The letter was brief and scrawled in a thick and clumsy hand. Dickens held it out in front so that I could read over his shoulder. My very first thought was that it was written by someone attempting to disguise his handwriting, or by a poorly schooled child.

  June 1, 1852

  Miss Coutts, of Coutts Bank—You won’t get away with this highhand treatment. You rob people at your bank. You keep whores and sodomites in country houses. You turn innocent people out into the street. You encourage women to overthrow law. I know your secrets. I can bring down both your houses.

  a private Phantom!

  “It seems awfully melodramatic.” Dickens studied it with the eye of a detective.

  “It sounds mad, if you ask me!” I blustered, shocked that a person of Miss Burdett-Coutts’s enormous wealth and public stature should have to deal with such impertinent harassment.

  “I must say it frightened me, Charles”—she had brought herself quite under control—“at first. I had never received such a thing, and if the family did, my father certainly never mentioned it. It surprised me, but now I feel, with Mr. Collins, that it must be some sort of aberration. But perhaps we should look into it, don’t you think?”

  As she spoke, Dickens was studying the letter intently. When he spoke, it was as if he were simply thinking aloud, critiquing what the smudged text told him.

  “It is purely a threat.” He punctuated his certainty by pushing the letter gently at her in the air. “There is no mention of blackmail, no request for money.” He paused and read it through once again. “It is written by someone who knows a great deal about you, about your philanthropies, your business.” He stopped again to study. “It is written by someone who feels badly treated, perhaps someone you have dismissed, or whose business with your bank turned out unprofitably.”

  “Yes, I see that now.” Angela nodded her head in agreement, her anxiety momentarily forgotten.

  “Really, Charles, I say”—I stared intently over his shoulder at the letter—“quite right, yes…but couldn’t it just be something written in a fit of anger, something the writer will think better of?”

  “Let us hope.” Dickens turned back to her. “But nonetheless, Angela, this sounds dangerous enough. I shall give it to my friend Field of the Protectives. He will look into it.”

  “Oh thank you, Charles.”

  “Do not be alarmed. In fact, forget about this. I’m sure Wilkie is right. It is but an ill-considered outburst. Now, let us go to Miss Ternan.” And with that, he seemed to dismiss the whole affair. Only, however, after safely depositing Miss Burdett-Coutts’s distressing letter carefully into the inner pocket of his waistcoat.

  As we traversed the cool dark corridor leading out to the garden, Dickens’s nervousness reasserted itself.

  “You have apprised her of all of our arrangements? She knows where and with whom she shall be living? That her monster of a mother is out of the way? That I shall be her guardian in all things? At her service? She feels comfortable and safe?” He interrogated poor Miss Burdett-Coutts as if she were a servant or some military subaltern.

  She hesitated to answer in the face of his earnestness.

  He misinterpreted her wariness for discretion.

  “You may talk freely,” Charles assured her. “Wilkie knows Miss Ternan. He was there when that whole sad affair happened.”*

  “Quite.” Miss Burdett-Coutts nodded her understanding as we emerged from the cool dark tunnel of the house into the bright spring sunshine of the lawn. The green grass stretched back to a thick pine forest, and was dotted in the eighteenth-century style with bushes sculpted in the forms of animals: a large rabbit here, a fat hedgehog there, two proud stags carved out of a privet hedge guarding the back verge of the property. The sunshine made the whole scene glisten in hues of green, an evergreen world peopled with young women in white dresses seated on stone benches.

  “Her recovery and progress into womanhood have been quite astounding,” Angela assured him with the utmost seriousness. “She has, since your last visit, survived her sixteenth birthday.” (Her majority according to English law, and a feat few of her less fortunate colleagues of the London streets can claim—Charles would survive his forty-first that year.) “And it is time for her to return to the world, to the theatre, which is the only life she knows, and for which she expresses a great fondness.”

  “Excellent”—Dickens nodded his satisfaction as we crossed that wide expanse of lawn—“that has been my hope.”

  As we traversed the greensward, young women in white, virginal I might have thought from appearances if I hadn’t known better, glanced up at us from their knitting needles or their reading. Some were probably reading Dickens’s own stories and may not have realized that the author was actually walking in their midst.

  “There she is.” Angela pointed to a bench flanked by those ferocious stags at the farthest boundary of the lawn. As we approached, Ellen Ternan looked up from beneath a wide-brimmed summer hat of white straw, and smiled innocently.

  It was the first time I had seen her in fourteen months, since that dangerous night in the roiling Thames. As she rose to meet us, I realized that this was quite a different young woman from that poor confused victim we had saved from suicide. It was how she extended her hand confidently to me and looked directly into my face as we were reintroduced that first intimated the extent to which she had changed.

  * * *

  *Urania Cottage was Angela Burdett-Coutts’s Home for Fallen Women established with Dickens as her closest advisor.

  *See Pippa Passes.

  *See The Rape of the Lock.

  *Obviously Dickens is referring to the Paroissien-Ashbee affair as narrated in The Detective and Mr. Dickens (1990). Dickens and Collins, along with Tally Ho Thompson, Inspector Field, and Serjeant Rogers, had rescued Ellen Ternan from the sexual bondage of the Victorian pornographer Lord Henry Ashbee.

  Nellie

  June 3, 1852—Noon and Later

  One did not have to be overly observant, an inspector of detectives or a hired spy, to perceive the change in Dickens as he took his young ward’s hand and basked in the radiance of her smile. Suddenly all his skittishness was gone, and he seemed utterly oblivious of his surroundings and his companions. Since his last birthday, Dickens had cultivated a rather rakish goatee,
but his own smile (for Miss Ternan’s eyes only) burst out of that sculpted thicket of his face.

  “Miss Ternan, ah yes, today is the day, and our English sunshine favors us.”

  He was formal yet alive with enthusiasm. He was courtly, even fatherly in his concern, yet he could not hide his excitement at seeing her, his attraction to the powerful lodestone of her smile. I overstate. Perhaps under the influence of later events, the ensuing history of their remarkable relationship, I have romanticized this moment, and that look that passed between them, as enchanted.

  “Mr. Dickens,” she answered with her proffered hand, which he took in both of his, “there is no way that I can thank you and Miss Burdett-Coutts for all you have done for me.”

  It was a well-rehearsed speech, the opening sally of an actress who has learned her lines and is taking the stage. If such can be truly said of one of her tender years, she looked wiser, no longer a vulnerable child, more powerful. Her dress could not hide the fullness of her young body. As she extricated her hand from Dickens’s possession and turned to Miss Burdett-Coutts and me, her mien showed no trace of the fright and humiliation of those earlier terrible events. Her smile was warm and innocent. Her gaze was open. There was strength lingering about her eyes, the wariness and determination of a survivor, but a hopeful survivor, one who has not despaired of the possibilities of life, not grown cynical from the brutality of experience.

  But I think all of this was lost on Charles, or perhaps I am romanticizing again. Nonetheless, I feel with utter certainty that Charles could see nothing but her smile, her white shining presence, as if she were his Guinevere or Dulcinea. Some might misconstrue the fact of such an accomplished and powerful middle-aged man’s devotion to a woman so young, especially in the light of her striking dark beauty; but, that day, in that unabashed English sunlight, as I looked at his face, I knew that he was truly in love with her.

  Dickens, like some solicitous waiter in a fine European hotel, sat Miss Ternan and Angela down upon that stone bench between those two vigilant stags and opened a formal colloquy upon that young woman’s immediate future.

  “Miss Ternan, ah, Ellen, if I may…,” he began, standing rather stiffly over them as I stood by.

  “Nellie,” she interrupted him easily. “Nellie is what all my friends call me. Please be easy with that. It is a new name which I enjoy.”

  A new name which helps to escape the terrible past, slithered across my mind as I stood eavesdropping.

  “Nellie, of course.” He was still a bit nervous, but he knew what he needed to say. “Miss Burdett-Coutts, ah, Angela, has apprised me of your determination to return to public life in the city, and she has”—bowing respectfully to Miss Burdett-Coutts—“also apprised you of the arrangements we have made together to allow you to do so.” He sounded like some pinch-backed countinghouse clerk delivering a bill. “Are you content with those arrangements?”

  “Oh, Mr. Dickens…”

  “Charles please, my friends…” And he looked of a sudden to me for help, as if I might throw him some spar to keep him from sinking. I honestly think that in his confusion it was the first moment that he remembered he had brought me along. “This is my friend, Mr. Collins, Wilkie.”

  “Miss Ternan”—I bowed shallowly, and she smiled ever so slightly—“Charles has told me so much about you.”

  “Yes, Mr. Collins, I do remember now. You have been a good friend.” And again I glimpsed that determined look of the survivor about her eyes.

  “Yes, thank you, yes.” I really had no idea what I was saying.

  “The arrangements,” Charles prompted her, regaining somewhat his composure, “have all been completed. You will live, to begin, with Miss Barbara Leigh Smith, with whom you are acquainted, and a Miss Evans.* You will be established in comfortable lodgings in the West End with these two ladies until you are able to make your own living arrangements; or, of course, you may choose to continue in these. The flats are close in upon the theatre district. Since you have expressed a desire to continue in the theatre, I have taken the liberty of making some necessary appointments. Mr. Macready of Covent Garden has requested that you appear for a general audition Thursday next, and, if all goes well, which I am certain it will, you shall, in all probability, be back upon the stage within the month. A lavish new production of The Taming of the Shrew is just entering the rehearsal period and that is the play for which you will be auditioning. Until your wages at the theatre begin, you will collect a weekly stipend from Coutts Bank at Trafalgar Square from Mr. Frederick Busch, a minor clerk. This modest living allowance will be discontinued as soon as it is ascertained that your earnings are sufficient to meet your living needs.” Charles finished this long and quite formal speech with an uncomfortable shrug. “And that, Miss Ternan, uh, Nellie, is it. We, Mr. Collins and I, have come in a coach to deliver you into the city.”

  Somehow, as he said it, it sounded ominous, as if we were going to deliver her into some lion’s den. Unfortunately, the city at that time had the potential to be exactly that, and Dickens was not as innocent in his intentions (though perhaps he thought he was) as he professed to be.

  “Oh, Mr. Dickens…Charles”—she changed her mode of address to the familiar only at the prompting of Charles’s archly raised eyebrows—“it is so exciting for me to begin anew. And Miss Burdett-Coutts, it is you who have made all of this possible. I can never repay you.”

  Angela Burdett-Coutts raised her hand to stop her: “We do not speak of repayment here at Urania Cottage, Ellen. We speak only of discipline, and self-respect, and the fulfillment of our potential as women. The greatest repayment I can have from anyone who has lived at Urania Cottage is to watch her leave the past behind and start over in a moral, productive life. That is what I hope for you.”

  “Oh, ma’am, I cannot thank you enough.”

  Ellen’s protestations of gratitude were sincere enough, yet there was a strangeness in the way she delivered them; her words sounded rehearsed.

  As for Dickens, his mien also was clothed in a certain strangeness. He looked so eager, yet he was not his usual confident, easy, joking self. It was as if being in her presence had unmanned him. He seemed compelled to observe every possible propriety. I could not help thinking that I was observing a man torn by quite conflicting desires. But who am I to judge from this distance of twenty years? Was my closest friend already struggling between the inclinations of the father and the lover, the knight in shining armor and the dragon?

  In the coach back to London Dickens’s awkwardness remained. His solicitousness about her meager luggage, the comfort of her seat in the coach, the possibilities of draughts, whether he should order the coachman to slow because she was being unduly jostled, whether she wished to remove her bonnet, whether she desired a blanket, a pillow, a footrest, whether she was tired, or cold, or too warm—his solicitousness, in fact, became quite comical. I watched him make a babbling fool of himself.

  She, however, seemed to think nothing of it, and said very little, except once, when she brought Dickens up quite short.

  “Will my mother be in London?” Nellie asked, and Dickens recoiled as if he had been tomahawked by one of Mr. Cooper’s wild Mohicans.

  “No. No, she will not be,” Charles recovered. “She is with a traveling company which ranges as far abroad as Scotland and Ireland, and never plays in the city.”

  Nellie received this news with genuine relief. She clearly wanted no social intercourse with her mother…and with good reason. It was that hag who had twice pandered her daughter’s virtue, first to their stage manager at Covent Garden, and then to the infamous Lord Henry Ashbee.

  As the coach left behind the rural openness of Shepherd’s Bush and rumbled closer to the sprawl of the city, the greenery gave way first to the country estates of the northern downs and then to the high houses and wide streets of the northern hamlets. We entered London’s own environs through the Notting Hill Gate and struck into the Kensington high road. Finally, I felt compelled
to break the awkward silence which had fallen between us.

  “Your companions here in the city, Miss Ternan, the women with whom you will live, Miss Smith, Miss Evans, are they friends, acquaintances?” I asked.

  “Miss Smith is a truly interesting woman,” Dickens began to answer for her.

  But before he could continue, Ellen took up the answer herself: “She is my teacher,” she slowly intoned, and a radiance came into her face. “She has taught me about myself.”

  “She is a young woman of astounding intellectual capacity,” Dickens interrupted, seemingly unaware of his rudeness, “impressively educated by her father, outspoken in her opinions, yet quite tireless in her efforts to help the young women at Urania Cottage. She is a close friend of Miss Burdett-Coutts. She is, however, rather…”

  It was simply Dickens’s way of taking control of every situation. I was really quite used to it. He never showed any reticence in interrupting another person. Therefore, you can imagine how delighted I was when Ellen Ternan made it quite clear that she would brook no repetition of such a rude habit of interruption.

  “If Mr. Dickens would kindly allow me to finish”—she stared levelly at him—“I think I can give a fuller, more accurate portrait of Barbara Leigh Smith.”

  “Why of course, excuse me. Please,” Dickens yielded.

  Nellie went on to describe the prodigious talents of Miss Smith in some detail, not stinting in her praise for the great good intentions of Miss Burdett-Coutts for providing such a tutor and lecturer upon self-esteem to the girls at Urania Cottage.

  “And the other young woman? Miss Evans?” I inquired.

  “I have never met Miss Evans.” Ellen surprised me with her answer (because going to live with someone I had never met seemed unthinkable), but surprised me even more by her next move. “But Mr. Dickens has, I believe, have you not, Charles?” She invited him back into the conversation, to speak for her, to do what she had chastised him for doing before.