The Hoydens and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  Oh, she was good. She knew better than to hurt his feelings for long.

  “Yes I have.” Charles leapt at this opportunity to redeem himself with the enthusiasm of a young beau. “Just once, briefly, in the company of Angela. She is a highly educated young woman, with an enormous nose, just up from the country.”

  Ellen covered her mouth and giggled at Dickens’s irreverent description of the young lady in question.

  “She works for Chapman,” Dickens went on, “my publisher, on his Westminster Review, the new Liberal magazine. He sings her praises.”

  Which means she had best beware, I thought; but I did not say it aloud, because though it was a sentiment that Dickens would surely understand, Miss Ternan would not. Suffice to say that our friend John Chapman was one of the most notorious philanderers in London, and no matter how long this young woman’s nose might be, it would not protect her from his attentions.

  “Yes, she is a writer, I have heard,” Ellen corroborated.

  “It sounds as if you are in impressive company.” I nodded sagely.

  “All protégées of Angela Burdett-Coutts,” Dickens added enthusiastically. “I truly feel that her goal in life is to support promising young women in working their way in London.”

  And, from all that I observed in the course of that coach ride into the city, Miss Ellen Ternan certainly displayed the potential to become one of those “promising young women.” I must admit that I was utterly taken with her.

  She seemed in control of the situation. As we passed through Piccadilly Circus and entered the West End, Dickens leaned out the window and, with a sharp tap of his stick to the topside of the coach, caught the attention of our coachman and directed him to Macklin Street, so named after the famous actor of the previous century.* The stone memorial of Macklin perches on its corner, providing a handy resting seat for crossing sweeps and flower girls. It was, indeed, a quiet, secluded street of high city houses broken up into rooms and lodgings. Number 21 was our destination. It was a nondescript establishment of three sparsely windowed storeys with a single peeling door propped on a narrow stone stoop only two steps up from the street. Our coach pulled up across the way, and Dickens leapt out calling up for the footstool to hand Miss Ternan down.

  “I shall carry her bag in and be right back, Wilkie,” he called to me.

  As they walked to the door, Ellen waved good-bye, smiling. Then she did a curious thing. She stopped him at the threshold of her new life with a hand on his arm just as he was reaching for the doorknob. With a word which I could not hear, she took her small valise from his hand. He answered her, pleading his case, I imagine, for accompanying her in, meeting the other young ladies with whom she was going to take up residence. But she demurred, banishing him to my less interesting company in the coach.

  It was, indeed, an interesting tableau. The bright spring sunshine cast a purity of light upon the scene, so unlike our usual London of fog and mire and grim despair. Dickens and his Nellie stood framed in that doorway. Her radiant smile betrayed her gratitude. Perhaps he was still pleading his case for a glimpse of her rooms. A shake of her head signaled her denial. A brief recoil of his goatee signaled his disappointment. Then, with a formality which seemed surpassingly comical, he stepped back, stiffly extended his hand for a businesslike shake, and bid this object of his morning’s attention good day. Not the least bit intimidated by his formality, Miss Ternan, in the spirit of the dancing sunshine, took his hand, pulled on it until he stooped slightly more toward her level, bounced once, sending a shimmer down the length of her long white dress, and placed a playful peck of a kiss upon Dickens’s surprised cheek. He stood there, stunned, his hand slowly moving up to his face in the wonder of it, as Nellie made her escape into the house.

  Dickens returned to our coach quite flushed. If I was not certain of it before, I was quite certain of it now. He was in love with her, utterly enchanted. I had suspected that he was taken with her, but this confusion in a man of his parts could be nothing less than love at its most defenseless.

  Do not, however, misinterpret my interpretation. At that time, all was quite respectable. Their meetings spoke to the letter of propriety. I must admit, however, that I never inquired of Charles whether Katherine, his child-burdened wife, knew of his benevolence toward Miss Ternan. I never inquired as to the public knowledge of this arrangement because I was certainly not the one to comment, considering the questionable nature of my own establishment with Irish Meg in Soho.

  When the coach had turned about and rolled off toward Wellington Street and the Household Words offices, and Dickens had somewhat regained his composure, he gave not so much as a by-your-leave to the events of that afternoon.

  “Well, that’s taken care of,” was all he said. But I was not deceived. Miss Nellie Ternan had indentured Dickens to her service. It was an afternoon which boxed the compass for the course of the last eighteen years of his life.

  * * *

  *Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon would go on to become one of the leading voices of British feminism in the second half of the nineteenth century. Author, women’s political-group organizer, cofounder of the first women’s college at Cambridge, and member of George Eliot’s circle, Barbara Smith was one of the leaders of the first groups of British women to undertake concrete political action on behalf of their gender. Marian Evans would become George Eliot, one of the greatest novelists of the Victorian age.

  *Charles Macklin was one of a succession of famous actors, including Edmond Kean, David Garrick, Nell Gwyn, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Colley Cibber, John Kemble, and Sarah Siddons, who were associated with the Drury Lane Theatre.

  The Phantom

  July 25, 1852—Late Evening

  A month, and then two, no three, more weeks passed. I remember that time quite well because it was so uncomfortable. An exceptionally heavy English summer had descended like an ancient suit of armor upon London. Like a doomed ship, London lay becalmed in that heavy, thick heat that dries up the very stones, sends the dust and refuse of the barren streets swirling at the slightest whisper of a breeze. You could turn into some narrow mews off Chancery Lane or in the West End, Macklin Street perhaps, or try to make your way down one of the twisting serpentines in Soho near my rooms, and suddenly there would be no air to breathe. The heat would empty your lungs as if with a sharp blow to the chest, and you would find yourself gasping. It was like living in the hold of a ship with the hatch cover battened tight. London’s people moved through the city as if tranced, mesmered,* trapped in this stifling pit of heat and ennui.

  Almost two months had passed since that bright spring day when I had ridden out with Dickens to liberate Miss Ternan from Urania Cottage. Bleak House, by the end of July into its fifth number, was the talk of London.

  Angela Burdett-Coutts, in that interval, had received two more threatening letters of the sort she had shown to Dickens and me. Dickens had mentioned passing them on to Inspector Field, but the Protectives were busy that summer with the crowds still flocking to the Crystal Palace,* and with the usual tide of criminality that flowed into the city with the hot oppressive weather. To my knowledge, no progress whatsoever had been made on that case. I should have been suspicious, however, because Field usually moved quite quickly and Dickens rarely passed up an opportunity to head off on one of our evening walks in the direction of Bow Street Station.

  As for Miss Ternan, she was employed, through Dickens’s intervention with Macready I am certain, at playing two small parts in Covent Garden’s rollicking new production of The Taming of the Shrew. But that was not the sum of what was happening in Miss Ternan’s life. How do I know? Though I had myself seen Miss Ternan only twice in the almost two months that had passed, by coincidence I had been kept well informed concerning her progress. Soon after Miss Ternan had returned to the city, my Irish Meg was invited by Angela Burdett-Coutts (acting on the advice of Dickens and Field I am now certain) to join a ladies’ discussion group which met in the evenings at the meeting room
s of Coutts Bank. Those meetings of the Women’s Emancipation Society were all that Irish Meg could talk about.

  In fact, it was, oddly enough, upon the night of her first attendance at a Women’s Emancipation Society meeting that the most unsettling event of that period of heat and adjustment occurred. I must turn to Irish Meg for the narration of it, for I was not there to witness it, but it placed all of us upon our guard and it beckoned me into a labyrinth of betrayal and murder that I would never forget.

  “He came out of nowhere, Wilkie!” Meg burst in upon me at my desk in our Soho rooms at half ten that evening. “He just came out of nowhere.” Her words were tumbling over themselves in her excitement. “We never saw where he came from and then he was upon us.”

  “Meggy, wait, what is it?” I tried to calm her, but to no avail.

  “He must have been waitin’ in the shadows for us. He wos like a ghost. Afore we even saw him, he wos upon us, all muffled in a white duster with a rag or scarf tied over his face. He knocked Miss Angela and Eliza down in his first rush.”

  “Meggy…stop…please…slowly.” I had arisen in alarm and, with both hands upon her shoulders, piloted her into a nearby armchair. “What is it? What has happened?”

  “We were attacked in the street, that’s wot!” She was almost indignant, as if I had something to do with this atrocity.

  “Please, start from the beginning. Tell me what has happened. You are not hurt, are you?”

  “No. No.” Yet I could tell that she was still skittish from the stimulation of it.

  “And the others? Miss Burdett-Coutts? She was not injured?”

  “No. No. I drove him off. We did, I mean.”

  “You what!”

  “Oh, Wilkie, it wos horrible. He just appeared out of the dark like a ghost, runnin’ at us and strikin’ out, for no reason.”

  “Tell me what happened. Tell me. Perhaps we can make some sense of it.”

  “It wos so dark and hot, not even a star, you know how the nights have been lately, Wilkie, like a bloody dungeon with no air.” She took a deep breath, calming herself, then set off in earnest into her story. “He must have been waitin’ somewhere in the shadows on our way. It wos St. Martin’s Lane, I think.”

  I took a chair facing her, careful not to interrupt, hopeful of getting at least the bare bones of the story before she became excited again.

  “It wos Miss Angela and Liza Lane walkin’ in front, and me and Nellie walkin’ behind when he came out of nowhere. None of us saw where he come from. He came runnin’ real hard out of the dark. Miss Angela and Liza Lane were about five steps in front of us and he knocked them both down. Liza screamed. I remember he kicked out at her.”

  Meg paused a moment to marshal either her own emotions or the details of her story, or both.

  “He wos huge, and all muffled up in white standin’ over them. He wos horrible, Wilkie, like a white ghost. He started reachin’ down like he wos goin’ to hit them or strangle them, and that’s when Nellie and I screamed.” And she stopped suddenly, as if she had told quite enough of this story.

  “And? For God’s sake, what happened?” I prompted her. I must admit that I was unable to hide my impatience. But, when she took up her story again, she seemed almost reticent.

  “Well, we screamed…then we came upon him…and, and, and then he ran away and it wos over.” She seemed to deflate in her chair as if the strain of the telling had sapped her strength. “Can you make me some tea, Wilkie?” she asked. “It has been a long and difficult night.”

  I leapt to do her bidding, happy to help in whatever way. However, when I returned short minutes later from the hob with her hot tea, she was already fast asleep in her armchair.

  Two days later, I was present when Miss Ternan told Dickens the same story. Her narrative was quite similar to Irish Meg’s, with one substantial difference.

  In telling her story, Irish Meg had in no way embellished her own role in this strange encounter. Nellie Ternan in her narrative took a somewhat different and fuller view of it.

  “Meg drove him off by herself,” Miss Ternan declared. “He was kicking and beating Angela and Liza Lane. He had knocked them to the ground. He was this terrible figure, all in white, standing over them. I was terrified. I froze. But Meg ran right at him. I won’t tell you the names she was screaming at him. ‘Leave them be! Leave them be!’ She was cursing him. She jumped on his back from behind and started beating at his head and face with her fists. He turned all around in a circle trying to shake her off, but she kept hitting and scratching at his eyes. Finally, he flung her off and threw her violently along the stones. I saw it all. ‘Cursed woman!’ he swore at Meg, who was lying on the ground, dazed from her fall. I thought for a moment that phantom figure was going to attack her as he had the other two, but he just ran off into the darkness. Meg saved us all,” Miss Ternan concluded forcefully. “If she hadn’t run in and jumped on him, we all would have been hurt.”

  I do not know why Irish Meg decided to play down her part in this violent street encounter. Perhaps her reticence stemmed from the changes in her thinking that seemed to be evidencing themselves on an almost daily basis.

  Field was present with Dickens and me when Miss Ternan told her fuller version of the story. The Protectives had been called to the scene of this street attack, but the constable had not been dispatched from Bow Street. Rather, he had come from a newly established station in St. James Fields, so this was the first eyewitness report which Inspector Field had received.

  “It is the writer of those threatening letters.” Dickens seemed convinced. “Out to frighten Angela. He bears her some grudge. He is angry, or desperate, a madman.”

  “Perhaps,” Field concurred. “But we have no proof of that.”

  “Then who is this attacker, this white ghost?”

  “It could be a simple street robber, a basher. But one of them would never have run away empty-handed.”

  “Then who?” Dickens persisted.

  “I do not know.” At least Field answered honestly. “Your letter writer, a robber, a disgruntled bank customer—it could have been anyone.”

  “But it wasn’t just anyone,” Miss Ternan broke in. “I was there. I saw him. He wanted to hurt them. He had that scarf tied around his face so that he wouldn’t be recognized. Angela would have known him, so he covered his face.”

  “There. That’s it!” Dickens turned triumphantly back to Field.

  “Yes, all of that is indeed true.” Somehow I sensed that Inspector Field was mildly bored by all of this amateur speculation. “We shall continue lookin’ into this affair,” he assured us. “Some gin, Charles? Wilkie? It is a hot-weather drink, you know.”

  We both declined his offer of gin on that hellish day, but before we left, Dickens extracted a promise from him that we would be summoned to share in whatever information became available pertaining to this case.

  Outside on Bow Street, Nellie reiterated her gratitude for Irish Meg’s courageous action.

  “She is a brave girl, Wilkie.” Ellen Ternan was quite solemn in her praise. “You should tell her so. She saved all of us from harm.”

  Back in our rooms in Soho, I confronted my Meg with the facts: “She said you saved them all,” I accused her. “Why did you not tell me that part?”

  “Because you worry so much, anyway,” she laughed it off.

  But I knew that was not it. There had to be some other reason. As I remember it now, that was just one of the things that marked a strangeness that was coming over my Meggy’s behavior at that time. It seemed as if she were changing before my eyes, and I found it unsettling.

  * * *

  *Friedrich Anton Mesmer, a German physician working in Vienna, did extensive research in “animal magnetism.” He developed an early treatment for what later, in the twentieth century, would be called psychosomatic illnesses. This treatment, which employed a primitive form of hypnotism, came to be called “mesmerism,” and, by the time of his death in 1815, had caused him t
o be ostracized by the medical communities of both Vienna and Paris. By 1852, Mesmer’s theories were very much back in vogue. Professional practitioners were numerous both in London and on the Continent. Public shows and carnivals featured charlatan mesmerists. Even curious gentlemen, such as Charles Dickens, dabbled in this strange power and attempted amateur hypnotic experiments.

  *The centerpiece of the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Crystal Palace was a huge glass-domed exhibition hall built for the display of the genius of the scientific progress of the Industrial Revolution.

  Death in Sheep’s Clothing

  August 11, 1852—Morning

  The one clear and present change in Irish Meg’s life at that time was, of course, the Women’s Emancipation Society, but, in those days, all of London was changing. The city was like a book that needed to be constantly reread. Dickens and Field read it in quite different ways, and I was just learning to read under their tutelage. It was a book of mysteries, where nothing was ever what it seemed, a book that offered something different with each new reading.

  Inspector Field knew how to read this book of the city better than anyone. He read it for its facts, its realities. It was his profession to read it.

  Dickens enjoyed reading the book of the city more than Field did. He enjoyed plunging into it on his night walks and turning its pages with delight.

  As for me, I found it a puzzling, often disturbing, text in which truth was as insubstantial as the fog and as agile as a cabman’s horse. That is why I fill these little leather books, in hopes that if I write down the facts or even the appearances of them, then the whole of it might make some sense.

  The Women’s Emancipation Society was a most puzzling chapter within that book of the city. Because both Dickens and I were utterly mesmerized by Irish Meg and Nellie Ternan at that time, and because they were both so dedicated to the Women’s Emancipation Society, we had no choice but to try to understand it. What bothered both of us was that violence seemed to be asserting itself as the dominant theme of that particular chapter.