Dickens was physically rather slight; but his power and energy more than compensated, enabling at least one woman who acted with him to see in him the ‘complete beauty of manliness’.8 He met new acquaintances with a remarkably keen gaze, usually credited to the intensity of a great writer, in fact more attributable to short sight. He did not wear glasses; it was part of his dandy’s streak, which appeared in his cravats, his beautifully cut trousers, his white jackets and velvet waistcoats, his looped gold watch-chain. Dickens, like Mrs Ternan, was formed by the Regency and kept some of its traits; he always favoured coloured plumage over the black frock-coated aspect of true Victorian man. And although the long curls of his youth were coarsening and thinning, and a moustache and beard now covered his lip and chin, there was nothing patriarchal about these, rather a hint of the raffish and piratical; he didn’t look or seem old. He held himself as straight as a soldier and moved with a dancer’s agility; his step was quick, light and precise.
The Ternans saw that everything about him was decisive, orderly, clean-cut, from his personal appearance and domestic arrangements to his manner of conducting a rehearsal. He had a neat little box of notes and gave his instructions absolutely clearly. He was exactly punctual in starting and finishing work, and expected as much of everyone else, which was fortunately how Mrs Ternan had brought up her daughters. At the same time he was full of high spirits and as attentive to the Ternans as though they had been guests rather than workers; and he never failed to arrange refreshments for them whether at Tavistock House or the Gallery of Illustrations, where they were rehearsing for most of the 17th, 18th and 19th August.9
By then he had changed his mind about the part of Uncle John and decided he must play it after all, for fear the public would be disappointed. Possibly, too, he found that he enjoyed working with his new pupils more than he had expected. His energy never flagged; he made rehearsals more like a game than work, but a game played with great intensity and absorption. All the Ternans were irresistibly caught up in the flow of his plans and his imagination.
Nelly’s mother, Fanny Jarman, as a young actress, splendidly ringleted. She was the child of strolling players, her stage career beginning in 1804 when she was two. Her ‘beautiful person, commanding stature, rich and flexible voice’ were acclaimed in England, Ireland, Scotland and America, which she toured in the 1830s on a working honeymoon. (illustration credit 6.1)
Nelly’s father, Thomas Ternan, born in 1790, was the son of a Dublin grocer; he came to England to make his way as a romantic actor. He had a passion for Byron and wrote verse himself, but he never equalled his wife’s success in the theatre. She is shown below acting Gertrude to the great tragedian Macready’s Hamlet; Macready admired and befriended her, but he declared that Ternan would never ‘shed lustre on the theatrical profession’. The first of the Ternans’ three daughters, Fanny, was born during their American tour in 1835; after their return to England and the birth of two more daughters, Maria and Nelly, he became a theatre manager in Newcastle upon Tyne. (illustration credit 6.2)
(illustration credit 6.3)
It was standard practice for actresses to appear on stage with their own babies. Mrs Ternan herself was carried on as a tiny child, and she did the same with each of her daughters in turn. This is her colleague, the great comic actress Dora Jordan, as she appeared in the popular part of Cora in Sheridan’s Pizarro; the baby here is one of her many children by the future king, William IV. (illustration credit 6.4)
The life of a company manager and his family was not always as riotous as suggested by Cruikshank’s 1841 drawing of a ‘Theatrical Fun-Dinner’, but a successful Benefit evening might call for a celebration of this kind. Note the Infant Prodigy standing on the table to the left, with sword and plumed helmet. Fanny Ternan was just such an acclaimed child performer from the age of three, and her younger sisters followed in her footsteps. (illustration credit 6.5)
Maria, dressed as a fairy. (illustration credit 6.6)
Daumier’s drawing suggests the view from the stage into the sort of audience that would be attracted to Atalanta, a scene from which is shown below; it was a burlesque in which Nelly had her first adult part when she was eighteen, at the Haymarket Theatre in 1857. (illustration credit 6.7)
The view of the theatre as a flesh market is still more nakedly expressed outside in the street, as evidenced by this scene after the show in 1860, where gentlemen and prostitutes are making their deals in the Haymarket. The cartoon comes from Henry Mayhew’s study of London life. Eminent Victorians like Gladstone and Dickens were simultaneously horrified and fascinated by the vice of the streets, and Dickens worked for several years as an enthusiastic reformer of fallen girls; his intimate knowledge of attempts to police their activities made him especially indignant when Maria and Nelly were mistaken for prostitutes by the police. (illustration credit 6.8)
Nelly in 1858: the earliest known photograph, taken in Florence, where the Italian photographic process, unlike the English, did not darken her blonde hair. Compare her appearance with Dickens’s description of Lucie Manette: ‘a short, slight pretty figure, a quantity of golden hair, a pair of blue eyes that met his own with an inquiring look, and a forehead with a singular capacity … of lifting and knitting itself into an expression that was not quite one of perplexity, or wonder, or alarm’. (illustration credit 6.9)
As in so many stories of three sisters, one of the Ternans was wise (Fanny, right), one merry (Maria, left) and the youngest endowed with a fatal beauty, as well as the gift of being able to transform herself at will. They loved and supported one another throughout their lives. (illustration credit 6.10)
As a novelist he was naturally curious about them, and how they lived, how they managed, a houseful of brave little women alone, unprotected, unguided. Dickens could read as well as anyone the signs of faded bonnets, carefully mended gloves and worn shoes, and he was quickly taken with these girls, as young and fresh and gifted as his own daughters, but fatherless, penniless. He found out at once that they lived in a rubbishy little house in an unwholesome suburb, struggled in and out of the West End, were forced to play parts their respectable mother could not want her daughters to appear in – parts no father could want his daughters to appear in. Yet they were so brave, so ready to laugh and sing, as though nothing frightened them; and how they worked! They had hardly been to school, but they had worked all their lives, had read everything they could lay their hands on, and knew a great deal more than most of the young women Dickens came across. Being actresses, they knew both the things that were written down and the other things that were never written. Or so he supposed. The ambivalence of actresses, the fact that so many of them felt able to break the rules of society without bearing any apparent mark of their guilt – quite the contrary – was precisely what made them so attractive.
Of course he knew many actresses already, had known some for years, like Emmeline Montague, Fanny Kelly, Fanny Stirling and Mary Ann Keeley and her daughters; but he had never been so close to a whole family of them. A whole nest of singing birds. There was a fascination in their blend of knowledge and innocence. In due course he must have gone to inspect Park Cottage, climbed the awkwardly twisted little steps to the narrow door, cast his practised glance through its few small rooms and determined inwardly that they must move to a more convenient house as soon as he could persuade them.10 He was intrigued by each of them, the dignified, hard-working widowed mother; quick, clever, ambitious Fanny, not at all frightened of him; dark-eyed Maria, who shifted so suddenly into laughter or tears; and the youngest, the child with the head of curls, who could not remember her father – who could have been his own daughter: Ellen.
Only not Ellen. They all called her Nelly. Little Nell: the name of his most famous heroine, the beautiful, doomed child who, like this girl, had travelled across England with show-people. Dickens was instructed to call her Nelly, too. As he asked her history, and she began to tell it, he made a discovery that can’t have failed to stir hi
m. Nelly, alone of the sisters, had been born in Rochester; and Rochester was the city where his own imagination had begun to flower. In Rochester he had first seen Shakespeare and pantomime; had written his own first play; had sung in his childish voice with his own sister Fanny, now dead. Rochester was enshrined as the happy place of his own childhood. He had left it fifteen years before Nelly appeared on the scene, but the coincidence was still extraordinary.
Dickens was forty-five. His career as a writer had been one of brilliant and unbroken success from his early twenties onwards. He was the father of nine living children and the master of two establishments staffed with their full complements of servants. Tavistock House had a drawing room that could take 300 guests. Gad’s Hill, a solid old Kentish house standing on a hill above Rochester, had been newly acquired in the fulfilment of a boyhood ambition.
He took his holidays where and when he chose, renting houses at Broadstairs or Boulogne; for months at a time he might install the whole family in France, or Italy, or Switzerland. His earning powers were prodigious, and he knew how to manage his money. He supported his widowed mother in a separate household and was often approached for financial help by his improvident brothers Frederick and Augustus, both of whom were better at getting children than earning money. Proud of his pre-eminence in the family, he was also sometimes grimly amused by the obligations it brought with it.
His fame as a writer went with him wherever he travelled. He had toured America and Canada with his wife and been fêted in Edinburgh. In France, where English writers are never sure of a welcome, he was acclaimed by the critics; his entire works were in process of translation for a splendid French edition. He was the author, so far, of eleven novels, not to mention the stupendously successful Christmas stories, as well as half-owner and active editor of Household Words.
Dickens struck admiration into almost all his contemporaries. Even Thackeray, his rival, acknowledged that he was at the top of the tree; he was ‘the great Dickens’, ‘abominably coarse, vulgar and happy’.11 He was not born a gentleman, like Thackeray; his grandmother had been a servant in a great house, his father a perpetual embarrassment with his debts and sponging. Dickens had made himself virtually out of nothing. Friends like Lord Jeffrey or Macready noted that his dinners could be over sumptuous, the sign of a parvenu, perhaps, but more simply an aspect of his immense geniality. He was much lionized yet resisted the invitations of the great, preferring his own comfortable circle. Family parties, games and theatricals which included the children were what he enjoyed; he would dance Sir Roger de Coverley till the pianist fell back exhausted. Sometimes his conviviality overboiled, and he might grab at a lady harder than she had reason to expect; on one occasion, on the pier at Broadstairs, a young woman he had whirled into an impromptu dance by the rough sea had her dress soaked through as she struggled. He could tease, he could retreat into a black mood, and he had a temper that came to the boil quickly. But more often he was sweet-natured; the actress Helen Faucit remembered him helping her out discreetly with a whispered clue in a game of charades. He was a kind man, with little malice; justifiably proud of his achievements, boyish in his enthusiasms, always eager to help others.
Dickens loved children; he played with them and gave them absurd nicknames; his wife believed that babies delighted him, and she was right, up to a point; only they had produced more than he wanted. He viewed their frequent arrival with a helpless, humorous resignation, as though they were a visitation from God rather than a consequence of his own actions. When she was expecting their ninth child, their old friend Lord Jeffrey wrote affectionately to Dickens, ‘as I would to a younger brother’, urging him not to get her pregnant again (though not apparently offering any advice on how to avoid it). Dickens, curious and alert as he was to scientific advances – Catherine had been given chloroform at the birth of Henry in 1849 – does not appear to have investigated the matter of birth control, unless the arrival of yet another son, Edward Bulwer Lytton (Plorn), in 1852 prompted some attempt to do so. At least the last five years had seen no further additions to the nursery.
As a father he was devoted and strict. He took his children on forays to toy shops, taught them games – Dumb Crambo, Twenty Questions, Proverbs – and performed conjuring tricks for them. Christmas was celebrated chez Dickens with as much verve as any child could ever wish. He also inspected their rooms daily for tidiness, and confiscated his sons’ cricket bats and balls if they allowed their clothes to become too unkempt; his son Alfred remembered all his life the scolding he got for brushing his coat in the wrong place – the dining room. His own cleanliness was almost fetishistic; he took a cold bath or shower every day and had his clothes kept impeccably. Dickens was puzzled by his boys’ shortcomings and pleased by any effort to put them right. He went to considerable lengths to cure Frank of a stammer by reading Shakespeare with him every morning. He also taught Henry, the brightest, shorthand. Yet as one son after another failed to measure up to his own strength of character, he grew more irritable with them. The girls were pretty well exempt from criticism, being girls, and only two in number, and Katey certainly intelligent. Charley, the eldest boy, was also bolstered against his father by being put through Eton at the insistence of his godmother, Angela Coutts; he did not do well enough to go to a university, but in 1857, when he was twenty, he was at least keeping afloat at Baring’s Bank. Dickens was fond of him; but a grown-up son at home was also a perpetual reminder that time was passing and that his own youth was irretrievable; and behind this thought another nagged, of how his huge family had failed him, of the ‘one happiness I have missed in life, and one friend and companion I have never made’.12
Even at the height of his enthusiasm for family life, Dickens had absented himself frequently in order to pursue his own interests. For years he had made a habit of going out riding by day and to the theatre by night, with his men friends. They also had a walking club and regularly took dinner out of town, at Greenwich, or Jack Straw’s on Hampstead Heath, or at the Star and Garter in Richmond. The friends included John Forster, his chief literary adviser, who shared his enthusiasm for the theatre; Daniel Maclise, the painter; Douglas Jerrold, the playwright; Mark Lemon of Punch; and other hard-working journalists, artists and writers, among whom Wilkie Collins was a new favourite from a younger generation. Collins appeared on the scene in 1850. He was a bachelor and regarded himself as a connoisseur where pleasure was concerned; and he seems to have acted as Mephistopheles to Dickens’s Faust, organizing sybaritic nights out and accompanying him on trips to Paris for a taste of its sophisticated ‘diableries’.
Dickens was also a solitary walker. He often set off alone at night and sometimes stayed out until morning. In this way he came to know the whole of London: the grimmest parts of the East End, regarded by most as impenetrable alien territory; the docks and the river from Hammersmith to Greenwich; slums various, around Seven Dials, around Somers Town, around the Borough; the Hampstead Road of his boyhood, passing through Euston, Mornington Crescent, Camden and Kentish Towns; and the miles of new suburbs eating up fields, market gardens, farms and the old green lanes to the north and south. He said these walks helped him to plan his next day’s writing, which was certainly true, but there was something else at work, too. For all his geniality, Dickens was a man who did not wish to be known and summed up by anyone. He needed a private existence in which he could cease to be either the convivial friend or the well-organized father and become nothing but a watching eye, a listening ear, a dreaming mind.
From the early 1850s he had made what he called a ‘gipsey camp’ in two rooms above the Household Words office at 16 Wellington Street, off the Strand, so that he could be free to remain there overnight when he chose. It was convenient for his nocturnal walks, his bachelor dinners and also his clubs, the Athenaeum and the Garrick; still more so for his frequent visits to the theatres clustered in the area – the Lyceum, the Adelphi, the Olympic, Covent Garden and Drury Lane – as well as the Surrey and the Victoria
on the other side of Waterloo Bridge. His letters and other personal writings are sprinkled with references to these theatre-going habits: a note to Madame Celeste, manager of the Adelphi, asking for a box; a complaint to William Farren, manager of the Olympic, about being given a seat in the stalls already occupied when he went in, late and alone, to see the burlesque on a Friday night;13 a vivid description of a walk through Bow Street, Longacre and Drury Lane on a wet winter evening, when the theatrical suppliers and ticket vendors are closed down, on his way to Hoxton, where the Britannia Theatre under Sam and Sara Lane was putting on pantomimes to huge, appreciative local audiences.14 Out of this solitude – the single man moving through the oceanic London crowd – he made the world of his books.
If domesticity meant less to Dickens than he liked to suggest, and if he had rather more of the Regency buck in him and less of the Victorian paterfamilias than is usually believed, it must also be remembered that his adult life was lived out during a period of acute hypocrisy in these matters. The domestic virtues were loudly proclaimed, public displays of bad behaviour – such as royal princes consorting with actresses – were no longer tolerated, and while prostitution of every kind flourished, discretion, or hypocrisy, was required from all but the lowest social class. Dickens’s response to this hypocrisy was never simple. He liked the idea of the neat little home and the neat little wife and mother, particularly when rounding off his plots; but it was not the only idea he liked. Recently a letter to his friend, the painter Daniel Maclise, has come to light which suggests that even in the early years of his marriage his interest in the sexual underworld may not have been purely that of an observer; he urges Maclise to join him in Broadstairs for a break, promising ‘conveniences of all kinds at Margate (do you take me?) and I know where they live’.15 Unless Dickens meant the ponies on the sands, living conveniences could mean one thing only in this context.
The Invisible Woman Page 10