The Invisible Woman

by Claire Tomalin

  On 25 May he gave a written statement to Arthur Smith, with an accompanying note giving him permission to show it ‘to anyone who wishes to do me right, or to anyone who may have been misled into doing me wrong’. In it he made several remarkable statements. He said that Catherine suffered from a mental disorder; he said she had been asking for a separation for some years; and he went on to discuss the accusations of ‘two wicked persons’ (he meant her mother and sister Helen) who ‘coupled with this separation the name of a young lady for whom I have a great attachment and regard. I will not repeat her name – I honour it too much. Upon my soul and honour, there is not on this earth a more virtuous and spotless creature than this young lady. I know her to be as innocent and pure, and as good as my own dear daughters.’27 For the moment Smith did nothing with this statement.

  On 27 May there is a payment of four guineas ‘to N.’ in Dickens’s Coutts account. On 7 June he published a statement in The Times which was repeated on the front page of Household Words a few days later; milder than the one he had given to Smith, it still insisted on his entire innocence in the matter of the separation from his wife:

  … Some domestic trouble of mine, of long-standing, on which I will make no further remark than that it claims to be respected, as being of a sacredly private nature, has lately been brought to an arrangement, which involves no anger or ill-will of any kind, and the whole origin, progress, and surrounding circumstances of which have been, throughout, within the knowledge of my children. It is amicably composed, and its details have but to be forgotten by those concerned in it.

  By some means, arising out of wickedness, or out of folly, or out of inconceivable wild chance, or out of all three, this trouble has been made the occasion of misrepresentations, most grossly false, most monstrous, and most cruel – involving, not only me, but innocent persons dear to my heart, and innocent persons of whom I have no knowledge, if indeed, they have any existence – and so widely spread, that I doubt if one reader in a thousand will peruse these lines, by whom some touch of the breath of these slanders will not have passed, like an unwholesome air …

  I most solemnly declare, then – and this I do, both in my own name and in my wife’s name – that all the lately whispered rumours touching the trouble at which I have glanced, are abominably false. And that whosoever repeats one of them after this denial, will lie as wilfully and as foully as it is possible for any false witness to lie, before Heaven and earth.28

  The public made what it could of this declaration. We have seen that The New York Times’s correspondent thought it worth reporting supposed details of the scandal before denying their veracity. Dickens’s kind old friend and fellow actor, Mark Lemon, who had wept during The Frozen Deep, flatly refused to publish it in Punch. At this, Dickens severed the friendship, not only with Lemon but also with the magazine’s publishers Bradbury & Evans; they also handled his books, which he now took back to Chapman & Hall.

  In June he told Collins that he was living chastely and found it best ‘to wear and toss my Storm away’. There was a break in his London readings, and he went off to Boulogne alone at the end of the month, complaining of kidney trouble. In July Nelly joined her company in Manchester for a summer season of six weeks. A few days later Dickens wrote to a cousin of the Ternans in Boston, Richard Spofford:

  Your cousin Fanny has shown me a letter of yours in which reference is made to me. I would not for the world do her or you the wrong of giving you any assurance upon a subject on which your own generous nature is perfectly clear. But what I wish to do is to thank you most heartily for the comfort and strength I have derived from the contemplation of your character as it is expressed in that letter beyond the possibility of mistake, and to convey to you, in a manner as plain and unaffected as your own, my admiration of the noble instinct with which the upright know the upright, all the broad world over. Your cousin well deserves to be its subject. From the first month, I think, of my knowing your cousin Fanny, I have confided in her, have taken great interest in her, and have highly respected her. You may be sure (as I know her mother and sisters are, and as I know, my own two daughters are), that there could not live upon this earth a man more blamelessly and openly her friend than I am, or to whom her honour could be dearer than it is to me.29

  There are two striking aspects to this letter. The most important is its clear evidence that his relations with the Ternans were now on an unusually intimate footing; intimate enough for Fanny to show him family letters, whether he actually confided – or confided fully – in her or not. The other is the difference in tone between his words to Spofford and his remarks to Wills on the subject of the ‘little riddle’; they seem to come from two different people. The whole letter, with its resonant protestations of virtuous intent, sounds like an exercise in allaying suspicion. Dickens had no difficulty in turning out high-sounding phrases when the situation required, and he signally failed to mention to Spofford what his current plans for Mrs Ternan and Fanny were. The fact was he had arranged for them both to leave England for a considerable period.

  Once again Dickens appears in a double light: as the disinterested benefactor, eager to fulfil the ambition of a deserving young woman, and as the bearer of dangerous gifts. Fanny’s desire to train as a singer with a first-class foreign teacher was to be met by his offer to pay for a year-long trip to Florence to study singing under Pietro Romani. Of course he would not dream of sending her alone. Mrs Ternan should go with her. This would leave Maria and Nelly on their own, without the chaperone still considered essential for all respectable young women. Perhaps Dickens promised to keep an eye on them.

  Why did Mrs Ternan agree to the plan? It would have been cruel to deny Fanny her golden opportunity when at last it was offered her. Somehow she was convinced that Maria and Nelly would be able to look after one another during her absence. Or she may simply have decided that she could not afford to think too closely about what was happening. The most important factor throughout must have been the sheer steady willpower of Dickens, who would use every weapon to get his own way, even when he was perhaps not clear what it was exactly he wanted. From Mrs Ternan’s point of view he could offer seemingly limitless benefits and favours to all three girls, without which they faced an uncertain and possibly stony path ahead; she withstood him no more easily than anyone else.

  In August Dickens was touring the provinces, reading from his own works, while Nelly worked in Manchester. She had the boy’s part in a play called The Honeymoon and understudied for Lydia Languish in Sheridan’s The Rivals. But when her chance to play the part came on 20 August, the critic of the Manchester Guardian did not think much of her:

  The comedy was completely successful, as far as the hearty enjoyment of the audience was concerned, although Miss E. Ternan being the Lydia there were the strongest reasons for regretting the continued indisposition of Miss Amy Sedgwick.

  Understudies are not usually singled out quite as cruelly as this. She may have been no good in the part, of course, but she may have attracted unfavourable attention for another reason. A few days before, on 16 August, the statement Dickens had given to Arthur Smith in May appeared in the New York Tribune and was taken up in England, where the press, northern and southern, expressed its disapproval of his behaviour and disbelief of his words.30 Only a year before he had appeared in Manchester with ‘Miss E. Ternan’; there was bound to be gossip. Gossip was unpleasant, but the bad notice was wounding and frightening, and cast a question mark over her future, even if Buckstone promised her work at the Haymarket when they returned to London. Dickens, regretting the statement, claimed that he had not authorized its publication, but he failed to reprimand Smith; in any case the damage was now done.

  * Dickens had, only a month before, tearfully but resolutely sent off his sixteen-year-old son Walter to serve in India as a cadet, even as the news of the Mutiny was arriving. Walter died there at the age of twenty-two, without seeing either of his parents again.

  † William Henry
Wills, known as Harry but always addressed by Dickens simply as Wills, started his literary career in the 1830s as a playwright and theatre critic; later he worked on the Edinburgh magazine Chambers’s Journal (and married Jessie Chambers in 1846). Dickens first met him in the late 1830s, and took him on as his assistant on Household Words in 1849. He was two years older than Dickens, who regarded him as solidly reliable and discreet, someone he could confide in and entrust with delicate private business.

  ‡ Tolla appeared in 1858 and became a European bestseller: Mrs Gaskell had her copy specially bound in vellum, and the schoolboy Henry James read it with passionate enthusiasm. Edmond About (1828-85) knew the world he was describing; he was a journalist and playwright as well as a novelist. Two years after Tolla his story ‘Le Roi des montagnes’ was put on in a dramatized version at the Lyceum in October 1860, translated by Tom Taylor as The Brigand and His Banker, with Madame Celeste, Mrs Keeley and Maria Ternan in the cast; it ran for only a few performances, though it was ‘capitally played’ according to Michael Williams in Some London Theatres (1883).

  § ‘If he is a decent person, he will either leave my daughter alone or reimburse me for my expenses in bringing her up.’

  8

  Mornington Crescent

  1858–1862

  While Nelly finished her not very successful season in Manchester, and Dickens set off from Liverpool to give his highly successful first readings in Ireland, Catherine made a visit to Miss Coutts. She took several of the children with her, and Miss Coutts was so affected by her candidly expressed grief and evident affection for her little sons that she wrote to Dickens on the subject. His reply shows once again how far he had travelled into fantasy, how easily he deluded himself as well as others when the facts did not suit him. He accused his wife and children of play-acting when they showed love for each other and suggested it would be ‘better’ for the children if they desisted. He also accused Catherine of having ‘struck’ at him with her weak hand, backed by her wicked family, on whom he had previously loaded so many benefits. He wanted, he said, only to ‘forgive and forget’ her.

  She was now installed in a small – but pretty – house in Gloucester Crescent, on the north side of Regent’s Park. Dickens had agreed to pay her £600 a year for life. It was not going to tax him too hard: in one month, September 1858, he made a profit of £1,000 from his readings alone. The Dickens children were obedient to their father’s wish that they should remain in his care – which meant in effect the care of their Aunt Georgina – except for Charley, who defiantly moved with his mother, compounding his misbehaviour by becoming engaged to the daughter of Dickens’s estranged publisher Evans. Father and son now broke off communications altogether for some time.

  Nelly returned to London at the end of August, and the new season at the Haymarket opened on 6 September. She kept her place in the company, but was assigned to small and undemanding parts. The stars were Charles Mathews Junior, Buckstone and Amy Sedgwick, and the plays were mostly light comedies and farces, a Labiche translation, a revival of The Soldier’s Daughter, in which she had played as a child with her mother, and a series of undistinguished modern pieces with titles like Used Up and Grimshaw, Bagshaw and Bradshaw. In most of them she had to do little more than run on and off stage, help set up the jokes and appear decorative. The few press notices she got were only polite; one critic praised a ‘well-conceived performance’ as a governess in one of the more serious plays, another described her as ‘petite and pretty’. Maria was doing altogether better, playing in burlesques at the Strand Theatre alongside the young Marie Wilton and under the management of Ada Swanborough; they had a successful and hilarious season. The Maid and the Magpie, in which Wilton and Maria both played male parts, was a hit – Dickens visited it in October and urged Forster to go too – and the Christmas show was a spoof on Kenilworth in which Maria, as the unfortunate Amy Robsart, was the centre of a bit of business in which she was saved from being dispatched through a trap-door by her enormous crinoline; later in the season she switched from female victim to male villain, and appeared as the Earl of Leicester. Maria knew how to assert herself in the company.

  At the end of September Mrs Ternan and Fanny left for Italy, armed with letters of introduction from Dickens to Anglo-Florentine acquaintances, among them the elderly novelist Frances Trollope, living there with her son Tom, also a writer and occasional contributor to Household Words. Maria and Nelly were now on their own in London. Park Cottage, of which Dickens had disapproved so strongly, was given up. The two newly independent working girls moved into lodgings in Berners Street, just north of Oxford Street. Setting up house alone in the West End was an adventure for them, and certainly more convenient. Nelly now had only to walk through Soho to be at the Haymarket, and Maria had not much further to go to the Strand Theatre. They may have found the lodgings for themselves; but given Dickens’s general habits and his frankly expressed interest, it seems likely he took a hand in the matter and perhaps made a tactful contribution to the rent. The Ternans had replaced the Hogarths as worthy objects to be ‘loaded with benefits’.

  But the plan was not as good as he had imagined. Berners Street had unexpected drawbacks. Coming and going at late hours as their work demanded, the girls became uneasily aware that they were being watched. The men observing them were, in fact, policemen. One evening Maria was stopped and questioned. The questions were insulting and the manner of the questioners no less so. The implication was clear: they were thought to be prostitutes. Whatever sophistication their years in the theatre may have given them, this was a moment of shock and humiliation. No doubt they were frightened too; once stigmatized, a young woman without protection might find that things could quickly become very nasty in London in the 1850s, when the age of consent was twelve and the word of a policeman would carry more weight than any protest by a pretty young unchaperoned actress.

  Fortunately for the sisters they did have a protector, and a powerful one. It’s possible, of course, that he had brought the trouble on them in the first place, by calling on them at indiscreet times, escorting them home after the theatre or taking them out for late suppers. We don’t know; but it would have made his explosion of rage when they told him what had happened all the more terrific. Wills, the trusty and indispensable, was instructed to go to Scotland Yard – where Dickens had many contacts – to call off the police, complain of their ‘Dangerous and unwarrantable conduct’ and ask ‘what the Devil the mystery means’. He should also visit ‘our two little friends’ – whom Wills apparently already knew – for their account of the trouble, ‘between three and five’ the following afternoon. Dickens stressed that he must insist to the police on the fact of both sisters being ‘in all things most irreproachable in themselves and most respectably connected in all ways’, owning their own furniture, etc.1 No more talk of little riddles now. Wills succeeded in his mission to the Yard, and the annoyance ceased.

  Dickens knew a good deal about police surveillance of young girls through his years of work for the Urania Cottage project. This now came abruptly to an end. Miss Coutts’s firm support for Catherine and her anxiety to reconcile the separated couple made his partnership with her uneasy, though he could have gone on helping with the organization without being on particularly close terms with Miss Coutts. It looks as though he chose to give up Urania Cottage for more private reasons. Perhaps he felt the loss of that springy moral confidence that had always characterized his dealings with the girls there. It must have become rather more difficult to look them in the eye when he was involved in something that led him to view the police as enemies and single girls living unchaperoned in a new light. This was not all. For years the visits to Shepherd’s Bush and talks with the girls had been important to him: ‘a most extraordinary and mysterious study it is, but interesting and touching in the extreme’.2 Like some other reformers – Gladstone is one – he had a genuine wish to do good by reclaiming lost innocents, but at the same time was indulging a need of his own,
a curiosity about another world, and particularly the world of young women who existed on the margins of society. The enjoyment with which he made his visits and talked to the girls was always obvious in his letters; with the advent of other young women to answer this particular need, the pressure to keep up his role at Urania Cottage slackened. Once he abandoned it, it became clear just how much the project had depended on him as its mainspring and driving force. Without him the whole enterprise failed, and in a few years it closed down for good.3

  The public readings on which Dickens now embarked were hard work in themselves, and meant a great deal of travel and nights in hotel rooms, but he found them enjoyable and even relaxing. The real strain upon him had other causes. A woman who had known him well in earlier years observed him at a reading and noted the change in him: ‘The nostril was still sensitive and dilated like that of a war-horse, the whole aspect spoke of power, sensibility, and eager restlessness, but overcast with a shadow which blighted its geniality. The open, frank steadiness of eye was gone. He seemed to have withered and dwindled into a smaller man,’ she wrote.4 He was acutely aware of what the public thought, and to another correspondent who asked him if she should change the picture of him she had in her mind, he wrote back assuring her of the happiness and wholesomeness of his home life; only knaves and fools, he said, were responsible for the other rumours.5 He could not bear the image of a rake; he also had genuine difficulty in seeing himself in it. He fought off self-knowledge and quarrelled with the friends who wouldn’t reassure him that he was in the right in everything he did. Yet he knew his actions were disapproved. He knew he had made his children unhappy. He knew, too, that there was a real danger of spoiling the reputation of the Ternan girls and even perhaps of putting their careers in jeopardy.