The Invisible Woman

by Claire Tomalin

  There were other serious annoyances to deal with at this time. In October his brother Frederick’s wife, Anna, taking advantage of the new divorce laws, sued him on the grounds of adultery with an unknown woman. Frederick contested the case, saying it was condoned, and the name of Dickens was unpleasantly dragged through the courts. Then his youngest brother, Augustus, following what began to look like a family tradition, also deserted his wife and children, and departed for America with another woman, with whom he started a second family. One of his mother’s brothers, John Barrow, a writer who had fallen on hard times, died, leaving an illegitimate daughter who put in a claim to the Royal Literary Fund. None of this can have pleased Dickens at a time when he needed to shield himself from gossip. At the Garrick, after quarrelling with Thackeray over a trivial literary matter, he resigned from the club (it was the second time he had done so). Thackeray made a point of befriending Catherine, and the two men did not speak to one another again for years. In addition to these troubles his mother, now senile, was still a charge upon him, yet another woman who had to be maintained in a house of her own.

  With all these difficulties and anxieties, Dickens kept up his discreet and persistent attentions to Nelly. The traces are of the faintest, but they are there. Before Christmas 1858 there is another gift of £10 from C. D. to E. T.6 The idea that Nelly – who had probably never been further than Ireland – might be sent to join her mother and sister for a holiday in Florence some time during the following year began to be considered. Slowly he persuaded her of his constancy and reliability; slowly the family’s indebtedness to him built up. Dickens, by nature impetuous, was exercising restraint and patience now. ‘We know that the Muses were women, and we know every day of our lives that the Fates are women,’ he announced in a speech in December, proposing a toast to the ‘softer and better sex’ who gave so much ‘both in happiness and pain’.7 The all-male audience gathered to honour him roared with appreciative laughter – after all, Dickens was a humorist – though his remarks may not have been intended entirely humorously.

  The year 1859 came in, and in mid-January Dickens exchanged letters with Forster and Wills on the subject of assigning his lease of Tavistock House to another family (it had thirty-seven more years to run). It’s clear that he had a specific family in mind, and both men advised him in the strongest terms against the plan, Wills telling him bluntly it would be wrong, Forster that ‘such a step would most decidedly be very damaging indeed’.8 No other family is known of in this connection, and the vehemence of Forster and Wills on the subject suggests that Dickens may have been thinking of the Ternans, following their trouble in Berners Street. Certainly within the next few weeks an 84-year lease on a large house just to the north of Tavistock Square, and forming part of the same Bedford Estate, was purchased by – or for – ‘Frances and Maria Ternan, spinsters, of 31 Berners Street’. This must have been something of a formality, since Fanny was still in Florence; and in any case the house was ‘sold’ by them to Nelly a year later, when she reached her majority, in what was obviously a carefully worked-out plan. No. 2 Houghton Place, Ampthill Square, was a tall, handsome, four-storey terraced house with an iron balcony at the front and a garden at the back; it was near Mornington Crescent, then a pleasant, leafy place with many open spaces, close to Regent’s Park and no great distance from the centre of town.9

  There is no proof positive that Dickens was the real purchaser, though Nelly later said he was, and the likelihood of the Ternans suddenly finding themselves rich enough to buy such a large and well-placed house, and choosing to buy it for the youngest daughter through a curious manoeuvre, is too remote for serious consideration.10 It must surely be seen as a gauge of Dickens’s seriousness and a guarantee of her future security, whatever happened; a generous and even delicate gesture, since it gave Nelly her liberty if she chose. It was also a gift no respectable woman would have accepted, and no mother who cherished her daughters’ good names would have permitted.

  Nelly continued to act, still with Buckstone, but with diminishing commitment. In March she was given another chance of a leading role in The World and the Stage, a drama adapted from the French, in which she played a titled lady saved from debt by her sister, who is an actress, and so socially unacceptable. The irony may have amused the cast, but Nelly left the production after a single performance. She made one or two more appearances, but then appears to have departed for her first holiday abroad, joining Fanny in Florence. The photograph of her taken in a Florentine studio – was it done for Dickens? – shows her as a very juvenile twenty, ‘petite and pretty’, with her hair in ringlets and a slightly puzzled air. If she felt perplexed by the rapidity of events, it was hardly surprising. In eighteen months the situation of the Ternan family had been transformed from poverty and uncertainty to something approaching luxury. They were now householders, Mrs Ternan was no longer working, Fanny was a student, and they were all able to travel abroad.

  For Dickens, Nelly may have been the flawless embodiment of his fantasies, so much so that her image had emerged from the Doncaster episode not only undamaged but enhanced. But fantasy does not convey much about the hard centre of truth, the real person inside the image; whether she was a mercenary minx or a doll-like victim, installed in her doll’s house in Mornington Crescent. Is it possible to tell what she was really like?

  No surviving accounts from this period contain anything more than the bare professional and physical description – a young actress, small, pretty and well developed (a phrase which meant, then as now, that she had noticeable breasts); moderately competent as a performer but not outstanding. She had been admired as a sweet child performer, though without the formidable talents of her sister Fanny; and it’s safe to say she enjoyed acting for its own sake, or she would not have returned to it as she did, as an enthusiastic amateur, later in her life. But no friend or observer has ever stepped forward from these early years to speak on her behalf and say, I remember her well, a nice girl; or I hated her, we acted together at the Haymarket; nor does a single scrap of writing in her hand survive from this period.

  What we do know is that Dickens’s daughter Katey, Nelly’s exact contemporary, considered her clever and well able to educate herself. We also know that Katey did not hold her responsible for Dickens’s behaviour, although she said she flattered him, and he was ‘ever appreciative of praise’: but then all his family also flattered him constantly. Katey may have seen her on stage, for she declared she was not a good actress; however, ‘she had brains, which she used to educate herself, to bring her mind more on a level with his own [Dickens’s]. Who could blame her … He had the world at his feet. She was a young girl of eighteen, elated and proud to be noticed by him.’ Clever Katey did not become the friend of this intelligent, elated girl, whereas her mild elder sister Mamey, less acute and much more subject to their father’s will, evidently did.

  We know that Nelly, like her sisters, was a good mimic and became a fine linguist; that she loved books, and read widely and seriously; and that she had literary aspirations of her own, which later expressed themselves in various ways, including the composition of verse and an attempt at a play. She enjoyed music both light and serious, and had opinions on the subject, unlike Dickens. With him she shared a pleasure in singing and dancing, and a sentimental fondness for dogs; the Ternans always kept pet dogs, large and small, about the house, and sometimes on their laps. She was also physically brave: not learning to ride until she was an adult, she became notably skilful and fearless on horseback.

  Nelly had no roots, no one place of childhood memories to which she yearned. Perhaps because of this she was not a settler; again like Dickens, she was always restless and ready to travel or move on. What survived all the moving was her profound attachment to her sisters; they represented home for her as no place ever did.

  She was – or she became – acutely sensitive to what people thought of her; always careful of her appearance and prettily dressed, she had the vanity of a wom
an who knows herself to be attractive. People who made her acquaintance later in life spoke of her as cultured and charming, and of the quickness and wit of the conversation of all three sisters, and their perpetual interest in books, the theatre and politics. Their interests were thoroughly secular, and although Nelly went through a period of religious observation, she was never devout; indeed, there is no sign that religion played more than a formal part in the life of any of the Ternans.

  Surprisingly perhaps, given Dickens’s much proclaimed love of busy little housekeepers, she was always totally undomesticated; household management and cookery were of no interest to her at all. He described her character as gentle; if this was a true view, she evidently changed once she emerged from his giant shadow. Then she acquired a reputation as a tease, high-spirited and rather imperious; and as she aged, her vitality, and her temper, became more marked. She had a fiery streak, was notably dominant, and is said to have made extraordinary scenes when she did not get her way.

  All this may have been held in check as long as she was Dickens’s ‘dear girl’; time and circumstance do change character, and the force of hers may have developed slowly and been scarcely apparent when he first knew her. But even in his lifetime the little riddle in the lilac bonnet and gloves became, in his own description, a proud and self-reliant woman.11 How the balance of power was held between him and her (and her family), and how much she made her own decisions and plotted her own course of action, must be mostly guesswork. What is not in doubt is that, although she lacked the ambition of her mother or her sister Fanny, she was, like them, both intelligent and brave. One more characteristic: she loved children. Later she talked of being eager to have a whole nursery full of babies.12

  During the spring of 1859 Dickens was rearranging his own affairs. He moved his office in Wellington Street a few doors along to No. 26, on the corner of York (now Tavistock) Street, where he could have a larger and more comfortable apartment for himself, with a housekeeper in attendance. It provided a serious bachelor residence, very conveniently placed; from his balcony on the first floor he had a direct view of the Lyceum Theatre opposite.*

  During these months his portrait was painted by Frith; it depicted, as he acknowledged ruefully, a man in whom ferocity prevailed over geniality. His behaviour bore out the message of the picture. He fought a lawsuit against Bradbury & Evans, his coowners of Household Words, bought it, closed it down and reopened it without them under a new name, All the Year Round. Even the new novel on which he embarked as a serial in the newly named weekly brought a potential fight with it. A Tale of Two Cities took some of its chief inspiration from Carlyle’s French Revolution, a book that had gone to Dickens’s head like strong spirits; but there appears to have been another source for the story in a play by an obscure writer, Watts Phillips, on the theme of a substitution at the guillotine. Dickens had read Phillips’s play in 1857 and, presumably, half forgotten it; the luckless author, himself accused of plagiarism, called witnesses to the fact that his was the earlier work and known to Dickens. The potential scandal was quickly suppressed and forgotten, but the incident provides a good example of the efficiency and ruthlessness of Dickens’s handling of public relations. He gave Phillips the coup de grâce by dramatizing his own novel; it was produced at the Lyceum under his own direction.13

  There was one further source for The Tale of Two Cities which Dickens proclaimed happily enough when he wrote that he had been inspired by his role as Richard Wardour in The Frozen Deep in creating the character of the dissolute but self-sacrificing Sydney Carton; and the name of the girl acted by Nelly in the play – Lucy – is given to the girl Carton loves, Lucie. Dickens discussed his work in progress with Nelly; in July, back from Italy, she was reading proofs for him, which he had sent round to Mornington Crescent.14 She can’t have failed to notice that Lucie Manette was physically modelled on herself. Dickens gave her 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 (remembering how young and smooth it was), of lifting and knitting itself into an expression that was not quite one of perplexity, or wonder, or alarm, or merely of a bright fixed attention, though it included all the four expressions.15

  This distinctive physical appearance makes Lucie’s character, or lack of it, all the more disappointing. Far from breaking the mould of his vapid heroines, he makes her almost a blank, a paper princess, an innocent who undergoes a series of ordeals – loss of father, loss of child, loss of husband – with perfect passivity; she is required to be only sweet, simple and enduring, as she is swept along in the wake of great events. As in The Frozen Deep, melodrama blots out any possibility of finer considerations. The morally uncertain world of purely private dangers in which Nelly was actually struggling remained as distant from the fiction of her distinguished admirer as the moon.

  Dickens complained of his health several times during the summer of 1859. In June he put it down to his bachelor state. Chastity was held to be unhealthy for men, and it was not something he had endured much since his youth.16 The contrast with Collins, enjoying all the pleasures of a domestic ménage round the corner in Albany Street, must have irked him. In the same month he told his fortunate friend that ‘The “cold” is pretty much in the old state. So I have made up my mind to think no more of it, and to go (in a general way) the way of all flesh’ – a richly ambiguous statement of dissatisfaction.17 In June he complained to Wills of feeling ‘languid and short of starch’.18 At the same time he explained to his American publisher that he was financially tempted by an invitation to cross the Atlantic, but that ‘several strong reasons would make the journey difficult for me’. To his manager Arthur Smith he had already written of his reluctance ‘for a private reason, rendering a long voyage and absence particularly painful to me’ and to Forster he now insisted that ‘I should be one of the most unhappy of men if I were to go’.19 These remarks add up to a picture of a man who feels intermittently ill, is suffering from sexual deprivation, and does not want to go away: and the ‘private reason’ for not wanting to go away was surely to be found in Mornington Crescent.

  In August, still not feeling right, Dickens visited Collins at the seaside in Broadstairs, where he was comfortably installed with Caroline and her little daughter. Whether or not he discussed his difficulties with his friend, and whether Collins gave him advice which helped towards resolving them, Nelly made her last appearance on stage as a professional actress on 10 August 1859, still at the Haymarket, as Mrs Gatherwool in Charles Mathews’s Out of Sight, Out of Mind. She was then firmly removed out of the public’s sight. Her adult career, which had lasted for a little more than two years, was over for good, at twenty. Maria took over her sister’s part and continued her stage career without a break. In September Fanny was with her mother in Paris. Dickens wrote recommending her to his friend Philoclès Régnier of the Comédie-Française, in the hope that he would help her to find work. She was, he wrote, ‘uncommonly clever and accomplished … as good and diligent as she is spirituelle’.20 Régnier, however, either could not or chose not to help Fanny, and a cooling in the relations between the two men followed. Dickens’s financial involvement was again signalled in his Coutts account, which shows ‘£50 to Mrs E. F. Ternan at Paris’.21 In January he paid £50 for ‘E. Ternan’s Bill’. At this point Maria appeared to be the only member of the family not dependent on him. Then, on 3 March 1860, her twenty-first birthday, Nelly acquired the Ampthill Square house as her own property. Dickens was reported to be living very quietly, while at Thackeray’s dinner table the breaking of his marriage was confidently attributed to ‘Miss Teman’.22

  Fanny’s Italian training did not make her the prima donna assoluta she had hoped to become. Although she was given leading soprano parts, it was either in the Mile End Road, where the Eastern Opera House was grandly named but not grandly attended, or slogging round the northern provinces again; she attracted neither seriou
s critical attention nor popular following. Maria spent some time touring with her and also continued to act at the Lyceum with Mrs Keeley and Madame Celeste; but although she, too, sang well and was a skilful comédienne, she failed to progress to leading roles. The life of a perpetually touring singer or actress below the first rank was not something to be contemplated with enthusiasm, and Mrs Ternan may have been thankful that one of her daughters at least had some security – and that they all now had a good home at Ampthill Square. Her relations with Dickens remained entirely cordial.

  In May Annie Fields, the wife of Dickens’s American publisher, meeting him for the first time at Tavistock House, noted that he was not the cheerful person she had expected but ‘rather the man of labor and of sorrowful thought’.23 One reason seems to have been the impending wedding of his daughter Katey to Wilkie Collins’s younger brother Charles. Charles was not another libertine, quite the reverse, a soulful artist, member of the Pre-Raphaelite group, gentle and ineffectual, and suffering from the beginnings of an illness that would soon kill him; he was twelve years older than Katey. The marriage precipitated feelings of remorse at his own behaviour in Dickens, who believed – probably rightly – that his daughter was marrying to get away from an unhappy home and not for love; certainly without passion. Perhaps she felt there was enough passion in the family, and also that her father had found himself a daughter – a whole family of new daughters – with whom she simply did not wish to compete. Her wedding in July at Gad’s Hill was attended mostly by Dickens’s younger friends – the French actor-manager Charles Fechter and Edmund Yates, also from an acting family; Mr and Mrs Wills, her niece Nina Lehmann with her German husband; the journalist Percy Fitzgerald, whom Dickens hoped Mamey might marry; Mary Boyle, an unmarried cousin of Lavinia Watson, whose devotion to him had begun with amateur acting and survived his marital crisis; and Marguerite Power, niece of Lady Blessington. There were a few local families present also, but the wedding was solemnized without the presence of the bride’s mother. When it was over, Dickens allegedly wept and said, ‘But for me, Katey would not have left home.’24