The Invisible Woman
Page 17
So, I pass to my hotel, enchanted; sup, enchanted; got to bed, enchanted; pushing back this morning (if it really was this morning) into the remoteness of time … murmuring, as I wing my idle flight into the land of dreams, ‘No hurry, ladies and gentlemen, going to Paris in eleven hours.’1
He wrote the language efficiently and spoke it fluently, though some say with a shocking accent. His books were popular there, and he had friends in the Parisian literary and theatrical world; he had noted the domestic arrangements of Victor Hugo, whose mistress of many years’ standing was the actress Juliette Drouet. Dickens could be critical of French immorality, dirt and disobligingness, but as the years went by he found less to complain of and more to love.
In the early 1860s he wrote a series of stories about a London lodging-house keeper, Mrs Lirriper, whom he sent off on a trip to Paris and Sens. Mrs Lirriper’s delight in French customs and the beauty of its landscape and architecture would do credit to a tourist board copywriter. ‘What do you think of this lovely lovely Paris, Gran?’ asks her young protégé, and she answers that it’s ‘like beautiful fireworks being let off in my head’. Paris, she declares, is
town and country both in one, and carved stone and long streets of high houses and gardens and fountains and statues and trees and gold … and clean tablecloths spread everywhere for dinner and people sitting out of doors smoking and sipping all day long and little plays being acted in the open air for little people and every shop a complete and elegant room, and everybody seeming to play at everything in this world.
The people are much more ‘homely and domestic in their families and far more simple and amiable in their lives than I had ever been led to expect’ and much better than the English at taking ‘little enjoyments on little means’. Mrs Lirriper is one of Dickens’s most purely amiable characters, and there’s no doubt that her views are those of her creator.
Privately he sometimes boasted about his frequent trips across the Channel. He told a Swiss friend,
my being on the Dover line, and my being very fond of France, occasion me to cross the channel perpetually … away I go by the mail-train, and turn up in Paris or anywhere else that suits my humour, next morning. So I come back as fresh as a daisy.2
To another friend he wrote that a visit to France always cured the touch of neuralgia to which he was subject.3 There was nothing new about his liking for the country itself; what was new was the secretive and apparently solitary nature of many of his trips, and his sometimes disingenuous accounts of them. Nelly’s presence, somewhere within reach of Paris or the Channel ports, is the most obvious explanation for all this.
We know he was in France during the second half of June 1862 and again in July. On 7 July he told one friend he had just been in France and was preparing to return.4 But on the same day he wrote to another,
I am away to France forthwith, for a holiday, and am not likely to be in London for many weeks to come. It is some years since I was last across the channel, and I am going on a little tour of observation that may keep me wandering for some time.5
On 1 January 1863 he wrote to Collins to say he would be at Wellington Street for two nights (2 and 3 January, a Friday and Saturday), then ‘on the Sunday I vanish into space for a day or two; but I must be in Paris about Thursday the 15th’ – giving him another period of invisibility.6 To one correspondent he wrote at this time that he might be visiting ‘a sick friend’ and possibly going to Lausanne or Geneva; perhaps he did, but if so he left no other trace of such a visit. To another friend he said he might go to Genoa, but again there is no evidence that he did. In February 1863 he took a break in northern France: ‘a little perfectly quiet tour for about ten days’, during which he apparently – and uncharacteristically – spent his fifty-first birthday alone, at Arras; he had even dismissed his manservant.7 In August 1863 he again spoke of ‘evaporating for a fortnight’.8 In June 1864 he gave more conflicting accounts of his destination abroad, telling one friend it was to be Belgium, another that it was Paris; he referred to it as a ‘Mysterious Disappearance’.9 His daughter Mamey mentions in her memoir that he made ‘several runs into France’ in the later part of 1864, and it was in December of this year that he attributed his cure for neuralgia to just such a trip. Since it was so easy for him to set off either from Gad’s Hill or from Wellington Street; since he was served by totally loyal and discreet people in both places, who accepted without question that his comings and goings might be unpredictable and unaccounted for; and since he was blessed with prodigious energy, there is no knowing how many more times he was in France. Things were made even easier for him in 1863, when Charing Cross Station was opened, putting the Channel service within a hundred yards of Wellington Street. Like his contemporary Flaubert, he was very quick to grasp the possibilities offered by rail travel to those who wanted to live a double or secret life; there was a moment in the summer of 1865 when both writers were making clandestine dashes between England and France.10
*
Enchanting as France could be to Dickens, there was a period in 1862 and 1863 in which his journeys there were not cheerful ones. The letter to Forster in which he spoke of his ‘never to be forgotten misery’ coincided with the trip of June 1862. On 20 July he was still talking of a ‘load of troubles’ in a letter to Collins; a week later he wrote again to Collins, telling him he planned to be at Dover on 4 August, and on 1 September he referred to a visit he had been making ‘at a distance’. By 5 September he was planning a series of readings to be given that winter in Paris, which would necessitate a long stay in France; and on the twentieth of the same month he told Collins he had ‘rather miserable anxieties which I must impart to you one of these days when I come to you or you come to me. I shall fight out of them, I dare say; being not easily beaten – but they have gathered and gathered.’11 Forster was reminded again of his ‘unsettled fluctuating distress’ on 5 October, a week before Dickens crossed the Channel again. Paris was his base now until the end of the year, although, restless and busy as ever, he made two brief trips to London between October and December.
In mid-October he collected his daughter Mamey and Georgina at Boulogne, and escorted them back to Paris, where he took a house in the Faubourg St-Honoré for them. If Nelly was installed somewhere in the Paris region, their tolerant presence would hardly have changed things. They knew her and were entirely trustworthy; Dickens was giving them a treat, and in any case he could do no wrong in their eyes. Georgina had been ill, allegedly with ‘heart trouble’, and the ten weeks in Paris were meant to be restorative. Her biographer has suggested that her ailments may have had their origin in emotional turmoil caused by a crisis in Dickens’s relations with Nelly; a diagnosis that looks the more convincing in the light of Georgina’s complete recovery, and the fact that she was never troubled by her heart again in the course of a long life.12
Dickens certainly worried about her, though quite openly, just as he worried over the care of his whole tribe of family dependents; but the painful centre of his private misery seems to find expression in some remarks written in Paris in February 1863. He had returned to England for Christmas at Gad’s Hill with Georgina and his younger sons, and there seen his first grandchild, Charley’s month-old daughter. He then went back to Paris alone to give a few more readings. After seeing a performance of Gounod’s opera Faust, he was moved to write to Georgina: ‘I could hardly bear the thing, it affected me so, and sounded in my ears like a mournful echo of things that lie in my own heart.’13 To Macready also he wrote a description of the scene in which Marguerite is shown accepting the jewels from Faust:
After Marguerite has taken the jewels placed in her way in the garden, a weird evening draws on, and the bloom fades from the flowers, and the leaves of the trees droop and lose their fresh green, and mournful shadows overhang her chamber window, which was innocent and gay at first. I couldn’t bear it, and gave in completely.14
Gounod’s Faust was a new opera, and its libretto fitted the story to s
uit the taste of the day. Goethe’s metaphysics were removed to make it a simple sex drama centred on a vulnerable girl and an ageing man desperate to recover his youth. Mephistopheles’s offers of riches and power do not tempt Faust; what does is the promise that he will rejuvenate him, and so allow him to secure the love of Marguerite. Faust, magically young again, makes her the gift of jewels, which pleases and flatters her. She falls in love with him and willingly becomes his mistress. When she has a baby, he abandons her, and she finds herself ostracized. She goes mad, kills her baby, is imprisoned and dies; but her soul is carried up to heaven, because her sins all derive from Faust’s seduction.
It’s not too difficult to guess which aspects of the story produced the mournful echo in Dickens’s heart. He was fifty, a grandfather, but pursuing a youthful love; a rich, eminent and powerful man in a position to bribe, fascinate and seduce an innocent girl. Whatever he offered her in the way of money and protection, she must lose her reputation in the process. He could not sit through Faust without identifying with the guilty lover. The further implications of this guilt are reinforced by his later statement that Nelly had been through some long and lonely ordeal.15 If Nelly, like Marguerite, bore a child, a likely time for it seems to be 1862 or 1863, and France a likely place.
Nelly was not, of course, abandoned by her Faust-Dickens, any more than she was rejected by her mother. Nor was she going to be driven to madness, suicide, prostitution or even the colonies. If we imagine Mrs Ternan and her daughter installed in some pleasant spot in France, Nelly in the guise of a young married woman, and Dickens making regular visits, the situation, while still anxious and painful, looks a good deal less black than that of a Marguerite or any of the erring women in his novels. All the same there cannot have been much joy in becoming a mother, even in these relatively comfortable and discreet circumstances.
For Dickens, if there was indeed a child, its prospective arrival meant, as well as concealment, provision to be made for its future. He was not an aristocrat, a French poet-playwright or a man indifferent to what anyone thought of him, but one who felt intensely and peculiarly vulnerable to scandal. The likelihood of discovery, of a blight over his good name, must have loomed more threateningly than before; it was one thing to make clandestine visits to a young woman, another altogether to be responsible for a child who could grow up to claim you as its father. Nelly’s disappearance from England would help to keep the first part of the secret at least. And if there was indeed a child, the problem of providing for its future was soon solved in the simplest way: ‘there was a boy but it died’ – or so said Dickens’s son Henry.16
Inconvenient and upsetting for Dickens, but for Nelly it would have been infinitely worse. To give birth, to cherish for a few months perhaps, and then to lose a baby, is a terrible thing. It becomes more terrible if the child is not to be acknowledged and can be remembered only as a dreamlike guilty secret: first shame, then love, then grief. If Nelly went through this ordeal, rawly painful in itself, it must have raised in her mind the question as to whether there would be more babies for her, and what their circumstances were likely to be; whether she would ever be in a position to take pleasure and pride in children of her own. These were questions to which Dickens would scarcely have been able to offer reassuring answers.
From time to time people have turned up claiming to be children or descendants of Dickens through women other than his wife. The most persistent case is that of a man called Charley Peters, who applied to a charitable foundation in India in 1908, saying his name was Hector Charles Bulwer Lytton Dickens, and that he was the child of Georgina Hogarth by Dickens, born in 1854, and well known to the family, although he had been turned out. For good measure he produced letters of support from several Australian worthies, who were scandalized by the story of Dickens’s wickedness and believed that Charley Peters’s son, the callously unacknowledged grandchild, should be given assistance. The truth was that Peters had simply changed his name in Australia in 1900. He was not even a clever liar; he did not know, for instance, that his alleged mother, Miss Hogarth, was still alive at the time of his claim. The story was kept from her and easily shown to be false.* But understandably the family was enraged, and Sir Henry Dickens was vigorous in making sure that any such claims were disproved. In one case only he appears to have acted differently. In 1928 he is alleged to have stated that a child was born to his father and Ellen Ternan.†
We have seen that there is no hard evidence that Nelly had a child; but there is too much soft evidence to be brushed aside entirely. Gladys Storey, a close friend and confidante of Dickens’s daughter Katey (she became Kate Perugini through her second marriage), is the chief source of this evidence.17 Kate Perugini instructed Gladys Storey to write a book after her death, revealing certain facts she wanted on record. She died in 1929, and Gladys Storey in turn delayed publication until 1939. Dickens and Daughter states categorically that Ellen and Dickens had ‘a son, who died in infancy’. Gladys Storey added nothing to her bald statement and gave no definite date or place of birth.
Among her unpublished papers, however, is a note saying that Kate Perugini told her of the existence of a child in February 1923, and that Sir Henry Dickens confirmed the story on 9 September 1928. She gave two versions of her conversation with him, the first reading, ‘Sir Henry and I … talked about Ellen Ternan – that there was a boy but it died.’ Gladys Storey added that Sir Henry told her this while Lady Dickens was out of the room. A later note repeats ‘Sir Henry and I then spoke about Ellen Ternan the girl Dickens really lived with – Sir H. said there was a boy (as Mrs P. had told me) but he died.’ Still not proof, of course, but it should be borne in mind that Kate and Henry were certainly the most intelligent of the Dickens children, and the most likely to have known what was going on; and that they had no reason whatsoever for fabricating a story about their father, whom they loved.
Gladys Storey was regarded as trustworthy by the scrupulous Dickens scholar, the late Madeline House, who had several long talks with her and later wrote:
I’m convinced Mrs T was with Ellen at the time of the baby’s birth. This I have from Gladys Storey, who – with Kate Perugini – read the letters from Dickens to Wills making plans concerning the baby, before destroying them. – It was something of a triumph to get this out of Gladys, who is a jealous guarder of her secrets; but I’m convinced by the way it was said and the way it came up that it was the truth G was telling me.18
Gladys Storey also left a copy she had made of a letter from C. E. S. Chambers, great-nephew of Wills’s wife, to Walter Dexter of The Dickensian. Wills is known to have been in the confidence of Dickens and Nelly; he forwarded their letters, visited them, dined with them, transacted business for them and was regarded as a friend, although there is no trace of a continuing friendship with her after the death of Dickens: so perhaps Wills liked her less than Dickens wanted him to, and was less careful with letters concerning her than he might have been. Chambers refers to a packet of letters in Dickens’s hand which he (Chambers) sent to Sir Henry Dickens and which were never seen again. The letters were said to have been written from America during Dickens’s second visit, and they contained, according to Chambers, instructions from Dickens to Wills concerning the welfare of ‘a certain lady’ approaching her confinement. It is believed that the letters were destroyed by Sir Henry, though not until Kate Perugini had also seen them; and it is true that there are gaps in the Dickens-Wills letters from America which suggest they have been culled.
The trouble with this story is that it puts Nelly’s pregnancy much later, in 1867–8, and that there are reasons for doubting that she was pregnant then. Of course she may have been pregnant more than once. Purely on the basis of probability, an association of thirteen years between a man who has fathered children regularly on his wife over a period of sixteen years and a healthy young woman who had no difficulty in conceiving children later might be expected to produce children. On the other hand, Dickens may finally have tak
en the brotherly advice of Lord Jeffrey about avoiding conception.
Stumbling through this morass of conflicting and uncertain evidence, one is tempted to dismiss the whole subject with a ‘not proven’. No trace has been found of any birth in English registers, though an illegitimate baby could go unregistered up to 1874 – as Wilkie Collins’s first two children by Martha Rudd did – or it could have been registered under a false name.19 The French were more rigorous about registering births; but if Nelly was in the Paris region no record would remain, because the archives were burnt during the Commune in 1871. I found no trace in the Boulogne area archives, which are clearly kept and distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate births. But again, the birth and death of a baby in England, France, Switzerland, Italy or indeed any other European country could have been registered under a false name or simply lost in archives subject to destruction by the hand of God or man.
What Dickens continued to refer to as ‘mysterious disappearances’ and ‘evaporating for a fortnight’ continued, and the unhappiness connected with the Faust performance seems to have passed. The unlamented death of his mother in September 1863 saw him in England; in October he started a new novel, Our Mutual Friend, which was to keep him occupied for the next two years. A stranger who observed him walking near his office in the summer of 1864 noted his light step, sanguine complexion and jaunty air, the ‘spruce frockcoat, buttoned to show his good and still youthful figure’ and the ‘brand new hat airily cocked on one side’.20 Again, this seems closer to the Regency dandy than the Victorian patriarch; Dickens is still presenting himself in the costume of the juvenile lead, even if he sports a stick and has deepening lines etched in his face. He was in France in December 1864, for a week or so at the end of March 1865, again at the end of April, yet again in June. From this last trip he returned on 9 June; and this is the occasion on which Nelly makes her re-entrance.