The Invisible Woman

by Claire Tomalin

  The three travellers were at the front of the Folkestone to Charing Cross train which ran in conjunction with the ferry boats. On this particular day it had left at 2.30; Dickens had his latest instalment of Our Mutual Friend in his travelling bag and his usual flask of brandy. The afternoon was brilliantly sunny and hot. He described what happened in a letter to his old friend Thomas Mitton, written four days after the crash:

  Two ladies were my fellow-passengers, an old one and a young one. This is exactly what passed. You may judge it from the precise length of the suspense: Suddenly we were off the rail, and beating the ground as the car of a half-emptied balloon might. The old lady cried out, ‘My God’, and the young one screamed. I caught hold of them both (the old lady sat opposite and the young one on my left), and said: ‘We can’t help ourselves, but we can be quiet and composed. Pray don’t cry out.’ The old lady immediately answered: ‘Thank you. Rely upon me. Upon my soul I will be quiet.’ The young lady said in a frantic way, ‘Let us join hands and die friends.’ We were then all tilted down together in a corner of the carriage, and stopped. I said to them thereupon: ‘You may be sure nothing worse can happen. Our danger must be over. Will you remain here without stirring, while I get out of the window?’ They both answered quite collectedly, ‘Yes’, and I got out without the least notion what had happened …21

  Dickens does not dream of naming his companions even to an intimate old friend, or mentioning the fact that the young lady was injured; but he cannot resist making them into dramatic characters. The remark of the ‘young lady’ suggests Nelly was quarrelling with Dickens, or at least not feeling very friendly at this particular moment, but that the danger made her wish to be reconciled, even at the risk of their bodies being found with linked hands, should the crash kill them.

  The accident was caused by men working on the railway forgetting to signal back that the track was interrupted over a small bridge at Staplehurst in Kent. The train had simply steamed over the gap, its middle section collapsing into it; some of the coaches then ran out of control down a bank and overturned into boggy ground, crushing and killing passengers in a tangle of iron, wood and mud. Only the front coach, in which Dickens sat with his party, was held firm by its coupling to the tender, though it was tilted at a steep angle.

  Dickens was shaken but not injured; Mrs Ternan was also unharmed; Nelly was not so lucky. She was evidently thrown about and jammed into the broken corner of the carriage, badly enough to have her jewellery torn from her in the struggle to extract her; and, like many of the passengers, she seems to have sustained an injury to her upper arm, possibly a fracture.22

  Dickens, humanely seeking the wounded and dying with his brandy flask in hand – there were engravings of him at this work in the press – was at the same time absolutely intent on covering up the fact that he had not been travelling alone. He made sure the name of his injured companion was given to no one, and he categorically refused to give evidence at the inquest. The accident was widely reported, since ten people died in it and about forty were injured badly enough to require hospital treatment. One report mentions a young woman who refused to give her name, ostensibly for fear of alarming her relatives. It is not at all clear how Nelly was got from the scene of the crash to a hospital or doctor; it must have been a nightmare for all three of them. Whatever treatment she received, she was soon back in Mornington Crescent with her mother and Fanny, where for some weeks she remained an invalid needing special care.

  There is a glimpse of Dickens fussing over how to cheer her up in a note written on 25 June to his manservant John Thompson, instructing him to take

  Miss Ellen tomorrow morning, a little basket of fresh fruit, a jar of clotted cream from Tuckers, and a chicken, a pair of pigeons, or some nice little bird. Also on Wednesday morning, and on Friday morning, take her some other things of the same sort – making a little variety each day.23

  His most indiscreet action was to write, three days after the crash, to the station master at Charing Cross about her lost jewellery:

  A lady who was in the carriage with me in the terrible accident on Friday, lost, in the struggle of being got out of the carriage, a gold watch-chain with a smaller gold watch-chain attached, a bundle of charms, a gold watch-key, and a gold seal engraved ‘Ellen’. I promised the lady to make her loss known at headquarters, in case these trinkets should be found.24

  It seems rather a lot of gold to be hanging about the person of one young woman, but no doubt it represented the eight years of Christmases and birthdays celebrated by Dickens, who took such things seriously; he sometimes noted down the letters HBD – for Her Birth Day – against small sums laid out at the end of February and did not willingly accept any other engagement for the day itself, 3 March.

  From the time of the accident Dickens began calling Nelly ‘The Patient’ in his letters to Wills. On 12 July and again on 16 August he assured Wills that the Patient was much better, though still not quite right. On 25 July the Patient was ‘still much the same’. He went on to say he planned to go away again in September.25 Although he often claimed the accident had left him with a fear of train travel, there is no evidence of this in any aspect of his arrangements, which continued to rely heavily on the railways; and in September he did indeed return to Paris, with or without a companion, for two weeks. He records another short break – four days of ‘rest and recreation’ – in November. Between these two holidays it was decided that the Mornington Crescent house should be let and the Patient should move – or be moved – out of London again.

  This chapter has tried to make some sense of the known facts of the years between 1861 and 1865, and suggested a simple outline of a narrative to fit them: that Nelly became pregnant by Dickens and that to minimize the possibility of scandal he moved her to France, probably somewhere in the Paris area; that she had her baby there, with her mother in attendance, some time in 1862; that the baby died, probably during the summer of 1863; and that she then stayed on in France or spent most of her time abroad until June 1865, when the Staplehurst accident happened.26

  Some or all of this may be wrong. She may not have had a baby; she may not have lived in France but only visited it for brief holidays. Staplehurst, however, is incontrovertible, and it put Dickens into a panic. Staplehurst also enforces the point that, whatever the truth was, there had to be an innocent version of Nelly’s activities. It was the version used by Dickens when necessary and by her sisters. Whatever Fanny and Maria thought of Nelly’s progress – her acquisition of a house, her abandonment of the stage, her transformation into a well-dressed woman who travelled abroad clandestinely – and whatever they thought of their mother’s acquiescence in all this, they had this version which they could use to one another, and possibly to themselves.

  The version went like this. Dickens was a friend of the family. He was devoted to them all, but Nelly was most like a daughter to him, or perhaps a god-daughter; and she reciprocated his affection with a true, daughterly devotion. She helped him with his work, and he very reasonably wanted to give her an education – travel abroad was educational – so that she could help him still more. Because she was sensitive, he wanted to save her from the harshness of life in the theatre; but he could not be open about his friendship, because the world was too ready to lay blame and see scandal where there was none. His separation from his wife, while it had nothing to do with Nelly, meant he had to be especially careful not to appear publicly as their friend.

  It may be hard to credit that Fanny and Maria really believed this, but they needed it to offer to people who asked about their sister and Dickens, among them no doubt cynical colleagues in the theatre. And if Fanny and Maria didn’t believe it, they probably tried to, in order to square their own consciences over any suspicion that the house they lived in and the help they received from Dickens was paid for by their younger sister’s sexual favours.

  The Staplehurst accident brutally threatened Dickens’s privacy and brutally brought home to Nelly the humilia
tions of her position; for whatever physical injuries she received, his fear of exposure and his inability to give her help and comfort openly when she most needed it must have been painful too. It made very clear to Nelly and her sisters that, whether she was guilty or whether she was innocent, she was obliged to live her life somewhere in the gap between what could be said and what really happened. The gap was a wide one in mid-nineteenth-century England, but that did not make it any more comfortable.

  * The story persisted, however, and surfaced again from time to time right up to the 1980s, when it was confidently brought to the present writer in London at the Sunday Times: there was no more evidence then than before, just an accumulation of false claims, now covering three generations of ‘Dickenses’. Charley Peters’s mother was now said to be a servant girl seduced and abandoned by Dickens rather than Georgina Hogarth, which made a more appealing story to modern ears, though there was still not a shred of ‘proof’.

  † Sir Henry was Harry, born to Catherine and Dickens in 1849, their penultimate child, and the only son to win his father’s entire approval. He was clever and hard-working, won a Cambridge scholarship, read law, prospered, became a QC and made a happy marriage; after the death of his eldest brother Charley in 1896 he became the effective head of the family and the defender of his father’s reputation.

  10

  Fanny and Maria Get Married

  1863–1866

  When Nelly reappeared in June 1865, everything about her family had changed. Maria was married and living in Oxford, and Fanny was working as a teacher from the house in Ampthill Square. The theatre no longer had a place in any of their lives; all their skills and efforts had failed. Even Dickens’s faith in them and his efforts to promote their careers had been disappointed.

  He believed strongly in his own ability to wrench the world into the shape he wanted, the stage manager of real events and lives as well as imaginary ones. ‘I know my plan is a good one – because it is mine!’ he wrote to Miss Coutts once, with a proposal for Urania Cottage.1 It was not a joke: in his dealings with his publishers, in his quarrel with his wife and in-laws, he behaved as a man who never doubts that what he wants is what is right and will surely be brought about. He was not often defeated; in the case of the Ternans and theatre, however, he was. The energy with which he attempted to assist them in their careers is obvious from the few scraps of letters that have survived. After Nelly left the stage and Fanny moved into the operatic world, he continued to write enthusiastically to stage managers on Maria’s behalf. In the autumn of 1861 he reminded Ben Webster at the Adelphi of the strong interest he took ‘in her and her family’. The following spring, when Charles Fechter (the French actor-manager he had met in Paris in 1859 and encouraged to move to London) took over at the Princess’s Theatre, Dickens recommended Maria again to him and his colleague Edmund Yates, asking them to give her work,

  not because I have a great friendship for her and know her to be one of the best and bravest of little spirits and most virtuous of girls (for that would have nothing to do with it), but because I have acted with her, and believe her to have more aptitude in a minute than all the other people of her standing on the stage in a month. A lady besides, and pretty, and of a good figure, and always painstaking and perfect to the letter. Also (but this has never had a chance) a wonderful mimic.2

  Aside from the slight note of condescension in his insistence on her virtue and gentility, he could hardly have written in more glowing terms of Maria’s qualities, personal and professional; but his recommendations led nowhere. Perhaps Maria was not as talented as he believed, or perhaps managers were nervous of her name.

  Finding it impossible to work in London, Maria had to pick up what she could in the provinces: small jobs here and there, touring with Fanny in operas; a few weeks in Oxford, a few more in East Anglia. It was a tough business. In January 1862 she fell ill with bronchitis after being required to jump into a tank of water on stage during a performance of Boucicault’s Colleen Bawn. This was in Rochester, where her Uncle William lived, and where Dickens gave a reading to a rapturous audience in the same week. She recovered and struggled on again.

  By now Maria and Fanny knew everything there was to know about the status, working conditions and expectations of professional actresses. It had become increasingly clear that, despite Dickens’s faith in them, neither had the capacity to become a great popular actress or singer – an Ellen Terry, a Marie Wilton, a Jenny Lind – and that if they chose to go on with the grind of the provincial tours, the second-rate companies, the small parts and perpetual uncertainty about the next job, they would never earn more than a pittance, wearing their neat black silk dresses into shabbiness and losing the freshness of youth, all in the service of an increasingly precarious future. Even the most successful actresses could fall into the abyss of poverty: Fanny Kelly, who had been at the top of the profession once, rich, famous, beloved by critics and public, was now living in penury with her daughter, supporting herself by taking in lodgers. For lesser talents, the long-term prospects looked grim indeed.

  Neither was inclined to wait passively on fate. At midsummer 1862, when the latest opera tour reached Hull and closed there, while Dickens – and probably their mother too – was distracted by other problems, they decided to give up. For all its promise, the clan of Thomas Ternan had not lasted long in the theatre. Fanny turned back to her old idea of teaching. She decided to concentrate on lessons in music and Italian, and hoped to keep up her own singing with occasional concert work. Maria, bolder and younger, turned to what was generally regarded as a more legitimate womanly ambition than the stage. She became the first of the sisters to find a husband.

  Her bridegroom, whom she may have met during her last tour, was the son of a prosperous Oxford brewer and town councillor. Rowland Taylor could offer her everything a sensible Victorian bride hoped for: a good steady income, a respectable social position, a comfortable home with servants and a carriage. From being an actress with a failing career, she was to be transported into a world in which she would have no financial cares and no duties beyond the running of her husband’s establishment. The marriage took place on 9 June 1863 at St Matthew’s, Oakley Square. It was only a step from Nelly’s house, from which Maria must have set out for the church; and she was given away by her Rochester uncle, William Lawless Ternan. The absence of her mother and younger sister could plausibly be ascribed to reasons of health.

  Rowland Taylor managed one of his father’s breweries, and the couple was to settle in Oxford. According to family tradition, Maria was not in love with her husband but married him on the rebound from another, unhappy affair. It did not make a good start for either of them; she had, however, joined a very solid and respectable family. One of her brothers-in-law was a solicitor, another a clergyman preparing to become a schoolmaster; a few years later the Revd John Taylor became the principal of the school in Tunbridge Wells to which Dickens sent his youngest son, Plorn, and Plorn – who was in most respects as unsatisfactory as most of the Dickens sons – was happy in his care.

  In spite of this solid beginning Maria failed to turn into a model wife; or perhaps it was the very solidity that proved too much for her. She was known in the family as the merry sister, and with nothing to do but run a house – at first the beautiful old Paradise House in the centre of Oxford – and please her busy husband, she found things quiet. Soon she was bored. She was not used to being idle, and she had interests and wishes that were not met in the society into which she had entered, which was neither artistic nor intellectual. Oxford University took little note of women and none at all of the wives of brewers. Like all her family she was restless. She had been on the move for too long to settle easily. It looks as though she began to consider quite early how she might escape from the comfortable trap into which she had ventured. Like innumerable Victorian wives and daughters she developed the secret weapon of delicate health. In her case it did not confine her to the sofa, but dictated that she must tr
avel, to the seaside or, better still, abroad, like her sister Nelly. No children appeared to interfere with this programme. Maria acquired a pet dog and dreamed of another life altogether.

  Fanny also dreamed of achieving something more than being a north London singing teacher. Her performing career did not prosper. In June 1865 she was approaching her thirtieth birthday, still a trim, neatly turned-out young woman, clever, observant, hardworking, conscientious; and by now clearly destined for spinsterhood. As a governess she was in demand and had just acquired an interesting new pupil in little Beatrice Trollope. Fanny had first known Bice – so she was always called (pronounced in two Italian syllables, bee-chay) – as a five-year-old in Florence. She was the only child of Dickens’s friend, the Anglo-Florentine writer Thomas Trollope, and his wife Theodosia, also a writer, who had entertained Fanny in Italy seven years earlier. Theodosia, always delicate, died suddenly in the spring of 1865; and the grieving Thomas, hardly knowing how to cope, either with his loneliness or with his thirteen-year-old daughter, availed himself of the kindness of his brother Anthony, who collected Bice and took her to England to spend the summer with him and her comfortable Aunt Rose.

  The Anthony Trollopes lived at Waltham Cross in Essex, then unspoiled country, though easily reached from London; and here it was arranged in May that Miss Ternan should come down on alternate weekends, staying from Saturday until Monday, to give Bice a lesson on each of the three days. For this she was offered £2 per visit in addition to her board and lodging.3 If Thomas Trollope was surprised at the transformation of the aspiring opera singer into a governess, he made no objection; indeed, singing was something Bice enjoyed. The proposal did not originate with him but with his brother; how Anthony came to know of Miss Ternan we can only guess.