The Invisible Woman

by Claire Tomalin

  So on alternate Friday afternoons Fanny set off from the Shoreditch Station with her little bag and travelled out into Essex. She took to her pupil: Bice was beautiful, a tiny, sad, dark-eyed sprite, with an exotic look of her mother, who had both Indian and Jewish forebears; and she was in need of attention and affection, which Fanny was happy to give her. The weekends at the pleasant Georgian house, with its lawns and cedar trees and surrounding fields and woods, where its master hunted vigorously each winter, were probably worth as much to Fanny as the money. Anthony Trollope was reaching the peak of his success as a novelist in 1865; within the last year he had published two of his most popular books, The Small House at Allington and Can You Forgive Her? – both centred on young women of character, one a study in constancy, the other in inconstancy – and he was also involved in the setting up of a new magazine, the Fortnightly Review. This meant there were other interesting visitors at Waltham Cross, publishers and writers summoned to discuss literary and journalistic matters; all grist to Fanny’s sharp wits. Another bookish young woman who met Trollope at this time found him detestable, noisy, domineering and as vulgar as Dickens, she wrote;4 yet if Trollope lacked delicacy, he and his wife were a genuinely kindly couple.

  They did not, for instance, treat the governess with condescension. Several of Trollope’s heroines were meek-seeming little governesses with surprising inner resources and staunchness of character, who turned out more worthily than their social superiors. Fanny could in any case hold her own in company. She could look like a lady, and knew when to speak and when to be silent; and when she did speak she had something to say, because she read a great deal and was interested in everything around her. She made the very most of her time at Waltham Cross, aware that she could now count two of the giants of contemporary fiction among her friends; and during these months she began to try her hand at writing a story of her own.

  Some time in the late summer Thomas Trollope appeared at Waltham Cross and renewed his acquaintance with Fanny. When he returned to Florence in October he took Bice with him, but the governess promised to correspond with her pupil, and was as good as her word. Friendship was now well established between all the Trollopes and Miss Ternan, and when Christmas came she was invited to a ball and kindly told she might bring her younger sister. Fanny’s description of the ball, or rather of the matching dresses and flowers worn by herself and Nelly – ‘pale green silk covered with tarlatane of the same colour, trimmed with white lace and dewdrops, with scarlet geranium and white heather in her hair’ – has something pathetic about it, because it is one of the very few occasions on which we hear of some ordinary girlish enjoyment in the lives of the sisters. For one evening Fanny, so quick-eyed, so industrious, so eagerly pressing forward, and Nelly, with her burden of secrecy, were able to appear almost as simple and untouched as a pair of Barchester girls.

  Were some young men assembled for the occasion? The Trollope boys, Harry and Fred, were both under twenty but old enough to dance with the Ternans. Fanny, whose account of the ball was written for Bice, divulged nothing more than the details of their dresses and flowers. We can note in passing that the scarlet geranium in their hair was known to be the favourite flower of Dickens and may not have been altogether easy to come by in midwinter.

  Anthony Trollope obviously liked Fanny, and Nelly too. He was not a snob; nor was he a womanizer, but he responded to quick, clever girls. In 1860 he had met in Florence a young American, Kate Fields, twenty-five years his junior, and ever since cherished a passion – open, platonic but intense – for her. It could have made him somewhat sympathetic to Dickens’s position with Nelly and inclined him to believe in its innocence. And even if he didn’t, he was a tolerant man. The Belton Estate, another novel he published in 1865, defends the heroine’s decision to remain friends with a woman she likes, after discovering that she has committed adultery and lived with her husband for some years before they were able to marry – a piece of broadmindedness with no parallel in the work of Dickens, incidentally. Trollope’s invitation to the ball says something in his favour, and his liking for the sisters says something in theirs.5

  By this time Houghton Place had been let to a tenant. After October 1865 none of the Ternans ever occupied the house again; the rent, however, provided Nelly with a steady income of £50 to £60 a year almost till the end of her life.6 Now, for one reason or another, she was to leave London again for the country. Fanny and Mrs Ternan needed other lodgings, which they found still in the Mornington Crescent area, at Lidlington Place, and here Mrs Ternan received a surprising offer.

  Early in December Dickens came to her with the news that she was to be invited to take up her theatrical career again, by Charles Fechter, now manager of the Lyceum; although Dickens himself was also deeply involved in the plan to revive a dramatized version of Scott’s The Master of Ravenswood. Mrs Ternan was wanted to play blind Alice; coupled with this was a revival of Boucicault’s Corsican Brothers, which had another good part for her. She had last played in it ten years earlier; the idea of acting again was irresistible to her. It meant earning something, and being among old friends and colleagues. Whatever the circumstances of the past few years, they had kept her from the stage; but, after sixty years, the theatre was still in her blood. She was soon busy rehearsing.

  Dickens praised her professionalism to Georgina, saying she was word perfect at rehearsals when few of the others, Fechter included, had bothered to learn their lines. He took an active part in the production all through December, having ‘an earnest desire to put Scott, for once, upon the stage in his own gallant manner’; and the show opened on 11 January 1866.7 Fanny reported to her ex-pupil in Florence that all three sisters went to the Lyceum to see their mother perform.

  In the same letter she said Maria had been ill. She had gone to St Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex, to recuperate, accompanied by Nelly, each sister taking her own dog. Since railway regulations forbade dogs in the carriage, they smuggled them on to the train hidden in their crinolines. In their lodgings in wintry St Leonards the two sisters were on their own, probably for the first time since Berners Street: a chance to exchange confidences and advice, to consider the condition of marriage and non-marriage, as they tugged their dogs along the sea-front or settled cosily for the long, dark evenings. Maria then set off for Italy; she had decided she must get away from the English winter. Nelly remained in England and was with Dickens for her twenty-seventh birthday. He turned down an invitation to attend the meeting of a charity he supported, telling the organizer that ‘an annual engagement which I cannot possibly forego will prevent me attending next Saturday’s meeting’; and next Saturday was HBD, 3 March.8

  Nelly was now settled in Elizabeth Cottage in the High Street of Slough. In 1866 it was a small and sleepy market town, close to the banks of the Thames and set amid fields, with just a central street, a few small shops, modest terraced cottages and a picturesque old church, St Laurence Upton, just restored. Slough had another particular virtue for Dickens and Nelly: it was blessed with exceptional communications. A fast train from Paddington took only eighteen minutes; alternatively you could walk the two pleasant miles across parkland and fields to either Windsor or Datchet and take a different line to Victoria or Waterloo; and Waterloo was only a step across the river from Wellington Street.9

  If you looked up as you walked across the fields, you saw Windsor Castle floating above, presided over by the widowed Queen, symbol and upholder of the domestic virtues. The Queen did not hear of her best-known writer’s visits to Slough, for the simple reason that no Charles Dickens was known of there. Rates were paid on Elizabeth Cottage by a Mr John Tringham, who later became Charles Tringham, and then again ‘Turnan’; later Charles Tringham’s name appeared again, and for a while Mr Tringham paid rates on two cottages in the High Street. None of the rate books were kept with any great effort at precision, so a certain variation in spelling is not a matter of much moment, but in this case there is a clear pattern. Over the next four years
the names ‘Turnan’, ‘Turnham’ and ‘Tringham’ all crop up in rate books; there is a Frances Turnham and a Thomas Turnham (the first name of Nelly’s mother and father), but the most persistent is Charles Tringham.

  Dickens had since childhood made a habit of using false names whenever it suited him; it’s likely he picked out this one from his tobacconist, Mrs Mary Tringham, who kept her shop just round the corner from Wellington Street.10 The convenience of the pseudonym is obvious: it gave him the same initial as Nelly and was close enough to her name to allow an inattentive clerk to confuse the two. She might be Miss Ternan or Miss Tringham, or Mrs either, as convenience dictated. Whether she laughed about it with ‘Mr Tringham’, shrugged it off or felt humiliated by the charade, she had little option but to accept it. The disguise was not perfect, and some of the citizens of Slough certainly understood that Mr Tringham was really Dickens, among them a carpenter who did some work for him; but it was a quiet place, and nobody made trouble.11

  Mrs Ternan was engaged at the Lyceum until June. Maria was in Florence, and now Fanny’s life also took a surprising twist. She was invited by Thomas Trollope to go out to Florence as Bice’s full-time governess. The fact that Maria was already in Italy was an extra incentive; and without too much hesitation she agreed. London would hardly miss a teacher of singing and Italian; in April she set out to join Bice and the disconsolate widower.

  They had left Villino Trollope, where she had last visited them in 1858. It was simply too full of memories of Theodosia for Tom, who made up his mind to move. He acquired, at considerable expense, the Villa Ricorboli, a large house outside the Porto San Niccolo, where there was all the space he needed for his collection of antiquities, curios and books, and all the scope he needed for his architectural and gardening ambitions, which were grandiose. Fanny arrived to find everything in disorder. Most of the house was open to the air, there were planks laid everywhere, and the builders were living on the premises. They were just beginning work on a tower intended to house the library; meanwhile Trollope’s enormous collection of books lay scattered everywhere. She took all this in her stride. She was a good organizer, her Italian was excellent, she was happy to be abroad again, she was a kindly and conscientious governess, and she impressed the Anglo-Florentines with her ‘almost masculine’ cleverness. Still more important, Tom Trollope, who had suffered under the regime of an earlier French governess, found her congenial. So did his friend, the poet Alfred Austin, who was also installed at the Villa Ricorboli; in the evenings the whole party would climb down the steep hill to an empty villa below and sing stornelli – Tuscan folk songs – joined no doubt by Maria, as they sat on stone steps or a marble bench. The fire flies appeared and the crickets chirped.12 It was a blessed change from Mornington Crescent, from touring with second-rate opera companies, and from giving lessons by the hour.

  Dickens, aged forty-seven, as painted by Frith, who said he had the look of a man ‘who had reached the topmost rung of a very high ladder and was perfectly aware of his position’. At this time he owned both Gad’s Hill in Kent and, in Bloomsbury, Tavistock House. (illustration credit 10.1 and 10.2)

  ‘The Manager’: Dickens, lying on the grass, with his acting group in 1857. Among the ladies are his daughters and sisters-in-law, among the men his son Charley, Wilkie Collins, Augustus Egg and Francesco Berger. (illustration credit 10.3)

  A modern view of the modest front of Park Cottage in Islington, very little altered since the Ternans lived there in the 1850s and Dickens judged it ‘unwholesome’. (illustration credit 10.4)

  The scene outside the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, where Dickens and the Ternans played together in The Frozen Deep in August 1857. (illustration credit 10.5)

  ‘There is not on this earth a more virtuous and spotless creature than this young lady,’ wrote Dickens in the spring of 1858. On the other hand, ‘I do suppose that there never was a man so seized and rended by one Spirit,’ he also wrote of his longings. The Spirit was embodied by Nelly, here seen in an English photograph of the period when she was trying to establish herself as an actress, and he was doing everything he could to promote the careers of all three Ternan sisters. (illustration credit 10.6)

  Catherine Dickens, sad but dignified in her rejection by her husband, who insisted that even their youngest children stay with him. (illustration credit 10.7)

  Her sister Georgina Hogarth, who eagerly stepped into her place, becoming Dickens’s housekeeper and apologist. (illustration credit 10.8)

  Katey, the brightest of Dickens’s children, who resembled, understood and criticized him. (illustration credit 10.9)

  Maria Ternan: ‘A very good little pale face, with large black eyes,’ wrote Dickens. (illustration credit 10.10)

  ‘Near Covent Garden this afternoon I met Charles Dickens … clad in spruce frockcoat, buttoned to show his good and still youthful figure; and with brand-new hat airily cocked on one side, and stick poised in his hand’—Arthur Munby, 10 May 1864 (illustration credit 10.11)

  A painting of the popular subject of the Fallen Woman by Dickens’s friend Augustus Egg. Note the advertisements for excursions to Paris and the show at the Haymarket. (illustration credit 10.12)

  A print showing Dickens ministering to a woman passenger after the accident to the train in which he was returning from France with Nelly and her mother in June 1865. (illustration credit 10.13)

  The Villa Ricorboli outside Florence, where Fanny Ternan was first governess and then the wife of Thomas Trollope, and where Nelly was a frequent guest. (illustration credit 10.14)

  The main street of Slough, where Nelly was installed in a cottage in 1866, much visited by the mysterious ‘Charles Tringham’. (illustration credit 10.15)

  Dickens giving his Sikes and Nancy reading to a rapt audience during the ‘farewell readings’ of 1869 and 1870. Nelly was sometimes present on these occasions; Dickens’s American friend Annie Fields noted in her diary for June 1869 how he told her husband ‘that when he was ill in his reading only Nelly observed that he staggered and his eye failed, only she dared tell him’. (illustration credit 10.16)

  A copy of this photograph of Dickens in his last year, cut to fit a small oval frame, was among the few family trinkets and pictures left after the estate of Nelly’s daughter had been disposed of. (illustration credit 10.17)

  Tom Trollope was a big, bearish man; strikingly ugly, as were most of the male Trollopes, but sociable and good-hearted. Like his mother, who spent the last years of her life with him, he was a prodigious worker, turning out huge amounts of journalism as well as novels and works of history in an unending stream: he averaged more than a volume a year over fifty years. He had a special, almost unvarying routine, and wrote standing upright at a lectern from eight until two every day, sustained by cigars and glasses of milk. He was devoted to his daughter but awkward and short-tempered; he did not expect his activities to be interrupted and was quite at sea in handling her needs; above all he was accustomed to a strong presiding female presence, and now, gratefully, he had found one again. Within three months, in the heat of the Florentine July, the governess and the widower had exchanged lovers’ vows.

  Whether Fanny was in love with the 56-year-old Trollope or not, she got on with him well enough to see that this was a sensible solution to her problems as well as his. Books, history, music, languages, travel, were passions with both of them. She was thirty-one; the age gap was only a little less than that between Dickens and Nelly. Of course there was no other comparisons to be drawn between their cases; Fanny was to be a bride and take a distinguished name.

  Her engagement coincided with something which she regarded as of almost equal importance: the serialization of her first novel, Aunt Margaret’s Trouble, in Dickens’s All the Year Round. A pathetic story of a girl whose lover is stolen from her by her beautiful and evil-natured younger sister, and who nobly forgives the wrong, it is told simply and is not altogether without charm, though on the sentimental side. Dickens was ‘absolutely enchant
ed’ with the story and ‘enthusiastically invited his friends to read and admire it as much as he did’, wrote Percy Fitzgerald later. He added, ‘It was written by, I believe, Mrs Trollope, née Ternan, then living in Italy. I am not certain as to this, but I am as to the rapturous way in which Boz praised it. The authoress was presently given a commission for a long and serious novel called, I think, Mabel’s Progress.’13 Dickens himself sent a copy of Aunt Margaret’s Trouble to Frederick Chapman of Chapman & Hall, who published it in book form. Both in the magazine and in hard covers it appeared anonymously, and the discreet dedication was to ‘E.L.T.’

  In August Fanny received a payment of £75, from Dickens’s private account rather than through the usual channels of the magazine. In this way the name of Ternan was kept out of the office book-keeping. It made no odds to Fanny. She could now feel she was not going penniless into her marriage, and that she might join her future husband honourably in his profession. The news of the coming wedding appears to have delighted everyone, with the rather natural exception of Bice, who may well have felt she was losing her father and her governess in one stroke, and faced the less than enchanting prospect of being sent to boarding school in England not much more than a year after the death of her mother.

  In Slough, meanwhile, Nelly ruled over Elizabeth Cottage, Mariana-like awaiting the visits of her Mr Tringham. In the spring of 1866 he was on a reading tour, though, like all his tours, it was organized to allow frequent returns to London – and from London to Slough. His visits must inevitably have provided the dramatic focus of otherwise empty weeks; his eager arrival, anxious to find out how she was, bearing news, excitement, little presents, the latest number of All the Year Round, brought her the breath of the world from which she was sequestered as well as the proof of her power.