The Invisible Woman

by Claire Tomalin

  From now on Dickens enclosed letters for Nelly with every one to Wills, adding little notes which often included some words of love and longing: ‘my spirits flutter woefully towards a certain place at which you dined one day not long before I left, with the present writer and a third (most drearily missed) person’ (on 10 December); ‘I would give £3,000 down (and think it cheap) if you could forward me, for four and twenty hours only, instead of the letter’ (on Christmas Eve); ‘Another letter for my Darling, enclosed’ (on 30 December). Nowhere does his feeling for her appear so nakedly as in these scraps to Wills from America. There is a gap in the letters – it is thought some were destroyed by Sir Henry Dickens when they came into his possession – and then they resume in 1868 with the same yearning additions.

  Dickens’s darling, though deprived of her American trip, was, at any rate, well settled in Florence. Sharp-eyed, gossipy Isa Blagden called to take a look. ‘Mrs Taylor and Ellen Ternan are pleasant and rather pretty, but Fanny is the flower of them,’ she reported firmly to Bice in her next letter. Florence was experiencing its coldest winter for many seasons, and Fanny said Ricorboli was almost like a hospital; her mother was not well and Maria had joined them, fleeing on the plea of rheumatism from Oxford and the long-suffering Taylor, who shipped out a cask of bitter beer after her, perhaps intended as a reminder of his forlorn state.

  The Ternans seem to have enjoyed being together and got on well with Tom. Mrs Ternan’s old friend Charlotte Cushman, the American actress now settled in Rome, invited her to bring Nelly and Maria for the Christmas festivities; but they turned her down, preferring to remain where they were. Perhaps they were justifiably nervous of wandering armies: Garibaldi had just been defeated in his march on the Holy City. Fanny helped to run a committee for his cause, and Nelly busied herself sewing shirts for the wounded. Then, in the new year of 1868, Fanny, Tom and Maria did set off together for a jaunt to Naples and an ascent of Vesuvius, but ‘Mamma and Ellen were not strong enough to bear the journey’. They stayed behind with the builders, who had still not completed their labours. Nelly continued to receive frequent letters from her lover. He was suffering from catarrh so bad he thought it might damage his lungs permanently, a badly swollen foot and homesickness; he was also under the impression that she had returned to England, for on 21 February he wrote to Wills, ‘You will have seen too (I hope) my dear Patient, and will have achieved in so doing what I would joyfully give a Thousand Guineas to achieve myself at this present moment!’20

  Dickens was wrong in thinking Wills had seen her. She neither showed any sign of moving nor apparently kept him informed of her plans. When the Vesuvius party returned and the building work was finally finished, they celebrated Mrs Ternan’s birthday with their first meal in the new dining room on 10 February, and then lingered on at Ricorboli, past Nelly’s twenty-ninth birthday in March and through most of April, to enjoy the Italian spring.

  In America Dickens spent two days in mid-March at Niagara and had a small box, addressed to himself, dispatched to Wellington Street with instructions to Wills that it must be kept unopened in his bedroom for his return: intended, perhaps, as a late birthday present for N. He was not unhappy all the time, but he allowed himself to be fussed over by his Boston publisher, James Fields, and his pretty and enthusiastic young wife, Annie. Among other notes in her diary, she wrote down what the housekeeper of his New York hotel told her: that Dickens, in the goodness of his heart, had paid for one of the chambermaids to go to California with her illegitimate child. On the day of his own departure for England he sent off a last letter to Nelly via Wills and was greeted in passing by Anthony Trollope, just arriving in America. It was 17 April, and the crossing was expected to take about two weeks; and on 24 April the Patient and her mother left Florence for London.

  12

  ‘This life is half made up of partings’

  1868–1870

  Nelly had remained in Florence throughout February, March and most of April 1868 with the books, the gardens and the music of Villa Ricorboli to entertain her, and her assembled family to give her good advice. Only on 25 April Fanny noted that ‘we are alone as Mamma and Nelly went away yesterday’.1 Their journey was timed so they would reach England a few days before Dickens. On 1 May he and Dolby came ashore in Liverpool, dined and slept at the Adelphi Hotel, and next morning travelled to Euston; they parted on the platform at three in the afternoon. Dolby’s account is carefully vague, describing their farewell at the railway station so as to give the impression that Dickens was on his way to Gad’s Hill. In fact, he did not make his appearance there until a week later. Two local papers reported his return and enthusiastic welcome on Saturday, 9 May. For the missing week he had simply ceased to be Charles Dickens and become, presumably, Mr Tringham of Windsor Lodge, Peckham. It was a bold bit of deception, but he had the nerve, the practice and the strength of will of a man determined to have what he wanted.

  In Boston Annie Fields imagined this reunion as ‘the most painfully and joyfully intense of his whole life’ and full of ‘the intense joy of his beloved’; she wrote in her diary that it was ‘too much to face, even in one’s imagination and too sacred’.2 Mrs Fields was an intense person herself, with a highly developed sense of the drama of Dickens’s life; but her remarks can only be based on what he had said to her or her husband. There is no doubt of his joy at the prospect of being reunited with Nelly. The American tour had done what he meant it to do – made a very large sum of money, some of it quite possibly intended for her – but at the cost of both physical exhaustion and emotional suffering for him. He returned to England visibly aged, his hair thinner and more grizzled, his face scored and cragged; yet he was still able to summon up bursts of boyish spirits and charm, to cast aside his age and laugh ‘like a man in the full vigour of his life’, to display ‘a vitality … and a certain manliness of demeanour which made those who looked upon him believe that nothing that he had yet done had acted injuriously upon the machine of his body’.3 He was still able to dance tirelessly through an evening, ‘light and lithe as a boy of twenty’ when the mood was on him.4 Whether May in Peckham was as pleasant as April on a Florentine hillside, and whether Nelly viewed the reunion with the same joy as her lover or felt it more as the resumption of a burden, they seem to have fallen into their old routine easily enough. The lion was still a lion, and he was still at her feet; and whatever misunderstandings had arisen between them about her movements during their long separation were explained. No doubt there were teasing and laughter, traveller’s tales and presents: perhaps the contents of the mysterious box from Niagara. His first letters from English soil, written after his return to Gad’s Hill, are buoyant and good-humoured, which suggests that his stolen week in Peckham did not fail his expectations.

  Almost immediately he was off again, this time to Paris, to attend a Fechter production, L’abîme, a version of Collins’s play No Thoroughfare. He wrote to Collins to tell him of the trip, and to Macready, boasting of his revived ‘health and spirits’. At the same time Nelly and her mother visited Bice at her school in Brighton on 31 May; conveniently on their way if either or both intended to cross the Channel also and join Dickens in France. Although mother and daughter continued to be together a good deal, Mrs Ternan was by no means always at Windsor Lodge; she was to be found at other addresses in Mornington Crescent and later in Pimlico, leaving Nelly to run her own house and order her own life as she chose.5

  Still Dickens kept up his unflagging pace. At Wellington Street there was a crisis. Wills had suffered a hunting accident; he was obliged to give up work completely for a time, and although he returned to the office occasionally, things were never the same. Later in the year Charley Dickens, following the tradition of so many of the family, became bankrupt; his father decided to solve the two problems by taking Charley into the All the Year Round office where, under the parental eye, he did surprisingly well. Better still another son, Henry, won a place at a university, the only Dickens child to do so
; he started his law studies at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in the autumn. Both these adult sons, like their sisters, must have known something of Nelly’s place in their father’s life.

  Gad’s Hill was now entirely free of boys, for in September Edward (Plorn) was packed off to Australia to join his brother Alfred. Catherine Dickens was not consulted on the fate of her youngest any more than that of the others, and Dickens displayed the same blend of callousness and sentimentality as when his other boys were banished; the bewildered and tearful 16-year-old was given a letter at parting in which his father told him he loved him and was sorry to part with him, ‘but this life is half made up of partings, and these pains must be borne’.6 Georgina presented the nephew to whom she had been appointed a second mother with a farewell present of a box of cigars. Even when all the circumstances of Victorian family life and economics are taken into account, it seems a harsh way of treating a not very bright boy. Dickens’s obsession with ridding himself of his sons is a recurring reminder both of his ruthlessness and of the complete domination he exercised over Georgina; indeed, one of its effects was that her service ceased to be the general care of the family and became entirely personal to him. She remained fond of the boys and concerned for them but does not appear to have missed them. In her way she was quite as tough as her brother-in-law emotionally, and physically much tougher; she outlived all her nephews except Henry and, as we shall see, controlled the image of their father with a quasi-religious zeal and tenacity.

  By the time of Plorn’s departure Dickens was planning another large-scale British reading tour. It was to take up the whole of the winter and spring, from October 1868 until May 1869. Dolby was to be his manager again, and they would cover Scotland, Ireland and all the great northern manufacturing towns, as well as East Anglia, the south-west and the south coast; and just as when he went to the States, Nelly determined not to sit alone at Windsor Lodge throughout his absences. The house was still kept up, but her mother took lodgings on the south coast, at Worthing, for the first six months of 1869, to enjoy the sea air, that sovereign Victorian treatment for delicate constitutions. Maria and her husband joined them for a while, and from there Nelly travelled to town whenever she was needed; for Dickens’s tour was planned to bring him back to London several times a month.

  In January Dickens took Georgina to Ireland, and in February he was in Scotland; but both Dickens and Nelly were in London for her thirtieth birthday. He wrote to Wills from Edinburgh to fix the celebratory dinner: ‘I shall hope to see you at the office on Tuesday. If not, I will write to you from thence, giving you the “fixture” for next day’ – which was 3 March. Then he was off again, to Wolverhampton, Manchester and Hull. There, on the day of his reading (10 March), he went into Dixon’s, the city’s leading silk mercer, in Whitefriargate, and made a purchase which so impressed the young assistant who served him that he never forgot it. He asked for six pairs of ladies’ silk stockings. The assistant, Edward Simpson Long, did not at first recognize his customer; but, as he was selecting the stockings, Dickens asked him what he liked to do in his spare time, and when Long said he enjoyed reading Shakespeare and Dickens, and showed his familiarity with the novels, he was presented with a single ticket for that evening’s reading: at which point the young draper realized who his customer was.7

  Dickens was in York the next day and back in London within the week. Later in the same month he attended a Fechter production of No Thoroughfare at the Adelphi, and the following day conducted a characteristic ‘great burning of papers’ in the office at Wellington Street. On another occasion he ran into Anthony Trollope at the Athenaeum and wrote to Tom that he was ‘a perfect cordial to me, whenever and wherever I see him, as the heartiest and best of fellows’.8

  He had already agreed to a request from a group of professional actors and actresses to give them some special readings in the mornings, the only time they were free to attend. The success of his performance had been enhanced by the addition of the famous Sikes murder scene from Oliver Twist, which he had tested on an invited audience that included his actress friends Mrs Keeley and Madame Celeste. Everyone in the profession admired it – Macready too was full of praise – but it sent Dickens’s blood pressure soaring each time he read it. Charley advised him against doing it but without giving a reason, because he knew he must not tell his father he feared for his health. It was a subject on which Dickens would not be advised. But Charley was right: in April, at Preston, Dickens suffered symptoms of giddiness combined with a deadness on the left side of his body which alarmed him enough to make him send for his London doctor, Frank Beard. The tour was abandoned under Beard’s orders; almost certainly Dickens had suffered a mild stroke. A few weeks later he told Fields, who was making a European trip with Annie, ‘that when he was ill in his reading only Nelly observed that he staggered and his eye failed, only she dared tell him’.9 Small, casual references of this kind are the strongest indication of her perpetual presence in the background of his life; her range and influence extended considerably further than Windsor Lodge.

  She never came face to face with the Fieldses, however, during their five-month stay in England in the summer of 1869; evidently Dickens took the view that the proprieties made it impossible for him to introduce her to them. The Fieldses themselves are unlikely to have objected – quite the contrary – but they were not given the choice. During the same months Tom and Fanny Trollope were entertaining George Eliot and George Henry Lewes at the Villa Ricorboli, and though they felt obliged to explain that ‘all was not strictly normal’ in the marital status of the two eminent writers before introducing them to the resident US minister and his wife, they brushed aside the irregularity. But then George Eliot and Lewes were open about their relations and had deliberately rejected a legal and moral system they considered unjust and absurd; whereas Dickens had accepted that he must live by it, outwardly at any rate, and could not now take risks either with his own reputation or with Nelly’s and her family’s.

  Yet his feelings were ambivalent. The hints he dropped, the confidences he gave, the wish he had cherished to take her to America, all point to a desire that her part in his life should, even if only in some quarters and in some degree, be acknowledged. Macready, however easily he may have accepted the situation in private, was said to have worried about Dickens’s lack of discretion, fearing it might lead to a public scandal.10 Now, with the warning of his stroke, he prepared a new will in which he set Nelly’s name down defiantly before all the other beneficiaries. ‘Miss Ellen Lawless Ternan, late of Houghton Place, Ampthill Square’ appears as his first legatee.

  The will has puzzled everyone. The first question is why a man who was apparently at pains to keep his relations with a woman concealed from public knowledge should leave a posthumous signpost pointing at her. One answer could be that it was an act of defiance against the Podsnaps of his world, the society that had made it impossible for him either to write truthfully of certain things in his books or to live truthfully in his life. He would not have to explain or defend the act himself, but it would at least put on public record for ever something that had been of prime importance to him. Neither of the two executors, Forster and Georgina, were likely to be pleased with this gesture, though both could be trusted to carry out his wishes. And Nelly herself: did he consult her before he wrote her in to the will, and did she decide that the glory of being named first in the will of Britain’s greatest novelist was worth any possible scandal? To both questions the likely answer is yes. Nelly, too, was ambivalent. For thirteen years she had played a central part in his life. Some acknowledgement was owing to her pride. It’s clear that the will, as a document, was important to her; a printed copy was found among the few papers remaining in the household of her family nearly a hundred years later.

  Dickens and Nelly may both have believed that the very smallness of the sum bequeathed to her would shield her from scandal. His daughter Mamey received the same amount; Nelly could explain it as a little nest-egg f
or a ‘god-daughter’ from a family friend – which is indeed exactly how she did explain it. The other puzzle from our point of view is precisely its inadequacy: £1,000 from an estate of nearly £100,000. A thousand pounds was certainly not going to go very far. Invested, it would not bring even enough to live on, and it was not a twentieth of the sum required for her to maintain the habits to which she was by now accustomed: a large house, trips to the Continent and prolonged seaside holidays. Catherine Dickens was guaranteed an annual income of £600 a year from his estate in addition to her house; in less than two years she could spend the whole amount of Nelly’s legacy. It is inconceivable that Dickens should leave a woman he had loved and taken responsibility for over a period of many years – a woman no longer young what’s more, and with a question mark over her reputation – in a penurious situation, when he made such fair financial arrangements for his estranged wife. The only reasonable assumption is that he had made other, proper provision for Nelly through trusts or insurance policies which, added to the rent from the house in Ampthill Square, gave her the income she needed. There is evidence that this indeed is what he did.11 It is possible that some of the cash he brought from America was used in this way; Wilkie Collins took out insurance policies for his two daughters when he was in America in 1873 and continued to have the premiums paid in Boston after his return.

  Dickens was rich – very rich for a writer – but not so rich that he could leave his dependents in luxury. The income from his copyrights was to be divided among his children. His daughter Mamey, in addition to her £1,000, received an annuity of £300 a year which would cease on her marriage; married daughters must be supported by their husbands. Georgina, who could not now hope to marry, received by far the biggest legacy, £8,000, and we know that she had already been given some capital sums during Dickens’s lifetime. It was enough to enable her to live comfortably, though even she was obliged in old age to sell off her mementoes and papers to collectors, and was in real difficulties by the time of her death. Did Dickens expect Nelly to marry? At thirty-one it was not very likely; but the will naturally had nothing to say on the subject, and her legacy was outright.