The Invisible Woman

by Claire Tomalin

  Georgina had spent the first days after his death going through his private papers. She wrote to Ouvry, his solicitor, explaining that she had examined all the locked places at Wellington Street and was sending what she found ‘relative to the Trusts &c’. Dolby, she added, had another drawerful of papers. There were known trusts for various dependents of Dickens, such as the widow and children of his brother Alfred, and possibly unknown trusts, too, and it is likely that some arrangements and instructions concerning Nelly passed through Georgina’s hands.2 One receipt in the cheque book used by Ouvry for payment of legacies on the estate may be relevant, simply because it is one of the few left unattributed on the stub: it is dated 16 July 1871 and entered simply ‘Trust £500’.3

  On 20 August Forster wrote to Ouvry to say he had been trying to see him at the Athenaeum but without success:

  Now however I wish you on Monday next, if convenient, to give me the means of paying Miss T—’s legacy. She is lodging in Craven St for a few days before going abroad. Tell me when you send the cheque – what form of acknowledgement must be had from her. Perhaps indeed you will, with the cheque, enclose such a form for her to sign.4

  Forster wrote to Ouvry twice more on this matter, on 24 August when he said he had appointed to see ‘Miss T’ on Friday and to pay her the legacy, and again on 26 August when he announced that he was to see ‘Miss T— today’. This was not the end of his dealings with her. On 11 November there was another letter to Ouvry in which he wrote, ‘I assume that you have all the needful consent to payment of the Provident sums – and will therefore write to E.T. accordingly.’5 None of this is very clear, but then it was not intended to be. At a rough calculation Nelly would have something like £60 a year from the house in Houghton Place, and another £30 income from her £1,000 bequest, if it was invested in something safe. In addition to this there were the unknown ‘Provident sums’. It is also possible that she had received something from Dickens when he returned from America, and other gifts of stocks or bonds such as he made to Georgina during his lifetime. From one source and another, Forster’s ‘Miss T—’ found herself with enough to live as comfortably as Dickens must have wished; and which none but the mean and cruel could begrudge her.

  (illustration credit 13.1)

  From Craven Street she set off for Paris. As bad luck had it, August 1870 was the worst possible time for such a trip. France, goaded by Bismarck, had declared war on Prussia in July; throughout August the Prussians humiliated the French in a series of battles, and at the beginning of September the French emperor capitulated at Sedan. Nelly and Jane just managed to get out of Paris on 19 September before the Germans encircled the city and began their long winter siege, which starved the Parisians into submission in January and was followed by the revolutionary uprising of the Commune. But if she could not be in France, Nelly was still determined not to remain in England. She set off again immediately, by sea, for Italy. Equally momentous though less dangerous events were taking place there; Rome had fallen to the Italians in September, and in October it was proclaimed the capital of the new kingdom in place of Florence. The transfer affected Tom and Fanny, since his work as a journalist would force them to move to Rome; though for the moment they stayed put. Nelly, after another difficult journey – she was detained at Genoa for two weeks under quarantine regulations – arrived to join in what Tom described as a very gay winter at the Villa Ricorboli, with many musical evenings and expeditions into the Tuscan countryside.

  No doubt Nelly wanted sunshine, distraction, movement from one place to another. She had lost the dominant force in her life, her second father and protector; and although she had a will of her own, she was accustomed to pitting it against a still stronger one, whose disappearance was bound to be painful. She had to find her balance again. She also had, in effect, to reinvent herself. The process might be easier to start off abroad: so much she had grasped. In Paris she had already achieved one thing useful to someone who sets out to reconstruct herself: the making of a new friend, Mrs Rosalind Brown, a young English widow also travelling abroad to recover from the death of her husband. The two had taken to one another immediately, and Mrs Brown told Nelly she had inherited a house in Bina Gardens, Kensington, and proposed to let rooms once she returned to England; Nelly would be a most welcome ‘paying guest’ whenever she needed accommodation in London. Nelly was naturally cautious in her account of herself, but she did let drop that there was a Secret in her life. She also conveyed that she had suffered an injury to her arm in an accident; this was not properly healed and was responsible for the extreme delicacy of her health.

  Delicate health took people abroad for the better climate, but there were other good reasons for travelling. Society on the Continent could be notably more relaxed about single women with unknown antecedents, who might or might not choose to describe themselves as widows. There are several such in the early stories of Henry James, who made his first visit to Italy in 1873 and was profoundly struck by the freedom of Continental manners, particularly those of women in their relations with men; it became and remained a favourite theme. In one story (‘Eugene Pickering’) he shows an innocent youth captivated by a clever, pretty German widow considerably older than himself; she has a witty tongue, a decisive way and a girlish appearance, with cascading golden curls, muslin dresses adorned with blue ribbons and a good display of jewellery. In addition she is a writer, something of a feminist and has acted in her own play, Cleopatra. James had not met women like this in America or England, but on the Continent, and in Rome especially, he came across many such clever and charming, good companions, and with enough money to keep afloat; only, to the vigilant eye, they carried questions marks over their pretty heads.

  Such in her way was Nelly, who gravitated so naturally towards Italy in the 1870s. She was made welcome, although even there she was not entirely safe from gossip. Isa Blagden – dear Isa, who seemed such a friend to the Trollopes – was soon writing from Florence to Robert Browning in London, explaining to him just why Dickens had paid Fanny Trollope so well for her novels. Browning confessed that ‘the relationship between Mrs T. and “Miss T.” never crossed my mind: I must have heard it – very likely from yourself – but it took no hold of me.’6 And even as far away as Boston tongues were also wagging; Annie Fields noted in her diary that her husband had confided in Longfellow, ‘as was quite right, about E.L.T.’7 When even these two august poets had Nelly’s story pressed on them, it suggests that lesser folk found it fascinating enough to discuss a good deal.

  Nelly remained abroad throughout the winter of 1870. In April 1871 the census shows that neither she nor either of her sisters was at The Lawn, only Mrs Ternan and her hospitable son-in-law. But in the summer Nelly and Maria were both back; in fact, in Eights Weeks they attended a party given in Queen’s College together. Their host was a second-year undergraduate, Mr Robinson. George Wharton Robinson was reading history, but his interests were not predominantly intellectual; he was destined for the Church, and rowing was his passion. He was the only son of a Liverpool gentleman who had died young; his widowed mother had sent him to Cheltenham School and settled herself with a troop of daughters in the Lake District, where the Ternans had a married cousin, the daughter of their Aunt Louisa. Hence the introduction to Maria.

  The party in Queen’s was extremely jolly. Mrs Taylor sang the Marseillaise to loud applause, and Miss Ternan teased all the big young rowing men in turn. She was so pleased with the occasion that she wrote some verses about it. They ended with a tribute to the host:

  Ten o’clock! now must all say Goodbye!

  As the ladies get into their fly,

  They say to each other

  ‘What a charming young brother

  Is Robinson, gallant and spry!’

  The light-hearted lines do catch something of the merriment of the Oxford summer evening party, and even of the instant appeal of George, hardly more than an outsize boy, with glossy dark hair and an uncomplicated physical presence. Nel
ly and George were instantly taken with one another, and although he was apparently already engaged to another young lady called Jessie, he was soon going for walks and rides with his new friend, and listening to her advice as well as her teasing. Within a few weeks he was no longer engaged to Jessie.

  Both George and Nelly kept commonplace books, and both wrote verses; George’s schoolboy training in turning out Latin hexameters had given him considerable facility. Some acrostics he produced indicate that Nelly gave him to understand she had suffered two tragic bereavements in recent years, in each case of men friends – possibly even prospective husbands. Frank Carter and George Herries are the names that appear; both seem to have been pure inventions.8 The function of these imaginary dead admirers is somewhat obscure; presumably they provided Nelly with a story for her recent past and served to explain why she always wore black. Later she told a woman friend that it made people think better of you; Dickens, who loved young women to be brightly dressed, would not have approved. George knew that Dickens had been a friend of the family, but whatever else Nelly told him, she kept her age strictly to herself; as it happened, the twelve years she needed to abolish from her life also coincided with the gap between her birth and George’s.

  The black clothes did not prevent her from being high spirited. George was teased to the limit about his rowing and the poor performance of the Queen’s boat. ‘George is so silly,’ she told Rosalind Brown in London.9 In July he wrote a poem in her praise in his book. It was called ‘A True Friend’, and part of it reads as follows:

  Oh – could I but express

  The debt of gratitude I owe!

  But words of mine can never show

  My sense of your true-heartedness.

  Ne’er has it been before my lot

  To meet with one so truly kind,

  So winning, womanly, refined,

  A heart so pure and free from blot.

  My privilege to call you friend

  The purest happiness imparts;

  I cherish in my heart of hearts

  Your friendship; may it never end!

  How well in fancy I recall

  Those rides and those but too-short walks,

  Those heart-arresting heart-felt talks

  Which did my mind and heart enthrall.

  My heart with joy was then replete:

  But oh! that time of bliss is past!

  Our ‘summer term’ sped all too fast –

  Oh Time, speed swiftly till we meet.10

  Poor George: whatever he might say about friendship, these sound like the accents of true love. Nelly, however, had no intention of sitting tamely in Oxford to enjoy the flattery of a boy. By the autumn she was back in Italy, first in Florence with the Trollopes and then in Rome. In December Annie Fields in Boston, still grieving for Dickens and with her ear fine-tuned for any word that bore on him, heard ‘quite accidentally’ that ‘N.T.’ was in Rome ‘with Mrs Tilton’. Mrs Tilton was the wife of an American painter, John Rollin Tilton who specialized in Claude-like sunsets and ruins. If Nelly was staying with them, it meant she was living in their apartment in the Palazzo Barberini – described by Anny Thackeray at the same time as ‘a great deal grander than Windsor Castle’ – and spending her time with a highly entertaining and cultivated cosmopolitan group. Henry James knew the Tiltons well, described John Tilton as a ‘very queer genius’, partly modelled a character in Roderick Hudson on him and allowed him to attempt a portrait. Mrs Tilton, whom he preferred to her husband, was the ‘poor ill-wedded, soured, yet withal clever, Mrs Tilton’. If the Tiltons were not the best advertisement for marriage, they were interesting people; and winter in Rome was almost unmixed delight. You could ride out for hours into the sunny, empty Campagna or fill your days visiting museums, antiquities and churches, where gorgeous rituals were enacted by cardinals and congregations endowed with a natural sense of the theatrical. You could attend concerts in the evening and visit the Colosseum by moonlight. There were salons; there were picnics, parties and dinners at which Americans, English, French, Italians and Germans mingled freely. Nelly’s commonplace book filled itself with excerpts from writers in all these languages, and she met a great many people; but she did not form any serious ties. To some, perhaps, she had the allure of a latter-day Claire Clairmont, another repository of the secrets and letters of a dead genius; but Nelly, like Claire, was proof against inquirers at this stage.11

  She was casting about for something to do. As long as Dickens had lived, she had to a degree been involved in reading his work and discussing it with him. She was eager to be part of the literary world again. So far all she had managed was the publication of some of her verses in an Oxford paper, which hardly counted; but in Italy she met through the Trollopes the poet and novelist Alfred Austin, then in his thirties, who had given up his profession as a lawyer to write, though so far with very little critical success. His own view of his contemporaries was striking in that he dismissed Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Morris and Clough with equal disdain; he knew he had a better grasp of prosody and would surpass them all. This self-conceit was supported by an adoring wife. The Trollopes were also devoted friends of the couple. Like Tom Trollope, Austin sometimes worked for the Standard; he was in Rome in 1870 to report on the Vatican Council, as he had been brought up as a Roman Catholic, and frequently took his holidays in Italy.

  There he evidently met Nelly and was sufficiently impressed by her to entrust her with a negotiation with a publisher in England in the winter of 1872. The whole episode is odd. There is no obvious reason why he should not have submitted his new poem, a long narrative work called Madonna’s Child, in the usual way. He preferred, however, or was persuaded, to use Nelly as an intermediary with Messrs Smith & Elder. George Smith was one of Britain’s most eminent publishers; he had been the friend as well as the publisher of Ruskin, Charlotte Brontë, Mrs Gaskell and Thackeray, whose daughter’s work he also published. Currently he was Fanny’s publisher. He had also been acquainted with Dickens.

  Nelly’s first note to Smith, written from The Lawn in December 1872, was a formal one; it simply stated that she was offering him a poem ‘of exceptional excellence and interest’ by a gentleman not at present in England, who wished it to be published anonymously. To this Smith replied politely, saying he would be happy to read the poem. Her second letter announced that she was sending the manuscript. He now apparently made an offer for the poem; she thanked him for his prompt reply and said she had written to the author. She followed this up immediately with another letter to say that the author now thought it right that Smith should be told his name, ‘confidentially’.

  This performance elicited a crusty answer from Smith. He knew Austin’s work and had previously turned some of it down. He now changed his mind about the proffered poem and stiffly advised Miss Ternan not to treat other publishers as she had him: ‘it would be advisable for you to mention the name of the Author or at least that he was a well-known writer who wished to publish a work anonymously, in the first instance’.

  Nelly brooded on this rebuke for several days, and then sent a spirited answer:

  … Notwithstanding the polite tenor of your note, I cannot conceal from myself that by it you intend to reproach me with not having treated you quite fairly. Now I feel so strongly that the reproach is altogether unjust, that I must ask you dispassionately, to consider the following facts.

  An anonymous Poem was submitted to you for publication, and you, influenced solely by what you conceive to be its merit, express yourself happy to publish it. But lest possibly its being by Mr Austin might affect your decision, his name as the author was then confidentially communicated to you. You reply by returning Mr Austin’s MS. He is perfectly satisfied; and that being so, I cannot see who can feel aggrieved. All this seems to me so plain and simple, that I cannot but think you will feel disposed on reconsideration to own that you have been treated with perfect straightforwardness.

  I ought to add that before receiving your last lett
er, Mr Austin had communicated to me his intention of publishing Madonna’s Child under his own name. You are therefore absolved from all secrecy in the matter.

  I remain

  Dear Sir

  Yours faithfully

  Nelly Ternan.

  Smith wrote a final letter expressing the view that her behaviour was inconsiderate and thoughtless, and that he felt aggrieved at the waste of his time – on the whole a justifiable complaint. Austin and Nelly’s byzantine procedure towards a publisher whom Austin already knew well personally has an air of trickery. Smith was the more annoyed, no doubt, in that the trick had worked to the degree that he had been prepared to publish the anonymous poem and been made to look foolish.

  Madonna’s Child is not a good poem; it is religiose and relies on quaint evocations of the Italian landscape for its better passages. Today Austin’s talent seems minimal, and his later appointment as poet laureate absurd, so it was unfortunate that Nelly’s attempt to become a literary agent before the career was invented should have been on his behalf. But she displayed some of the necessary spirit, as is shown in her final letter to Smith: