The Invisible Woman

by Claire Tomalin

  I am exceedingly sorry if I have wasted time that I know to be very valuable to you; but as I had no reasonable grounds for supposing that a poem you would otherwise be glad to publish, you would be unwilling to publish if written by Mr Alfred Austin – whether issued by him anonymously or not – I still think that for that waste of time, however much I may regret it, I am in no degree responsible.

  It was because you are – as you say – personally acquainted with Mr Austin, that it was thought due to you, after you had accepted the poem, that you should be confidentially informed of his being the author. Had you not been personally acquainted with him, this course would have been considered altogether unnecessary. And I am sure you are too well acquainted with those relations between publishers and authors, which have become historical, not to allow that such an opinion and such conduct would have been in strict harmony with precedents whose propriety no one has ever questioned.

  Much regretting that you should have had so much trouble in the matter, and still more, if possible, that any difference of view should have arisen between us in connection with it.

  I remain

  Dear Sir

  Yours faithfully

  Nelly Ternan.

  One thing is clear from this exchange: she had a fluent pen and an ability to make a case and justify herself in clear and even elegant prose. Subsequently Austin’s poem was published by Blackwood’s, under his name; whether Nelly had anything to do with it is not known. The fact that Smith – who initiated The Dictionary of National Biography a few years later – kept the correspondence so carefully in a special bundle suggests that he knew a letter signed with the name of Nelly Ternan was something to be preserved.12

  She had not proved an effective negotiator, but she had at least been trying to do something. Delightful as it may have been to travel, to stay with the families of American artists in Rome, to flirt with handsome undergraduates, to fill her notebooks with her own verses and excerpts from great writers, it did not fill her life. That remained a problem.

  The problem made Nelly ill, or contributed to her illness. A few weeks before her exchange of letters with George Smith, Fanny had arrived at The Lawn and found her mother and sisters all ‘pretty well’, but then Nelly had ‘an attack’ in November. Her illness drove her to take rooms at the seaside again, this time Eastbourne, where the Austins were currently settled; she was accompanied as usual by one of her little dogs, Clara having now given way to Dolly. Fanny joined her, leaving Mrs Ternan to the consolations of her son-in-law and her pet parrot. Whatever mortification Nelly felt at Smith’s rough handling, Fanny consoled her, and the two sisters returned to Oxford for Christmas. Nelly’s present from her mother was the whole set of volumes of Carlyle’s Frederick the Great: a gift which dispels any doubt about her capacity to tackle difficult and weighty books.13

  Things were then very quiet. In February Fanny returned to Rome, where Tom now had a job with the London Standard; the Villa Ricorboli had finally been sold, at a substantial loss, and they were settled in a modest apartment in the via Rasella. Nelly continued to be ill and was told she must leave Oxford again; in March she departed, this time for Brighton, to lodge in an expensive boarding house run by a Frenchwoman. It was a miserable year. Maria and her husband were on bad terms, perhaps because Maria, too, felt the need to do something more than reign over her domestic empire or drive out in her carriage. There was still no sign of any children for her or Fanny. Mrs Ternan, now in her seventies, was suffering from bronchial trouble, which the Oxford climate did nothing to alleviate.

  In the summer George Robinson took his degree in history. He got a third; still intent on becoming a clergyman, he accepted a curacy at St Anne’s, Soho, and settled in London.

  In October Mrs Ternan died of bronchitis. Fanny and Maria were both with her; whether or not Nelly was there is unclear. The death was registered by Jane, Nelly’s maid from Slough, now in service at The Lawn; obliged to specify the profession of the dead woman’s husband – she was not expected to have a profession of her own – Jane said it was ‘unknown’, which would not have pleased the actor-manager. Quite possibly Jane did not know, although she must have been aware of Mrs Ternan’s stage career in its last phase; equally it may have been a matter of quietly effacing the less reputable aspects of the past, a typical piece of mid-Victorian bowdlerization in which maid and mistresses colluded discreetly.

  Frances Ternan, née Jarman on the Yorkshire circuit at the beginning of the century, had lived a more adventurous life than most women of her generation, worked harder and risked more; but the highest prizes had not come to her. As a young actress she had seemed on the point of triumphant success, only to find she could not quite carry it off and would have to settle for the hard labour of the second rank. As a wife she was beloved but tragically unfortunate. A devoted and conscientious mother, she saw the carefully nurtured skills of her daughters fail to carry them where their ambitions aspired. For twelve years she had done her best to help her youngest through difficulties and dangers, and by 1873 she must have become resigned to seeing her as a lonely, dissatisfied semi-invalid.

  As long as she lived, she acted as a stabilizing influence on her daughters. Her death precipitated change. Within a few months Maria fled from The Lawn, never to return. She went first to the north of England, then abroad, joining Fanny and Tom in Baden the next summer. Her marriage had lasted ten years. Her husband appears to have been fond of her and given her both a luxurious establishment and all the freedom she could wish for, without succeeding in making her content. In the privacy of the family she complained of unspecified bad behaviour, but the real problem was surely that Maria, overflowing with spirits and energy, was bored by Oxford as well as dissatisfied with Taylor. She felt in herself the stirrings of a New Woman, and without waiting for Ibsen and William Archer to show her the way, she fled from her doll’s house, full of ambitious plans for independence.14

  Maria’s action left Nelly without a home in England; she now became a frequent paying guest at Bina Gardens with Rosalind Brown and more of an invalid than ever. ‘I am sorry to say that I have not good news of Nelly,’ wrote Fanny to Bice in May 1874; ‘She does not regain strength or appetite at all. I long to have her near me that I may nurse her and look after her myself. But that may not yet be.’ In June, in answer to Bice’s polite inquiry, she replied, ‘You ask how Nelly is. She has been very ill again, but is now better, and is in the country for rest and fresh air. Her physician orders complete repose. She is not to walk, nor even to stand, beyond the moments or two that may be necessary in cleansing herself.’ And a few weeks later, ‘Of Nelly my latest accounts are not quite so good. Her recovery is very tedious, and she suffers a great deal.’15 A grisly picture of Victorian medicine is conjured up here, when a young woman in her thirties who – it later transpires – has nothing fundamentally wrong with her is ordered to immobilize herself to the extent of not even standing up; whereas you can’t help thinking that violent activity may have been exactly what Nelly, like Maria, was craving.

  Something about her condition did, however, need medical – or rather surgical – intervention. In the autumn of 1874 when, after an interval, George Robinson reappears in her commonplace book, he has taken to Latin verse. His poem makes it clear that she is about to be operated on (or ‘tortured’ or ‘crucified’, as he puts it):

  Ah, mea dulcedo, quum nunc torquenda pararis,

  Praesenti in duro tempore fide mihi;

  Et quum vox surgit vehemens ad labra doloris,

  Da tua blanditiis labra serenda meis;

  Et mihi, quum tandem cruciatu fessa quiescas,

  Tunc spatium in lepido pectore cede tuo.*

  This is passionate, even earthy stuff, and it obviously made an impression on Nelly, perhaps the more so for being couched in the decent obscurity of a learned language. The separations George had endured over the past few years had only intensified his ardour and determination. When Rosalind Brown, who was hersel
f now engaged to a Mr Wickham, tried to suggest that Nelly might not make him happy, he answered, ‘I would rather be unhappy with Nelly than happy without her.’ Irresistible words, if they were repeated to her. She reciprocated with her own love poem, which ended with the lines, ‘It would fill a big volume to tell ye/All the blessings breathed forth for her boy by his – “Nelly”.’ All the same, once the operation was over she set off for Italy again; in the spring of 1875 she was in Perugia with the Trollopes for her thirty-sixth birthday. While she was away, George took his MA; he had already been ordained as a deacon. After her return to Bina Gardens the young clergyman became a constant caller; and before the end of the year Nelly agreed to become his wife: a step she might well have hesitated to take during the lifetime of her mother, who might have expected her to mourn Dickens for the rest of her days, and who would have found the disparity of age between her and George unseemly.

  They were married on 31 January 1876 at St Mary Abbot’s Church in Kensington. Nelly set off from Rosalind Brown’s house in Bina Gardens supported by Maria, who acted as one witness, the other being Mr Haymen of Rochester. The view of George’s mother is not known. In any case her son was old enough to do as he pleased. Neither bride nor groom gave an age in the register. They were photographed in their finery – George, seated, sporting a moustache and sideburns, Nelly leaning on him in her elaborate white dress, swathed in the sort of bridal veiling that suggests an expensively wrapped present – before setting off abroad for their wedding trip. She had already persuaded him to give up his career in the Church. None of the Ternans had ever shown much sign of religious faith, and the prospect of becoming a clergyman’s wife, obliged to do good works in her husband’s parish and move in narrow ecclesiastical circles, is not likely to have appealed to her. Her idea was that they should acquire a boy’s school in a southern seaside town and run it together, something that would give them both scope for many congenial activities. Whether he had misgivings or not, to this, too, George agreed.

  George had none of the business sense needed to run a private school, whereas a quiet and undemanding country parish might have suited him very well; but he was a good, conventional young man, healthy and eager for love, and he had been in pursuit of his bride for five years. He was ready to accept whatever terms Nelly chose to make if only he could achieve his goal.

  So began 1876, with a new life and a new name. The last of the Ternan girls disappeared from view, and henceforth Nelly was indeed someone quite different: Mrs George Wharton Robinson. George was especially keen on the ‘Wharton’, which represented, he claimed, a connection with an ancient and aristocratic family.

  As though to mark the demise of ‘Miss T—’, John Forster died in February; he had in his lifetime burnt a mass of letters to and from Dickens, and now his executors destroyed a great many more. At the same time Georgina and Mamey were beginning to think of gathering and publishing an edition of their own selection of his letters. Nelly had remained friendly with them both – one of her recent poems was an elegy for Mamey’s beloved dog Bouncer – and Georgina was evidently pleased by her marriage, in this instance putting aside her usual disapproval of unions between younger men and older women.16 Both Dolby and Wills were leading very quiet lives, and neither had as yet published any account of their work and friendship with Dickens. Still a tiny thread of gossip persisted. Wills’s niece, Nina Lehmann, received a letter from a friend mocking the Trollope men for insisting that ‘it was only friendship between Dickens and Miss Turnan —!’17

  But the object of her sarcasm had vanished, since there were no more Miss Turnans, Temans or Ternans to be so maligned. Mrs Thomas Adolphus Trollope was busy working on another three-decker novel for Charley Dickens’s All the Year Round; for the first time it was to bear her name rather than being published anonymously. A Charming Fellow was a tale of provincial snobbery and an unsuitable match between a young man and an older woman; again, it’s hard not to suspect Fanny of picking elements of her plots to tease her own family circle, though she turns the story safely into the realms of melodrama, jealousy and murder, crude but energetic stuff, and certainly readable. As for Mrs Rowland Taylor: she had become a mature student. At forty she was busy learning to paint at the recently established Slade School of Fine Art in Bloomsbury.18 And the third sister, Mrs George Wharton Robinson, was just returning from her honeymoon in Italy, cared for by her good and adoring young clergyman husband; she was still delicate but remarkably improved in health and spirits.

  * Ah, my sweet, now when you are being prepared for torment, in time of stress, trust in me, by your side; and when the cry of pain comes loudly to your lips, give your sweet lips to my caresses. And for me, when at last you grow quiet, exhausted by pain, grant me room upon your charming bosom.

  14

  The Schoolmaster’s Wife and the Foreign Correspondent: Margate, Rome, Africa

  The Revd George Wharton Robinson and his wife arrived in Margate in January 1877: a model Victorian couple, he a muscular Christian gentleman with a classical education and an Oxford degree, she delicate, charming and a perfect lady. They had spent the months since returning from their Continental honeymoon in a careful search of the Kentish coastal towns for a private boarding school which would provide him with a good investment for his capital and a teaching career; and of all the places they had seen, flourishing Margate seemed to offer the best opportunity.

  It was a healthy, lively, popular town. Margate had been the first of the Kentish resorts – the bathing machine, invented there, gave it an initial boost – and now it rejoiced in an annual regatta, a pier and a newly constructed jetty. France was only hours away, London was easily reached by boat or five-shilling day trip on the railway. When Nelly and George came to consider Margate, it had become as appealing to settlers as to trippers and was visibly growing before their eyes. Street after street of houses was extended along the cliffs to east and west; solid churches and chapels were also going up to serve the new population. They went to look at Margate High School, another new building, close to the centre of town and to the sea, and with five acres of grounds. It took boys from the ages of seven to seventeen, some from local families but mostly boarders from London or further afield; it had made a very promising start, and the headmaster saw every chance of expanding. He was pleased to find a prospective partner with capital, an Oxford degree and a delightful, intelligent wife to join him in the enterprise. George and Nelly decided they liked the place; it was soon settled that he should become co-proprietor.

  A new house was prepared in the school grounds for the Wharton Robinsons. Meanwhile they took temporary lodgings just off the sea-front and busied themselves choosing furniture and supervising the decorations. They named their future dwelling Wharton House; there was no doubt that it had more of a ring to it than Robinson. Writing paper was ordered, elaborately monogrammed and with a motto reading Virtus pretiosor Auro in blue and red. George looked over his Latin in preparation for his new career and began to investigate the possibilities of getting a rowing club organized. On their honeymoon he had grown a long, curly beard; with the addition of his black Oxford gown, he made a very striking figure.

  As did his bride. Mrs Wharton Robinson appeared in Margate as a young wife just emerged from a delicate girlhood mostly spent seeking health in seaside resorts and foreign climates. She had lost her parents sadly young but been fortunate in having a much older sister, Mrs Thomas Adolphus Trollope, to act as a second mother to her. Mrs Trollope and her husband, part of a distinguished family and interesting social circle, kept a tender eye on her from Italy, where, in recent years, she had spent so much time under their protective wing. Her background was a cultivated and prosperous one, and her whole family had enjoyed literary and artistic connections and friendships. Mrs Wharton Robinson, always quietly dressed, usually in black, beautifully spoken, well read, straight-backed on her horse, fluent in foreign languages and a good musician, was altogether more impressive than the usual wife of
a Margate schoolmaster; and she knew it.

  Nelly determined to take an active part in the running of the school. She was in her element with children and gave the little boys spelling classes; and the warm interest she took in her husband’s pupils extended further, to the inmates of a nearby boys’ orphanage whom she also took under her wing. From the start she was notable for the amount of charitable work she undertook, particularly to relieve orphans and working mothers, for whom she helped establish a crèche. Her other passion was the organization of plays and concerts, often intended to raise money for her charities. She converted school rooms into charming little theatres and had all the boys performing farces and pantomimes at the end of every term. It was as though the spring of theatrical passion within her, blocked for so long, had suddenly unstopped itself.

  As it happened, Margate was a town with a strong theatrical tradition. It had its own Theatre Royal, which doubled as an opera house, and put on everything from Romeo and Juliet to Wilkie Collins’s The New Magdalen, from Charles Mathews Junior in My Awful Dad to Alive or Dead?, a dramatic version of Edwin Drood with a surprise courtroom denouement. The theatre was rebuilt in the booming 1870s; whether Nelly knew it or not, it was full of associations with her past, for her father had performed in the old building, and Dickens had been a frequent visitor during his Broadstairs summers in the 1840s. There were also several concert rooms, where Miss Marian May or Miss Dot Rudge of Drury Lane might give ‘Frolicsome Flora’ or ‘Nelly’s Laughing Eyes’, or even dance a genuine Sailor’s Hornpipe, just as the little Ternan girls had done in their previous existence.

  Now, of course, Nelly was entirely an amateur. For her first Christmas she had the schoolboys perform in a farce called A Thumping Legacy, followed by a dance. In the second year there was another play, Poor Pillicoddy (in which Fanny had played at the Olympic in 1855); there was a concert afterwards, and again a dance. On this occasion 200 guests were invited, and many remained until five in the morning. This was the Christmas of 1878. It was a miraculous time for Nelly, who danced quite undaunted by the fact that she was now in an advanced state of pregnancy. She had never been so well and happy. When her friend Rosalind expressed alarm at the prospect of their dear delicate Nelly undergoing the ordeal of childbirth, she replied calmly and joyously that she hoped to have a whole nursery full of children. In Margate only she knew that she was approaching forty, not an easy age to have a first child: and only she knew if it was a first child or the providential replacement for what had been lost in another life more than a decade earlier.