The Invisible Woman

by Claire Tomalin

  For the birth she chose to go to London, and there Geoffrey Wharton Robinson was born in a private nursing home in Dorset Square. There was no undue strain on her health. He was a healthy baby and became a very pretty little boy, with his mother’s crop of blond childhood curls. She must have felt an immense private sense of triumph that, after all the years of unhappiness and uncertainty, she had at last produced this marvel. Neither of her sisters had achieved motherhood, or now would. Whether George inspired passionate love in her or simply gratitude, or something fluctuating between the two, she blessed him for giving her this extraordinary fulfilment, a second chance in life to blot out the shadowy shames and miseries of the past.

  So confident was Nelly of her new persona that she (or George, under instruction from her) gave her age in the 1881 census as twenty-eight. It was a reduction of fourteen years on the truth and made her two years younger than her husband, crowning the picture she now presented to the world. By her boldness – the boldness she had observed in Dickens and learnt from him – she had achieved the ambition of the right-minded Victorian girl. She was married to a well-educated and industrious gentleman, and together they were leading lives of quiet usefulness. She busied herself with charitable work, but at the same time they were a merry, happy couple, not neglectful of the realms of art and imagination. They were blessed with a strong and healthy child; and Nelly could be confident that there were not going to be too many more children. Photographs of Nelly with her husband and son in front of Wharton House show a pretty, happy young wife and mother. The Nelly of 1881 bore almost no relation to the Nelly of ten or twenty years earlier; in Margate she achieved what can almost be called an apotheosis.

  Now everything was bright, pleasant and secure. She could lavish love on her child and dream of his happy future. Money was not a worry to her; she had a cook and parlour-maid as well as the school servants to make her life easy. She had her own pony cart; and the sight of pretty Mrs Wharton Robinson bowling along the cliff tops and through the Kentish lanes, reins in hand, was a familiar one to the local people. George did start his rowing club; Nelly was much in demand at ladies’ tea parties; they were both well liked in the community. Indeed, they were model citizens. When George was appointed Registrar of the Church Institute, Nelly organized a three-day Fancy Bazaar to raise money for it, with the town band and an elephant hired from Sanger’s Zoological Gardens on the sea-front. After George was made a magistrate, she got up a concert in aid of the Working Men’s Reading Room, recited a sketch of her own composition in aid of the fire brigade, and became Honorary Secretary of the crèche.

  There was also time for holidays. In the summer of 1880 she and George went to Switzerland to join Fanny and Tom, who had just attended Bice’s wedding to a young English politician in Paris. In August 1882 Geoffrey was taken to Boulogne for a beach holiday, and the following winter, after he had been ill, Nelly took him to Rome, where both Fanny and Maria were now settled, Maria with her own studio. The three sisters indulged themselves by dressing the child as a clown and entering him for a children’s carnival contest, in which he took a prize; he delighted them by announcing that he would like to be a clown when he grew up, adding precociously, ‘but I may not have talent enough’, in which case he would settle for being an artist, like Aunt Maria. Back in Margate Nelly continued to play acting games with him; it was after all the form of education she knew best. The charm that had subjugated grown men was irresistible to a small boy. Geoffrey worshipped his mother.

  She was pregnant again, and again it deterred her neither from travelling nor from joining in the gaieties of Margate. In June 1883 she and George attended a fancy dress ball at Cliftonville Hall with a large party of friends, he as Fra Diavolo, she as Anne Boleyn; there was dancing till three. In October she presented Geoffrey with a sister, Gladys Frances; once more she chose to go to London for the birth. The good fortune and happiness of the little family was complete.

  The summer term often brought visits from Fanny, Tom or Maria; they were all roped in, either to sing at concerts or present prizes on sports’ days. Anthony Trollope also came, his grandson Frank being a pupil at the school for a time. Other figures from the past put in appearances: Miss Georgina Hogarth spent a week’s holiday in Margate in the summer of 1877, and two years later she, too, handed out prizes.1 These ceremonies were important for the prestige of the High School; for Nelly they were also quite obviously fun. She loved being at the centre of all the activity, the party atmosphere, games, speeches, songs, tableaux vivants and plays. They were enthusiastically reported in the press, though there may have been some who thought she took the High School too far in this particular direction.

  Its stated aim was to prepare boys for the universities and the army. George and Nelly sometimes laughed at the parents of their pupils: she described an interview with an asphalt manufacturer to whom they pointed out a picture of Anthony Trollope hanging in the study. The manufacturer asked whether this was ‘Trollope the builder’ and lost interest altogether when it was explained that he was not a builder, merely a novelist. Yet the sons of the asphalt manufacturers were no less welcome or necessary to the continued prosperity of the school.2 At least in part it was in business precisely to turn the sons of manufacturers into something approximating to young gentlemen, a service much in demand in the prosperous late-Victorian period. There was a lot of competition, and the local papers were full of advertisements for other schools with similar aims. Some were offering to keep pupils through the holidays as well as the term. After a few years the High School was obliged to do the same; its finances turned out to be less secure than George and Nelly had assumed.

  At the end of 1881 the original proprietor decided to leave. He sold his share to George, who became sole owner and headmaster. The Wharton Robinsons moved into the school building and celebrated their elevation by giving a show of tableaux vivants representing Collins’s ‘Ode on the Passions’. This was another revival from the days of the Ternan girls’ performances; and on this occasion Geoffrey appeared as the infant Bacchus, wearing a tiger skin and crowned with vine leaves, in which he had his picture taken. There are many photographs of him from the Margate days, in a variety of costumes that include a velvet aesthete’s suit and cap, and the Highland tartan and sporran in which he gave a scene from Macbeth at the age of six. He was a natural poser and a smiling, graceful child.

  Georgina Hogarth’s evident approval of Nelly’s marriage is not difficult to understand. During this period she and Mamey were engaged in producing their edition of Dickens’s letters, the third volume of which appeared in 1882 and was hailed as the equivalent of a new biography of the great man. It was also a virtual canonization; the editors cut out anything they thought might reflect ill on the ‘beloved memory’, omitting any mention even of the breakdown of Dickens’s marriage. Catherine was no longer there to remind anyone. She had died in November 1879; her daughter Katey, who supported her during the last months of her illness, said she talked a great deal of her grievances, but told Katey nothing she had not already heard from her father. Wills, too, who could have told so much about Dickens and Nelly had he cared to, died in 1880. With the Dickens family so intent on preserving an unflawed version of the great man, Nelly’s presentation of herself suited them as well as it suited her. Nelly made no secret of the fact that Dickens had been a friend of the family; she simply made the necessary adjustment to suggest that she had been little more than a child at the time of his death. It was the version she had given her husband, and it was now passed on to their children.

  Mrs Ternan with her three daughters in the early 1870s, at the home of Maria and her husband, the son of a rich Oxford brewer. The Lawn was at 89 Banbury Road, Oxford (now part of St Hugh’s), and it boasted a croquet lawn, paddock, flower and vegetable gardens, a vinery and stables for the carriage horses; Nelly was a ‘first-rate horsewoman’. The pet parrot belongs to Mrs Ternan; Fanny is on the left, Maria is standing and Nelly is holding her littl
e dog in her lap. (illustration credit 14.1)

  Fanny and her husband, Thomas Adolphus Trollope, brother of Anthony, friend of Dickens, and her senior by twenty-five years. (illustration credit 14.2)

  Maria, preparing to leave her Oxford doll’s house and become a New Woman. (illustration credit 14.3)

  After studying at the Slade, she did this drawing of her mother. (illustration credit 14.4)

  Nelly in the mid-1860s. (illustration credit 14.5)

  Nelly in the 1870s. (illustration credit 14.6)

  A drawing of Nelly done in Italy. (illustration credit 14.7)

  Nelly in fancy dress or acting costume, late 1870s. (illustration credit 14.8)

  Nelly and the Revd George Wharton Robinson after their wedding in 1876. (illustration credit 14.9)

  Nelly with flowers in her hair. (illustration credit 14.10)

  Nelly with her schoolmaster husband after settling in Margate. (illustration credit 14.11)

  The lively young matron, Mrs George Wharton Robinson, with husband and son Geoffrey: she was active in charitable works and helped to organize a round of fêtes, readings and dramatic performances with the school’s pupils, culminating in an appearance at the Theatre Royal, Margate. (illustration credit 14.12)

  On the steps of the High School: Geoffrey now has a sister, Gladys. (illustration credit 14.13)

  A Roman cartoon showing Maria as a working journalist. (illustration credit 14.14)

  Geoffrey attired as Bacchus for a performance of Collins’s ‘Ode to the Passions’ … (illustration credit 14.15)

  … and as a clown, during a visit to Rome in carnival time. (illustration credit 14.16)

  The Revd Benham, who extracted some of Nelly’s story from her. (illustration credit 14.17)

  Georgina in old age, guardian of Dickens’s reputation. (illustration credit 14.18)

  Geoffrey as a young army officer, conventional and correct to the last detail. (illustration credit 14.19)

  The old ladies: Nelly (left) and Fanny in Southsea, where all three sisters settled together in their last years, and where they are buried. They were living here when Dickens’s Birthplace Museum was set up in 1904; but Nelly never visited it and went to her grave in 1914 with her secret apparently safe from her children. (illustration credit 14.20)

  While Nelly rode the crest of her happy domesticity, Maria pursued her opposite course with great courage and persistence. Although she continued to call herself ‘Mrs Rowland Taylor’, she had become a totally emancipated woman, and nothing more seems to have been said about her husband. After the Slade she went to Italy, where she worked for and achieved an Artistic-National Diploma; Rome cast its spell over her, and she decided to make it her home. She worked as an artist and also became a journalist, getting her first chance from Tom Trollope, who asked her to fill in for him with the London Standard during his summer absences in England, Germany, Hungary and Switzerland – for the Trollopes continued to be great travellers.

  Maria made a success of her journalism; she was quick and witty, worked hard at making contacts and knew how to pick up information. She settled in her studio in the via della Mercede and later acquired a small house outside the city, set among olive groves by the sea, where she gave English afternoon parties, with tea and biscuits, in the shade of a lime tree. The presence of her sister and brother-in-law was naturally a help to her at first, but Rome was a city in which there was a well-established tradition of resident single foreign women. Maria remembered her mother’s friend, the American actress Charlotte Cushman, who had settled for some years in the sixties; and there had been a whole colony of American women artists before that, who had made it their business to impress on the Romans that ‘a Yankee girl can do anything she pleases, walk alone, ride her horse alone, and laugh at their rules’.3 Where a Yankee girl could go, an Englishwoman might venture to follow, and soon Maria was proving her spirit by being rowed round the Amalfi coast, alone, by some surprised fishermen.4 She travelled all over the country. An easel and palette were good companions, and with her quick ear she became bilingual; the fishermen asked her if she came from Venice, and no doubt the Venetians assumed she came from Naples. When Italy seemed too tame, she took a two-month trip to Egypt, learning a little Arabic before she set off in her usual independent fashion; this was in the winter of 1880, for Tom Trollope noted her safe return to Europe in May 1881. She was off again to Africa before another year was out.

  If she sometimes appeared eccentric, she avoided offending Italian susceptibilities and became very popular in Rome. When the time came for her to leave after twenty years’ residence, there were many tributes to her cultivated and civilized character – ‘colta e gentile signora Taylor’ – as well as her skills. The tributes appear in an album presented to her by the press corps of Rome, of which she made herself a respected member, living proof, as one wrote, that women could hold their own professionally in the nineteenth century: ‘una splendida prova che l’avanzarsi del femminismo e’ quanto di meglio puo desiderare questa fine di’ secolo XIX’.5 The London Standard thought so highly of her that the bosses in Shoe Lane asked her to take over Tom’s job permanently when he was retired in 1886; she kept it for another twelve years, until she was sixty-one.

  Thus Maria, the merry and gentle sister, emerges as the most unorthodox, both by leaving her husband and by becoming a successful career woman as a foreign correspondent. Sadly, little survives of her; but there is one short book from which her personality emerges distinctly. It appeared in Rome in 1889 and was called Some Old Letters from North Africa; it describes her trip to Tunisia in 1881. The title is not so promising, but in the very first pages Maria springs to life, adventurous, inquisitive, brave and witty. She introduces herself as she leaps into an open mail-boat from her steamer off the Barbary coast, for a twenty-minute run ashore among the bags of letters and newspapers – twenty minutes which leave her drenched in salt water, but ready to observe that the port of Goletta resembles nowhere so much as Sheerness on the Thames estuary, with its blocks of bare little one-storey houses, its hillocky wastes of sand and rubbish, its drawbridge over the canal and its cafés and drinking shops full of sailors. Only the turbans and dark faces mark the difference, and soon the flocks of flamingoes sighted from the English-made train carrying her on into Tunis.

  The timing of her trip was odd enough to raise the possibility that it may have been something other than simple tourism, perhaps more in the nature of some mild spying at the behest of either the English or the Italians. Tunisia, at that time independent and on friendly terms with Italy, was about to be invaded and annexed by the French; Maria was received by the ruling bey and later made an expedition to the Algerian border, where the French were preparing to advance. She seems to have made friends among several different groups. In Tunis she visited families of the Jewish community. Then she travelled inland with an English Gibraltarian called Levy. She used Italian interpreters when necessary, for her Arabic was not advanced; and she was accompanied by a French railway contractor when she crossed into Algiers.

  This last was a fairly hair-raising experience. She had expressed a wish to travel into lion country, and the nearest was in the mountains on the border; the railway line did not go the whole way, and the later part of the journey was made largely on foot, with much scrambling through thorny scrub and up and down steep river banks. At one point she had to be carried across the River Medjerda on the shoulder of a ‘small, meagre Arab’ summoned up out of nowhere by her guide; the alternative was to jump from one pier of a ruined Roman bridge to the next. All this while she was wearing a riding habit with skirt and ‘trowsers’, boots, hat and veil, and the temperature was in the eighties at least. When they finally found horses, there was no side-saddle for her, and she had to manage by ‘getting my knee round the front part of the Arab saddle’. There were no lions to be seen, but presently they saw a moving line of white in the distance: it was a large group of tribesmen advancing at full gallop in their white burnou
ses. By now she was very tired indeed, her head and neck on fire from sunburn despite her veil; at this point her guide led the horses down a rocky slope so steep that she had to lie flat on her back on the horse not to fall off. ‘Are you afraid now?’ he asked her. ‘Not yet,’ she answered very quietly, although she was. ‘Ah! une vraie anglaise,’ he laughed.

  Discreet as she was about politics, she was clearly sympathetic to the Italians, of whom a large work force existed in Tunisia. She reported that the French contractor was building his railway line almost entirely with Sicilian labourers, who were very good at pulling Roman ruins to bits – they were used as the basis of the new construction – and she also felt quite at ease with the local Arabs. Maria commented on the niceness of all the Italians settled in Tunisia, their respect for the rights of others and willingness to live and let live. Unlike other Europeans, she wrote, ‘they do not treat their fellow creatures of a different race and colour as if necessarily abjectly inferior to themselves’.