The Invisible Woman

by Claire Tomalin

  While the Dickens Birthplace Museum was being set up in Portsea, Frances Trollope and Maria Taylor were living only a mile from it, in Victoria Grove, Southsea. Whereas Portsea is the part of the city of Portsmouth that grew up in the eighteenth century between the old town and the naval dockyards, Southsea was developed during the nineteenth century as a resort, with an esplanade, theatre and rows of modest streets named for the royal family and the novels of Walter Scott – the sort of seaside place in which elderly people settled as their lives petered out respectably. Fanny felt comfortable there, and after a while Nelly and George followed her and established themselves a few streets away, in Waverley Road. None of the sisters offered mementoes to the museum or, as far as we know, visited it. All three had accepted that there was a taboo over their memories and indeed over their lives; and it seems that nobody wanted to realize that there were three old ladies who could have talked for hours about their professional association and their long friendship with Dickens. The gap between what the Dickens people wanted to believe in, the tender-hearted icon of the Victorian age, and the actual man who had intervened so forcibly in the lives of three young working women was too wide to be bridged. If anyone did try to talk to the Southsea ladies, they were no doubt repulsed; Mrs Trollope and Mrs Wharton Robinson had come to accept long since the impossibility of their version. Their self-suppression, their fear of the damage they might cause themselves and others if they spoke or wrote of their experiences and knowledge, is one of the saddest parts of the whole story.

  Maria, the merry, original and outspoken, might have felt differently, though she would not have done anything to distress her sisters; but in 1903 she was mortally ill. She died the following year, cared for by Fanny to the end. The trio of the sisters was broken; Fanny had her placed in a double grave in which she announced her intention of joining her in due course. Maria’s husband was still alive, but there had been no contact between them for years; and she left what she had – a tiny sum of money, a few of her paintings and drawings – to her elder sister.

  When the Calcot market garden finally failed, and the last of George and Nelly’s investments disappeared, they, too, after a brief spell in Hanwell, were drawn to Southsea to be near Fanny. They were now painfully poor and kept afloat mainly by Nelly taking in French boarders who wanted to learn English. George and Gladys did what teaching they could find; Fanny also had her daily pupils, mostly young officers who needed to pass examinations in French, Italian and German. The pride of the whole family was Geoffrey, away on the business of the Empire and now a major. It was he who sustained their image of themselves as people of a certain standing and made all their hard work and scrimping worth while. After Malta he had been stationed in Ireland; later he was in China and then Nigeria. He had the family gift for languages; he set off for West Africa with a Hausa grammar, and when he was on leave he studied Russian with Fanny, who had decided to learn it herself, partly to help him, partly for the sheer fun of it. Soon she was reading Russian fluently enough to take the literary journal Novoe vremya for her own enjoyment, and her ‘belovedest of nephews’ sailed easily through his army examinations in three languages, French, German and Russian.

  While he was in Nigeria, things got no easier in Southsea. In 1907 Nelly was operated on for cancer of the breast; she was nearly seventy but now so used to her false age, which had settled at ten years below the truth, that it seemed quite natural to think of herself as a much younger woman, and she made a good recovery. George, deeply distressed by her illness, fell ill himself. The couple moved down the social scale still further and were living in a tiny terrace house in a dismal street, next to a pub, when he died, aged sixty: the lowest point in Nelly’s fortunes since her childhood.

  Still she went on working, as a teacher in a small girls’ school. Soon after George’s death, Gladys was married, from Fanny’s house, to a Cardiff solicitor; Fanny didn’t think much of him, but he solved the problem of Gladys’s future. Only when Geoffrey announced that he also wanted to marry, he had to be told that it was out of the question. He had met a Miss Thackeray, the daughter of an army family. The name did not please his mother, though the connection was too remote to signify anything (there were scores of distant Thackerays); in any case Geoffrey could not propose to a girl when he was still dependent on his family. There simply was not the money.

  Now the ties between the two sisters, so strongly formed in their first years of life, were drawn tight again. Fanny took Nelly into her own house. Frail and poor as they were – even Fanny was reduced to asking for genteel ‘loans’ from kindly Trollope connections – the two indomitable old ladies began to amuse one another and enjoy themselves again. Their thoughts went back to their early days, and they embarked on a final fling by settling down to write for the theatre together. Several comedies in Fanny’s hand and one fragmentary plan for a play in Nelly’s survive among the family papers. Some take their inspiration – distantly, it must be admitted – from Oscar Wilde and involve upper-class marital misunderstandings and clashes between foreign adventuresses and innocent English ladies. One is set in a Swiss boarding house, one among English rustics. As works of literature they are not exciting, but they are competently thought out and bear witness to the continuous energy and willpower of the Ternans: how many people attempt to become playwrights in their seventies? Nelly, in her spiky hand, started on a comedy built around theatre people: an elderly amateur writer has a wife half his age, and two young men, a manager and an actor are prepared to put on the amateur’s effort in order to make advances to the young wife. The cast list and the plot give out a clear, unrepentent signal that Nelly’s imagination was still steeped in the theatre.2

  (illustration credit 16.1)

  In her late seventies Fanny continued to make rounds of visits and take a lively interest in politics, with Lloyd George as her particular villain and all radical ideas under suspicion. Early in 1911 she and Nelly joined the Anti-Suffrage League and attended an anti-suffrage lecture given in Southsea by Dickens’s granddaughter Mary, known as Mekitty. Georgina Hogarth was also up in arms against ‘idiotic suffragettes’; she had long maintained that, with all the education women were now getting, they had only their own personal disabilities to blame if they failed to get on. ‘Every kind of Employment which is women’s work, and not man’s, I am too thankful they should have – and the education to be the companions and even the instructors of men, but I don’t see what other “Rights” they have a claim to, that they have not got – or nearly all.’3 Kate Perugini, as usual, put a different emphasis on the subject and went out of her way to declare that her father ‘had the strongest possible sympathy with women writers, women painters, and indeed, with all women who work in order to gain a livelihood for themselves and those dependent upon their exertions’.4

  The exertions of the Southsea ladies could not continue for much longer. Fanny, approaching her seventy-eighth birthday, grew thin and weak, and developed a persistent cough. In June 1913 she was bedridden. Like Nelly, she had cancer; and all through that hot summer she was nursed by Nelly who, in spite of her anxiety and devotion, in spite of her own illness, never lost her gaiety or her wish to be in the swim of events. She wrote to Geoffrey:

  Of course all Portsmouth and Southsea had been en fête since the arrival of the French ships. Equally of course I have seen nothing of the gay doings. I did meet a group of French sailors in Victoria Road yesterday. I said, ‘Vive la France Vive la Marine française Vive M. Poincaré.’ ‘Merci Madame merci!’ & with many bows and smiles they went on.5

  The letter continues with a comment on Kipling and another on the French press: literature and foreign affairs were not to be neglected. When Nelly could manage no longer, a nurse was called in. Fanny’s last weeks are chronicled by her sister in clear and touching letters:

  The end was very sudden and unexpected. It was in the morning about nine o’clock. Nurse had given her some coffee and turned away from the bed to get something else
when looking round she saw dear Fanny with her head thrown back on the pillow – insensible! Geoffrey rushed to Telephone for the Doctor but the sweet spirit had passed away before he could come. Of course I was with her and held the dear delicate little hand in mine to the last but she was quite unconscious … My one comfort is that she wished to go. She told me so many times. Forgive me if I have written incoherently or have said too much. These things cannot be written with a quiet hand or dry eyes.6

  She died in September and was buried in the same grave as Maria, with no inscription but her name; Nelly gave her age as seventy-five, subtracting a modest three years. She called her ‘the most loving sister, the most loyal friend, the wisest counsellor, the brightest most uplifting companion that woman ever had’ and added that Fanny had loved her children as though they had been her own.7 Fanny’s house was rented, and her pension died with her, but what she had to leave – a very small sum of money, her books and some boxes of family letters – went to Nelly.

  Geoffrey now resigned his commission. His mother had only a few months to live. They went to London together and took a small house in Guion Road, Fulham, with Jane, her good old maid, to care for them; and there, alert to the end, and jokingly apologizing for the time it took her, she died on 25 April. Her son was with her and registered her death, giving her age as sixty-five. He then took her body to Southsea, had her buried in his father’s grave, and arranged for the inscription ‘Ellen Wharton Robinson, His Loving Wife’.

  Nelly died a little richer than her sisters. After her will was sworn at £1,200, an extra, secret fund of another £1,200 turned up, and it had to be resworn. She left her books, pictures, and photographs and one or two other personal trifles to her daughter and everything else to Geoffrey; in this way the papers of all three sisters came to him. Presently they would lead him to reappraise his mother and the whole history of his family; but for the moment there were more pressing matters. Three months after the death of his mother the long peace of Europe ended. As soon as war was declared against Germany, Geoffrey returned to the army. Within weeks he was fighting in Flanders. His mother and aunts became as distant as everything that had once made the normal world; they were sealed into a safe, immeasurably remote past.

  17

  Geoffrey

  Geoffrey’s war was grim and long. He was wounded at Mons in 1914, recovered enough to serve two years in charge of a detention barracks in Scotland, and returned to the Somme in 1916. In 1917 he was sent home sick, and in January 1918 he became part of the Dunsterforce, a secret expedition sent out to Persia to keep an eye on the Turkish presence there, and also on the Bolsheviks in Azerbaijan, for fear their ideas would spread in the direction of India; it was Geoffrey’s Russian, learnt from Aunt Fanny in 1907, that earned him this posting. He remained for two years, mostly at the Persian port of Enzeli on the Caspian, locked in by a boiling mass of fierce and miserable people: disbanded Russian soldiers and Austrian prisoners released by the Russians; Jangali bandits backed by the Germans; Kurds, Cossacks, Gilanis, Turkomans, Tartars, Armenians and Georgians. There was typhus and cholera, in the mountains there was famine, in the towns cases of cannibalism. Geoffrey was besieged in Baku by the Turks and helped evacuate the wounded by boat back to Enzeli; and he was still there, in charge of the refugee camp, more than a year after the end of the war in Europe.1

  Finally, in January 1920, he resigned his post and returned to England; in the laconic words of the army records, he ‘reverted to unemployment’. He had lived through horrors. Now he was forty, a tall, fair, shy ex-major with very little in the world beyond a good command of several languages and a few boxes of books and old letters left to him by his mother. On this rather slender basis he married his Eva Thackeray at last and set up as a second-hand book dealer, also handling manuscripts and autographs. He found a cottage in the old centre of Slough – possibly because of faithful Jane, who had returned to her sisters there – and named it the Bluebird Book Shop. He bought himself a typewriter and began to go through the boxes of papers and books left by his mother and his aunts.

  Either he found things which he did not understand or, more likely, other manuscript dealers approached him with requests to buy his mother’s papers. He became aware of statements which did not tally with his own knowledge and memory of her. They upset him. Geoffrey had adored his mother; he had been brought up within the conventions of the correct middle classes and lived all his adult life among fellow officers who set a fixed dividing line between ladies and women, virtue and vice. He had no idea even, at this point, that his mother and aunts had ever worked as professional actresses.2

  Once alerted to the possibility that his version of his mother’s life was not entirely correct, he embarked on a course of painful re-evaluation of the past. It was easy enough to find facts that undermined it. In the boxes were cuttings relating to Fanny’s career as a child performer and to his mother’s, hers at an impossible date. An obituary notice of his grandfather Ternan’s death also failed to tally. Once he began to doubt and search, more evidence came out of books: her name on a reprinted playbill announced her professional, adult appearance in Manchester in the 1857 production of The Frozen Deep.3 No doubt Geoffrey made other inquiries and discoveries. The shock of finding out that she had quite another past, quite another persona, must have been considerable. That she was not sixty-five when she died, as she had told him and as he had informed the authorities, but seventy-five. Had his father ever known or suspected her true age? Not that she had looked old; but how had his parents discussed their lives together without this huge discrepancy slipping out? She must have watched herself, determined not to give anything away, and she must have relied on her sisters not to betray her. Geoffrey began to realize that all the family had been keeping secrets. Why?

  For a time it seemed that there was no one he could turn to for the truth. His younger sister knew nothing, and all his mother’s generation was dead; but he could not let the thing rest. Some time in 1921 or early 1922 he wrote to Sir Henry Dickens and asked for an appointment. As Gladys Storey put it in her notes, ‘the son came to H.F.D. the only surviving son of CD & asked if it was true that his mother was the mistress of CD & HFD had to admit it.’4

  Geoffrey found his talk with Sir Henry so upsetting that he went home and destroyed virtually every memento of the mother he had loved. For the rest of his life he would not have any book by Dickens in the house; he would even switch off the radio if the name were mentioned. He steadfastly refused to answer questions about his mother or about the family papers he had inherited from her, and he told his sister not to discuss their mother with anyone.

  Of course he could not stop curiosity. His sister did not entirely comply with his orders. After the death of Eva – the marriage was not a happy one – he found a warm-hearted second wife who devoted herself to him; not unnaturally, she expressed a sympathetic interest in his mother’s history, but even when she pressed him in his old age, he would not talk about her. He kept his study locked, showed no one his papers, and destroyed most of them without letting anyone see them; in this way the Trollope family letters which had gone to Fanny most unfortunately also disappeared.

  His silence suggests two things: that he was deeply hurt and upset by Sir Henry’s story, and that he accepted it was true. He made no attempt to disprove or deny it when it became public in the 1930s. Why did he react so strongly? Dickens had, after all, died before Geoffrey’s mother had even met his father. If she had transgressed, it was long ago and had long been expiated. For Geoffrey, though, it was not so simple a matter. It was bad enough, no doubt, that Dickens’s huge fame made him almost inescapable, but much worse that what he had learnt changed his picture of his mother in almost every particular. Her social origins, her upbringing and education, her relations with her own family, the circumstances of her marriage to his father, the significance of other friendships, her amusements, interests and skills – they all took on a different aspect, even to the way she had play
ed with him when he was a child. Everything she had said appeared to him in a new light; and, still worse, everything she had not said. To him and his sister, to their father, it now seemed she had offered a picture of herself that was in almost every essential false. Even on her deathbed she had lied to him.

  The young mother Geoffrey remembered had been only a few weeks short of forty when he was born. Her passionate love for him was very possibly not the love of a woman for her first-born but the love of a woman who had lost her first-born and was being offered, at the last moment, another chance. If she was Dickens’s victim, her husband and children were her victims, and all her deceptions had been supported by her elder sisters. Geoffrey had loved his aunts, who lavished affection and attention on him, and mourned them, too, when they died. He now saw that the three sisters had formed a magic circle, close and mutually supportive, which at times and over certain matters excluded everyone else.