17. 23 July 1876, Anne Procter to Nina Lehmann, quoted in Miss K. M. Longley, ‘A Pardoner’s Tale: Charles Dickens and the Ternan Family’, by permission of the late John Lehmann.
18. Fanny Trollope to Bice, June 1876, letter quoted by permission of Robert Cecil Esq.
14 THE SCHOOLMASTER’S WIFE AND THE FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT: MARGATE, ROME, AFRICA
1. Information from letter from Georgina Hogarth to Annie Fields, 30 October 1877; I am indebted for it to Miss K. M. Longley, who had it from Arthur A. Adrian. Miss Hogarth’s presentation of prizes at the school in the summer of 1879 is reported in Keble’s Margate and Ramsgate Gazette.
2. Told by Fanny Trollope in an unpublished collection of family anecdotes which she kept between 1879 and 1890, now in UCLA Library.
3. William Wetmore Story to J. R. Lowell, 11 February 1853, quoted in Henry James, W. W. Story and His Friends (1903), p. 255.
4. The story of Maria and the fishermen appears in Fanny’s book of family anecdotes in the UCLA Library.
5. The album is now the property of Mrs Lillah Fields, who kindly let me see it and reproduce from it.
15 NELLY TELLS
1. See Gladys Storey papers held at Dickens House, also Walter Dexter to Comte de Suzannet, 22 February 1939, letter in Dickens House: ‘It is confirmed by Miss S. that the children of Henry D and of E.T. used to play together on the sands at Boulogne.’ Other information for this chapter comes from letters of Fanny Trollope in possession of Robert Cecil Esq.; the Thanet Guardian and Keble’s Margate and Ramsgate Gazette; and the archivist at Margate Public Library.
2. See report in Thanet Guardian 1 November 1879. The preacher G. J. Everest was almost certainly a member of the Church and Stage Guild, founded in 1879 by Revd Stewart Headlam, after he’d been sacked by the Bishop of London as a result of lecturing in favour of theatre and music halls in 1877. The Guild faded out, but its ideas were taken up by the Actors’ Church Union in 1898, founded by the Revd Donald Hole, whose wife had been a child actress. Information from Michal Sanderson, From Irving to Olivier, pp. 146–8. Soon after the sermon at St John’s a group of Margate ladies and gentlemen formed an amateur dramatic society. More important, in 1885 a dramatic school was opened by Sarah Thorne, the lessee of the Margate Theatre Royal; this attracted many pupils, including Ellen Terry’s children and Irene and Violet Vanbrugh.
3. The words are those of Helen Wickham, the daughter of Rosalind Brown, to Miss K. M. Longley quoted in ‘The Real Ellen Ternan’, The Dickensian (1985).
4. Thomas Adolphus Trollope, What I Remember (1887–9), Vol. II, pp. 113ff.
5. This was Julia Clara Byrne, wife of the editor of the Morning Post, in her book of reminiscences, Gossip of the Century (1892), Vol. I, pp. 225–6.
6. Manchester Evening News, 16 September 1893, quoted in Miss K. M. Longley, ‘A Pardoner’s Tale: Charles Dickens and the Ternan Family’.
7. Wright gives this information in his autobiography Thomas Wright of Olney, published in 1936; he says Hughes wrote to him 18 April 1893, telling him about the letters; Hughes died in 1899.
8. Kate Perugini to George Bernard Shaw, letter in British Library.
9. Eliza Lynn Linton, My Literary Life (1899).
10. Mabel’s Progress was translated into German and continued to sell well enough in England for there to be a new edition from Chatto & Wind us in 1884. There is even a passing favourable mention of Fanny as a ‘novelist of no mean ability’ in the (unsigned) entry under her brother-in-law Anthony in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica.
11. This description comes from Muriel Trollope, the granddaughter of Anthony, and appears in ‘What I Was Told’, The Trollopian (1948).
12. Constance Clinton-Baddeley gave a BBC Third Programme talk entitled ‘Recollections of Thomas Adolphus Trollope’ on 9 May 1947, in which she recalled her friendship with the family. This is part of it:
I was a grown-up woman when, on retiring from his work in Rome as correspondent of the Morning Post, Mr Trollope came to live the last years of his life in Budleigh Salterton, the Devon village where we had our home. It had been the Trollopes’ plan to remain ‘Incog:’ for a little – but on the first walk they took, they encountered one of their oldest friends, Mr Edward Pigott, then Controller of Theatres in Great Britain: – that ended their period of retirement. Before long the Trollopes knew everybody and had started weekly receptions which were always crowded.
Mr Trollope’s appearance in and outside his house was remarkably different. Outside he seemed insignificant, a short, somewhat shrunk old man. Inside, where he was generally seated, you enjoyed the sight of a large head covered with a shock of white hair, and the merriest blue eyes I ever saw; – and he used them to add to the sparkle of his conversation, – for he was full of jokes and puns and tales worth listening to, – tales of his early days when as a boy he accompanied his parents on their ill-planned journey to America; tales of his life in Florence where he had lived with his mother in the days of her triumph; tales of his own later life in Rome, and tales of his younger brother Anthony, of whom he was a devoted admirer. He had been a friend of so many people, George Eliot and Charles Dickens among them. Indeed Dickens had introduced him to his second wife. His first wife had died young, leaving a little daughter. Dickens had recommended a Miss Frances Eleanor Ternan as a companion for the child, and in due course Mr Trollope married her.
She was the sister of Dickens’s friend Ellen Ternan, – and Ellen, now Mrs Robinson, often used to stay in the house on the cliff at Budleigh Salterton. She was very charming and very pretty, and I knew her well.
But I was talking about Mr Trollope’s ‘At Homes’. After we had all squashed into the first reception room, we were sent out into the long, big room where there was always a resplendent spread, and Mr Trollope would move around talking to everyone. Sometimes – we returned to the drawing-room for music, and I recall ‘Nellie’ Robinson – Ellen Ternan – giving a long recitation, – I forget what, but something famous and historical. But Mrs Trollope was always very careful to see that no one performed at her ‘At Homes’ who could not do whatever it was well. Indeed I think she was inclined to find the Devon society a bit stupid; – but Mr Trollope loved the ‘At Homes’, and talked hard.
13. Helen Wickham died in 1982 at the age of ninety-eight. Miss K. M. Longley knew her from 1968: see ‘The Real Ellen Ternan’, The Dickensian (1985).
16 SOUTHSEA
1. Kate Perugini to George Bernard Shaw, 19 December 1897, letter in British Library. Her sister Mamey had died the previous year, after publishing a memoir that entirely supported the view of Dickens as a perfect father and family man.
2. These papers are held in the Morris L. Parrish Collection of Victorian Novelists, Princeton University Library.
3. See her letter to Annie Fields, who was in favour of votes for women, and to Sir Nevil Macready, 6 February 1913, both quoted in Arthur A. Adrian, Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle, p. 257.
4. From a speech made by Kate Perugini in April 1910 at the Lyceum Club for Women Artists and Writers, reported in The Dickensian (1910).
5. Nelly to Geoffrey, 26 June 1913, quoted by permission of Mrs L. Fields.
6. Nelly to Charles Stuart-Wortley (Bice’s widower and the father of her child, now remarried; the Stuart-Wortleys had kept in touch with Fanny and ‘lent’ her small sums of money from time to time), September 1913, quoted by permission of Robert Cecil Esq.
7. ibid.
17 GEOFFREY
1. The Imperial War Museum contains both printed and manuscript accounts of the experiences of the British expedition led by Major General Dunsterville; it’s an extraordinary story.
2. His sister, Gladys Reece, insisted that their mother told them that her mother had been altogether unwilling to allow any of her daughters to follow her on to the stage professionally.
3. For instance, a playbill for the Manchester production of The Frozen Deep, with the names of Mrs Ternan, Maria and Ellen, had bee
n reproduced in T. E. Pemberton’s Dickens and the Stage in 1888.
4. Gladys Storey papers at Dickens House, 18 February 1923. A later note adds Sir Henry’s confirmation in 1928. See also note in Comte de Suzannet papers at Dickens House in which Walter Dexter tells Comte de Suzannet that she told him on this date that Ellen’s son ‘Once called on H.F.D. with some letters and asked him point blank, “Was my mother your father’s mistress?” To which H.F. had to reply, “Yes.” ’
5. Gladys Storey to George Bernard Shaw, 23 July 1939, letter in British Library: ‘Poor Miss Ternan, I know more about her than I put in my book. Nearly all her married life she lived in perpetual fear of her association with Dickens being revealed to her children. They did not know of it until after her death, when owing to some discovery, her son took a courageous and dramatic step to learn the truth.’
6. The story was told by Mrs Thomas Whiffen (Blanche Galton) in Keeping off the Shelf and was denied by J. W. T. Ley in The Dickensian in 1930, quoting Sir Henry saying Ellen was not D.’s god-daughter, and that the accident story was pure invention. Mrs Whiffen was the daughter of Madame Pyne Galton who lived in Margate and sometimes accompanied Nelly at concerts.
7. For O’Connor’s statement, which appeared 29 September 1928, see Ada Nisbet, Dickens and Ellen Ternan, p. 30.
8. On pp. 196 and 216.
9. An unpublished letter from Gladys Reece to Leslie Staples in Dickens House, dated 18 November, says of Geoffrey: ‘knowing him as I do, I am sure that few things would upset him more than being asked to discuss this matter of Dickens and our mother. When I have once or twice slightly approached the matter, merely speaking of the fact of the friendship between them, my brother has shut up like a clam.’ Malcolm Morley, whose pioneering series of articles The Theatrical Ternans in The Dickensian from 1958 to 1961 used a good deal of information supplied by Gladys Reece, notes in his papers at Dickens House that both she and Leslie Staples put pressure on him to present Nelly as ‘innocent’.
10. Gladys Storey’s book is not the work of a professional writer, but it is by no means negligible as testimony. Whenever she appears to be quoting Kate Perugini’s words directly, it carries particular conviction. Of course it can be argued ad infinitum that she and Wright were both sensationalists and scandalmongers, but it is hard to see what these two elderly people, both of whom waited for many years before publishing what they had been told, had to gain by inventing evidence, almost all of which has subsequently been corroborated from quite independent sources. Bernard Shaw, defending Gladys Storey, wrote, ‘The facts of the case may be in bad taste. Facts often are’ (TLS, 29 July 1939).
11. The editor of the Nonesuch Edition was Walter Dexter; Dexter was the recipient of a good deal of private information, including the statement by C. E. S. Chambers that his aunt, Nina Lehmann – herself the niece of Mr and Mrs Wills – told him that Dickens ‘had actually lived for some twelve years with a well-known actress, I forget the name’ (Chambers to Dexter, 21 January 1934, Storey papers in Dickens House).
12. The author has seen unpublished letters between Gladys Reece and several Dickens scholars, now in private possession. There are also unpublished letters at Dickens House from her to J. W. T. Ley, in which she makes the remark about love being the only possible reason for her mother to have become Dickens’s mistress.
18 MYTHS AND MORALS
1. Miss K. M. Longley’s unpublished typescript and notes have been a valuable source to many recent scholars and writers, among them Michael Slater, George Curry, Fred Kaplan, Peter Ackroyd and the editors of the Pilgrim Edition of the letters.
2. From a letter to Lady Emily Lytton, later Lutyens, written in 1891 and printed in A Blessed Girl: Memoirs of a Victorian Girlhood (1953), p. 59.
3. G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens (1906), p. 19.
4. Kate Perugini’s account is given in a lecture to the Dickens Fellowship, reported in The Dickensian for 1918; she writes of ‘garden parties, long walks, drives and rides … occasional rather dull dinner parties, dances and … opera and theatre parties … mornings occupied with the usual small domestic worries … a large amount of letter writing, embroidery and reading’. She also mentions charitable work.
5. G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens, p. 136; and John Carey, The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens’s Imagination (1973), p. 71.
6. Dickens to Mrs Dickinson, 19 August 1860, Nonesuch Edition, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, p. 172, and Dickens to Georgina Hogarth, 27 November 1860, Nonesuch Edition, Vol. III, p. 792.
7. Dickens to De la Rue, 23 October 1857, letter in Berg Collection, New York Public Library.
8. Charles Eliot Norton said Dickens told him a story along these lines at Gad’s Hill in the summer of 1868; it appeared in the extracts from Norton’s journals printed in Scribner’s Magazine in 1913.
Bibliography
1 UNPUBLISHED SOURCES
Manuscript letters held by Dr Graham Storey for the Pilgrim Edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens
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Papers held at the Morris L. Parrish Collection of Victorian Novelists, Princeton University Library
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Trollope papers held in the Rare Book and Special Collections Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Papers of Malcolm Morley held at Victoria and Albert Museum, Theatre Library
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The Invisible Woman Page 36