The dual nature of Lizzie, erotic and chaste, appears in her confused response to Wrayburn. Upon first seeing him, she is flustered: blushing and shrinking under his gaze, she flees the room to escape his gaze. Yet she soon adopts him as something like a scapegrace brother, an erring male in need of womanly care and support, filling the need of her own generous nature for someone to love. Speaking of herself (in the third person), she observes:
She knows he [Wrayburn] has failings, but she thinks they have grown up through his being like one cast away, for the want of something to trust in, and care for, and think well of. And she says,… “Only put me in that empty place, only try how little I mind myself, only prove what a world of things I will do and bear for you, and I hope that you might even come to be so much better than you are, through me who am so much worse, and hardly worth the thinking of beside you.”
Like earlier Mary Hogarth heroines, Lizzie glows with sympathy, earnestness, loyalty, devotion, self-abnegation, self-sacrifice. But her love for Wrayburn is not ethereal. She confesses that “Her heart—is given him, with all its love and truth. She would joyfully die with him, or, better than that, die for him.” Dickens is not punning here on “die” in the sense of sexual climax, the double entendre so beloved of English poets, but he makes plain Lizzie’s amorous susceptibility.
For Lizzie, however, vulnerability is strength, desire elevating. Her love for Wrayburn transforms him, but transforms her as well. It “has made a change within me, like—like the change in the grain of these hands, which were coarse, and cracked, and hard, and brown, when I rowed on the river with father, and are softened and made supple by this new work [as a seamstress], as you see them now.” Yet her nature remains grounded in her riverside origins; her desire transcends the sensual, but never loses touch with it. In Lizzie, love is a richly embodied spirit. “Love’s mysteries in souls do grow,” John Donne wrote, “but yet the body is his book”:
So soul into the soul may flow,
Though it to body first repair,…
So must pure lovers’ souls descend
T’affections, and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend.
(“The Ecstasy”)
In the figure of Lizzie, Dickens’s reverence for the chaste spirit of Mary Hogarth marries his sensual attraction to Ellen Ternan. Lizzie is desired and revered; both a siren of the river and an angel.
Her dark radiance reclaims the lost soul of Eugene Wrayburn. In David Copperfield, Agnes had saved David by leading him away from the allurements of the flesh; by contrast, Lizzie redeems Wrayburn by drawing him into desire. Their strong mutual attraction is unmistakably sexual. Paradoxically, however, erotic love leads Wrayburn upward, out of his purposeless dandyism into self-sacrificing love. He learns to love Lizzie generously, but only because he has first desired her. Heroines like Agnes are spiritual and loving in their essence, but flawed mortals like Wrayburn must struggle through fleshly desires to a higher love. When Lizzie drags him from the river after he is bludgeoned by Bradley Headstone, he emerges reborn. He must drown before he can live.
Until Ellen Ternan, Dickens had assumed an unbridgeable gulf between the ether of pure love and the thick currents of human life below. Even in Our Mutual Friend, created loveliness stands far removed from its Creator:
So, in the rosy evening, one might watch the ever-widening beauty of the landscape—beyond the newly-released workers wending home—beyond the silver river—beyond the deep green fields of corn, so prospering, that the loiterers in their narrow threads of pathway seemed to float immersed breast-high—beyond the hedgerows and the clumps of trees—beyond the windmills on the ridge—away to where the sky appeared to meet the earth, as if there were no immensity of space between mankind and Heaven.
The concluding “as if” clause betrays Dickens’s feeling that God kept himself at a lofty and hygienic distance, aloof from the muddy sphere of humanity. And yet in the character of Lizzie Hexam the antithesis collapses, as Dickens’s most exalted ideal of sanctity is incarnate in a darkly sexual heroine.
Beginning doubtfully, with infatuation and scandal, his love for Ellen Ternan had passed through its greatest crisis and emerged stronger. When Lizzie Hexam unwillingly confesses her love, Eugene Wrayburn exults that “so earnest a character must be very earnest in that passion.” Dickens himself was a very earnest character, and threw himself into his love for Ellen with all of his ardor and strong will.
In A Farewell to Arms, old Count Greffi, regretting his own lack of piety, reminds Frederic Henry that “you are in love. Do not forget that is a religious feeling.” Dickens would have agreed; his strongest religious feelings were always evoked by women. Describing the first time he saw the actor Charles Fechter on stage, he remarked: “He was making love to a woman, and so elevated her as well as himself by the sentiment in which he enveloped her that they trod into purer ether and in another sphere quite lifted out of the present.… I never saw two people more purely and instantly elevated by the power of love.” Our Mutual Friend’s Lizzie Hexam reveals love’s power to transform and elevate—even to undrown the dead. Perhaps Dickens felt that he too had been resuscitated, by Ellen.
CHAPTER 8
Mr. Tringham and the train crash
In the years following Ellen Ternan’s pregnancy, she and Dickens settled into a less eventful routine, though never bland domesticity. They never actually lived together, in fact. Although Ellen was paramount in his affections, he owed most of his time to his family and professional activities. He wrote less, beginning only one novel after finishing Our Mutual Friend in 1865, and leaving it unfinished at his death. But he was scarcely idle. “The older I get,” he boasted the year before his death, “the more I do, and the harder I work.”
During his last five years, however, his health and vigor declined, while Ellen herself may not have been entirely well. Most spectacularly, they nearly died together in a train wreck. But despite ills and accidents and despite his strenuous, protracted reading tours and the difficulties of spending time with her, his devotion to her never faltered; indeed, grew stronger. She was never merely the convenient mistress of a busy man, a voluptuary indulgence for his leisure hours. The most remarkable feature of his affair with Ellen Ternan was not its pyrotechnic origins, nor the complications that ensued—his wife’s eviction, the gossip and scandal, the stealth, the pregnancy—but the steady progress of his love for her, as the excited infatuation of the older man for the young actress grew into a deep affection, admiration, and loyalty. If Mary Hogarth had inspired his young manhood, Ellen became the cult of his later years.
For two or three years after their return from France in early 1863, her whereabouts are difficult to ascertain. During these years, however, he remained mostly in or around London—presumptive evidence that she too was in London, or nearby. She probably continued to live with her mother at 2 Houghton Place, in the house Dickens had purchased for her. More exotic possibilities have been suggested. He is known to have stayed occasionally at a secluded house in Condette, a village near Boulogne, directly across the Channel, and some have suspected that he maintained Ellen there. But there is no evidence that she ever resided in Condette, or indeed that she ever went there at all, though she may well have visited with him. Most or all of his trips across the Channel in 1863 and the following years were made in her company, and Condette would have been a suitably private retreat for them. But he is unlikely to have been content with Ellen living across the Channel by herself, hidden away in a village inconveniently distant from London—and it is hard to imagine why he would have sequestered her in France while he was in England.
Despite the uncertainties, his letters reveal much about his routine during these years.
The center of his professional life was of course London, in particular the offices of All the Year Round on Wellington Street, near Covent Garden. Most of the business and editorial duties of the magazine were discharged by his capable subeditor, W. H. W
ills; but Dickens spent one day a week at the office, sometimes more, to attend to magazine business and answer correspondence, much of it having nothing to do with All the Year Round, as well as for appointments. In 1867, for example, a visiting Methodist minister from Philadelphia, a complete stranger, wrote to ask if he could call on Dickens; and surprisingly Dickens consented, spending an hour in amiable chat with the Reverend Mr. Goldsmith Day Carrow. Dickens was limping on a gouty foot, but greeted his American visitor cheerfully and they sat down “knee to knee.” Carrow could not help but deplore his host’s “exceedingly poor taste in the matter of dress”—his “flowered purple velvet vest and checkered cashmere pantaloons” were too flashy for a sober Philadelphia eye. (Dickens had always favored smart clothes, but perhaps an aging man with a much younger mistress would especially cultivate a youthful appearance.) Despite his garish outfit, Dickens’s “general bearing was earnest, frank, gracious and winning,” Carrow was gratified to note, and the conversation flowed easily from topic to topic—Carrow’s travels in Europe and his impressions of Europeans and the English; Dickens’s work habits and his prowls about London; and of course his novels.
Carrow, for example, praised Dickens’s female characters: “You have sometimes in a single paragraph laid open the heart of a woman as Sir Walter Scott has failed to do in his whole Waverley series.”
“Why my dear sir!” Dickens exclaimed in surprise, and sprang to Sir Walter’s defense, citing several of Scott’s memorable female characters and “expatiating upon and eulogizing his genius.”
Carrow politely demurred; Scott’s only passion had been his ambition to found a family, he argued, and then confidently enunciated a critical principle: “I hold that a man must have really loved a woman if he would fully interpret the secrets of a woman’s heart.”
Dickens agreed: “‘You are correct again, sir,’ replied Mr. Dickens smiling.” But did the smile mask a twist of sudden anxiety? Was the Reverend Mr. Carrow, Dickens might have wondered, slyly alluding to Ellen? Perhaps this chatty, apparently innocuous clergyman was in fact fishing for some compromising disclosure.
Carrow almost certainly knew nothing about Ellen. But Dickens was just then planning a reading tour of America, and his visitor’s curious suggestion that Dickens “must have really loved a woman” might have seemed suspicious. Was this “clergyman” an imposter, some low American journalist nosing about for a scoop?
“But to what particular character in my works have you alluded?” Dickens pressed him.
“The question drew him more closely to me,” Carrow recalled, “and replacing his hands on my knees, he added, ‘Do me the favor to explain yourself.’”
This would seem a pointed, almost bellicose, demand, but Carrow was unaware that he was treading on dangerous ground. Dickens’s smile, he considered, “was expressive of curiosity as well as of pleasure, and showed that he was saying to himself, ‘I wonder if this Yankee clergyman does truly comprehend me?’”
Dickens may have been wondering precisely that.
Pondering which of his fictional women best testified to Dickens’s experience of love, Carrow proposed Esther Summerson of Bleak House.
If Dickens had feared that his visitor was hinting at Ellen, Carrow’s choice of Esther must have been a relief. Bleak House had been written a full five years before he had met Ellen; and the right-minded Esther was more indebted to another fictional paragon, Jane Eyre, than to any actual woman Dickens had ever known, let alone Ellen. Perhaps he suppressed a smile. To Carrow’s eye, “the face of the great artist took on a pensive, tender aspect.” Dickens almost hugged him. “I see you understand me! I see you understand me!” he exclaimed, according to Carrow. “And that is more precious to the author than fame or gold.”
Mr. Carrow visited Wellington Street on a Friday in August. Afterward, Dickens joined Ellen in Peckham for the weekend, and perhaps they laughed together when he recounted his interview with the earnest clergyman from Philadelphia.
Most of his callers were less random, but Mr. Carrow’s visit suggests the range of Dickens’s days in London, from editing and business matters to social calls and distractions.
The offices on Wellington Street also served as his London lodgings. When he sold Tavistock House in 1860 and moved his family to Gad’s Hill, he had a bedroom and sitting room fitted up for himself above the business offices of All the Year Round; his servant John Thompson remained in London to tend to the Wellington Street quarters as well as to help out in the offices below (although in 1866 he was dismissed for pilfering from the office cash box). Dickens often took dinner at Wellington Street, occasionally entertaining guests. At some point, a second bedroom was fitted up for his daughter Mary, and Georgina sometimes stayed there as well. Nonetheless, the Wellington Street rooms were essentially a bachelor retreat.
Did Ellen visit him there? After business hours, it would have been easy enough to escort her upstairs to his private apartment unobserved, and she was probably familiar with the All the Year Round offices and Dickens’s lodgings above. But as to whether she knew them well, or knew them at all, his letters (as later censored by Georgina) are silent, and any visits were probably only occasional. Wellington Street was no secure hideaway, and he preferred seeing her in greater privacy.
The second corner of his triangular life was Gad’s Hill. In summers and autumns especially, he spent much of his time at his Kentish retreat, enjoying long walks through the countryside, the amenities and comforts of the house, and the roles of local squire and genial host. His unmarried daughter Mary was nominally mistress of the household; Georgina was actually the indispensable domestic manager—as Wills was to All the Year Round, Georgina was to Gad’s Hill. Dickens was continually making improvements to the property, from drilling an expensive new well the first year to having an expensive conservatory constructed in his last year. His friend Charles Fechter the actor presented him with a miniature two-story Swiss chalet, the pieces shipped to Gad’s Hill in fifty-eight crates; a tunnel had been dug under the busy road in front of the house for easier and more private access to a wooded plot on the opposite side, and here Dickens had the chalet erected amidst trees and shrubs. In fine weather he used it for writing, sitting in the upper story with the shutters thrown open. On summer weekends there were usually guests, Dickens issuing invitations liberally, not just to close friends but also to more casual acquaintances. The wine cellar was kept well stocked, and in 1864 he installed a billiard table. The following year, one of his invitations to Gad’s Hill advertised “Billiards, croquet, bowls, &c on the premises. Cool cups and good drinks. Good beds. Harmony, most evenings.” The local cricket club used a field at Gad’s Hill for their matches; Dickens did not play, but sometimes kept score.
Ellen seldom visited Gad’s Hill; it was a family home, and the particular domain of the loyal Georgina; Dickens entertained many people there, but it would have been uncomfortable to host his mistress there often, or long. There are no contemporary references to any visits she made, but later reports attest to them. As an old woman, Dickens’s daughter Katie recounted a visit of Ellen’s: “Ellen Ternan came to stay [at Gad’s Hill]; followed by Katie, who, when she heard of the visit of Nelly … and that she had taken a hand at cricket with the boys in the field, observed: ‘I am afraid she did not play the game!’” (One could hardly expect a young woman brought up to the stage to be a cricket adept.) A friend of Ellen’s recalled an occasion when Ellen, as an old woman, “looking at photographs of Gad’s Hill, exclaimed, ‘Ah, many’s the time I’ve been there!’, then whisked the lot away, with the reticence on the subject of Dickens that characterized her later years.” Though her “many” visits to Gad’s Hill may have been multiplied by memory, she no doubt visited on occasion.
In winter and spring each year, however, Dickens rented a furnished house in London—a different one each year, always near Hyde Park—to give Georgina and Mary time in the metropolis during the high social season. Every May, during the final wee
ks of their London stay, he groused about the multitude of dinner parties to which Georgina and Mary committed him. It seems unlikely that Ellen often appeared at such dinners, if she ever visited his rented London house at all.
It was not easy to find private time with her, in fact: his celebrity and his family both imposed obstacles. For a year or two following her pregnancy, his most frequent answer to the difficulty was France.
Both he and Ellen were fond of France, and comfortable there; he had visited many times over the years, and she had just spent seven or eight months there. France was readily accessible by way of express trains from London to the Channel and packet boats across the Channel; “tidal trains” ran according to the arrivals and departures of the boats, which were in turn dependent on high tide. From London to Paris was only about ten hours. Far from the offices of All the Year Round, with its flood of correspondence, decisions, deadlines, and problems, France offered a holiday escape with relative privacy and leisure.
In England Dickens was a prisoner of his fame; in France he was just another bowler-hatted Englishman. For further anonymity he probably employed a pseudonym. “You know how to address me, if need be,” he reminded Georgina before leaving for France on one occasion in 1864, and since in the same note he included the name of his hotel in Boulogne, his reminder probably alluded instead to a French pseudonym. In England he was sometimes “Charles Tringham”; across the Channel perhaps he was Monsieur Tringham. Because he gave Georgina the name of his hotel during this trip, the Hôtel du Pavillon Impérial in Boulogne, it is for once possible to pin down his location after he crossed the Channel.
He made many “mysterious disappearances” in 1864 and 1865, most or all of them to France. In March 1864, for example, he disappeared for a week on “a little run.” In June, “I expect to be in France on the 30th for a few days’ holiday,” he told one correspondent, though to another he described the same holiday as “a ten or twelve days visit to Belgium.” Perhaps he visited both, but certainly France, for after telling Wills that “I have been working desperately hard to get away,” he added that his next Christmas tale “might have a mixing in it of Paris and London,” as “my present Mysterious Disappearance is in that direction.” The June holiday took him and Ellen to Paris and perhaps Sens—“a pretty little town with a great two-towered cathedral and the rooks flying in and out of the loopholes and another tower atop of one of the towers like a sort of a stone pulpit,” as he later described it in the Christmas story he had mentioned to Wills—and perhaps to other spots as well, but their itinerary is a mystery, for there is no surviving correspondence from the ten days of their absence, an unusually long gap, suggesting that wherever he took Ellen, he dropped out of touch with England almost completely.
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