Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  He spent hundreds of hours on trains in 1866 and 1867, shuttling among Gad’s Hill, London, and Slough. With symbolic fitness, Gad’s Hill and Slough were on opposite sides of London, Gad’s Hill about thirty miles east, Slough twenty miles west. With the train to each taking an hour, more or less, from the London stations closest to his office near Covent Garden, he moved along an east-west axis between his family at one end and Ellen at the other, usually by way of his office in between. Like the ferryboat captain with a wife on either side of the harbor, he oscillated back and forth between the two poles of his life. Planning his days around railway schedules, he became an adept in routes and timetables. Alarmingly punctual, he would have brooked no obstruction or delay in catching his appointed train to Slough. Bare diary notes like “To Sl: at 2” or “To D [Datchet, near Slough] from W [London’s Waterloo Station] at 11” are pregnant with eagerness, determination, and impatience. How often did business associates or visitors notice him glancing sharply at the office clock, as if he could hear the warning shriek of a departure whistle?

  His mastery of the trains lay in more than just details of routes and schedules. He was an early railway enthusiast; his 1848 novel Dombey and Son—a decade before Ellen Ternan—was the first notable English novel to embrace the railway, both as fact and metaphor. Victorian railway expansion, spreading a vast iron spider web over England, benefitted Dickens as businessman, making possible the rapid distribution of his monthly novel installments and weekly magazine issues all over Britain, and greatly facilitating his public reading tours. But the railways also allowed him to maintain a comfortable separation between business, home, and mistress, to disappear from sight in a puff of locomotive smoke, to be “here, there, everywhere, and nowhere.” It was a great convenience for a man with a secret life.

  In the early months of 1867, his travels extended far beyond Gad’s Hill and Slough, to two dozen cities in England, to Swansea in Wales, to Glasgow and Edinburgh, and across the Irish Sea, to Dublin and Belfast. Most weeks he gave three or four public readings and then returned to London—and from there, straight to Slough. The diary records his return from his readings in Ireland in March, for example:

  22 at Dublin. Read Carol & Trial [A Christmas Carol and a scene from Pickwick Papers]. To boat at Kingston.

  23 Boat starts at 7. To Holyhead & Town [London]. To Sl:

  24 at Sl:

  25 at Sl: Office.

  Fleshing out this barebones outline, we see Dickens so impatient to return to Ellen that after “a very trying week” in Ireland he walks off the stage from his final evening performance in Dublin, takes a carriage directly to the quay, spends the night on a moored steamer due to get underway early in the morning, crosses the churlish Irish Sea, and immediately on landing at Holyhead embarks on the long train journey to London—all this “in the worst of hard weather.”

  But London is of course not his ultimate destination: from Euston Station he proceeds directly to Slough. Only after a restorative Sunday and two nights with Ellen does he make his way back to Wellington Street on Monday morning to catch up on editorial business. That evening, he returns to Slough for another night with Ellen. Meanwhile, Gad’s Hill will not see him for another three weeks, during which absence from his Household Gods he will return to Slough another half dozen times in the intervals between his out-of-town readings.

  The pocket diary reveals that in the three months between mid-January and mid-April 1867, he was away from London for all but thirty-three nights; and of those thirty-three nights, two thirds were spent in Slough. The other eleven, he slept at his Wellington Street office. Gad’s Hill he did not visit at all. Only with the end of his reading tour and the arrival of spring weather did he find his way back to Gad’s Hill, and even then he continued to spend two or three nights each week in Slough. In May, for example, he wrote to Georgina from London that “I cannot get down to Gad’s between this [Wednesday] and Monday, being fairly overwhelmed by arrears of work.” Nonetheless, he had found time to spend the day before at Slough, and would spend the following weekend there, too—after which, he still failed to appear at Gad’s Hill. Georgina no doubt knew or at least suspected that “arrears of work” meant Ellen.

  What was his life with Ellen in Slough like? The clipped notes of the pocket diary give hints. To begin, she is often accompanied by another figure, “M.” In early February, for example, after giving readings in Leeds and Manchester, Dickens returned to London late at night, spent the rest of the night and the next morning at his office, and then took a train to Slough. The next day after spending the morning at Slough he returned to London at 12:45 (from Windsor station, he noted) and went to his office; he met Forster and they dined at the Atheneum Club. Then, “Back with N & M”—that is, back to Slough with Ellen and “M.” Three days later, after three more nights at Slough: “To P [Paddington station] with N & M at 10:20. Then to Bath,” where he gave a reading that evening. From the pocket diary’s half dozen linkings of “N & M,” it becomes plain that “M” was Ellen’s steady companion. It has been argued that this companion was Dickens’s eldest daughter Mary (usually called Mamie); alternatively, that “M” was Ellen’s sister Maria.

  “M” was undoubtedly Ellen’s mother, however. Mrs. Ternan had temporarily come out of retirement in December 1865 to act in two plays produced by Dickens’s friend Charles Fechter at the Lyceum Theatre; until her engagement ended in June the following year, she probably stayed in London, though she may have retreated to Slough on her off days. By the time of the 1867 pocket diary, however, she was re-retired and spending more time in Slough with Ellen. Almost a century later, Ellen’s daughter, looking into old letters, learned that a family servant named “Jane [Wheeler] first went into the service of Mrs. Ternan (my grandmother) at Slough in 1866. Mrs. Ternan and my mother were then living there together.” Mrs. Ternan also had a house in London, however, and with the house in London and Mr. Tringham’s two cottages in Slough, the exact arrangements are uncertain. In any case, the two women probably spent much of their time together, either in London or Slough, when the busy Tringham was occupied or out of town.

  The frequent presence of “M” in Slough suggests the connubial and domestic flavor of Dickens’s life with Ellen as it had developed over ten years. It was not as if he alternated between two moral antipodes, a respectable home at Gad’s Hill and a scarlet concubinage in Slough. His irregular arrangement with Ellen had a respectable family quality: along with a mistress, he had acquired a de facto mother-in-law and two sisters-in-law who figured prominently in Ellen’s—and consequently his own—life. There were even the customary family tensions: he rubbed along on uneasy terms with her sister Fanny (who was in England and sometimes staying with Ellen during the summer of 1867). If not a case of Love me, love my family, it was at any rate Love me, tolerate my family. Ellen was no black-sheep child defying her family; she remained a good daughter and devoted sister. (Toward the end of their lives, the three Ternan sisters were once again all together, in Southsea.) The Ternans’ tight family bond might have been occasionally inconvenient from Dickens’s point of view, particularly as manifested in Mrs. Ternan’s frequent presence—but it was a comfort to Ellen, for with his frequent absences she would otherwise have been much alone; it was only equitable, moreover, for Dickens spent much time with his own family at Gad’s Hill. He may have welcomed the respectability that Mrs. Ternan lent to his Slough ménage; perhaps her matronly dignity quieted the neighbors.

  Almost every week, Mr. Tringham showed up at Ellen’s cottage in Slough, probably walking from Slough station or nearby Windsor or Datchet station, and stayed for a day or two. Sometimes he made a daily commute to London from Slough, taking a train to Paddington or Waterloo station; Waterloo was an easy walk to his Wellington Street office. In the evening he returned to Ellen. Even his longer stays in Slough were probably working vacations. He brought along correspondence to answer, submissions to All the Year Round to read, and proofs to correct, carrying
his working papers to and from Slough in “a small black bag or Tourist’s Knapsack.” Returning from Slough on one occasion, he left this bag or knapsack in the hansom cab he hired from Paddington to Wellington Street. (It is reassuring to discover that even the relentlessly efficient Dickens suffered absent-minded lapses.) Sometimes he worked on his own current writing project in Slough. In 1867 he was between novels, but wrote a strange story called “George Silverman’s Explanation” and a series of children’s stories collectively titled “A Holiday Romance;” together with Wilkie Collins he also wrote a long alpine melodrama for All the Year Round, a story titled “No Thoroughfare.” He wrote in the mornings, and after breakfast (always a rasher of broiled ham) and conversation with Ellen, he would have spent the next several hours at his desk.

  Following a light luncheon, afternoons would have been for writing letters, or for recreation and relaxation. At Gad’s Hill, relaxation often took the form of a long walk; in Slough, too, walks with Ellen in the nearby countryside were probably part of the routine. Beyond the pleasures of air and exercise, walking probably allowed him time with her alone, without Mrs. Ternan. Did he and Ellen also stroll the streets of Slough, or wander the two miles to Windsor, to shop, or to idle along the pavements? Possibly—although passersby might recognize the famous man and wonder about the attractive young woman at his side. One day, at any rate, he was recognized by two dogs: “When walking … between Slough and Windsor, he met a royal groom on horseback” accompanied by two great St. Bernards to whom Dickens had once been introduced (they were the sire and dam, in fact, of his own St. Bernard at Gad’s Hill, Linda). The sagacious and friendly dogs greeted him warmly, “and it was with difficulty that the groom could get them to leave him.” Was Ellen with him to witness this happy encounter—and did the dogs recognize her as well?

  She herself had a lapdog, Lady Clara Vere de Vere, named for a heartless aristocratic beauty in a ranting poem of the same name by Tennyson. Dickens himself preferred large and truculent outdoor dogs (one of whom, Sultan, he reluctantly shot after it attacked a little girl), but since his daughter Mamie, like Ellen, had a small dog, “a tiny ball of white fluffy fur” named Mrs. Bouncer, he was willy-nilly greeted by a pampered lapdog at both doorsteps of his domestic life, Slough and Gad’s Hill. (As Maria Beadnell had also doted on a dog, her spaniel Daphne, it was evidently Dickens’s fate always to have his beloved’s lapdog underfoot.)

  Apart from the latest antics of Lady Clara Vere de Vere (nickname: Claro), what did Dickens and Ellen talk about in the cottage at Slough? There is little reason to suppose that their conversation rose much above the usual stuff of domestic chat: anecdotes of the day’s happenings and mishaps, the mail, gossip, family. Ranging beyond these topics, they shared a keen interest in the theater and would have shared theatrical news and observations. Ellen was an ambitious reader, moreover, and they would naturally have talked about books, writing, and writers. But Dickens certainly, and Ellen probably, had little interest in more abstruse topics.

  We may get a hint of their conversation in his epistolary conversations with another intimate woman friend—his surrogate wife back at Gad’s Hill, Georgina. Though frequently dispatching instructions on business or household matters, his letters to Georgina are often newsy, gossipy, and humorous as well. From an 1867 letter from Leeds, for example:

  I think I mentioned to you that Mr. Harrington is now Master of the Post Office at York. I am sorry to say that he gave me—with tears—an account of E.Y.’s behaviour to him which presented the said E.Y. in a most repulsive, thankless, and odious light. Harrington is established in a very comfortable and pretty little house. I went home with him to see his wife. She is passée, with the remains upon her of a kind of beauty. But she too wears a wig; and it was rather comical to see the two wigs presiding at lunch opposite one another.

  Or another, from Dublin:

  Finlay’s wife is a very prepossessing little Scotch girl. Something remarkably pleasant both in her face and speech. A very natural manner. I was greatly pleased with her. He [Finlay] is very ill in Edinburgh under a Scotch surgeon. Has had two trying operations performed—is going to suffer under another—and is greatly reduced and cast down. I am afraid he is not naturally strong enough to bear so much.

  A breezy, intimate tone; news of shared friends and acquaintances; candid, amusing observations—all suggest the character of his conversation with Georgina (who herself had a penchant for satire).

  His feelings for Ellen were very different, of course: while his relationship with Georgina was companionate and friendly, his love for Ellen was romantic and ardent. Together they would have fallen into a comfortable private conversational pattern of their own; and yet at table or as they walked along the footpaths outside Slough, his talk perhaps had the ring of his chatty letters to Georgina. Perhaps in shuttling between Slough and Gad’s Hill, in fact, he sometimes forgot which news item or anecdote he had related to which woman. Both women were well acquainted with his loud and bumptious friend John Forster, for example, and a lunch with Forster would always have been conversationally newsworthy. Did Georgina and Ellen hear the same account of each new Forsterism? And did one of them sometimes hear it twice?

  Evenings in Slough would have been conversational, too, enlivened with Victorian parlor pastimes like singing, perhaps—Dickens loved old popular songs and ballads—and certainly with reading aloud. Ellen almost certainly heard him read his own current stories as proofs arrived from the printer, as well as other fiction appearing in All the Year Round. While they were in Slough, All the Year Round began serializing Fanny Trollope’s novel Mabel’s Progress. Dickens would have read aloud each installment as it arrived from Fanny in Italy and was cast in proof, and conversation would have revolved about the story’s characters and development. The heroine of Mabel’s Progress is an actress, and Ellen and the old stager Mrs. Ternan, if present, would have enjoyed detecting the novel’s sources in their own theatrical experience. To indulge Ellen, Dickens would have suppressed his aversion to Fanny and been gentle with the novel’s shortcomings.

  Despite the likelihood of such evenings together, however, the 1867 pocket diary is silent on their activities in Slough, Dickens usually summarizing entire days there with the bald entry “at Sl:”. The diary provides far more information on his train routes than on the time they spent together. Only occasionally did he record specifics. To the entry for April 19, a Friday, next to the usual notation of “To Sl:” he added, parenthetically, “Wills.” A curious detail: on no other of his many trips to Slough does the diary mention any companion apart from Ellen and “M.” Was the visit of his confidential subeditor merely a pleasant social occasion? Or did this rare visitor to the clandestine Slough ménage signal some problem or intrigue? As Wills often acted as agent in Dickens’s personal affairs, one may wonder if there was more to his visit than simply dinner and chat with the Ternan ladies. But, after all, that may have been the sum of it. The diary’s mysteriously brief note may lure us into imagining a ghost in the attic, when there is only a mouse.

  Wills’s visit, however, comes close to an even more unusual entry, to which his appearance at Slough may somehow be related. The diary is invariably an unannotated record of each day, free of summary remarks—with one exception. At the bottom of the page for April, Dickens drew a horizontal line under the entry for the thirtieth and below it added: “N ill: latter part of this month.” Possibly Wills’s visit had something to do with Ellen’s ill health, though a physician might have been a more useful visitor. Nothing else in the diary gives any hint that she was indisposed in April, let alone quite ill. Yet she evidently was, so much so that turning the page on April, Dickens thought her poor health worth a special memorandum. It is a token of how critical her well-being was to him.

  What ailed her? In the 1950s, Felix Aylmer in his analysis of the pocket diary made the argument that Ellen had given birth to a child on April 13, 1867, in which case her illness in the following weeks might
naturally be ascribed to postpartum complications. But Aylmer’s evidence quickly dissolved, eventually dwindling to the single word “Arrival” in the diary’s entry for the thirteenth, a cryptic note which may simply refer to Dickens’s own arrival in Slough that day, at 2:30 in the afternoon. Nothing else suggests a birth in 1867. Others have guessed that Ellen continued to suffer from Staplehurst injuries, but no concrete evidence exists for this theory either. One guess seems as good as another.

  Whatever the case, a few weeks later Ellen and her mother took a train from Slough to Paddington with Dickens: Ellen was now well enough to travel to London. A few days later, back in Slough, she and Dickens took an evening walk together, while the diary entry for the following morning, “N walks,” may mean that she walked with him from Slough to the train station in Windsor, two miles off. He took the train into London alone that day, but the next day Ellen attended a play with him at the Lyceum Theatre. She and her mother were in town the following day, as well, probably after spending the night in London, suggesting that Mrs. Ternan still maintained lodgings there.

  Later in May, however, the pocket diary contains two curious entries. On the twenty-fourth, a Friday, Dickens recorded: “To Sl: at 10. again Bad night.” As the bad night is recorded after his arrival in Slough—he had slept in London—it was probably Ellen who had suffered the bad night. His trip to Slough that morning, in fact, was probably an unscheduled call to check on her health, for he had engagements that required him to return to London in the afternoon. He dined in London that evening with Georgina. Did he anxiously discourse to her about Ellen’s condition, and if so did Georgina feign sympathy for the woman who so monopolized his attentions? Later that evening he returned to Slough, remaining overnight and the next day—but “Out all day after 2. The Doctor—” These brief remarks are obscure, but the doctor must have been for Ellen, as Dickens would scarcely have traveled to Slough to consult his own doctor, whose practice was near Cavendish Square in London.