Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  He had instructed Wills to expect the telegram for Ellen the day after he landed, but the morrow came and went with no message. Perhaps he wanted another day to assess the situation; if the prospects seemed doubtful, moreover, he would be reluctant to cable the gloomy “No.” On the second day after his arrival, he and Dolby took a walk to “discuss arrangements in the pleasant air rather than in this room [in Parker House].” This open-air discussion probably centered on Ellen, for Dickens noted that after speaking with Dolby, he would “get some letters ready for England.” Among the “letters” was the fateful telegram for Ellen, as well as a letter to Wills with further instructions on staying in touch with her.

  The all-important cable went off, with the apparently cheerful message: “Safe & well expect good letter full of Hope.”

  But “Safe & well” was a red light—Ellen was not to come. Dickens had apparently concluded that her presence would be too risky, or that his public schedule and the necessity of concealing her would leave them little time together—not enough to justify the long journey from Italy to England and thence across the North Atlantic to Boston. Dolby may have been discouraging. As a professional manager of public amusements, he might well have frowned on unprofessional distractions; and cherishing his close and confidential relationship with his “Chief,” perhaps he did not welcome feminine competition. A year later, Dickens would exclaim, “Dolby! Your infernal caution will be your ruin one of these days!” Perhaps he was recalling their discussions about Ellen the year before.

  Whatever the reasons, “safe & well” meant that Dickens had relinquished his hope of bringing Ellen over … maybe. Even now he did not wholly despair, it would seem. A few hours after his fresh-air conference with Dolby, he dined with Mr. and Mrs. Fields and a large company of the golden illuminati of New England, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. He “bubbled over with fun,” his hostess Annie Fields recorded in her journal. Could he have felt or even feigned such ebullience if only a few hours earlier he had resigned himself to a long winter without Ellen? His telegram to her had in fact been ambiguous; for while “safe & well” told her not to come yet, the added note, “expect good letter full of Hope,” perhaps hinted that he was hopeful of summoning her soon.

  The following week, he informed various English correspondents that he would be transferring his American headquarters from Boston’s Parker House to the Westminster Hotel in New York City, “a more central position,” he explained, “and we are likely to be much more there than here [in Boston],” adding that “I am going to set up a brougham in New York, and keep my rooms at that hotel”—that is, he would keep his suite at the Westminster for the duration of his American stay, even when traveling outside New York. But New York may have had virtues beyond its central location. Boston was his American base; he knew many people there, including his American host Fields and Fields’s hospitable wife Annie. In Boston, it would be difficult to evade visitors, dinners, and other obligations; the pocket diary records lunch or dinner engagements for eleven straight days after he arrived there. “Your respected parent is immensely popular in Boston society, and its cordiality and unaffected heartiness are charming,” he wrote to his daughter Mary. But so much cheery hospitality would be problematic if Ellen were with him.

  In New York, on the other hand, he knew fewer people and none well; it would be easier to maintain his privacy. Keeping a suite at the Westminster Hotel would allow Ellen to remain in comfort there when he dashed off to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington for readings. It seems unlikely, moreover, that he would keep a brougham in New York just for himself; he did not keep one in London. This luxury, too, was perhaps intended for Ellen.

  Soon after his first American reading in Boston on December 2, moreover, he sent a mysterious telegram to Wills, for relay to Georgina, Forster, and other confidants: “Tremendous success greatest enthusiasm all well.”

  The message’s concluding “all well” was the code for “You come.” Was Ellen now being summoned to join him in America?

  The evidence is inconclusive.

  When he admonished Wills that the precise wording of his first telegram from America would be critical, he had said nothing about a second telegram, and nothing in the surviving documents makes any reference to one. Yet the later telegram concludes with one of the two specific code phrases, and after its exuberant report “Tremendous success greatest enthusiasm,” the bland “all well” would seem superfluous—unless it had a particular coded meaning. If “all well” did not mean “you come,” it was confusing. Should Ellen interpret the message as a summons? or as simply a commonplace reassurance?

  The pocket diary also reveals Dickens still scheming to get her to America. Next to its table of December’s high and low tides at London Bridge, he made note of another code:

  If P [written over an “M”]. N in London -------Tues 10

  If R. N in Liverpool --------------Wed 11

  These jottings are cryptic, but evidently he had arranged for one of his English confidants, probably Forster or Wills, to cable news of Ellen’s progress toward America. The coded message “R” would presumably mean that she had traveled to Liverpool to embark on a steamer for America, and with a line drawn to December 14 he jotted a memorandum: “Scotia for N York.” On the fourteenth, the Cunarder Scotia indeed sailed from Liverpool, landing in New York on the twenty-sixth, when Dickens—surely no coincidence—happened to be there for readings. Had Ellen been aboard, she would have been a most gratifying Boxing Day gift.

  But on that day she was not aboard Scotia or any other ship sailing to New York. She was instead still in Italy, making no progress whatever toward London or Liverpool, let alone America. For all his planning and plotting, Dickens was apparently in the dark as to her plans. Soon after arriving in Boston, he had directed Wills:

  Will you specially observe, my dear fellow what I am going to add. After this present Mail, I shall address Nelly’s letters to your care, for I do not quite know where she will be. But she will write to you and instruct you where to forward them.

  While he evidently expected that Ellen would soon leave Florence, probably to return to England to await a summons to America, she herself had evidently decided to wait in Florence.

  Dickens, several thousand miles away, remained confused about her location. He continued to write her in care of Wills, perhaps thinking her back in England ready to sail for America at short notice. But if the hotel suite in New York, the brougham, and the “all well” message were part of a strategy to bring her to America—nothing came of it all. Ellen remained in Florence.

  The Ternans’ journey to Florence had been primarily for Mrs. Ternan’s health; and Maria too had been ill. “We shall have quite a hospital up here this winter,” Fanny had remarked before they arrived. “However I trust it may benefit all the invalids.” Ellen herself may have been unwell. When, in January, Fanny, her husband Thomas Trollope, and Maria traveled to see Vesuvius erupting, Ellen and her mother remained in Florence: “Mamma & Ellen were not strong enough to bear the journey,” Fanny remarked. If Ellen was not strong enough for an excursion to Naples, she was scarcely strong enough to cross the North Atlantic in winter. In February, when Fanny and Maria went into Florence, masked, to observe Carnival festivities, Ellen and her mother again remained behind at the villa. Probably Mrs. Ternan, if not Ellen herself, was still unwell; if so, Ellen might have been reluctant to leave her mother behind in Florence. Besides, the strong-willed Fanny, perhaps hostile to Ellen’s joining Dickens in America, may have pressed her to linger.

  And as the weeks passed, an Atlantic crossing became less and less likely. By Christmas, when Dickens had been in America for over a month, it was probably too late to set out. Along with her mother and Maria, Ellen settled down to spend the winter in Florence—a particularly cold winter in Tuscany, as it happened, but nothing so dreary as an English winter, and incomparably milder than the severe winter in the Amer
ican Northeast, where Dickens was sneezing and snuffling.

  For, after exulting in the adulation and profits that greeted him in Boston and New York, he had fallen ill. Following a heavy snow in New York in mid-December, he dashed about “in a red sleigh covered with furs, and drawn by a pair of fine horses covered with bells, and tearing up 14 miles of snow an hour.” Soon, however, a “dismal cold” began to wear him down. “Heavy cold, idle, & miserable,” he summarized Christmas Day in his pocket diary, and echoed this cheerless report in a letter to his daughter Mary: “I had a frightful cold (English colds are nothing to those of this country), and was exceedingly depressed and miserable.” Two days after Christmas, “I am so very unwell,” he confessed, “that I have sent for a doctor.” His cold—or “American catarrh,” as he called it—persisted for months, nourished by fatigue and low spirits. It was probably no mere coincidence that he fell into the grip of a winter-long cold just as his dream of bringing Ellen to America dissolved.

  For the next five months, he worked his way through seventy-six readings up and down the East Coast. From New York and Boston he traveled to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, where he had an audience with President Andrew Johnson; he read in half a dozen smaller cities in New England, and in March made a pleasure excursion to Niagara Falls, giving readings in Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Albany, and Springfield along the way. In February, impeachment proceedings against the president had monopolized public attention and he canceled readings for a week, but the entire tour nonetheless reaped excellent profits and his letters to England invariably quoted the ticket sale for the latest reading. He grew increasingly exhausted, however, and his December cold lingered into spring: “Catarrh worse than ever!” he lamented in April. There were incidental consolations. In February he made a great facetious production of a twelve-mile walking race between his manager Dolby and an American assistant named Osgood, advertising it as the Great International Walking Match between the “Man of Ross” and the “Boston Bantam,” drawing up elaborate rules, umpiring the match personally, and afterwards hosting a gala dinner at the Parker House for the contestants and a large company of his Boston literary circle.

  But all the while he pined for Ellen. “It is a wearying life, away from all I love,” he lamented in February, and two weeks later he was even wearier, and missing her even more: “I am beginning to be tired, and have been depressed all the time (except when reading), and have lost my appetite. I cannot tell you … how sorely I miss a dear friend.” During the final month, “all his thoughts were of home and of the loved ones there,” Dolby recalled, loyally dissembling, for he knew well that the loved one for whom Dickens yearned most wistfully was not at Gad’s Hill and in fact not even in England at the time.

  Dickens continued to write this loved one in care of Wills. None of his letters to her survives, but several of those to Wills do, in each of which he mentions an enclosure for Ellen:

  “The enclosed letter to your care as usual.” (3 December 1867)

  “Enclosed is another letter for my dear girl to your kindest care.” (6 December 1867)

  “Enclosed is another letter for my dear girl, to your usual care and exactness.” (10 December 1867)

  “Enclosed, another letter ‘as before’.” (17 December 1867)

  And on Christmas eve, he sent Wills yet another letter to forward to Ellen, accompanied with a sorrowful fantasy: “Enclosed, another letter as before, to your protection and dispatch. I would give £3,000 down (and think it cheap) if you could forward me, for four and twenty hours only, instead of the letter.”

  Over the next four months he enclosed at least six more letters to Ellen in packets mailed to Wills; there were likely others, too, for many of his letters to Wills have disappeared. He probably wrote Ellen weekly, more or less, depending on ships sailing for England; he wrote his last letter to her in mid-April, less than a week before sailing from New York himself.

  There is one especially curious feature in Dickens’s letters to Wills. In February, he remarked that “You will have seen too (I hope) my dear Patient, and will have achieved in so doing what I would joyfully give a Thousand Guineas to achieve myself at this present moment!” This ardent wish testifies to his longing for Ellen, whom he had not seen for almost four months. But it seems strange that he thought that Wills in London would have seen her recently, as she was still in Florence and would remain there for another two months.

  How could Dickens have been so confused about her whereabouts? She must have written him often. She had little excuse not to, for she was highly literate and enjoyed abundant leisure at Villa Trollope. Moreover, his brief mentions of her in his letters to Wills scarcely suggest any unhappiness or uneasiness, as might be expected had she been out of touch. But the entire correspondence between Dickens and Ellen having disappeared, it is impossible to know just what he knew or didn’t know about her while he was in America. Perhaps at some point she intended to return to England in February, but changed her plans. Letters between Florence and America were two weeks or more in transit, so he was always behind in his information.

  In Florence, the Florentines complained of the cold damp winter. “I tell my sisters that they must stay until the spring sun begins to shine,” Fanny Trollope wrote her stepdaughter in England, “and then they will know what an Italian day really is. Maria remembers how beautiful it was when she was here in September, and is always talking with great tenderness of the figs.” As an additional discomfort, Villa Trollope was undergoing renovations: the family was eating in the drawing room and the library was accessible only by ladder. But rain, cold, illness, and hammering apart, the close-knit Ternan women probably enjoyed the chance to spend several months together.

  From Fanny’s letters to her stepdaughter during these months, we catch glimpses of Ellen.

  We see her on a modest family outing for tea and punch, for example, and also attending a more glamorous affair, “a very large and brilliant reception … in honour of Admiral Farragut the officer who so distinguished himself in the recent American Civil War,” at which “there were nearly four hundred persons present.” We see her with Fanny and Mrs. Ternan “kindly” making flannel shirts for soldiers wounded in the Italian wars of unification. Hearing of her walks with her sisters (“The days are so short now that we seldom get our afternoon walk before dusk,” Fanny notes in December), we recall that long afternoon walks were a Dickens habit too.

  Here and there in Fanny Trollope’s letters, we glimpse Ellen as a living personality.

  Some Dickens biographers and scholars have assumed her to be the model for Dickens’s later disobliging heroines—in particular, the icy Estella of Great Expectations and the mercenary Bella Wilfer of Our Mutual Friend. But the Ellen of Fanny Trollope’s letters is a good-humored, generous, and likeable young woman.

  One day, for example, she makes a special trip into Florence to buy sheet music for Fanny’s stepdaughter Beatrice (“Bice”): “I have bought the songs you asked for (Ellen kindly went down to Ducci’s on purpose) the day we received your letter,” Fanny writes Bice. When Bice sends each of the Ternans a personally illustrated Christmas card, Fanny in thanking her remarks that “Ellen’s robin redbreast drinking her health is particularly admired. She says it is evident that you consider her the ‘jolly dog’ of the party!”

  We see Ellen laughing appreciatively at the un-English mannerisms of a small English girl, “little Emelina”: “Ellen was very much amused by her funny little Italian gesticulations and airs.” We see her chatting kindly with an insecure young guest at Villa Trollope: “A girl who was here last night … said such a pretty naïve thing to Nelly. She (a certain Miss King) is at school.… Nelly was showing her some attention, and she said ‘Oh how kind Mrs. Trollope is to let me come. But I am very frightened.’ ‘Why?’ asked Ellen. ‘O, because I am not used to going out, and I don’t know any of the people. I am just sixteen, and if you know I am only a school girl though I look so big!’”

 
Later, after her return to England, Ellen and her mother will pay a special visit to Bice, unhappy at school in Brighton; later yet, Fanny tells Bice that “I hear from Nelly that she has a little present to send you.”

  Fragmentary as they are, these mentions of Ellen in her sister’s letters remain the most vivid images of her to survive. From them, we may begin to understand why Dickens pined for her during his long winter in America.

  During his five months in America, another woman entered his life, and her affection for him is much better documented than Ellen’s.

  Earlier in 1867, Dickens had designated a Boston firm, Ticknor and Fields, as his authorized American publisher. Ticknor himself was dead, but the surviving partner, James T. Fields, already one of Dickens’s closest American friends, now became his de facto American business agent.

  Fields holds an honorable place in American publishing history. He had risen from clerking in a Boston bookshop to partnership in Ticknor and Fields (as it then became), the most prominent publisher of poetry and fiction in America. He was a shrewd businessman with a sharp eye for literary merit, but also a gregarious friend and patron of writers. He enjoyed close ties with most of the prominent New England literati of the time, including Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Hawthorne, and Whittier; Ticknor and Fields published them all. Fields had rescued Hawthorne from obscurity by encouraging him to write his first novel, The Scarlet Letter, which Ticknor and Fields published in 1850. Hawthorne later told Fields: “My literary success, whatever it has been, or may be, is the result of my connection with you.” Fields had also made himself the authorized American publisher of many well-known English writers, including Dickens, by the simple expedient of paying them royalties; with no international copyright agreement, English writers seldom profited from the publication of their books in America.