Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  The public readings were forced on him by the heavy train of responsibilities he was dragging, but they were also an outlet for his restlessness. He needed the exhausting activity as much as he needed the money. “I am perpetually counting the weeks before me to be ‘read’ through, and am perpetually longing for the end of them,” he mused during his 1868-69 reading tour; “and yet I sometimes wonder whether I shall miss something when they are over.” Looking beyond the readings, he wondered if even then he would be able to rest: “I have a wild fancy that I shall sometimes try to be idle afterwards, but it is one of the many things I have never been able to do yet.” He could not long relax, even at Windsor Lodge with Ellen; he must be working and moving and pushing himself. His fantasy of selling Gad’s Hill and vagabondizing was probably a vision of wandering about Europe with Ellen—free of all the hard work, free of domestic obligations, perhaps free of the English proprieties forcing him to keep Ellen hidden. It was a fantasy that integrated his two conflicting motives, restlessness and Ellen.

  As if his ambitious road show were not strain enough, he decided to add a new reading to his repertory, a sensational re-enactment of Bill Sikes’s murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist. His decision to adapt this violent scene was baffling but also characteristic. From a prudential point of view, it was a gratuitous strain on his health and energies, when his existing repertory already filled the houses. “It seems as though we could fill Saint Pauls,” he reported of the “astonishing houses” in London before the Twist reading was even introduced. The cautious Dolby and others counseled against the new reading.

  But Dickens was insistent. The previous year, after hearing him read in Boston, Ralph Waldo Emerson had gravely pondered the phenomenon and concluded (he informed Annie Fields) that Dickens “has too much talent for his genius, it is a fearful locomotive to which he lies bound and can never be free from it nor set at rest. You … would persuade me that he is a genial creature full of sweetness and amenities and superior to his talents, but I fear he is harnessed to them.” (Dickens himself liked to predict that he would die “in harness.”) Emerson’s ominous observation uncannily anticipated Dickens’s willful enslavement to the Sikes-and-Nancy reading. Delighted with its electrifying effect, he gleefully bludgeoned his audiences with horrors, though each performance left him knocked out with exhaustion. With an ambiguous mix of facetiousness and ferocity, he often identified himself with Sikes: “I murdered the girl from Oliver Twist last night in a highly successful and bloodthirsty manner,” for example, and (declining an invitation), “I have a great deal of Murdering before me yet, and social pleasure must yield to it!”

  Was Ellen, like his more mundane social pleasures, sacrificed to all this Murdering? Where did she fit into all the traveling and performing of these months?

  He certainly saw less of her than he otherwise would have. But amidst the whirl of his touring, she remained at the center of his affections, and he probably managed to see her weekly, or at least whenever he was in or passing through London.

  In early November 1868, for example, shortly after he began his reading tour, she was one of the first to hear the new Oliver Twist reading, in a private performance probably at Windsor Lodge. “I … tried it,” he wrote in a long Christmas letter to the Fieldses, “merely sitting over the fire in a chair, upon two ladies separately, one of whom was Georgina.” The other was transparently Ellen, as the Fieldses would easily guess; it testifies to Dickens’s caution that he avoided naming her even in writing to reliable and sympathetic friends. The two ladies, Dickens reported, “both said—’O good Gracious if you are going to do that, it ought to be seen; but it’s awful.’” This was just the response he wished; the Sikes-and-Nancy reading seems to have been designed to thrill and appall women especially. That Georgina and Ellen should be the first witnesses of this lurid experiment suggests their role as his two closest intimates; that they should witness it separately suggests their reigns in distinctly different spheres of his life.

  Despite his epistolary caution, his letters betray hints of other visits to Ellen. His last out-of-town reading before Christmas 1868, for instance, was in Edinburgh, on December 19; on the following day, he returned directly to London. But before leaving Edinburgh, he declined the offer of a theater box in London, explaining that “as I do not leave Scotland until Sunday morning [the twentieth], and have to make a visit on my way home, I cannot be in town in sufficient time to accept the box you place at my disposal.” He reached London in plenty of time to see the play, however; the visit “on my way home” was certainly to Peckham. He may have taken Ellen to another theater on the same evening, for a few days later he reported that “the other night I went into the new theatre in Long Acre”—for a burlesque, “I am sorry to add.” As the burlesque seems not to have been his own choice, he was perhaps indulging a whim of Ellen’s.

  Following the Christmas holidays, he did not see Gad’s Hill for the first four months of the new year, 1869, but he managed to see Ellen often. Soon after Christmas, for example, he wrote Dolby that “We propose to change the Venue to Verrey’s on Monday; and to take a snug Private Box for a pantomime.” It seems unlikely that the snugness was intended for an intimate evening with Dolby himself, and likely that the “we” making plans for the evening were himself and Ellen. He had taken her to Verrey’s on their last night together before he left for America, and this latter dinner at Verrey’s was also a farewell, for two days later he left for Ireland. This time he was gone only ten days, but he was as eager to return to London as if he had been gone six months, excusing himself from a dinner invitation in Belfast by insisting that “I MUST BE in London on the morning of Monday the 18th”—though he seems to have had no particular engagements that day, apart from seeing Ellen.

  Her thirtieth birthday on March 3, 1869, was a notable event, and he started thinking about it well beforehand. In January he wrote of an Oliver Twist reading that “I do not commit the murder again in London, until Tuesday, the 3rd of March”—March 3 was so much on his mind that he mistook the date of the reading, which was actually Tuesday the second of March. Three weeks before the signal birthday, he reminded Wills: “Don’t forget your engagement with me to dinner on Wednesday the 3rd of March.” When Georgina celebrated her birthday in January, Dickens was out of town.

  During the latter years of the 1860s, his health and strength began perceptibly to wane. His response was characteristic: to push himself to the edge of collapse, and sometimes beyond; to retreat and recoup for a time; and then begin again. In 1866, for example, he admitted to Forster that “For some time I have been very unwell,” diagnosing the problem as “some degeneration of some function of the heart.… I have noticed for some time a decided change in my buoyancy and hopefulness—in other words, in my usual ‘tone.’ But tonics have already brought me round”—and in the next sentence he announced that after a three-year recess he was resuming public readings.

  He suffered off and on from various disorders: neuralgia, piles, a shin splint, nervous anxiety on fast trains; most frustrating for an enthusiastic walker, he was recurrently bothered by gouty symptoms, first in one foot, then the other. In America, the pain and swelling had become so severe that for a time he couldn’t walk. He attributed the problem to walking with wet feet in deep snow, but the complaint outlasted the New England winter. During his farewell tour in England, he was again lamed by a painfully inflamed left foot, and in February 1869 he was forced to cancel his readings for a week because he couldn’t walk out onto the platform. When he resumed, he chose with perverse overexertion to do “four Murders in one week”—his exhausting Oliver Twist reading. “There was something of almost willful exaggeration, of a defiance of any possible overfatigue … in the feverish sort of energy with which these readings were entered upon and carried out,” his eldest son remembered. With Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near, Dickens was incapable of husbanding his strength.

  How much of this fierce resistance to aging sprang from a
troubled awareness of the age difference between himself and Ellen? When he had met her a decade earlier, he had been a vigorous forty-five-year-old man, and her own youthfulness made him feel even younger. Now in the spring of 1869 he was fifty-seven, felt his age, and looked older. When Ellen, Wills, and he (and probably Dolby) dined together on March 3 that year to celebrate her thirtieth birthday, she was an attractive young woman in her prime.

  In David Copperfield twenty years earlier, Dickens had imagined a dottery old man, ironically named Doctor Strong, married to a much younger wife. Now he had no need to guess at the feelings of an aging man in love with a young woman.

  The next month, he was struck by his most serious medical problem yet. From Blackburn, a cotton-mill city in Lancashire to which his reading tour took him in April, he wrote to his London physician in alarm: “Is it possible that anything in my medicine can have made me extremely uncertain of my footing (especially on the left side) and extremely indisposed to raise my hands to my head?” He found himself (he later told Forster) “extremely giddy, and extremely uncertain of my sense of touch, both in the left leg and the left hand and arms.” His physician hastened to Blackburn and solicited a second opinion, and together the two doctors insisted that the readings be stopped at once and the rest of the tour canceled. Dickens did not dispute their judgment. Neither he nor they seem to have realized that he had suffered a mild stroke: “a weakness and deadness … all on the left side,” as he described the symptoms; “if I don’t look at anything I try to touch with my left hand, I don’t know where it is.” He ordinarily assumed that by hard work and strength of will he could force his way through any difficulty; now his ready concurrence with his doctors’ orders to abandon his reading tour suggests how exhausted and “greatly shaken” he felt.

  Ellen is unlikely often to have accompanied him on his out-of-town reading journeys. During the winter, while Dickens was usually out of town on readings, she and her mother took lodgings in Worthing, on the south coast, perhaps for Mrs. Ternan’s health. But Ellen plainly attended at least one of Dickens’s readings, for in June 1869, a few weeks after his tour had been truncated, the Fieldses visited England and stayed at Gad’s Hill for a week, and Annie Fields recorded a curious item in her journal: “C.D. told J. [her husband] that when he was ill in his reading only Nelly observed that he staggered and his eye failed, only she dared to tell him.”

  With respect to Ellen, this is one of the most intriguing entries in Annie Fields’s journals. It was the first time they refer to Ellen by name, but the use of Ellen’s family nickname “Nelly” implies that Annie was already well familiar with her, at least by report and reputation. And the entry again shows Dickens confiding not in Annie directly, but in her husband.

  But this tidbit from Annie’s journals also reveals that Ellen was present at least once when Dickens betrayed troubling symptoms on the platform. Was she with him on tour in April when he was afflicted with dizziness and disorientation? There is no hard evidence that she was, and both Dickens and Dolby uniformly insisted that when on tour they were all business. It may be that Ellen went, rather, to his London readings on alternate Tuesdays and observed his unsteadiness on one of those occasions. He had read in London on April 13, four days before his seizure, and perhaps she detected ominous signs of the impending stroke at this performance. If so, his failure to mention any symptoms earlier than April 17 is puzzling, since he later described in detail the onset of his apoplexy, not only to his doctor but to several confidential correspondents including Forster and Georgina, to whom he could have indicated Ellen’s observation.

  Other circumstances suggest that she might actually have been with Dickens when he suffered his stroke on April 17. He had read in Leeds the evening before, a Friday. He often read on Saturdays, but this weekend he was free: he would not read again until Monday, in Blackburn. With two open days, he might have caught a late train back to London after his Friday reading and spent the weekend at Windsor Lodge before returning to Blackburn on Monday for his reading that evening; he often dashed back to London when he had a free day or two, especially on weekends. Why would he want to spend two or three idle days with Dolby in the Midlands? But rather than returning to London that weekend, he made an excursion to Chester with Dolby, and with Dolby alone—according to Dolby’s later account. But the note Dickens sent Georgina from Leeds, giving his itinerary for the next several days, has lost two or three lines at the end, victims of Georgina’s scissoring: lines excised very likely because they referred to Ellen.

  That Ellen fails to appear in Dolby’s account of his and Dickens’s excursion to Chester is no evidence of anything, moreover, as Dolby, though knowing her well, never mentions her at all in his memoir. Describing the visit, he instead mentions the charms of Chester’s “old walls and picturesque streets,” and of nearby Mold, “a small and picturesque Welsh market-town.” All this quaintness would scarcely have appealed to Dickens by himself (or with only Dolby as a companion); but it would have made for pleasant sightseeing with Ellen. As he and Dickens took a Sunday carriage ride through the countryside to Mold, Dolby recalled, the April day was delicious, and Dickens was “greatly revived by the invigorating air, and the sight of the spring blossoms.” Might his spirits have been refreshed by Ellen beside him, even more than by the zephyrs and flowers? Following the weekend visit to Chester, he read twice more, on Monday and Tuesday, before his doctors intervened. If Ellen observed his apoplectic symptoms at one or both of these readings, her testimony might have carried as much weight with Dickens as his official medical advice.

  Abandoning the reading tour, he made a show of restored health and optimism. Refusing to acknowledge his giddiness and left-side fogginess as anything serious, he explained them as a temporary debility brought on by “immense exertions … and the constant jarring of express trains.” Several months later, he analyzed the experience:

  I was engaged in a pursuit [his public readings]… which imposed a constant strain on the attention, memory, observation, and physical powers; and which involved an almost fabulous amount of change of place and rapid railway travelling. I had followed this pursuit through an exceptionally trying winter in an always trying climate [the American Northeast] and had resumed it in England after but a brief repose. Thus it came to be prolonged until, at length—and, as it seemed, all of a sudden—it so wore me out that I could not rely, with my usual cheerful confidence, upon myself to achieve the constantly recurring task, and began to feel (for the first time in my life) giddy, jarred, shaken, faint, uncertain of voice and sight and tread and touch, and dull of spirit.

  A few weeks of rest would restore him: “Just as three days’ repose on the Atlantic steamer [returning from America] made me, in my altered appearance, the amazement of the captain,” he observed a few days later, “so this last week has set me up, thank God, in the most wonderful manner. The sense of exhaustion seems a dream already.” His usual cheerful self-assurance was surging back.

  Or so it seemed. Much of this cheer may have been feigned for family, friends, and public. His stroke had in fact brought his own mortality forcibly to his attention, and within days he sent his solicitor instructions for bringing his will up to date. A few days’ rest may have set him up again, but he nonetheless determined to avoid traveling and to refuse any new commitments during the summer and autumn. Even Dickens’s preternatural vitality was not inexhaustible—as he himself reluctantly acknowledged. Four months later, he would complain that “I have had some distressing indications that I am not yet as well as I hoped I was.” Looking back after his death, Georgina would recall that “all who loved him” observed “that from this time forth he never regained his old vigour and elasticity.”

  The interruption of his reading tour was widely publicized, and he received many notes of sympathy and concern, one of particular interest. Thomas Trollope, Ellen’s brother-in-law, wrote from Italy to invite him to Florence to recuperate.

  As Trollope and his wife Fanny w
ere more than aware of Dickens’s connection with Fanny’s sister Ellen, one wonders if their invitation to him included Ellen as well. It would have seemed strange were she to remain in England while Dickens was idling in Florence with her sister. After all, Ellen knew the Villa Trollope well, having spent a winter there a year earlier, and the door was probably open for her return at any time. The Trollopes’ invitation to Dickens suggests that, condoning his affair with Ellen, they were willing not only to shelter them together, but to defy gossip among the English expatriates in Florence. Had the disapproving Fanny relented?

  Of course, Trollope may have issued the invitation simply as a matter of form, expecting (and hoping) Dickens would decline. If he considered Trollope’s offer at all, he must have reflected not only on steamy Florentine summers, but also on the discomfort of having Fanny as his hostess. Gad’s Hill had cooler summers, while Windsor Lodge, Peckham, offered greater privacy with Ellen than the Villa Trollope. In any event, Dickens politely declined Trollope’s invitation: “A thousand thanks for your kind tempting,” he replied. “Through the summer and autumn I have promised to be as idle as I can, and to oscillate only between London and Gad’s Hill. I am always to be in the air, but am to be as shy as possible of railway travelling.”

  As he was declining Tom Trollope’s invitation, his American friends James and Annie Fields were on a ship steaming toward England. While they were still at sea, Dickens wrote to assure them of his robust health, promising that “I am good for all country pleasures with you.” At the moment, they themselves were feeling far from robust—they were bad sailors and, without the promise of seeing Dickens, they would probably not have submitted themselves to ten purgatorial days of seasickness. Eager to return their hospitality of the year before, he had urged them to come, however, and a reunion with Dickens was the chief purpose of their journey—at least for Annie: “We try to hold ourselves disengaged whenever Mr. Dickens wishes to see us,” she wrote during their first week in London, “because nothing and nobody else can be so interesting to us as he is.” During their stay in London he took rooms at St. James’s Hotel, Piccadilly, to be close at hand and to usher them about; later they would spend a busy week at Gad’s Hill, enjoying country pleasures.