Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  Dickens’s estranged wife Catherine was also excluded, though not for lack of room in the mourning coaches.

  After the “anxious and careful consideration” of family and executors, Ellen too was apparently excluded.

  Or was she?

  The next day, The Times carried a lengthy account of the funeral. Its source should have been Forster, who—as Dickens’s longtime confidant, as a close family friend, as one of two executors, and as the one who had made the arrangements for the funeral—was uniquely qualified to provide a full and accurate report. Forster had in fact arranged to give an account to a leader writer for The Times, William Stebbing. But Forster was in poor health, and by the day of the funeral he was exhausted by grief, by all the business connected with Dickens’s death, and by the strain of the funeral itself. The day before, accompanied by Dickens’s eldest son, he had called on Arthur Stanley, Dean of Westminster, to discuss interment in the Abbey. Stanley later recalled: “When they entered Mr. Forster was at first, and also during several passages of the interview, so much overcome by the violence of his grief that he could hardly speak. Indeed, I have never seen any man so overcome by sorrow as he appeared to be on that occasion.” Forster was in no better shape the following day, and after the burial service he asked Wilkie Collins to talk to Stebbing of The Times.

  Collins agreed. “I have just come from Dickens’s funeral,” he wrote Stebbing. “Forster is perfectly incapable of calling on you—and has asked me to call in his place.” Collins feared that he might be expected to write the Times article himself: “Shall I supply you with the names of the persons present—and all else that is to be told? And will you have the necessary article written from the facts? I am far from well—or I would offer to do it myself.” He offered instead to give Stebbing a list of the mourners and other details of the funeral by two o’clock that same afternoon.

  Collins too was well qualified to report on the funeral. Though not involved in the arrangements, he had been a close friend and confidant of Dickens and knew the family well; also, his brother Charles was married to Dickens’s daughter Katie. Collins had attended the funeral. And even in his distress, Forster probably briefed him on what the family thought desirable—and not desirable—to make public. Forster would also have furnished him with any needful facts outside Collins’s knowledge, as well as a written list of the mourners.

  With the information provided by Collins and Forster, The Times described both the events leading up to the funeral and the service itself. The theme throughout had been secrecy. The funeral was held “with as much privacy as could have been secured for it in any little village church in Kent, or even in Wales or Cornwall.” Even as the grave was being dug below the Abbey floor, “besides the Dean and Canons, hardly a member of the Cathedral body on Monday evening [the night before the funeral] was aware of the intended arrangement.” On the morning of the funeral, “almost before any one was stirring,” a hearse had carried Dickens’s body from Gad’s Hill to the nearby train station, from which a special train had conveyed the body and a select group of mourners to Charing Cross station in London. From there the body had been carried through Westminster to the Abbey in a hearse “which was plainness itself.” (The gardens along the way were bright with Dickens’s favorite flower, scarlet geraniums.) As the small procession made its way down Whitehall shortly after nine o’clock that morning, “not a single person of the many scores who must have met the gloomy cavalcade as it slowly paced along was aware that the hearse was conveying to its last resting-place all that was mortal of Charles Dickens.”

  Apart from Dickens’s desire for a private funeral, was there a further motive for conducting the funeral with the surprise and stealth of a commando operation?

  The Times went on to describe the graveside service. When the small procession of coaches arrived at the Abbey, “the body was carried through the cloisters to the door of the nave, where it was met by the Dean, the two Canons in residence,… and three of the Minor Canons.” Dean Stanley read the burial service over the grave. Then:

  The earth was cast into the grave by the Clerk of the Works; the service ended, the mourners—14 in number, with perhaps as many more strangers who accidentally chanced to be present—gathered round the grave to take a last look at the coffin which held the great novelist’s remains, and to place wreaths of immortelles and other flowers upon the coffin-lid, and the service was at an end.

  So we find fourteen mourners in the funeral party, a figure confirmed by Dean Stanley in the eulogy he delivered in the Abbey the following Sunday, when he mentioned “those fourteen mourners and the handful of other persons who were gathered a few days before in the silence and stillness of that vast empty church around the grave of the great novelist.”

  Just as Dickens had specified, there were three mourning coaches for the funeral party, and The Times listed the occupants of each, so we know who kept whom company during the procession from Charing Cross station to the Abbey.

  In the first coach were Dickens’s four children then in England: Charles Junior; Henry, or Harry, studying at Cambridge; Dickens’s eldest daughter, Mary; and his second daughter, Katie, now Mrs. Charles Collins.

  In the second coach were Georgina Hogarth; Dickens’s younger sister Letitia, now widowed; Charles Junior’s wife Bessie; and Forster.

  In the third coach were five men: Frank Beard, his physician; Charles Collins, his son-in-law; Frederic Ouvry, his solicitor; Wilkie Collins; and Edmund Dickens, a nephew.

  Thus the funeral party. But after stating that there were fourteen mourners, The Times had named only thirteen.

  Who was the mysterious fourteenth, silently omitted?

  Surely none other than Ellen Ternan. We can even guess that she rode in the second coach, in which Forster escorted three other women. In describing the funeral to The Times, however, Wilkie Collins, probably following a directive from Forster, suppressed Ellen’s name, failing to notice the discrepancy; or perhaps recognizing that the numbers failed to tally but letting the disagreement stand, as unimportant, or even as a teasing enigma for attentive readers of The Times the next morning.

  As Dickens had always hated elaborate funerary display, his testamentary insistence on a modest, strictly private funeral was no surprise. By excluding the public, however, he also made it possible for his beloved Nelly to attend with his family, as he no doubt thought she deserved and as he would have wished. Certainly he had her much in mind as he drafted his will, for “Miss Ellen Lawless Ternan, late of Houghton Place, Ampthill Square,” was boldly listed as the first legatee. (“The will of Dickens … gives his friends a great deal of dissatisfaction,” Wilkie Collins was said to have complained. “The first person named in it is his mistress.”) Given their long and intimate relationship, it is unlikely that Ellen would in any case have stayed away from Dickens’s funeral, but the privacy dictated by his will allowed her to attend inconspicuously. In his death, as in his life, she was an essential but shadowy presence.

  Yet how attentively did she listen at the graveside as “the service was most impressively read by the Dean”? Thirty-one years old, she had been virtually widowed. Though provided for financially, she looked ahead to an uncertain future. Looking back on her dozen years with Dickens, reflecting on her suddenly altered situation, musing on the next chapter of her life—she had much to occupy her thoughts.

  The following Sunday, to a large audience in the Abbey, Dean Stanley delivered a full-blown eulogy, his allusions to Dickens’s novels suggesting that he had read none of them since Nicholas Nickleby thirty years earlier. “Among the congregation were several members of both Houses of Parliament, some dignitaries of the Church, and a host of literary celebrities, among whom Mr. Tennyson attracted considerable attention as he sat in the centre of the Sacrarium,” The Times reported. Ellen was probably absent from this crowd of the curious and important, however; certainly she had nothing to learn about Dickens from Dean Stanley’s pulpit eloquence.

 
Later, however, when the Abbey was less crowded, she visited the grave with her mother and sisters. “We went when in London to see Charles Dickens’s grave,” Fanny Trollope wrote to her stepdaughter Bice in Florence two weeks after the funeral. “He is buried in Westminster Abbey. The tombstone was strewn with flowers scattered there by different visitors. I was greatly affected, and so were we all.” The sorrowful Fanny had once been Dickens’s antagonist; but time (and his death) had evidently softened her feelings. She could not in any case be indifferent to Ellen’s loss. After paying their respects at the Abbey, the Ternans carried Ellen off to stay at the green and pleasant Oxford estate of her sister Maria, married to a wealthy brewer. Windsor Lodge, Peckham, was given up.

  Eventually Ellen married, and as Mrs. George Wharton Robinson she bore and raised a son and daughter. Many years later, her daughter-in-law testified that she was “a most devoted wife and mother and a charming personality.” She survived Dickens by more than four decades, dying on the eve of the First World War. While his bones lie beneath the Abbey pavement, sifting into dust as sightseers shuffle by overhead, Ellen’s ashes lie far off the tourist rounds, in Highland Road Cemetery in Southsea, near Portsmouth. Close in life, the Ternan sisters are close in death: Ellen’s beloved sisters Maria and Frances—“Mia” and “Fanny”—share a grave just a few yards from hers. At the end of their lives, Ellen and Fanny had lived together in Southsea. Ellen’s grave is scarcely two miles from the terrace house in Portsmouth where Dickens had been born a century before her death; in the house, now a museum, is the couch on which he died at Gad’s Hill.

  By a curious coincidence or mysterious providence, Maria Beadnell had also moved to Southsea with her clergyman husband, and died there in 1886. She too is buried in Highland Road Cemetery; so that the first and last women Dickens loved, who never met and probably never heard of each other, now lie only a few yards apart. In a quiet provincial cemetery, the beginning and end of his amorous pilgrimage have come together.

  Meanwhile, beneath a high brick wall shutting out the traffic and seediness of the Harrow Road outside London, Mary Hogarth lies in a shady corner among the thousands of other graves in Kensal Green, a crowded sea of gravestones and elaborate monuments heeling and pitching at various angles like a dense fleet of small boats tossing about in choppy waters. Mary’s own weathered gravestone cants slightly, with the ungrammatical epitaph composed by Dickens now barely legible: YOUNG BEAUTIFUL AND GOOD, GOD IN HIS MERCY NUMBERED HER WITH HIS ANGELS AT THE EARLY AGE OF SEVENTEEN. He had hoped to be buried beside her, but as things fell out Mary shares her grave (and gravestone) not with Dickens, but with his detested mother-in-law.

  “Yet do the worst, old Time. Despite thy wrong,/My love shall in my verse ever live young,” Shakespeare had boasted (Sonnet 19). Dickens himself, rejecting “any monument, memorial, or testimonial whatever,” stated in his will that “I rest my claims to the remembrance of my country upon my published works.” But his novels are memorials, too, to the three women he loved well, if not always wisely—his muses and teachers in the school of love. No one taught him more; no one stirred his feelings more powerfully, or enriched his imagination more generously.

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  All of Dickens’s novels are available in reliable inexpensive editions; I usually quote from the Oxford World Classics editions, based on the scholarly Oxford Clarendon editions. In one or two cases involving an alteration Dickens made in manuscript or proof, I cite the Clarendon edition itself. For Great Expectations, however, I have used the magisterial Norton Critical Edition, edited by the inimitable Edgar Rosenberg. Sources for quotations from Dickens’s other published writings—such as Christmas stories, journalism, working notes for his novels—are given in the bibliography below.

  Any recent scholar studying Dickens must be grateful for the twelve meticulously edited and annotated volumes of The Letters of Charles Dickens, usually called the Pilgrim Edition (Oxford University Press, eds. Madeline House, Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson, et al., 1965-2002). The Dickensian publishes frequent supplements to the Pilgrim letters. In citing the letters, I follow the dating of the Pilgrim Edition, which is sometimes conjectural.

  For access to unpublished material, I am grateful to:

  The British Library, London

  The Dickens House Museum, London

  Firestone Library, Princeton University

  Houghton Library, Harvard University

  Huntington Library, San Marino, California

  The Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston

  The New York Public Library

  Pierpont Morgan Library, New York

  Senate House Library, University of London

  SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY

  The following studies or editions are cited in the text or have otherwise been especially helpful.

  Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. New York: HarperCollins, 1990.

  Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. 1918; reprinted Oxford: Oxford University Press (Oxford World’s Classics), 1999.

  Adrian, Arthur. “Charles Dickens and Dean Stanley.” Dickensian 52 (1956), 152-56.

  ——. Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle. New York: Oxford University Press, 1957.

  Allen, Michael. Charles Dickens’ Childhood. New York: St. Martin’s, 1988.

  Augustine, Saint. The Confessions of St. Augustine. Tr. F. J. Sheed. New York, Sheed & Ward, 1942.

  Aylmer, Felix. “Dickens and Ellen Ternan” [letter to the editor]. Dickensian 51 (1955), 85-86.

  ——. Dickens Incognito. London: Hart-Davis, 1959.

  Baker, George Pierce, ed. Charles Dickens and Maria Beadnell (“Dora”): Private Correspondence. Saint Louis: Privately Printed for William K. Bixby, 1908.

  Berger, Francesco. Reminiscences, Impressions & Anecdotes. London: Samson Low, Marston, 1913.

  Bigelow, John. Retrospections of an Active Life: 1867-1871. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page, 1913.

  Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson. 1791; London: Oxford University Press, 1953.

  Brannan, Robert Louis. Under the Management of Mr. Charles Dickens: His Production of “The Frozen Deep.” Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966.

  Brattin, Joel J. “‘Let me Pause Once More’: Dickens’ Manuscript Revisions in the Retrospective Chapters of David Copperfield.” Dickens Studies Annual 26 (1998), 73-90.

  Butt, John, and Kathleen Tillotson. Dickens at Work. 1957; London: Methuen, 1982. [Byrne, Mrs. William Pitt]. Gossip of the Century. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan and Co., 1892.

  Carey, John. The Violent Effigy. London: Faber and Faber, 1973.

  Carlton, William J. “Dickens’s Forgotten Retreat in France.” Dickensian 62 (Spring 1966), 69-86.

  Carrow, G. D. “An Informal Call on Charles Dickens.” Dickensian 63 (1967), 112-19.

  Cather, Willa. “148 Charles Street.” Not Under Forty. 1922; reprinted Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.

  Chittick, Kathryn. Dickens and the 1830s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

  Collins, Philip, ed. Charles Dickens: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971.

  ——, ed. Dickens: Interviews and Recollections. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1981.

  ——. “W. C. Macready and Dickens: Some Family Recollections.” Dickens Annual 2 (1966): 51-56.

  Collins, Wilkie. The Public Face of Wilkie Collins: The Collected Letters. Ed. William Baker, Andrew Gasson, Graham Law, Paul Lewis. 4 vols. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005.

  ——. The Frozen Deep and Other Stories. 2 vols. London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1874.

  Cross, Constance. “Charles Dickens: A Memory.” New Liberal Review 2 (1901), 392-98.

  Curry, George. “Charles Dickens and Annie Fields.” Huntington Library Quarterly 51 (Winter 1988), 1-71.

  Darby, Margaret. “Dickens and Women’s Stories: 1845-1848.” Dickens Quarterly 17 (2000), 67-76, 127-138.

  DeTernant, Andrew. “Miss Ellen Lawless Ternan.�
�� Notes and Queries 165 (1933), 87-88.

  DeVries, Duane. Dickens’s Apprentice Years: The Making of a Novelist. London: Harvester Press, 1976.

  Dexter, Walter, ed. Dickens to his oldest friend: the letters of a lifetime from Charles Dickens to Thomas Beard. New York: Putnam, 1932.

  ——. The Love Romance of Charles Dickens: Told in His Letters to Maria Beadnell (Mrs. Winter). London: The Argonaut Press, 1936.

  Dickens, Charles. American Notes. In American Notes and Pictures from Italy. London: Oxford University Press, 1974 (Oxford Illustrated Dickens).

  ——. Christmas Stories. London: Oxford University Press, 1971 (Oxford Illustrated Dickens).

  ——. Dickens’ Journalism. Ed. Michael Slater. 4 vols. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994-2000.

  ——. Dickens’ Working Notes for His Novels. Ed. Harry Stone. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

  ——. Pictures from Italy. In American Notes and Pictures from Italy. London: Oxford University Press, 1974 (Oxford Illustrated Dickens).

  ——. Selected Short Fiction. Ed. Deborah A. Thomas. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1976.

  ——. The Speeches of Charles Dickens. Ed. K. J. Fielding. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960.

  Dickens, Charles, Jr. “Glimpses of Charles Dickens.” North American Review 160 (1895), 525-37, 677-84.

  Dickens, Henry F. Memories of My Father. London: Gollancz, 1928.

  Dickens, Mamie. My Father As I Recall Him. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1897.

  Dixon, Ella Hepworth. As I Knew Them: Sketches of People I Have Met on the Way. London: Hutchinson, [1930].

  Dolby, George. Charles Dickens as I Knew Him: The Story of the Reading Tours in Great Britain and America (1866-1870). London: Unwin, 1885.