Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  On the 14th the Cunarder: Aylmer, “Dickens and Ellen Ternan,” 86.

  Will you specially observe: Letters 11:483 (21 Nov. 1867).

  I expect Mamma: Frances Ternan Trollope to Beatrice Trollope, 8 Oct. 1867, Trollope Papers, Princeton.

  Mamma, I am sorry: Frances Ternan Trollope to Beatrice Trollope, 20 Oct. 1867, Trollope Papers, Princeton.

  Mamma & Ellen: Frances Ternan Trollope to Beatrice Trollope, 23 Jan. 1868, Trollope Papers, Princeton.

  in a red sleigh: Letters 11:515 (17 Dec. 1867).

  dismal cold: Letters 11:521 (24 Dec. 1867).

  I had a frightful cold: Letters 11:523 (26 and 27 Dec. 1867).

  I am so very unwell: Letters 11:525 (26 and 27 Dec. 1867).

  Catarrh worse than ever!: Letters 12:90 (1-3 April 1868).

  It is a wearying life: Letters 12:57 (24 Feb. 1868).

  I am beginning: Letters 12:67 (8 March 1868).

  all his thoughts: Dolby, Charles Dickens As I Knew Him, 286.

  Enclosed, another letter: Letters 11:522 (24 Dec. 1867). When Dickens’s American letters to Wills were first edited for publication (in 1912), all references to Ellen were heavily canceled in the manuscripts. The manuscripts are now at the Huntington Library in Pasadena; in the 1950s infrared photography allowed an enterprising researcher, Ada Nisbet, to read the canceled passages.

  You will have seen: Letters 12:55 (21 Feb. 1868).

  I tell my sisters: Frances Ternan Trollope to Beatrice Trollope, 30 Jan. 1868, Trollope Papers, Princeton.

  a very large: Frances Ternan Trollope to Beatrice Trollope, 20 Feb. 1868, Trollope Papers, Princeton.

  The days are so short: Frances Ternan Trollope to Beatrice Trollope, 16 Dec. 1867, Trollope Papers, Princeton.

  I have bought: Ibid.

  Ellen’s robin redbreast: Frances Ternan Trollope to Beatrice Trollope, 27 Dec. 1867, Trollope Papers, Princeton.

  Ellen was very much amused: Frances Ternan Trollope to Beatrice Trollope, 8 Dec. 1867, Trollope Papers, Princeton.

  A girl who was here: Ibid.

  I hear from Nelly: Frances Ternan Trollope to Beatrice Trollope, 26 June 1868, Trollope Papers, Princeton.

  My literary success: quoted in Tryon, Parnassus Corner, 323.

  She dazzled no one: Tryon, Parnassus Corner, 216-17.

  singularly graceful: James, “Mr. and Mrs. James T. Fields,” 164.

  harmonious atmosphere: Cather, “148 Charles Street,” 58.

  Such kindliness as shines: Annie Fields’s journals are held by the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. Extracts are printed in Howe, Memories of a Hostess, and Curry, “Dickens and Annie Fields.” My own reading of Annie’s sometimes difficult handwriting differs occasionally from Howe’s or Curry’s.

  Eudora Welty recalled: Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings, 7.

  there was never: Cather, “148 Charles Street,” 60.

  a cult of adoration: Tryon, Parnassus Corner, 312.

  cannot be expected: Letters 12:74n.

  one of the dearest: Letters 11:518 (22 Dec. 1867).

  she was willing to allow Dickens his mistress: Annie Fields rather disapproved of other irregular liaisons. When Charles Fechter came to Boston in 1870 he brought his mistress with him—Carlotta Leclerq, the actress who often played the leading female roles opposite him. The Fieldses entertained Fechter (not Carlotta), but Annie later observed: “Fechter is not perfect, we could see that alas! only too clearly—but how far wrong only One must judge” (Annie Fields Diaries, Massachusetts Historical Society).

  You may imagine: Letters 12:130 (10 June 1868).

  Tomorrow I will come: Letters 12:109 (14 May 1868).

  The early days: Dolby, Charles Dickens as I Knew Him, 338. A “saloon carriage” is a railway car “without compartments, furnished more or less luxuriously as a drawing-room” (OED).

  I had such a hard day: Letters 12:161 (31 July 1868).

  very restless: Letters 12:148-49n.

  What with travelling: Letters 12:106 (11 May 1868).

  Divers birds: Letters 12:119 (25 May 1868).

  You wouldn’t recognize: Letters 12:268 (4 Jan. 1869).

  the train I have to drag: Letters 12:221 (16 Nov. 1868).

  for ever and ever: Letters 12:82 (21 March 1868).

  tearing about the country: Letters 12:320 (29 March 1869).

  I am perpetually counting: Letters 12:235 (8 Dec. 1868).

  I have a wild fancy: Letters 12:257 (26 Dec. 1868).

  It seems as though: Letters 12:224 (19 Nov. 1868).

  I murdered the girl: Letters 12:272 (6 Jan. 1869).

  I have a great deal: Letters 12:285 (2 Feb. 1869).

  I … tried it: Letters 12:248 (16 Dec. 1868).

  as I do not leave: Letters 12:246 (15 Dec. 1868).

  the other night: Letters 12:254 (25 Dec. 1868).

  We propose: Letters 12:263 (31 Dec. 1868).

  I MUST BE: Letters 12:271 (6 Jan. 1869).

  I do not commit: Letters 12:277 (19 Jan. 1869).

  Don’t forget: Letters 12:288 (12 Feb. 1869).

  For some time: Letters 11:168 (?Early March 1866).

  four Murders: Letters 12:298 (26 Feb. 1869).

  There was something: Charles Dickens, Jr., “Glimpses of Charles Dickens,” 679.

  Is it possible: Letters 12:336 (19 April 1869).

  extremely giddy: Ibid.

  a weakness and deadness: Letters 12:339 (21 April 1869).

  greatly revived: Dolby, Charles Dickens as I Knew Him, 403.

  immense exertions: Letters 12:431 (22 April 1869).

  I was engaged: “A Fly-Leaf in a Life,” Journalism 4:387-88.

  Just as three days’ repose: Letters 12:348 (3 May 1869).

  I have had: Letters 12:391 (8 Aug. 1869).

  all who loved him: [Hogarth & Dickens], Letters of Charles Dickens, 708.

  A thousand thanks: Letters 12:350 (6 May 1869).

  I am good: Letters 12:350 (5 May 1869).

  She is a charming: Letters 12:299 (26 Feb. 1869).

  Suppose we give: Letters 12:357 (19 May 1869).

  In case Monday: Letters 12:358 (20 May 1869).

  What a treat: Fields, Yesterdays with Authors, 237.

  With a fine face: Longley, “The Real Ellen Ternan” 36.

  In her next letter home: Mabel Lowell’s letters from England are held at the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

  we began with oysters: Hollingshead, My Lifetime, 1:99.

  And perhaps you wouldn’t mind: Mystery of Edwin Drood, ch. 11.

  there was no sitting: Frederic Chapman, quoted in Collins, Interviews and Recollections 1:113.

  While so engaged: Letters 12:45 (9 Feb. 1868).

  I need not tell you: Letters 12:187 (?26 Sep. 1868).

  It was a hard parting: Letters 12:189 (End Sep. 1868).

  When you come: Letters 12:190 (29 Sep. 1868).

  a wasted life: Letters 12:208 (24 Oct. 1868).

  I am truly grateful: Letters 12:207 (23 Oct. 1868).

  belongs to my life: Letters 11:166 (2 March 1866).

  any communication: Letters 12:395 (15 Aug. 1869).

  he gave a little dinner: Dolby, Charles Dickens as I Knew Him, 436.

  I shall not be able: Letters 12:407 (6 Sep. 1869).

  I have a notion: Letters 12:408 (11 Sep. 1869).

  In answer to your enquiry: Letters 12:445-46 (27 Nov. 1869).

  The patient: Letters 12:470 (23 Jan. 1870).

  I have just come back: Letters 12:475 (5 Feb. 1870).

  a certain small dinner: Letters 12:482 (26 Feb. 1870).

  In addition to: Letters 12:517 (2 May 1870).

  having come here: Letters 12:541 (31 May 1870).

  the best and truest friend: Dickens’s will, printed in Letters 12:730-33 (Appendix K).

  the little touch: Letters 12:466 (14 Jan. 1870).

  For some fifteen years: Fielding, Speeches, 413.

  In this brief life: Ibid., 378.

  from these g
arish lights: Ibid., 413.

  come back from: Mystery of Edwin Drood, ch. 14.

  Dead? Or Alive?: Stone, Dickens’ Working Notes, 381.

  they look down: Mystery of Edwin Drood, ch. 12.

  it has happened: Mystery of Edwin Drood, ch. 14.

  a dark man: Mystery of Edwin Drood, ch. 2.

  shadow on the sun-dial: Mystery of Edwin Drood, ch. 19.

  Put those knives: Mystery of Edwin Drood (Clarendon edition), ch. 11.

  Katie’s husband Charles Collins: Collins designed a “charming” cover wrapper for the monthly numbers of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, “but having achieved that success, instantly collapsed for the whole term of his natural life,” Dickens reported with notable lack of sympathy. His sickly son-in-law simply lacked the will to get better, Dickens felt. “Charles Collins may be a shade better, but will never keep better or be well,” he complained to Annie and James Fields in 1868 (Letters 12:212), and early the following year he observed that “Charley Collins is no better, and no worse. He can eat well, and that is about the only sign of a natural or healthy condition that can be detected in him” (Letters 12:268). Concerned for his daughter Katie, Dickens wished that her husband would either recover or die (though he never recovered, he outlived Dickens by several years).

  After Dickens’s death, Annie Fields recorded a conversation with Charles Fechter: “Dear Dickens took a strange dislike to [Collins] during the last year or two of his life. I think it was his [Collins’s] dreadful and continued sickness which neither exhausted the frame to death, nor ever ceased in order to allow a return to health. He could not understand the prolonged endurance of such an existence and in his passionate nature which must snap when it yielded at all, it produced disgust” (Annie Fields Diaries, Massachusetts Historical Society).

  The womanly qualities of sympathy and nurture that Dickens revered in his heroines and conceded to occasional male characters like Great Expectations’ Joe Gargery were alien to his own impatient temperament. The only patient with whom he had much patience was the Patient—Ellen.

  I see: Letters 12:449 (?Early Dec. 1869).

  there are many points: Letters 12:467 (16 Jan. 1870).

  a blooming schoolgirl: Mystery of Edwin Drood, ch. 2.

  wonderfully pretty: Mystery of Edwin Drood, ch. 3.

  a charming little apparition: Ibid.

  an amiable, giddy: Mystery of Edwin Drood, ch. 9.

  something untamed: Mystery of Edwin Drood, ch. 6.

  when I lost: Mystery of Edwin Drood, ch. 7.

  An unusually handsome: Mystery of Edwin Drood, ch. 6. “Gipsy” coloring or gypsy blood in a woman was a Dickens code for strong eroticism.

  Mixture of Oriental blood: Stone, Dickens’ Working Notes, 385.

  a deep rich piece: Our Mutual Friend, ch. 1:13.

  womanly feeling: Mystery of Edwin Drood, ch. 17.

  My pretty one: Mystery of Edwin Drood, ch. 7.

  sisterly earnestness: Mystery of Edwin Drood, ch. 9.

  The lustrous gipsy-face: Mystery of Edwin Drood, ch. 7.

  The Mystery in the Drood Family: Stone, Dickens’ Working Notes, 381.

  looks on intently: Mystery of Edwin Drood, ch. 2.

  in the space of a few pages: Mystery of Edwin Drood, ch. 7.

  pride and self reliance: Letters 11:389 (4 July 1867).

  Every day and hour: Mystery of Edwin Drood, ch. 17.

  Helena’s admirer: It may (or may not) be significant that Crisparkle’s name echoes one of Dickens’s own epithets, “the Sparkler of Albion.”

  his heart and soul: Kate Perugini to G. B. Shaw, 11 Dec. 1897, British Library.

  lost letters to Ellen: Lost or, more likely, destroyed.

  Chapter 10

  My dear father: Mary Dickens to Anne Cornelius, 9 June 1870, Dickens Family Correspondence, Huntington Library.

  We were most thankful: quoted in a letter of Dickens’s son Alfred, who was in Australia when his father died (Alfred Tennyson Dickens to G. W. Rusden, Letters 12:734, Appendix L).

  four boxes: Letters 12:542 (3 June 1870).

  Extending my hand: Kitton, Supplement to Charles Dickens by Pen and Pencil, 27.

  he found his father strangely abstracted: Charles Dickens, Jr., “Glimpses of Charles Dickens,” 683.

  a better father: Storey, Dickens and Daughter, 133-34.

  My father disliked: Perugini, “Edwin Drood and Charles Dickens’s Last Days,” 654.

  much inconvenienced: Letters, Supplement 2, Dickensian 99 (2003), 163 (17 May 1870).

  directed all the rehearsals: Merivale, “Last Days of Charles Dickens.”

  after the play: Fitzgerald, Memoirs 1.13-14.

  her grief was “terrible”: Longley, “The Real Ellen Ternan,” 27.

  Charles Dickens has died: Brooks diaries, Pierpont Morgan.

  A telegram has just come: J. T. Fields to Annie Fields, Fields Addenda, Huntington Library. Fields’s note is undated, but was probably written on June 10th, the day after Dickens’s death. Dickens died at about six in the evening London time, but the news did not cross the Atlantic until the next morning.

  will be felt by millions: The Times, 10 June 1870, 9.

  a general and very earnest desire: [Hogarth and Dickens], The Letters of Charles Dickens, 750.

  In his will: Dickens’s will is printed in Letters 12:730-33 (Appendix K).

  Our hands were … completely tied: Dexter, Dickens to His Oldest Friend, 258. Forster, Ouvry and Frank Beard were not the only non-family members of the funeral party, however; Wilkie Collins was also present.

  Dickens’s estranged wife: The day after Dickens’s death Shirley Brooks “heard that Mrs. Dickens’s sorrow was overwhelming.” He was told by a family friend that she “wants to see C.D. but I think the permission would be cruel, & the scene shocking” (Brooks diaries, Pierpont Morgan). If requested, permission must have been denied; Mrs. Dickens did not view the body, which lay at Gad’s Hill until the funeral.

  When they entered: Adrian, “Charles Dickens and Dean Stanley,” 153.

  I have just come: Collins, Collected Letters 2:194.

  The Times described: The Times 15 June 1870, 12.

  The gardens along the way: Mary Dickens, in Kitton, Charles Dickens by Pen and Pencil, 49.

  those fourteen mourners: The Times 20 June 1870, 14.

  The will of Dickens: Bigelow, Retrospections, 383. Bigelow was reporting on a luncheon conversation with Collins about six weeks after Dickens’s death. Though he seems to have mangled other of Collins’s remarks, the gossip about Dickens’s will is probably accurate.

  Among the congregation: The Times 20 June 1870, 14.

  We went when in London: Frances Ternan Trollope to Beatrice Trollope, 28 June 1870, Trollope papers, Princeton. Seventeen-year-old Beatrice, known as “Bice,” knew that Dickens had been a particular friend of the Ternan family, but her stepmother Fanny’s avoidance of any special mention of Ellen suggests that her relationship with him had been so far as possible kept from Bice.

  a most devoted wife: Ethel Robinson to Felix Aylmer, Aylmer papers, Dickens House Museum.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Since 1870, scholars, editors, and enthusiasts have created a wealth of resources for those studying and writing about Dickens. There are many good editions of his novels and other fiction, from the scholarly Oxford Clarendon editions to student paperback editions; much of his journalism is reprinted and annotated in the Dent Uniform Edition; the Dickens Companions Series provides generous annotations of his novels; and there are of course many biographies and biographical studies. Three journals dedicated to Dickens studies—The Dickensian, Dickens Quarterly, and Dickens Studies Annual—contain a treasury of information and ideas. The most valuable resource to arrive in recent years has been the Clarendon Press Pilgrim Edition of Dickens’s letters, to which anyone studying his life will be much indebted.

  With respect to his affair with Ellen Ternan, a curious anomaly exists. No researcher has investigat
ed the affair more assiduously than Katharine M. Longley, nor contributed more to our knowledge of it; her monograph on the subject, A Pardoner’s Tale, remains the most complete collection and discussion of the evidence. Yet A Pardoner’s Tale has never been published and can be read only in a typescript copy in the archives of Senate House Library of the University of London. Miss Longley herself once called A Pardoner’s Tale “unpublishable”; I hope this judgment will one day be proved wrong. Anyone studying or writing about Dickens’s connection with Ellen Ternan owes her thanks.

  Browsing bookstore shelves some years ago, I fortuitously came across another book by Miss Longley, a closely researched biography of the sixteenth-century martyr St. Margaret Clitherow of York—in print and conveniently available in paperback. Dickens would have scoffed at Miss Longley’s admiration for the recusant saint, and would have deplored her tireless researches into his own quite different history. Despite her staunch Catholicism, Miss Longley was lenient on Margaret Clitherow’s persecutors—“We cannot keep Heaven’s balance-sheet, but looking back from this distance of time, we may judge that the rancour of the martyrdoms has been washed out, leaving only the joy”—and she was equally charitable to Dickens, arguing in A Pardoner’s Tale that his connection with Ellen Ternan was simply an innocent friendship. My own views differ; but in disagreeing with Katharine Longley, I do so with gratitude and admiration.

  Over the years, members of the Dickens Society have patiently listened to my notions about Dickens at the Society’s annual symposia and provided both encouragement and corrective advice; I’ve also profited from their own ideas and discoveries. In particular, my thanks to Natalie Cole, Marie-Amélie Coste, Mark and Meg Cronin, Margaret Darby, Duane DeVries, Bert Hornback, Natalie McKnight, Goldie Morgentaler, Lillian Nayder, David Paroissien, Trey Philpotts, and Edgar Rosenberg. To three Dickens scholars especially—Joel Brattin, Robert Heaman, and David Parker—I owe special thanks for reading and offering helpful comments on an earlier (and longer) version of this study.

  Many libraries have been generous in giving access to manuscripts or rare books, and in granting permission to print extracts from unpublished manuscripts: the British Library; the Dickens House Museum in London; Princeton University’s Firestone Library; Houghton Library at Harvard; the Huntington Library; Lauinger Memorial Library at Georgetown University; the Library of Congress; the Massachusetts Historical Society; the New York Public Library; the Pierpont Morgan Library; and Senate House Library, University of London. I was also helped by the collections of the University of Virginia’s Alderman Library; Swem Library at the College of William & Mary; and the University of Missouri’s Ellis Library. At Gettysburg College’s Musselman Library, I’m grateful to Kerri Odess-Harnish for keeping the Dickens holdings current, and to the Interlibrary Loan office, and especially Susan Roach, for quickly and efficiently filling many requests, some of them arcane.