The trip was finally settled and in 1818 the trio with three children went to Italy. Unfortunately little Clara Shelley, only a baby, came down with typhus and died. The Shelleys were left with little William, the son and heir. About nine months later he too got ill and died, he was only 3 years old. As seemed to be Mary’s way, she conceived another child after the death of little Clara; the baby was born after the death of his older brother. This child was named after his father, Percy, and Florence because that was the place of his birth. Percy Florence lived to old age, inheriting his father’s estates, though he was himself childless.
Allegra was duly delivered to Byron and Claire never saw her little girl again. Byron did not really want the bother of a child and when the little girl began to make demands on his time he had her given to the British-Consul General and his wife to look after. They were not too keen to have a man’s illegitimate child thrust upon them, and when they left Venice, Allegra was passed on to the Danish Consul and his wife. Finally the child, age 4, was sent to a convent in Ravenna where she died quite suddenly in 1822 of a ‘convulsive catarrhal attack’ thought to be either a form of typhus or recurring malaria; she was just 5 years old.
Shelley never forgave Byron for his callous disregard for the little girl who was taken from her mother as a form of punishment and no other reason. Even though he had abandoned a wife and two children himself, Shelley may have learnt the preciousness of what he had lost. Certainly he couldn’t understand why someone would act in the way Byron had done.
Claire finally settled down after the initial shock of her daughter’s death. She wanted to return to Florence, where she had been making her own life for once, but the Shelleys were organising for her to go to Lerici with Mary, who was pregnant for a fifth time. Claire did not really have a choice; she was still dependent on the Shelleys for her maintenance. It was probably just as well that she did go with them as Mary suffered a terrible miscarriage, bleeding so profusely that she could easily have died. Shelley was full of the fact that he had ordered his wife to be placed in a tub of ice to stem the blood flow, but it was most likely Claire who gave the emotional support Mary needed. A month later Mary Shelley was to become a widow. Her husband, his friend Edward Williams and a young Englishman, 18-year-old Charles Vivian, went out sailing and were caught in a storm. The boat went missing. Mary and Edward’s wife Jane had no idea that anything had gone wrong until several days later when they had no word from their husbands. They both went down to Livorno, where the boat had been heading, to meet with Leigh Hunt and Byron, who also had no idea that anything was wrong. Nearly two weeks after Shelley and his friends went out in the boat their bodies were found washed up on the coast.
Mary reacted to her husband’s death in a quiet and dignified manner that was thought cold by some of her friends. Claire was still with her for support, they had both loved Shelley in their own way. Now Mary had no income; she didn’t know if Shelley’s father would continue to pay the allowance he had granted his son. Mary was going to have to earn her living and, as far as she was concerned, so was Claire. The sisters’ bond was broken at last.
Claire did not seem to resent the fact that Mary couldn’t keep her. She took herself off to become a governess. Her first stop was to visit her brother Charles in Vienna. However, she felt unwelcome in Austria and when she was able to Claire took up a position with Countess Zotoff to educate her children in St Petersburg. Before she had left Italy Claire had found she was suddenly bombarded with offers of marriage and declarations of undying love from a number of different men of varying ages and incomes. She refused every one of them although she was penniless at the time. Perhaps, after being tied to her sister for so many years, Claire liked the idea of total independence and freedom from love and men. After spending time with the countess, Claire went further north into Russia, at which time none of the family heard from her for more than a year.
Mary stayed in Italy with the Hunt family, until she was encouraged by Byron to go back to England. She had decided to devote the rest of her life (she was sure she would die at the age of 36, like her mother) to putting Shelley’s papers in order and trying to get his poems published. She would keep herself and Percy by writing. After all, she was the author of Frankenstein and another novel, Valperga. In August 1823 Mary Shelley and her 3-year-old son were back in England. She eventually managed to get a £200 loan from her father-in-law that would be paid back out of her old man’s estate when he died.
Then suddenly Mary Shelley found she was a celebrity author herself. Frankenstein had been turned into a stage play and was drawing huge crowds. Her novel went into a second publication and her name became a household word. Thus Mary was able to devote much of her time on returning to England to editing Shelley’s work and enhancing his reputation as a kind and gentle man.
Mary became a noted novelist in her own right and lived to see her only son, Percy Florence Shelley, inherit his grandfather’s estates and marry a respectable widow of independent means, Jane Gibson St John. While the kindly Percy was happy to ramble about his estates, his wife was keen to secure the Shelley, Godwin, Wollstonecraft legacy and helped her mother-in-law with Shelley’s papers. Mary lived well beyond her self-predicted 36 years of age but she still died relatively young at 53 of a brain tumour.
Claire lived to be 80. She did not have an easy life after Shelley’s death but she did maintain her new-found independence. She worked in Russia for several years, but always in fear of being discovered to have socially unacceptable relations. After Byron’s death in 1824 Claire was anxious that one of the many biographies coming out about him would reveal her part in his life. Eventually word did get out and she then found it hard to get employment. She struggled on for twenty years working as a governess with one family or another.
In 1846 Shelley’s father finally died and Shelley’s kind legacy to Claire was made available to her. It meant she could give up teaching. She retired to Florence and spent much of her old age making sure that the facts about her youth shared with Shelley, Byron, Mary and other famous people was not mistold. She did claim, outrageously, that Byron had only pretended their daughter had died in order to upset her – and had sent the body of a goat in the coffin to England, not that of a child.
Claire Clairmont died in 1879.
Part 5
Mistress as Muse
Throughout the world and throughout time artists have found the need for inspiration to help them achieve their greatest works. Artists today may well tell you that hard work is an excellent form of inspiration and that you need to grab it by the throat not wait for it to float down from on high. It is true though that artists, whether they are musicians, painters or writers, do respond better to certain stimuli over others. The traditional source of inspiration is the beautiful woman, particularly for visual artists. It has been such a constant source of artistic expression that Greek mythology named it in terms of goddesses: the Muses. The word muse has stuck and a human female will sometimes captivate an artist to such an extent that the creative juices cannot flow without it.
ELLEN ‘NELLY’ LAWLESS TERNAN
THE INVISIBLE MISTRESS
OF CHARLES DICKENS
Charles Dickens is a name everyone knows. His stories are admired the world over, as much today as they were in his own time. There has never been any doubt that he had a vivid imagination, boundless creative energy and was a character fit for one of his own novels (and indeed several of his books had strong autobiographical elements). He was married for many years to Catherine (née Hogarth), with whom he had ten children. Dickens built up a reputation as being a family man and that children and loyalty in marriage were very important. And for a long time they were, until Charles Dickens, at the age of 45, fell desperately in love with a young woman who was roughly the same age as one of his daughters. Infatuation made Dickens become ruthlessly cruel to his faithful wife and extremely secretive about his love for the young woman. Although Dickens was adamant he was no
t having an affair with another woman he couldn’t help himself from dropping huge incriminating hints about it. He knew that if word got out that he had taken a mistress it could devastate his reputation and his livelihood.
Dickens was in his mid-40s at the time of writing The Frozen Deep and was beginning to find his long-time marriage to Catherine uninspiring. Catherine, after so many years of childbearing, was growing stout and homely.
Who was this mysterious young woman? In 1857 Dickens engaged a number of professional actors to perform The Frozen Deep with him, a play that he had helped co-author with his friend Wilkie Collins. Among the thespians were a well-known but semi-retired actress and two of her daughters. It was one of these two young ladies who caught Dickens’s attention and ultimately stole his heart.
When Dickens had been a teenager himself he had fallen deeply in love with an intoxicatingly pretty young woman called Maria Beadnell. For a long time after Dickens’s death nothing was really publicly known about Maria and her part in the young Dickens’s life. Just after the turn of the twentieth century an American collector of curios, Mr William K. Bixby, came across a bundle of letters containing Dickens’s signature. The bundle turned out to contain two lots of letters to the one woman, but years apart. The first group were letters by a teenage Dickens to a young lady named Maria Beadnell, the second group were to the same lady but to her married, middle-aged self Maria Winter.
The letters could not be published in Britain at that time because of the copyright laws. Mr Bixby took the letters home across the Atlantic and handed them over to the Bibliophile Society to have 493 copies of them made, all to contain the society’s book-plate. These were to be distributed to members of the society. Several other copies were made and these were placed in the Congress Library in Washington.
The bulk of the early letters show Dickens as a would-be suitor pouring his heart out to Miss Maria Beadnell. For a while Maria seemed to enjoy his attention and encouraged him. After a stint abroad, however, Maria spurned Dickens and broke his heart. Maria became the inspiration for the delicate, impractical and demanding character of Dora, who becomes the needy wife of David Copperfield in the novel of the same name. Maria Beadnell may well have been the author’s first muse. The second bundle of letters were written after Dickens and a married Maria Winter made contact again some twenty years later.
In 1836 Dickens married the much more sensible Catherine Hogarth. They began life together with Catherine’s younger sister Mary coming to live with them. The following year Dickens held Mary in his arms as she was dying. He had idolised her. The depth of Dickens’s mourning led to him taking a ring from her dead finger and wearing it on one of his own for the rest of his life, keeping a bundle of her clothes and letting her spirit enter a number of his poignant characters: little Nell being among the most obvious. Mary Hogarth, with her youthful freshness and vivacity, her imagination and willingness to be entranced by her brother-in-law’s stories and wit, was the perfect muse for the writer, especially as she was never to grow old.
In 1842 Mary Hogarth was replaced by another of Catherine’s sisters, Georgina. She too came to live with the Dickens family when she was 16. This was the year that Charles and Catherine went to the United States for Dickens’s first lecture tour. Georgina was left at home to look after the couple’s four children. In 1843 Dickens wrote a letter to his mother-in-law asserting that Georgina was the spirit of Mary returned to them. Georgina became the new muse in Dickens’s life. Perhaps, as Georgina passed into mature womanhood, although she didn’t grow matronly as her older sister did, she nevertheless lost some of her angelic loveliness.
In 1855 Maria Beadnell resurfaced in Dickens’s life. She wrote him a letter, and he enthusiastically responded. They exchanged a number of letters talking about their youthful friendship, Dickens certainly implying that he had deeply loved her. Maria answered that she too had been in love with him but that she had been prevented from following her passion by her family. The brief correspondence led to a meeting, what was probably going to be a secret assignation in Dickens’s mind, between himself and his first true love. To be fair, Maria had warned him that she was no longer the slim beauty he had known over twenty years ago. Dickens was not going to be put off by what surely must be modesty. Yet he was in for a shock. Maria, nearly 45, was indeed a portly, middle-aged woman. Dickens did not try to conceal his disappointment. Maria, hoping that there might yet be an old spark to reignite the amorous flame, continued writing to him but Dickens’s replies grew cold and he evaded making a commitment to seeing her again. Instead he immortalised the older Maria in the form of Flora Finching in Little Dorrit, just as he had done her young self in David Copperfield. Another muse had bitten the dust.
Charles Dickens
By the time Dickens met Ellen Ternan he was again in need of that sweet, adolescent muse that could help stimulate memories of Mary Hogarth.
Ellen ‘Nelly’ Ternan (1839–1914) was born in Rochester, Kent into a theatrical family, the youngest of three girls. There had been a brother but he had died as a baby. Ellen’s mother, Frances Ternan, née Jarman, had played with such notable actors as Edmund Kean and Charles Kemble. Thomas Ternan, Nelly’s father, had died in 1846, with hardly a penny to his name. The bereft family came under the protection of William Charles Macready, a long time friend of Dickens.
When Dickens met Nelly, she had been acting for some fifteen years already. She and her sisters had been introduced to the stage in their early childhood and had been presented as an ‘infant phenomena’. Maria, the sister next to Nelly in age, was showing great promise in comedy theatre and singing. Fanny, the eldest of the girls, was playing Oberon in a production of a Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Princess Theatre at the time Dickens engaged the rest of the family to play in The Frozen Deep for a performance at the Manchester Free Trade Hall. Nelly had just finished playing her first adult role on stage, that of Hippomenes in a satire by Frank Talfourd at the Haymarket Theatre. Nelly had found it difficult to shake off the reputation of herself as a child prodigy and the recurring roles that this offered.
Ellen ‘Nelly’ Lawless Ternan
The Frozen Deep was inspired by reports by the Scottish surveyor John Rae, of evidence of cannibalism among the members of the Arctic expedition of Sir Charles Franklin that had left England in 1845 never to return. The play was an allegorical denial of this supposed barbaric fate. Dickens had started helping Wilkie Collins to write the play in 1856, at least he maintained that he was just altering a line or two here and there, though in reality a fair bit of it is the work of Dickens and not Collins. Dickens was outraged at the suggestion that Franklin and his men would resort to something as barbaric, as un-English as eating one another, no matter if they were starving.
Frances Ternan played Nurse Esther, Maria had the main female role of Clara Burnham and Nelly was given a minor part as Lucy Crayford. The cast was initially gathered together for three days of intensive rehearsals in Dickens’s own home, Tavistock House. From there they travelled as a company, taking the train to Manchester and boarding at the same hotel.
The little company gave three performances of the play at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, the proceeds from ticket sales going directly into a charitable fund to aid the widow and family of Dickens’s long-time friend Douglas Jerrold. The event raised £2,000 (around £117,000 today) and brought the audience to a torrent of tears. Dickens was elated by his success (not only with the play but with his own performance).
However, after the adrenalin rush from the play’s triumph, Dickens began to display a restlessness unlike any he had previously shown. It manifested itself with the need, as he suggested himself, to climb high mountains. Surely this was a strong symptom of being hopelessly in love.
It was unclear for some time as to which of the two Ternan sisters was the object of his desire, until he wrote of little lilac gloves and golden hair: Nelly was the blonde. Dickens felt he had found his muse in the young woman, only a li
ttle older than his own daughter Katie. The more he seemed to think about Nelly the more he seemed displeased with his frumpy old wife. Catherine took the blame for all her husband’s unhappiness; she was unimaginative, she had no creativity, she didn’t understand his needs.
Dickens tried to allay some of his restlessness by going on a walking tour with his friend Wilkie Collins; their adventures would be written up in Household Words in a piece called ‘The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices’. While he was away Dickens wrote only to his sister-in-law Georgina and not at all to his wife, which was rather unusual in itself. He ignored Catherine entirely in his letters to her sister, although he sent his love to all the children. When the walking tour was over (ending with Collins falling over and spraining his ankle) the pair travelled straight to the races at Doncaster where Dickens had already booked them accommodation. Coincidentally, the Ternan girls were going to be there and he couldn’t help but bump into them.
Nelly and Maria were performing in a play in the town and Dickens went along to see them. He was outraged at the treatment the women were given by the audience and defended them fiercely. This was followed by a series of social outings, visiting local attractions, going to the races and showing off in front of the ladies.
At some point in the drama Catherine is supposed to have opened a parcel from her husband containing a bracelet. It was obviously not meant for her but for young Ellen ‘Nelly’ Ternan – and poor Catherine knew it. When Dickens was confronted with his wife’s suspicions, that he was having an extramarital affair, and with a girl young enough to be his daughter, Dickens was most self-righteous and claimed that he had no designs on the purity of the girl. Perhaps there was something in this. Maybe there was no sexual relationship between Dickens and Nelly Ternan. Perhaps Dickens really did require a girl of virginal beauty to stimulate his creativity, as his own sweet Mary Hogarth had, as had the youthful Maria Beadnell and the ever faithful but now mature Georgina Hogarth. All this is speculation, however, and it may be that any proof of a more physical relationship has been lost in the dozens of letters destroyed by both Dickens and Nelly.
Other Women Page 12