Dickens
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On March 29, Dickens introduced Thackeray, who was chairing the dinner of the Royal General Theatrical Fund, with lavish praise as a writer and as a man of “truth and wisdom.” On the first of May, following Dickens at the annual Royal Academy of Art banquet, Thackeray good-humoredly recalled walking up to his chambers “with two or three drawings in my hand” all those years ago. Later in the month, Dickens asked his assistance in putting a stop to the rumors about himself and Ellen Ternan, probably because he had heard about Thackeray’s less than satisfactory response to rumors about Dickens and Georgina (“no such thing—its with an actress”). Dickens “fancies that I am going about abusing him! We shall never be allowed to be friends that’s clear.”33 Among the most private of men, with two skeletons of his own in the closet, his institutionalized wife and his love for Mrs. Jane Brookfield, Thackeray’s impulsive comment had been meant as a defense.
On the same June day that Dickens’ “PERSONAL” statement appeared in Household Words, a young friend, Edmund Yates, published a brief article about Thackeray in a gossipy weekly called Town Talk. Bitterly furious to read that “his success is on the wane; his writings never were understood or appreciated even by the middle classes,” and his lectures in America done purely for the money, Thackeray was especially pained to have the world told that “his bearing is cold and uninviting … his wit biting, his pride easily touched,” and “there is a want of heart in all he writes.…” An inveterate sentimentalist, Thackeray’s heart was his best feature.
Soon to become Dickens’ protégé, Yates had warmed himself in Dickens’ estimation by strongly supporting him in the previous weeks. An ambitious, hardworking journalist, earning his living with a post-office position, he was additionally dear to Dickens for his mother’s sake. Elizabeth Yates, a successful minor actress known for her wit and social grace, had been on the stage with her actor husband, Frederick Yates, when Dickens had come to young manhood. Having performed in adaptations of his novels, the Yateses were associated with the warmth of his early struggles. Aware of the connection, Thackeray immediately speculated that Dickens had had something to do with the younger Yates’s article. It is unlikely that he did. Yates later claimed that it had been a last-minute, midnight composition, written in the office with the printer at his elbow. Except for having met him once at Tavistock House, Thackeray had never seen him anyplace other than at the Garrick Club. Yates had been a member now for ten years. His father had been a founding member. Thackeray had made the Garrick his second home for over twenty years. Convinced that Yates’s misknowledge of his personality had been derived from conversations overheard there, Thackeray made it a Garrick Club matter. By definition, all conversation within the club was private, not to be repeated outside and certainly never in print. Publishing such comments threatened the tenability of the club itself, for who would feel comfortable with the thought that anything one said there might appear the next day in the newspapers? Furious, Thackeray wrote to Yates emphatically, demanding an apology and an assurance that “you will refrain from printing remarks or opinions respecting my private conversation; that you will forego public discussion, however blundering, of my pecuniary affairs; and that you will henceforth please to consider the question of my truth and sincerity as quite out of the province of your criticism.”34
Yates immediately consulted his mentor, for whom it was a simple matter. Thackeray had not supported him in his hour of crisis. Yates had. “I needn’t tell you,” Dickens told him on the same day, “that you may in all things count upon—Yours ever.” His young friend was being falsely attacked, his honor as a gentleman questioned, just as his own had been by those who spread or did not deny the rumors about himself and Ellen. Yates quickly replied to Thackeray, his words written in consultation and collaboration with Dickens, that he would not respond to such insulting demands. Throwing Thackeray’s words back at him, he rejected the “slanderous and untrue” interpretation of his article. His pride wounded, Yates could not retreat. His honor unsatisfied, Thackeray could not give up. On June 26, 1858, at a special meeting of the Garrick Club committee, it responded to Thackeray’s request that it adjudicate and Yates’s claim that it was not a club matter by declaring that “it is competent to the Committee to enter into Mr. Thackeray’s complaints … that Mr. Thackeray’s complaints against Mr. Yates are well founded.” The committee concluded that “Mr. Yates is bound to make an ample apology to Mr. Thackeray, or to retire from the Club; and if Mr. Yates declines to apologise or retire, the Committee will consider it their duty to call a General Meeting of the Club to consider this subject.”35 Naturally, Yates refused to apologize or resign.
“The Garrick is in convulsions,” Dickens told W. H. Russell. “The attack is consequent on Thackeray having complained to the Committee (with an amazing want of discretion, as I think)” about Yates’s article, which “is in bad taste, no doubt, and would have been infinitely better left alone. But I conceive that the Committee have nothing earthly, celestial, or infernal to do with it. Committee thinks otherwise.…” In the meantime, the latest installment of Thackeray’s novel-in-progress, The Virginians, had appeared, with a hostile depiction of Yates as “young Grubstreet.” Yates “can’t apologise (Thackeray having written him a letter which renders it impossible) and won’t retire. Committee thereupon call a General Meeting, yet pending.…” With Dickens’ support and counsel, Yates hoped that at the general meeting on July 9 he would be vindicated. Neither Yates nor Thackeray attended. Dickens and Collins spoke on Yates’s behalf. By a vote of seventy to thirty-six, the membership voted to support the committee. Yates refused to allow, when the decision went against him, that the general meeting had authority in the dispute. He decided to sue. To do so he had to force his physical ejection from the premises. That was not easy to arrange. To sue, he also had to find a legally responsible defendant. That was almost impossible. After a depressing half year of effort, he gave up the unlikely possibility of a satisfaction that could be pursued only at great cost in time and money.
Though his assistance had not been useful, Dickens tried again in November in a more conciliatory way. Perhaps he could mediate the conflict, he wrote to Thackeray, after talking to him briefly, “with the hope and purpose of some quiet accommodation of this deplorable matter.” When Thackeray had first written to Yates, he “brought your letter to me. He had recently done me a manly service I can never forget, in some private distress of mine (generally within your knowledge) and he naturally thought of me as a friend in an emergency. I told him that his article was not to be defended; but I confirmed him in his opinion it was not reasonably possible for him to set right what was amiss, on the receipt of a letter couched in the very strong terms you had employed.… I was very sorry to find myself opposed to you; but that I was clear that the Committee had nothing on earth to do with it.… If this mediation that I have suggested can take place, I shall be heartily glad to do my best in it—and God knows in no hostile spirit towards any one, least of all to you.”36
“Grieve[d] to gather,” actually to have confirmed, “that you were Mr. Yates’s adviser in the dispute between me and him,” Thackeray immediately declined his offer. “Ever since I submitted my case to the Club, I have had, and can have, no part in the dispute.” Dickens felt rebuffed. Forster expanded his anger into fury. To the Dickens circle, it seemed that Thackeray was being vindictive. To Yates, it seemed as if he were being persecuted in “one of the wickedest, cruellest, & most damnable acts of tyranny, ever perpetrated.” At Forster’s for dinner early in December 1858, Thackeray thought his host “admirably grotesque and absurd. I was glad to get out of the house without touching on the Dickens affair.” The Thackeray-Yates “affair still roars on bravely. Three articles this week. Two against me and accusing me of persecuting Yates.”
When, in February, Yates abandoned his intent to take Thackeray and the club to court, the imbroglio was in effect over. It left the Thackeray-Dickens relationship badly bruised. Thackeray felt convi
nced, probably rightly, that Dickens had dictated Yates’s letters to him, that it was he “who made him submit to the Committee, then call a general meeting, & then go to law.” Dickens’ own affair died much more slowly, if at all. Thackeray, visiting Catherine in late February 1859, probably sensed that Dickens’ actions in the Yates affair were an echo of and a response to his marital problems. He now reversed his earlier position, perhaps on the basis of something she told him, perhaps more comfortable with the conclusion that Dickens was neither incestuous nor adulterous. “The row appears to be [about] not the actress, but the sister in law—nothing against Miss H—except that she is the cleverer & better woman of the two, has got the affections of the children & the father—thank God for having a home where there is nothing but sunshine.” In December 1858, though generally temperate and courtly, Thackeray had allowed himself to pass on in private correspondence someone else’s not singular opinion that “CD is a miscreant. He is ½ mad about his domestic affairs, and the other ½ mad with arrogance and vanity.”37
Dickens’ inclination to use his pen to justify himself had come home to haunt him in September 1858. The publicity resulting from the publication of the personal statement in June had seemed finally to be dying out at the end of the summer. Perhaps it had done some good in counteracting salacious rumors. Now, when he thought the worst over, his private problems suddenly blazed again into public fireworks. His readings in August had been brilliantly successful. From the west of England he had gone to Ireland for the first time, then to Gad’s Hill, before continuing on to Edinburgh and Glasgow, eighty-eight readings in a little more than ninety days. While resting for a short time in Kent in early September, he was stunned to learn that the document he had composed in late May, “written as a private and personal communication” and given to Arthur Smith to use selectively, had “found its way into some of the London papers, extracted from an American paper.” It had first appeared in The New York Tribune on August 16. Though “painfully necessary at the time when it was forced from me, as a private repudiation of monstrous scandals … it was never meant to appear in print.” He wanted Catherine’s lawyer to know that he was “no consenting party to this publication; that it cannot possibly be more offensive to any one in the world than it is to me; and that it has shocked and distressed me very much.”
Though he carried on with the readings, he was depressed. “Sometimes I cannot leave it. I had one of those fits yesterday, and was utterly desolate and lost. But it is gone, thank God, and the sky has brightened before me once more.” Still, “to know that any man who wants to sell anything in print, has but to anatomize my finest nerves, and he is sure to do it—It is no comfort to me to know … that when I spoke in my own person it was not for myself but for the innocent and good, on whom I had unwittingly brought the foulest lies.”38 Though he bitterly referred to the document as the “violated letter,” it is not at all clear who had violated it. He did not blame his friend and partner in his public reading career. More likely than not, Smith had had numbers of copies made. Concerned with his reputation in America, Dickens would not have objected to Smith’s showing the letter there. He had stipulated only that Smith use it as he saw fit. Railing at unspecified violators, he preferred to deal with anonymous enemies rather than with his own responsibility for what had occurred.
Unfortunately, its republication throughout England in the autumn of 1858 gave new life to the scandal and to his misery. Even by as late as the following March, the normally cordial Elizabeth Gaskell reported to a friend that “Mr Dickens happens to be extremely unpopular just now,—owing to the well-grounded feeling of dislike to the publicity he has given to his domestic affairs,” as if he were his own worst enemy, embarrassing even his friends.39 The audiences at his readings, though, hardly noticed. Or if they did, they did not care. Despite pain and exhaustion, he went on, through the autumn, from one reading success to another. He meant to his Victorian audiences more than the sum of his parts, and he had a hold on their hearts that transcended scandal.
FROM EARLY IN THEIR RELATIONSHIP, DICKENS ACTED AS ELLEN’S and her family’s protector, the powerful friend of four women living in London without a man in the house. After their appearance in Doncaster in September 1857, they returned to town. Maria acted at the Lyceum. Fanny, who had been touring successfully in the provinces, resumed her effort to replace her acting with an operatic career. Throughout 1857–58, Ellen performed in minor roles at the Haymarket, supported more by Dickens’ influence with Buckstone than by her native ability or her enthusiasm for the theater. During the summer of 1858, she acted in Manchester, where the company had a two-month engagement. His readings in August took him close enough to visit her there. Though the loyal Wills and Smith would have facilitated any private meetings or communications, perhaps his sense of danger overcame his usual impulsiveness. Also, his schedule was mercilessly businesslike.
In late September 1858, the Ternans moved from Park Cottage, Northampton Park, Canonbury, to 31 Berners Street, near Oxford Street, close to the theatre district. Probably Dickens had strongly urged Mrs. Ternan to move from the lodgings in Canonbury, which he thought “unwholesome.” Apparently he had visited them there. Aware that she needed additional professional training, Fanny decided to go to Florence, and Mrs. Ternan escorted her eldest daughter there, with Dickens’ financial support and his letters of introduction. “You are to understand,” he confided to Wills, “between you and me, that I have sent the eldest sister to Italy, to complete a musical education.” Two of the people with whom his name might be of use were Frances Trollope, whose career as a writer he knew well and whose book on America he had read, and her eldest son, Thomas Adolphus, both influential members of the Florentine English community. Soon Thomas was to be a regular contributor to All the Year Round, from whom “it will give me real pleasure … to hear … at all times and seasons.” Dickens introduced Fanny to Mrs. Trollope as “a professional lady of great accomplishments and the highest character, who purposes establishing herself in some very respectable family in Florence, probably for a year, that she may complete her musical education.… Let me beg you to shew her any aid or attention in your power: assuring you that if you bestowed it on one of my daughters, it could not be more welcome to me.… In this young lady and in her family, I have the warmest interest.”40
He could not depend on those to whom he wrote letters on Fanny’s behalf not being reached by rumors of his relationship with Ellen. If his financial sponsorship were to become known, his denial of a sexual relationship would lose some credibility. At best, why was he being so imprudent? More likely than not, he felt protected by technical innocence. Still, many of those who saw Ellen perform in September and October would have known that this was the young lady with whom he had strenuously denied having an affair. Dickens’ interest rose, momentarily, from concern to outrage when in late October 1858 Ellen and Maria reported to him that they were being pestered by a policeman who he thought had been bribed by a man sexually interested in either or both of them. He instructed Wills to visit the young ladies, “both of whom you know,” to “get the particulars from them.” Then he was to go to a friend in Scotland Yard to ask him to inquire into this “extraordinary, and … dangerous and unwarrantable conduct in a Policeman,” who “should be dismissed.” There should be no question of the ladies’ respectability—they live “in the family lodgings,” with their own furniture, not “in furnished lodgings.”41
When Mrs. Ternan returned, Maria was performing in the enormously successful The Maid and the Magpie, which Dickens saw in mid-December 1858. Two years later he adapted the name of one of the characters, Pippo, for the name of the main character of Great Expectations. Ellen was still at the Haymarket, her career descending into very minor roles until she made her last appearance on the stage in July 1859. She was never again during his lifetime to be employed. Mrs. Ternan had no ostensible income. On March 24,1859, Frances Eleanor Ternan and Maria Susannah Ternan, spinsters, of 31 Be
rners Street, purchased the substantial remainder of the ninety-nine-year lease of 2 Houghton Place, Ampthill Square, a sizable four-story house in residential Somers Town into which they soon moved. When Ellen reached the age of twenty-one, on March 3, 1860, her sisters sold it to her, probably transferring ownership for a token payment. She was to remain owner of the leasehold for much of her life and to receive income from it as rental property for many years after Dickens’ death. “Since my said purchase I have had quiet enjoyment of the said premises and have received the rents and profits thereof.” Since there is no hint of a legacy or of substantial savings or of sufficient income to purchase the leasehold, it seems likely that it was a gift from Dickens in which, with their mother’s knowledge, her sisters served as proxy owners until she came of age.42
In the eyes of Dickens’ bewildered children the separation that occurred in May 1858 was not only painful but partially blinding. They may have heard rumors of their father being involved with an actress, even of “Auntie” being somehow to blame. Only the three oldest were formally told in the sense of having the situation described and partly explained to them. The six others learned of it as a fact of their daily lives. Their mother no longer lived with them. Even the older children had only a partial view of the crisis, protected by Victorian decorum, by the elaborate soundproofing of servants and domestic distances. They were observant enough, though, particularly Katie, Mamie, and Charley. Much after the deaths of her parents, Katie, close to her own, contributed a foreword to a selection of her father’s letters to her mother in which she remarked that, though “the cause of the parting of my father and mother, is not unknown to me … I do not enter upon any details respecting it, for I consider it a subject with which the public has no concern.” Her words resonate with the ironies of cultural change. Dickens always maintained that his rejection of his marriage preceded his relationship with Ellen Ternan. If anything, she was the catalyst, not the cause.