by Fred Kaplan
No conclusive evidence has surfaced to determine whether or not their relationship was sexual. If it was, there is no indication of precisely when it became so. It became an intimate one, probably by late 1857 or 1858. By Victorian private and modern public standards sexual relations would have been likely. Like many of his contemporaries, Dickens did have the opportunity (assuming Ellen was willing) to have both a marriage and a mistress. Catherine rejected that alternative. Anyway, his talent was for romantic passion. He preferred a single intimate relationship. His masks were all romantic. He did not find it in the least dishonorable to be secretive. But he could not tolerate being consciously hypocritical. After 1858, with the exception of his sister-in-law and his daughters, he had a close relationship with no other women besides Ellen. That he seems almost to have ceased his characteristic flirtations suggests that his friendship with her was emotionally satisfying in ways that his life with Catherine had not been.
Though intent on idealization, neither he nor his “Princess” were courtly lovers pledged to abstinence and/or death. Before meeting her, he had had a lifetime of training in expressing himself romantically and sexually. Even when the romance went out of his marriage, the sex remained, at least until the mid-1850s. Having had sexual relations for much of his adult life, he was not likely to renounce them voluntarily when he found himself deeply in love with an attractive young woman. He had no ascetic impulse. He detested prudishness. His concerns were of this world, and his long-held values and personality affirmed the naturalness of sexual union between lovers. That these lovers were not married, that they could not marry even if they had desired to, would have been cause for regret and concealment. It would not have been, though, sufficient reason for him to deny himself the fulfillment of being Ellen Ternan’s lover.
Only she could have denied him that. Though she may have been star-struck initially, there is no reason to doubt that she loved him and committed herself to their relationship. That she was intelligent, willful, witty, playful, and certainly bold in small ways makes it even more likely that she would have behaved, with proper precautions, in an unconventional manner.43 Her mother, her older sisters, and certainly Dickens had a sophisticated awareness of how such situations were managed. That her feelings would have struck some compromise with conventional moral values seems likely. In having such a relationship, she gained as well as forfeited much. Given the intimacy and duration of the attachment, though, and given the necessary secrecy, since the world would make assumptions whatever the private reality, she had ultimately to deal mainly with her own feelings. No matter what the facts, she would have to pay the penalty of secrecy. There is no reason to believe that either was sufficiently rigid or perverse not to behave normally in their private world.
By December 1858, Dickens was dividing his public energy between his readings and his editorial work, with the possibility of a new novel also in mind. His private energy went into controlling his anger and restoring emotional balance to his life. “Vengeance and hatred have never had a place in my breast.” The only way, though, to keep them out was to insulate himself as much as possible from provocations. Just as he declined to read reviews of his work, he tried now to avoid reading gossip, including private letters to him about what other people had heard. Even without such provocations, he confessed to Mary Boyle, “I am a man full of passion and energy, and my own wild way that I must go is often—at the best—wild enough.”44 That wild way had gotten him out of his marriage. It was the only way available to him. Whatever mistakes he had made, whatever pain he had caused, he accepted as the determinatives of his nature and the source of his creativity. That same energy had created his relationship with Ellen. By 1860, particularly after the Ternans moved to Ampthill Square, it became one of the two domestic poles of his life, combining relaxed privacy with romance and passion. He was a regular visitor, for musical evenings of songs and piano playing, for games of charades, for dinners, for the start of day excursions. And though Mrs. Ternan had her place and her role, by the spring of 1860 Ellen was of age and the house hers. It was a suitable time for his passion and energy to assert themselves.
This period in Dickens’ life was one of revitalization. The readings sometimes tired him. But they were always contained within a condensed schedule, so that the weariness had its clear limits. In addition to the pleasure of being widely praised, the gains were so large that it made the occasional exhaustion worthwhile. Not even the cost of children, wife, friends, and retinue could deplete the two-hundred-pound average profit per reading, with the possibility of even more astounding sums from America and Australia. His father had never made more than twice that amount in an entire year, and there had been no significant inflation between 1820 and 1860. The turmoil of his marital separation had made things worse before they got better. But they were certainly better by early 1859. Though there were irregular reminders of heartache, he did manage to sustain periods of comparative tranquillity. In appearance, he had aged rapidly. In experience, he had always felt romantically young and imaginatively wise, and the threat of becoming imaginatively dead and morally cynical provoked a resistance so strong that it probably was a driving force in his rejection of his marriage. His rediscovery of his young, romantic self in a context in which he could perform his devotions without draining conflicts contributed significantly to his creativity in the next few years. Secrecy did not seem too high a price to pay for romantic revitalization.
In 1859, “for a private reason, rendering a long absence particularly painful,” he rejected a tempting offer to read in America. He did not wish to leave Ellen. In January, an American entrepreneur, Thomas C. Evans, visited him at Tavistock House with a proposal for a reading tour that autumn. Since he would “never go, unless a small fortune be first paid down in money this side of the Atlantic,” he proposed the figure of ten thousand pounds for eighty readings, expecting that to put an end to it. Ouvry argued against it. Wary, Dickens advised George Henry Lewes, when Evans approached George Eliot, to be careful with this “unaccredited agent, who, if he could make any bargain here, would take it to New York and sell it to any buyer who would pay enough.… Dollars (as you say) are good things. But a dollar in Wandsworth is worth fifty in New York.” He assured Evans that he did not intend his stipulation “as a bargaining challenge to you to make another offer.” In June, he told the Boston publisher James Fields that “several strong reasons would make the journey difficult to me, and—even were they overcome—I would never make it unless I had … reason to believe that the American people really wanted to hear me.” He confessed to Forster that he “should be one of the most unhappy of men if [I] were to go, and yet I cannot help being much stirred and influenced by the golden prospect held before me.” He queried Fields about possible schedules and alternatives. With a sure eye for one aspect of Dickens’ personality, Collins told his mother in mid-July that nothing is “settled yet about Dickens’s trip to America, except that he will lose a fortune if he does not go. So his departure sooner or later seems inevitable.” By early August, though, he had decided that he would “not go now. “45 At the moment, personal considerations outweighed financial ones.
After the completion of his provincial tour in November 1858, Dickens had returned to his desk. For the first time in almost two years (he had finished Little Dorrit in May 1857), he was approaching the state of controlled imaginative excitement that he needed to write a new novel. First he had to dispose of the Christmas number. Collaborating with Collins again, he wrote two of the eight chapters of The Haunted House, combining self-conscious gothic horror with his perennial skepticism about ghosts and fashionable spirit-rapping. Georgina appears as the main character’s “maiden sister… very handsome, sensible, and engaging,” Frederic Ouvry as “Mr. Undery, my friend and solicitor.” The ghost of John Dickens, “my father, who has long been dead,” appears in the mirror while the narrator is shaving. A long suppressed memory of gloom in the Dickens household, when they moved from Chath
am to London in 1822, rose to consciousness in the narrator’s evocation of his youth. “I was taken home, and there was Debt at home as well as Death, and we had a sale there.” His “own little bed” was sold. “Then I was sent to a great, cold, bare, school of boys … where the boys knew all about the sale … and asked me what I had fetched, and who had bought me, and hooted at me, ‘Going, going, gone.’” The financial anxiety that made the American prospect so tempting still haunted him.
In January 1859, he prolonged his stay at Gad’s Hill, turning the new story over in his mind. It had been in back of his mind since he had played the part of Richard Wardour in Manchester in August 1857. The “vague fancy” of noble self-sacrifice had come to him, as he “lay on the ground, with surprising force and brilliance.” He had jotted down some notes for it in his Book of Memoranda. He had used a version of it in “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners.” During the personal turmoil that followed, he had not been able to do anything more with the idea, except to incorporate into it his love for Ellen Ternan. She had been on the stage when he had conceived it. Now she was central to the conception of his new novel. In late February, he struggled with the beginning. “I cannot please myself with the opening … and cannot in the least settle at it or take to it.” By the middle of March, with the first few chapters under way, he was hard at work on A Tale of Two Cities.
Beginning with the phrase “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” he had high hopes of “a magnificent start.” His plan was to inaugurate his new journal, All the Year Round, on April 30 with the first of thirty-one weekly installments. The new novel would keep readers of Household Words from drifting away. It would emphasize continuity. It would inextricably identify the journal and its success with him as a writer. With the loan of books from the London Library and from Carlyle, whose inspiration he was to warmly acknowledge in his preface to the novel, and from the London Library through Carlyle, Dickens worked up the French Revolution background, hoping “to add something to the popular and picturesque means of understanding that terrible time, though no one can hope to add anything to the philosophy of Mr. CARLYLE’S wonderful book.”46 Carlyle, though, continued to decline invitations to visit. His own interests and introvertedness kept him away from Dickens’”cheerfulness,” which he admired more than his novels, though he strongly extolled A Tale of Two Cities, to the author’s delight. The public read and praised it avidly. By early July, All the Year Round was selling even more strongly than Household Words ever had, and back numbers with portions of the novel were in heavy demand.
Drawing upon decades of English fascination with and anxiety about the French Revolution, Dickens combined historical drama, social awareness, and nonsectarian Christian archetypes of compassion, forgiveness, and sacrifice. With stringent structural economy forced on him by his decision to write it for publication as a weekly serial, “nothing but the interest of the subject, and the pleasure of striving with the difficulty of the forms of treatment, nothing in the mere way of money … could also repay the time and trouble of the incessant condensation.” As he struggled through the summer, he had a sense of both the challenge and his achievement. “The best story I have written,” it “has greatly moved and excited me in the doing, and Heaven knows I have done my best and believed in it.” The public was dazzled by the sureness of style, the firmness of tone, the combination of literary qualities and noble feelings whose ultimate referent was the model of Christ. With the appearance of the final installment at the end of November 1859, he felt firm in his conviction that he had created a novel in which dialogue and action represented tragic patterns in life and divine forces in the universe. There was a consonance between art and providence in both the preparation and the revelation of the plot. “These are the ways of Providence, of which ways all art is but a little imitation.” From the beginning, he had designed the novel so that the development of “the contrasts and dialectic” would represent “an act of divine justice,” which seemed to him “to be in the fitness of things.”47
The providence at work, though, was a personal and autobiographical one. A novel about the eruption of long buried people and things, about putting right or at least finding ways to resolve the mistakes of the past, even at the cost of turmoil and death, A Tale of Two Cities dramatizes the confluence of Dickens’ past and his recent present. In the depiction of Lucie Manette, he portrayed aspects of Ellen Ternan and his vision of her: “a short, slight, pretty figure, a quantity of golden hair, a pair of blue eyes … with an inquiring look, and a forehead with a singular capacity (remembering how young and smooth it was) of lifting and knitting itself into an expression that was not quite one of perplexity, or wonder, or alarm, or merely of a bright fixed attention, though it included all the four expressions.”48 Lucie, though, must undergo a trial by suffering, the threat of the loss of her husband and child, before her bright eyes can shine happily. The two patriarchal figures of the novel, Dr. Manette, Lucie’s father, and Jarvis Lorry, provide a ballast of competence, authority, and paternal responsibility, some of the bittersweet sense of what his own father lacked. Put to the test, they both pass. In the figure of Miss Pross, Dickens provides the counterbalance to Madame Defarge. The two matriarchal figures of the novel are literally childless, but through love and loyalty Miss Pross becomes a mother to Lucie. In the final battle to the death between the matriarch of revolution and blood and the matriarch of love and loyalty, it is Miss Pross who is triumphant.
The novel’s most intense autobiographical energy focuses on the relationship between Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay, the former Marquess St. Evrémonde. They are aspects of Dickens’ internal dialectic. Evrémonde has renounced his family’s past, his inheritance, in order to begin anew, to be reborn as Charles Darnay, who, like David Copperfield, has the author’s initials. History and human nature, though, reject that renunciation. The Revolution still considers him Evrémonde. His conscience reminding him of his responsibility, even if only indirectly, for what others are suffering, Darnay, unlike Dickens, leaves the wife he loves to return to France to set things right. He can return only through the assistance of Sydney Carton. In the depiction of the semidamned, Faust-like Carton, who has wasted his life with the anguish of writing someone else’s scripts and with willful suicidal dissolution, Dickens created an alternate version of himself. This version of himself continued to haunt him when, a few years later in Paris, he saw a performance of Charles Gounod’s Faust that caused him such anguish he could hardly bear to sit through it.
Like Dickens, Sydney Carton feels himself redeemed by his love for his princess. Like Darnay, he falls in love with Lucie. Unlike Darnay, he cannot have her in life. But through the transcendent and Christ-like self-sacrifice of love he can have her as long as she lives and remembers him. Like St. George rescuing his princess, Carton saves Lucie’s husband and her daughter, though at the cost of his own life. The ploy is based upon a strong physical resemblance between Darnay and Carton. They become one figure, two parts of Dickens’ personality that are united in art, though it is Carton whose energy and imagination most resemble his. Between the two characters, he creates an antiphonal self-portrait that, while it emphasizes the heavy hand of the past and the potential for self-destruction, unites opposites into an idealized version of love. Self-sacrifice and imaginative initiative triumph. Though Carton dies, he lives in Lucie, Darnay, and their daughter. At the end, Darnay is an idealized version of Carton transformed and Dickens fulfilled. While playing the role of Richard Wardour, he had imagined Sydney Carton. While creating him, he imagined himself as himself and as playing Carton’s role. “I have a faint idea sometimes, that if I had acted him” onstage, “I could have done something with his life and death.”49 He already had.
CHAPTER TWELVE
A Splendid Excess
(1860–1864)
WEDDING BELLS REVERBERATED THROUGH THE SUMMER-GREEN Kentish countryside. At St. Mary’s Church in Higham, at a height from which the nearby
weather vane of Gad’s Hill was visible, a radiant Katie Dickens married Charles Collins, Wilkie’s brother. The church was resplendent with flowers. Crowds of working-class neighbors created floral arches and fired celebratory guns the night before and throughout the morning of July 17, 1860. A special train brought guests down from London. Dickens’ oldest intimate friend, Thomas Beard, was in the poignant but anomalous position of being the only person at the wedding who had also been at the wedding of the bride’s father. Dickens ironically compared it to “a similar ceremony performed in a metropolitan edifice some four and twenty years ago.” Catherine, though, was not there. She had not been invited. To family and friends, hers must have been an awkward, expressive absence. Elizabeth Dickens also was not there, though only her son and her sister may have noticed. The crowd of guests came back to Gad’s Hill for a sumptuous wedding breakfast, “a gorgeous affair.… Everything on the table in the way of decoration was white, none but white flowers.”1
At twenty years of age, Katie was high-spirited, restless, and troubled. She looked more like her father than any of her brothers. The thirty-two-year-old groom was an introspective, self-doubting painter of minor achievement who had turned to writing brief articles and travel essays. Like Wilkie, he had a small patrimony that needed to be supplemented and a vigorous, protective mother, Harriet Collins, who had more personal energy than either of her sons, “a woman of great wit and humour—but a devil,” her daughter-in-law later remarked. Possessing a fragile constitution, Charles Collins had had a necessary nurse in his mother, with whom he lived until his marriage. When the brothers visited Gad’s Hill together in July 1859, Wilkie told his mother that Charlie “is still trying hard to talk himself into believing that he ought to be married.” On this festive summer morning, the celebrants shed the usual tears, drank the expected toasts, and did their best to forget the inevitable anxieties. Intensely loyal to his brother, Wilkie may have seen the marriage as a tightening of his bond with Dickens. Charley’s “darling” and his “dearest,” his mother, disguised her feelings with good cheer and flirtation.