Dickens

by Fred Kaplan

  Twice Dickens returned to the carriage, once to get the remaining full bottle of brandy, the other when he “clambered back” to retrieve the manuscript of a number of his novel-in-progress, Our Mutual Friend. It was “soiled, but otherwise unhurt.” Writing the end of that book four months later, he remembered the accident, remarking that he could “never be much nearer parting company with [his] readers for ever” than he was “on Friday the Ninth of June in the present year … until there shall be written against my life, the two words with which I have this day closed this book.” Ten people had died, seven of them women. Forty were seriously injured. Though he had saved his manuscript, he noted the extraordinary phenomenon that at the moment of impact people’s pockets had emptied, as if they were being relieved of material things in preparation for death. Soon the railroad accident became a “horrible … terrible” reminder of mortality. While Mrs. Ternan seemed unharmed, Ellen had aches, bruises, and whiplash and Dickens became stiff in the limbs. His hands shook. Two days later, at Gad’s Hill, he still looked “something the worse for wear.” Attempting to reassure family and friends, he wrote, or dictated when he trembled too much to write, note after note, repeating how horrible it had been and how shaken he was from “getting out the dead and dying.” He even answered a query of concern from Catherine. Sedatives helped. His pulse, though, was feeble. Noise distressed him. He felt “very nervous [and] faint.” For years afterward, when traveling even short distances, he would sometimes “suddenly fall into a paroxysm of fear, tremble all over, clutch the arms of the railway carriage, large beads of perspiration standing on his face, and suffer agonies of terror.… Sometimes the agony was so great, he had to get out at the nearest station and walk home.” He tried to talk himself into feeling better. He was, though, “curiously weak … as if [he] were recovering from a long illness.”3

  Worried about Ellen, the poor “patient,” who seemed to be taking a long time to recuperate, he did not flag in his attention to all the Ternans. He continued helping Maria’s acting career. “I have a high opinion of the young lady and take a strong interest in her self and her family.” He urged her employment “not because I have a great friendship for her and know her to be one of the best and bravest of little spirits … but because I … believe her to have more aptitude in a minute than all the other people of her standing on the stage in a month.” Fanny soon gave up her operatic aspirations for a writing career. Having met when Fanny went to Italy in 1858, she and Thomas Trollope, Anthony’s brother, were married in 1866. He was an established writer who had already been published in All the Year Round, and in the early 1860s he became a welcome visitor to Gad’s Hill. Dickens was always eager to see him and took pleasure in reminding him that since he had paid for Fanny’s trip and effected the introduction to the Trollopes, he had unwittingly played Cupid. “Bear me in your mind then as the unconscious instrument of your having given your best affection to a worthy object.” He was “heartily glad, both for her sake and for yours, that she is with you.”4 Dickens had published a poem by Trollope’s first wife and Fanny soon became a contributor as well.

  In the early 1860s, Dickens’ intimacy with Ellen became one of the open secrets of the Dickens circle and the Ternan family, though what any individual knew and when is difficult to determine. Occasionally rumors surfaced. They were denied or ignored. Private conversations in the London literary and social world sometimes contained parenthetical references to the relationship as one of the acknowledged givens of the great man’s life. Sometimes the echoes were supportive, other times disparaging. Occasionally, despite attempts to be prudent, they were noticed in one another’s company, at the theatre, in the country, while traveling. A shrewd, experienced woman, Mrs. Ternan either accepted or encouraged the relationship, perhaps both, equally concerned about her daughter’s reputation and her material well-being. Her role as a sometime chaperone did not liberate Dickens from the need to be discreet.

  The many letters that he wrote immediately after the Staplehurst accident either omit all reference to his traveling companions or refer to them anonymously. More than his own reputation mandated secrecy. What other people knew existed independent of Ellen’s awareness of their knowledge. She desired to maintain the illusion that the relationship was secret, her privacy unpierced. One of his friends, defending him, discovered that no defense was possible. Dickens confided that Ellen’s “‘magic circle’” consisted of but one member. Not even with her sister Fanny, whom Dickens distrusted and who “is infinitely sharper than the serpent’s tooth,” could the subject be discussed. Ellen “would not believe” that anyone “could see her with my eyes, or know her with my mind.… It would distress her for the rest of her life.” … If she knew that others knew of her relationship with him, “she could not have the pride and self reliance which … has borne her, alone, through so much.” When Dickens had attended the performance of Gounod’s Faust in 1862, he had been deeply moved by Marguerite’s situation, the “mournful shadows overhang[ing] her chamber window, which was innocently bright and gay at first”; “Mephistopheles surrounded by an infernal red atmosphere of his own.” The scene probably reminded him of Ellen’s position and the price she paid for their relationship.5

  France and Ellen became his two main safety valves. Beginning with the summer of 1862, he was “perpetually oscillating between Paris and London.” The former had the attraction of otherness. Its very differentness was resuscitating. In October 1862, he moved there, with Mamie and Georgina, for the fall season, intending to stay until Christmas. He partly hoped that the change would revive Georgina’s low spirits and help her recover from her frightening cardiac episode. From “a most elegant little apartment” on the Rue du Faubourg-St.-Honoré, with “the lively street in front, and a splendid courtyard of great private hotels behind, between us and the Champs Elysee,” everything seemed “pretty, airy, and light.” To the visiting Mrs. Lirriper, Paris is “town and county both in one,” where “everybody seemed to be playing at everything in the world.… And as to the sparkling lights … after dark, glittering high up and low down and on before and on behind and all round, and the crowd of theatres and the crowd of people and the crowd of all sorts, it’s pure enchantment.”

  Though Paris was “as wicked and extravagant as in the days of the Regency,” it also seemed “more amazing than ever.” The familiar city had been changing so rapidly under Louis Napoleon’s reconstruction that Dickens had to use a map to find his way to the post office, to which he had been “at least 50 times before.” Change seemed everywhere. Change, though, was expensive, both in literal and in human terms. “The Genius of the Lamp is always building palaces in the night.—But he charges for them in a manner altogether Parisian and not Arabian.” When Dickens had last lived in Paris, he had gone to the theatre with Eugene Scribe. “The last time but one Victor Hugo had the most fantastic apartments … a little fine-featured fiery-eyed gallant fellow. Now, Scribe is in Pere la Chaise, and the fantastic apartment is in the Channel Islands and Victor Hugo is an old photograph in the shops with a quenched eye and a stubbly beard, and no likeness to any one I ever saw.”6

  From Paris, he managed to exchange with Wills by mail “an astonishing quantity of proofs” and his 1862 Christmas story, “Somebody’s Luggage.” He went to the theatre regularly. He encouraged Wilkie Collins, for whom the “only one true friend to the afflicted in body … is Brandy and Water,” to visit him in Wilkie’s “city of dissipation.” He walked at all hours the entertaining streets, often by himself, sometimes with Georgina and Mamie, whose little Pomeranian, Mrs. Bouncer, “muzzled by the Parisian police,” was “a wonderful spectacle to behold … restrained like a raging lion.” Self-imposed restraints, though, provided text and subtext to his life. In November 1862, he learned of the death of Maria Beadnell’s father. “For all the old Past comes out of its grave when I think of him, and the Ghosts of a good many years stand about his memory.” Continually living “over again, the years that lie behind
us,” he was startled in early December by a telegram claiming that the aging John Elliotson was fading into senility. Returning briefly to London, he had “a weary time … with an old friend’s miseries,” though Dickens felt he had “quite enough of his own … to keep me going (or not going) when such affairs fail me.” Fortunately, the claim was exaggerated, though he soon concluded that Elliotson could no longer be relied on to function effectively as a doctor. In Paris again, he learned that Stanfield, for whom “there cannot be in this world a heart more affectionately and faithfully yours than this that beats in me,” had been painfully “ill three mortal months.”7

  Though at first he thought he would not “entertain the idea,” partly because of the prospect of reading in Australia, partly because he had in mind late-winter readings in London, Dickens soon agreed to read for charity at the British Embassy. Spending Christmas at Gad’s Hill, he had seven of his children at home. He tried to “contemplate their levity as a Sage should” and not be driven wild by “fourteen pairs of creaking boots.” During the first two weeks of January, he saw Ellen regularly in London. Soon he returned to Paris for six weeks. He had thoughts of going on to Genoa. He dreamed “of getting back to Italy; but I am always waking, and never knowing when I shall look on its beloved face again.… Visions of going back and living there, beset me at odd times and make me restless.”

  In Paris, he gave three readings from his usual repertoire in the elegant mirrored throne room of the embassy, in which Queen Victoria had held court on her visit in 1856. Wildly responsive “in a most astonishing and rapturous manner,” the audience expressed its enthusiasm after the final reading on the last day of January 1863 by applauding him out of the embassy and down onto the Rue du Faubourg-St.-Honoré. Afterward, he could not sleep for the excitement. “If I had carried out my original intention and had Readings of my own in Paris, I don’t know where they would have stopped.” People “who don’t understand English, positively understand the Readings!” But, though he “could have made a great deal of money, the dignified course was to stop.” He already had arranged London readings for March through June. Before returning to England in February, he claimed that he took “a ten day’s tour” outside Paris, visiting Robespierre’s birthplace at Arras, remembering Carlyle’s descriptions of the “amiable Sea-Green.” He was there on his fifty-first birthday. He wrote to Forster that he was “as little out of heart as you would have me be.”8

  Dickens’ relationship with Ellen provided much of the heart that he had. Still living with her mother at 2 Houghton Place, she entertained him regularly. During his visits to France between 1862 and 1865, he and Ellen usually coordinated their movements. Some of his trips were public, others were not, the latter barely acknowledged, even in letters to friends. Often they were concealed by lies of omission or commission. Occasionally, on his way to Paris, he would “vanish into space for a day or two” or become noticeably vague about his destination and his routes. His usually full correspondence became distinctly porous, often for periods of ten days to two weeks, and the tracer remains of his visits to France in his letters leave shadowy dark holes to indicate the other, more secret visits. “Few men are more restless than I am, and … few sleep in more strange beds and dine at more new cooks’ shops.” Sometimes, while in England, he stayed neither at Gad’s Hill nor at his office apartment in London. He was simply “out of town all day,” or for a few days, though apparently close by. By the summer of 1862 his main holiday destination had become a villa owned by the discreet, affable Ferdinand Beau-court, his summer landlord from 1853 to 1856, near the Norman castle of Hardelot, in the village of Condette, about five miles south of Boulogne.9

  Convenient to London and Paris, Condette also offered privacy. The only public part of the trip was the Channel crossing, which Dickens made so frequently that, despite his tendency to seasickness, he joked that when “I retire from a literary life I think of setting up as a Channel pilot.” Flamboyant, though seemingly intent on secrecy, he was recognized on one of the ferry trips by a hostile observer. “Traveling with him was a lady not his wife, nor his sister-in-law, yet he strutted about the deck with the air of a man bristling with self-importance, every line of his face and every gesture of his limbs seemed haughtily to say—‘Look at me; make the most of your chance. I am the great, the only Charles Dickens; whatever I may choose to do is justified by that fact.’” At Condette, he had the nonjudgmental hospitality of villagers, whose occasional awareness that they had a great man among them was not complicated by British moralism. He stayed frequently at “La Maison Dickens,” a substantial, handsome, single-story bungalow nestled against a grove of trees, with an attractive courtyard.

  In late June 1862, he was “in France, and in London, and in other parts of Kent, and everywhere but [Gad’s Hill] for weeks and weeks.” To a more confidential correspondent, he acknowledged that he had spent a week “wandering in the strangest towns in France, and I will go back again for another adventure again next week.” He called the visit in July “going to Paris.” Probably his destination was Condette. Sometimes, crossing the Channel with Ellen, he went on to Paris while she stayed in Condette. She may have been there during part of his stay in Paris in the fall of 1862. After spending time together in London at the beginning of the new year, they probably crossed the Channel together. After his return to Paris in mid-January 1863, he left for several days for some destination in France. When he wrote to Forster on his birthday from Arras, on his “perfectly quiet tour for ten days, touching the sea at Boulogne,” undoubtedly he was on a day excursion from Condette. The tour had no datemarks other than from Arras and nearby Amiens.10

  Some “anxious business” took him across the Channel for five days in March 1863. He claimed to be happy to say that “it is not my own.” He disappeared again on another mysterious absence in April, then in August. In mid-November, and then the next summer, he had another “Mysterious Disappearance” in the direction of France, with the false trail of “a ten days’ or twelve days’ visit to Belgium” mentioned to a less intimate correspondent. In November 1864, he again went to France, and he was away during the first two weeks in May 1865. On at least some of these trips, he had with him the latest number-in-progress of his new novel, portions of which were written in Condette. In late May, for the second time that month, he went to France for ten days with Ellen and her mother. He had felt near a breakdown, partly from the accumulated fatigue of work.11 Financial insecurity (despite the facts of his balance sheet), his editorial duties, and the gap between his public position and the secrecy of his private life contributed to a constant low level of anxiety. They returned on the morning of the ninth of June to their unhappy encounter with the forty-two feet of steel at Staplehurst viaduct.

  THE CHARACTERS WHO IN THEIR “MANUSCRIPT DRESS” HE HAD REScued from the railroad carriage were some of the principals in a novel in twenty monthly parts that he had begun writing in late 1863. He had partially conceived the germ of Our Mutual Friend in 1855, when he had entered into his newly begun notebook, “Found Drowned. The descriptive bill upon the wall, by the waterside,” and “A ‘long shore’ man—woman—child … connect the Found Drowned Bill with this?” In 1850, he had encouraged Horne to write for Household Words an article called “Dust; or Ugliness Redeemed,” which dramatizes the rescue of a seemingly “drownded man,” describes London dust heaps or refuse mounds in detail, includes a character with one wooden leg, and makes use of the device of a document buried in a dust heap that determines a legacy. In 1853, he touched on some of the same subjects in his own article “Down with the Tide.” In 1862, when he conceived the “LEADING INCIDENT FOR A STORY. A man—young and eccentric?—feigns to be dead, and is dead to all intents and purposes, and … for years retains that singular view of life and character,” he brought closer to realization elements for a novel about the heavy hand of the past, materialistic corruption, and death and resurrection that had been in his mind for over ten years.12

&nb
sp; After the completion of Great Expectations in 1861, he had devoted much of two years to profitable public readings. With Wills’s tireless help, he kept All the Year Round flourishing. His own hand guided its editorial revisions and decisions. In March 1862, he was “trying to plan out a new book, but have not got beyond trying.” By April, his frustration on being unable to hit upon anything for a story, though he had “again and again … tried,” led him to blame the “odious little house,” 16 Hyde Park Gate, that he had exchanged for Gad’s Hill Place for the spring season. His London reading series at the Hanover Square Rooms, which became more enervating as the weather became warmer, may have had as much to do with his difficulty in coalescing his notebook materials into a definite plan for a novel as the uncomfortable house. On a hot night, the readings “in so large a place” were “quite wasting.” Georgina’s heart condition worried him terribly. In April and May 1863, he read twice in each week, and then once, and put together a reading from Oliver Twist that seemed to him so frightening that he was “afraid to try it in public.”13 In June, he went to France. Between the need for change of scene, concern for Georgina, relaxation in Paris and Condette, readings at the embassy, Australian possibilities, work on All the Year Round, and his spring 1863 readings, he had sufficient “ordinary occupations and botherations.”