The Mystery of Charles Dickens E-Book

A.N. Wilson

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

A Book of the Year in The Times & Sunday Times, Daily Mail, Spectator, Irish Times and TLS. 'Superb' Daily Mail, 'Book of the Week' 'Brilliant' The Times, 'Book of the Week' '[A] vivid, detailed account' Guardian, 'Book of the Week' 'Hugely enjoyable' Daily Telegraph 'Fascinating' Spectator Charles Dickens was a superb public performer, a great orator and one of the most famous of the Eminent Victorians. Slight of build, with a frenzied, hyper-energetic personality, Dickens looked much older than his fifty-eight years when he died. Although he specified an unpretentious funeral, it was inevitable that crowds flocked to his open grave in Westminster Abbey. Experiencing the worst and best of life during the Victorian Age, Dickens was not merely the conduit through whom some of the most beloved characters in literature came into the world. He was one of them. Filled with twists, pathos and unusual characters, The Mystery of Charles Dickens looks back from the legendary writer's death to recall the key events in his life. In doing so, A. N. Wilson seeks to understand Dickens's creative genius and enduring popularity. Following him from cradle to grave, it becomes clear that Dickens's fiction drew from his own experiences - a fact he acknowledged. Like Oliver Twist, Dickens suffered a wretched childhood, then grew up to become not only a respectable gentleman but an artist of prodigious popularity. Dickens knew firsthand the poverty and pain his characters endured, including the scandal of a failed marriage. Going beyond standard narrative biography, Wilson brilliantly revisits the wellspring of Dickens's vast and wild imagination, revealing why his novels have such instantaneous appeal and why they continue to resonate today. He also uncovers the double standards of both the man and his times.

Leseprobe

The MysteryofCharles Dickens

Also by A. N. Wilson fiction

FICTION

The Sweets of Pimlico

Unguarded Hours

Kindly Light

The Healing Art

Who Was Oswald Fish?

Wise Virgin

Scandal: Or Priscilla’s Kindness

Gentlemen in England

Love Unknown

Stray

The Vicar of Sorrows

Dream Children

Incline Our Hearts

A Bottle in the Smoke

Daughters of Albion

Hearing Voices

A Watch in the Night

My Name Is Legion

A Jealous Ghost

Winnie and Wolf

The Potter’s Hand

Resolution

Aftershocks

NON-FICTION

The Laird of Abbotsford

A Life of John Milton

Hilaire Belloc

Tolstoy

Penfriends from Porlock

Eminent Victorians

C. S. Lewis

Paul

God’s Funeral

The Victorians

Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her

London: A Short History

After the Victorians

Betjeman: A Life

Our Times

Dante in Love

The Elizabethans

Hitler

Victoria

Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker

Prince Albert

etc.

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2020 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © A. N. Wilson, 2020

The moral right of A. N. Wilson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Illustration credits: p.1, Ellen Ternan (Public Domain); p. 51, Dickens at the Blacking Warehouse, illustration from The Leisure Hour, 1904 (Wikimedia); p.97, Catherine Dickens, 1852 (GL Archive/Alamy Stock Photo); p. 143, ‘Charles Dickens relieving the sufferers at the fatal railway accident, near Staplehurst’, Penny Illustrated Paper, London, 1865 (© British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/Bridgeman Images); p.193, Dickens’s last reading at St James’s Hall, 15 March 1870, from The Illustrated London News Record of the Glorious Reign of Queen Victoria 1837–1901, London, 1901 (The Print Collector via Getty Images); p. 241The Mystery of Edwin Drood title page (Historic Images/Alamy Stock Photo); p. 289 Illustration by Hablot K. Browne, ‘Phiz’, from The Old Curiosity Shop, 1841 (Culture Club/Getty Images)

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78649 791 8

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 792 5

Printed in Great Britain

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For Amicia and Richard

CONTENTS

1   The Mystery of fifteen pounds, thirteen shillings and ninepence

2   The Mystery of his childhood

3   The Mystery of the cruel marriage

4   The Mystery of the charity of Charles Dickens

5   The Mystery of the public readings

6   The Mystery of Edwin Drood

7   The Mystery of Charles Dickens

Bibliography

List of Abbreviations

Acknowledgements

Notes

Index

ONE

THE MYSTERY OF FIFTEEN POUNDS, THIRTEEN SHILLINGS AND NINEPENCE

‘IHAVE NO relief, but in action. I am become incapable of rest… Much better to die, doing,’1 the hyper-energetic, over-sexed, tormented, exultant, hilarious, despondent Charles Dickens had written to a friend, thirteen years before he actually died.

Dickens was good at dying. If you want a good death, go to the novels of Dickens. Watch the dwarfish swindler Mr Quilp on the run from the police, slithering into the muddy Thames. Watch Mr Merdle, the financier who cuts his own throat with a penknife in a Turkish bath. Look upwards to the rooftops and see the murderer Bill Sikes trying to make his escape from arrest by clambering over the tiles, missing his footing and hanging himself by accident. See, too, his dog, Bull’s Eye, leap to his master’s shoulder and fall, dashing his brains out on the stones below. There had been the poignant deaths – little Jo the Crossing Sweeper trying to repeat the, to him unknown, Lord’s Prayer; and heroic deaths – none more so than Sydney Carton, voluntarily approaching the guillotine and doing a far, far better thing than he had ever done before.

Sometimes Dickens may be said to have overdone the sob-stuff. Oscar Wilde quipped that it would take a heart of stone to read of the death of Little Nell without laughing. But the thing is, this isn’t true: for a start, in The Old Curiosity Shop the child is already dead when we find her lying in the schoolmaster’s house; her death happens offstage; and – as the thousands who gathered in New York harbour awaiting the latest instalment of the novel attested, with the anxious cry ‘Is Little Nell still alive?’2 – the scene where we find her dead body has astounding power, though sophisticated readers might be disturbed by the vulgarity of that power. Even if you question the story of the Americans shouting, agog on the quayside, for news of Little Nell, the fact remains that the novel was selling 100,000 copies per instalment as it appeared.3 The public reaction to Little Nell’s fate had revealed to Dickens that he possessed what no author in history had ever possessed to such a degree: a mesmeric power. Literature had never before, in the West, attracted the sort of crowds that had hitherto only been drawn to the revivalist meetings of John Wesley.

The poignant deaths were not the only ones at which he was adept, of course. There were grotesque deaths, such as the tall lady eating sandwiches who was decapitated by an unnoticed archway in Rochester; improbable deaths, such as Krook’s – by spontaneous combustion; deaths by judicial execution and by mob violence; deaths by accident; deaths, like that of Edwin Drood, in his final novel, unexplained, mysterious. And there is what must be one of the most wonderful deaths in literature – rivalled only by that of Falstaff as described by Mistress Quickly – the death of Barkis: ‘and it being low water, he went out with the tide’. [DC30]

But now it was June 1870, and although he was only fifty-eight years old, Dickens was exhausted. His face was ravaged; it could have been the face of an octogenarian. He had been heavily dosing himself with laudanum (a mixture of opium and alcohol) for many months and was opium-dependent. The novel that he was in the middle of writing, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, begins with an opium-induced trance. It is the story of a man who drifts into different states of consciousness through the influence of the drug. It is the story of a divided self, a man who is a different person when leading his secret lives – lives hidden from the respectable cathedral town of Cloisterham, a fictionalized version of the same cathedral town, Rochester, that was a brisk hour’s walk from Dickens’s home at Gad’s Hill in Kent. For, ill as he was, Dickens, who all his life was a restless and prodigiously energetic walker, still forced his body into vigorous exercise, on those days when he was capable of it. Now, his heart was weak, his breath was uncertain. He had crammed many lifetimes into one – the lifetime of the most celebrated novelist in the world; the lifetime of a full-time journalist; the lifetime of an actor, and of a public reader; the lifetime of a philanthropist; the lifetime of a family man and of a secret lover. Now, having described and enacted so many deaths, he was going to do it for real.

Enacted, yes, for as well as his unrivalled presence in print, his fame as a writer, he never lost his desire to perform on the public stage. I want to write, in this chapter, about Dickens’s debt to the theatre, to burlesque, to pantomime, to the harlequinade, because it is central to his way of functioning as one of the greatest artistic geniuses of the nineteenth century. But although we know so little about the actress Nelly Ternan, she was part of this, obviously she was. So I also want to start with Nelly, and the theatre, before we go back and explore the other mysteries of Charles Dickens – the mystery of his childhood and his past; the mystery of his appalling cruelty to a harmless wife who bore him ten children; the mystery of his passionate, sincere and burning charity, his fury at injustice; the mystery of his relationship with the public, in the first era when there was a truly enormous public with whom to have such a relationship; and the mystery of his last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, in which he changed direction as an artist and explored the human consciousness in a way that anticipated the developments of psychology and literary modernism. And I want to maintain that Charles Dickens was a writer like no other, a sui generis figure, unique in the nineteenth century. It was the glory age of the English novel.4 In his infancy, Jane Austen was still at work, and Sir Walter Scott. His contemporaries included the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray. Dickens was fundamentally different from any one of them, for reasons that we shall explore. Although we call all their works ‘novels’, he was actually writing books that were quite different in kind from theirs, and it was perhaps only when one of his greatest admirers abroad, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, began to write, partially in homage to Dickens, that the world started to see the kind of novelist he had been. His stories were prodigiously popular, and continue to be so. Unlike so much prose fiction, however, they work on many levels, and it would be as true to describe them as great visionary poems, as fairy tales, as pantomimes, as it would be to talk of them as novels in the prosaic tradition in which, say, Trollope excelled.

This book is entitled The Mystery of Charles Dickens because, of all the great novelists, Dickens is the most mysterious. His way of going to work appears to be, on one level, so obvious, so basic: the comedy so crude, often – though, equally often, so hilarious; the pathos so heavily laid on with a trowel. But although he was a journalist, and one of the really great journalists, his novels were not journalistic, like those of Emile Zola. Zola was a camera. He depicted what was there. Dickens, like the illustrators chosen to adorn his early novels, created an alternative universe. He amused, or shamed, his readers into recognizing that this universe was uncommonly like their own, but his techniques were decidedly not those of a realist. He invented, rather, an alternative universe into which we are all drawn, persuaded that it is a real world, of a sort. Those who protest that the Dickensian world is unrealistic are so often forced to confront the pantomimic grotesquerie, the high comedy, the violence and the pathos of ‘real life’ and recognize that it is ‘just like Dickens’. This, however, is not to deny that, almost more than any great artist, he is the puppet-master who pulls the strings and writes the script.

We are now going to his house in Kent, Gad’s Hill Place, near Rochester, in June 1870 to watch Charles Dickens die. Before we reach Gad’s Hill, however, following a road that was trodden by so many before us, fictitious and semi-fictitious, aware of Chaucer’s pilgrims going down to Canterbury, of Falstaff, Bardolph and Poins making their night-foray as highwaymen, and of Mr Pickwick making his more innocent sortie towards Rochester, we are going to return in our mind to a death enacted by Dickens on the stage of the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, thirteen years before. As well as writing up a good death, he loved to act one, and the more the audience sobbed, the better. Thirteen years earlier, then, during the summer of 1857, he was acting in The Frozen Deep, a play written by his friend Wilkie Collins, loosely based on the doomed expedition, led by Sir John Franklin, to find the North-West Passage. Dickens, performing on the stage of the Free Trade Hall, had the satisfaction of having ‘a couple of thousand people all rigid and frozen together, in the palm of one’s hand’. He took particular satisfaction in seeing ‘the hardened carpenters at the sides [of the stage] crying and trembling at it night after night’.5

He took the part of Richard Wardour, and the actress in whose arms he died was Nelly’s sister, ‘Miss Maria Ternan – born on the stage, and inured to it from the days when she was the little child’.6 Dickens wrote Nicholas Nickleby before Maria Ternan was even born, but her mother, who had herself been on the stage since childhood, could have echoed the ham actor-manager Mr Vincent Crummles who engages Nicholas Nickleby in his troupe: ‘I am in the theatrical profession myself, my wife is in the theatrical profession, my children are in the theatrical profession. I had a dog that lived and died in it from a puppy, and my chaise-pony goes on in Timour the Tartar.’ [NN22] Mrs Ternan, a widow, came from a family who had followed the theatrical profession since the eighteenth century.

Continuing to describe Maria’s thespian gifts, on display in Manchester, Dickens explained, ‘She had to take my head up as I was dying, and to put it in her lap, and give me her face to hold between my two hands. All of which I showed her elaborately… that morning. When we came to that point at night, her tears fell down my face, down my beard (excuse my mentioning that hateful appendage), down my ragged dress – poured all over me like rain, so that it was as much as I could do to speak for them.’7

Maria Ternan had been a true Infant Phenomenon. In fact she was twenty by now, but she looked much younger. Dickens always liked child-women, little fairies who were betwixt and between, like Little Dorrit or the Marchioness, neither children nor adults. When Mark Lemon, editor of Punch, took Maria backstage after the performance, her weeping set him off. Soon they were all crying, and she had to be comforted by her mother and sister, while Dickens gave her sherry. So much for little Maria. Her elder sister Fanny, who would one day marry the brother of the novelist Anthony Trollope and become a popular novelist herself (author of Aunt Margaret’s Trouble, That Unfortunate Marriage and others), really had been an infant prodigy, playing Mamilius in The Winter’s Tale when she was only three and a half in 1840.8 All three of the Ternan sisters, like their mother, pursued careers on the stage throughout their childhoods. The summer before they took on the roles in The Frozen Deep, Fanny had appeared as Oberon in Edmund Kean’s lavish production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (in which a ten-year-old Ellen Terry played Puck). Nelly, meanwhile, had been on the stage of the Haymarket Theatre, playing a ‘breeches’ role – in a show called Atalanta. Her part was that of Hippomenes, throwing golden apples in front of the speedy Atalanta to stop her running so fast. It had run every night from April to July 1857, and Nelly had not missed a single performance.

Of the three Ternan girls, it was Nelly – eighteen, the youngest, slightly plump, blonde curls, large blue eyes and, again, the way he liked them, small – who arrested Dickens’s attention in that Manchester show some months later.

Even by Dickens’s hyper-energetic standards, 1857 had been a phenomenal year. He was deeply involved in running a refuge for women and trying to rehabilitate them, after rocky starts, and prepare them for married life. He was finishing one of his very greatest novels, Little Dorrit. He was embarking on a series of public readings from his work. He had a seemingly ceaseless series of charitable dinners at which he was required to make the speech. He was the editor of the weekly Household Words. At home, his unhappy marriage seemed to be causing him and his wife Catherine untold strain and misery, and there are few human experiences more exhausting than living with a partner to whom one is unhappily yoked. ‘There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose,’ [DC45] a manifesto-mantra repeated four times by David Copperfield (twice midway through Chapter 45, once at the end of that chapter and again in Chapter 48).

After The Frozen Deep in Manchester, however, he was a changed man. He wrote to Collins seven months later, in March 1858, ‘I have never known a moment’s peace or content since the last night of The Frozen Deep. I do suppose that there never was a Man so seized and rended by one Spirit.’9

It was perhaps inevitable that the crisis of his life – the before-and-after experience – should have happened onstage, and that the woman in his life, for its last decade, should have been an actress. Equally inevitable, for Dickens was a divided self whose art depended upon the divisions in his personality, was the fact that Nelly Ternan should become, not his wife, but his secret. When they met he was forty-five and she was eighteen. She was with him to the end, and very nearly at the end, when, thirteen years later, he died in reality. Her relationship with him lasted thirteen creative, energetic, secret years; years in which she was better qualified than most to contemplate the Mystery of Charles Dickens. She did so offstage, away from the lights. As far as the world was concerned, Nelly did not exist. She was unknown to Dickens’s devoted public. She was largely unknown to posterity. And when, during the early decades of the twentieth century, rumours of her existence began to emerge, many of his dedicated readers refused to believe in her existence. Even one of the finest late-twentieth-century Dickensian biographers, Peter Ackroyd, claimed it was unthinkable that Dickens and Nelly could have been lovers, as they obviously were.

So in this exploration into the Mystery of Charles Dickens, we begin with the secret Muse, with Nelly, and we return to the bright June day in 1870 when she saw him fully alive for the last time.

He would die on 9 June. On Tuesday 7 June 1870, Charles Dickens was hard at work, in his house at Gad’s Hill, writing the next episode of his serial novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood. He wrote to Luke Fildes, the young artist who was illustrating the story, telling him that he would be at Gad’s Hill from Saturday 11 June onwards. That was to indicate, at the least, that he would be away from home for three days. The next day, on Wednesday 8 June, he breakfasted early, at 7.30 a.m. One of the maids in the house was to be married that day, but Dickens was not intending to be present at the ceremony. He wrote a few other letters, indicating that on the following day, Thursday, he would be in London. He looked in at the Falstaff Inn opposite his house, to cash a cheque for £22 from the landlord, Mr Trood, whose name surely half suggested that of the hero, or anti-hero, of his current fiction.

Dickens never reached London that Thursday. It was the day on which he was destined to die. His scrupulous sister-in-law Georgina, who had kept house for him ever since he separated from her sister Kate, wrote to the solicitor, Frederic Ouvry, on 9 June to relate that she had been through her brother-in-law’s pockets after his collapse from a stroke, and found six pounds, six shillings and threepence. In other words, on the previous day he had spent fifteen pounds, thirteen shillings and ninepence. Where had it gone?

The person who emerged from the Falstaff Inn, with £22 in his pocket, on the morning of the 8th was a small, trim, punctiliously neat, whiskery figure who would have been instantly recognized in almost any of the great cities of the world. He was a celebrity. The most famous novelist, but also one of the most famous human beings, alive. The fact that Dickens did not wish the world to know he had a mistress necessitated a life of constant subterfuge and deception, which had been the pattern of his existence for the previous thirteen years. Nelly Ternan could not live with him openly at Gad’s Hill. If she had kept rooms in the middle of London, likewise the secret would have been out immediately. He had bought her a house, in 1860, at Ampthill Square, near Mornington Crescent, on the edges of Camden Town. It became the family house of the Ternans, and it was not a place where Dickens could visit Nelly as a lover. It was technically bought by her mother and sisters, but Nelly afterwards admitted that Dickens had bought it himself. She herself had lived a twilit existence, in rented accommodation in France and England. When in England, she had lived in obscure places, villages turning into suburbs, such as Slough – easily reachable from London, but essentially dingy and out of the way; and now the village of Peckham in South London, still a village surrounded by trees and fields, but one that was fast being swallowed up by new jerry-built houses, quickly reachable by railway from the capital. The land of small farms and labourers was giving place to the mean dwellings of obscure clerks and shopkeepers, though the row of villas in which Nelly resided, built on spec because Peckham now had a railway station connecting it with ease to London and the Channel ports, was constructed for respectable professional people.

Dickens, for his own convenience, had moved Nelly (and her mother) from Slough to Peckham, whose new-built station, which connected with his own station of Higham in Kent, enabled him to reach her within less than an hour. They gambled on the fact that there was no one likely to encounter them in Peckham, but it was a risk.

On the morning in question – and if that sounds like the beginning of police evidence in court, how pleased Dickens would be, for if there was anything he liked more than the theatre, it was criminal courts, and if there was a profession that delighted him more than the theatrical profession, it was the police! – he had cashed the cheque, and with the £22 in his pocket he had left for Higham Station. ‘It’s a singler story, sir,’ as Inspector Wield says to him in his marvellous ‘Three “Detective” Anecdotes’.10

He was making his by now habitual journey, by cab and train and cab, to Windsor Lodge, Nelly’s house in Peckham. He did it most weeks. He paid her housekeeping money – which would account for the substantial sum of more than £15 missing from his pockets. Some time after this, he collapsed. One does not need to speculate on what brought on his seizure; clearly Dickens, the father of ten (nine living), was a highly sexed man who brought to the life of love the same exuberant hyper-energy that he also brought to love of life: to acting, writing, walking, charitable work and entertaining.

With the help of two maids, the resourceful Nelly Ternan – and her later life shows her to have been highly resourceful – had to act quickly. One maid was dispatched to the post office, to send a telegram to her friend, Georgina Hogarth, Dickens’s sister-in-law at Gad’s Hill Place, telling her to expect him back and to have a doctor on hand. She then engaged the help of the caretaker of the church opposite Windsor Lodge, and a hackney-cab driver, to heave the semi-conscious body into a large two-horse brougham. Though Dickens was a small man, inert bodies can appear to double in weight.

What happened after that is not quite clear. Nelly and Dickens, in the two-horse carriage, accomplished the journey of some twenty-four miles in the hot afternoon. They entered a house where the smell of cooking permeated. Dinner was being prepared. The next thing we know is that the famous novelist was lying on the dining-room floor, semi-conscious. A doctor had been sent for, and Georgina, his devoted sister-in-law and housekeeper, was kneeling by his side. Exit Nelly, stage left. She respectably departed, though she would come back the next day, when his family had assembled to watch him die. Two accounts state that she was in the room, with the children and Georgina, when Dickens died at ten past six on the evening of Thursday 9 June 1870. She had waited with them as the breath faded, as the awe-inspiring uncertainty of whether he was dead or alive continued.

Stay! Did that eyelid tremble?…

No.

Did that nostril twitch?

No…

See! A token of life! An indubitable token of life! The spark may smoulder and go out, or it may glow and expand, but see!… Neither Riderhood in this world, nor Riderhood in the other, could draw tears… but a striving human soul between the two can do it easily. [OMF III 3]

There would be many tears for Dickens, as there had been in his fictitious and dramatic renditions of death, but I quote that passage from Our Mutual Friend not because he was like Rogue Riderhood in the smallest degree; rather, that he had been to that No Man’s Land with the dying, and described what, for so many, is the most poignant part of witnessing the deathbed experience. And the day of his death altogether possessed that betwixt-and-between quality. Indeed, it may well be that the account just given of the circumstances of that death – the journey to Peckham with £15 in his pocket, and the seizure – did not in fact take place. We’ll approach this aspect of the mystery later. What we do know is that, when he died on 9 June in the dining room at Gad’s (as it was so often known in the Dickens family), Nelly was there. And we know that fifteen pounds, thirteen shillings and ninepence could not, by the punctilious Georgina, be accounted for.

There had been every reason why those who cared for Dickens’s reputation with the public – and that emphatically included his mistress Nelly Ternan, his sister-in-law Georgina and Dickens himself – should wish to create a death which, if not entirely fictitious, was at least a good deal more respectable than the one we just sketched out. That Dickens, the greatest English novelist, and celebrant of family innocence, should have collapsed in the bosom of his mistress in Peckham was not to be countenanced. Nelly was perpetually troubled by the possibility of disgrace. She was a ‘respectable’ person, and she hated the idea of their relationship being known or acknowledged.11 The great man must die instead at Gad’s Hill in the bosom of his family.

Nelly certainly shared Dickens’s wish that their relationship should remain a secret. Unlike Dickens’s raffish friend Wilkie Collins, who lived openly with his mistress, and unlike George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), who lived with her lover George Lewes as if she were his wife, Dickens was a ‘respectable’ man, and Nelly, although – no, because of – belonging to the theatrical profession, regarded herself as a respectable young woman. They had both had to struggle for their respectability. For many Victorians the acting profession was little better than the low world of the demi-monde. For the Dickens family, respectability was something that had had to be invented for themselves, and however much they clung to it, it had kept blowing away from them, like a flimsy umbrella lost in a gale. Dickens’s persistent claim to be a gentleman, a claim on which he had implausibly insisted since childhood, was the first of his great fictions. The English never escape their class. It is one of Dickens’s great themes. Social insecurity underpins his comedy and his tragedy, and much of his social life. The great rift with Thackeray, for example, was in part caused by the knowledge that Thackeray was a gentleman and Dickens was only a pretend gentleman, admitted to clubs, for example, because he was a genius, not because his father could ever have been on terms with his fellow clubmen’s fathers. With the ambivalences of theatre folk, whose people were professionally involved in pretence, he could feel safe.

Five years before, in June 1865, Nelly Ternan had been travelling with Dickens and her mother in a first-class railway carriage, coming back from France. Dickens had made no fewer than four visits to France to see her that spring, almost certainly because Nelly had gone abroad to give birth to a child. Claire Tomalin, who collected so much of the evidence for Nelly’s life with the novelist, shows it was possible that she had two children by Dickens. Gladys Storey, whose book Dickens and Daughter is about the author’s friendship with Dickens’s daughter Katey, states categorically that Nelly had a child, ‘a son, who died in infancy’. Storey left a note to say that Dickens’s daughter told her in February 1923 that a child had been born. And Madeline House, who spent long periods of conversation with Gladys Storey, left it on record that ‘I am convinced that Mrs T[ernan] was with Ellen at the time of the baby’s birth.’12

Storey, House and Tomalin all assume that Katey was correct in stating that the baby (or babies) died; and yet, as Tomalin wrote, one of the factors that has made people doubt the story is the non-existence of any death certificates, especially for the second supposed baby, born in Slough. There could be an obvious explanation for this. That is, that the baby (or babies) did not in fact die, but was given up for adoption. Nelly went on to have two healthy children, in her later, respectable existence as a clergyman’s wife. Why should it be assumed that Dickens’s babies died? Of his own ten known children, although his wife had some miscarriages, only one of the babies who lived to full term died in infancy, a very low statistic by nineteenth-century standards. Neither Nelly nor Dickens had a medical history of parenting weak children.

The month following the supposed birth of a child in France, accompanied by her mother, Nelly was coming back to England with Dickens in June 1865. The public face of their relationship, in so far as it had a public face at all, was that Dickens was a sort of uncle or godfather figure in her life. The train journey was to make clear to Nelly how completely determined Dickens was to protect his reputation and keep their relationship a secret.

As the train hurtled towards Staplehurst in Kent, it hit a bridge, slithered off the track and fell into the river below. The first-class carriage was at the front, so that although the three of them feared the worst, their lives were spared. They were hurled across the carriage. Nelly, fearing they were about to die, said to her mother and Dickens, ‘Let us join hands and die friends’, a remark that suggests that there had been an estrangement of some kind.

The evident ruction that the words imply gives the lie to Claire Tomalin’s notion that Nelly’s baby died in France. If the young woman had just lost a baby through death, her mother and Dickens would surely have been solicitous with a woman in grief. ‘Let us join hands and die friends’ suggests that Nelly had been angry with Dickens – justifiably angry – and is not the likeliest explanation for such anger that she had been forced, for the sake of appearances, to give away her baby for adoption?

They had to be helped out of the carriage through a window. Nelly’s arm and neck were injured and she was frail for weeks afterwards, and Dickens would send his manservant, John, to ‘take Miss Ellen’ tempting foods: a cold chicken, clotted cream and fruit. Aware of his public, and knowing that it would be impossible to conceal the fact that he had been aboard the train that crashed, he left Mrs Ternan and Nelly to be cared for by the paramedics while he went to offer succour to the second-class passengers. ‘I was in the carriage that did not go over, but went off the line, and hung over the bridge in an inexplicable manner. No words can describe the scene,’ he would write.13 Even more revealing (of his character, but unrevealing of the facts of the case) was his preface to Our Mutual Friend, the novel he was writing at the time of the accident, the manuscript of which he had in his luggage.

On Friday the ninth of June in the present year Mr and Mrs Boffin (in their manuscript dress of receiving Mr and Mrs Lammle at breakfast) were on the South-Eastern Railway with me, in a terribly destructive accident. When I had done what I could to help others, I climbed back into my carriage – nearly turned over a viaduct, and caught aslant upon the turn – to extricate the worthy couple. They were much soiled, but otherwise unhurt. The same happy result attended Miss Bella Wilfer on her wedding-day and Mr Riderhood inspecting Bradley Headstone’s red neckerchief as he lay asleep. I remember with devout thankfulness that I can never be much nearer parting company with my readers for ever, than I was then, until there shall be written against my life the two words with which I have this day closed this book – THE END.14

Clearly, Dickens was not going to share with his devoted public the knowledge that, at the time of the Staplehurst railway crash, he had been travelling with a much younger mistress who had borne his child. Nevertheless, given that this was what he had been doing – he was certainly with Nelly, whatever truth there is in the story of her having had his babies – there is something more than arch about his speaking about the characters in Our Mutual Friend as having been ‘on the South-Eastern Railway with me’. It is by no means clear, in the life of a novelist, who are the more ‘real’: the imagined characters in the books or those who share the supposedly real life of the writer. As we shall discover, the fictions of Dickens, which came from so deep a part of himself, were also capable of swallowing him up, so that in a sense he was absorbed into them. The majority of us have a life that ends in death; Dickens was living a story, whose conclusion was – to quote again from that preface to Our Mutual Friend – ‘the two words with which I have this day closed this book – THE END’.

After Dickens died, Nelly went to live in Oxford with her mother and sisters, in a house on the Banbury Road just south of the present-day St Hugh’s College, where for seven years I used to teach. (Maria the Infant Phenomenon had married an Oxford brewer.)

I often used to think of the Ternans as I cycled past the villa in the late 1970s. The fantasy question would flit in and out of my brain: what would it have been like to teach Nelly? She was the same age, wasn’t she, when she lived in that house as the undergraduates with whom I was about to read medieval poetry. Would I have fallen secretly in love with her, as Dickens did, or would she have been one of the pleasant, hard-working majority whose names and personalities one forgot the next year when a new batch of students arrived, clutching Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer?… Nelly at eighteen. But no! She was not, of course, the age of most of my students. Brilliant, loveable Nelly! She had cunningly changed and concealed her age. In The Life of Charles Dickens by John Forster, the Will of Charles Dickens is printed as an appendix. After revoking all former wills and codicils and declaring this to be his last Will and Testament, Dickens, with a candour and bravura that had been lacking in life, began: ‘I give the sum of £1,000 free of legacy duty to Miss Ellen Lawless Ternan, late of Houghton Place, Ampthill Square, in the county of Middlesex.’

With an inventiveness to match his own, Nelly, who was by now more than thirty, decided to chop a decade or so off her age. Six years later she would marry one of the undergraduates who had visited her mother’s house in Oxford, George Wharton Robinson, who had by then become a clergyman. He was twelve years younger than she was, so he had only been eighteen or so when he met the thirty-year-old Nelly. By the time of the 1881 census, she had reduced her age still further, declaring herself to be twenty-eight, when in fact she was forty-two. By now the respectable wife of a clerical schoolmaster, she had left behind the invisible Nelly of Windsor Lodge, Peckham – a figure of the 1860s. Those years had been discarded like a novel, unopened for years. As the years rolled by, she grew ever younger and more respectable.

They had been married, she and Mr Robinson, at St Mary Abbots Church in Kensington. White-clad, virginal Nelly, with flowers in her hair, was by now thirty-seven to her husband’s twenty-three. They honeymooned in Italy, and returned to England to run a school in Margate. They had two children, Geoffrey, born in 1879, and Gladys, born in 1884. Nelly helped her husband to run the school, organizing concerts and plays and reading aloud from her favourite novels: David Copperfield, The Old Curiosity Shop, A Tale of Two Cities, Nicholas Nickleby, Bleak House. She retained her friendships with Georgina Hogarth and Dickens’s eldest daughter Mary (Mamie), neither of whom betrayed the secret of her true age. In 1877 Georgina came to have a holiday in Margate and presented the prizes at the school run by Mr Robinson, and in 1882 she had a holiday with Nelly and Mamie.

Nelly Robinson was widowed in 1910 and lived until April 1914, nursed by her son Geoffrey, who subsequently fought a gallant war and remained in the army until 1920, fighting in Persia with Dunsterforce. It was only after her death, going through his mother’s papers, that he began to piece together the truth. He was horrified by what he discovered and destroyed as many of his mother’s letters and papers as he could find. He lived until 1959.

A generation ago, John Lucas wrote a book called The Melancholy Man: A Study of Dickens’s Novels. He took his title from Immanuel Kant, who defined a Melancholy Man as one who:

is little concerned with the judgements of others, with their opinion of what is good or true; he relies purely on his own insight… He regards changes of fashion with indifference and their glitter with contempt… He has a lofty sense of the dignity of human nature. He esteems himself and regards man as a creature deserving of respect. He suffers no abject subservience and breathes the noble air of freedom. To him all chains are abhorrent, from the gilded fetters worn at court to the heavy irons of the galley slave.

Lucas’s study of the novels was deserving of its status as one of the most perceptive of its time. The notion of Dickens, however, as a man who was not concerned with the judgements of others is not borne out by what we know. In particular in relation to his marriage and his sexual and romantic life, he was intensely occupied not merely with concealment, which is perfectly understandable, but with subterfuge and falsification.

It is easy to mock the desire to be respectable, just as it is easy to label as hypocrites those who wish to keep up appearances. It would be less easy to have been born near the bottom of the heap in the cruel nineteenth century. Charles and Nelly had both gazed into the abyss. The fates of their two fathers could never be forgotten.

Thomas Ternan, one of nineteen children, was the son of a Dublin grocer. Thomas became an actor in England. Even had he aspired, in his dreams, to enter one of the professions, that would have been impossible. He was a Catholic, and in those days the Inns of Court and the universities were reserved for members of the Established Church. A lot of actors, in those Penal Times, were Catholics, from the great Mrs Siddons and her Kemble brothers downwards. Thomas Ternan came to England, joined a troupe of actors in Kent on the Rochester circuit and married a fellow actor, Fanny Jarman, who also came from an Irish theatrical tradition. She was a cut above him, socially and in skill, having played Desdemona to Edmund Kean’s Othello, Ophelia to Charles Kemble’s Hamlet and having been in her way a minor star. But both Nelly’s parents had known the kind of rough-and-tumble life on the road, which we find in the life of Codlin and Short in The Old Curiosity Shop, in the Crummles troupe in Nickleby and in Jingle, the strolling player in Pickwick.

Dickens responded to all this so strongly because, although his parents had not been actors, it was the profession he had always dreamed of following. Pretending to be someone else for a living, being constantly on the road, belonging nowhere – these were all activities he had pursued faute de mieux. Thomas Ternan had become an actor-manager in the North of England, with many periods of separation from his wife: that was what the profession demanded – demands – of those who follow it. The family united in Newcastle upon Tyne for the Christmas of 1844. That was the season Maria played Mamilius in The Winter’s Tale and Fanny performed a duet with her in a melodrama. Shortly thereafter, however, their father became severely ill. The next that was heard of him, he was in London and had been taken to the asylum at Bethnal Green, suffering from ‘General Paralysis of the Insane’. He would almost certainly have been kept in chains until, incontinent and skinny, he was too weak to require constraint. He would have been locked up and simply left to die.15 Which he did when Nelly was only six.

John Dickens, the novelist’s father, likewise spent a crucial period locked up – during a (or, rather, the) crucial period of Charles Dickens’s childhood. We shall investigate all this in the next chapter. Suffice to say here that Charles, like Nelly, had a father who had fallen foul of the nineteenth century in all its monstrous pitilessness. He had been locked up in consequence. Of course, for the Victorians it was a crime to be a thief or a murderer; but also for the Victorians, who bought thousands of copies of Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help and who believed that they were an Island Empire that had pulled itself up by its own boot-straps, the worst crime was to be a failure. It was the century that reversed the Sermon on the Mount. Cursed were the meek. Cursed were the poor in spirit. Cursed were the merciful.

The respectable professions from which circumstance excluded the parents of Charles and of Nelly were instruments of monstrous cruelty. Dickens’s novels dwell repeatedly on the grotesque blundering unkindness of the law. All Victorians knew about it. The other great profession, that of medicine, was something even more to be dreaded. In 1851, when, as usual, Charles Dickens was doing twenty different things at once – tending a sick wife in Malvern (she was suffering from giddiness, occasional loss of eyesight and serious depression, none of which was cured by the quack-water cure recommended by the doctors), preparing a play, Not So Bad As We Seem, which Queen Victoria had expressed the desire to see, and editing his weekly Household Words – he heard the news that his father was grievously ill. John Dickens was then in his mid-sixties. Ever since he was a young man he had suffered from a urinary complaint, which he had never sufficiently addressed, still less (spendthrift that he was) been in a position to cure. Charles Dickens had rushed back to London from Malvern to make the speech at the annual dinner of the General Theatrical Fund in Covent Garden, a charity devoted to indigent actors. At the same time, in his own house in Devonshire Terrace, Regent’s Park, he had a dying baby – little Dora. In one week he would lose his youngest child and the father who begat him.

When Dickens arrived at Keppel Street in Bloomsbury (just behind the British Museum) it was to see his father, who was in delirious agony.

The doctor was summoned, ‘who instantly performed (without chloroform) the most terrible operation known in surgery, as the only chance of saving him’. This involved cutting a vagina-like incision between the anus and the scrotum and unsexing the patient. ‘He bore it’, wrote Dickens, ‘with astonishing fortitude, and I saw him directly afterwards – in his room, a slaughterhouse of blood.’16 A few days later, when Dickens visited at eleven o’clock at night and sat beside the unconscious figure, ‘he died – O so quietly’.17

His mother’s presence at this scene is scarcely mentioned. Nor is the fact that, present at the death, were Dickens’s two brothers Alfred and Augustus, his sister Letitia and her husband Henry Austin. When John Dickens died, Charles did take his mother in his arms and weep, but by the time he described the scene to his biographer, it was a duet, of him and his father alone.18 For Dickens, it was not the tragedy of a woman losing her husband, or of a family of siblings losing their father. It was the tragedy of severance from a ‘zealous, useful and cheerful spirit’, as his Micawber-father had become. Dickens had been deeply affected – and, in the middle of so much business, he had visited his father in his affliction. When his mother finally died in 1863, he had not visited her for months.

Dickens’s complex relationships with his mother and father were the seedbed of all his art. As far as his relationship with John Dickens is concerned, we watch a huge shift in the artistic problems that Charles was addressing and solving as his imagination came to terms with life-experience.

Dickens did not blame his father for the childhood traumas. It was the mother who bore all the weight of that cruel story. John Dickens remained, for the novelist, the jolly, jokey figure with whom, in early childhood, Charles had enjoyed ramblings in the marsh country along the Medway, and who, in the squalid London houses where they lodged, and from whose rent-collectors they flitted, kept him amused with recitations, imitations and jokes. The two great creations to emerge from the Charles–John Dickens dynamic were Micawber and Dorrit. In David Copperfield, the alternative-autobiography composed while John Dickens was still alive, Dickens made his father a figure of benign burlesque. Mr Micawber is the Clown of the old harlequinade. In the original pantomimes, Clown was the speaking part in what was often a mime show and, like all the Dickensian figures who correspond to Clown, Micawber is gifted with the exhilarating power of utterance – ‘“Now, welcome poverty!” cried Mr Micawber, shedding tears. “Welcome misery, welcome houselessness, welcome hunger, rags, tempest, and beggary! Mutual confidence will sustain us to the end!”’ [DC52] Just as Micawber changes his character entirely and becomes a successful farmer and administrator in Australia, so John Dickens after his death – he who had been so conspicuously inept as a clerk and so undistinguished as a hack journalist – was saluted by his son as ‘one of the most efficient and respected members of the Press’.19

Pantomime, more than serious drama, was the template for Dickens’s fiction in the earlier half of his writing life. How an audience responds to comedy and pantomime was central to Dickens’s life-view. Grimaldi the Clown, whom John Dickens took his children to see, and whose biography Charles Dickens reworked after writing Pickwick, was one of the greatest exponents of the commedia dell’arte.

Behind the traditional Christmas pantomime may be seen, even in the debased form in which it is performed in Britain today, a dramatic archetype which offers much the same katharsis that Aristotle sought in Tragedy. The inadequacy of the parents; the frustration of the young lovers; the poverty of the unsympathetic father, and his attempt to force the heroine to marry money against her will; the machinations of the Yellow Dwarf or the Demon King; while the transvestite Dame or Widow Twanky or Mother Goose projects, and redeems, the eternal dread of Mother. In these garish projections, the audience confronts comic versions of their own fears and griefs – the impossibility of finding domestic happiness in the place where we are programmed to seek it: in the family; the emotional frustrations and financial anxieties of life. It is a world, of course, where misfortune, rather than being something to weep over, is of necessity projected as comic.

Dickens himself, both in his definitive and revealing essay ‘The Pantomime of Life’, and in a later article for Household Words called ‘A Curious Dance Round a Curious Tree’, made the point trenchantly – that pantomime was a world:

where a man may tumble into the broken ice, or dive into the kitchen fire, and only be the droller for the accident; where babies may be knocked about and sat upon, or choked with gravy spoons, in the process of feeding, and yet no Coroner be wanted, nor anybody made uncomfortable; where workmen may fall from the top of a house to the bottom, or even from the bottom of a house to the top, and sustain no injury to the brain, need no hospital, leave no young children; where every one, in short, is so superior to all the accidents of life, though encountering them at every turn, that I suspect this to be the secret (though many persons may not present it to themselves) of the general enjoyment which an audience of vulnerable spectators, liable to pain and sorrow, find in this class of entertainment.20

In the great English tragic tradition of the Elizabethan stage, the Clown had his finest manifestation in King Lear, the ultimate drama of fathers and children, in which the mad Lear, on the Heath, gathers around him the alternative family, consisting of Edgar disguised as a crazy beggar man, Poor Tom, the loyal Kent and Fool. Most of us, when we first read or see King Lear, realize that we have seen the story acted out before – at Christmas, with Cinderella and her Ugly Sisters foreshadowing Cordelia, Goneril and Regan. In the alternative fairy-tale universe of the panto, the inadequate parent – the Lear-like character – is usually a relatively minor figure, Baron Hard-up, as it were, in Cinderella, whereas the Clown could sometimes be the dominant figure. This was especially true, in the old harlequinade, if Clown were played by a great figure such as Joseph Grimaldi – later in the century by Dan Leno and in the twentieth century Charlie Chaplin, the conscious heir of this tradition, who carried it into motion pictures.

In David Copperfield, Dickens’s own favourite among the novels, he recast his own autobiography as a harlequinade. When the Brothers Grimm, whose collection of German fairy stories was published in the year of Dickens’s birth, began their researches, they were appalled to discover how many of the folktales related to incest, or to parents in one way or another neglecting, brutalizing or mismanaging their children; so in the published version, the wicked mothers were converted into wicked stepmothers. When he came to write Copperfield, one of the central pantomime/fairy-tale themes – that of faulty parents betraying, through weakness or wickedness, their children – was neutralized by making David Copperfield pretty quickly into an orphan. His father is dead before the story starts, and once she has married Murdstone, David’s mother has no further role to play and can be allowed conveniently to die. The real John Dickens, whose misfortunes caused the infant Charles so much torment, was transmogrified kindly into a benign father-substitute, a Pantaloon Clown in the figure of Micawber.