Charles Dickens: A Life (55 page)

Nelly’s character remains clouded. A petted youngest daughter and little sister, she was now set apart, free of any necessity to earn her own living, but facing decisions that would determine her future. The words Dickens gave the adult Pip in
Great Expectations
to describe his feelings for Estella insisted that ‘I did not … invest her with any attributes save those she possessed.’
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If Dickens felt himself to be equally clear-sighted about Nelly’s motivation in their dealings, he also, like Pip, appears to have ‘loved her simply because I found her irresistible’. He makes Pip tell Estella, ‘You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read … You have been the graceful embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with … to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain a part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil.’
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These are memorable statements of obsessive love.

In June 1861 Maria was acting at Rochester with the Windsor Strollers and in July she joined Fanny in the north, taking contralto parts with the touring opera company. In September Dickens wrote to Webster, manager of the Adelphi, asking him to give work to Maria and mentioning her mother at Houghton Place, but Webster did not oblige, and in December Maria was in Rochester again. It was depressing for Dickens, who tried so hard to help them, and still more for Fanny and Maria, both gifted and ready to take on anything, but unable to break through to real success. Perhaps they were not quite good enough. Perhaps their association with Dickens proved to be a disservice. While they struggled on, Nelly’s life took a dramatic new direction.

The Bebelle Life

Over the next three years Dickens divided his life between England and France, crossing the Channel at least sixty-eight times, at a rough reckoning, and only occasionally giving a reason for his journey. He had his fiftieth birthday in February 1862. Ten years earlier, reaching forty, he had spent 1852 writing
Bleak House
, and his youngest child had been born. In 1862 he wrote little more than a very short story for the Christmas number of his magazine. It was called ‘His Boots’, and it was about an Englishman, a middle-aged grandfather (as Dickens was), with a temper and unforgiving to those who cross him, who goes to France, stays in a northern garrison town, interests himself in an illegitimate and virtually abandoned baby girl known as Bebelle, and ultimately takes her back to England as his adopted child. The story is well told, tender and touching, but it is not a major piece. Clearly Dickens had other things than writing on his mind in 1862.

One was the reading tour he had begun in the autumn of 1861, which had been interrupted by the death of Prince Albert in mid-December. He took it up again in Birmingham on 30 December and continued through January. ‘Success attends me everywhere, Thank God,’ he wrote to his sister Letitia, ‘and the great crowds I see every night all seem to regard me with affection as a personal friend.’
¹
So he pursued a triumphant way through Leamington, Cheltenham, Plymouth, Torquay and Exeter, stopping in Cheltenham with the Macreadys – he aged and infirm, but with a new and blooming young wife visibly preparing to present him with another child, and indeed she bore him a stout son in May. Then he returned north for what he described as an ‘absolutely dazzling’ close to the tour at Manchester and Liverpool.
²

Personal success was one thing, family life another, and two letters to Georgina in January show his exasperation, first with Alfred’s widow, Helen, bothering him at his office – would Georgy make it clear to her that she must negotiate with her, or with Mamie? – and then with Georgy herself, for sewing the wrong buttons on his coloured shirts. You hear the voice of a man who expects to be looked after efficiently and get a glimpse of his dictatorial mode.
³
Another thing he disliked was having to exchange Gad’s for the ‘nastiest little house in London’ in order to give Georgy and Mamie their promised ‘season’.
⁴
It was in Hyde Park Gate in Kensington, on the wrong side of the park for Dickens, and he told Forster it stifled and darkened his powers of invention, but he was stuck there until the end of May. He made a point of spending two days and nights of every week at Wellington Street.

There were more readings in London through March and April, still mostly
Copperfield
and
Nickleby
, and he was able to boast to Forster of the money he was earning: ‘Think of £190 a night!’
⁵
There was
All the Year Round
to occupy him, and much of his correspondence relates to articles commissioned and magazine business discussed with Wills. In other letters there are terse comments on public affairs. He refused to run anything about the proposed memorial to Prince Albert in his magazine, regarding him as a perfectly commonplace man and his son, the Prince of Wales, as ‘a poor dull idle fellow’.
⁶
And he was cynical about the attitude of the Northern states to slavery in the American Civil War, which was bringing depression to England. It was also postponing any possibility of an American tour.

In April he went to see Charles Fechter, an actor who had made his career in France and was now putting on spectacular performances in London, as a Hamlet unlike any seen before, and as Ruy Blas in Victor Hugo’s play, both admired by Dickens. Edmund Yates was working with Fechter’s company, and Dickens wrote to Yates:

I wish Fechter would take among his young ladies, Miss Maria Ternan. Not because I have a great friendship for her and know her to be one of the best and bravest of little spirits and most virtuous of girls (for that would have nothing to do with it), but because I have acted with her, and believe her to have more aptitude in a minute than all the other people of her standing on the stage in a month. A lady besides, and pretty, and of a good figure, and always painstaking and perfect to the letter. Also (but this has never had a chance) a wonderful mimic. Whatever he showed her, she would do. When I first knew her, I looked her in the eyes one morning in Manchester, and she took the whole Frozen Deep out of one look and six words.
⁷

Few recommendations come better than this, although it did Maria no good, as Fechter’s company was about to be disbanded. But it tells us what Dickens saw in her – her courage, her professional quickness and conscientiousness, her good looks and her perfectly ladylike presence – and it says something about how Mrs Ternan had brought up her daughters, to pass as ladies even though they were working women. Only now Nelly was no longer a working woman.

There is no certainty about where she was or what she was doing in 1862, 1863, 1864 and until June 1865, when she appears on a train carrying passengers from the cross-Channel boat from France in which she was travelling with Dickens and her mother. Otherwise it is only from Dickens’s letters that it is possible to conjecture that she was in France. But since we know he was her protector and closely concerned with her welfare, it is not a very bold assumption to make, given how much can be gleaned from his letters. Georgina’s role has something to tell us too, because it was at the time he made two trips to France in the summer of 1862 that she declared herself ill. A healthy 34-year-old, she suddenly seemed to be going into a decline, unable to run the house or perform her usual duties. Dickens was anxious enough to call in two doctors, Frank Beard and Dr Elliotson, and she was diagnosed as having ‘degeneration of the heart’ and said to be in need of rest. He then offered to take her, with Mamie, to Paris for two months – only not until mid-October. This promise of a treat and a rest was enough to start her recovery, although she still spoke at times of feeling weak and of pains in the left breast. Once comfortably installed in Paris, and Dickens and Mamie in attendance, her heart regenerated itself spontaneously, and by the end of the two-month visit she was ‘almost quite well’. Back at Gad’s in 1863 she soon resumed her normal life. In fact she suffered no further illnesses and lived to be ninety. Degeneration of the heart had clearly been a misdiagnosis, and her biographer suggests politely that there may have been a psychosomatic element to her illness in 1862.
⁸
It had certainly frightened Dickens, which was no doubt what was intended.

There could have been a reason for Georgina putting on this performance. She may have feared that Dickens was going to make a further readjustment to his life – even perhaps to set up house with Nelly Ternan and to father more children – which would leave her without her pre-eminent place as his housekeeper, helper and best friend. Macready had after all just become a father again, in his sixties, with his new young wife. Georgina needed to be reassured, and Dickens evidently succeeded in reassuring her, by showing he was ready to take her to Paris, as in the old days, and by explaining the situation he was in regarding Nelly, and to some degree including her in it. It would help to explain Georgina’s behaviour, now and later. There is no proof that it was Nelly who took Dickens to France the summer of 1862, or that the reason for her being in France was that she was pregnant, but it would make sense of Georgina’s behaviour.

The story might go like this: as long as Nelly had resisted being his mistress, and Dickens was suffering from his bachelor ailment, there had been no danger of pregnancy, but, once cured, he pursued his suit and succeeded in becoming her lover. Mrs Ternan, who had already accepted his financial and professional help for her daughters, by then saw that the great Charles Dickens, so friendly and so generous, was not to be cast aside, and that given his difficult marital situation it might not be wholly wrong for Nelly to give him what he desired so ardently and needed so badly. Or maybe Nelly simply succumbed. Dickens was a great performer who knew how to please his audience. He was famous for his energy and he took his physical pleasures seriously, eating and drinking, walking, dancing, travelling, singing. He had fathered ten children on his wife in twenty years (leaving aside miscarriages), and he believed that sexual activity was necessary to a healthy man. He wanted his own blissful proceedings, and it seems he got them, and with them their consequences.

Scandal must be avoided, and a pregnant Nelly had to be hidden. Where better than France? The railway lines in northern France were extended in 1861 to make good links between the coast and Paris, a line from Boulogne passing through Amiens and another from Dunkirk passing through Arras. Nelly could be settled somewhere in that region to await the birth of her child and then easily moved to Paris, where there were good doctors and the anonymity of city, while everyone considered the future. In 1862 Dickens was in France in June, in July, probably in August, possibly in September, certainly in October, telling Collins he was suffering from ‘miserable anxieties’ and writing to Forster of being ‘unspeakably wretched’ with an ‘unsettled fluctuating distress’.
⁹
He was seriously considering a reading tour in Australia as a way of making money.

In early October he told Collins he was working on his story, describing it as an evocation of a fortified French town; then he told Mrs Brown it was put into his head by seeing a French sailor acting as nurse to his captain’s baby girl.
¹⁰
As it turned out, the centre of the story is the illegitimate baby, adopted by a secretive and shame-faced Englishman who is slowly drawn to love the child and redeemed by his good action. ‘God will bless you in the happiness of the protected child now with you,’ a Frenchwoman tells him as he leaves France for England with the child ‘of no one’. In the critic John Bowen’s account of the story and the time at which it was composed, he writes that ‘although we can never be certain what occurred during these months, we can be sure that in France in the autumn of 1862, Dickens was thinking about the fate of illegitimate children, about sudden death, adoption, fatherhood and reconciliation by telling himself, and us, a story in which a middle-aged Englishman, estranged from his family, creates a happy ending for an illegitimate child in France.’
¹¹

But nothing was simple or straightforward. In September Georgina complained of feeling weak, and he took her to Dover for a rest. On 16 October he set off for France again, not going as far as Paris. Georgy crossed the Channel two days later with Mamie and her dog Mrs Bouncer, muzzled as required by French law. They installed themselves in a small, elegant apartment in the Faubourg St Honoré, not far from where the whole family had stayed in the winter of 1846, and they were visited in November by Bulwer, and by Wills, who brought Dickens ‘cash for the enclosed cheque, in Gold’. In mid-December he departed for two days in London, leaving Georgy and Mamie on their own for nearly a week, and spending the other days only he knew where. On 18 December he wrote to Wills with another urgent request: ‘I want a £50 note for a special purpose. Will you send me one by return of post?’
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It sounds like money for Nelly, or for a doctor and a nurse. He returned to Gad’s for Christmas with Georgy and Mamie, and at this point made his decision against the Australian reading tour. He told Forster he needed the money, ‘with all the hands upon my skirts that I cannot fail to feel and see there, whenever I look around. It is a struggle of no common sort, as you will suppose, you who know the circumstances of the struggler.’
¹³
But there were more important considerations even than the money.

In mid-January 1863 he was back in France without the ladies. He remained there until mid-February. Before arriving in Paris he told Joseph Olliffe, an Irish friend who was physician to the Embassy, that he would be visiting a sick friend, and wrote again on arrival to say how he was suffering and that ‘some unstringing of the nerves – coupled with an anxiety not to be mentioned here – holds sleep from me.’
¹⁴
Other friends and acquaintances were given different stories of long trips planned to Genoa or to Switzerland, but to Wilkie Collins he wrote only that he was ‘unsettled and made uncertain by “circumstances over which —” &c &c&c’ [
sic
].
¹⁵
He said he was leaving Paris for a week for an undisclosed destination – which could have been another district of Paris – and was officially back in Paris on 29 January and preparing to read about the death of little Dombey to his French admirers, feeling ‘as though I could not muster spirits and composure enough to get through the child’s death’.
¹⁶
Possibly Nelly’s child had been born, and was frail.