Charles Dickens: A Life (59 page)

All three Ternan daughters had now given up their acting and singing careers. Fanny was teaching, Maria was in Oxford with her brewer husband, and Nelly was pursuing her own mysterious life. In December 1865, however, their mother announced her intention of returning to the stage, to appear in a double bill with Fechter’s company. Dickens was greatly interested in the production and was at a rehearsal just before Christmas: she was already word perfect while Fechter had not yet begun to learn his lines.
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One play was an adaptation of Scott’s romantic tragedy
The Bride of Lammermoor
, the other a translation of Dumas’s popular melodrama
The
Corsican Brothers.
The Ternan sisters were at the Lyceum together on the opening night on 11 January 1866 to see their mother perform, and Dickens was without doubt in the audience too, and later reported that the show was ‘an immense success’. It ran until June, when Mrs Ternan retired from the stage.

When Nelly let out Houghton Place in October, providing herself with a small income, Fanny and her mother found lodgings nearby in Mornington Crescent, and in January Maria and Nelly went together to St Leonard’s-on-Sea on the Sussex coast, saying they needed sea air for their health. Meanwhile Dickens rented two cottages in Slough, at that time a quiet country village, where he thought he could go unrecognized by the country people and install Nelly discreetly. He used a false name – Charles Tringham – under which he paid the rates; his tobacconist in Covent Garden was a Mrs Tringham, which probably amused him. He believed that in a different place, with a different name, he could be a different person, and his life became more like a novel with a plot too complicated to be followed easily. When Mrs Elliot wrote pestering him again about Nelly, he told her, ‘As to my romance it belongs to my life and probably will only die out of the same with the proprietor.’
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He refused an invitation to speak in public on 3 March on account of ‘an annual engagement’, and celebrated Nelly’s twenty-seventh birthday with her, possibly in Sussex, possibly in Slough, but much more likely at Verrey’s, one of his favourite restaurants, in Regent Street.

His doctor, Frank Beard, had told him in February that he had a degeneration of the functions of the heart, which hardly surprised him, since he felt himself lacking in ‘buoyancy and hopefulness’.
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Still, to please Georgina and Mamie he rented a London house as usual, this time in what was then known as Tyburnia, at No. 6 Southwick Place, Hyde Park, as a base until June; and, regardless of his health problems, he prepared to set off for a new series of readings.

Maria Taylor now told her husband she needed to travel south, since she was suffering from rheumatism, and Oxford was damp; and she took herself to Florence. In May, Thomas Trollope invited Fanny to come out to be Bice’s governess, and she too was soon in Florence. Fanny had not been idle, and had written a novel,
Aunt Margaret’s Trouble
, which she showed to Dickens. He was enthusiastic about it and prepared to run it in
All the Year Round
, but anonymously, and paid for out of his private funds, so that even in the office no one should know what he paid for it. It was dedicated to ‘E. L. T.’ – Ellen Lawless Ternan – and began to appear in July. In the same month Thomas Trollope, relieved to have his household put in order and his daughter cheered up by an efficient and good-natured woman, proposed marriage to Fanny Ternan and was accepted. There was to be a wedding in Paris in October, with Maria, Nelly and Mrs Ternan all present, and Bice was to be sent, to her considerable indignation, to boarding school in England: Fanny could be tough. Dickens wrote to Thomas Trollope to congratulate him warmly, saying he had foreseen the match, but he did not attend the wedding.

Fanny was thirty-one, her husband fifty-six, and both had reason to be pleased. He had acquired an affectionate and hard-working companion and she had taken a crucial upward step socially, her husband being a gentleman by birth and education, albeit a poor gentleman who had to earn his living as a writer. And now Fanny, who had achieved exactly what a young woman hoped to do by marrying into a rank of society higher than she was born into, began to worry about Nelly’s position. Was her friendship with Dickens safe, or was he putting her reputation at risk? The fact was she could do nothing except preach caution to Nelly. That Dickens was now her publisher and patron, already commissioning a second novel, for which he paid her the extraordinarily large sum of 500 guineas for three years’ copyright, made it just about impossible for her to raise objections to whatever was going on between E. L. T. and the editor of
All the Year Round.
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Her letters to Bice read curiously as she talks about Nelly as though she were living the life of a conventional young girl, with her mother in attendance and devoted to her pet dog; she passes on Nelly’s silly jokes about the dog, and sends her love.

In the intersecting circles of Ternans, Trollopes, Dickenses, Hogarths, Forsters, Collinses, Elliots, Wills and Dickens’s new readings manager, George Dolby, it is impossible to be sure how much anyone knew about Nelly. Forster, Wills, Dolby and Georgina were pretty well in the know, although not entirely; Katey, Charley and Henry were aware of Nelly’s existence. To Wills, Nelly was ‘the Patient’; to Dolby, she became ‘Madame’. We have seen how Dickens fielded questions from Mrs Elliot, a friend of both Wilkie Collins and Thomas Trollope. He was so much on his guard that he did not even tell Wilkie Collins the name of the author of
Aunt Margaret’s Trouble
. Soon he was warning Mrs Elliot to be careful what she said to the Thomas Trollopes: ‘Of course you will be very strictly on your guard, if you see Tom Trollope, or his wife, or both – to make no reference to me which either can piece into anything. She is infinitely sharper than the serpent’s tooth. Mind that.’
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It looks as though Fanny had a double role for him: as a writer he published and as someone who could not be trusted with information about his life with Nelly. And it makes you wonder how he and Nelly talked about Fanny together, or he and Thomas Trollope, when they met, as they did; and whether the 500 guineas Dickens paid for
Mabel’s Progress
, duly serialized from April 1867, was meant to keep Fanny quiet.

Years after Dickens’s death Nelly said that she had begun to feel remorse about her relations with him at some stage during their association, and that her remorse had made them both miserable.
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It may have been a fluctuating remorse, since she was clearly eager to go to America with him, and she made sure she was back from Italy to welcome him on his return. One perpetual worry must have been the fear of becoming pregnant again, and Fanny, protective and practical, and now a knowledgeable married woman, could have urged Nelly to try to avoid further sexual relations with Dickens. There is no way of knowing, but whatever went on between Dickens and Nelly, anxiety, remorse, reluctance and guilt are all spoilers of joy.

With the publication of
Our Mutual Friend
in November 1865 his best work was almost done. A warning of mortality came in that same month when his fellow novelist, contributor and sometime friend, Elizabeth Gaskell, died suddenly, aged only fifty-five, just before completing her novel
Wives and Daughters
.
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Over the next years he willed himself to produce a few more articles and some effortful stories, and with a last summoning of creative energy he planned and wrote a good part of another novel. He also kept up a bruising programme of activities. He was rarely in the same place for more than a few days at a time, and said of himself, ‘I am here, there, everywhere and (principally) nowhere.’
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World events had their effect on him, the end of the American Civil War in 1865 bringing renewed invitations to cross the Atlantic to entertain a public eager to hear him and ready to pay generously for the privilege. He needed the money, but 1865 was also the year in which the trouble with his foot began to make things more difficult for him: it seems clear to modern medical opinion that it was gout, but he would not accept the diagnosis, and found doctors who agreed with his denial. From now on he appears as a man assailed, proud and obstinate, not merely keeping going by strength of will but forcing the pace, at the cost of increasingly distressing symptoms. Nelly remained his darling, but she was not always easy and he was not always well. His son Henry remembered his ‘heavy moods of deep depression, of intense nervous irritability, when he was silent and oppressed’.
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Yet he never allowed himself to sink into permanent gloom, and even now there are many more accounts of his charm and conviviality than of his low moments. He was the inimitable still, and would be to the end, with his own trick of putting aside agony and exhaustion and reappearing suddenly, like a clown from behind the curtain, full of energy, amazing everyone with his good humour and laughter, and his determination to get on with the chief work of his life.

The Chief

In 1866 a new figure appeared in Dickens’s life who did a good deal to cheer him. This was George Dolby, a big man, full of energy, optimism and know-how, and talkative, with a stammer he bravely disregarded. He was thirty-five, just married, a theatre manager out of work and keen to take on the running of Dickens’s next reading tour. He was sent by Chappell, the music publishers who were setting up the tour, and he won Dickens’s confidence at once, and quickly became a friend.
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Through Dolby’s eyes we see again how irresistibly charming Dickens could be, how funny, how energetic, even when suffering from hideous pain and difficulty in getting about. He became a hero to Dolby, who revered him, called him ‘Chief’, and over the next four years saw him in every mood, from wild high spirits as he demonstrated how to dance a hornpipe in a moving railway carriage, to tears of remorse after he had shouted angrily at his tour manager for being too cautious. Dolby’s Dickens is the boys’ Dickens, the Pickwickian Dickens, at ease with his male companions and masculine pleasures. They laughed and joked together like boys, and enjoyed the small rituals of travel, the ‘artful sandwich’ favoured by Dickens (French roll, butter, parsley, hard-boiled egg and anchovy), the mixing of the gin punch, the coffee made on a spirit lamp, the game of cribbage. Dolby took in his stride being treated to a prison visit in Stirling during a rare free hour, and accepted that whenever there was a circus running nearby it had to be seen. For his part, Dolby showed off by standing on his head, which was a big, solid one. He perfectly understood that Dickens’s favourite restorative between the two parts of his reading every night consisted of ‘A dozen oysters and a little champagne’.
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He observed that his Chief always took a draught of brandy an hour into each train journey, followed by sherry later, and the two of them smoked cigars steadily throughout each trip.
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Dickens said Dolby was ‘as tender as a woman and as watchful as a doctor’.
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He served him to the end of his life, Dickens trusted him with his secrets, and Dolby never betrayed his trust.
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He said that Dickens had given him ‘the brightest chapter of my life’.

Dolby needed to be resilient, because over the next four years he was with Dickens for many months of continuous travel. The first tour they did together lasted for three months in the spring of 1866, covering Scotland, the north, Birmingham and Clifton. A four-month tour starting in January 1867 added Ireland, Wales, Hereford and more northern cities. The American tour, from December 1867 to March 1868, took in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington and other towns in the eastern states. After this there was the farewell tour, during which they travelled all over the British Isles from October 1868 until April 1869, when it had to be cut short; and then there were the last London readings in 1870. During this time Dolby was in charge of the complex arrangements necessary for such tours, saw how his Chief prepared and worked, endured long train journeys with him and nights in different hotels – Dickens refused to stay with friends – and performances in public halls of all kinds, some vast, many inconvenient, in which Dolby sorted out the technical problems and Dickens stood up alone to entertain audiences, usually worked up to a high pitch of expectation and enthusiasm but just occasionally not. There was no question but that he wanted to do the readings, but his own accounts of his health sometimes make distressing reading.

Yet he went on. Readings brought in much better money than book sales, and he was desperate to earn, feeling he was in a trap from which he had to escape by earning – the trap of having been born with the wrong parents, supplied with the wrong brothers, married to the wrong wife, father of the wrong sons, with the result that he was surrounded by dependants. He had ‘my wife’s income to pay – a very expensive position to hold – and my boys with a curse of limpness on them. You don’t know what it is to look round the table and see reflected from every seat at it (where they sit) some horribly well remembered expression of inadaptability to anything.’
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Even his son-in-law was unable to earn a living. There were needy sisters-in-law and orphaned nephews and nieces. There was Georgina’s future to think of, and his daughters’. There was Nelly, who had given up her life to him.

If money was the basic reason for the reading tours, something else kept him always eager to continue with them. Whatever the physical and emotional strain, his audiences nourished his spirit. Even when he was worn out, the contact with the people who came to hear him was precious to him. Their response confirmed to him that he was a star, the great man who was also the people’s friend; they came to worship and adore, queuing up to hear him, applauding him with shouts and cheers. From them he felt how much love he could command; and he had power over them, the power of the great actor he felt himself to be, an almost hypnotic power. They laughed when he wanted them to laugh, trembled and shed tears when he meant them to tremble or shed tears. The readings left him elated as well as exhausted. Even Frank Beard, his doctor, thought the occasional reading likely to do him more good than harm.
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