BOOKS

Mystery of

the young

passenger

John Mortimer

THE INVISIBLE WOMAN: THE STORY OF NELLY TERNAN AND CHARLES DICKENS • by Claire Tomalin

Viking, £16.99, pp. 317

Alady who had been upon the stage from her earliest childhood . . . . once said to me, "Oh, but I have never forgot- ten the time . . . . when my baby brother died, and when my poor mother and I acted three nights . . . with the pretty cre- ature lying upon the only bed in our lodging before we got the money to pay for its funeral." ' When Dickens made this speech at a charitable banquet of the Theatrical Fund none of his listeners knew how close his association with the Ternan family was. Thomas Ternan, an Irish actor who achieved a good deal of success before he became insane, married Fanny Ternan, who had played Desdemona to Kean's Othello. Their three daughters, Fanny, Maria and Ellen, all performed profes- sionally from their earliest years, and it was little Thomas Ternan who, when the family fell on evil days, lay dead in the lodgings while his mother and elder sister went out to put on the greasepaint and spangles and glitter in the gaslight. It was Ellen, the youngest, who became Dickens's secret love, the young girl kept in a cottage in Slough. She was either set on a pedestal for the unblinking adoration he reserved for many of his fictional heroines or, as some people, including Thackeray, suspected, became his mistress and, perhaps, the mother of his child.

Whatever the precise truth of the mat- ter, Dickens continued to shroud it in mystery. Whether innocent or not it was hardly consistent with his role as an up- holder of family life, nor would it have been readily understood by his huge public and the multitude of readers of Household Words, which he edited. In pursuit of the facts Claire Tomalin has written a work of literary detection as fascinating, in its way, as The Quest For Corvo. She has also dealt with the varying effects of the Victorian demand for respectability on writers, and the splendours and miseries, mainly the miseries, of being an actress in the middle of the last century. She tells with great clarity and with much sympathy and under- standing the story that Dickens would never have cared, or indeed dared, to write.

Actresses, when the Ternans trod the boards, didn't only work in appalling con- ditions. The stinking lodgings, the rats behind the scenery, the long and danger- ous walks home down muddy roads from the theatres, the miserable pay, all this was bad enough. What must have hurt more was the fact that they were treated as social pariahs. The Encyclopaedia Britannica for 1797 had said that the exercise of 'agree- able and beautiful' talent by an actress was considered 'a sort of public prostitution'. Thackeray was able to write in a novel, `You knew that this person was on the stage and you introduced her into my son's family. Pack your trunks, viper!', and, as late as 1898, Clement Scott wrote, 'It's nearly impossible for a woman to remain pure who adopts the stage as a profession.'

Not that the Ternan sisters were not thoroughly respectable, and they lived to escape the social disabilities of their profes- sion. Fanny married Trollope's brother and settled in the fairly grand Villa Ricor- boli outside Florence, Maria became a foreign correspondent and Ellen, after Dickens's death, the wife of the Reverend George Robinson who ran a private school in Margate; there she gave charitable readings from the works of her former friend.

They had met when Dickens engaged her to take part in The Frozen Deep, a melodrama he had written with Wilkie 'It's David Attenborough, all right . . . so it must be time to spawn!' Collins. It was one of those extraordinary theatrical occasions for which he found the time and energy and in which he played the lead, apparently to mesmerising effect. It is clear he fell desperately in love with her, clear also that their meeting coincided with his apparently callous rejection of his marriage, the symbolic bricking up of the door which gave his wife access to his bedroom. It is a time of his life when Dickens appears at his least attractive, as in the moment when he sent his bewildered 16-year-old son off to Australia, comfort- ing the boy with the thought that, 'Life is full of partings and the pain must be borne.' He was not the first successful middle-aged man to become somewhat unhinged by the love of a young woman with whom he hoped to recapture his lost youth. And the 18-year-old Ellen and her mother were no doubt swept away by the friendship of a brilliantly entertaining, world famous genius who could also act.

It was the time of Dickens's close asso- ciation with Wilkie Collins, who kept two mistresses, one of whom used to entertain his men friends in her negligee. George Eliot contrived to live in what was then known as 'sin' with great candour. Dick- ens's immense popularity, and the public who saw him as the spirit of Christmas present, made such honest behaviour im- possible. He was trapped, as so many writers have been, in the character he had invented for himself. He was not the Dickens of Dingly Dell, and probably never had been. He was the author of such dark masterpieces as Bleak House, Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend, in which the shadows are lit by flashes of angry human- ity. If he had been able to come to terms with himself he might have come to terms with his love for Ellen Ternan. As it was, he covered it with a web of secrecy which reached its most absurd moment when he was caught, with Ellen and her mother, in a dramatic train crash after which he ministered to the casualties. 'Two ladies were my fellow passengers', he wrote when he described the incident, `an old one and a young one'. For the sake of Dickens's invented personality Ellen and her mother had lost theirs.

Did they do it? Peter Ackroyd, in his long and exciting life of Dickens, decides that they did not and that Dickens would have treated Ellen as though she were as perfectly untouchable as Lucy Mannette in A Tale of Two Cities, who is modelled on her. Claire Tomalin accepts the contrary evidence. Dickens's son Henry told Gladys Storey that Ellen had been his father's mistress and 'there had been a child'. Ellen

dropped heavy hints to a vicar in Margate, and it seems unlikely she was merely boasting. Kate Dickens also seems to have told Mrs Storey that her father and Ellen had a 'son who died in infancy'. Most convincing to me is the behaviour of Ellen's son Geoffrey, a man of some culture who had a long career in the army. When he started to go through his mother's possessions he went to see Henry Dickens and after their meeting he destroyed all his mementoes of her and never mentioned her name again. Finally, Claire Tomalin has analysed, from Dickens's pocket di- aries, the length and frequency of his visits to Ellen's cottage in Slough. Dickens was a man of strong sensuality and enormous charm; it seems unlikely that, in the deepest secrecy, he wouldn't have behaved just like his friend Wilkie Collins.

Whether they made love or not seems, in this strange and sad story, irrelevant. Dickens caused as much trouble to himself and his family as if he had, and she, whatever their relationship, was con- demned to a life of secrecy. Perhaps she had never set out to be an actress or the mistress of a genius, but these were the roles she was offered, and she accepted them. Did she love him? This, for all the evidence now disinterred, is something we shall never know.

Claire Tomalin's book is a small work of art, a story which would be well worth reading even if it did not concern the hidden life of our greatest novelist.