Books of the Week
Charles Dickens and Ellen Ternan
By TOM HOPKINSON 0 N April, 3rd, 1934, readers of the Daily Express noticed with astonishment an article on a literary theme. Their surprise was less than it might be at present, for the subject of the article was Charles Dickens, this was the period of an intense war for circulation, and sets of Dickens' works were being freely given away by the leading dailies—as well as such mundane objects as trouser- presses and free life insurance—in order to persuade people to buy papers they would not otherwise have read. The heading of the article was a curious phrase "Charles Dickens Began His Honeymoon." Its author was Thomas Wright, a schoolmaster of Olney and a writer of biographies, Who took a somewhat naive interest in the lives of great literary figures. Wright disclosed that the cause of the separation between Dickens and his wife, carried out With the maximum of publicity in 1858 when Dickens was forty-six, was a young actress, Ellen Ternan. The story of their association had been told him by a certain Canon Benham, whose intimate friend Wright had been for a number of years. "1 had it," said the Canon, "from her own lips, and she declared that she loathed the very thought of the intimacy."
The response to this disclosure was prompt and ferocious. Wright was accused of fabrication. There was said to be no " evidence " worthy of the slightest credence. Those who accepted his conclusions were similarly assailed. Hugh King- smill was working on a life of Charles Dickens—The Sentimental. Journey—when Wright's article appeared. It supported conjectures he was already making, and he included the story of Ellen Ternan in his book. In 1945 appeared Dame Una Pope-Hennessy's Charles Dickens. She, too, came under fire—though in the meantime the truth of Wright's original article had been confirmed from Other sources. First, Miss Gladys Storey—in Dickens and Daughter published in 1939—had recorded the memories of Dickens' daughter, Mrs. Kate Perugini. She told how "the small fair-haired rather pretty actress came like a breath of Spring into the hard-working life of Charles Dickens—and enslaved him.
To this, the defenders of the Dickens legend replied by repeating their demand for "real evidence." Miss Storey had Undoubtedly been a close friend of Kate Perugini for a number of years : that could not be denied. But a great deal of what she had set down was merely "gossip," and in any case, Mrs. Perugini during her last years had been "unbalanced."
When The Times reviewer made use of this suggestion to support his disapproval of Miss Storey's book, he drew a strong letter of protest from George Bernard Shaw . . . "My last conversation with her (Mrs. Perugini) took place shortly before her death. Her mind was not in the least enfeebled."
' The second support for his story came from Thomas Wright himself. Stung by the attacks on his reputation, he had carried his enquiries into the last years of Dickens' life a stage further. Between July 1867 and July 1870 (it was given lip after his death in June) a house at Linden Grove, Nunhead, had been rented under the names of Frances Turnham, Thomas Turnham or Tringham, and Charles Tringham. There was clear evidence that Charles Tringham Was in fact Charles Dickens, and strong, though not conclusive, evidence that he lived there with Ellen Ternan.
Hardened Dickensians seem, however, to have believed that if the legend of Dickens as a pattern of domestic virtue were destroyed, his works must perish instantly, or at least suffer serious depreciation. They continued to denounce as calum- niators all to whom fact meant more than their idol's reputation. And now, once again, this attitude has brought to light infor- Illation which might otherwise have been passed over.
Miss Ada Nisbet, whose book Dickens and Ellen Ternan (University of California Press : Cambridge 21s.) came out last year in the United States and has just been published over here, is Assistant Professor of English at an American University. She is also one of the board of advisory editors working on a much-needed, definitive edition of Dickens' letters. For ten years she has been rummaging through old material and taking notes. However, "these notes would probably have remained unpublished . . . if it had not been for the violence of certain recent attacks upon the reliability and integrity of those critics and scholars who have accepted the story of Dickens' liaison with Ellen Ternan as fact. The attackers claim there is no evidence.' I have gathered an accumulation of what I am convinced constitutes 'evidence.'" What Miss Nisbet has done is to apply the technique of infra- red rays to a series of passages in Dickens' letters, written during his American tour of 1867-8 to W. H. Wills, his assistant editor on the magazine Household Words. These passages had been carefully inked-out and rendered illegible. By so doing she proved that Dickens wrote regularly to Ellen Ternan, under cover of his correspondence with Wills, and was clearly on terms at the same time affectionate and secret. He refers to her as "my Darling," and tells Wills "I would give £3,000 down (and think it cheap) if you could forward me, for four and twenty hours only, instead of the letter." Secondly, by the discovery of a code contained in a notebook, she shows that Dickens had considered sending for Ellen to join him in America, but thought better of it after he arrived.
Miss Nisbet's additional evidence makes what was already plain, incontrovertible. Why should there ever have been so much emotion roused ? Why, in consequence, were literary historians driven to delve so deeply into Dickens' life in order to prove their point The answer lies of course in the particular position which Dickens built up for himself as patron deity of the domestic hearth, and the Victorian domestic hearth at that. No one, I believe, would think the worse of Fielding for learning that he had a mistress. No one struggles to prove the life of Wilkie Collins irreproachable. But Dickens is different. He identified himself so completely with the ideal of the home, at the same time cosy and respectable, that the two legends of himself and it seem inextricably bound up. It is not only the present-day devotees of Dickens who believe this to be so. Dickens himself believed it. It was this which led him into the most disastrous folly of his life, the public explanations about his separation from his wife. He did not want to go on living with her, but he could not endure that the public image of hims,elf should be shattered ... "there is a great multitude who know me through my writings, and who do not know me otherwise; and I cannot bear that one of them should be left in doubt, or hazard of doubt, through my poorly shrinking from taking the unusual means to which I now resort of circulating the truth. . . ."
The attempt to secure personal freedom, without any sacri- fice of public standing, broke Dickens. It was probably his need to keep on impressing the public, not any incitement from Ellen, which drove him more and more into those melodra- matic popular readings which finally took charge of his life. The secret he struggled so desperately to conceal is now public knowledge. Our impression of Dickens' character is bound to be affected, not so much by knowledge of the relationship as by recognition of the subterfuges in which he involved himself, and the public injustice shown towards his wife. Moral indignation, however, is an emotion less highly esteemed today than it was formerly. At the level of art, Dickens' feeling for Ellen is believed by most critics to have enriched his later books : on the other hand, the effort. he put into his readings and into the maintaining of a .public face, has perhaps, deprived us of books we might otherwise have had.
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