The Granger Collection, New York
Bob Cratchit’s Christmas dinner; wood engraving after Edwin Austin Abbey for Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” 1881.
Could there be any further mysteries to a life studied as thoroughly as that of Charles Dickens? As it happens, yes, because the exact nature of his secret relationship with a young actress, Ellen Ternan, remains almost entirely opaque, despite being the object of literary and biographical sleuthing since the 1930s.
The relationship piques our curiosity especially because Dickens is the great celebrant of hearth, home, and family. Of all the scenes in English literature, the Cratchit clan’s humble Christmas dinner in A Christmas Carol is undoubtedly one of the most familiar and best loved. Radiant domesticity is also the dominant mood at the end of most of Dickens’s great novels, notably the strongly autobiographical David Copperfield. More generally, Dickens can be said to represent for us in England today the benign face of those “Victorian values” once so memorably invoked by Margaret Thatcher. Any association of him and his work with the even remotely salacious is therefore bound to have for us a piquant savor. Meanwhile, his literary reputation has risen so greatly over the last 60 years that he is now regarded by many as second only to Shakespeare in the pantheon of English literature.
When Dickens died in 1870, he had been for decades both the most popular novelist in the English-speaking world and a much-loved public figure identified not only with the idealization of the domestic virtues but also with strong championship of the poor and downtrodden in society. He was very much what in England nowadays would be called a “national treasure.” But there was strong resistance on the part of the more upper-class and highly educated section of the British public to his acceptance as a great literary novelist, one in the same league as William Makepeace Thackeray or George Eliot. Characteristic of this attitude was the withering comment by Sir Leslie Stephen, father of Virginia Woolf, in the entry he wrote for Dickens in 1888 for The Dictionary of National Biography: “If literary fame could be measured by popularity with the half-educated, Dickens must claim the highest position among English novelists.”
For some 60 years after Dickens’s death, this continued to be the situation. The International Dickens Fellowship, founded in 1902, was very much a middle-class organization with the prime objective of celebrating Dickens as a great and good man, a lover of humanity who had expressed this love in his writings by means of his great mastery of pathos and humor. Fellowship members and Dickensians in general found a doughty champion for their Dickens in one of England’s leading men of letters, the rumbustious G.K. Chesterton. In 1906 he published a vivid appreciation of Dickens both as a champion of the people and as a great demotic literary artist. Ten more years were to pass before the first major academic study of Dickens’s work emerged, and then it was published in neither Britain nor America but in Germany. Professor Wilhelm Dibelius’s Charles Dickens appeared in Berlin in 1916. In the English-speaking world, the first book by an academic to be wholly devoted to Dickens was Edward Wagenknecht’s The Man Charles Dickens, published in Boston in 1929, but this study, as its title suggests, is more biographical (not to say hagiographical) than literary-critical in its approach to its subject.
Corbis
Charles Dickens in 1861.
Then, in 1930s England, startling revelations about Dickens’s private life began to emerge. These appeared first in a 1934 newspaper article written by a professional biographer named Thomas Wright, referring to an interview he had conducted more than 30 years earlier with a clergyman who had since died. Wright included them in his 1935 Life of Charles Dickens. Four years later they surfaced again in a book called Dickens and Daughter by a former actress, Gladys Storey. This featured the reported reminiscences of Dickens’s daughter Kate Perugini, who had died at an advanced age in 1929. Storey and her mother had maintained a close friendship with Perugini in her later years. The statements reported by Wright and Storey were unsupported by any documentary evidence but unequivocally stated that, following the end of his marriage in 1858, Dickens had for the remaining 12 years of his life conducted a secret relationship with a young actress named Ellen Ternan.
According to Wright, Ternan felt burdened by remorse about this in later life, following Dickens’s death and after she had become a respectable wife and mother. This moved her to tell her local vicar, subsequently Wright’s informant, about her liaison with Dickens. According to Perugini as reported by Storey, Ternan had borne Dickens a child but it had died in infancy. These stories were fiercely contested by the Dickens Fellowship and other Dickens lovers. Their firm belief was that Dickens’s relationship with Ternan, the only public record of which was the legacy of £1,000 he had left her by name in his will, had been of an entirely nonsexual nature.
The revelations of Wright and Storey attracted the interest of the highly influential New York critic Edmund Wilson. In 1941 he published The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature, which began with a long essay entitled “Dickens: The Two Scrooges.” In it, Wilson argued strongly for the recognition of Dickens as one of the greatest novelists of all time, maintaining that his work had a depth, richness, and complexity comparable to Dostoevsky’s. In Dickens’s writings Wilson detected a secret sympathy with social rebels and even with criminals that, he believed, derived from Dickens’s own psychological makeup and life experience.
In the later novels especially, Wilson found an intensified interest in doubles and dualism that, he believed, resulted from Dickens’s secret liaison with Ternan, which compelled him to lead a double life. Following Wright, Wilson established the tradition, which became commonplace in biographical criticism of Dickens, of seeing Ternan and her relations with Dickens reflected in the heroines of the later novels, whose first names seem to echo hers—Estella in Great Expectations, Bella Wilfer in Our Mutual Friend, and Helena Landless in The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
Wilson’s essay stimulated scholars like John D. Gordan, of the New York Public Library, and Ada B. Nisbet, of the University of Southern California, to begin investigating letters and other documents relating to Dickens held in academic libraries in the United States regarding the history and the nature of his relationship with Ternan. In 1952, Nisbet published her Dickens and Ellen Ternan, with a foreword by Edmund Wilson. She revealed evidence that Dickens had hoped to bring Ternan to America during his 1867-68 readings tour, and also that, while he was on the tour, he was sending to W.H. Wills, deputy editor of his weekly magazine All The Year Round, frequent letters for transmission to Ternan in which he referred to her as his “dear girl” or “Darling.”
Hulton Archive, Getty Images
Ellen Ternan, an actress, was reputed to be the lover of Charles Dickens.
In the same year that Nisbet’s book appeared, Edgar Johnson, of the City College of New York, published his monumental and extensively researched two-volume biography entitled Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph. Written very much under the influence of Edmund Wilson, it depicts Dickens as increasingly leading a double life and experiencing in his later years “a dark and fateful drift toward disillusion even in the midst of universal acclaim.” Johnson argues that this disillusionment, which he sees reflected in Dickens’s later writings, was related both to the novelist’s public and private life. With regard to the latter, he concedes that “there is no direct evidence” as to what part Ternan might have played in saddening Dickens’s later years but claims that “there can be no doubt that in some way she, too, failed his need.” It is clear from the context that Johnson is here referring to Dickens’s romantic and emotional needs rather than merely to his sensual ones.
Five years later, Arthur Adrian, of Case Western Reserve University, published a biography of Dickens’s sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth, in which he quotes several times from a journal kept by Annie Fields, the wife of Dickens’s American publisher. The Fieldses became close friends of Dickens, and Annie remained an intimate friend of Georgina’s after Dickens’s death. Those quotations show clearly that the Fieldses certainly knew about Dickens’s great love for Ternan, but they do not make clear whether they believed it to have been consummated.
Further documentary evidence about the nature of Dickens’s relationship to Ternan appeared in Britain in 1959. It was published in a book entitled Dickens Incognito, written by Sir Felix Aylmer, a distinguished British actor with a penchant for detective fiction. Like Nisbet, Sir Felix had examined the 1867 diary in the New York Library’s Berg Collection and had discovered that during 1866-67, Dickens had made frequent journeys to Slough, then just a small village a short train ride from London. On checking the local rate books (records of the payment of local property taxes), Aylmer discovered that Dickens had during that time used a pseudonym to pay the rates on a cottage in Slough that had been occupied by Ternan. Unfortunately, he went a step too far when he also claimed to have found written evidence, in the records of a London hospital, of the birth of an illegitimate child to Dickens and Ternan. It was quickly shown by one of the editors of the scholarly Pilgrim Edition of Dickens’s letters, then being published, that Sir Felix had misread the records and that there was nothing to connect Dickens with the entry to which he called attention.
In Dickens, Edmund Wilson saw a secret sympathy with social rebels.
By this time, Dickens had become one of the most intensively studied authors in the English departments of American universities. This situation was to a large extent the result of Wilson’s “Two Scrooges” essay and Johnson’s biography, though it certainly also owed much to the influence of J. Hillis Miller’s seminal 1958 study, Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels, a rereading of the novels in the light of contemporary phenomenological theory, which analyzes literature as representing profound aspects of an author’s consciousness.
In England, however, though some excellent scholarly work was being done on Dickens’s texts and on his social criticism, his academic stock was not generally very high. He was not on the B.A. English syllabus at Oxford, for example, and in Cambridge and elsewhere, students were strongly influenced by F.R. Leavis, who reduced Dickens to a mere appendix, dealing with only one Dickens novel (Hard Times) in his Great Tradition of the English novel.
By the early 1970s, that situation had begun to change in British academe (even Leavis had been converted), while Dickens studies flourished ever more strongly in American colleges. The 100th-anniversary year of Dickens’s death, 1970, saw the launch in the States of two academic journals entirely devoted to Dickens, The Dickens Studies Annual and The Dickens Studies Newsletter (now titled The Dickens Studies Quarterly). The same year saw the publication of Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, heralding the great upsurge of feminist criticism and scholarship that took place over the next 20 years or so. That had an immense impact on Dickens studies (my own Dickens and Women appeared in 1983) and led to a renewal, or rather intensification, of interest in Dickens’s relationships with women and his representations of them in fiction, as can be seen in Fred Kaplan’s 1988 Dickens: A Biography, for example. Then, in 1991, came the publication of Claire Tomalin’s thoroughly researched and highly acclaimed The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens.
During the last 20 years, there has been continued scholarly as well as general interest in the Dickens-Ternan relationship and in its possible effects on Dickens’s later work. The relationship’s history and nature at any stage still remain almost completely obscure, however. How did it change, as surely it must have, over the 12 years it lasted? Did Dickens and his “dear girl” ever cohabit at secret addresses? What had they been doing together in France when in June 1865 they were involved in a terrible train crash on the journey back to London? Did they have a child who died in infancy? Were there other children? To what was Dickens referring when he wrote to an intimate woman friend in 1867 that “it would be inexpressibly painful to [Ternan] to think that you knew her history”? Did he suffer his fatal stroke when in her company?
Answers to some of these questions might throw interesting new light on some aspects of Dickens’s later writings, in which the torments of unrequited or imperfect love is a major theme, as are secrecy and dualism, and in which there are a number of poignant child deaths. They might also help to illuminate a haunting remark made by Dickens himself in a review of a biography of an old friend of his, the poet Walter Savage Landor, written the year before Dickens’s death: “The life of almost any man possessing great gifts, would be a sad book to himself.”
