Other Women (19 page)

Nelly and Maria were performing in a play in the town and Dickens went along to see them. He was outraged at the treatment the women were given by the audience and defended them fiercely. This was followed by a series of social outings, visiting local attractions, going to the races and showing off in front of the ladies.

At some point in the drama Catherine is supposed to have opened a parcel from her husband containing a bracelet. It was obviously not meant for her but for young Ellen ‘Nelly’ Ternan – and poor Catherine knew it. When Dickens was confronted with his wife’s suspicions, that he was having an extramarital affair, and with a girl young enough to be his daughter, Dickens was most self-righteous and claimed that he had no designs on the purity of the girl. Perhaps there was something in this. Maybe there was no sexual relationship between Dickens and Nelly Ternan. Perhaps Dickens really did require a girl of virginal beauty to stimulate his creativity, as his own sweet Mary Hogarth had, as had the youthful Maria Beadnell and the ever faithful but now mature Georgina Hogarth. All this is speculation, however, and it may be that any proof of a more physical relationship has been lost in the dozens of letters destroyed by both Dickens and Nelly.

Another source claims that the bracelet was actually a pendant with a portrait of Dickens in it, given by him to Nelly. It came to Catherine’s notice when the item came back from the jewellers where it had been repaired. According to the same source, it was a jealous Georgina Hogarth who opened the parcel and told her sister about it. Catherine is supposed to have attacked her husband with her brush and comb.

In December 1857 Dickens had his dressing room – adjoined to the bedroom he had for so many years shared with Catherine – turned into a small bedroom for himself. The door between the two rooms was sealed up. Catherine was told none of this directly. It was almost the end of the marriage. Catherine was to receive one more housekeeping cheque and that would be it. In Dickens’s mind, he was free to follow the passion of his heart and to begin his financial support of Nelly. Initially it began in subtle ways such as buying her a performance engagement with a theatre at the Haymarket. Dickens confessed to J.B. Buckstone, manager of the theatre, that this would not be the last of his interest in the young lady.

Dickens and Catherine’s marriage came to its absolute end about three months later. Dickens had tried to come to an amicable arrangement with Catherine, or at least he pretended it was. He first suggested that they cohabit at Tavistock House with her keeping out of his way during the daytime but continuing to act as hostess to his friends and business guests. When this was not acceptable Dickens suggested Catherine move into the flat at Gad’s Hill with a single servant; he would stay in the family residence with the children and be looked after by Georgina, Catherine’s younger sister.

Catherine stood her ground and refused to be humiliated by her husband. In the end they settled for a formal separation. Dickens unkindly claimed that Catherine was suffering inexplicable and outrageous jealousy and that she was apt to imagine things.

To add insult to injury Dickens also kept asserting that Catherine had been and was still incapable of normal maternal feelings for her children and that she had never loved them or cared for them as she should. The list of complaints against poor Catherine grew with the business of separation. He said she was begging to be released from her unhappy marriage and that she knew she had been unfair to her husband. He said outright that she suffered from delusions, and even went as far as pretending, for the benefit of any visitor to the house, that she loved and played with her children.

At the same time his infatuation for Nelly became more intense; although Dickens tried hard to keep it out of the public eye he could not help dropping hints all over the place that he was very interested in some beautiful young creature. What Nelly thought at the time is not known, as all correspondence between herself and Dickens was deliberately destroyed, as was his wish on his deathbed.

In 1860 Dickens supplied the financial means for the Ternan family to take out a lease on a not insubstantial house in Houghton Place; the lease was put into Nelly’s own name on her twenty-first birthday that same year. It was here that Dickens was a regular visitor. Dickens would take Nelly Ternan and Georgina Hogarth, who had remained part of his household when he and Catherine split up, to social events in London, not seeming to be worried that they were all three seen in public together.

In 1861, having sold Tavistock House, Dickens rented a place in the vicinity of the Ternan residence so that he could visit often. He not only made sure the Ternan family had all they needed for a respectable and comfortable life but he also helped Fanny, the eldest daughter, to go abroad to study. He saw himself as the benefactor to a family of talented and deserving young women, in this way always justifying his attentions to the family to his friends.

Nelly Ternan did at some stage become the kept woman in Charles Dickens’s later life. She gave up her acting career and lived in one or other of the places he rented under a false name. At one time it is thought that Nelly and her mother were living in Condette in France, as at one time Dickens was making numerous trips to the Continent with unexplained absences from legitimate activities.

About 1863 Charles was offered a lucrative deal to take a six-month tour of Australia, sponsored by a Melbourne catering company. It would have drawn in an immense £10,000 (around £585,000 today) but would have meant half a year away from his beloved. Dickens did not take the offer.

There is no evidence left as to the absolute nature of the relationship between Dickens and Nelly Ternan. One of Dickens’s daughters was sure that an illegitimate child had been born to them, but who died in infancy. Yet nothing has been recorded of this possibility.

Then in 1865, on Friday 9 June, Dickens was travelling on a train with Nelly and another woman, who was probably her mother, when the train crashed off a bridge. Dickens was busy helping the injured but he made sure his companions, who remained nameless, were safely put into care. Dickens had been afraid that he may be called as a witness at the inquest to the crash and that it would come out that he had been travelling with Nelly. However, he did not have to appear at the inquest and was able to keep Nelly’s name out of the press.

After Dickens’s death Nelly confessed to the Revd William Benham that she was ashamed of the affair she’d had with Dickens, implying that it had involved sexual intimacy but not openly declaring so. It may be that she felt guilty about being the catalyst that split Dickens from his wife and then accepted the man’s financial support, or that she was in all ways Dickens’s mistress and that this was the intimacy she spoke of to the Revd Benham. She told him that the feelings of regret at having been Dickens’s companion had intruded upon their life together and that her own guilt had brought unhappiness to both of them.

Ellen ‘Nelly’ Ternan was left a lifelong legacy by Dickens in his will. It was enough to make her independent and comfortable. At age 37 – but obviously retaining her youthful beauty because she was able to pretend she was only 24 – Nelly Ternan married George Wharton Robinson, aged 26. Nelly’s sister Maria was instrumental in introducing the couple at a party in Oxford where George was a recent graduate. They set up a boys’ school in Margate and had two children together, a boy, Geoffrey, and a girl, Gladys. When George was ill in 1886 they sold their school. Life was financially difficult as Mrs Robinson, especially after the school had gone. Both Nelly and George took on teaching commitments and also ran an unsuccessful market garden for a short time. George died in 1910. Nelly went to live with her eldest sister Frances but died only four years later of cancer.

When the couple’s son, Geoffrey, returned home from having fought in the First World War, he was able to look into his family documents. He discovered that his mother had lied about her age and that she had been an actress, along with her sisters and mother. During an interview with Henry Dickens after some of the findings, Geoffrey was shocked to learn about his late mother’s relationship with Charles Dickens and possibly about the birth of an illegitimate child. Geoffrey burnt all the documents he had received on his mother’s death and apparently never spoke of her again.

Wilkie Collins was a close long-time friend of Charles Dickens. He witnessed the breakdown of the Dickenses’ marriage, knew about his passion for the lovely young Ellen ‘Nelly’ Ternan, and became, through the marriage of Dickens’s daughter Katie to Collins’s brother Charles, a sort of relation. Collins didn’t judge his friend on the matter of his affair of the heart, although when being sounded out by Dickens on the matter he did advise him to leave love well alone: falling in love was not the problem but what was to be done when one fell out of it again.

At the time of Dickens’s emerging passion for Ellen ‘Nelly’ Ternan, about the time of their ‘Lazy Walking Tour’, Collins had not yet met the woman who was to live with him for almost the rest of his life.

Caroline Graves (
c
.1830–95) was and is still very much a mystery. When she came into Collins’s life she told him she was much younger than she really was, a lie that she perpetuated for a very long time. She also made out that she was born into a gentleman’s family and that her husband, supposedly dead, had been of independent means. She did not even go by her christened name, Elizabeth, but called herself Caroline (this may have been a second name, which would not be unusual to use as her preferred name). When, or if, Caroline revealed the truth about herself is unknown.

There is a fanciful story told by the painter John Everett Millais to his son telling how Collins first met Caroline Graves and how it inspired the novel
A Woman in White
. Collins and his brother lived together at Hanover Terrace. Millais had dined with them and then the three men had wandered back to Millais’s studio in Gower Street. They were near to Finchley Road when they were startled by an anguished cry coming from a nearby garden. Before any of them could respond, the garden gate was flung open and a beautiful young woman dressed in flowing white garments became illuminated in the moonlight. She looked towards the men as if begging for help but then turned and fled down the street. Only Collins followed her, and wasn’t seen again by his friend or family that night.

This story fits in wonderfully as a tale of artistic inspiration but it is doubtful as to whether all the details are accurate. It is suspected that the story had been heavily embroidered by Millais for the amusement of his son.

It is thought that the woman was Caroline Graves and that she had been held prisoner in the house for several months. This story came from the lips of Kate Perugini (formerly Collins’s sister-in-law) when she recounted it to Gladys Storey for her book
Dickens and Daughter
. It was not known if the captor was the woman’s husband or some other man, nor where her young daughter was at the time.

Other sources suggest that Caroline, a widow, met Collins when she lived with her widowed mother-in-law near Collins’s lodgings in Howland Street. This is certainly a less dramatic story than the previous one and, therefore, may well be the true one. And, according to the same source, Collins did not settle down to live with Caroline until he was financially stable.

Caroline began to live with Collins probably around 1858. She claimed she was a widow, her husband having died in 1852, but there seems to be some doubt about this as well. It also turned out that her father was not a gentleman named Courtney but a carpenter called John Compton, her mother his wife Sarah. Her husband, George Graves, whom she married in Bath in 1850, was not a man of independent income but a hard-working shorthand writer who was the son of a stonemason. These were humble roots indeed. The couple had a daughter, Elizabeth, who went to live with her mother and Collins.

Whatever Caroline’s history really was she certainly gave Collins a comfortable home both physically and emotionally. What would have sealed Caroline’s happiness with Collins would have been marriage, but that was one thing he always denied her. Ten years after they first met Caroline suddenly left Collins to marry a man called Joseph Clow. Collins made no objections and even went to the wedding. The marriage was over in two years or less and Caroline returned to her home with Collins as if nothing had changed.

Because of her situation as a kept woman, Caroline could not entertain publicly for her lover’s guests unless they were among his close friends, neither could she attend public functions with him. For the sake of propriety, Collins told people she was his housekeeper. However, Caroline was able to travel abroad with Collins as no one would know the true nature of their relationship. She was devoted to Collins, despite his refusing to marry her and the fact that he was keeping a much younger woman, Martha Rudd and their three children, not far away. She nursed him when he was ill, which happened frequently, often seeing to his business and correspondence on his behalf. In his final illness she was his constant companion and nurse. She was with him when he died in 1889.