The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens

472 Pages·1991·3.55 MB·English

by  Claire Tomalin

PENGUIN BOOKS
THE INVISIBLE WOMAN
‘This is feminist biography at its best – and it becomes, in Tomalin’s
magical sleuthing, a page-turning Victorian novel while remaining
faithful to biographical truth’ Leon Edel
‘A wonderful book… In telling the Dickens-Ternan story as the story of
two people, Tomalin does more than restore an invisible woman to her
rightful place in history. She gives us a hitherto invisible man as well’
Katha Pollit, Newsday
‘A compulsive read… Claire Tomalin makes the Victorian world
accessible and has a clear, unreverential approach to Dickens
himself… Her picture of the London theatre is equally immediate
and absorbing’ Kate Kellaway, listener
‘As a piece of detective work, this book is elegant and fascinating… As
social history it is illuminating. The careers of the Ternan sisters make
livelier reading than many a novel’ Sue Gaisford, Independent
‘I suspect it will come to be seen as one of the crucial women’s
biographies because of its vivid dramatization of the process by
which women have been written out of history and the closely
associated, but more subtle, process by which women have been
forced to deny their own experiences’ Sean French, New Statesman
& Society
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Claire Tomalin has worked in publishing and journalism all her life. She
was literary editor first of the New Statesman and then of the Sunday
Times, which she left in 1986. She is the author of The Life and Death of
Mary Wollstonecraft, which won the Whitbread First Book Prize for 1974;
Shelley and His World (reissued by Penguin in 1992); Katherine Mansfield:
A Secret Life (1988), a biography of the modernist writer on whom she
also based her 1991 play The Winter Wife; the highly acclaimed The
Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, which
won the 1990 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography, the NCR
Book Award in 1991, as well as the Hawthornden Prize; Mrs Jordan’s
Profession (1995), a study of the Regency actress; Jane Austen: A Life
(1998); a collection of her literary journalism entitled Several Strangers:
Writing from Tliree Decades (1999); and Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self,
which won the Whitbread Biography Award and which went on to win
the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for 2002. All her books are
published by Penguin.
CLAIRE TOMALIN
THE INVISIBLE WOMAN
THE STORY OF NELLY TERNAN AND CHARLES DICKENS
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
First published by Viking 1990
Published with additional material in Penguin Books 1991
18
Copyright © Claire Tomaiin, 1990,1991
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted The acknowledgements on page xiv constitute an
extension of this copyright page Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or
otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other
than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser ISBN: 978-0-14-193726-7
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
PART ONE
1 ‘N’
2 ‘Agreeable and beautiful talents’
3 Family Saga (1790–1845)
4 Little Orphans (1845–1855)
5 Gaslight Fairies (1856–1857)
PART TWO
6 The Amateur: Dickens in 1857
7 Manchester, Doncaster and Scandal (1857–1858)
8 Mornington Crescent (1858–1862)
9 Vanishing into Space (1862–1865)
10 Fanny and Maria get Married (1863–1866)
11 The Year of the Diary (1867)
12 ‘This life is half made up of partings’ (1868–1870)
PART THREE
13 Another Life Begins (1870–1876)
14 The Schoolmaster’s Wife and the Foreign Correspondent: Margate, Rome,
Africa
15 Nelly Tells
16 Southsea
17 Geoffrey
18 Myths and Morals
A Postscript: The Death of Dickens
Notes
Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations
Nelly’s mother, Fanny Jarman, as a young actress (courtesy of Miss
Katharine M. Longley)
Nelly’s father, Thomas Ternan (courtesy of Miss Katharine M. Longley)
Nelly’s mother acting Gertrude to Macready’s Hamlet (Raymond Mander
& Joe Mitchenson Collection)
Dora Jordan, as Cora in Sheridan’s Pizarro (painting by Samuel de Wilde
in the Raymond Mander & Joe Mitchenson Collection)
Cruikshank’s 1841 drawing of a ‘Theatrical Fun-Dinner’ (from the Comic
Almanac)
Maria dressed as a fairy (courtesy of the Board of Trustees of the Victoria
& Albert Museum)
A scene from Atalanta (Illustrated London News)
Street scene after the theatre in the Haymarket (from Henry Mayhew’s
London Labour and the London Poor)
Nelly in 1858 (courtesy of Mrs L. Fields)
Fanny, Nelly and Maria Ternan (courtesy of the Board of Trustees of the
Victoria & Albert Museum)
Dickens as painted by Frith (courtesy of the Dickens House)
Tavistock House, Bloomsbury (courtesy of the Dickens House)
Dickens with his acting group (reproduced from Francesco Berger’s
Reminiscences, Impressions and Anecdotes, courtesy of the British Library)
A modern view of Park Cottage, Islington (courtesy of Geoff Howard)
The Free Trade Hall, Manchester (Manchester Public Libraries)
Nelly Ternan (courtesy of the Board of Trustees of the Victoria & Albert
Museum)
Catherine Dickens (courtesy of the Dickens House)
Georgina Hogarth (courtesy of the Dickens House)
Katey Dickens (courtesy of the Dickens House)
Maria Ternan (courtesy of the Dickens House)
Charles Dickens… clad in spruce frockcoat (courtesy of the Dickens
House)
Painting of the Fallen Woman by Augustus Egg (The Tate Gallery,
London)
A print showing Dickens ministering to a woman passenger after a train
accident in June 1865 (from The Penny Illustrated Paper, Saturday, 24
June 1865, courtesy of the Dickens House)
Villa Ricorboli (courtesy of Robert Cecil Esquire)
The main street of Slough (Slough Library, photograph by Alan Greeley)
Dickens giving his Sikes and Nancy reading (courtesy of the Dickens
House)
Dickens in his last year (courtesy of the Dickens House)
Mrs Ternan with her three daughters in the early 1870s (courtesy of Miss
Katharine M. Longley)
Fanny and her husband, Thomas Adolphus Trollope (courtesy of Robert
Cecil Esquire)
Maria (courtesy of Miss Katharine M. Longley)
Maria’s drawing of her mother (courtesy of the Board of Trustees of the
Victoria & Albert Museum)
Nelly in the mid-1860s (courtesy of Miss Katharine M. Longley)
Nelly in the 1870s (courtesy of the Dickens House)
A drawing of Nelly done in Italy (courtesy of Miss Katharine M. Longley)
Nelly in fancy dress or acting costume, late 1870s (courtesy of the
Dickens House)
Nelly and the Revd George Wharton Robinson after their wedding in
1876 (courtesy of the Dickens House)
Nelly with flowers in her hair (courtesy of Miss Katharine M. Longley)
Nelly with her schoolmaster husband in Margate (courtesy of Mrs L.
Fields)
Nelly with husband and son Geoffrey (courtesy of Mrs L. Fields)
Nelly with her family (courtesy of Mrs L. Fields)
A Roman cartoon showing Maria as a working journalist (courtesy of
Mrs L. Fields)
Geoffrey as Bacchus (courtesy of Mrs L. Fields)
Geoffrey as a clown (courtesy of Mrs L. Fields)
The Revd Benham (courtesy of the Dickens House)
Georgina in old age (courtesy of the Dickens House)
Geoffrey as a young army officer (courtesy of Mrs L. Fields)
Nelly and Fanny in Southsea (courtesy of Mrs L. Fields)
TEXT ILLUSTRATIONS
p. 38: Playbill (from collection in the Public Library of Newcastle upon
Tyne)