Charles Dickens in Love by Robert Garnett

Author:Robert Garnett [Garnett, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Literary Figures, Cultural; Ethnic & Regional, General, women
ISBN: 9781639360185
Google: bZ06EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2021-08-31T23:55:45.674273+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Mr. Tringham and the train crash

In the years following Ellen Ternan’s pregnancy, she and Dickens settled into a less eventful routine, though never bland domesticity. They never actually lived together, in fact. Although Ellen was paramount in his affections, he owed most of his time to his family and professional activities. He wrote less, beginning only one novel after finishing Our Mutual Friend in 1865, and leaving it unfinished at his death. But he was scarcely idle. “The older I get,” he boasted the year before his death, “the more I do, and the harder I work.”

During his last five years, however, his health and vigor declined, while Ellen herself may not have been entirely well. Most spectacularly, they nearly died together in a train wreck. But despite ills and accidents and despite his strenuous, protracted reading tours and the difficulties of spending time with her, his devotion to her never faltered; indeed, grew stronger. She was never merely the convenient mistress of a busy man, a voluptuary indulgence for his leisure hours. The most remarkable feature of his affair with Ellen Ternan was not its pyrotechnic origins, nor the complications that ensued—his wife’s eviction, the gossip and scandal, the stealth, the pregnancy—but the steady progress of his love for her, as the excited infatuation of the older man for the young actress grew into a deep affection, admiration, and loyalty. If Mary Hogarth had inspired his young manhood, Ellen became the cult of his later years.

For two or three years after their return from France in early 1863, her whereabouts are difficult to ascertain. During these years, however, he remained mostly in or around London—presumptive evidence that she too was in London, or nearby. She probably continued to live with her mother at 2 Houghton Place, in the house Dickens had purchased for her. More exotic possibilities have been suggested. He is known to have stayed occasionally at a secluded house in Condette, a village near Boulogne, directly across the Channel, and some have suspected that he maintained Ellen there. But there is no evidence that she ever resided in Condette, or indeed that she ever went there at all, though she may well have visited with him. Most or all of his trips across the Channel in 1863 and the following years were made in her company, and Condette would have been a suitably private retreat for them. But he is unlikely to have been content with Ellen living across the Channel by herself, hidden away in a village inconveniently distant from London—and it is hard to imagine why he would have sequestered her in France while he was in England.

Despite the uncertainties, his letters reveal much about his routine during these years.

The center of his professional life was of course London, in particular the offices of All the Year Round on Wellington Street, near Covent Garden. Most of the business and editorial duties of the magazine were discharged by his capable subeditor, W. H. Wills; but

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