The Great Charles Dickens Scandal by Michael Slater

Author:Michael Slater
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300112191
Publisher: Yale University Press

This is followed by a version of the misdirected jewels story, which is represented as having been a wake-up call for Catherine who, ‘insulted by [Dickens's] making love under her very roof to a girl of eighteen’, immediately ‘flared into a scene’ with him. In Pope-Hennessy's version this ‘scene’ ends with Catherine reluctantly yielding to Dickens's request that she should demonstrate her belief in Ellen's innocence by paying a call on Mrs Ternan – then follows Kate's account, as told to Storey, about finding her distressed mother putting on her bonnet to go and visit the Ternans. Later, Pope-Hennessy incorporates into her narrative, this time with acknowledgement to Wright, the details from his autobiography about the evidence of the Camberwell (Peckham) rate-books and about the hearsay evidence for Dickens's visits to Ellen in Peckham. She herself does not believe ‘that with Ellen Ternan Charles Dickens entered into the ideal relationship he had all his life hankered for’ but deems that ‘nevertheless the association must have given him some pleasure as it was kept going till his death’.

Pope-Hennessy's Charles Dickens was generally welcomed, though V. S. Pritchett in The New Statesman on 15 September was exasperated by its ‘mood of chirruping equanimity’. As to The Dickensian, Dexter, its long-serving editor, died suddenly in 1944, having seemingly concealed from the Dickens Fellowship at large his acceptance of the truth of Storey's report of what Kate Perugini had said. His successor, Leslie C. Staples, was evidently determined to continue the official Fellowship line that the case for believing Ellen and Dickens had been lovers remained at best ‘not proven’. Ralph Straus, however, whom Staples (or perhaps Dexter) had asked to review Pope-Hennessy's biography for The Dickensian, wrote that he ‘found no difficulty whatever in accepting the fact that for some years Ellen Ternan was Dickens's mistress’. He admitted, however, that this was based on his own idea of Dickens's emotional and mental state after the Maria Beadnell disillusionment rather than on any hard evidence. As to such evidence, the new President of the Fellowship, Dickens's lawyer grandson Henry Charles Dickens, robustly declared at the 1945 Fellowship Conference that there was not enough of it ‘on which to hang a cat’.

Four years later a prolific literary topographer named William Kent published his London for the Literary Pilgrim in which, commenting on Dickens's ‘extraordinarily private’ funeral in Westminster Abbey, he noted an interesting discrepancy in the Times report of the occasion. According to this, there were just fourteen mourners but only thirteen of them are actually named. ‘The one omitted’, writes Kent, ‘can safely be conjectured as Ellen Ternan’. Also, in an appendix on the Dickens House Museum in Doughty Street he notes that the Dickens family, including Kate Perugini, had boycotted the opening of the Museum in 1925 on the grounds that it was a ‘memorial’ to Dickens, something he had expressly forbidden in his will. Referring to Kate, Kent added, ‘It is ironical that this lady, so squeamish on this occasion, by the divulgence she made to a friend was to do much to damage her father's reputation as a man’.

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