rewriting history
The Invisible Woman
Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington,
Don’t put your daughter on the stage
The lyrics of Noël Coward‘s famous song were echoing in my head as I read Claire Tomalin‘s detailed description of the perils and hardships of the acting life for women and children in the 1800s in her biography: The Invisible Woman. Actresses were equated with exhibitionism and sin, but Tomalin draws out the virtues and dignity and courage of families who eked out a meagre living from this occupation and the extreme hardships they endured in so doing.
The invisible woman of the title is Ellen/Nelly Ternan, who was put on the stage as a toddler along with her sisters, by their mother, Frances/Fanny Jarman herself an actress. No less a personage than Charles Dickens took a keen interest in the family and did what he could to protect and sponsor them. There was nothing remarkable in this initially since he was known for his philanthropic actions, and he himself was a married man with ten children.
[He had] a genuine wish to do good by reclaiming lost innocents.
But at the same time he was indulging a need of his own, a curiosity about another world, and particularly a world of pretty young women who existed on the margins of society.
So when, after his son caught him out and about with a young lady, he suddenly separated himself from his wife of 22 years, Catherine, blaming her (a mental disorder; a long standing wish on her part to go their separate ways; deep incompatibility), everything changed. And pretty innocent Nelly Ternan, a girl 27 years his junior, was the reason. He was infatuated by her and went to inordinate lengths to establish a relationship with her without leaving a trace. So successful was he indeed in the latter mission, that Tomalin admits she has struggled to piece together the fragments from here and there, and some of what she has recorded is speculative though based on strongly suggestive evidence.
Before his liaison with Nelly, Dickens himself had already established a complicated life with frequent absences, extensive travels, multiple abodes, and these now helped him to obscure his split life and rendezvous with Nelly. A diary which Dickens somehow mislaid has since been found and reveals that he managed somehow to spend a third of his time with or near Nelly, one third at his main country residence and his social circle, and one third serving his adoring public.
I am here, there, everywhere, nowhere.
Given that Nelly was a billed actress, the muse of Dickens, and sister-in-law of Anthony Trollope‘s brother, it’s remarkable that she has been omitted from the many biographies and accounts of the famous names of her day. But such was the fear of scandal or disgrace at the time, and Dickens had all to lose. His reputation was very high indeed. He himself did much of the work in obliterating his middle-aged obsession from the records, with his consummate skill in reconstructing history and the world around him to fit with his will and wish, obliging and expecting everyone else to conform to his account of things. He easily deluded himself when the facts didn’t suit him.
Dickens had no difficulty in throwing out high-sounding phrases when the situation demanded … He used every weapon to get his own way.
Nelly herself was a complicated and resourceful woman who was very nearly crushed by the weight of Dickens in her life. Small, pretty, and well deveoped, she was only a moderate performer though a good mimic, but was naturally clever and read voraciously. It was flattering for a ‘nobody’ to be courted by a distinguished and famous older man.
The love of the great man, which must have seemed to promise so much when she was twenty, had become both destructive and a barrier cutting her off from any future of her own … he had also become a millstone round her neck.
Even after his death everyone colluded with the myth about his virtuous life.
[They remained] intent on giving the world an image …
which, if not sanctified, was at least most scrupulously sanitized.
The nation mourned and sang his praises.
Nelly was now free. Free to reinvent herself as a cultured, well-read literary lady, with enough to live on comfortably, initially abroad where society was notably more relaxed about single women with unknown or questionable antecedents. She shed twelve years from her official age, and before long in Oxford she had a brief dalliance with a young man many more years her junior, George Wharton Robinson, an undergraduate destined for the Church, before returning to a busy social whirl in Europe. But she became quickly bored with a life without purpose and five years after meeting him, she married Mr Robinson, dissuaded him from entering the Church, and instead they together acquired a boy’s school in a seaside town.
[She was] altogether more impressive than the usual wife of a
Margate schoolmaster; and she knew it.
Two children of her own followed, only Nelly herself knowing that she was in her forties by this time. Indeed she shed a further two years in the 1881 Census, a reduction of fourteen years, making her two years younger than her husband! At last she had found happiness and purpose in her life, and she could use her acting skills to good effect both with her children and her pupils. And indeed subsequently she returned to the stage as an actress again.
Strange then that she should choose this time to drop hints to select people about her time as Dicken’s mistress. But so she did. However, her revelations gained little traction and in time the couple again fell on hard times and plummeted down the social ladder once more. After George’s death the two remaining Ternan sisters grew very close again, and indeed lived together until their deaths within a few months of each other. It was only then that her son, Geoffrey, discovered amongst her papers information that revealed his mother was not the person she had claimed to be; it damaged him cruelly.
The rewriting of history is a central theme in this whole story, since Nelly, too, almost succeeded in her attempt, also abetted by Georgina [Dickens’ sister-in-law] and with the support of her sisters. Likewise many Dickensians … have been determined to maintain the version of Dickens they regard as accetable, even … when they know it to be untrue.
Meticulous detective work, elegant writing, and plenty of illustrative photos, make this book, by one of the best female biographers of our time, absorbing and fascinating.