Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women

Charles Dickens led a rich and varied life.  Driven by ambition as well as nervous energy, he not only wrote books that illuminated the dark underbelly of London life during the middle nineteenth century but he also threw himself into schemes and projects that were designed to help alleviate the suffering he witnessed as well as survived.

Jenny Hartley's book, Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women, focuses on the Urania House and the 12 years that Dickens was intimately involved with it, from 1846 to 1858.  He essentially talked heiress Angela Burdett-Coutts, who was already philanthropically oriented, to spend some of her millions on creating a house to which a handful of "fallen women" (i.e., prostitutes and unwed mothers) could go to for a year in order to learn the skills and manners needed in order to emigrate and start a new life abroad as a servant with an eye on marriage.

I have had this book on my TBR shelf for a number of years and finally put it on my TBR Pile Challenge list for this year.  While I wasn't disappointed, it fell a bit short of the mark for me simply because while there is a fair amount of info about the various women that Coutts and Dickens helped or tried to help--there were some spectacular failures--there is almost no information about how they women who actually did emigrate fared.  So I ended feeling that I only really got half of the story.  But, to be fair, I read the book to learn about Dickens's involvement in the house, and that the book delivered superbly.

My favorite parts were when Hartley wove into the narrative of the history of Urania House the actual novels that Dickens was working on at the time and how the stories of the real women--Dickens took massive notes and wrote many letters to Coutts and others about the particulars of the women's lives--became immortalized in David Copperfield, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and in Dombey and Son.

It's often said that Dickens's women are either saints or sinners, and while I can see why that is said--and I've often made this complaint myself--reading this book helped me to understand why that is so.  He was enthralled with that cliche'd dark underbelly and it shaped the fictional worlds he created.

Here's a passage from the book that describes how Dickens interviewed prospective girls before they were admitted to the House for their year's training.

Dickens was the one doing the interviewing, and as the process evolved its confidentiality appealed to him.  What started as a formal questionnaire with 'printed inquiries' transformed itself under his pen.  No longer a matter of forms to be filled in by 'us,' the Case Book was to be for him alone.  The secret book would bulge with the life stories of the Urania women ghost-written by Dickens.  Their back stories would be his great dividend.  The Urania Case Book is Dickens's ur-text, the book behind his other books.

The Case Book is lost, however.  It's been searched for since Dickens's death in 1870.  Hartley convincingly speculates that he burnt it along with stacks of letters and other personal documents in the bonfire he indulged in shortly after he left his wife, Catherine. In fact it was that split with Catherine that ended his involvement with Urania House, as Coutts sided with Catherine, stopped funding Urania House, and broke contact with Dickens.

I find it psychologically interesting that Dickens's affair with Nelly Ternan, which led to the breakup of his marriage and home, marked the next and final major stage of his life.  He moved from trying to rescue hundreds of women to "rescuing" one, who in the final irony, he seduced and so made a "fallen" woman.  If you're interested in learning about this stage of his life, I recommend Claire Tomalin's excellent book, The Invisible Woman: The Story of Ellen Ternan and Charles Dickens.

Felicity Jones and Ralph Fiennes as Nelly Ternan and Dickens in the movie adaptation of The Invisible Woman.

A Tale of Two Cities - Allegory and/or Apologia

My first official classic of 2013 is what I term a Classic classic--it's one of those top five or ten books that just about everyone has either heard of, been forced to read in school, or shows up on a Jeopardy question in the easiest category.  My list of Classic classics includes The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Moby Dick, and A Tale of Two Cities.

For some reason, I never got around to reading A Tale of Two Cities until now but what a wonderful treat. It is every bit as good as its reputation and is the best Dickens novel that I've read.  I loved just about everything about it--the tight focus of the plot, the limited cast of characters, the interwoven themes of redemption/resurrection/forgiveness/sacrifice/retribution, the historical setting, and all the doubles (cities and characters).  I'm looking forward to reading Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde later this year, and comparing both to The Picture of Dorian Gray.  I really like doppelgangers!

And then there's the writing--of all his novels, I feel that in this one Dickens is not showing off, preening by inventing character after character, and meandering his way to a point.  It's focused, tight, and it works. There are some vividly beautiful passages (I already blogged about his first description of Sydney Carton, which took my breath away), and some stunning imagery (e.g., the sun and the moon, rising and setting, illuminating horrific scenes and blessing domestic ones), all of which combine to make a great novel. It's a brilliant premise for a novel, and Dickens executes it brilliantly.

Now that I've gushed sufficiently, I'll get down to what I really want to talk about in this post and what I thought about whilst reading the novel.  I've heard the theory that the characters an author invents are actually facets of himself and the story a novelist writes is ultimately a story about himself.

With regards to A Tale of Two Cities and Dickens, I totally subscribe to this theory.  While hundreds of term papers have been written on how Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton are two contrasting aspects of a single individual, namely Dickens, and it's now fairly well-documented and accepted that Lucie Manette was modeled on Nelly Ternan, Dickens' mistress, It strikes me that the characters of Dr. Manette and Jarvis Lorry are also aspects of Dickens and reflect facets of his relationship to Nelly/Lucie.

The novel was written in 1859, shortly after Dickens had irrevocably broken his marriage.  After years of moaning, he had moved out in 1858 and established a separate residence from his wife.  In the introduction to the novel, he acknowledges that he came up with the idea for the book whilst acting in Wilkie Collins's play, The Frozen Deep, in 1857 with members of his family and friends.  One of those friends was Nelly Ternan, an actress, who along with her sister and mother had been recruited to help fill out the cast.  Dickens fell in love with Nelly, and in a relatively short time, set her up in her own household and assumed the role of lover, father, husband, caretaker, benefactor, and champion of not only Nelly but her mother and sisters.

In a way, it is easier for me to see Dickens in Jarvis Lorry (i.e., the benevelent business man who toils for years for others--rescuing, managing, and organizing the lives and cares of those around him) and Dr. Manette (i.e., the intelligent, capable man who became obsessessed with work during his years of imprisonment, and who slips into dementia when severely stressed), than in Carton and Darnay.   Carton and Darnay are handsome, young, noble (though one does a good job of being a reprobate), and worthy of Lucie's love.  They are the lover aspect of Dickens, albeit a Janus-type lover.  Mr. Lorry is the caretaker and organizer side of Dickens, and Dr. Manette is the manic artist (note that even Dr. Manette has a split personality!) who must be cared for even while he is caring for others.

Not content to stop thinking along these lines, it also occurred to me that Madame Defarge can be seen as representative of Dickens' wife Catherine, and Dr. Manette's time in the Bastille as the 18 years that Dickens felt himself to be "buried alive" in their marriage.  While the Dickenses were married for 28 years before Dickens walked out, their early years together were happy ones.  Taking this even further, I can see in Miss Pross, Lucie's companion, Georgina Hogarth, Dickens' sister-in-law, who remained loyal to him after the separation and kept house for him.  It is not insignificant that Miss Pross was rendered deaf after defeating Madame Degarge, just as Georgina must have been deaf to her family and friends who railed at her for deserting her sister for Dickens.

Finally, getting back to Carton and Darnay, I can see in Sydney Carton's assertion of his will, his insistence on sacrificing himself for Charles Darney and Lucie, Dickens' own vindication of the assertion of his will to break his marriage and defy social norms so that he could create a new life with Nelly. 

One of the motifs throughout the book is weaving--Madame Defarge and The Vengeance are the Fates from Greek mythology, controlling the destiny of the mortals.  Dickens repeatedly talks about how they knit the records of the people they denounce. And Book 2, the book in which Lucie reigns as the lovely goddess with a plane tree in her backyard, no less, is titled "The Golden Thread."  The overall tone of the novel is oppressive with destiny.  There is an inevitability as France moves into chaos and terror and Darnay is trapped tighter and tighter within the madness.  But Sydney's assertion of his will overcomes Darnay's preordained fate to die for the sins of his fathers.

Darnay's destiny was to die, but Sydney's will overcame that fate.  Free will conquered destiny so that love could reign.  Whether it was subconscious or not, for me A Tale of Two Cities is a reflection of Dickens' love for Nelly Ternan and what it meant for him to break with his wife and family in order to make a new life with her.

Ever since I read Peter Acrkyod's bio of Dickens roughly twenty years ago, I've really had a problem liking Charles Dickens as a person.  Reading A Tale of Two Cities has helped me understand the man behind the story and be more sympathetic to how he felt about his life, his work, and the people he loved.  Whether he saw his story as an allegorical tale, I see it as an apologia for the actions he took in his personal life.

If you're interested in reading more about Dickens' relationship with Nelly Ternan, I can recommend Claire Tomalin's wonderful book, The Invisible Woman.

A Tale of Two Cities counts for books read in two of my 2013 challenges...Back to the Classics, of course, and Historical Fiction.

Now I have to decide which adaptation to watch.  Any suggestions?

Daniel Day-Lewis May Head OUT THE WINDOW to Play Charles Dickens

Lynda from Echostains mentioned in her comment to my first post on The Invisible Woman that she had seen a documentary about the affair Charles Dickens had with actress Nelly Ternan. I Googled and didn't find the one she mentioned, but did find this article.

To cut and paste,

It was recently announced that writer/director Armando Iannucci would follow up the uproarious Brit-comedy In the Loop with Out The Window, a recount of the secret love affair between renowned author Charles Dickens and actress Nelly Ternan. It seems that it is merely the best of times, as the Victorian project is attracting some serious talent: The Observer reports Oscar-winner Daniel Day-Lewis (There Will Be Blood) is now the frontrunner to portray Dickens in the biopic, with Ben Whishaw (Bright Star) also in the running.

I think Daniel Day-Lewis would make a terrific Dickens!

More on Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens

I finished up The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, by Claire Tomalin, and am happy to say that it only got better and better. This is one of the best books I've read in a long time.

I loved Tomalin's ability to weave in lit crit with biographical elements with historical perspective and felt an immense amount of satisfaction in seeing a portrait of Dickens emerge that was somewhat different, and more sympathetic, than I had had before. I last read about Dickens about 10 years ago when I read Peter Ackroyd's bio and felt so angry with the man for his treatment of his wife Catherine that I found his novels unreadable afterwards. While Tomalin certainly doesn't sugar-coat Dickens' character, she does show him as a much more conflicted author/artist/man, and I felt much more sympathy for him as I got to know Nelly than I did before.

Here's some of the interesting things I marked as I read...

While we think of Dickens as the epitome of the Victorian age, he "was formed by the Regency and kept some of its traits; he always favored colored plumage over the black frock-coated aspect of true Victorian man. And although the long curls of his youth were coarsening and thinning, a mustache and beard now covered his lip and chin, there was nothing patriarchal about these, rather a hint of the raffish and piratical...He held himself as straight as a soldier and moved with a dancer's agility; his step was quick, light and precise." p. 78 Chapter 6, "The Amateur: Dickens in 1857"

Tomalin discusses at length the irony (or perhaps hypocrisy) of Dickens, the champion of the Fallen Woman (in both his stories as well as the work he did with Angela Coutts to rehabilitate young unmarried girls who became pregnant), who establishes as his mistress a young, dependent girl, casting himself in the role of the villain who corrupts innocence. While he did not abandon Nelly as Steerforth abandons Little Em'ly in David Copperfield, the life she lived as his mistress was definitely shadowy, on the margins, locked away from respectability.

Dickens lived a frantic double life so that his public and even some of his friends didn't know what she was to him. Tomalin also suggests that Dickens's struggles with his guilt manifests itself in his later works, especially Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities. In the latter, Tomalin makes the case that Nelly was the physical model for Lucie Manette:

As his eyes rested on a short, slight, pretty figure, a quantity of golden hair, a pair of blue eyes that met his own with an inquiring look, and a forehead with a singular capacity (remembering how young and smooth it was), of rifting and knitting itself into an expression that was not quite one of perplexity, or wonder, or alarm, or merely of a bright fixed attention, though it included all the four expressions...

After Dickens died, Nelly created an entirely new life for herself--she lopped ten years off of her age, found herself a handsome husband, had two children, and for awhile prospered. She and her husband fell on hard times, but there is no evidence that he ever knew about her former life, and her children did not find out that their mother was more to Charles Dickens than a god-daughter until after she had died.

I enjoyed the research and thoughtful analysis that Tomalin put into this work--it has gone a long way to rehabilitating Dickens in my eyes. I still think he treated Catherine in a shabby way, but he did his best to protect and support Nelly in her gilded cage. He wasn't able to set her free until he died, but I got the feeling in reading this book that he was fully aware of the price that he had to pay to pursue his passion for her. It's a sad story, probably sadder than any he ever wrote.

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

I've started an absolutely terrific bio by Claire Tomalin, The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens. Tomalin is one of my favorite biographers anyway--easy to read, a reliable historian with footnotes and endnotes galore, who is careful to note when the factual record ceases and her speculation begins.

Ellen "Nelly" Ternan was Charles Dickens' mistress during the latter part of his life. He met her in 1857 when he was 45 and she was 18. I've just read part 1 of the bio, which chronicles her family and years before Dickens.

More than reading about Nelly, I found Tomalin's description of the theatrical world into which she was born absolutely fascinating. She was from an acting family, as were most actors and actresses of the Georgian and Victorian periods. Her mother was the most successful of the family, and played leading roles in the regional theatres as well as occasionally in London. Nelly had two older sisters, Fanny, who was a "prodigy" and an immensely popular child actress whose star faded as she matured, and Maria, who also was also an actress. Nelly's father, also an actor and theatre manager, died in an insane asylum when she was quite young, and the family survived by hard work in the theatres. Until she was 16, they were essentially homeless--traveling around England, Scotland, and Ireland, performing and living in hotels and cheap lodgings, and working hard.

Nelly's mother and sisters often acted in male roles as well--her sister Fanny did male impressions, including a popular one of Richard III. I can only imagine what that was like! Nelly was considered the least talented of the four women, but was hardworking and uncomplaining in true Dickensian heroine style.

Tomalin also talks at length about how actresses, while not considered ladies because they worked for pay, were able to control their lives far more than other women of the age. They were exposed to more of the world, regularly negotiated their salaries and could organize and promote benefit evenings in which they were entitled to a portion of the ticket proceeds. Tomalin points out that Nelly Ternan, because of the life she led until she met Dickens, was far less sheltered and much more aware of the world and how it worked than Dickens' daughters who were her contemporaries.

Nelly's sister Fanny, who married Anthony Trollope's brother Thomas, wrote a fictional account of the experience of being an actress, Mabel's Progress, which was published by Dickens. In the book, she is able to:

...show the good qualities of theatre people and to mock the prejudice of those who see a career on the stage as nothing but exhibitionism and sin. She gives a vivid account of working in Ireland with a country company and then in a London theatre, with no glossing over the dirty lodgings with black beetles on the brick floors, the shared beds, the inevitable diet of bread, cold meat and beer, the hard slog of learning four new parts in a week while making costumes, and rehearsing all day and acting long hours in the evening...

Nelly met Dickens when he wanted to take his amateur production of The Frozen Deep on the road. He hired professional actresses to play the female parts because the wives, sisters, and daughters of his friends as well as his own daughters couldn't possibly sully their reputations by appearing in a play on the road. The Ternan family was recommended as ladylike, accomplished, and available, and he hired them.

The title stems from the fact that there is very little historical record of Nelly herself. Dickens Inc. was apparently an incredibly powerful PR machine that kept the existence of Nelly and her relationship to Dickens suppressed until well into the 20th century.

I trust the rest of the book, now that Dickens has met Nelly, will be as fascinating as the first part.

Wishful Wednesday: Tomalin on Dickens and Ternan

This meme hosted by The Bluestocking Guide.

Last night I was reading a bit of Nick Hornby's Polysyllabic Spree and was drawn in by his discussion of Claire Tomalin's The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens. Since I am consumed by the Victorians these days, enjoy literary biographies, and think Tomalin is a first-rate biographer, this is definitely now on my wish list.



The blurb on Amazon is only fueling my desire to get my hands on this book:

This is the story of someone who - almost - wasn't there; who vanished into thin air. Her names, dates, family and experiences very nearly disappeared from the record for good. 'Claire Tomalin's multi-award-winning story of the life of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens is a remarkable work of biography and historical revisionism. It not only returns the neglected actress to her rightful place in history, but provides a compelling and truthful portrait of the great Victorian novelist.' A biography of high scholarship and compelling detective work.'