When Ellen ‘Nelly’ Ternan first met Charles Dickens, she lived in Islington. What was his interest in her?
Dickens’ 13 year relationship with Ellen Ternan is widely considered to have been of an amorous nature, but there is little proof. Some suggest it was merely an infatuation, or perhaps an unrequited love. It has also been mooted that Nelly was his illegitimate daughter. Whatever the truth, the relationship between Dickens and Nelly was close and lasting.
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The 45 year old Dickens first met Ellen in 1857 when she was 18, only six months older than his youngest daughter, Kate. Known to her family as Nelly, she lived with her mother and sisters at Park Cottage, Islington, in what was then a quiet semi-rural area (their home from 1855 to 1858).
The little house, which still stands at the corner of Northampton Park and St Paul’s Place, was built some time in the late 18th/early 19th century. It was the estate cottage in fields (belonging to the Marquess of Northampton), cultivated by a man named Robert Barr as a nursery for plants.
Ellen Ternan and Charles Dickens both performed in an amateur production of a play called The Frozen Deep, in which Dickens had the lead role. The play had been performed in London, with Dickens’ daughters in the female roles, but a transfer to Manchester required the hiring of professional actresses.
Frances Ternan and her daughters, Fanny, Maria and Ellen, were all actresses and were suggested to Dickens by a friend. Nelly took over the part previously played by Dickens’ daughter Kate.
Kate later said of Ellen:
"Nelly was a small fair-haired pretty actress... She had brains, which she used to educate herself, to bring her mind more on a level with his own. Who could blame her? He had the world at his feet. She was a young girl of eighteen, elated and proud to be noticed by him."
The play was written by Dickens’ friend and literary collaborator Wilkie Collins, to whom the great author is later reported to have confessed his long running affair with Ellen.
Ellen's mother, Frances Ternan, was an established actress and the widow of Thomas Ternan, an actor known for playing tragedies. Tragically, Thomas died in an asylum for the insane when Nelly was still young.
At that time, women often needed to rely on men to provide financial stability and it was a challenge for Mrs Ternan to ensure the well-being and the reputation of her daughters. Park Cottage would have been crowded, particularly as the family would also have employed servants.
Dickens visited Park Cottage, possibly meeting the Ternans there for the first time before casting them in The Frozen Deep, as well as after the production. By this time, many of the neighbouring houses had been built, but some fields still remained very close to the cottage. Nevertheless, he described the house as “unhealthy and unwholesome”.
He moved the Ternans into a better property on Berners Street and provided Nelly with a house in Ampthill Square on her 21st birthday.
This was at a time when Dickens’ 19 year marriage to his wife Catherine was coming to an end. His relationship with Nelly – whatever its nature – was kept quiet. As one of the most famous men in the world, with a towering reputation, he wanted to avoid any possibility of scandal. However, inevitably, there was gossip and speculation of an affair between the two.
According to one story, Dickens sent Nelly a gold bracelet, with a handwritten note, but is was wrongly delivered to his wife. This incident, in 1858, is said to have led to Charles and Catherine’s separation later that year.
In spite of the rumours about Nelly, or perhaps because of them, Dickens insisted that his split with Catherine was entirely above board.
“Mrs Dickens and I have lived unhappily together for many years,” he wrote, “Hardly anyone who has known us intimately can fail to have known that we are in all respects of character and temperament wonderfully unsuited to each other.”
Ellen’s acting career ended in 1860, from which time Dickens supported her financially. He later provided houses for her in Slough and at Nunhead in south London.
Dickens may have funded an extended stay in France for Nelly in 1862/63. Some suggest that Nelly gave birth to his illegitimate child during that time, but the baby did not survive beyond infancy.
In June 1865, Dickens, Nelly and her mother Frances Ternan were returning by rail from a visit to France, when the train derailed while crossing a viaduct at Staplehurst in Kent, killing 10 passengers and injuring 40.
Dickens managed to climb out of the window of their first class carriage, which was teetering over the precipice. He helped Nelly and Frances to safety and then attended to other passengers with his flask of brandy and hat full of water before help arrived three hours later.
Perhaps fearing publicity over the nature of the relationship, he put Nelly and her mother on the next available train to London. He also avoided appearing at the inquest into the crash.
When he died aged 58 in 1870, he left Nelly a bequest of £1,000, the same sum that he bequeathed to his unmarried daughter, ensuring that she was financially secure for the rest of her life.
Ellen Ternan married George Wharton Robinson in 1876. She was 37 and he was 25, but she presented herself as 23. The couple had two children and ran a boys’ school in Margate. She outlived her husband by four years, living her final years with her sister Frances in Southsea before dying of cancer in Fulham in 1914.
A number of scholars and writers have furthered the view that Nelly was Dickens’ mistress.
Dickens' daughter Kate Dickens Perugini provided information to biographer Gladys Storey for her book Dickens and Daughter, published in 1939. She described the relationship as a love affair, which deeply affected Dickens:
"My father was like a madman... This affair brought out all that was worst - all that was weakest in him. He did not care a damn what happened to any of us."
Many Dickens supporters considered the book unreliable, but playwright George Bernard Shaw said that Kate had told him everything in the book 40 years earlier.
Other writers subscribing to this view of the relationship include Thomas Wright in the 1930s and Clare Tomalin, author of the 1990 bookThe Invisible Woman. This was made into a film in 2013 and was the basis for Simon Gray's 2007 play Little Nell.
However, in Peter Ackroyd's 1990 biography of Dickens, he rejected this interpretation of the relationship and the suggestion that Nelly gave birth to his illegitimate child:
"That he was obsessed with her, there can be little doubt. That he maintained his relationship with her until the end of his life, there can be no doubt. That he maintained his affection for her, also, is undeniable... [but] it seems almost inconceivable that theirs was in any sense a 'consummated' affair."
Dickens scholar Katharine Longley researched the lives of Ellen Ternan and Charles Dickens and left a collection of research material to the University of London's Senate House. She concluded that the relationship between them was platonic.
In his 2009 biography of Dickens, Michael Slater reviewed the speculation and evidence and concluded that we “simply do not know”.
Others, including Irish author Cora Harrison and Dickens scholar Brian Ruck, have more recently proposed that Ellen was Dickens’ illegitimate daughter, which might explain the enduring and close nature of the relationship.
All of these possibilities seem feasible.
Before deciding which version you believe, dear reader, please take a look at what Dickens himself wrote in response to rumours that his relationship with Nelly was the reason for his split with Catherine.
Dickens gave a statement to his manager, Arthur Smith, on 25 May 1858 to be shown "to anyone who wishes to do me right, or to anyone who may have been misled into doing me wrong.” It later appeared in the New York Tribune and was widely reported in England.
In the statement, Dickens wrote:
“Two wicked persons… coupled with this separation [from my wife] the name of a young lady for whom I have a great attachment and regard. I will not repeat her name – I honour it too much. Upon my soul and honour, there is not on this earth a more virtuous and spotless creature than that young lady. I know her to be innocent and pure and as good as my own dear daughters.”
Whatever the true nature of Dickens’ interest in Nelly Ternan, the relationship dawned in a small cottage in the fields of Islington, long before the area became an inner city borough of London.
Walks available for booking
For a schedule of forthcoming London On The Ground guided walks, please click here.
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