"The Mystery of Charles Dickens” by A.N. Wilson

We live in a time when we destroy our monuments. Sometimes it’s physical destruction. Other times, we damn with faint praise – or praise with “faint damn.”

 

A.N. Wilson is a novelist, story writer, biographer, popular historian, British newspaper columnist, and critic. He’s written a lot – a lot – of books, including some 23 novels. His biographical subjects include Leo Tolstoy, Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, C.S. Lewis, Dante, Jesus, St. Paul, Sir Walter Scott, John Milton, Adolph Hitler, Charles, Darwin, Iris Murdoch, Hilaire Belloc, and John Betjeman. He’s also been a columnist for the Daily Mail, the London Evening Standard, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator, New Statesman, and The Observer. 

 

There is the mystery of fifteen pounds, thirteen shillings, and ninepence – which is the story of Dickens’s death, where he actually (or might have) died, and the young woman, Ellen Ternan, who was his mistress. The mystery of his childhood concerns Dickens and the blacking factory, unknown until his friend and first biographer, John Forster, disclosed it after the author’s death. This mystery also concerns the relationship between Dickens, his father, and his mother.

 

A.N. Wilson

The mystery of the cruel marriage focuses on Dickens’s shabby treatment of his wife and the mother of his nine children. Then follows the mystery of his various philanthropic endeavors. Wilson turns his attention to the famous public readings, which likely contributed to the author’s final stroke and death. That’s followed by a look at the work in progress when Dickens died, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and how much if it might have been autobiographical. The summary chapter looks at the mystery of the man and author himself, a summary of what’s come before.

 

Wilson relies heavily upon psychological analysis, assuming that a great deal of the man’s works and life can be directly traced to his upbringing and his complicated relationships with his parents, especially his mother. The connections become as bit tenuous at times, and the reader gets the impression that the author is straining here to make his points. Wilson also offers outright speculation, including that Dickens likely suffered the stroke that killed him at Ellen Ternan’s home and not his own at Gad’s Hill in Kent, as everyone else had reported and recorded, including the author’s own children. 

 

The Mystery of Charles Dickens is not all speculation and psychodrama. Wilson does offer solid insights into many aspects of the man’s life and works. But to cite the author’s imagination and achievements while reducing many of them to the psychological impact of alleged betrayals by one’s parents is “praising with faint damn,” indeed. 

Michael Slater’s “The Great Charles Dickens Scandal”

In 1858, during the production of a play written by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, Dckens met the veteran actress Frances Ternan and her two daughters, Maria and Ellen. That same year, he announced that he and his wife Catherine were separating, which was something of a sensation in Victorian Britain, involving as it did the most popular writer in the English language and a man associated with family values.

For the next 12 years, until his death in 1870, Dickens maintained a relationship with young Ellen Ternan. Exactly what that relationship was has never been truly determined, but it spawned a minor research industry that continues through today.

That research industry is the subject of Michael Slater’s The Great Charles Dickens Scandal, and it may tell us more about the generations that followed Dickens than it does about the man himself.

It’s a fascinating book.

Slater, Professor Emeritus of Victorian Literature and Fellow of Birkbeck College at the University of London, is well positioned to tackle the subject. His doctorate at Oxford was on Dickens’ The Chimes. He’s written an acclaimed biography of Dickens. He’s written several books on aspects of Dickens’ life and times, including Dickens on America and Americans (1970), Dickens and Women (1983), The Genius of Dickens (2011), and Douglas Jerrold 1803-1857 (2002). He’s a past president of the International Dickens Fellowship and editor of its journal, The Dickensian. And he’s served as trustee and president of the Charles Dickens Museum in London.

Ellen Ternan

The man knows his Dickens. What he explores in The Great Charles Dickens Scandal, published in 2012), is what can never ultimately be known about Dickens and Ellen Ternan.

For decades after his death, Dickens’ children maintained something of an iron lock on what was written and known about their father. What began to break the story open was a novel published in 1929, entitled This Side Idolatry. It was written by a journalist for the Daily Express, Carl Eric Bechhofer Roberts, and what he tripped over in his research was the possibility, or likelihood, that Ellen Ternan caused the breakdown in Dickens’ marriage.

Michael Slater

Slater moves decade by decade, describing additional investigatory work by biographers, journalists, defenders and prosecutors, involving significant names in Britain’s literary establishment (including G.K. Chesterton, who was a Dickens defender). By the 1970s, Ellen Ternan starting receiving her due, particularly as a result of the growing popularity of feminist studies. Peter Ackroyd, author of a mammoth biography of Dickens, argued that the relationship was platonic, given Dickens’ own attitudes toward young women (and there’s precious little proof to the contrary).

Slater looks at all of the decades of work and research, and concludes that “the smoking gun” to prove Dickens and Ternan were physical lovers will likely never be found.

But, oh, what lengths people have gone to in the attempt to prove one thing or another. 


Related: Finding "The Genius of Dickens' at the Charles Dickens House.