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.

Finding “The Genius of Dickens” at the Charles Dickens House

When we visited London in 2012, I was looking forward to seeing the Charles Dickens House on Doughty Street, where the writer lived with his family for about three years in the late 1830s. This was the 200^th anniversary of his birth; Simon Callow was playing him in the one-man play “The Mystery of Charles Dickens” (written for Callow by the noted writer and Dickens biographer Peter Ackroyd); and I knew a lot more about Dickens and the London of Dickens’ era than when we first visited in 1983.

The only problem was the Charles Dickens House was closed for reconstruction. On his bicentennial birth year. Go figure.

So when we went back this year, I was determined to see it. I had checked and knew it was open. Since my wife was less interested in seeing it, she chose to have a leisurely morning, and off I went, via three tube lines. Surfacing at the Russell Square station (same one you use for the British Museum),  I walked the six blocks or so to Doughty Street, found the house, paid my admission fee, and stepped back in time 170 years.

It’s a narrow structure, four floors and a basement, with narrow stairs. The self-guided tour is well done, and I could stare in wonder at the parlor when the Dickens family entertained, the study, the bedrooms, even the bathroom. The kitchen is in the basement.  The house had been furnished with period furniture, including some furniture from the final home of Dickens, at Gad’s Hill in Kent.

And the house included a small shop; the English are good at small but outstanding. I could have spent hours looking over the books, biographies, book markers, and busts of the writer. As it was, I had to watch the clock; we had plans for later in the morning.

One of books in the shop was a small volume, The Genius of Dickens by Michael Slater. Slater is a well-regarded biographer of Dickens, having not only written an official biography but also several smaller studies, including one on Dickens’ love affair with actress Ellen Ternan.

In The Genius of Dickens, Slater considers the themes that dominate the novels and other writings: fancy (something akin to what we call imagination), innocence, responsibility and earnestness, progress, home, and faith. He uses all of the novels as primary research material, but has also drawn upon articles, letters, writings of contemporaries, and news and magazine reports.

Noting the author’s continuing appeal to readers today, Slater says, however, that “we should always bear in mind that in the first place he was a man of his own age.” Dickens was a Victorian at the age’s high-water mark, sting at the “top of the literary tree in the English-speaking world” (as Slater says) for thirty-five years – no small achievement. It is almost as if Dickens were the right writer for the right time, achieving notice and then fame as literacy was surging, the middle class was growing, and the Industrial Revolution was creating great (if unevenly distributed) wealth and leisure time. In many ways in his writings, Dickens became the conscience of his era

It’s a small volume, yes, but sitting behind it is an exhaustive amount of research. Originally published in 1999 as The Intelligent Person’s Guide to Dickens, it’s full of insight about the man and his work.

I purchased my copy, along with a small, easily packable bust, a bookmark, and a book of walking tours of Dickens’ London. Back outside, I walked in the overcast morning back to the tube station.

Illustration: Dickens Receiving His Characters by William Holbrook Beard (1824-1900), via Wikipedia.