Richard Davenporthines

Flaws in our national treasure

Charles Dickens remains in his bicentennial year as much a national treasure as Shakespeare, and just as deeply embedded in the English psyche as the Bard, declares Michael Slater, an Emeritus Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of London. Among the innumerable Victorians who sanctified domesticity, sentimentalised hearth and home and idealised family love, Dickens is especially conspicuous.

Few people nowadays know Coventry Patmore’s Angel in the House, but many have seen depictions of Bob Cratchit’s humble Christmas dinner in A Christmas Carol. Dickens’s weekly magazine for the lower middle classes, Household Words, entrenched his reputation as the favourite storyteller of the 19th-century English-speaking world, and as an idealist serving humanity and battling social evils.

Yet the English like to stand on tiptoes, peer into secret compartments and catch their betters philandering. And so, beginning in his lifetime, and mounting to a fervent pitch in the last 80 years, there has been scrutiny of his relations, during the last 12 years of his life, with an intelligent, cultivated and pretty young actress called Ellen (‘Nelly’) Ternan.

Was Dickens’s involvement with Ternan sexual or platonic? Claire Tomalin, whose 1990 biography of Ternan is a classic, concludes that they were sexual lovers. Slater suspects that Ternan gave birth in Paris in 1863 to Dickens’s child, who swiftly died. Yet he is fair enough to give prominence to the opinion of Peter Ackroyd, who published a rousing biography of Dickens in 1990.

Ackroyd is an exceptional man who recognises exceptionality in others. He feels that it is ‘almost inconceivable’ that Dickens ‘consummated’ his love for Ternan, because she provided him with ‘the realisation of one of his most enduring fictional fantasies’, that of ‘sexless marriage with a young, idealised virgin’. Ackroyd’s idea is not dissimilar to the reality of Gore Vidal, who lived for 53 years with Howard Austen without once laying a finger on him, because he preferred Austen to serve as the fictive fantasy substitute for the dead love of his boyhood, Jimmy Trimble.

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