All my adult life I’ve been reading what I call “a Jane Austen” or “a Charles Dickens”. I simply love the work of both writers. Most recently I read two of Claire Tomalin’s books, Jane Austen: A Life and The Invisible Woman (about an important secretive relationship in Charles Dickens’s life), and they are both finely detailed and entertaining histories of how each of these two authors lived.
In both cases, Tomalin presents a closely viewed account of the author with whom she is concerned. We learn about their books. We get descriptions of the origins of those books. We come to understand how the authors worked. But what makes Tomalin’s accounts so special to me is that she nestles them in detailed descriptions of the houses, gardens, cities, neighborhoods, and fields in which her subjects lived or through which they walked or rode. Tomalin also surrounds each writer with the numerous family and acquaintances each had, in close detail.
The results? I learn so much about the life of the English family in the hinterlands in the late 18th century that Austen’s fictions become even more memorable to me than they once were. The same with Dickens in ”town”, i.e. London, many years later, with Tomalin’s descriptions of his life in the theater, in his clubs, his turbulent family life (ten children from his long-suffering wife Catherine), and his many publishing ventures and travels.
Jane Austen’s family, for example, moved to the small village of Chawton when she was in her twenties and now a spinster:
“(Jane’s brother) Edward had the plumbing renewed for them. This did not mean indoor sanitation, of course; some town houses had water closets by then…but you did not expect the luxury of piped water in a country cottage. An improved pump at the back, and a better cess pit, well away from the house, would be enough. Some structural alterations were also carried out: however much (Jane’s mother) Mrs. Austen liked looking out at the passing world, it was thought better to have the front drawing room window blocked, replaced by a large and pretty Gothic one on the garden side. The ceilings were low and roughly finished, and none of the bedrooms large….
“Mrs. Austen and Martha each had a bedroom to themselves, and there was a ‘Best Bedroom’ kept for guests; family tradition says that Jane continued to share with (her sister) Cassandra….”
This level of detail in its everyday plainness exists throughout the book and much of it for me is exquisite. It gives the reader a real picture of what daily life was like for Jane, her extensive family, and her contemporaries.
Tomalin’s The Invisible Woman tells of the behind-the-scenes relationship of Charles Dickens and Ellen Ternan, a very young actress when they first met who was known to friends as Nelly. She was eighteen when she was noticed by the forty-five-year-old Dickens. They carried on an affair for thirteen years. There is the possibility that Nellie had a child by Dickens, although that remains to this day speculation. Once the affair was over, Dickens did everything he could to keep knowledge of it secret.
Here’s what Tomalin writes:
‘Nelly (was) written out for two reasons. The first and obvious one is that Nelly was a blot on the good name of Dickens, and the Dickens machinery for public relations was unrivalled. Dickens wished to be, and was, generally worshipped — the word is not too strong for a person who evoked comparison with Christ at the time of his death — as a man of unblemished character, the incarnation of broad Christian virtue and at the same time of domestic harmony and conviviality. The jolly domestic part of his reputation had been acquired young, through his early novels and his notable exuberant and hospitable family life; it had been crowned by his Christmas stories and never dislodged. It came to exasperate his percipient daughter Kate, but the very fact of her exasperation shows how firmly the legend was established and sedulously kept going in the reminiscences of his more pious children. Amazing as it now seems, the break-up of his family left it unaffected; Dickens preserved his renown as the jovial keeper of hearth, home, children and dogs at Gad’s Hill even as he was ridding himself of wife and children.
“The public swallowed the carefully maintained domestic image….”
Prior to Tomalin’s book, too little was written about Charles Dickens and Ellen Ternan's relationship, probably with good reason, given the secrecy that surrounded its existence that was maintained by Dickens and his family, by Ternan and hers. Dickens especially wished to keep it hidden because of the grand reputation for personal respectability that he had so ardently built. But neither did Ternan herself or her family (who knew of the affair) leave any account of the matter. Evidently, almost all correspondence about it between the members of the family was destroyed.
But now we have Claire Tomalin’s remarkable account of these two people and their affair. As in her other books, she dresses the story itself in marvelous detail about London life in the nineteenth century, about the British acting profession and what it meant especially for actresses during that time, about the writing of journalism and the publishing of books, all set in the exciting, even breathless, milieu in which Dickens’s fantastic rise to world-wide fame unfolded.
In both books, we learn a great deal about Austen and Dickens’s own books and how they got written, essential for anyone who cares about their splendid output. But we learn all that in a presentation of remarkable detail about the settings of their lives, the others who witnessed their lives, and the surroundings in which they all thrived (or not).
So, now, I have a third descriptive term. I’m about to read yet another “Claire Tomalin.” I’m not sure which one yet, but I’ll keep you posted.
Copyright ©2023 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.
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