102 KNOWING DICKENS
the great author Charles Dickens. When he returned to London, however,
he wrote to her father, T. E. Weller, enclosing a copy of Tennyson’s poems
that he had promised to Christiana. It was not just any edition, but Dickens’s
own, a gift, he said, from the poet himself. Nor could Dickens keep himself
from telling the father how he felt. Writing, again, as the great novelist, he
pontificated to Weller about the “numerous figures” he encountered, most of
them raising little care or concern. “But I read such high and such unusual
matter in every look and gesture of the spiritual creature... that she started
out alone from the whole crowd the instant I saw her, and will remain there
always in my sight” (4.58). The girl-child’s figure in the crowd recalls the
description of Little Nell; Dickens’s response may have been affected as much
by his fictional creation as by anything emanating from Christiana herself.
Christiana fell instantly into a ready-made position in Dickens’s senti-
mental imagination; he wrote to Thompson from Birmingham that Chris-
tiana was “too good” to joke about and that she was destined for an early
death (4.55). She—and Nell—are generally linked with Dickens’s regressive
love for the dead Mary Hogarth. But there was a difference. Like Dickens’s
older sister Fanny Burnett, Christiana was an accomplished pianist and a
performer, not a household angel. Dickens had never forgotten the day,
twenty years earlier, when he sat in the audience as a working drudge, while
fourteen-year-old Fanny played a prize concert at the Royal Academy of
Music. When he later referred to the occasion in the autobiographical frag-
ment, he wrote, “The tears ran down my face. I felt as if my heart were
rent.... I had never suffered so much before. There was no envy in this”
(Forster 34). When Dickens denied a feeling, there is good reason to believe
that he felt it deeply, and disapproved of it as deeply. In Liverpool he was
onstage as the great celebrity, and the young woman played in celebration of
his own success. His sister Fanny, who lived nearby in Manchester, had been
visiting with him before the speech, and was now a member of his audience.
Dickens may have been aware of the great reversal; the outpouring of emo-
tion for Christiana Weller might have included a kind of release from the
tangle of pride and resentment he had felt about Fanny’s special status during
the miserable period of their youth. More than just an echo of the lost Mary
Hogarth, then, Christiana was the prototype for Dickens’s attraction to the
equally young actress Ellen Ternan. They too shared a stage—with Ellen in
a minor supporting role—at another moment, fourteen years later, when
Dickens was again away from home in the northern city of Manchester and
wildly excited by the reception of his acting in The Frozen Deep.
The Weller situation took its peculiar turn when Thomas James Thomp-
son also fell in love with Christiana and confided his feeling to Dickens.