158 KNOWING DICKENS
and the demythologizing Great Expectations, Dickens had another plot to
manage: the destruction of his marriage.
Meeting Ellen Ternan, the young actress who took part in the 1857 Man-
chester performances of The Frozen Deep, was apparently the precipitating
factor in the marriage crisis. Dickens had met and flirted with plenty of
young actresses in his life; he liked lively performing women, and had man-
aged to inspire a lifelong devotion in at least one, Mary Boyle, who called him
“the only despot I ever tolerated” (Boyle 234). Ellen herself does not explain
enough; certainly Dickens himself could not have foreseen in 1857 that his
infatuation with her would lead to a twelve-year secret affair that would
occupy the rest of his life. Like other Victorian men, he might have kept an
actress on the side; only the terror of losing his public reputation would have
prevented that course. But, for reasons that no one will ever fully understand,
it became necessary for him in 1858 to exile Catherine completely, from his
house and from his presence.
The title of Claire Tomalin’s biography calls Ellen Ternan “the invisible
woman,” but it was Catherine of whom Dickens first required invisibility.
His first act in the dismantling of his marriage was quite literally to wall her
off. On 11 October 1857 he wrote to their faithful servant Anne Corne-
lius while the family was staying at Gad’s Hill Place, to order new sleeping
arrangements for himself and Catherine at Tavistock House. The letter never
mentions this central fact; it concerns itself with the moving of furniture.
The servants were to move his washing stands into the bathroom, and to
“get rid altogether” of the chest of drawers in his dressing room (adjoining
the marital bedroom); that item was to be brought down to Gad’s Hill. The
“recess of the doorway between the Dressing-Room and Mrs. Dickens’s
room” was to be “fitted with plain light deal shelves, and closed with a plain
white deal door, painted white.” He is sending a small iron bedstead with
bedding, that is to stand behind the door, “its head toward the stairs, and its
foot towards the window”; he wants it all done before the family returns
to London at the end of October (8.465). The letter conveys the plan as if
it were just another of his ingenious little household arrangements that the
servants could readily implement—an odd repetition of the Tavistock House
study door, or the bachelor male house spaces Dickens had been writing
about for years.
Perhaps even Dickens himself did not yet know quite what he meant by
it. Catherine was forty-two; he was forty-five. Their last child had been
born five years earlier, in 1852. Had they prevented subsequent pregnancies
through abstinence, or had Dickens lost interest in his wife? Was the story he
told to himself, or to her, about his night wanderings rather than about their