His Friends Were Appalled

Letters

Vol. 34 No. 2 · 26 January 2012

From Claire Tomalin

I’ll take up only three points in Deborah Friedell’s review of my book Charles Dickens (LRB, 5 January). She asserts that I suggest ‘out of the blue’ that Dickens ‘actually died at Nelly’s house in Peckham’. Nowhere in the book do I suggest that Dickens died anywhere but at Gad’s Hill. Are there no fact-checkers at the LRB?

A propos my being hoaxed by the Dostoevsky letter story, she writes: ‘She might have been less susceptible had she not so badly wanted it to be true.’ In fact Malcolm Andrews, distinguished Dickens scholar and editor of the Dickensian, first accepted the Dostoevsky story. As I have already explained in print, I found it in Andrews’s Charles Dickens and His Performing Selves, looked up the source he gave – the Dickensian, in 2002 – and presumed he had checked its authenticity. Michael Slater, a pre-eminent Dickens scholar, also accepted it and printed it in his biography of 2009. We were all caught out. The hoax was a clever one precisely because it convinced so many Dickens scholars.

I did not argue in The Invisible Woman that Nelly Ternan was more central to Dickens’s life than other biographers had thought, as Friedell states. I simply set out to tell Ternan’s story as best I could. That was twenty years ago, and in no sense is my new book ‘a return to that project’, as Friedell wrongly informs your readers. The earlier book was about Ternan, the new book is a life of Dickens.

Claire Tomalin
London WC2

From Mark Bostridge

Deborah Friedell’s critique of Claire Tomalin suffers from a lack of bibliographical precision. Tomalin’s suggestion that Dickens died, not at Gad’s Hill, his country house outside Rochester in Kent, but at Ellen Ternan’s home in Peckham, is not presented ‘out of the blue’ in the new biography, as Friedell claims. In fact, Tomalin first advanced this hypothesis in 1991, in the second, paperback edition of The Invisible Woman, where she gives a plausible account of Dickens’s death ‘in compromising circumstances’, based on information sent to her by a reader whose great-grandfather had been told the alternative version of Dickens’s last hours.

Mark Bostridge
London NW3

Deborah Friedell writes: I refer Claire Tomalin to Mark Bostridge’s letter and to pages 395-96 of her Dickens biography. There she notes inconsistencies in the usual account of Dickens’s death at Gad’s Hill and offers ‘another possible version of the events of Wednesday 8 June’, in which Dickens may have ‘made the familiar journey by train and cab to Peckham’, given Nelly her housekeeping money and soon after this collapsed. Then Nelly would have secreted the ‘inert or semi-conscious’ man to Gad’s Hill so that his body wouldn’t be found with his mistress. But Tomalin doesn’t tell the story in the conditional mood and though she says that ‘it seems wild and improbable,’ she also says it’s not ‘entirely impossible’ and explains why.

The subtitle of The Invisible Woman is ‘The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens’. On the first page Tomalin writes that Nelly Ternan ‘played a central part in the life of Charles Dickens at a time when he was perhaps the best-known man in Britain’ though she was ‘wholly excluded from the great biography of Dickens written by his friend John Forster’. The LRB does indeed have fact-checkers.

Vol. 34 No. 3 · 9 February 2012

From Claire Tomalin

Just to get it absolutely straight, I will quote what I wrote in my postscript, ‘The Death of Dickens’, to the paperback edition of The Invisible Woman (Letters, 26 January). The postscript began by giving two letters from Mr Leeson, who offered information that had come through his family about something told them by a church caretaker at Linden Grove in Peckham, which suggested that Dickens might have died there. I followed the quotes with this (p. 273): ‘Mr Leeson saw, as soon as he looked at the standard biographies, that the caretaker was obviously wrong in maintaining that he had helped transport the dead body of Dickens: there were too many witnesses to his actual death at Gad’s Hill.’ I then carried out a detailed investigation of what might possibly have happened, which I thought worth consideration. I still think it worth consideration, but since I went into detail in the postscript, I gave only a summary in the new book. I have never believed or suggested that Dickens died anywhere but at Gad’s Hill.

Claire Tomalin
London WC2