Charles Dickens Mistress & Little Dorrit’s Graves | Highland Cemetery

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Published Nov 20, 2023

Little Dorrit:

Georgina Margaret Hayman (nee Bridges)
claimed that Dickens told her she was chosen as the model for Little Dorrit when he visited her father (a Solicitor) and she was a petite 17-year-old. She came to Southsea to live with her son and died in 1912.

The Mistress:

In mid-September 1857, Charles Dickens went with Wilkie Collins to Doncaster to see Ellen perform in The Pet of the Petticoats at the Theatre Royal, and wrote to John Forster that his relationship with his wife was disintegrating; 'Poor Catherine and I are not made for each other. What is now befalling I have seen steadily coming'.

Dickens was 45 years old when he met Ellen Ternan. She was 18 at the time, only slightly older than his daughter Katey. It is believed that Dickens began an affair with Ternan; however, the true nature of their relationship was kept secret from the general public. Ternan was clever, charming, a force of character, and interested in literature and the theatre. Dickens referred to Ternan as his "magic circle of one." According to what is known, matters came to a head in 1858 when Catherine Dickens opened a packet delivered by a London jeweler which contained a gold bracelet meant for Ternan with a note written by her husband. Charles and Catherine Dickens separated that May, after 22 years of marriage.

Ternan left the stage in 1860, and was financially supported by Dickens from that point onward. She sometimes traveled with him, which was the case in the event of the Staplehurst rail crash on 9 June 1865 as Dickens was traveling with Ternan and her mother back from a visit to France. Allegedly, he abandoned a plan to take her on his visit to America in 1867 for fear that their relationship would be publicized by the American press. She lived in houses he took under false names at Slough and later at Nunhead. Although the truth of the issue has been highly speculated, Ternan may have given birth to a son by Dickens who died in infancy. There is little evidence pertaining to the nature of Charles Dickens and Ellen Ternan's relationship because neither Dickens, Ternan, nor Ternan's sisters left any account of the relationship, and most correspondence relevant to the relationship was destroyed. Dickens is thought by many scholars and commentators to have based several of his female characters on Ternan, including Estella in Great Expectations, Bella Wilfer in Our Mutual Friend and Helena Landless in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and others may have been inspired by her, particularly Lucie Manette in A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens left a legacy of £1,000 to Ternan in his will on his death in 1870 and sufficient income from a trust fund to ensure that she would never have to work again.

Later Life & Marriage
In 1876, six years after Dickens's death, Ternan married George Wharton Robinson, an Oxford graduate, who was 12 years her junior and knew nothing of her close association with Dickens. She presented herself as 14 years younger (23 years-old, rather than 37). The couple had a son, Geoffrey, and a daughter, Gladys, and ran a boys' school in Margate. Ternan's husband died in 1910, and she spent her last years in Southsea with her sister Frances. She died of cancer in Fulham, London and is buried in Highland Road Cemetery in Portsmouth.

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Charles Dickens Mistress & Little Dorrit’s Graves | Highland Cemetery | Portsmouth, U.K

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