How the Franklin Expedition ruined Charles Dickens’s marriage

Karin Uncategorized

Yes, it’s a clickbait headline. No, I’m not sorry. Because history is fucking weird sometimes, and here’s how.

(I’m posting this in honor of The Terror Appreciation Week on Tumblr. Apologies for not sticking closely to the daily themes; I hope no one minds that I’m using this as an opportunity to dump some interesting historical tidbits I’ve picked up over the last year.)

Recently the world of Victorian scholarship had a small stir over letters from Edward Dutton Cook, a friend late in life of Catherine, Charles Dickens’s wife. She confided much about her life with Dickens to Cook, particularly this bit which is what’s really got people going (my emphasis):

he discovered at last that she had outgrown his liking. She had borne ten children and had lost many of her good looks, was growing old, in fact. He even tried to shut her up in a lunatic asylum, poor thing! But bad as the law is in regard to proof of insanity he could not quite wrest it to his purpose.

More details in the Times Literary Supplement and via the University of York.

Dickens’s marriage seems to have been pretty well on the rocks by the time he became infatuated with actress Ellen Ternan (and you can read a fascinating account of how the scandal “went viral” in this paper by Patrick Leary). But how he met her is the bit that’s of interest to the Franklinologist.

The play The Frozen Deep came about in 1856. It was written by Wilkie Collins, but Dickens had his hands deep in the production (he and his daughters played some of the roles), and it was written in reaction to the findings of John Rae’s expedition in search of Franklin. As all we Franklin nuts know well: in 1854, Rae had submitted a report to the Admiralty stating that:

From the mutilated state of many of the corpses and the contents of the kettles it is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last resource—cannibalism—as a means of prolonging existence.

And instead of keeping his report confidential, the Admiralty made it public.

Reaction was swift and horrified, and Dickens put Rae and his Inuit sources on blast. He wrote articles insisting that no good Christian Englishman would have stooped to such depravity and also went full-bore racist, insinuating that the Inuit probably killed and ate the explorers themselves. Highlights:

We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel; and we have yet to learn what knowledge the white man — lost, houseless, shipless, apparently forgotten by his race, plainly famine-stricken, weak, frozen, helpless, and dying — has of the gentleness of Esquimaux nature. […] We submit that the memory of the lost Arctic voyagers is placed, by reason and experience, high above the taint of this so easily-allowed connection; and that the noble conduct and example of such men, and of their own great leader himself, under similar endurances, belies it, and outweighs by the weight of the whole universe the chatter of a gross handful of uncivilised people, with domesticity of blood and blubber.

And so: The Frozen Deep, a play penned by Collins under Dickens’s heavy guidance. In it, a young woman fears her fiancé has been lost in an Arctic expedition, and there’s a doomy Scots nursemaid (possibly a dig at Rae, a Scotsman) who pronounces all manner of gloomy portents—“who goes about the house like an ominous enchantress, muttering of awful visions which come to her from ‘the land o’ ice and snaw’” as a review describes it. There were a few private and semi-public performances in 1857, followed by a production at the Manchester Free Trade Hall as a benefit for the widow of Douglas William Jerrold. Dickens decided a couple of the performers (in roles originally played by his daughters) should be replaced by professionals … including a Mrs. Francis Ternan and her daughters Mary and Ellen.

And thus did Ellen Ternan enter Dickens’s life. Probably the Dickens marriage was at a point where any sufficiently strong motive would have occasioned the separation that ended it, but his infatuation with her does seem to have been the proverbial camel-breaking straw. And all thanks to Dickens’s upset about the Franklin Expedition.

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