Published in Windlesora 28 (2012)
©2012, WLHG
In 2012 there will be many celebrations of the bicentenary of the birth of one of England’s greatest novelists, especially in Portsmouth where he was born, London where he lived, Broadstairs where he holidayed, and so on. But Windsor too has reasons to remember Dickens. On the evening of 10 February 1840 he joined in the celebrations of Queen Victoria’s wedding, though he claimed to be in personal despair because she’d married another, and said in a letter to a friend that he’d lain down ‘in the mud at the top of the long walk and refused all comfort‘ – to the astonishment of passers-by.
A year later he stayed at the White Hart inn to recover from an illness, and when his eldest son Charlie was at Eton he would arrange grand picnic parties on the Thames with the boys, bringing hampers from Fortnums with him.
Much less innocently, when his marriage had soured and he had taken up with a mistress, the actress Ellen Ternan, he installed her in Elizabeth Cottage, Slough, then more of a village than a town (the cottage burned down in 1889). The great British public was not to know that the man who preached the virtues of family life had broken his marriage vows, so he used a pseudonym, Charles Tringham, and when he visited at weekends he would arrive at Slough station and return from either Datchet or Windsor & Eton Riverside stations, so as not to be seen too frequently at any one place.(*1)
Hester Davenport
Notes
(*1) See Felix Aylmer, Dickens Incognito (1959) to discover how his secret was revealed; Claire Tomalin, The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (1990), and Hester Davenport, Writers in Windsor (1995).
Windsor Local History Group 