Volume 38, Number 9 · May 16, 1991
The Angels and Devils of Dickens
By Garry Wills
Dickens
by Peter Ackroyd
HarperCollins, 1,195 pp., $35.00
The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens
by Claire Tomalin
Knopf, 317 pp., $25.00
Mark Twain's Aquarium: The Samuel Clemens 'Angelfish' Correspondence, 1905–1910
edited by John Cooley
University of Georgia Press, 297 pp., $24.95
Victorian Subjects
by J. Hillis Miller
Duke University Press, 330 pp., $47.50
Dickens and the 1830s
by Kathryn Chittick
Cambridge University Press, 208 pp., $34.50
Nicholas Nickleby was adapted for the stage, almost immediately after it was written, by the kind of theatrical troupe that figures in Dickens's novel as the Crummleses. One actual family of the time, with a pronounced Crummles aspect, was led by Thomas Ternan, who married an actress he had worked with on the road, Fanny Jarman. They had three daughters, each of whom worked her way up in the profession, from 'infant phenomenon' to pants roles to ingénue, learning how to sing, dance, articulate, ingratiate, and scrape by. The Ternans were on a bill with Nickleby before the novel's serialization had been completed. They had a fascination with Dickens arising from the fact that their most prestigious moments in the theater had been some engagements with the great Shakespearean actor William Macready, who was one of Dickens's closest friends.
Review, 3185 words
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