Ellen Ternan was born in Rochester, Kent. She was the third of four children; she had a brother who died in infancy and two sisters named Maria and Frances (later the second wife of Thomas Adolphus Trollope, the brother of Anthony Trollope). Her parents, Thomas Lawless Ternan and Frances Eleanor Ternan (née Jarman), were both actors of some distinction.^{[citation needed]}

Ternan made her stage debut in Sheffield at the age of three, and she and her two sisters were presented as "infant phenomena". Ellen was considered the least theatrically gifted of the three sisters, but she worked extensively in the provinces, particularly after her father died in October 1846 in the Bethnal Green Insane Asylum.^[1]

In 1857, she was spotted by Charles Dickens performing at London's Haymarket Theatre. He cast her, on the recommendation of his friend, actor and playwright Alfred Wigan, along with her mother and sister Maria, in three performances of The Frozen Deep by Wilkie Collins in Manchester in August 1857. It was not unusual for professional actresses to be invited to appear with amateur gentlemen; Mrs Ternan played a Scottish nurse; Maria, the heroine Clara; and Nelly (Ellen) took over the girl's part from Katey Dickens, Dickens's seventeen-year-old daughter.^[2]

In mid-September 1857, Charles Dickens went with Wilkie Collins to Doncaster to see Ellen Ternan perform in The Pet of the Petticoats at the Theatre Royal. At the time, he had written 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'.^[3]

Dickens was 45 years old when he met Ternan. She was 18 at the time, only 6 months older than his youngest daughter Katey. In two books published in 1935 and 1936, Thomas Wright alleged that they had an affair, stating that he had heard it from Canon Benham, who claimed that Ternan had confessed all.^[4] If so, Dickens kept his affair with Ternan secret from the general public.

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 they destroyed most correspondence relevant to the relationship. We "simply do not know" asserts the professor of Victorian literature with a special interest in Charles Dickens, Michael Slater, in his 2009 biography of Dickens.^[5]

On the "many speculations about the exact relationship between Dickens and Ellen in this period" biographer Peter Ackroyd writes, "it has to be said at once that no evidence has been found for any of these more dramatic possibilities."^[6]

While writers prior to the scholarship of Ackroyd and Slater have largely assumed the truth of Wright and other authors' assertions that Ternan was Dickens' mistress,^[7] an alternative version of events was detailed in 2022 by the Dickens scholar, Brian Ruck in the Dickens Fellowship's journal The Dickensian. Ruck presented the view that Ternan is Dickens' illegitimate daughter, and that this accounts for the peculiar nature of the intimacy between Dickens, Ternan and her mother.^[8] This view is supported by critically acclaimed Irish author Cora Harrison,^[9] but otherwise is yet to be considered by scholars of Dickens. Controversial^[10] Dickens biographer Helena Kelly, citing Ruck and Harrison, calls the view "not impossible", but not "particularly plausible".^[11]

Ackroyd only goes as far as asserting that the father-daughter relationship portrayed in Little Dorrit should act as a guide: "Could it not be precisely this form of love which Dickens had for Ellen Ternan?".^[12] Ruck and Harrison argue that in fact the whole body of Dickens's works in relation to daughters, illegitimacy, and his joint attention to Ternan and her mother together, suggests that in fact she was indeed his daughter.

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 a "gossipy tale",^[13] matters came to a head in 1858 when Catherine Dickens opened a packet delivered by a London jeweller. It 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.^[14] Ternan left the stage in 1860, and was financially supported by Dickens from that point onward. She sometimes travelled with him, which was the case in the event of the Staplehurst rail crash in Kent on 9 June 1865 as they and Ternan's mother were returning 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.

Ternan and her mother lived in houses Dickens took under false names at Slough in Berkshire and later at Nunhead in Southwark. There has been speculation that Ternan gave birth to a son who died in infancy. However, biographer Peter Ackroyd asserts that it is "inconceivable" that theirs was "in any sense a 'consummated' affair".^[15] Ackroyd's strength of feeling on this point is taken up by Harrison. A subplot of her 2020 fiction, Summer of Secrets, featuring Ternan, her mother, and Dickens, reveals her fictional Charles Dickens as the secret father of Ellen Ternan.^[16]

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. Others may have been inspired by her, particularly Lucie Manette in A Tale of Two Cities, in which the suggestion that Ternan is Dickens' daughter is a particularly viable interpretation.^[17] Dickens left a legacy of £1,000 to Ternan in his will on his death in 1870, precisely the same amount as to his unmarried daughter, and sufficient income from a trust fund to ensure that she would never have to work again.^[18]

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 on April 25, 1914, and is buried in Highland Road Cemetery in Portsmouth, the city of Dickens's birth.

The Dickens Fellowship and the surviving close family members of Charles Dickens maintained a complete silence about the relationship between Ellen Ternan and Charles Dickens from the time of Charles Dickens's death in 1870 until the death in December 1933 of his last surviving child, Sir Henry Fielding Dickens. Several Dickens researchers wrote about various aspects of the relationship between Ellen Ternan and Charles Dickens in the ensuing years, including Gladys Story in 1939, Ada Nisbet in 1952, Sir Felix Aylmer in 1959, and Katherine M Longley in 1985. Ellen Ternan was the subject of a bestselling biography by Claire Tomalin in 1990, which brought the relationship to a broader general audience. A summary of the story of the discovery of the relationship was published in 2012 by Professor Michael Slater.

Research by Brian Ruck published in The Dickensian, Winter 2022, introduced the view that Ternan was Dickens' illigitimate daughter rather than a mistress.^[19]

Some records relating to Ellen Ternan and her family are held by Senate House Library, University of London.^[20]

Simon Gray's play about her life, Little Nell, had its world premiere in 2007 at the Theatre Royal, Bath. It was directed by Sir Peter Hall and starred Louise Brealey as Ternan. The affair was featured in the docudramas Dickens (BBC, 2002) and Dickens' Secret Lovers (2008, Channel 4 – it was the main subject of this programme, presented by Charles Dance and with Ternan played by Amy Shiels and Dickens by David Haig). Ternan is also featured in the 2009 novel Drood by Dan Simmons.

Cora Harrison's 2020 novel Summer of Secrets portrays Dickens and Wilkie Collins, among other period artists, together with Ellen Ternan and her mother, in a murder mystery tale in which Ellen Ternan is forbidden from marrying Dickens' son, by both Dickens and Mrs Ternan, on the grounds that she is their daughter.^[21]

The Invisible Woman (2013) is a feature film adaptation of Tomalin's book about Ternan's relationship with Dickens. Ternan is played by Felicity Jones and Dickens by Ralph Fiennes. The 21-year age difference between the two actors is somewhat similar to the 27-year difference between Ternan and Dickens.^[22]

Other sources

• Storey, Gladys (1939), Dickens and Daughter, Frederick Muller, London.
• Nisbet, Ada (1952), Dickens and Ellen Ternan, University of California Press, ISBN 0-520-00946-0.
• Aylmer, Felix (1959), Dickens Incognito, Rupert Hart-Davis, London.
• Longley, Katherine M (1985), The Real Ellen Ternan, The Dickensian, vol 81, London.
• Tomalin, Claire (1990), The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, Penguin Books, ISBN 0-14-012136-6.
• The Ternan family papers (Index), Senate House Library, University of London, retrieved 20 December 2021.
• Davies, Serena (16 June 2008). "The secret affair that almost ruined Dickens". The Telegraph. Retrieved 16 June 2008.
• Claire Tomalin, 'Ternan, Ellen Lawless (1839–1914)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 accessed 8 Feb 2012
• Slater, Michael (2012), The Great Charles Dickens Scandal, Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0-300-11219-1.
• Ellen Ternan at spartacus-educational.com