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Looking at history through another’s eyes

I am a married man, but I have been locked down since March with another woman: Claire Tomalin.

Tomalin, born in 1933, is one of the most respected biographers writing in the English language. I have been reading from her list, which includes a biography of Charles Dickens, although she is best known for her biographies of women.

In 1954, Tomalin received a degree from Cambridge, which admitted few women. After her formal schooling, she worked for some of Britain’s major papers before turning to biography full-time. In her autobiography, “A Life of My Own,” Tomalin writes about one of her first job interviews after leaving Cambridge. She was hired but later learned the boss’s assistant had been asked to rate her on a 1-10 scale as she entered the interview. She received a seven.

It's men who decide what happens to a Miss Seven.

After reading Tomalin, I can see -- or at least glimpse -- history as women who have studied gender history see it. Here it is, via three women Claire Tomalin wrote about.

Jane Austen (1775-1817) was a clergyman’s daughter who grew up in Hampshire, 50 miles from London -- a country girl. Her novels, for example “Pride and Prejudice” and “Sense and Sensibility,” achieved modest success during her lifetime. Today, her novels are read around the world. They also have been transformed into film. Onscreen, the men are handsome, the women beautiful, the country homes palatial, the grass so green the pastures hurt your eyes. The novels cannot aspire to visual perfection. The beauty is in the writing and the story telling about relationships, especially courting and marriage.

Austen was one of eight children. Her mother followed a woman’s expected path: infancy, childhood (preparation for marriage), marriage, motherhood, old age. One of Austen’s sisters-in-laws had 11 children: She died at age 35 in childbirth. An early death in childbirth was mourned but in no way unexpected.

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There were exceptions to expectations. Her aunt Philadelphia, known as Phila, sailed to India intending to marry well. Phila was explicit about her idea of marriage. She was willing to give up her body and her freedom for money and security. She settled for a businessman who was not at all rich, but she became the mistress of the richest Englishman in India, Warren Hastings. Phila had her only child by Hastings, who in time gave the girl 10,000 British pounds. Armed with her own money, the young woman married a French count.

Austen was surrounded by marriage and talk of marriage. Writing was a man’s world, although there were occasional women novelists. At first, Austen’s novels were published anonymously. Many readers assumed a man wrote them.

Ellen “Nelly” Ternan was born in 1839 into a family of actors and actresses. In the mid-1850s, the teenage Nelly met Charles Dickens during one of his theatrical productions. Dickens loved to perform as well as write. The great man, probably the most read writer in the world, was separating from his wife. He made 18-year-old Nelly his mistress and began a relationship that lasted until he died in 1870. This was done with the acceptance of her mother. The mother made a rational calculation. Dickens was a rich man who would provide for Nelly. And what was Nelly’s alternative? Marry an actor with an uncertain future?

Dickens gave Nelly and her mother cash, a house and supported the two generously, but never publicly. He had made himself the patron saint of the Victorian family and knew the Charles Dickens industry could not survive the revelation of a mistress.

It is a mystery to me what Dickens wanted from Nelly. Obviously, he wanted sex with a young thing, but he was introduced to young things every day. He seems to have been driven by some obsessive possessiveness. Some men with exceptional money might want a famous painting, a possession to display grandly to friends. Nelly was Dickens’ beautiful possession: He kept her from sight.

Dickens provided for Nelly after he died. She is named in his will, and Tomalin believes there was other money as well. The executors of the estate, like Dickens himself, did everything they could to minimize her existence beyond the legacy. Nelly, with enough money to build respectability, married into the middle class. She died in 1914.

Dora Jordan (1761-1816) was the best-known comedic actress of Georgian England. Her mother was an actress, and Dora began performing young. As an attractive girl, she was subjected to sexual misuse by several of her employers. This ended when she began working for Tate Wilkinson, who managed a traveling dramatic troupe. Wilkinson, apparently immune to lechery, suggested she become a Mrs. at least in name, and overnight she became Mrs. Dora Jordan. Wilkinson believed the appearance of marriage provided protection from predators. Mrs. Jordan had three children by lawyer Richard Ford and expected to marry him. He backed out.

She performed while pregnant, sometimes taking the role of young men. This was an accepted 18th-century convention. An actress who could draw 2,000 paying customers a night to Drury Lane, Tomalin emphasizes, had unusual leverage: She could bargain for wages, working conditions and the productions she would perform in. Wives and mistresses could be replaced; a leading lady on the London stage could not.

Mrs. Jordan came to the attention of the Duke of Clarence, a son of George III and a potential heir to the British throne. His charm, persistence, status and money proved too much for Dora. She lived with him for more than 20 years years; they had 10 children together. Their country estate was fittingly regal. But as an actress, she could never marry a member of the royal family.

Tomalin is such an assiduous researcher she found what Jane Austen paid for a haircut. But Tomalin’s strength is not unearthing old receipts -- it is visualizing the internal lives of those she writes about and moments when lives change forever.

Austen’s came when, as a 26 year-old woman on her way to spinsterhood, a young man of means, known to her family, asked her to marry. She accepted. Tomalin writes, “Jane would now become the future mistress of a large Hampshire house ... And she would have a perfectly decent young husband. There she paused.” That night, Jane wrestled with her decision, and the next morning, she announced she had changed her mind. Why? There is no clear answer. Tomalin can be only certain Jane would rather be single — and a writer — than marry this man. She lived out her life as a single woman.

Ternan’s life certainly changed when she met Dickens. But in Tomalin’s biography, the most dramatic moment is reserved for her son, Geoffrey, whom she had born to a husband who struggled with money but was a proper Victorian. Geoffrey, born 1879, went into the army, retiring after World War I. He then opened a small bookstore. With time on his hands, he went through some of his mother’s papers. He soon saw that the story his mother had told him about her background before marriage was false. For one thing, Nelly had reduced her age to hide the missing years with Dickens. The clips, playbills, memorabilia clearly led to Dickens and to her real family — the Ternans, actor and actresses. Geoffrey was crushed and remained crushed.

Jordan, after 10 children with her duke, was abandoned as the duke set out to find a wife society would greet with approval. Dora, now in her fifties, could not return to the London stage. It seems she died of a broken heart. In 1830, the duke became King William IV. When he died in 1837, none of his children by Dora Jordan were eligible to ascend to the throne. Instead, his deceased brother’s daughter rose.

Men made the rules, as Tomalin explains yet again. They made the rules by which William’s niece, Victoria, became queen for 63 years. She would never have become ruler of the British Empire if there had been a man standing in her way.

Michael Carey is an occasional columnist and the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News.

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Michael Carey

Michael Carey is an occasional columnist and the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News.

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