Charles Dickens & A Tale of Two Women.

(This article first appeared in the A.A Journal, May/June 2012)

Charles Dickens had been married for twenty one years, with nine surviving children, when he first met actress Ellen Lawless Ternan in 1857. The great novelist was then aged forty five and ‘Nelly’ eighteen, in what for him seems to have been a classic midlife crisis. Nelly, with Sun-Uranus in Pisces was the perfect hook for his natal Moon-Venus projections, and somebody who gave him longed-for romance and excitement. Even her middle name was Uranian.

Charles Dickens: 7^th February 1812, 19:50 LMT, Portsmouth, England.

In the backwash of both his Saturn and Uranus half-returns, Dickens was in a long process of growing apart from his wife, Catherine. She was an attractive, easy-going Venusian Taurus-Libra character, but lacked his intellect and vitality, and by 1857, he simply tolerated her. The couple had only known each other for six months when they were married on 2^nd April 1835. His Mars in Aries in the seventh house was romantically impulsive, yet he repented at leisure and came to regard his marriage as his worst-ever mistake. By the time he met Nelly Ternan, he was restless for change.

Catherine Dickens

Dickens was as decisive in his split with Catherine as he had been in marrying her. He paid her an income for life and set her up in a house in Camden Town, while all their children, apart from one son, remained with him. Venus conjunct Pluto likes to maintain control. By August 1857, Dickens’s secondary progressed Saturn had come to 7 Capricorn, perfecting its natal square to Mars. This is a clash between initiative and deliberation, and the fourth and seventh house placements clearly show domestic friction and frustration. His eldest daughter Kate described the frenzied atmosphere at the time of the separation and reported that her father had almost lost his reason. Dickens sublimated much of his Mars-Saturn energy into his prodigious workload, but these two powerfully placed, antagonistic planets were a defining influence on his life.

Despite his personal warmth and geniality, Dickens was a forceful character who liked to have his own way. At worst, his chart reveals something of a domestic bully. Combative Mars-Saturn contacts demand great resilience from a marriage partner. This energy doesn’t hold with quiet unspoken rapport, but enjoys argument and conquest, and expects the other party to stand up and make a challenge. Likewise, in classic Aquarian fashion, he was more at ease with larger humanitarian issues than emotions closer to home. And when frustrated, Saturn-Mars can also play the victim. During his marital split, Dickens wrote a self-serving article that appeared in The London Times and his own Household Worlds magazine, portraying himself as the injured party. It also publicly insulted his wife, claiming, quite callously, that she had never loved their children.

Even before his separation, Dickens had moved out of his marital bedroom, partly to avoid enlarging his family still further. He was an attentive father, and wealthy, receiving book advances of a million pounds in today’s money. Yet he despaired of the financial demands his children made on him, and at some level blamed his wife for this too. This irrational, not to say deeply self-centred, attitude stems from his otherworldly Moon, square Venus-Pluto. This aspect may also have been susceptible to a kind of mother-versus-lover syndrome. Catherine’s Saturn in Aquarius conjunct his fifth house Sun would easily leave him feeling trapped, though ironically, this contact comes with built-in longevity. As the law then stood, he had no grounds for divorce and the Dickenses remained married until he died in 1870.

In the early stages of his new love affair, Dickens suffered agonies, acutely conscious of his reputation as a socially aware family man. He was a world famous figure, identified in the public mind with the idealised domestic life depicted in his books. Nelly was an actress, a disreputable vocation in high Victorian England, seen as virtually synonymous with prostitution. Yet there is no doubt of his infatuation and his Mars, again, would find a romantic conquest hard to resist.

He wrote to a female friend:

‘I wish an ogre with seven heads… had taken the Princess whom I adore – you have no idea how much I love her! – to his stronghold on a high series of mountains, and there tied her up by the hair. Nothing would suit me half so well this day as climbing after her, sword in hand, and either winning her or being killed’.

Dickens’s exact Moon-Neptune conjunction in the 3^rd house, as well as a classic writer’s signature, shows his great sentimentality towards women. Spiritual nostalgia for a long-lost or sacrificial mother figure, reflected in characters like Nancy in Oliver Twist, or his most famous heroine, the doomed Little Nell. He encountered London’s real-life street women and prostitutes dating from his career as a court reporter and was instrumental in schemes to help them. There are hints in his letters that his interest in so-called Fallen Women was not always wholly altruistic, though he set up a refuge in Shepherd’s Bush, called Urania Cottage, in his words, a ‘Home for Homeless Women’. This fascination with the sexual underworld is archetypal Venus-Pluto in Pisces.

Nelly Ternan

Nelly’s natal Saturn was closely conjunct his Moon-Neptune, a distinctly mixed blessing in synastry. There is a heaviness and lack of emotional spontaneity here, where day to day relating becomes awkward and overly literal. It also echoes the Sun-Saturn contact Dickens had with his wife. There are few more incompatible energies than hard Saturn and Neptune contacts, either natally, transiting, or in synastry, with the torment coming from a glimpse of heaven never quite attained. A close Saturn-Venus square in their composite chart also reflects their differing age and status. Love is surely possible with this aspect, but it implies two people kept apart by fate, and might be viewed as poetic justice for the way Dickens treated his wife. It was the best of relationships, it was the worst of relationships.

As if the Piscean projection wasn’t enough in their synastry, 1857 saw transiting Neptune at 22 Pisces, crossing Dickens’s descendant. In 1858 he wrote of Nelly:

‘There is not on this earth a more virtuous or spotless creature than this young lady’.

Still, an air of mystery surrounded their relationship and Dickens made every effort to ensure their liaisons remained secret. There is some evidence that he maintained her privately in a residence less than a mile away from the house where he moved his wife. He referred to Nelly only cryptically in his letters and even during his lifetime, burned quantities of their correspondence. Today, no communication between them survives, and all parties would be grateful the mobile phone had not yet been invented.

Some biographers have claimed Dickens and Nelly’s affair was purely platonic, though this does not fit the chart of someone with as passionate a chart as his. The wide Venus – Mars conjunction between them, in his seventh house, suggests a strong chemistry. There were other rumours that Nelly had a baby by him who died; we will never truly know. Whatever their actual status, it was a relationship that endured against the odds. The mutual contacts between Saturn and the Moon and Venus would make the relationship ‘challenging’, but also describe a sense of mutual duty or obligation. Despite society gossip, Nelly pursued her own career as an actress and remained a discreet, shadowy, Neptunian presence, Kate and Georgina, Dickens’s daughter and sister-in-law, recognized her place in his life and sent for her when Dickens lay dying at his house at Gad’s Hill.

Data:

Charles Dickens: 7^th February 1812, 19:50 LMT, Portsmouth, England.
Catherine Dickens: 19^th May 1815, noon chart.

Ellen Ternan: 3^rd March 1839, noon chart.

Reference: The Invisible Woman, by Claire Tomalin.