Ellen Ternan

Ellen Lawless Ternan (3 March 1839 – 25 April 1914), also known as Nelly Ternan or Nelly Robinson, was an English actress who is mainly known as the mistress of Charles Dickens.

Ellen Lawless 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. 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.

In 1857, she was spotted by Dickens performing at London's Haymarket Theatre. He cast her, on the recommendation of his friend the actor and playwright Alfred Wigan, along with her mother and sister Maria, in a performance of The Frozen Deep 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. In mid-September 1857 he went with Wilkie Collins to Doncaster to see Ellen at the Theatre Royal in The Pet of the Petticoats, and wrote 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'.

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