Frederic Ouvry’s invitation to a July garden party at his home in Fulham Green, London, insinuates that guests would gather with two celebrities: Albert Smith, the famous lecturer of “The Glaciers of Mont Blanc,” and Charles Dickens. The latter was producing and acting in The Frozen Deep by Wilkie Collins. Though neither of their names appears, the joke is obvious.
However, in the obligatory party photograph, Dickens is the gathering star, and Smith is relegated to the second row. The playwright Wilkie Collins is standing in the second row (right). The rest of the crowd are either Dickens’s friends or The Frozen Deep’s cast members, including two of Dickens’s children, Charles and Mary, and a sister-in-law Helen Hogarth.
Among those cast members missing are the professional actors Mrs. Francis Ternan and her daughters Maria and Ellen, engaged for the August performances in Manchester. Perhaps Dickens did if no one else missed them, for he would soon be enthralled with Ellen, and she agreed to be his mistress. Maybe the Ternans’ absence was a necessary caution.
The Frozen Deep playbill for the August 1857 production at Free Trade Hall, Manchester.
* Frederic Ouvry was Dickens’ solicitor. Albert Richard Smith was a celebrity famous for his travel lecture series about Mont Blanc. He had no association with The Frozen Deep, but his brother Arthur was engaged as road manager for Dickens’s lecture tour scheduled for spring 1858. Ouvry might have hosted the party so that Dickens might get some advice from Smith when he was anxious about the forthcoming tour.
Featured Image: Francisco Berger’s souvenir photograph is the only record of the party that survives. (He’s in the second row, third from right.) He remembered wrongly that the party was at Albert Smith’s home. The photographer is unknown. London: National Portrait Gallery.
See Wilkie Collins. The Frozen Deep: A Drama in Three Acts (1857). Boston: W.F. Gill and Co., 1875; Albert Smith. Mont Blanc. London: Ward and Lock, 1861; Jenny Hartley, ed. Selected Letters of Charles Dickens. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012; Alan McNee. The Cockney Who Sold the Alps, Albert Smith, and the Ascent of Mont Blanc. London: Victorian Secrets, 2015. McNee doesn’t discuss Dickens or The Frozen Deep; Paul Lewis. “My Dear Wilkie: The Letters of Dickens to Collins.” The Wilkie Collins Journal (2002); Thomas Wright. “The Life of Charles Dickens,” In Norman Page, editor. Charles Dickens: Family History. Volume 5. London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1935, rpt.1999; Claire Tomlin’s The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (1990) reproduces the photograph without an explanation.