Christiana Weller

Christiana Weller was born in 1825. She became a concert pianist and soon became receiving very good reviews. William Ayrton noted that Christiana "played charmingly... she delighted everybody as much by her performance as her great beauty" and George Hogarth, the music critic of The Morning Chronicle, praised "the lightness, rapidity, and brilliance of her fingers."

When she was nineteen years old Charles Dickens saw her perform in Liverpool. He immediately fell in love with her and admitted that he "kept his eyes firmly fixed on her every movement". Dickens sent her a gift of two volumes of Lord Tennyson. Dickens told her father, Thomas Edmund Weller (1799–1884), that she stood "out alone from the whole crowd the instant I saw her, and will remain there always in my sight."

Dickens wrote to his friend, Thomas James Thompson (1812–1881) about the woman who reminded him of Mary Hogarth: "I cannot joke about Miss Weller; for she is too good; and interest in her (spiritual young creature that she is, and destined to an early death, I fear) has become a sentiment with me. Good God what a madman I should seem, if the incredible feeling I have conceived for that girl could be made plain to anyone." Dickens suggested to Thompson, who was a rich widower, that he should marry Christina. As Claire Tomalin , the author of Dickens: A Life (2011), pointed out: "it allowed him to remain intimate with her, if only by proxy".

June Badeni has argued: "Thomas James Thompson was born in Jamaica, the son of an Englishman, James Thompson, and his Creole mistress. His grandfather Dr Thomas Pepper Thompson had emigrated from Liverpool and had grown rich on the ownership of sugar plantations, and when his son James predeceased him Dr Thompson brought his grandson to England. At his death he left him a substantial legacy. After leaving Cambridge without taking a degree, Thomas James dabbled in politics and the arts. He was a widower in his mid-thirties."

According to Peter Ackroyd, the author of Dickens (1990): "He (Dickens) encouraged and abetted Thompson in his efforts to marry Christiana... Even at this point in his life, at the age of thirty-two, his sexual responses and energies were sublimated by, or channelled towards, that strange pattern of passivity, innocence, spiritually and death which emerges so often in his fiction and in his extant correspondence. Why else did he treat Christiana Weller as if she were one of the heroines of his novels, doomed to an early death as soon as the possibility of sexual attraction becomes evident?"

After some resistance from her family, Thomas James Thompson married Christiana Weller at St Mary's Church in Barnes on 21st October 1845. Although Dickens went to the wedding he found that his feelings of jealously so strong he turned against her. He was still convinced that she was doomed to an early death. Dickens told Thompson: "I saw an angel's message in her face that day that smote me to the heart."

Christiana's first daughter, born in 3rd November 1846, was the famous artist, Elizabeth Butler. The second daughter, the poet and essayist Alice Meynell, was born on 11th October 1847. Both girls were educated by their father. His teaching was to be a great influence on them.

Charles Dickens's brother, Frederick Dickens, married Christiana's sister in 1848. Dickens was against the marriage and described the Weller family as: "feverish, restless, flighty, excitable, uncontrollable, wrong-headed; under no sort of wholesome self-restraint; and bred to think the absence of it a very intellectual and brilliant thing."

Christiana Weller Thompson died in 1910.

Primary Sources

(1) Peter Ackroyd , Dickens (1990)

He (Dickens) encouraged and abetted Thompson in his efforts to marry Christiana... Even at this point in his life, at the age of thirty-two, his sexual responses and energies were sublimated by, or channelled towards, that strange pattern of passivity, innocence, spiritually and death which emerges so often in his fiction and in his extant correspondence. Why else did he treat Christiana Weller as if she were one of the heroines of his novels, doomed to an early death as soon as the possibility of sexual attraction becomes evident?