SOURCE: Wills, Garry. “The Angels and the Devils of Dickens.” New York Review of Books 38, no. 9 (16 May 1991): 8, 10-11.

In the following excerpt, Wills commends The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, despite the flaws he sees in Tomalin's interpretation of Dickens's fascination with younger women.

Nicholas Nickleby was adapted for the stage, almost immediately after it was written, by the kind of theatrical troupe that figures in Dickens's novel as the Crummleses. One actual family of the time, with a pronounced Crummles aspect, was led by Thomas Ternan, who married an actress he had worked with on the road, Fanny Jarman. They had three daughters, each of whom worked her way up in the profession, from “infant phenomenon” to pants roles to ingénue, learning how to sing, dance, articulate, ingratiate, and scrape by. The Ternans were on a bill with Nickleby before the...