Narrow-minded mediocrity, envious of my success in my profession, calls me a Swindler. What of that? The same low tone of mind assails men in other professions in a similar manner – calls great writers, scribblers – great generals, butchers – and so on. It entirely depends on the point of view.
With his differently coloured eyes, one bilious green, one bilious brown, Wragge is himself particularly skilful at adopting whatever point of view happens best to suit his own ends. In this he is, as much as Count Fosco in The Woman in White, an archetypal representative of the amoral, relativistic world of the Sensation Novel, but he may also be interpreted as a caricature of the hypocrisies of Victorian capitalism. His entrepreneurial spirit (‘I respect independence of character, wherever I find it’), business-like account books recording his ‘transactions’, and his final apotheosis into a ‘Grand Financial Fact’, all serve to demonstrate, how easily may be blurred the distinctions between the commercially respectable and low-life cheats and hucksters. And whereas Dickens habitually contrived some poetically just comeuppance for his rogues, Collins’s small-time villains like Captain Wragge or the more sinister Doctor Downward and Mother Oldershaw in Armadale, are less likely to be brought to book. ‘Don’t think me mercenary – I merely understand the age I live in,’ Wragge proclaims, and this understanding finally fulfils its monetary potential through his outrageous advertising campaign for his Pill – a placebo that he promises can cure all ills known to man.
Wragge surely attempts his most daring impostures, though, during his thrilling duel of wits with Mrs Lecount at Aldborough. Here Collins pits his two wiliest protagonists against each other, and their constant guessing and double-guessing, their sudden perplexities and decisive manoeuvres, are as intriguing as a perfectly balanced game of chess. Though deadly serious, their jousting also has moments worthy of a comedy of high manners – particularly during the excursion to Dunwich sands when they are left alone together; Wragge stretches himself romantically at Lecount’s feet, and the two sworn enemies drift into ‘as easy and pleasant a conversation, as if they had been friends of twenty years’ standing’.
Lecount offers, like Wragge, a good example of Collins’s facility for adapting stock figures to his own purposes. As is the case for so many of his women characters, from Lydia Gwilt of Armadale to Valerian Macallan of The Law and the Lady (1875), Mrs Lecount depends for her survival on her ability to manipulate men yet also to keep them unconscious of the fact that they are being manipulated. Before her visit in disguise to Vauxhall Walk, Magdalen expects Noel Vanstone’s housekeeper to be an ‘ill-favoured, insolent old woman’, but is confronted instead by ‘a lady of mild ingratiating manners; whose dress was the perfection of neatness, taste and matronly simplicity; whose personal appearance was little less than a triumph of physical resistance to the deteriorating influence of time’. By linking the extent of her control over Noel Vanstone so explicitly to the ‘smooth amiability’ of her appearance, Collins seems to be suggesting that only through polished manners and expert dress sense can a woman in her dependent position gain any kind of power. That there is something degrading and inhuman in this is made clear in the ensuing interview, during which Magdalen’s emotions are always threatening to boil over and ruin her disguise, while Lecount is as self-possessed as her pet toad. ‘I wonder whose blood runs coldest,’ Magdalen whispers at it through clenched teeth, ‘yours, you little monster, or Mrs Lecount’s?… You hateful wretch, do you know what your mistress is? Your mistress is a devil!’
But Mrs Lecount is not a devil, and her behaviour is not even so very reprehensible. She too understands the age she lives in. As with Magdalen’s use of Norah’s mannerisms in The Rivals, it is the deliberateness of her conduct which renders it so disconcerting. There is, as well, a certain pathos in the extremes to which she – again like Magdalen – is driven in her attempts to extract her rightful legacy out of Noel Vanstone. One marvels less at her reptilian sang-froid than at the patience with which she coddles her debilitated yet avaricious and self-important employer; and the novel itself hardly endorses any less punishing means by which its women characters may achieve even a measure of autonomy.
Certainly neither Norah, with her dutiful trust in the ways of Providence, nor the sturdy Miss Garth, who functions as the book’s unheeded voice of reason, constitute particularly persuasive alternatives to the life of strategic campaigning embraced by a Magdalen or Mrs Lecount. In the early chapters Collins goes out of his way to stress the negative aspects of Norah’s conventionality – her ‘unconquerable reserve’ that verges on ‘pride, or sullenness’ – but after the cataclysm allows her to develop more or less unhindered into a standard icon of patience and goodness. She – along with Captain Kirke at the helm of his ship Deliverance – becomes part of the frankly allegorical dimension of the narrative, an aspect of Collins’s art which seems unlikely to win many admirers today.
Collins composed the closing sections of the novel in both great pain and desperate anxiety over publishers’ deadlines. Much of his life he was plagued by ‘rheumatic gout’, for which he was prescribed progressively larger doses of laudanum. During the fraught closing months of 1862 his symptoms worsened alarmingly, and in a letter of 10 October to his doctor Francis Carr Beard, to whom No Name is dedicated, he produces a formidable list of ailments:
My stomach and nerves are terribly out of order again. Yesterday at 1 o’clock I had to give up work with a deadly ‘all-overish’ faintness which sent me to the brandy-bottle. No confusion in my brains – but a sickness, faintness, and universal trembling – startled by the slightest noise – more nervous twittering last night – little sleep… my nerves want soothing and fortifying at the same time.9
On hearing of Collins’s prostration, Dickens characteristically offered ‘to come to London straight, and do your work. I am quite confident that, with your notes, and a few words of explanation, I could take it up at any time and do it… so like you as that no one should find out the difference.’10 Collins, needless to say, refused, struggling on through the pain to the book’s conclusion, hovered over by Beard who acted for a time as both physician and amanuensis.
Many, however, have found No Name’s last chapters unsatisfactory. That Magdalen’s brave odyssey should collapse into such a morass of clichés – rescue by a seafaring strong man, a penitential illness and a sickbed conversion – seems a frustrating elision of the many powerful questions the novel has hitherto posed; though to such as Mrs Oliphant, even this dramatic reversion to the ideals of hearth and home was too little too late.
In a piece for the Athenaeum the critic H.F. Chorley reported No Name to be ‘deservedly a great success, if not altogether a sound one’.11 In fact it never became nearly as popular as its predecessor. The first print run of 4,000 was sold out on publication day (31 December 1862, only a week after Collins finished writing it on Christmas Eve), but most of the copies bought were part of a prearranged bulk order from Mudie’s Circulating Library – another instance of Collins’s hard head for marketing. Reviews ranged from the lukewarm to the condemnatory, and sales were on the whole disappointing.
A clue to the distrustful reception accorded No Name may perhaps be found in Collins’s next novel, Armadale, in which the shameless Dr Downward explains what books he considers suitable reading matter for the inmates of his sanatorium:
Nothing painful, ma’am! There may be plenty that is painful in real life – but for that very reason, we don’t want it in books. The English novelist who enters my house (no foreign novelist will be admitted) must understand his art as the healthy-minded English reader understands it in our time. He must know that our purer modern taste, our higher modern morality, limits him to doing exactly two things for us, when he writes a book. All we want of him is – occasionally to make us laugh, and invariably to make us comfortable.12
No Name certainly wouldn’t make it into Dr Downward’s library. For it is, overall, a highly unsettling novel; it expands an investigatio
n into the concept of legitimacy into one of Victorian fiction’s sharpest, most wide-ranging critiques of the society’s prevailing codes and structures, and the moral values that supposedly underpin them. And though today the ideal of legitimacy has lost much of its force, Collins’s exposure of the strategic manoeuvring and manipulations of identity that determine the social battle for survival is pertinent and disturbing as ever. No Name may occasionally make us laugh, but it won’t make us comfortable.
Notes to the Introduction
1. (p. vii). Letter of 31 July 1861, quoted in The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins (London, 1991) by Catherine Peters, p. 236.
2. (p. vii). Letter of 12 August 1862, quoted in Peters, p. 243.
3. (p. vii). Henry James, unsigned review, ‘Miss Braddon’, 9 November 1865, quoted in Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage (London, 1974) edited by Norman Page, p. 122.
4. (p. viii). Letter to Collins, 24 January 1862, quoted in Page, p. 127.
5. (p. x). Alexander Smith, unsigned review, North British Review, February 1863, quoted in Page, p. 142.
6. (p. x). Mrs Oliphant, unsigned review, Blackwood’s Magazine, August 1863, quoted in Page, p. 143.
7. (p. x). E.S. Dallas, The Gay Science (London, 1866), Vol. 11, p. 298.
8. (p. xii). Basil (London, 1852), p. xxxvii. Two stage versions of No Name itself exist. The first, published in 1863, was an adaptation by Bayle Bernard commissioned by Collins to protect his copyright. In 1870 Collins attempted his own adaptation, which he finally abandoned to an actor friend, Wybert Reeve. Reeve completely altered the book’s plot, transforming Norah into an off-stage invalid, and George Bartram into a persevering suitor for Magdalen’s hand. It was even less successful than Collins’s other plays on the professional stage.
9. (p. xv). Letter to F.C. Beard, 10 October 1862, quoted in Peters, p. 244
10. (p. xv). Letter to Collins, 14 October 1862, in The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vols 1–3, edited by Walter Dexter (London, 1938), Vol. 3, p. 310.
11. (p. xv). H.F. Chorley, unsigned review, Athenaeum, 3 January 1863, quoted in Page, p. 132.
12. (p. xvi). Armadale (London, 1866), p. 623.
CHRONOLOGY
1824 8 January: Born at 11 New Cavendish Street, St Marylebone, London to William John Thomas Collins, RA (1788–1847), painter, and Harriet Collins, née Geddes (1790–1868).
1826 Family moves to Pond Street, Hampstead.
1828 25 January: Brother, Charles Allston Collins, born (d. 1873).
1829 Family moves to Hampstead Square.
1830 Family moves to Porchester Terrace, Bayswater.
1835 13 January: Attends Maida Hill Academy.
1836 19 September–15 August 1838: Family visits France and Italy.
1838 August: Family moves to 20 Avenue Road, Regents Park; attends Mr Cole’s private boarding school, Highbury Place.
1840 Summer: Family moves to 85 Oxford Terrace, Bayswater; December: leaves Mr Cole’s school.
1841 January: Apprenticed to Edmund Antrobus, tea merchant of the Strand.
1842 June – July: Visits Scotland with his father.
1843 August: First published fiction, ‘The Last Stage Coachman’, Illuminated Magazine.
1844 Writes Iólani; Or Tahiti as it was, a Romance, which remains unpublished until 1999.
1845 January: Submits Iólani to Chapman and Hall; is rejected in March.
1846 17 May: Enters Lincoln’s Inn to study law.
1847 17 February: Death of father.
1848 Summer: Family moves to 38 Blanford Square; November: first book, Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., RA, published by Chapman and Hall.
1849 Exhibits a painting, The Smuggler’s Retreat, at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.
1850 26 February: First play, A Court Duel, an adaptation of J. P. Simon and Edmond Badon’s Monsieur Lockroy, staged at the Soho Theatre, Dean Street; 27 February: first novel, Antonina; or the Fall of Rome, published by Richard Bentley; Summer: moves with mother to 17 Hanover Terrace; July – August: walking tour of Cornwall with Henry Brandling, artist.
1851 30 January: Rambles Beyond Railways, a travel book on Cornwall, published by Bentley; March: meets Charles Dickens; first contribution to Bentley’s Miscellany, ‘The Twin Sisters’; 16 May: acts with Dickens in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Not So Bad as We Seem; 27 September: first article for Edward Pigott’s socialist newspaper, Leader, 21 November: called to the Bar; 17 December: Mr Wray’s Cash-Box published by Bentley.
1852 24 April: First contribution to Household Words, ‘A Terribly Strange Bed’; 16 November: Basil: A Story of Modern Life published by Bentley.
1853 July–September: Stays with Dickens in Boulogne; October–December: tours Switzerland and Italy with Dickens and Augustus Egg.
1854 Joins the Garrick Club; 6 June: Hide and Seek published by Bentley: July–August: stays with Dickens in Boulogne.
1855 16 June: First play, The Lighthouse, performed at Tavistock House by Dickens’s theatrical company; September: sails to Scilly Isles with Pigott.
1856 February: First collection of short stories, After Dark, published by Smith, Elder; 1–29 March: A Rogue’s Life serialized in Household Words; September: Moves to 2 Harley Place; October: becomes staff writer on Household Words.
1857 3 January: The Dead Secret begins serialization in Household Words and (from 24 January) in Harper’s Weekly; 6 January: The Frozen Deep performed at Tavistock House; June: The Dead Secret published in volume form by Bradbury and Evans; 10 August: The Lighthouse opens at the Olympic Theatre; September: tours Cumberland, Lancashire and Yorkshire with Dickens; 3–31 October: they describe the trip in The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, published in Household Words; December: collaborates with Dickens on ‘The Perils of Certain English Prisoners’.
1858 First French translation, The Dead Secret; July–August: first visit to Broadstairs, Kent; September: resigns from the Garrick club, in protest at the expulsion of his friend Edmund Yates; 11 October: The Red Vial is produced at the Olympic Theatre, and flops.
1859 January–February: Lives with Mrs Caroline Graves at 124 Albany Street; apart from one short interlude, they remain together until his death; May–December: lives at 2a Cavendish Square; October: The Queen of Hearts published by Hurst and Blackett; 26 November–25 August 1860: The Woman in White serialized in All the Year Round; December: moves to 12 Harley Street.
1860 17 July: Charles Allston Collins marries Kate Dickens; August: The Woman in White published in volume form by Sampson Low; 22 August: opens bank account at Coutts.
1861 January: Resigns from All the Year Round; 16 April: joins the Athenaeum club; August: visits Whitby, Yorkshire, with Caroline Graves.
1862 15 March–17 January 1863: No Name serialized in All the Year Round; 31 December: published in volume form by Sampson Low.
1863 August: Visits the Isle of Man with Caroline and her daughter, Harriet; November: a collection of journalism, My Miscellanies, published by Sampson Low.
1864 November–June 1866: Armadale serialized in the Cornhill Magazine; December: moves to 9 Melcombe Place, Dorset Square.
1865 Chair of the Royal General Theatrical Fund.
1866 May: Armadale published in volume form by Smith, Elder; October: visits Italy with Pigott; 27 October: The Frozen Deep opens at the Olympic Theatre.
1867 September: Moves to 90 Gloucester Place; December: collaborates with Dickens on short story ‘No Thoroughfare’; 24 December: theatrical adaptation produced, Adelphi Theatre.
1868 Finds lodgings for Martha Rudd, his second mistress, at 33 Bolsover Street, Portland Place; she uses the name ‘Mrs Dawson’; 4 January–8 August: The Moonstone serialized in All the Year Round; 19 March: his mother dies; July: The Moonstone published in volume form by Tinsley Brothers; 29 October: witnesses the marriage of Caroline Graves to Joseph Charles Clow.
1869 29 March: Black and White, written in collaboration with the actor Charles Fechter, opens at the Ade
lphi Theatre; 4 July: daughter, Marian Dawson, born to Collins and Martha Rudd; 20 November–30 July 1870: Man and Wife serialized in Cassell’s Magazine.
1870 June: Man and Wife published in volume form by F.S. Ellis; 9 June: Death of Dickens.
1871 April: Caroline Graves returns to live with Collins in Gloucester Place; 14 May: second daughter, Harriet Constance Dawson, born to Collins and Martha Rudd at 33 Bolsover Street; 9 October: The Woman in White opens at the Olympic; 2 September–24 February 1872: Poor Miss Finch serialized in Cassell’s Magazine.
1872 26 January: Poor Miss Finch published in volume form by Bentley; October–July 1873: The New Magdalen serialized in Temple Bar.
1873 17 January: Miss or Mrs? And Other Stories published by Bentley; 22 February: Man and Wife opens at the Prince of Wales Theatre; 9 April: Charles Allston Collins dies; 17 May: The New Magdalen published in volume form by Bentley; 19 May: stage version of The New Magdalen opens at the Olympic; 25 September: arrives in New York for reading tour of America; 10 November: The New Magdalen opens in New York.
1874 Martha Rudd moves to 10 Taunton Place, Regents Park; 7 March: Collins leaves Boston for England; 26 September–13 March 1875: The Law and the Lady serialized in the Graphic, 2 November: The Frozen Deep and Other Stories published by Bentley; 25 December: son, William Charles Collins Dawson, born to Collins and Martha Rudd at Taunton Place.
1875 Copyright for Collins’s work acquired by Chatto and Windus, who remain his publishers until his death; February: The Law and the Lady published in volume form by Chatto and Windus.
1876 January–September: The Two Destinies serialized in Temple Bar, 15 April: Miss Gwilt, a dramatic version of Armadale, opens at the Globe Theatre; August: The Two Destinies published in volume form.
No Name Page 2