Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation

by Andrew Lycett

  It had notable artistic connections, represented in the transparency (or picture window), by Benjamin West, President of the Royal Academy, the institution greatly revered by William Collins. It would later become the local, if seldom frequented, church of Wilkie Collins’s friend Charles Dickens, when he lived in Devonshire Terrace.

  Baby Wilkie appears in his father’s drawings as a fat-cheeked infant with dark hair and no hint of his cranial deformity. He had grey eyes and was small for his age, though he would grow to five foot six inches, an average height for a man of his time. When David Wilkie, a lifelong bachelor, first encountered him at his christening, he was so unfamiliar with babies that he did not know what to do. After examining his godson’s eyes as if they were a puppy’s, he handed him back to his parents, declaring with an air of satisfaction, ‘He sees.’22

  William Collins, now in his mid-thirties, was reaching the peak of his creative and earning powers, which meant he was often away, sketching or visiting aristocratic patrons. A fine-featured man, with warm, searching eyes and thick, well-kempt hair, he was generally liked for his calm, unassuming manner. An art critic described him as no genius, but ‘simply a gentleman, mild and pleasing, without foppery, affectation, or even peculiarity of any kind.’23 Those who knew him better noticed a priggish streak. This was linked to his strong religious faith, based on a personalised form of Evangelicalism, which stressed the importance of hard work, Biblical study and prayer.

  Wilkie stayed at home with his mother, who supervised his early education and was responsible, he acknowledged, for ‘whatever of poetry and imagination there may be in my composition’.24 Harriet Collins was witty and intelligent enough to win the admiration of men such as Coleridge, but she could also be garrulous, which would later irritate Wilkie’s friend Charles Dickens.

  At New Cavendish Street, Wilkie and his mother had plenty of company. His grandmother and unmarried uncle Frank still lived with them and, on 25 January 1828, his brother Charles was born. Like Wilkie, he was given an artist’s middle name, Allston, in homage to his father’s American friend Washington Allston.

  Wilkie’s aunt Christy, his mother’s younger sister Christine, often helped with the two boys, while another aunt, Margaret Carpenter, lived nearby, though she was more preoccupied with tending her expanding family and developing her career as a painter.

  After being elected a full Academician in 1820, William found himself increasingly (and by no means unwillingly) a member of the artistic establishment – a position that, in an age of competing artistic tendencies, meant he was also in the thick of controversy. He was roundly criticised by the excitable Benjamin Haydon following the death in April 1825 of Henry Fuseli, who had taught them both at the Royal Academy Schools. Haydon was unhappy about what he saw as the development of the Royal Academy into a ‘nest of portrait painters’.25 He called on the government to take action to prevent history painters of his kind being usurped by aspiring portraitists, including Collins, who, he seemed to imply, were adopting a rather lackadaisical approach to their profession.

  Haydon overestimated William’s influence and misrepresented his output, which that year included rustic scenes such as Buying Fish on the Beach – Hazy Morning and The Cottage Door, which seemed designed not to ruffle feathers in the politically repressive years following Waterloo. However, such attacks spurred William to perfect his respectable nature scenes rather than waste unnecessary time on portraits.

  In the summer of 1825, he removed his wife and baby Wilkie from the heat and bustle of Marylebone to a house in then rural Hendon, a favourite spot of his. When not sketching en plein air, he liked to walk five or six miles to Highgate and discuss matters of philosophy with his friend Coleridge.

  William enjoyed looking out over the city from the salubrious heights of north London, for in 1826 he left New Cavendish Street and took a small house in Hampstead. It was there, at 2 Pond Street, a short walk from the Heath, on a site currently occupied by the Royal Free Hospital, that Charles was born a couple of years later.

  At this time, David Wilkie was away on a three-year tour of Europe, from where he sent back enthusiastic reports of the works of Michelangelo and other Italian old masters. William reciprocated with his latest news: ‘Your godson grows a strapping fellow, and has a little blue-eyed red-haired bonny bairn, as a brother, about three months old.’26

  Hoping to settle permanently in Hampstead (and also to accommodate his now ailing mother), William looked into buying land and building his own house there, close to other friends, including the artist John Linnell. After David Wilkie returned from the Continent in July 1828, William came under renewed pressure to follow him on a similar career-defining European tour, but, as long as his mother was alive, he felt unable to do so.

  As a compromise, while plans for his house in Hampstead were being drawn up, he took his wife, mother and children across the Channel to Boulogne, where in the summer of 1829 he painted The Mussel Gatherers – Coast of France, for which his banker client, Sir Thomas Baring, would pay four hundred guineas, one of his highest fees. Always alert for authenticity, William came across a fisherman who had witnessed a shipwreck near Boulogne in which everyone had died except a black man. However, the quarantine laws then in force would not allow anyone to help the half-drowned survivor. When William’s son Wilkie later retold the story, he would write, with some passion, ‘No one attempted to approach, or succour him, but the fisherman; who, in defiance of all danger and objection, carried the poor wretch to a straw-hut on the beach; and, taking off his own clothes, laid down by him the whole night long, endeavouring to restore the dying negro by the vital warmth of his own body. This sublime act of humanity was, however, unavailing – when morning dawned, the negro was dead!’27 William Collins recorded this unfortunate incident in a sketch called ‘Good Samaritan’, which had the kind of narrative immediacy later found in his son’s written work.

  On his return to England, the paperwork relating to the Hampstead house was still not completed, so the family stayed briefly in Ramsgate, a seaside resort in Kent, which several of William’s friends, including the Linnells and Coleridge, had visited and recommended. Still hankering after North London, William took a short lease on a property in Hampstead Square, close to the Heath, then, in mid-1830, moved back into town to 30 Porchester Terrace, a house with a decent-sized room which could be used as a studio, just north of Hyde Park in Bayswater. The surrounding area was still partly rural, but the Collinses felt at home since John Linnell lived at number 38, having made the same journey south from Hampstead two years earlier.

  Wilkie had his first experience of politics, sitting at the window of this new house, at the time of the First Reform Act in April 1832. When, after much agitation, this controversial extension of the franchise was finally passed, jubilant crowds roamed the streets threatening to break the windows of any building not lit up in celebration. The Collins boys found themselves caught up in the excitement: Wilkie recalled a mob marching six abreast, smashing the glass of an un-illuminated house on the other side of the street. As the vigilantes surged forward, cheering the passage of the Act, he could not help expressing the same sentiment. But his spontaneous demonstration of political feeling infuriated his father, a High Tory, who had shown his colours when he told a friend that he equated political reform with cholera as a scourge of the age and evidence of God’s wrath.

  In William Collins’s mind, politics and religion were closely linked, and this would prove significant as Wilkie’s opinions began to develop. There was no doubting William’s commitment to God; his letters were full of it: ‘I could go on for an hour describing our blessings,’28 he wrote to his wife on one of his trips. ‘Your heart is not insensible to the mercies of Providence, and when I return we will thank our heavenly father together.’ Reading the Bible was a regular evening feature in the Collins household. However, like many thoughtful Anglicans in an uncertain age, he was still looking to find an appropriate spiritual response to
fill the space between direct communication with the Deity, as practised by dissenters, and the elaborate ritual associated with Roman Catholics.

  Over the years he moved fitfully from Evangelicalism to a more rigid High Church set of beliefs associated with the Oxford Movement, or Tractarians, in the 1830s. The Reform Bill had played its part in the birth of this latter faction, which was to split the Church of England, because one of its lesser-known provisions (and the one that particularly exercised the conservative-minded William Collins) was a reduction in the number of Irish bishops. Coming so soon after Catholic emancipation in 1829, this additional concession was regarded by reactionary Anglican clerics as yet another attack on the established Church, indicative of the lax liberalism to be found not only in its own affairs but in society as a whole. This was the point made in John Keble’s ‘national apostasy’ sermon, which kick-started the Oxford Movement in July 1833, leading to the first Tract for The Times written by the Reverend John Henry Newman of Oriel College, Oxford, later in the year. However, the Movement’s conservatism would push it nearer to the Roman Catholic Church, to the extent that some supporters, including Newman, became dissatisfied with the compromises involved and preferred to align themselves completely with Rome.

  As an ardent Protestant, William Collins did not follow Newman down that path. His adventures on the fringes of Tractarianism took a different route, buffeted by the many spiritual cross-currents of the time. He had always been interested in philosophical and religious enquiry, from his early discussions with fellow artists such as Allston and Wilkie to his association with Coleridge.

  Through a combination of these influences William came into the orbit of Edward Irving, an unorthodox preacher, whose brand of Evangelicalism and social conservatism was popular in his native Scotland. When Irving moved to London as a Church of Scotland minister in 1822, one of his two contacts was David Wilkie (who painted his portrait). Irving was quickly taken up and lionised, becoming a member of Coleridge’s philosophical circle in Highgate, where another participant was a retired Royal Artillery doctor called James Thompson, a neighbour of William’s in Hampstead. Wilkie Collins later emphasised the significance of this circle to his father: ‘Here he first met that original and extraordinary character, Edward Irving, whose preaching was at that time drawing its greatest multitude of hearers . . . From the discussions upon matters of worship constantly occurring between Coleridge and Irving, Mr. Collins, and others of the poet’s guests, gathered such fresh information, and acquired such new ideas, as they never afterwards forgot.’29

  As the decade progressed, Irving was drawn to ‘speaking in tongues’ as a way of getting in touch with the Holy Spirit. This gained him the support of a rich, Conservative banker, Henry Drummond, who from 1826 held regular conferences on the study of prophecy at his estate in Albury, Surrey. When news came of an outbreak of Pentecostalism in Scotland, these ‘Irvingites’ sent a small delegation to investigate, among them Dr Thompson who, in 1831, wrote A Brief Account of a Visit to Some of the Brethren in the West of Scotland.

  A year later, these ‘Irvingites’ coalesced into the Catholic Apostolic Church, centred at Irving’s church in Newman Street, London, and backed by Henry Drummond. However, religious trends were fickle in those turbulent times and, as Irving himself became increasingly obsessed with spontaneous communication with God, he lost his religious and social credibility, leading to his formal removal from the Church of Scotland and to his Catholic Apostolic Church going its own way. In 1835, Dr Thompson put himself forward for election as one of this new Church’s apostles. Although defeated, he went on to run its affairs in Southampton.

  On the fringes of Drummond’s Albury conferences was a Yorkshire-born preacher called William Dodsworth, whose beliefs were more in keeping with William Collins’s. In 1829, Drummond arranged for Dodsworth to take over a small chapel in Margaret Street, Marylebone, where William often went to hear him preach. Like many astute clerics, Dodsworth married well – in his case, Elizabeth Buller-Yarde-Buller, the daughter of a rich, well-connected parishioner, Lady Buller, who lived in York Terrace, one of the new Nash developments in the Regent’s Park.

  Although he had been interested in Irving’s charismatic approach, Dodsworth moved away from the increasingly wayward Scottish preacher in the early 1830s. William eagerly followed suit, as shown in the many positive comments about Dodsworth in his correspondence. In October 1831, when his wife Harriet was staying in Brighton with Dr Thompson and his family, William informed her, ‘Mr Dodsworth continues his sermons upon the fearful character of the present time.’30 Underlining his sense of the links between politics and religion, he asked her to seek the opinion of ‘our friend Dr Thompson’ on ‘recent events’ relating to the agitation surrounding the Reform Bill. Two years later, when she was again away, he reported going ‘to Mr Dodsworth’s, heard an excellent sermon & stayed to thank the Lord for all his mercies “for they endure for ever”.’31

  Although William was happy to follow Dodsworth, traces of his old Evangelicalism remained. This was evident in his determination to uphold the sanctity of Sundays. On more than one occasion he upbraided John Linnell, his neighbour in Porchester Terrace, for failing to respect the Sabbath – once for tending his peach and nectarine trees, and another time for daring to paint on the Lord’s Day. He even threatened to take Linnell, a Baptist, to court over the matter. Such intransigence could sometimes take a nasty turn. When he accused Linnell of not paying his gardener, he was met with a strong denial, to which William haughtily enquired, ‘Of what consequence is it whether you cheated a man out of his wages or not, when you are constantly doing things ten times worse?’ Asked if he was still referring to the nectarine incident, William admitted he was, and, according to Linnell’s biographer A.T. Story, went on to say ‘that a man who would break the Sabbath would do any other bad thing’. Story added a comment that probably echoed his subject’s view of William: ‘The worthy Academician, though an amiable, was in many respects rather a weak-minded, man. He appeared always to be oppressed by the twin bugbears, propriety and respectability, and found it difficult to forgive anyone who failed in his respect to them.’32

  This piousness was reflected in the upbringing of the Collins children, who were constantly urged to be good. Writing from the Warwickshire seat of Sir George Phillips, a rich textile magnate, William exhorted his sons, ‘Go on praying to God, through Jesus Christ, to enable you, by his holy spirit, to be blessings to your parents; and then you must be happy.’33 He signed off in an unctuous manner that would come to infuriate Wilkie: ‘And now, my dear boys, I must leave you and prepare for going to Church . . . where I shall pray for my two children and their mother as well, as for all the world beside.’

  On this occasion Mama was at home, but this was not always the case. Wilkie had to endure long periods when both his mother and father were absent. For several years she had suffered from ‘nerves’. As a result, she was often away, convalescing with her parents, visiting friends, or ‘taking the waters’ in coastal resorts. It seems that, for all her sociability, she had difficulty coping with a life centred on her husband’s activities. ‘At home very poorly from anxiety and fatigue,’34 read one of her diary entries in 1835. Her afflictions were not uncommon at the time, particularly among women, who struggled in a male-dominated industrial society. Although Harriet was a spirited woman, who would later write a fine quasi-fictional memoir, there is no evidence of her having any outlet for her creativity.

  A branch of medicine sprang up to minister to such complaints. Her husband played along, telling her he hoped that, as a result of a regime of rides and walks, she might ‘by the blessing of God have found some benefit for your nerves’,35 and on another occasion, that ‘Dr Quin’, one of several doctors the family used, ‘says you may with much chance of benefit take tepid sea water baths twice or perhaps thrice a week.’36

  Young Wilkie took note and would later write sympathetically about women with anxiety disorders. H
is novels would reflect how, as the century progressed, neuroses became more openly discussed and studied. He would try to recreate in his narrative style the experience of nervous agitation, with its highs and lows, its terrors and searing emotions.

  Although not always at home, Harriet managed to supervise Wilkie’s education. She encouraged him in his early reading, such as Joseph Ritson’s edition of the ballads of Robin Hood. Wilkie had developed an enduring love of the sea; so, when he stayed in Ramsgate, his father gave him Isaac Taylor’s The Ship, part of a popular educative series for the young.37

  As Wilkie grew older he became a devoted reader of Walter Scott, while other favourite books included Don Quixote, The Vicar of Wakefield, The Arabian Nights and the nautical adventure stories of Captain Marryat – all of which suggested his notably eclectic tastes.

  In 1833, the Collins family circumstances changed radically as a result of the deaths in quick succession of Wilkie’s good-natured Uncle Frank and his grandmother, old Mrs Collins. Frank’s loss from typhus in his early forties proved the last straw for his mother, who had been in poor health for several years. It also hit William hard, since he relied heavily on his brother’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the art world.

  He followed Harriet into a state of melancholy, which was only mitigated by his religious faith. When he visited Kent the following May, he found relief in the beauty of the countryside and in ‘the society of Christians. No other society can comfort me – the society of the world depresses me greatly. I am sadly low in mind at times, and in body weak – apt to be vexed, very impatient, not bearing my afflictions with that patience, which afflictions were sent to teach.’38 He tried to improve his low spirits by taking his family on an extended and rather gruelling tour of Wales in the summer of 1834. This trip was to prove a dry run for William’s postponed Italian grand tour two years later. However, though change was in the air, he could not yet tear himself away from his work. So, in January 1835, shortly after his eleventh birthday, Wilkie was despatched to school for the first time. He attended the Maida Hill Academy, an undistinguished and short-lived establishment run by the Reverend James Gall, off the Edgware Road. Aside from a bout of measles, Wilkie seemed content enough: his mother’s diary recorded how he brought friends home and accompanied his brother on expeditions to the zoo. The year ended on a note of triumph when Wilkie won the school prize – a copy of the Essays written by the profoundly conservative Poet Laureate Robert Southey, whom his father had met in the Lake District in 1818.