Wilkie’s education was cut short or, as he later saw it, enhanced when, in September 1836, his father decided that the time had finally come to make the journey to Italy, since he no longer had the excuse of his mother to detain him. As an artist, he was convinced – or had had it drummed into him by David Wilkie – that he was at a stage in his artistic development when he would benefit from greater knowledge of the Italian masters. Although his own style tended towards Dutch figurative painting, William believed that art in Italy could only be properly appreciated by a mature artist.
It was a testament to William’s dedication to his profession that, approaching the age of fifty, he was prepared not only to devote two years of his life to improving his skills, but to take his family with him. Travelling to Italy involved long and often uncomfortable journeys by coach and boat; visas were difficult and time-consuming to obtain; and disease, notably cholera, was a hazard at every stage.
In Paris, their first significant stop, the Collinses called on friends, including Miss Thompson, sister of the Irvingite doctor, and saw the sights, including the Louvre, where they happened to meet William’s patron Sir Robert Peel and his family. William was impressed by the way the Bonapartist system of patronage ensured that all artists were gainfully employed. He wondered if it might be replicated in Britain, where the Royal Academy was in the process of moving from Somerset House to shared premises with the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square.
Another series of gruelling coach trips took the family south to the Mediterranean, where they were held up in Nice for six weeks because of a deadly cholera outbreak in Italy. While twelve-year-old Wilkie tried to keep up his studies by taking lessons from a young Jewish tutor, William made the most of his letters of introduction to the British Consul. These had been written by Sir William Knighton, keeper of the privy purse and physician in ordinary to George IV, who was a great friend and patron of David Wilkie, and by Sir William’s brother-in-law, a well-travelled naval captain called Edward Harker. With his contacts to the royal household, Knighton was one of several men who regularly smoothed the progress of William’s career. William regarded him highly, and was saddened, while in Nice, to learn of his death.
After getting the all-clear to travel, the Collinses spent surprisingly little time in Florence, given its artistic treasures. The city was simply inhospitable: nothing was open because of the Christmas and New Year holidays and it was extremely cold, with snow knee-deep. They hurried on to Rome, where William looked forward to finding a studio and resuming his work.
The Collinses settled into a suite of apartments in the via Felice, looking out onto the fashionable Pincian Hill, close to the Villa Borghese. Their house had a niche above the door for a statue of the Madonna, which was much revered, as the neighbours sang to it every evening. Wilkie was impressed when, by chance, he and his father met Wordsworth nearby. He later recalled the Lakeland poet as kindly and mild, but ‘quite out of his element’39 abroad – a man terrified by any suggestion of cholera, counselling William not to proceed to Naples for that very reason, and determined to leave Italy as soon as he could. William ignored this alarmism. Instead, as he told David Wilkie,40 he ‘lost no time in getting to pictorial head quarters’, meaning the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel, where he marvelled at the paintings and frescos of Raphael and Michelangelo.
He also enjoyed the company of local British artists, particularly Joseph Severn and the portrait painter Thomas Brigstocke, who both allowed him to use their models and studios. Other artists based in Rome, or passing through, included the sculptor Richard James Wyatt, Thomas Uwins, who specialised in portraits and landscapes, and Samuel Palmer, John Linnell’s new son-in-law.
While Harriet’s diary gives the impression that she and her husband seldom strayed outside the sphere of other expatriates, Wilkie adapted easily to local ways, picking up Italian, enjoying Roman cuisine and developing a taste for opera. He was drawn to the historical aspects of Rome. Stimulated by visits to the Colosseum, the Pincian Hill and other ancient sites, he became fascinated by the city’s past – not the Christianised version that captured his parents’ imaginations, but the more dramatic struggles of Classical times, as given life in Bulwer-Lytton’s hugely successful novel of 1834, The Last Days of Pompeii.
Meanwhile, William and Harriet studiously kept up their Tractarian-style observances, though even such committed Protestants could not completely ignore Catholicism in such a place. They went to Mass at the Vatican over Easter and attended the funeral of Thomas Weld, the first Englishman to be made a cardinal for well over a century. However, their distaste for local practices was clear in Harriet’s angry reaction when she witnessed the ‘most ridiculous and disgusting ceremony’ of animals being baptised. ‘The chief drawback to the enjoyment of the beauties and advantages of Italy’ was, she felt, ‘the dreadful and debasing idolatry they call the Christian religion.’ And in true English anti-papist style, she was incensed by the cult of the Virgin: ‘Not a trace to be found of the religion revealed in God’s word but a few names for instance, Jesu Christo, but how his mother is exalted on every occasion above him.’
Wilkie perked up when a younger painter called Edward (Ned) Ward arrived with his friend John Leech, the future Punch illustrator. Feeling stifled by the religiosity of his parents, he looked to Ward, a high-spirited banker’s son, studying to be a history artist, to introduce him to the more earthy aspects of the Eternal City. The effusive dark-haired Ward shared Wilkie’s interest in the local culture: he ‘sang, chiefly in Italian, and danced the Tarantella with the grace and agility of a native’.41 Ward had tried his hand at banking but, unlike his older brother Charles, had found it ‘most uncongenial’ and reverted to his first love, painting. In Rome, he enrolled at the prestigious Accademia di San Luca and then, as a protegé of David Wilkie, sought out William Collins, whom he found ‘a very sincere kind of man’.42
A little more than a decade later, Wilkie would perform the crucial role of giving the bride away when Ward secretly married one of his teenage pupils, against the wishes of her parents. This act of comradeship suggested a history of shared escapades, which almost certainly started in Rome. It is not surprising to find that Wilkie later gave two boastful accounts of his first amorous encounter at around this time. In one description, to the German critic Ernst von Wolzogen, he was not too specific, recalling how he had fallen in love with a woman43 at least three times his age and how he had been consumed with jealousy whenever her husband was nearby.
In the other, to Charles Dickens when they visited Italy together in 1853, he provided more detail. As Dickens wrote soon after to his sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth, Wilkie ‘gave us . . . in a carriage one day, a full account of his first love adventure. It was at Rome it seemed, and proceeded, if I may be allowed the expression, to the utmost extremities – he came out quite a pagan Jupiter in the business.’44
Both these reports say that Wilkie was twelve at the time. But that should not be taken too literally. Indeed, by naming Rome, Dickens puts the date at 1837 when Wilkie was thirteen (or perhaps fourteen, since the Collins family returned there the following summer).
However, it is not difficult to imagine Wilkie venturing into the city one night, accompanied by Ward, and meeting a voluptuous Roman lady who helped him lose his viginity. Even if this was a fanciful story that Wilkie span to entertain Dickens, it nevertheless suggests he was a precocious youth who was discovering his sexuality and indicates why he later looked back on Italy as a country of freedom and passion.
In early May, William Collins was ready to move south with his family to Naples, where he again settled into a round of painting and hobnobbing with local artists and celebrities. The domestic emphasis of Neapolitan art was more in keeping with his own style than the rich classicism that prevailed in Rome. But after a leisurely month they began noticing ominous signs of a worsening cholera epidemic. They quickly made their way by boat down the coast to Sorrento, where, as the summer heat intensi
fied, they set up house on a clifftop overlooking the sea, and Wilkie began to take Latin lessons.
This was not how he wanted to spend his time. After his amorous adventures (imagined or otherwise) in Rome, his energies were focused elsewhere. As the pagan Jupiter noted by Dickens, he became restless and obstreperous, causing Harriet to confide to her diary, ‘Willy very tiresome all day. His father obliged to punish him at dinner time. Made us all miserable.’45
The next day William felt ill. It was the beginning of a long period of confinement to his bed with pains throughout his body, especially in his eyes. He tried various remedies for this rheumatic fever, but they all proved unsuccessful. Eventually his doctor suggested he should take the sulphur baths on the nearby island of Ischia.
To cheer him while he lay ill, his wife read him a recent English best-seller, Gilbert Gurney, the fictionalised autobiography of the witty Regency man of letters and serial hoaxer Theodore Hook. If Wilkie listened in, he would have been intrigued by this writer of the ‘silver-fork’ school, derided as snobbish by William Hazlitt in his 1827 essay ‘The Dandy School’, but later a formative influence on Wilkie’s own ‘sensation’ novels.
As William’s health slowly improved, he started taking donkey rides with his sons. Wilkie enjoyed this, but continued to irritate his convalescing father. His mother recorded that he had ‘offended his father’ and been forbidden to ride. A few days later the stroppy testosterone-fuelled teenager was ‘in disgrace again’.46 True to form, he had been reading A Sentimental Journey, Laurence Sterne’s spicy novel about a young man’s grand tour, similar to his own. He had been given this by an American in Naples, together with another ‘amusing’ work, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, about a sensitive young artist’s passion for a married woman.
Back in Naples in early November 1837, William was still weak. Harriet’s composure was not helped when, as she and her husband attended church on New Year’s Eve for the first time since his illness, Charley fell off a wall and broke his arm while playing with friends near the Villa Reale promenade. The poor boy’s pained screams that night did not give the family the happiest of starts to 1838. Harriet admonished herself, ‘I take shame to myself for not taking my boys with me to church in the afternoon as I ought to have done.’ And she reflected in her diary, ‘Many months of this past year have been passed in much anxiety and fatigue caused by the severe affliction of rheumatism etc suffered by my husband. Many times my patience has failed me. Many times my heart has been oppressed with weariness by reason of sin . . . Lord remove these burdens that come from the bondage of Satan.’
Harriet’s problems did not prevent her enjoying the local social life. New friends included the respected Russell family, headed by Sir Henry Russell, a former chief justice of Bengal who had recently inherited a baronetcy, together with Swallowfield Park, an estate in Berkshire which would later be familiar to Wilkie through his friendship with Sir Henry’s sons, Henry and Charles.
Returning to Rome with Harriet and the two boys in February 1838, William took rooms on the Corso and seemed set to stay for some time. He got to know the latest batch of artists from Britain, including George Richmond, and Sir Henry Knighton, son of the late royal doctor and another protégé of David Wilkie.
William was particularly eager for news about the Royal Academy in its new headquarters in Trafalgar Square. The postal deliveries further south had been sporadic, and he had not received vital letters from his brother-in-law, William Hookham Carpenter, who was looking after the sale of his pictures. Everything he had seen on his journey reinforced his conviction of the importance of having a national centre of artistic excellence. But when he suggested that the Academy, like its French and German rivals, should have a propagandising outpost in Rome, he was rebuffed in London.
This sense of isolation contributed to William’s sudden decision to return home. He admitted to David Wilkie that he was tired ‘of the rambling, unsettled life a man necessarily leads when in a foreign country, with such a variety of attractions’. He longed ‘to be at work in England’, but the immediate problem was how to transport the fruits of his Italian labours, an estimated eight hundred sketches and oils. He had been told that the Austrian customs officials were particularly philistine and routinely tore paintings, so he resolved to send half his output back to London by sea.
Eventually, after almost two years away, the family began their return journey. Even at this stage it was a leisurely affair. Passing through Florence, William was delighted to meet a direct descendant of Michelangelo, who showed him the original manuscript of a sonnet by the master. He took time off in Parma to see the Correggios that had so impressed David Wilkie. In Venice he caused consternation when, in his determination to paint a particular scene, he insisted on parking his gondola – and keeping it stationary – in the middle of the crowded Grand Canal on market day.
The Collinses arrived back in London on 15 August 1838, six weeks after the coronation of the nineteen-year-old Queen Victoria. After a short stay with the Carpenters,47 they moved to 20 Avenue Road, just north of Regent’s Park, close to their old stamping ground in Marylebone. They soon got to know a family at number 10 called the Otters, who were related to the Irvingite Dr James Thompson, and would become good friends. Although the Collinses did not stay there long, Avenue Road made a strong impression on Wilkie. In 1859, when he needed a suitable location for the dramatic opening scene of The Woman in White, he set part of it there, with its comfortable detached houses and leafy surroundings.
Four days after returning to London, the family visited the recently knighted Sir David Wilkie in Vicarage Gate, Kensington. The Scottish painter told his sister that they were all ‘in the highest spirits, quite delighted with the style of living in Italy. They are, indeed, so satisfied with having seen Italy, that it will be some time before they can get reconciled to the sobriety and darkness of this climate.’48
This was certainly true of Wilkie, who would always hanker after the warmth and sensuality of the Mediterranean. Nevertheless, for all his knowledge of Italian food and (he liked to think) women, he remained in many ways a callow, unformed youth. At least, after two years in often stifling proximity to his parents, he was beginning to realise that he had little sympathy for their Tractarian approach. He had also learned a degree of intellectual and emotional self-sufficiency. And that, more than anything, would prove the lasting legacy of his time in Italy.
3
A PLAN OF INSTRUCTION
IF WILKIE THOUGHT that, at the age of fourteen and a half, he had finished his formal education, his father had other ideas. Since fault lines had recently opened up in their relationship, William Collins was more determined than ever to have another, perhaps last-ditch, attempt at turning his potentially wayward son into a devout Christian gentleman. As his chosen instrument, he found a combative cleric, the Reverend Henry Cole, who was so much a creature of his spiritually turbulent times that he might have been a novelist’s invention.
In the autumn of 1838, while William busied himself with new paintings based on his Italian study tour, Wilkie was packed off across town to Highbury Place, Islington, where Cole ran a small, eponymous Academy that prepared boys for university and professional careers. The school’s prospectus appeared conventional enough, offering a ‘plan of instruction [which] embraces the Greek and Latin Classics, English (to which particular attention is paid both in the reading of authors and composition), French, History, the mathematics, use of the globes, Geography and Writing &c.’
But behind an unexceptional public face, it was an unusual institution, whose principal, the Reverend Cole, was a Biblical fundamentalist of extreme opinions, particularly on matters relating to religion and education. Only four years earlier he had been locked in an intemperate dispute with Adam Sedgwick, the respected Professor of Geology at Cambridge. He had attacked Sedgwick’s advocacy of the new science of geology, arguing that, by questioning the scriptural account of creation, it threatened th
e fundamentals of divinely inspired Christianity. As well as writing at length on the subject to The Times, Cole published a 136-page pamphlet called (in full)49 ‘Popular Geology Subversive of Divine Revelation! A Letter to the Rev. Adam Sedgwick, Woodwardian Professor of Geology in the University of Cambridge; Being a Scriptural Refutation of the Geological Positions and Doctrines Promulgated in His Lately Published Commencement Sermon’. Although a reviewer in the Morning Post praised Cole’s ‘considerable biblical learning’, the Athenaeum was not so generous, dismissing him as an intolerant bigot who ‘assumes a more than papal infallibility, and pronounces his anathemas with a complacency that would be fearful if it were not ludicrous’.50
A graduate of Clare Hall, Cambridge, Cole had travelled an uneven path towards his uncompromising beliefs. A decade earlier he had written an equally scathing attack on the millenarianist, Edward Irving. And although William Collins would not have agreed with him then, he clearly did so now, having himself followed William Dodsworth (but not Dr James Thompson) away from Irving’s sect to become a run-of-the-mill Tractarian, or follower of the Oxford Movement, the nearest description of Cole’s beliefs.
Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation Page 4