Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation

by Andrew Lycett

  Unlike the Clique, the Brotherhood had a manifesto. Its members were tired of the dull formalism of most Academic art, with its obeisance to the old masters. (A bête noire was Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first president of the Royal Academy, who was dubbed Sir Sloshua for his slapdash brushwork.) Instead, they returned to the simple naturalism of painters before Raphael. They would not fully establish themselves for a couple more years. However, their ideas were now on the agenda, an artistic reflection of the yearning for traditionalism which had also spawned Pusey and Newman.

  The atmosphere at the new Collins family house in Blandford Square reflected this intellectual diversity, with Wilkie associating with the Clique through Ned Ward, and Charley affiliating himself with the Pre-Raphaelites. As Wilkie had told Dana, ‘I live very much in the society of artists’. And it was a way of life his mother encouraged. As a reaction against the travails of her husband’s final years, Harriet had begun to relax and enjoy herself. Just shy of sixty, she could still be staid, advising Henrietta Ward against combining a career as an artist with bringing up a family, which was surprising for someone whose sister had undertaken both roles so successfully. But she loved the company of her sons’ artistic friends – not only the Wards, but Charley’s Pre-Raphaelite colleagues, particularly Millais and Holman Hunt, who flirted outrageously with her.

  One way of merging literary and artistic interests was amateur dramatics. After an early dinner at 5pm, Wilkie and his friends would stage their own plays in the ‘Theatre Royal, Back Drawing Room’. One of their first productions, on 19 June 1849, was The Good Natur’d Man by Oliver Goldsmith, which featured Wilkie as producer, actor and author of a new prologue. The combined role was not easy: ‘The disappointments we have met with in getting up the Play would fill a three volume novel,’94 he told one of the Clarkson girls. But he managed to corral Ned Ward (who also designed the costumes) and another Clique member, William Powell Frith, as actors. Charley also played a part, as did John Millais. Harriet, who had once hoped to be an actress, could not fail to have been thrilled.

  Irish-born Goldsmith was a cult figure among Wilkie and his friends. A few years earlier Ned had painted the scene (recounted in Boswell’s Life of Johnson) where Dr Johnson appears just as Goldsmith is about to be evicted by his landlady for non-payment of his rent. The good doctor finds the manuscript of The Vicar of Wakefield and promptly sells it for £60. Wilkie no doubt enjoyed this insight into the writing profession (together with the detail that Goldsmith had spent his last money on a bottle of Madeira). Wilkie would have empathised with Goldsmith’s physical deformities, particularly his protuberant brow, though he himself was never described as ‘monkey face’. A substantial biography of Goldsmith had recently been published by Dickens’s friend John Forster, so, if Wilkie did not know before, he would have learned how Goldsmith had been appointed historian of the Royal Academy by his friend Sir Joshua Reynolds.

  Now Frith painted a scene directly from The Good Natur’d Man.95 His Mr Honeywood Introduces the Bailiffs to Mrs Richland as his Friends would be exhibited at the Royal Academy the following year. Although he does not specifically state so, he was clearly working from a Blandford Square production. So it is interesting to speculate which actor in the work was Wilkie. Since he was reported to have given the main parts in this production to his friends and to have concentrated on his role as stage manager, he probably took a smaller part – perhaps one of the bailiffs in Frith’s painting.

  By the middle of 1849 Wilkie’s novel Antonina was nearing completion. Set in the early fifth century, with Rome under siege from the Goths, it told the story of a young Roman girl – the title’s namesake – caught between two cultures after she falls in love with the chieftain of the invading forces. In highlighting the contrasts between Christianity and paganism within Rome and between Classical civilisation and barbarianism in Europe, Wilkie suggested something of the cultural tensions in late 1840s Britain (where another example of backward-looking traditionalism could be found in the cult of Gothic architecture). Inspired by his research, he worked hard to conjure up ancient Rome, backing his factual references with notes and geographical detail, with the result that Antonina sometimes reads like a guidebook, interspersed with Wilkie’s own recollections of places such as the Pincian Hill.

  Wilkie was still finding his feet as a novelist and not yet confident enough to give full rein to his imagination. He remained self-conscious about his technique, drawing on his familiarity with art for ways of creating and heightening interest, so that, ‘in the painter’s phrase, the “effects” might thus be best “massed,” and the “lights and shadows” most harmoniously “balanced” and “discriminated”’, as he put it in his first preface to this book.

  There was also evidence of his maturing ideas. He commented incisively on the role of women among the Goths, emphasizing the wilfulness of the chieftain’s sister, who was bent on revenge on anything or anyone Roman (including Antonina) because the city had been responsible for the deaths of her children. However, his strongest attack was reserved for intolerance and bullying, either by parents or religious families. There was more than a hint of a personal agenda in his portrayal of Antonina’s father, Numerian, who breaks her lute, her favourite means of self-expression, describing it as ‘the invention of libertines’.

  Still needing a publisher,96 he approached Richard Bentley, who had made his name in the 1830s with cheapish editions of novels. In 1837, Bentley hired the up-and-coming Charles Dickens to edit his new monthly magazine Bentley’s Miscellany. But the two men fell out, leading Dickens to decamp to Chapman and Hall and rail against the ‘Burlington Street Brigand’. By 1849, Bentley was suffering financial difficulties, though this might not have been known to Wilkie, who showed astute bargaining skills in his dealings with the publisher, emphasising not only the success of the biography of his father, but also the topicality of Rome as a subject in the aftermath of the 1848 Revolution that had forced Pope Pius IX to flee the city. Despite a last-minute hitch, when Wilkie fretted that Antonina was not a suitable name as it recalled the dissolute wife of the Byzantine general Belisarius, he was rewarded with a deal that gave him £100 on publication and £100 after five hundred copies were sold.

  Before the book appeared, Wilkie returned to the stage – this time in public – at Miss Kelly’s Theatre, situated at the back of the actress Miss Fanny Kelly’s house in Dean Street, Soho. The sweet, round-faced Miss Kelly had been helped financially in the building of the theatre, which doubled as an acting school, by the art-loving ‘Bachelor Duke’, the sixth Duke of Devonshire. Dickens had used the place since the mid-1840s for performances by his occasional theatrical company, the Amateurs. Having translated A Court Duel, a French melodrama set in the early eighteenth century, Wilkie arranged a performance on 26 February 1850 on behalf of the Female Emigration Fund, recently established by the MP Sidney Herbert to help destitute seamstresses find a new life in the colonies. It was a fashionable cause: the lure of the city undermined family life, putting unemployed women onto the streets and into the grip of prostitution. It complemented another of Dickens’s initiatives – Urania Cottage, a refuge for fallen women, which he had established in Shepherds Bush with financial help from Angela Burdett-Coutts (of the banking family).

  In A Court Duel, Charley Collins took the lead, while Wilkie acted a comic courtier. There was also a part for Henry Brandling, who had entered the Royal Academy Schools at the same time as Charley. To lend credibility, since the performance was a public one, a professional actress was recruited, Jane Mordaunt, whose most recent appearance had been in the royal theatricals at Windsor Castle. As nieces of Lady Cranstoun, she and her more successful elder sister Louisa (in real life, Lady Boothby, wife of a baronet) were often hired to play high-society roles.

  However, there was another side to Jane, as is clear from her entry in a contemporary publication The Swell’s Night Guide, which detailed the various bawdy houses, drinking dens and gambling joints that mi
ght be patronised by a hedonistic young gentleman, as well as listing the names of several of the more superior demi-mondaines they might encounter. This sounds exactly the sort of reading matter that a bored law student with a taste for the nightlife might have picked up from one of the cheap booksellers around the Strand. Listed among the actresses was Jane Mordaunt: ‘Her hair is dark, long and luxuriant; her eyes large, dark, soft, and melting; while her smile has fascination in it that . . . [would] have tempted even the moral St Anthony.’

  The day after the performance at Miss Kelly’s Theatre, Antonina was published in a three-volume edition (the industry standard for novels), with a dedication to Lady Chantrey, widow of his father’s colleague, the sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey, who had amassed a fortune from his busts of the great and the good. She did not know Wilkie, but one thing he had learned from his father was the value of such contacts. When Mrs Hunter, David Wilkie’s sister, went to Bentley’s offices to pick up her reserved copy, she was (erroneously) told it was a gift from the author. As soon as the cost-conscious Wilkie heard about this, he quickly moved to inform Bentley that the people on a list he had given the publisher were expected to pay for their copies. Among them was his father’s old friend Dr James Thompson, who had moved from Southampton and was living near Henry Drummond, the wealthy leading figure in the Catholic Apostolic Church in the Surrey village of Albury.

  Perhaps Wilkie wanted to understand more about his father’s spiritual life, for he went to stay with Thompson in March but disliked the countryside, with its ‘cursed confused chirping of birds – an unnecessarily large supply of fresh air – and a d—d absence of cabs, omnibuses, circulating libraries, public houses, newspaper offices, pastry cooks shops, and other articles of civilisation’.97 He was more interested in the progress of his book and asked Charles Ward to send him copies of any review he saw – and apply to ‘Mamma Collins for payment of your charges’.

  These notices were generally favourable, led by the respected Henry Chorley in the Athenaeum, who welcomed ‘a richly-coloured impassioned story, busy with life, importunately strong in its appeals to our sympathy’, though he warned Wilkie against ‘the vices of the French school . . . against catering for prurient tastes’, and, an augury of his criticism of Wilkie’s later sensation works, he became unnecessarily personal when he asked, ‘Need we remind a painter’s son how much Terror and Power are enhanced by Beauty?’98

  The anonymous reviewer in the Spectator99 took a similar approach, accusing Wilkie of being too rhetorical (‘Everything is pitched in too high a key’) and of describing scenes with ‘too much of the glare and mannerism of the scene-painter’. In other words, Wilkie had failed to move far enough from the artificial theatricality of Ned Ward’s canvases. Nevertheless, the reviewer acknowledged that Wilkie had ‘a painter’s eye for description, much eloquence of a florid kind, clever “treatment” and invention in the incidents, with some tenderness if not pathos’.

  Wilkie would draw on his artistic background and his understanding of technique throughout his working life, but he had made up his mind where his future lay, and it was not in painting. His cousin Alexander Gray later described how Wilkie ‘showed me a picture which he had just finished and said it would be the last he intended painting. He then showed me his first book, Antonina, or The Fall of Rome, of which he made me a present, saying his future would be devoted to writing books.’100

  As the summer of 1850 drew on, the atmosphere in the Collins house in Blandford Square was unsettled. Like others in the vicinity, Harriet regarded the area as a staging post, but she had still not yet decided where she wanted to live permanently. With this matter still in the air in July, Wilkie took a working holiday in Cornwall, where he wanted to write an upbeat travel journal. This was an established, indeed hackneyed, genre: many people had produced accounts of treks to the Lakes or the Highlands, but Wilkie thought he could interest readers by making a point of exploring a part of the country not yet touched by the railways. As he was hoping for publication, he needed someone to illustrate his words. Since his brother was otherwise occupied with the Pre-Raphaelites, he teamed up with Charley’s friend Henry Brandling, an interesting choice since he came from a distinguished Northumbrian family, which, after making money in coal, had helped bring the railways to the north-east. The two industries were closely linked, since the first railways had been developed to carry coal. Indeed, the first working railway was at the Middleton Colliery in Yorkshire, owned by one of Henry’s ancestors in the mid-eighteenth century. Subsequently Henry’s father Robert had raised money for his friend, the engineer and railway pioneer George Stephenson, in gratitude for inventing the miners’ safety lamp. After his father’s death in 1848, Henry had followed Wilkie on a drawing tour of northern France. This resulted later that year in a book of lithographs, printed by M. and N. Hanhart from an address in Fitzroy Square, where Henry lived with his sister Emma, a beauty whose looks had stirred the local artistic community.

  Since Cornwall was beyond the reach of the railway line, there had been no reason to build a bridge over the river Tamar, which divides the county from Devon. So the two men began their journey by boat, from Plymouth to St Germans. From there they travelled along the south coast, through Looe, ‘a snug cosy primitive old place’, and Liskeard, which was rather different, with an inn so unwelcoming that Wilkie wanted to rename it the Sackcloth and Ashes. This was an exception, however: generally speaking he loved the locals’ company and lapped up their stories of Druid history and Celtic legends. He also delighted in the variations in the landscape, particularly the dramatic rocks and cliffs by the sea.

  Before reaching Lands End, he dipped down to the Lizard, the southernmost point of England, where he was entranced by Kynance Cove with its natural amphitheatre of rocks. When Tennyson, the new poet laureate, had been there a couple of years earlier, he had noted its ‘glorious grass green monsters of waves’. Wilkie strove to improve on this in telling his mother about the colours of the rocks – ‘deep red and rich brown and green and yellow and silver grey – as bright as polished marble’,101 with the sea ‘a Mediterranean blue and the sky covered with minute driving, fleecy clouds’.

  On his way back, passing northwards via Newquay, he visited a strict Carmelite convent at Lanherne House, formerly owned by the landed Arundell family, in the village of St Mawgan. Setting aside his innate anti-Catholicism, he was impressed by the commitment of the nuns, with their capacity for good works and their ‘generous sympathy for those weaknesses of impatience and irresolution in others’. He was interested how ‘that vigilant and indestructible papal religion, which defies alike hidden conspiracy and open persecution,’ has maintained its hold in this cut-off place.

  At one stage Wilkie had hoped that Charles Ward would again steal away from his family and meet him in Penzance. But Ward was unable to make it and, when he looked to France instead, Wilkie mocked him, saying that no scenery there could compare with Cornwall, where even the food was superb. He declared that he had only eaten red meat once and instead had feasted on a diet of duck, geese, pickled pilchards, curried lobster, clotted cream, jam tarts ‘and fifty other succulent dishes’.102

  Predictably, Wilkie ran out of money and had to ask his mother to bail him out. By then, she had decided to move to Hanover Terrace on the edge of Regent’s Park – a desirable property which she had probably had her eye on for some time. Wilkie tried to dissuade her, arguing that she would let herself in for additional financial dues associated with living in the Park. But she was a determined woman and, though both her sons were away, she pressed ahead. Charley was involved with his Pre-Raphaelite friends – or, as Charles Ward disparagingly put it to Wilkie, ‘busily engaged in painting a fly’s eye with lashes to match’.103 Wilkie had to beg her to look after his papers and to inform him of the number of her chosen house, otherwise he would not know where to return to.

  Once ensconced at 17 Hanover Terrace, a generously sized house where he commandeered a study and C
harley a studio, Wilkie offered the manuscript of his Cornish trip to Richard Bentley, who agreed on 18 November to publish it on a shared profits basis. By a separate agreement, Brandling was engaged to provide twelve drawings (to be lithographed by Wilkie’s old family friend John Linnell). Although Wilkie saw fit to complain about the delays before the work ‘rambled into print’, everything moved forward with alacrity. He may not have got the book into the shops by Christmas as he had hoped, but he was poring over the proofs before the end of the year and Rambles Beyond Railways was published on 30 January 1851 to general acclaim.

  Now that Bentley had been responsible for two of his books, Wilkie regarded him as his regular publisher and offered him a story for Bentley’s Miscellany. This was ‘The Twin Sisters’, a well-observed piece which combined two of his favourite themes – the power of love at first sight and the disturbing effects of the double or doppelgänger. It tells of a man who falls instantly in love with a girl he sees on a balcony. After pursuing her and discovering she is called Jane Langley, he becomes engaged to her. When he visits her parents’ house, he discovers she has a twin sister, Clara, who, he is now adamant, is the girl he saw on the balcony and the only person he can ever marry. Although this causes great consternation in the Langley family, he defends himself to the girls’ father, saying he has remained true to his conscience and his ‘first sensations’. Clara is initially unwilling to countenance any wedding. But Jane, who has developed an almost mystical stoicism, encourages her to change her mind. The narrator is duly married to the girl he first saw on the balcony and passes into familial obscurity. The story is really about the dignity of Jane, the sister who has been passed over. Wilkie shows his empathy for such women when he concludes, ‘Reader, when you are told, that what is impressive and pathetic in the Drama of Human Life has passed with a past age of Chivalry and Romance, remember Jane Langley, and quote in contradiction the story of the twin sisters!’