Wilkie was determined to situate his story firmly in mid-century London where the main means of transport, the horse-drawn omnibus, symbolised the energy of the modern metropolis. Wilkie commented in the book on the ‘mighty vitality of the great city renewing itself in every direction’. Part of this process involved new suburban developments, such as the Sherwin’s North Villas, which was not so far from Wilkie’s own stomping ground of Regent’s Park. Far from being oases of peace and respectability, these places stood in ‘wretched patches of waste, half built over’, amid unfinished streets and squares.
More unexpectedly, Basil was introduced to a world of carefully guarded secrets. These modern castles were riddled with extraordinary stories of deception, intrigue and domestic oppression. As a writer, Wilkie would now begin to concentrate on this kind of material, partly because he was canny enough to realise that the suburbs, with their aspiring middle classes, were where his core market now lay. He would try to bring the sense of drama and romance found in traditional adventure tales to the job of probing the mysteries and lies of conventional domesticity.
One way of ruffling the closed curtains of the home was to shock and, in Basil, Wilkie did this by focusing on sex. From his first encounter with the femme fatale Margaret, Basil is consumed with lust. As she enters the omnibus, she momentarily touches him. ‘But how the sense of that touch was prolonged! I felt it thrilling through me – thrilling in every nerve, in every pulsation of my fast-throbbing heart.’ She wears a veil but, like curtains in a house, it provides little real protection. Behind it, he thinks he sees slight movement as her lips ‘ripened to a smile’, but ‘still there was enough left to see – enough to charm’, as Basil muses about ‘the little rim of delicate white lace, encircling the lovely, dusky throat’ and concludes, ‘The veil! how little of the woman does it hide, when the man really loves her!’
After this introduction, he is impelled to pursue her, with the soft erotic tone continuing until he spies her and Mannion in the blunter act of sexual intercourse: ‘I listened; and through the thin partition, I heard voices – her voice, and his voice. I heard and I knew – knew my degradation in all its infamy, knew my wrongs in all their nameless horror.’
In the process, Wilkie contrasts this dark-haired sexual adventurer, Margaret, with Basil’s pure, fair-looking sister, Clara. The two women appear to him as archetypes in a dream to which there is only one possible conclusion. ‘I was drawn along in the arms of the dark woman, with my blood burning and my breath failing me, until we entered the secret recesses that lay amid the unfathomable depths of trees. There, she encircled me in the folds of her dusky robe, and laid her cheek close to mine, and murmured a mysterious music in my ear, amid the midnight silence and darkness of all around us. And I had no thought of returning to the plain again; for I had forgotten the woman from the fair hills, and had given myself up, heart, and soul, and body, to the woman from the dark woods.’
As was often the case in Pre-Raphaelite art, the idealised angel in the house was powerless against the immediacy of sexual lust. But, also like the Pre-Raphaelites, the message of Wilkie’s novel was ultimately moralistic. Margaret is manifestly punished for her sexual transgression. She contracts typhus when visiting Mannion in hospital and later dies.
Such sharp comparisons provided the tension that gave Basil its vitality. Wilkie was fascinated by opposites, like the twins in his earlier story. Here he set about highlighting the differences not only between domesticity and promiscuity, but between the suburbs and the city, the aristocracy and the middle classes, and romance and realism. He set up a nice distinction between the worthy Basil and his rakish brother, Ralph, who, after a life of frivolity, opts for a contented morganatic marriage with an older woman. Ralph tells Basil that he too has enjoyed affairs with ‘ladies of the counter’, but has never been mad enough to marry them.
Wilkie’s most significant set of contrasts was between appearances and reality, a theme he would pick at throughout his working life. People are not who they seem; respectable houses can obscure dangerous secrets. As a writer, he had been fascinated to discover how this truth could be explored in that factory of illusions, the theatre, and he was now intent on examining it further in his novels. But here, to confuse matters, were two apparent opposites that Wilkie regarded as very similar. As he stated in his letter dedicating Basil to Charles Ward, he believed ‘that the Novel and the Play are twin-sisters in the family of Fiction, that the one is drama narrated, as the other is a drama acted.’ Once again, the truth was not quite as it appeared.
Wilkie, the literary magpie, drew on various influences in his quest. In Basil, he turned to the Gothic tradition to portray the process of revenge, with ancient grievances coming back to haunt successive generations. Always an eerie figure, Mannion, following his disfigurement, looks and behaves like Frankenstein’s monster – to the point of asking his assailant Basil, ‘Do you know the work of your own hands, now you see it?’
This reflected Wilkie’s growing interest in science, particularly psychology. In recent months he had written about mesmerism and how it could override the rational mind. Now he recorded how sexual infatuation could suspend time and thought. ‘From the time when she entered the omnibus,’ mused Basil, ‘I have no recollection of anything more that occurred in it. I neither remember what passengers got out, or what passengers got in. My powers of observation, hitherto active enough, had now wholly deserted me.’ Later he asked, ‘Among the workings of the hidden life within us which we may experience but cannot explain, are there any more remarkable than those mysterious moral influences constantly exercised, either for attraction or repulsion, by one human being over another?’ Wilkie was beginning to think seriously about perception and understanding, and to consider the relationship between sensations, thoughts and visions. Put this together with Wilkie’s compulsion to stir his readers, and the building blocks of what would later be called sensation fiction were settling in place.
By the end of September Wilkie was ready to offer the manuscript to Bentley for publication. Taking courage from Dickens, he was clear about his terms: he wanted £350 for the full copyright. Bentley initially demurred, but eventually agreed, though he demanded some changes. For example, the premises where Margaret and Mannion went for their sexual tryst became a hotel rather than a house (by implication a brothel).
The book was published in three volumes on 16 November 1852 as Basil; A Story of Modern Life. (The manuscript shows earlier discarded titles, including Basil; or The Love Secret.) The reviews were generally favourable, though there were dissenting voices, such as the critic of the Athenaeum who complained of ‘a tale of criminality, almost revolting from its domestic horrors’,131 and said that Wilkie, as the son of an eminent painter, ‘should know that the proper office of Art is to elevate and purify in pleasing’.
Wilkie enjoyed creating a stir. With some satisfaction, he told a correspondent that his book had ‘been vehemently objected to as immoral (!) by some of those virtuously inflammable ladies and gentlemen of Modern Times who are gifted with particularly sharp noses for smelling out supposititious [sic] filth in particularly unlikely places. As I never have written for these people and never will, then their condemnation is infinitely more acceptable than their approval.’132
6
REDISCOVERING EUROPE
WRITING BASIL HAD taken its toll. Although not yet thirty, Wilkie was already showing signs of wear. In the early summer of 1853 he was unwell and confined to Hanover Terrace. When he began to recover in late June, he needed to walk with a stick and was ‘not strong enough yet to do more than “toddle” out for half an hour at a time’.133 More worryingly, he noted how ‘my illness and long confinement have muddled my brains dreadfully – I am still in very bad trim for anything that deserves the name of work.’
The following month Wilkie was feeling much better. He was staying in Maidenhead and had, as he put it, ‘begun the great reformation’, his way of saying he was taking
a rest cure. He was rising earlier and paying more attention to his health. ‘Observe the hour above written,’134 he crowed in a letter to his mother, and underlined for emphasis ‘Thursday morning 10 minutes to 9’. He was already dressed and waiting for breakfast, ‘a position I never remember to have been placed in before in the whole course of my life’. He added, ‘I feel better already – I take no beer – and I stop short at my three glasses of wine.’ This passed for abstemiousness in Wilkie’s book, and was all the more odd since his hosts were the Langtons, the leading brewers in this Berkshire town. They were friends of Harriet’s, living in an area – beside the Thames, within striking distance of London – favoured by the Collinses and their associates. It was not far from Iver, where his father had gone shortly before his death, or from Slough, where Ned and Henrietta Ward had recently moved, with their two children, including Alice, who was Wilkie’s goddaughter.
On one level Wilkie’s body had simply let him down. With his various physical irregularities, he was never a particularly healthy specimen. He did not help himself by over-indulging in food and drink, and taking little exercise. As a result he had developed early symptoms of gout and rheumatism. This painful combination raises the possibility that he had rheumatoid arthritis (sometimes known as rheumatic gout). Since this disease often has a genetic component, he might have inherited it from his father. However, at this stage rheumatoid arthritis had yet to be named. Although Wilkie’s symptoms were frequently rheumatic, they are probably best identified as gout, which also attacks the eyes, as William Collins had experienced and as Wilkie would soon discover. Certainly they were always treated as gout; there was little sense of Wilkie’s immune system being attacked, as scientists would later learn was the case with rheumatoid arthritis.
He was suffering considerable pain, which he tried to mask by taking laudanum. This is the inference from his casual references to the drug, such as his comment to his mother the previous year about the effects of the sea air in Dover. She, for all her foibles, had a relaxed attitude to drugs. Once when her late husband’s friend Coleridge had bemoaned his opium habit, she consoled him, ‘Mr Coleridge, do not cry. If the opium does you good and you must have it, why don’t you go and get it?’135
Laudanum, a ten per cent solution of opium, was widely available over the counter at chemists. But it could easily become addictive, particularly if taken regularly. At this stage, however, Wilkie’s use was mildly therapeutic.
Gout is actually caused by the build-up of uric acid in the body, and the subsequent accumulation of sodium urate crystals in the joints. However, hereditary factors can also play a part, as can diet and stress, the last of which was significant in Wilkie’s case. The psychosomatic element in the illness was clear from the way it was often used as a catch-all diagnosis – something Wilkie himself understood and alluded to in his 1873 novel The New Magdalen where Lady Janet remarks that ‘the medical profession thrives on two incurable diseases in these modern days – a He-disease and a She-disease. She-disease – nervous depression; He-disease – suppressed gout.’
He had no obvious cause for stress, since in the previous two years he had published a successful novel, developed a friendship with Britain’s best-known author, and won plaudits for his acting. However, he had been working extremely hard on Basil at a time when, on an emotional level, he was also trying to distance himself from his late father. In the early months of 1853 he was beginning to think about a new novel, Hide and Seek, in which he would address more directly some of the problems in their relationship. At the same time his mother was preparing her own memoir,136 which required her to reach some accommodation with her past. And all the while Wilkie was trying to build his friendship with Dickens without being overwhelmed by the latter’s personality or reputation.
One area where Wilkie was still floundering was sex. He claimed to have been initiated into lovemaking at an early age, and he had demonstrated a keen young man’s interest in women and the demi-monde. He was clearly not unattractive to females, as Nina Chambers’s breathy reaction showed, but he had yet to develop any significant relationship. He gives the impression of a man with a strong libido but, when undirected, prone to frustration and perhaps depression.
Part of his problem was that, like many Victorian men, he found it hard to move beyond prevailing sexual stereotypes that cast women as either angels or whores – the dichotomy highlighted in Basil between Clara and Margaret. Wilkie’s Pre-Raphaelite friends were particularly susceptible in this respect. In their case, matters were complicated by their religious convictions, as was evident in works such as Charley’s Convent Thoughts.
The Brotherhood had been on Wilkie’s mind because of the recent Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy, where its members had been cast as bad boys and thus legitimate targets by the Establishment press. The Era could not refrain from poking fun at Holman Hunt’s Our English Coasts for its expanses of grass and sheep, where ‘every “tit” of wool is produced so carefully that a Yorkshireman could value it to a farthing in the pound’. Fringe member Charley Collins avoided the limelight with his particularly devout work, The Christian Year. But the show-stopper, the painting everyone crowded around, was The Order of Release, 1746 by Millais.
This canvas was notable for its depiction of Effie – the gorgeous, brown-haired Scottish wife of the Pre-Raphaelites’ once reluctant but now enthusiastic promoter John Ruskin – as the grim, bare-footed wife of an imprisoned Jacobite soldier presenting a gaoler with the order for her husband’s release. Effie’s involvement was regarded as scandalous in conservative sections of the London art world. Artists normally used working-class girls, such as Rossetti’s red-headed muse Lizzie Siddal, but the offence of this particular work was that Millais had visited the well-born Effie at the Ruskins’ home in Tulse Hill and painted her for long periods while her husband was absent.
The unworldly Ruskin did not seem to mind. Indeed, he invited Millais to join him and Effie on an extended painting holiday in Scotland in late June. After a few more weeks together, Millais realised he had fallen deeply in love with Effie, whom he described as ‘the most delightful unselfish kind hearted creature I ever knew’,137 while Ruskin had become ‘unworthy – with his great talents – of any woman possessing affection and sensibility’.
While he was away Millais wrote regularly to Charley Collins. However, substantial passages of his text were later carefully rendered illegible by Dickens’s daughter Katey, who would marry Charley. These might have contained references by Millais to his love life, though, from what remains, it seems unlikely, for, rather than discuss Effie or Pre-Raphaelite stunners, he preferred to engage Charley on the finer theological points of Tennyson.
Religion and art did indeed feature strongly in the two men’s complex relationship. Millais was wary of Charley’s asceticism, but he was happy to accompany him regularly to services at the Tractarian St Andrew’s Church in Marylebone. At times he found Wilkie’s brother positively ‘chilling’, his description to Holman Hunt the previous autumn when, at a loose end, he had wandered over to Hanover Terrace from his parents’ house in Gower Street. Once there, Millais had done no more than ‘jest with the old lady, say about a dozen words to her layfigure son, and tumble out into the freezing night miserable’.138 (The old lady referred to so off-handedly was, of course, Mrs Collins, and her layfigure son, Charley, who was compared to a lifeless mannequin or artist’s dummy.)
This emphasises how much Millais regarded the Collinses as ‘family’. He described Mrs Collins as his ‘second mother’, delighting in calling her by silly names, such as ‘Mrs Bluebird’ or, to Charley, ‘your Cardinal mother’. Millais was also very friendly with Wilkie, and was one of the few people to use his first name in correspondence. He had painted his portrait and illustrated his Christmas story Mr Wray’s Cash-Box.
The two men shared an interest in scientific and philosophical questions, such as the nature of observation. The Pre-Raphaelites had always stressed the impor
tance of looking and seeing correctly. Millais took this further, producing a series of drawings which concentrated on the physical attributes of sight, the best-known of which was The Blind Man. At around the same time, his drawing A Ghost Appearing at a Wedding Ceremony dealt with another aspect of the same subject – how was it possible to see a spectral being? This was a relevant query at a time when a vogue for spiritualism and séances was emerging from the United States. Wilkie would take up such phenomenological questions as he began to introduce supernatural elements into his stories. Sight would also feature as an important theme in his later novels, such as Poor Miss Finch.
It is entirely possible that Millais would have discussed his feelings for Effie with Wilkie. When exactly these arose is not clear, but he was probably aware of them earlier in the year when painting The Order of Release. And while he would have been unlikely to mention them to the fastidious Charley, he might well have done so to the more worldly Wilkie, who had recently written so eloquently about sexual passion in Basil. However, for all his imaginings about love, Wilkie was by no means an expert. Even Basil was more about sexual yearning than gratification. The eponymous hero does not pursue Margaret with the intention of taking her to bed. His only conceivable – and honourable – course is to marry her. In this respect Wilkie offers a more secular version of the Pre-Raphaelite anxiety about sex.
Aside from Millais, the Pre-Raphaelites were surprisingly tentative in their relations with the opposite sex. Far from being the great seducer of popular mythology, Dante Gabriel Rossetti went through endless agonies of sexual denial in his relationship with Lizzie Siddal – to the extent that his biographer Jan Marsh suggests that he was still a virgin at the age of thirty in 1858.139 And the more religious Holman Hunt had a similarly intense, unhappy and ultimately celibate affair with his model and love, the former bar-girl, Annie Miller.
Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation Page 11