Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation

by Andrew Lycett

  Throughout 1853 Hunt talked of visiting the Holy Land in search of inspiration. He seemed to want to put some distance between himself and Annie, whom he optimistically intended to leave in the care of his artist friends to be educated into the role of his future wife. Prior to departing, in August 1853, he started work on The Awakening Conscience, which, more than any other painting, epitomised the conflicted Pre-Raphaelite attitude to sex. It shows a young woman arising, with a startled look on her face, from the lap of her sexually satisfied lover. This reflected, in graphic pre-Raphaelite fashion, a common enough mid-Victorian phenomenon – a man entertaining his mistress (clearly unmarried because she has no ring on her wedding finger) in a house that is not his family home. Indeed, in order to get the right atmosphere, Hunt rented a room in a ‘maison de convenance’140 owned by a courtesan in St John’s Wood.

  Although the painting’s realism made it shocking to Victorian sensibilities, Hunt intended it as a morality tale. Initially he wanted to call it The Still Small Voice (the words ‘of conscience’ are assumed) and to emphasise that redemption was possible, even in such sorry circumstances, though some details, such as the cat playing with the mouse, indicated that the artist was signalling that this liaison would not end happily. By comparison, Millais’s affair with Effie would turn out to be relatively straightforward.

  Wilkie, of course, had other role models for irregular relations with the opposite sex. Ned Ward had led the field by opting for an underage bride. Ned’s fellow Clique member William Powell Frith was one of several men who openly defied the conventions of his age and lived with two separate families, at Park Village West and Pembridge Road Villas. Another Clique artist, Augustus Egg, who had introduced Wilkie to Dickens, was known for his hearty bachelor gatherings. But he too would express ambivalence about sex and matrimony in his fascinating, and very Victorian, triptych Past and Present (1858), which told the harrowing story of a woman’s fall from respectable family life, via infidelity to destitution under the arches by the River Thames.

  And then there was Dickens.

  As Wilkie began to feel better during the summer of 1853, he was again able to contemplate the future. A return trip to Italy was mooted for the autumn, this time in the company of Dickens and Egg. As a trial run, he was asked to join the Dickens family on its summer holiday in Boulogne. Dickens was clearly ignorant of the extent of his friend’s problems for, in extending his invitation on 24 June, he simply enquired if Wilkie had ‘shaken off all (his) ailings’. Less than a week later, after Wilkie had obviously provided chapter and verse, Dickens wrote, ‘I am very sorry indeed to hear so bad an account of your illness, and had no idea it had been so severe’.141 He then built up the attractions of Boulogne, where he had rented Chateau de Molineaux, ‘a doll’s country house of many rooms, in a delightful garden’, and where he promised Wilkie ‘a Pavilion room . . . with a delicious view, where you may write no end of Basils.’

  Once again it was a working trip, with Wilkie struggling to make inroads into his new novel Hide and Seek, while Dickens put the finishing touches to Bleak House. Apart from a brief sortie to Beauvais and Amiens, Wilkie stayed firmly in Boulogne. However, as soon as Dickens had finished his book, the atmosphere at the chateau changed, and he played host to Forster, Wills, Lemon and various other writers, publishers and illustrators. To add to the mix, Frank Stone was living up the road and there was a flying visit from Angela Burdett-Coutts, Dickens’s partner (and financier) in the Urania project for fallen women. Wilkie rather took to her, telling his mother that even if she had not possessed a farthing, he would still have deemed her ‘really, and not conventionally, a very “charming person”’.142

  Despite a punishing work schedule, Wilkie’s personality and prejudices could not help asserting themselves. In Boulogne he was reminded of his ambivalent position as someone who felt largely detached from religion, certainly organised religion, but retained atavistic anti-Catholic sentiments. When he visited a votive chapel used by the fishing community, he found the smell of candles and incense so oppressive that he had to escape before he could even look ‘at half the sacred Roman Catholic frippery with which the inside of the chapel is decorated from floor to ceiling’.143 He also made clear his attitude to matrimony when he heard that an artist acquaintance, John Sleigh, was getting married. He asked Charley to convey his best wishes, ‘and say I wish him long life and loads of children. He is one of those fresh-complexioned men with a low forehead and a meek character, who always take kindly to the institution of marriage. He will get domestic happiness, a large paunch, and a numerous family in the enjoyment of which advantages he will live respected and die happy.’144 This was not a future he envisaged for himself.

  By the time he left Boulogne for London in early September, Wilkie had written only one volume of Hide and Seek, and wanted to talk to his publisher about his future. Bentley, who continued to flounder financially, had plans to shake up the books industry through various marketing ploys, one of which was to cut the price of the traditional three-volume novel. Earlier, he had hoped to put out Basil in two volumes, but Wilkie, for all his free trade instincts, was not ready for this innovation and the book came out as a ‘triple-decker’.

  He had no problem with Bentley’s suggestion that a cut in the price of any edition, triple-decker or not, would lead to increased sales to popular lending libraries, such as Mudie’s, which dominated the retail market. However, he was not prepared to go along with another of Bentley’s proposals – that author and publisher should share profits – since it was generally considered to act against the interests of the former. Feeling eager to compromise if he could, Wilkie added that ‘the only real difficulty that I see in our way’145 was the fact he had lost two months to illness. As a result, he was painfully behind with his book and unable to make much progress before the end of the year since he was committed to travelling abroad with Dickens.

  A month later Wilkie was back at the chateau in Boulogne, waiting to start his autumn journey to Italy with Egg and Dickens, who made a point of packing various medicines, including a bottle of laudanum, which he doubtless thought might be useful for Wilkie. Accompanied by a factotum called Edward, the three of them set off, spending an enjoyable few days in a lively Second Empire Paris (where they again met Angela Burdett-Coutts), before taking what Wilkie described as the best railway he had ever known to Strasbourg. Next stop was Lausanne, an old haunt of Dickens’s, where they stayed in a comfortable house, overlooking Lake Geneva, belonging to his friend, the very rich cleric and poet, the Reverend Chauncy Townshend, who was a strong advocate of mesmerism and spiritualism. Townshend provided another example of the diverse state of British marriage, having gained a deed of separation from his wife in 1845 on grounds of ‘unhappy differences’. Bulwer-Lytton suggested something of the causes when he described Townshend as ‘an accomplished man – but effeminate and mildly selfish’.146

  Since there was a sizeable British community in Lausanne, Dickens was duly dined and feted. However, he found time to take his travelling companions to an institution for the blind, which had achieved success in rehabilitating young people who were not only blind but deaf and dumb – an experience Wilkie integrated into his ongoing novel Hide and Seek.

  The ‘triumvirate’, as Dickens called them, had been informed authoritatively in Paris that they would not be able to enter Austrian-held Italy from Switzerland as the latter was regarded by the former as a nest of spies and revolution. But this proved to be untrue and they were able to proceed on a route that took them across the Simplon Pass. Once in Italy, Wilkie visibly relaxed and began to feel at home. He admitted to almost crying when he heard a blind fiddler playing Italian folk tunes (he emphasised the musician’s lack of sight, adding that the man had two blind children). Over the border, his services as an interpreter were more than ever in demand. The final stage of the journey to Milan involved travelling through bandit country and, to ensure nothing was stolen, they were advised to tie strin
g to their luggage on the roof of the carriage and hold onto it through the window.

  Wilkie was impressed by the city of Milan, but not by La Scala opera house, where they saw Il Trovatore, ‘Verdi’s last and noisiest production’,147 which was ‘miserably lighted, wretchedly dirty, mournfully empty, and desecrated by some of the very worst singers I ever heard, and some of the mouldiest scenery I ever saw exposed to gaslight.’ Reaching the coast at Genoa, they boarded the SS Valetta, an overcrowded mail boat owned by the P&O company, for the voyage to Naples. Wilkie spent the first night on deck before prevailing on the captain to allow him to sleep on a dresser in the store room, surrounded by flour, figs and spices.

  Since they were already behind schedule, the three friends decided not to proceed from Naples to Sicily as intended. Instead, they travelled straight to Rome, which Wilkie was happy to discover was truly the Eternal City. Nothing had changed since he had lived there fifteen years earlier: the Pincian Hill was the same, the Madonna still stood in a niche outside the Collinses’ old house in the via Felice. He was amused when his tendency to procrastination led to an encounter with the Pope. Wilkie was delayed at his hotel when his companions went to St Peter’s Basilica. Trying to catch them up, he was passed by the papal carriage. When everyone dropped to his or her knees, Wilkie remained on his feet, though he did doff his hat, a gesture acknowledged by a gracious wave from the Pontiff.

  The party carried on to Florence, where Wilkie seems to have made his first acquaintance with Frances Dickinson, a woman to whom he would grow very close. She was an unusually spirited and intelligent woman in her early forties, who was trying to keep out of the public eye after one of the most lurid divorce cases of recent years. The only child of a Somerset landowner who died when she was six, she was a wealthy heiress when, aged eighteen, she married a Scottish soldier, Lieutenant John-Edward Geils, and went to live with him on his heavily mortgaged estate near Glasgow. However, he regularly abused Dickinson and, after he committed adultery with the servant girls, she sued for divorce in a case that was pruriently reported as it dragged through a succession of ecclesiastical courts. In the course of these actions, the differences in the finer points between English and Scottish matrimonial law were endlessly aired – points that would fascinate Wilkie and provide copy and plots for his later novels.

  For the last few years Dickinson had been trying to reinvent herself as an author. In 1851 she wrote a rabidly anti-Roman Catholic book for Richard Bentley, entitled The Priest Miracles of Rome, a Memoir for the Present Times. This comprised an attack on the ‘papal aggression’ – the Pope’s re-establishment the previous year of the Catholic episcopal hierarchy in Britain, under the newly appointed Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Wiseman. This unilateral action fuelled considerable controversy in the febrile world of religious politics, coming so soon after Newman’s defection to Rome. Wilkie, with his inbred Protestant ideology,148 would no doubt have applauded her stand.

  After a short stay in Venice (more opera, more Verdi – this time Nabucco), the party began its homeward journey, stopping again in Genoa to see Dickens’s friends, the de la Rues. When Dickens had visited the Continent in 1844–5, he had tried to mesmerise Augusta de la Rue, a local banker’s wife, in an attempt to cure her of her various nervous complaints, which have been likened to the symptoms of what later in the century was described as hysteria. However, Catherine Dickens had not been amused: so far as she was concerned, her husband had seemed rather too keen on this intimate manner of relating to a comely lady. Now, nearly a decade later, Dickens returned to the subject in an insensitive manner, calling on his wife to write what amounted to a letter of apology to Madame de la Rue, and also to recognise that ‘the intense pursuit of any idea that takes complete possession of me, is one of the qualities which makes me different – sometimes for good; sometimes I dare say for evil – from other men.’ This uncompromising statement of his independence was an early sign of problems in his marriage. It was significant that it came towards the end of his bachelor-style travels when, as he later jested to Augusta’s husband, Emile, his own wife had been ‘excruciatingly jealous of, and has obtained positive proofs of my being on the most confidential terms with, at least Fifteen Thousand Women’.149s

  Along the way Wilkie picked up some gifts – bracelets for his mother, a snuff box for Charles Ward, and a brooch for Ward’s wife Jane. However, he had difficulty deciding what to buy for his devout brother. Eventually, with a sense of mischief, he bought him a Roman crucifix. Charley had clearly thought that Wilkie’s soul needed sustenance, because he had earlier pressed on him a book by Jeremy Taylor, a seventeenth-century divine known for his Laudian anti-papist sentiments. Wilkie had to report to his mother that he had found this hard going ‘because my present course of life is not favourable to theological studies, and Jeremy is rather involved and hard to understand after a day’s rolling over rough high roads in a travelling carriage’.150

  Wilkie recorded his progress in letters, mainly to his mother, brother and Edward Pigott. He hoped to call on these later when he came to write up his travels in a series of articles or perhaps a book. The picture he painted helped complement Dickens’s accounts to his wife Catherine and others. It was clear that the triumvirate got on well. Wilkie enjoyed his role as the party’s linguist, which meant he did much of the necessary haggling, though Dickens thought him slightly mean with his tips and other payments. He sometimes annoyed Dickens with his habit of whistling opera hits, particularly as he was so often out of tune.151 But there was no lasting ill feeling.

  Dickens’s recollections were generally more humorous than Wilkie’s, recounting the shambolic progress of three Englishmen in Europe and making fun of their various eccentricities. In Venice, Dickens painted a delightful picture of the trio attending the opera: ‘Imagine the procession – led by Collins with incipient moustache, spectacles, slender legs, and extremely dirty dress gloves – Egg second, in a white hat and a straggly mean little beard – Inimitable bringing up the rear, in full dress and big sleeved coat, rather considerably ashamed.’152 (‘Inimitable’ was a nickname that Dickens rather liked for himself.)

  A running gag was the men’s facial hair, which they tried to grow in competition with each other. Apropos Wilkie’s moustache, Dickens informed Catherine, ‘You remember how the corners of his mouth go down, and how he looks through his spectacles and manages his legs. I don’t know how it is, but the moustache is a horrible aggravation of all this. He smooths it down over his mouth, in imitation of the present great Original.’ Having done this, Wilkie would then tell Egg he ought to cut his moustache because it was likely to get in his mouth.

  In his despatches Dickens presented Wilkie as an amiable fantasist who regaled his companions with colourful stories recalling, for example, the copious amounts of Montepulciano he drank when last in Italy, ‘and what distinguished people said to him in the way of taking his opinion, and what advice he gave them and so forth – being then thirteen years old.’ Dickens noted that Egg would make him laugh by poking fun at these ‘absurdities’.

  He also remarked how Wilkie had talked of his ‘first love adventure’ during his 1837–38 trip to Italy. Dickens was sceptical of this tale too. Indeed, context was all: in the same way that Wilkie’s recollections of his youthful drinking bouts came while the triumvirate were carousing, his memories of his amorous exploits may well have occurred when he and his companions were dallying with members of the opposite sex.

  In a curious admission, Dickens told Catherine that Wilkie ‘occasionally expands a code of morals, taken from modern French Novels; which I instantly and with becoming gravity Smash.’153 There is no escaping his tone of disapproval, though he might have been trying to mollify his jealous wife. He also wrote of Wilkie’s growing enthusiasm for French authors such as Balzac. The code of morals Dickens referred to was the bourgeois realism of La Comédie Humaine, Balzac’s collection of novels portraying a ruthless, immoral world driven by material avarice a
nd sexual passion. Wilkie was doubtless indicating the kind of books he wanted to write, but the implication was that he sometimes tried to introduce elements of this code into their lives on the road.

  7

  LEAVING HOME

  WHISKERS WERE NOT154 merely an amusing diversion for the ‘triumvirate’, but a cultural and even political statement. Wilkie was clean-shaven in two portraits in the early 1850s – one by Millais in 1850, the other by Charley three years later. But by the time Wilkie was photographed in 1857, he was heavily bearded. Dickens similarly had no facial hair in a daguerreotype of 1852, but sported a moustache by 1854, a wispy beard the following year, and a full growth in 1856.

  This hirsuteness was an expression of the cult of manliness that developed during the decade as the confidence of the Great Exhibition dissipated in the face of a series of threats to national security. First there was a fear that France might invade following the coup d’état by the new Emperor, Napoleon III. (Hunt’s painting Our English Coasts has been interpreted as an artistic statement of this concern.) In response, the government of Lord John Russell proposed reconstituting the militia, but the passage of his Militia Bill proved so fraught that Russell was forced to resign. The death of the Duke of Wellington, the hero of Waterloo, in September 1852 added to the unease. William Rossetti was adopting a widely-held point of view when, to Millais’s horror, he stated that he was in favour of war because ‘it would do much good’. The following year the tables were turned, and Britain and France found common ground once more as Russian aggression in the Balkans ratcheted up the diplomatic tension prior to the start of the Crimean War in March 1854.

  The extreme cold of the Crimea encouraged a trend noted by Dickens in an article in Household Words a few months earlier. In ‘Why Shave?’155 he promoted the cause of beards, arguing that they had a public health role in preventing the spread of germs and quoting Socrates as an example of the ‘connection between a man’s vigour of mind and body, and the vigour of growth in his beard’. Punch ran cartoons about the vogue for facial hair. The coming together of beards, manliness and, it was generally thought, success with women was too powerful to argue against.