Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation

by Andrew Lycett

  For Wilkie, as a pacifist and a contrarian, his hair had more to do with fashion than political sentiment. True to form, he rejected the popular martial mood, telling Charles Ward succinctly, ‘My sentiments on the subject of the approaching Russian War, are dictated by the most disinterested feelings of Patriotism.’156 He would continue to oppose the hostilities, to the extent of expressing support for John Bright,157 the anti-war campaigner. However, he could not help being affected by the general mood. As he told Richard Bentley, ‘If this war continues, the prospects of Fiction are likely to be very uncertain to say the least of it.’158

  As he eased himself back into London life in early 1854, Wilkie found that several other things had changed. For one, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had pretty much ceased to exist. This was underlined by Millais’s election as an Associate of the Royal Academy the previous November, leading Dante Gabriel Rossetti to pronounce to his sister Christina that ‘now the whole Round Table has been dissolved’. Nevertheless, Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience would create an appropriate furore when it was shown at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition that year. The artist himself was still in the Middle East, where Charley spun him the unlikely tale that Wilkie wanted him to ‘go to Thebes & Memphis & Philae & Carnac & the 1st & the 2nd cataracts of the Nile & the Negro kingdom of the Shillooks & the Lotos eating & unexplored parts of Central Africa that he might have the benefit of your experience previous to going there himself.’159

  More immediately, Millais’s affair with Effie was not only flourishing but causing major problems. With divorce or some form of annulment now on the cards, her husband John Ruskin had begun to accuse her of insanity. In despair, Effie was forced to confide in a couple of female friends that her marriage had never been consummated. They were affronted on her behalf, not so much because she had been denied160 the delights of sexual intercourse but because she had been prevented having children – the goal of all Victorian women, and a constant ingredient in the debate about their role in society.

  Wilkie was in touch with Millais during this time, and records a meeting at his house in February. But not a jot of his friend’s affair came to light in any of Wilkie’s public declarations or correspondence. As he began to develop a running theme of secrets in his novels, he remained adept at keeping mum about his own confidences and those of the circle around him.

  On his return to London, Wilkie offered Bentley’s son George a series of six articles on Italy, which he puffed as a lively concoction about art, papist ceremonies and love. But Bentley’s Miscellany had recently run similar pieces and declined the offer, as did Dickens’s Household Words.

  His recent travels were still on his mind in May when he sent Samuel Carter Hall at the Art Journal an article about Italian art by his new friend Frances Dickinson. This time he was more successful and Dickinson’s offering would prove the first of a number she wrote for that outlet over the next year or so under the pseudonym Florentia. She regularly travelled back to England where she owned large houses near Bath and Reading. The latter, Farley Court, was home to her mother, who soon became a good friend of Harriet Collins.

  With Wilkie’s artist friends otherwise engaged, Dickens working on his novel Hard Times, and Pigott occupied with his family estate (which was a mess, following his father’s death and his elder brother Henry’s dementia), Wilkie was now making headway on his new book, Hide and Seek. This was turning out to be quite different from Basil. It was still ostensibly ‘modern’ but, dismayed by the less than whole-hearted response to his previous offering, Wilkie wanted to make it lighter in tone than its predecessor. So he sought to satirise the emerging middle classes, with their sterile suburban construction projects, where ‘the cry of the costermonger and the screech of the vagabond London boy were banished out of hearing’.

  At the same time, like Dickens and Mrs Gaskell, he hoped to say something about the social condition of Britain. In Hide and Seek he addressed the problems of one particular disadvantaged group – deaf and dumb children. He also began to look critically at the law as it related to aspects of matrimony, adoption and legitimacy.

  However, the novel’s edge came from its personal input, as Wilkie began to work through unresolved issues with his father. Only six years after dutifully writing the Memoirs, he was now prepared to expose the traumas he had experienced as a result of William Collins’s fundamentalism.

  Hide and Seek shows the feckless Zack Thorpe trying to escape from his over-zealous father by apprenticing himself to a gentleman artist, Valentine Blyth. Wilkie emphasises the autobiographical elements by giving Zack a stultifying job in the tea business and making him subject to a domestic curfew, which he regularly breaks to frolic in late-night taverns. Old Mr Thorpe is predictably uncompromising in his religious views, which are more Evangelical than Tractarian. He uses the same kind of moral blackmail as William Collins when he tells his son, ‘I want you to learn your lesson, because you will please me by obeying your papa. I have always been kind to you, – now I want you to be kind to me.’

  Wilkie showed another side of his father in the more sympathetic Blyth, who has a similar studio and a cat called (in the initial 1854 version) Snooks, the name of an earlier much-loved Collins family pet. Wilkie’s two-pronged approach extended not only to the title, Hide and Seek, but to its format, with a first part establishing the characters and their mysterious backstories, and a second teasing out and gathering together disparate narrative strands. In this way the novel followed Basil in its emphasis on the unlocking of secrets.

  The main story revolves around the origins of a deaf and dumb girl, Mary, otherwise known as Madonna, who lost her hearing in an accident at the circus. Subsequently adopted by the artist Valentine Blyth, she is treasured by him and his wife, a woman with her own disability, an injury to her spine. Meanwhile, on one of his nightly revels, the would-be artist Zack befriends Mat Marksman, a maverick figure who spent years living wild in the Americas (where he was partially scalped by an Indian). Mat is keen to rediscover his British roots, which he does through a mixture of perseverance, good fortune and amazing coincidence.

  After finding that his sister has been forced to leave home because she gave birth to a bastard child by the mysterious Arthur Carr, Mat, acting on a hunch, gains access to a locked bureau where Blyth has hidden a hair bracelet belonging to Madonna. An inscription on the bracelet confirms to Mat that Madonna is his niece (the illegitimate daughter of his long-lost sister), while the hair itself seems so similar to Zack’s that Mat suspects his friend and Madonna may be siblings. When he confronts Zack’s father, Mr Thorpe breaks down, admits his ‘guilty secret’ – that he is indeed Arthur Carr – and begs Mat not to divulge it to his wife or son.

  During the course of unravelling this intricate web of deception, Wilkie deals with topics he was familiar with, particularly art and fundamentalist religion, as well as others in which he was less well versed, including the outdoors world of Mat Marksman and the finer points of disability. To understand these, Wilkie relied mainly on literary sources: his details of the American frontier drew on the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, while his understanding of deafness and dumbness came partly from his visit to the institute in Lausanne and more specifically from John Kitto’s 1845 study, The Lost Senses, to which he had probably been introduced by Dickens, a correspondent of the author.

  Although Hide and Seek provides insights into Wilkie’s struggles with his father, it should not be read, as some have done, as gospel truth. However, its charting of Zack’s voyage of self-discovery has many parallels with Wilkie’s. At one stage the young man is too callow to respond to Madonna’s modest gestures of affection. With the help of three father figures (his own, Blyth and Mat), Zack grows to maturity. In Wilkie’s case, similar roles were played by William Collins, his artist friend Ned Ward, and now Dickens, the man of the world who took him under his wing. (Dickens reportedly saw a resemblance to himself in Mat.)

  How far can one take these parallels? Z
ack’s father, the religious fanatic, turns out to be a hypocrite with a ‘guilty secret’ of the kind Wilkie would regularly root out in his novels. Although William Collins did not, so far as is known, have a child out of wedlock, the book does throw light on Wilkie’s parents, when Zack’s father admits, ‘I married, under circumstances not of an ordinary kind’. A passage, removed from the second 1861 edition, elaborates on this, suggesting that Mrs Thorpe had ‘misconstrued some very ordinary attentions paid her by Mr Thorpe, had fallen in love with him, and had long pined for him in secret, before he discovered it, and – more out of honour than affection – made his proposals to her.’ This revisionist interpretation of the courtship of William and Harriet Collins was doubtless discussed in Hanover Terrace when Harriet was writing her memoir. If nothing else, Wilkie was hinting that his own family had secrets that still bore unravelling.

  Since he was working furiously to complete Hide and Seek, Wilkie did not get round to discussing it again with Bentley until early April and he did not conclude a publishing agreement until mid-May, when he had only seventy pages left to write. Bentley’s terms were not particularly generous, certainly not financially – £150, to be paid in two parts, for a three-volume edition of 500 copies, with an option for reprints over the next eighteen months. Nevertheless, Bentley was fast and professional and the novel was, remarkably, ready for sale by the end of the month, complete with a dedication to Dickens ‘as a token of admiration and affection’.

  It was soon gathering favourable notices in the Spectator, the Athenaeum and, not surprisingly, Bentley’s Miscellany. Reviewing it for the Morning Post, William Rossetti compared it to the works of Dickens and Thackeray161 ‘and not inferior in our judgement, to any of the productions of these popular writers . . . It is the matured work of a mastermind.’ Dickens was equally laudatory, chiding his sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth, for not taking it seriously and telling her that he thought it was ‘far away the cleverest Novel I have ever seen written by a new hand. It is much beyond Mrs Gaskell, and is in some respects masterly.’162 However, sales were again sluggish – something Wilkie attributed to the competing attentions of the Crimean War. He also gave this as the reason for the book being ignored in the review columns of The Times.

  Wilkie celebrated Hide and Seek’s publication by joining the Garrick Club, a leading watering hole for writers and actors, then based in King Street, Covent Garden. He was proposed by Dickens, who had only recently rejoined after a period of exile, and seconded by Shirley Brooks, one of the many multi-faceted Victorian men of letters noted as a journalist, author and playwright. Brooks lived at Kent Terrace, directly behind Hanover Terrace, so was a near neighbour. The names of Wilkie’s numerous supporters spill out in higgledy-piggledy fashion in the candidates’163 book. However, it is possible to make out well-known literary and artistic figures such as William Makepeace Thackeray, David Roberts, John Leech, Tom Taylor and Mark Lemon, as well as trusted friends including Edward Pigott and Augustus Egg.

  Wilkie could now ply between his club, his bank Coutts in the Strand (still, technically, the bank of the executors of his father’s will), the Leader offices, close to Household Words in nearby Wellington Street, the Royal Academy in Trafalgar Square, and the inviting theatreland in and around Covent Garden. With time on his hands, he was keen to review not only books but plays. But theatres were choosy about the names on their free lists, so Wilkie, who was discomfited by the claims of a rival journalist called Collins, asked Pigott, as editor of the Leader, to help him obtain tickets as a reviewer for that paper.

  He tended to opt for slightly outré productions with a French flavour, such as La Joie Fait Peur by Delphine de Girardin, an extraordinary Frenchwoman of impeccable literary pedigree, who had written about Balzac. Her husband, Emile, was a radical journalist and friend of Dickens. After the original French version of this play opened at the St James’s Theatre at the end of May, an English adaptation (Sunshine Through the Clouds) by George Henry Lewes followed at the Royal Lyceum. Lewes’s work on the play was one of his last commitments before going into voluntary exile in Europe with his lover Marian Evans. Tongues had been wagging about unorthodox sexual relationships in the Leader offices, and Pigott was having to answer awkward questions. Wilkie lent him support in his ‘troubles’,164 as he tried to sample whatever French culture he could.

  Wilkie was at an important turning point in his career. His novels were winning plaudits in literary circles but, for all Bentley’s energy, this success had yet to be translated into appreciable sales. His situation was not helped by the financial difficulties both he and his publisher were now experiencing. Offered an opportunity to buy back the copyrights of Antonina and Basil, Wilkie did not have the spare £200. Bentley then rather desperately suggested a deal where Wilkie paid £100, with the rest to come when he had the money. But Wilkie was still unable to afford it. Before long, Bentley was forced to look elsewhere for funds and sold his Miscellany magazine to Harrison Ainsworth.

  At this stage, Dickens’s support proved important. It is difficult to say exactly what qualities he saw in Wilkie, his junior by a dozen years. Dickens already had plenty of literary and artistic friends, and was particularly close to John Forster, who would write his biography. But Wilkie had certain irrepressible features not found in Forster or the others. As well as sharing Dickens’s more cerebral interests, he was an agreeable companion with an unusual capacity for enjoying himself.

  The two men’s friendship had evolved considerably since they had larked around in hotels while on the road with the Guild company. They had subsequently taken leisurely holidays together on the south coast of England and in Europe. And they had come to relish their shared pleasure in food, drink and, although they were careful not to commit details to paper, women. When Dickens told Wilkie in July that he was making a brief visit to London from the house he was renting for the summer in Boulogne, there was no mistaking his intentions when he said he wanted to pass his time ‘in the career of amiable dissipation and unbounded licence in the metropolis.’ He asked Wilkie to join him for breakfast at about midnight ‘anywhere – any day – and go to bed no more until we fly to these pastoral retreats.’ He added he would ‘be delighted to have so vicious an associate,’ an unusual adjective, until one recalls that ‘vicious’ is related to ‘vice’ and realises that Dickens was proposing a night on the town that would take in not only bars but prostitutes.

  Wilkie was happy to oblige, particularly since he was alone at Hanover Terrace, with his mother doing her summer rounds of hospitable friends and Charley away on a painting holiday in Scotland with a blissfully contented Millais, who learned in July that the marriage of his beloved Effie had been annulled in the Ecclesiastical Court.

  Dickens had promised to sit for a portrait by Ned Ward who, never having been a Pre-Raphaelite, continued to forge a more conventional career, specialising in history painting (including a commission to decorate the corridor at the rebuilt House of Commons). After completing his London commitments, Dickens invited Wilkie to accompany him back to Boulogne, where he offered the added enticement of copious quantities of ‘the celebrated 1846 champagne . . . a very fine wine, and calculated to do us good when weak.’165 Dickens had earlier sent his sister-in-law Georgina across the Channel to scout out a house for the summer. She had alighted on the Villa du Camp de Droite, on a hill overlooking the main town of Boulogne. Since it was close to an old army encampment that had been revived for the war, Wilkie was unable to ignore what was going on in the Crimea, particularly when Prince Albert paid an official visit to the town. In celebration of the Anglo-French alliance, Dickens, his family and his guests illuminated the front of their house ‘in the English way’166 with 114 candles, and hung the Union Jack and the Tricolor at the top of a tall flagpole in the Villa’s garden.

  By the middle of September, after nearly two months of leisurely non-activity, Wilkie returned refreshed to Hanover Terrace, where he was soon writing ‘The Lawyer’s Story of
a Stolen Letter’,167 an accomplished tale about the disruptive power of indiscretions and confessions committed to paper in private correspondence. Here a woman’s marital happiness is threatened by a blackmailer who gets his hands on a letter in which her father confesses to the forgery of a bill of credit. The lawyer turns detective to retrieve the offending letter and burns it.

  Dickens was now producing special portmanteau issues of Household Words for Christmas. Wilkie’s piece, which is often described as the first British detective story, would appear there alongside a series of linked tales called ‘The Seven Poor Travellers’ in the Christmas 1854 edition. In this story Wilkie stated, ‘If everybody burned everybody’s letters, half the courts of justice in this country might shut up shop.’ This reflected an ongoing concern: letters could be extraordinarily revealing and, as such, frequently provided the basis for litigation. But although he would often use them in his written work to throw light on hidden aspects of his characters, he took pains in his personal life to ensure that his own correspondence remained private. A few years later Dickens would famously carry out a ritual burning of all his letters, and Wilkie would frequently call on his nearest and dearest to keep his confidences to themselves.

  Wilkie was also thinking about what he called his ‘dramatic experiments’ to turn one of his stories into a play. Worried that he might not be successful, he begged Charles Ward not to mention this to anyone. From his correspondence with Pigott it seems he did write some sort of play. However, it remained experimental and was never staged.