Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation

by Andrew Lycett

  Professional circumstances remained difficult and Wilkie was forced to scrounge around for books and plays to review. One positive result was that he honed his ideas about the Victorian books business. Hide and Seek had been published as a triple-decker, which was an expensive purchase in its three separate volumes. Wilkie was reinforced in his view that the way to sell more books was to make them cheaper. Triple-deckers persisted for a variety of reasons, relating to literacy and class, but one was simply market inertia: the reading public knew nothing else, a situation that publishers were happy to perpetuate because they could rely on popular lending libraries to underwrite their excessive costs. Faced with producing a triple-decker, writers often resorted to padding out their material, as was the case with Hide and Seek.

  When Wilkie cut the book and reissued it in single-volume form in 1861 he enjoyed significantly higher sales. He was supportive when, in early 1855, the enterprising Bentley mooted plans for a new venture to issue single-volume novels at six shillings (about £22 in 2013 money). Wilkie also showed interest in negotiations on copyright, attending meetings of Dickens’s Guild of Literature and Art, where at one stage he suggested that artists’ works should also be protected. But none of these initiatives could alter his penury. ‘I am as poor as Job just now,’168 he told Pigott, ‘and am hard put to it to ride comfortably over the next three or four months.’

  Dickens did not help financially but, as an interim measure, he invited Wilkie to take part in a children’s entertainment at Tavistock House after Christmas 1854. As well as a small speaking part, Wilkie performed a comic turn which involved devouring some loaves – very appropriate, commented Dickens’s son Henry, since ‘he had the reputation of being a bit of a gourmand’. But Dickens had problems of his own. He was suffering from an overwhelming feeling of ‘restlessness’; were it not for his regular, long, brisk walks, he recently confided in Forster, he felt he would explode.169 At root was his realisation that he was bored with his marriage but could not yet admit this to anyone else. He was about to start a new novel, an anti-government polemic, later called Little Dorrit, but at the time known as Nobody’s Fault, a title that reflected his disgust at the incompetence of the Aberdeen coalition government and, in particular, its refusal to take responsibility for military reverses in the Crimea. But before embarking on this, he needed a short break in Paris, and for this sort of escapade there was only one companion – Wilkie Collins.

  The two men’s intentions were again clear enough. Dickens asked his friend François Regnier, an actor in the Comédie-Française, to find him and Wilkie an apartment so that, on their arrival in February 1855, they could throw themselves ‘en garçon on the festive diableries of Paris’. Regnier negotiated rooms in the Hotel Le Meurice on the rue de Rivoli, looking out over the Tuileries. As the weather was piercingly cold, Wilkie relished having the ‘gorgeously-furnished drawing-room170 – bedrooms with Turkey carpets – reception room – hall – cupboards – passages – all to ourselves’, and being able to make a start on a new story, A Rogue’s Life, a lively satire more in Thackeray’s style than Dickens’s, on the phoniness of English society and of the art world in particular. Looking back to Memoirs of a Picture, his grandfather’s idiosyncratic biography of George Morland, Wilkie’s novella tells of Frank Softly, a would-be young gentleman who, unable to find a settled role in life, drifts from painting to forgery to counterfeiting coins.

  Wilkie’s progress was held up when he felt unwell and Dr Joseph Olliffe, the British ambassador’s physician, was called to see him. According to Dickens, Olliffe gave Wilkie ‘strong medicine’171 and advised him not to go out. The malady was described as influenza but, reading between the lines, Wilkie had picked up a venereal disease. The following month, when Wilkie was back in London, Dickens made comments about coming to ‘inspect the Hospital’,172 adding, ‘I am afraid this relaxing weather will tell a little faintly on your medicine, but I hope you will soon begin to see land beyond the Hunterian ocean.’ Wilkie, but not many others, would have realised that his friend was referring to John Hunter, the great surgeon and anatomist of the previous century, who was also a pioneer in the treatment of venereal diseases. Hunter is believed to have given himself syphilis in order better to understand the symptoms. The ‘ocean’ was probably a reference to the unpleasant discharge (associated with both syphilis and gonorrhoea) that was curtailing Wilkie’s social life.

  On his return to London, Wilkie found everyone at Hanover Terrace unwell – his mother had her obligatory winter cold, Millais was staying and was ill, and Charley was labouring under the burden of producing a new picture. No wonder Dickens called it the Hospital. It cannot have been a joyful place.

  Wilkie informed Ned Ward opaquely, ‘I am in the Doctor’s hands again – a long story which I will not bother you with now.’173 But by mid-April he was feeling better, and was able to meet Dickens at the Garrick Club and to talk of visiting the Ship and Turtle, an East End pub noted more for its links with Freemasonry than for any suggestion of ill repute. Dickens found him ‘an amiably, corroded hermit’174 – an odd description of a man in his early thirties. He left Wilkie to get on with his affairs, while he himself continued to lobby for his various social and political causes – inside and outside the pages of Household Words.

  Wilkie’s main writing commitment was Sister Rose, a bloated tale of family intrigues at the time of the French Revolution. Dickens approved of the outcome, which ran for four weeks in Household Words and, four years later, helped inspire his own A Tale of Two Cities.

  Wilkie was otherwise concentrating on freelance journalism, covering books and the arts for the Leader. But making ends meet remained a struggle. On more than one occasion he had to chase payments from Pigott, who, as a result of the problems associated with his family estate, was also surprisingly strapped for cash.

  Wilkie was particularly active with his journalistic pen in May, following the opening of the Royal Academy summer exhibition. Even before the event, Millais had objected furiously to the poor hanging of his new painting The Rescue, which showed a swarthy fireman saving three children from a blazing house. Based on a fire that he had witnessed at Meux’s Brewery on the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, this advertisement for a new public service was as near as Millais got to social commentary. Wilkie showed he had lost none of his antipathy towards his father’s revered institution when he took up the attack on the exhibition in three scabrous articles in consecutive weeks in the Leader,175 concluding that it was ‘the worst we remember to have seen since the building in Trafalgar-square was first opened to the public’. He was not above using his piece to puff not only Millais, but his brother Charley, whose poignant The Good Harvest of 1854 he described as ‘the best piece of earnest conscientious painting the artist had produced’, and also Ned Ward, whose less inspired General Hearsay in the Dress of the Irregular Native Cavalry E.I.C.S. he deemed ‘a most refreshingly-original picture to turn to, after looking at the yards of conventional portrait-painting’. This last comment was an unusually barbed jibe at his aunt, Margaret Carpenter, who, from her grace and favour house at the British Museum, continued to turn out portraits, four of which were shown in the exhibition.

  Wilkie had now completed The Lighthouse, the play he had been ruminating about for some time. This was a theatrical rendering of his earlier story ‘Gabriel’s Marriage’, rewritten in a British context and given dramatic intensity by a confined new setting in the Eddystone Lighthouse. Dickens liked what he described as ‘a regular old-style Melo Drama’177 and, seeing a good role for himself as Aaron Gurnock, an old lighthouse keeper haunted by memories of his part in a woman’s murder, set about staging it at Tavistock House. He spared no expense in arranging for Clarkson Stanfield to paint the backdrop, Francesco Berger to compose some music, and the cream of London’s theatrical outfitters to provide costumes and props. He even made sure he had the right sound effects (half a dozen cannonballs rolling about on the floor) for the sea la
shing against the lighthouse. He then gave rein to a small company of players, comprising Wilkie, Lemon, Egg, himself and members of his wider family, including Georgina as the female lead, Lady Grace (in which role she was painted by Charley Collins).

  After running for four nights at Tavistock House in mid-June, The Lighthouse was resurrected the following month for a single public performance in aid of charity at Campden House, Kensington, a vast palazzo around the corner from where Egg was now living.176 One member of the audience, Janet Wills, the wife of Dickens’s colleague at Household Words, was the first person to question Wilkie’s acting ability when she noted, ‘Mrs Collins sat next to me and got every now and then so excited applauding her son Wilkie that I thought the respectable, comely old woman would explode, he all the time looking and acting most muffishly. Nothing could be better than the drama as drama, but oh, he makes a most unloving and unlovable lover.’178

  Neither Dickens nor Wilkie was aware that they were dupes in a giant mid-Victorian sting. Colonel Waugh, formerly of the 10th Light Dragoons and apparently a successful businessman, had rented the house earlier that year and was using it as a vehicle for self-promotion. Situated in beautiful grounds with views over London, the house had served as a palace for Princess, later Queen, Anne and her husband Prince George of Denmark. She had added a separate dwelling, initially called Little Campden House, to the west of the main building. This was later renamed The Elms and was in the 1850s the home of Augustus Egg, which may explain why the venue was chosen.

  On 7 July 1855, Campden House, with its twenty main rooms, was the venue for a sumptuous reception for Colonel Waugh’s stepson Francis Carew when he married Mary Fanny Cornwell at a ceremony attended by the Duke and Duchess of Richmond, the Duchess of St Albans and other titled ladies and gentlemen. For several days previously, newspapers were full of advertisements for the charity performance of The Lighthouse at Campden House the following week.

  But less than a year later, the Waugh bubble burst. It emerged that the Colonel, who also lived at Branksea Castle on Branksea (now Brownsea) Island in the middle of Poole Harbour, had defrauded his fellow directors at the London and Eastern Banking Corporation of over £250,000. At his bankruptcy proceedings details were revealed of how his wife, the former Mrs Carew, had run up a bill of £1,854 with Jane Clark, a milliner in Regent Street. Included in this was about £1,200 for her daughter’s wedding trousseau. At one stage Waugh was declared to have debts of over £333,000.

  Although the reviews for The Lighthouse were mixed, Wilkie, inspired by the smell of the greasepaint, was determined to persevere with the theatre, a medium where he could experience the visceral impact he was striving for in his fiction. He enlisted friends to help him get The Lighthouse staged in the West End, even presuming to lay down terms to the established actor-manager Benjamin Webster (an option on the piece for twelve months, plus a payment of five pounds a night for each of the first twenty nights of its run). However, he received little response and had to wait three more years before his career as a playwright took off.

  On 3 July 1855, Millais finally married Ruskin’s former wife, Effie. The Collins family had, in their different ways, helped him to the altar. Until the end of the previous year, Millais had been frantically finishing his portrait of Ruskin. For this he used Charley’s studio in Hanover Terrace, where he acknowledged he ‘half reside[d]’.179 In January, Millais had attended a dinner given by ‘that strong-minded old lady’ Harriet Collins at Hanover Terrace, where he buried the hatchet with his fellow guest Dickens, who finally made his peace with Pre-Raphaelitism. Charley again helped as Millais worked until the last minute to complete The Rescue for the 1855 Summer Exhibition. Charley’s contribution was to paint the fire hose.

  The wedding at Bowerswell, Effie’s family’s house in Scotland, was low-key. Wilkie did not attend; instead he invited mutual friends – Charles and Jane Ward, Pigott and John Luard, an army officer turned artist, whom Wilkie had helped put up for the Garrick Club – to a celebratory dinner that evening in Hanover Terrace. Amid the high spirits, Wilkie declared, ‘May he consummate successfully! and have the best cause in the world to lie late on Wednesday morning!’180 He added that he couldn’t ‘resist jesting on the marriages of my friends. It is such a dreadfully serious thing afterwards, that one ought to joke about it as long as one can.’ This might have been Wilkie’s jaundiced view, but it was not Millais’s. Although he had been apprehensive about his course of action, he was soon telling Hunt how happy he now was and how he hoped soon to be a paterfamilias: ‘I cannot help touting for matrimony, it is such a healthy, manly and right kind of life.’181

  Having few such ambitions, Wilkie was grateful to receive an invitation to spend August and part of September with the Dickens family in a quieter holiday house in Folkestone,182 Kent. Even now he could not escape the war, since the Queen came to Folkestone to review the (in his eyes) particularly scruffy members of the German Foreign Legion recruited for service in the Crimea. There was another contingent he disliked: ‘This place is full – troops of hideous women stagger about in the fresh breezes under hats as wide as umbrellas and as ugly as inverted washhand basins. The older, uglier, and fatter they are the bigger hats they put on – and the more execrably they dress themselves. My soul is sick of the seaside women of England.’183 However, he enjoyed meeting the usual flock of pilgrims who made their way to the Dickens shrine, including Thackeray, Lemon and Pigott.

  While walking around town, he frequently ran into George Murray Smith, proprietor of the publishing firm Smith, Elder, who was also holidaying on the Kent coast. This was the company, started by Smith’s father, that had turned down Antonina. Wilkie’s holiday contact paid off, however, for he was commissioned by Smith, Elder to gather his more recent stories, originally written mainly for Household Words, in a collection called After Dark.

  In Folkestone he spent some time editing his mother’s memoir, but he regretfully concluded that it lacked a compelling enough narrative. Nevertheless, there were signs of this memoir in After Dark, where he expanded on his idea in ‘A Terribly Strange Bed’ of having a painter introduce the main story of bizarre goings-on in France. This time, in his determination to find a convincing framing device (and so emphasise the artistic context), he doubled this effect by having the painter’s wife Leah (based on his mother) present the introducer.

  Although he complained of financial worries while in Folkestone, Wilkie still found the time and resources to join Edward Pigott in October on a much discussed voyage around the south-west coast to the Scilly Islands. While Edward’s family was known for its seamanship, as champions of the newish sport of yachting, Wilkie had never been identified with any particular physical rigours. However, he had always enjoyed the ocean and jumped at a chance to show off his skills as a sailor.

  Pigott needed the break more than Wilkie. Aside from the Leader, he was still tied up with family problems. Indeed, the unconventionality of the Smyth Pigotts had never been clearer than in the years following the death of Edward’s father. The eldest son and heir to the estates, John, preferred to remain abroad with his mistress rather than return to Somerset. The more reliable Edward had been appointed as executor of the estates, together with his brother Henry, but the latter was now suffering the worst effects of dementia associated with syphilis. Edward was involved in endless legal cases, including a complaint against John, who had gambling debts of £10,000, and protracted efforts to replace Henry with another trustee. Matters were complicated because their late father’s mistress had also entered the legal fray. Edward managed to sell his father’s valuable books and paintings, but his brother John’s debts necessitated a massive auction of Smyth Pigott property, which took place gradually over three years from 1854.

  Eager to leave these worries behind, Pigott threw himself into preparations for the voyage. Wilkie started to get cold feet after friends told him they felt he was being foolhardy sailing such a distance in squally autumnal conditions. He tol
d Pigott he had been consulting his Almanack and wondered if they might not be ‘tempting Providence’184 in embarking on a voyage in an eight-ton boat at the time of the ‘equinoctial gale’. But Pigott was determined and overruled these objections. With Wilkie’s help, he secured provisions, first in Bristol and then from the well-stocked larders at his family home Brockley Hall. The two men added their personal stashes of tobacco, French novels and Egyptian cigars. Then, after visiting their friend Dr Stringfield in Weston-Super-Mare, they set sail in a slightly larger cutter, the Tomtit, having hired three local sailors as crew.

  After two nights at sea, they reached the Scilly Islands. Even more than with the Smyth Pigotts in Weston-super-Mare, these south-westerly outposts were the dominion of one man, Augustus Smith, a scion of the family that owned Smith’s Bank. Having leased the islands from the Duchy of Cornwall, he was determined to make them productive. That year, he had caused a furore by evicting the last of ten inhabitants from one of the islands, Samson, which he intended turning into a deer park – an experiment that failed as the deer kept trying to swim away.

  Wilkie saw fit to describe this autocracy as ‘benevolent’ when he wrote up the trip for Household Words as ‘The Cruise of the Tomtit’. This was a comic travelogue, not unlike Rambles Beyond Railways, featuring two very familiar protagonists, Jollins and Migott, who sailed from Mangerton in the Mud. At the start Wilkie announced his intention to ‘tell things just as they happened. What some people call smart writing, comic colouring, and graphic describing, are departments of authorship at which I snap my fingers in contempt.’ He recorded how Jollins treated any of the crew who felt sick with his patent medicine: ‘Two tea spoonsful of essence of ginger, two dessert spoonsful of brown brandy, two table spoonsful of strong tea.’ He emphasised the leisurely nature of the on-board regime: ‘We have no stated hours, and we are well ahead of all rules and regulations.’ And he took pride that the five of them were able to coexist in ‘a pure republic’ with no particular master. They shared a twelve-foot by eight-foot cabin, which provided just enough space for their hammocks. Otherwise, ‘the man who can do at the right time, and in the best way, the thing that is most wanted, is always the hero of the situation among us.’