This amiable on-board democracy made for entertaining newspaper copy. But the voyage was little more than a nautical interlude in the increasingly fraught lives of Wilkie and his close friends. For all his intention to ‘tell things just as they happened’, his account ignored the problems that Pigott, Dickens and he himself were experiencing in their personal lives.
Pigott’s immediate task, after the voyage, was to go to Genoa to bail out his hapless elder brother, who had become emotionally attached to a foreign woman – something that both Wilkie and Dickens had managed to avoid. Little is known about the lady, except that she was Polish and Jewish. With the help of Dickens’s banking friend Emile de la Rue in Genoa and the local British Consul, Timothy Yeats-Brown, Pigott paid her £600 (around £43,700 in today’s money).
For Dickens, matters were hardly less complicated. He had been living in Paris since October. Without consulting his wife, he had decided to leave Tavistock House and was considering a possible move to Gad’s Hill Place, a large house outside Rochester in Kent, which he had known and loved as a child. But, still troubled by his ‘restlessness’, he acted on his often stated intention – some might say threat – to uproot his family and settle them in the French capital for six months. Although working hard to finish Little Dorrit, he was able to assist in efforts to extricate Pigott’s brother, while Wilkie in London could only file away second-hand information about a landed gentleman’s peccadillos and hope to use it in some future fiction.
In February 1856, Wilkie joined his friend in Paris, where Dickens arranged for him to stay in a ‘perfect little bachelor apartment’ at 63 Avenue des Champs-Elysées, close to his own entourage in the same street. Wilkie had a bedroom, sitting-room, dressing-room and kitchen, all in one little building ‘like a cottage in a ballet’. He was able to observe a fast-moving city, where old buildings were being demolished and boulevards widened in accordance with Baron Haussmann’s radical urban planning initiatives.
However, Wilkie’s trip was shrouded in mystery. He was delayed, though the reason was unclear, and Dickens was forced to dissemble to his own family. ‘I told them at home that you had a touch of your “old complaint”,’185 he informed Wilkie by letter on 12 February, ‘and had turned back to consult your Doctor. Thought it best, in case of any contretemps hereafter, with your mother on one hand and my people on the other.’
Wilkie finally surfaced in Paris more than two weeks later, when he informed his mother on 28 February about his safe arrival. What had he been doing in the meantime that Dickens clearly thought it politic not to divulge? In the light of developments on Wilkie’s return from Paris six weeks later, it could have been one of three things. It might have related to Harriet Collins’s tenancy at Hanover Terrace. While her son was in Paris, she surprised him with a plan to up sticks to Harley Place on the New Road, as Marylebone Road was still called at the time. However, this news cannot have come out of the blue since the lease was drawing to a close and the matter must have been discussed.
Alternatively, Wilkie’s delayed arrival in Paris was probably a consequence of his unorthodox love life – perhaps a flare-up of his venereal disease. More likely, it was the first intimations of a new romantic liaison which he would pick up on his return to London, and which, despite his mother’s continual opposition, would last a lifetime. Whatever Dickens was referring to in his letter of 12 February, it was something which Georgina Hogarth later thought best not to include in her edition of her brother-in-law’s letters.
Having established himself in what he liked to call his ‘pavilion’ in the Champs-Elysées, Wilkie soon succumbed to persistent ‘rheumatic pains and aguish shiverings’,186 which really did sound like his ‘old complaint’. But his condition soon improved, and before long he was feeling only ‘a little weakness’.
A week later, Wilkie heard that his mother had taken a lease on the house in Harley Place. He counselled her to check the lease and taxes and to ensure that the place was properly surveyed. But he was soon purring, ‘I like the situation of the house so much that I am sure to like the house itself.’187 His concern about what would happen to his papers was removed when Ned Ward and his family took a short lease on Hanover Terrace. His only other worry was that his mother and brother should have places to go to until Harley Place became available in June. He himself could stay with Pigott, Stringfield or even old Mrs Dickinson. There was also an offer from Dickens to park himself at Tavistock House.
Wilkie used his time in Paris for some energetic writing. Before he left London, his collection of stories, After Dark, had been published to acclaim by Smith, Elder, but he still had work to do completing the last, difficult section of A Rogue’s Life (the earlier chapters of which were being printed in Household Words even as he wrote). The story picked up on his current fascination with painting and forgery to produce some of his most penetrating analysis of his father’s profession. He told his mother he was ‘rather proud’188 of chapters four and five and asked her to read them attentively. These laid bare the tricks of the art forger, a trade which, he argued, had been made easier by the deeply conservative taste of the mindless aristocratic patrons his father had put up with. More recently, this kind of deceit had become more difficult because art buyers now tended to be self-made entrepreneurs, not bound by rules and precedents, but keen on acquiring art they liked. ‘They saw that trees were green in nature, and brown in the Old Masters, and they thought the latter colour not an improvement on the former – and said so.’
Along the way Softly, the eponymous rogue, is redeemed by his love for Laura Knapton, the daughter of a master counterfeiter. This affair again allows Wilkie to wax lyrical (and seemingly knowledgeably) on the power of romantic obsession. He remarks, ‘Love is generally described I believe as the tender passion. When I remember the insidiously relaxing effect of it on all my faculties, I feel inclined to alter the popular definition, and to call it a moral vapour-bath.’
He is forced to flee, ahead of the Bow Street Runners, leading to his marrying Laura across the border in Scotland, where the law on matrimony requires no official banns, but only a personal declaration of troth. Softly does not escape trial for his forgery, however, and is sentenced to transportation to Australia, where Laura follows him and later, in the guise of a widow, hires him as her indentured servant or ‘ticket of leave man’, after his partial release for good conduct. Wilkie concludes his story by showing Softly prospering and becoming respectable Down Under – another dig at the shaky foundations of Victorian propriety. Although unambitious in design, A Rogue’s Life tackled a number of themes to which Wilkie would return, including the mutability of form and personality, the nature of criminality, and variations on the marriage law. Dickens was delighted at the finished product, which appeared as a short serial in five consecutive editions of Household Words in March.189
Having finished this assignment, Wilkie began thinking about his new novel, The Dead Secret, and was encouraged to receive enthusiastic feedback from Dickens about the plot. However, he asked his mother not to mention this to anyone except Charley. Clearly responding defensively to something that had been written or said, he feared that people might think he was dependent for his success on his more experienced friend. He pointed out that Dickens had simply alerted him to some of the weak points in his story and helped him strengthen them.
It was not all work in the Champs-Elysées. In the evenings Wilkie accompanied Dickens to literary dinners and was introduced to Ary Scheffer, the Dutch-born painter of Dickens’s latest portrait. In Dickens’s telling, Wilkie, ‘who has a good eye for pictures’,190 did not like the end result, commenting that there was ‘no man living who could do the painting about the eyes’. Wilkie was more positive in a letter to Ned Ward, though his antipathy towards the Royal Academy remained as strong as ever, for he could not help adding, only half-jokingly, ‘The picture is to be exhibited in the rooms of the corrupt Institution to which you belong.’191
As usual, the two friend
s enjoyed their visits to the theatre. One evening they attended a new production of Paradise Lost, which was attracting advance publicity based on speculation that Eve would appear naked. In the event, Dickens was disappointed to find that the producers had scoured Paris for a woman whose vast expanse of hair fell to her knees and so obscured her charms.
There was, however, another dimension to this friendship. Dickens was now convinced that his ‘restlessness’ was linked to problems in his relationship with Catherine. Wilkie’s carefree ways had helped him throw off some of the worries of married life as the two men continued to explore the Parisian underworld. The more severe John Forster had been superseded in this respect, though Dickens still valued his friendship, recalling the ‘old days’192 in a letter, and adding, ‘I find that the skeleton in my domestic closet is becoming a pretty big one.’ There is no doubt he was referring to his difficulties with Catherine.
After Wilkie returned to London, Dickens threw his usual epistolary discretion to the winds and reminded his friend of their ebullient times together. Writing from Paris, he recorded how he had revisited a seedy dive where they had both recently watched a wrestling match. He described the place as similar to ‘our own National Argyll Rooms’.193 In this he seemed to be mixing up two similar dance halls, the Argyll Rooms in Great Windmill Street and the National Assembly Rooms in High Holborn. The former in particular was known as a gathering place for prostitutes. Dickens said he had seen ‘some pretty faces, all of two classes – wicked and coldly calculating, or haggard and wretched in their worn beauty’. Among the latter he had alighted on a woman of around thirty in an Indian shawl. Fancying something about the nobility of her forehead, he reported, ‘I mean to walk about tonight, and look for her. I didn’t speak to her there, and I have a fancy that I should like to know more about her.’ It sounds as though this sort of pick-up procedure was a regular practice of the two men.
Back in London, Wilkie was still suffering from a cold and rheumatic symptoms. Developments at the Collins house remained uncertain, so Wilkie had taken the precaution of addressing his last letter from Paris to his mother, care of her neighbour Elizabeth Gibbons at number 16 Hanover Terrace. Charley had already moved out and was renting a studio in 2 Percy Street, off Tottenham Court Road. This caused some of his friends to think he had taken a mistress. But they were mistaken; Charley was not that type. As soon as he was in Percy Street he was having a crisis of conscience typical of his highly sensitive nature. He was worried about a painting he was attempting, which depicted a wife using the electric telegraph to try and find out about her husband who has been involved in a railway accident. He had been working on this for nearly two years, but had become concerned that it reflected too much of the influence of his friend Millais. On 22 April, he wrote a distressingly pained account of this matter,194 in which he tried to work out where he stood. The idea for the work was not unlike Millais’s The Rescue, not merely in the way it tried to marry a Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic to a modern subject, but also in its depiction of the tribulations of a modern wife. Charley claimed that the idea for the painting had been his, but admitted that Millais had made several useful suggestions. (The parallels in his brother Wilkie’s relationship with Dickens are clear.)
While Charley was wrestling with these problems, Wilkie also moved out of the family home. He stayed one night in a hotel, before establishing himself in a lodging house at 22 Howland Street,195 one of the less salubrious thoroughfares in Marylebone, but close to the new woman in his life.
THIRD EPOCH
8
ENCOUNTERING CAROLINE
AT THE AGE of thirty-two, Wilkie was finally escaping the ghosts of feuding Academicians and pious Tractarians and establishing himself as his own man, a literary Bohemian worthy of the company of Dickens. The results would show in a more confident tone to his writing. And the catalyst for these changes was an enigmatic young woman who lived in the same warren of run-down streets as Wilkie now did.
Twenty-six-year-old Caroline196 Graves was a pretty, capricious widow from a humble background who was particularly down on her luck, following the death of her husband three years earlier. Left with a baby daughter, she was trying to avoid the fate of many similar down-at-heel women who were forced to sell their bodies. This was not easy in an area of London which – as a glance at London Labour and the London Poor, Henry Mayhew’s contemporary sociological survey, confirms – was thick with prostitutes. In her efforts to claw her way to respectability, Caroline had reinvented herself in a manner that would have done credit to Wilkie’s skills as a novelist.
For a start, Caroline was not her real name. She was born in late 1829, and for her first twenty years she was called Elizabeth, until she saw the advantages of adopting the arguably more genteel moniker, Caroline. Her age was also a matter of debate, as she liked to suggest she was five years younger than she was. Then there was the matter of her origins. She described her father as a gentleman (or sometimes an army captain) with the delightfully aristocratic name of John Courtenay, while in fact he was John Compton, a jobbing carpenter. At the time of her birth he was living in Toddington, on the edge of the Cotswolds, not far from Cheltenham, in Gloucestershire, but he originally came from Combe Hay, on the other side of Bath, in Somerset, where he returned in the early 1840s.
Caroline’s lifelong efforts to present herself as better born than she was covered over her most closely guarded and potentially most damaging secret: she was born out of wedlock. Biographers have hitherto known about her family from censuses but have skated over her birth since there was no certificate. However, so far as it can be read, the register of baptisms in the parish of Toddington shows that on the 8th November 1829 Elizabeth Compton, the illegitimate daughter of Sarah Pully (in fact Pulley) of Grovelays in the neighbouring parish of Hailes, was baptised by the vicar, John Eddy. So Elizabeth was born some time in the preceding weeks. There is no specific mention of a father, though it does state her name as ‘Compton, illegitimate daughter of’.
The register goes on to show that her sister Teresa was baptised in May 1832, by which time John and Sarah Compton were described as married (though probably in an unofficial ceremony rather than according to ecclesiastical law, since there is again no record of any union, in the parish or elsewhere). Teresa was followed by four more siblings.
A decade later John Compton had moved back to his native Combe Hay and was living there with his wife Sarah and four additional locally born children. In the meantime, Elizabeth (or Caroline as we shall call her) had been brought up between Toddington and nearby Hailes, the home of her mother’s family, the Pulleys. They had all been attracted by the employment opportunities at the main estate in the vicinity, Toddington Manor, seat of the Hanbury-Tracy family, who had made a fortune from ironworks in Wales. (Today the Manor is owned by the wealthy artist Damien Hirst.)
In the early to mid-1840s, Sarah Compton joined her husband in Combe Hay, taking her young family with her. Towards the end of the decade her daughter Caroline moved to Bath, which was still prosperous despite having lost some of its Georgian lustre. It is not clear how she was employed, but she almost certainly had a lowly job, not unlike her younger sister Martha, who in 1851 was working there as a servant in the house of Henry Roberts, a silk merchant in Gay Street, where both Jane Austen and Dr Johnson’s friend, Hester Thrale, had once lived.
The city offered Caroline an opportunity first to lose herself and then to put her bastardy behind her by finding respectability through marriage. She was quartered in Burdett Buildings, a tenement house in the Walcot district, when, on 30 March 1850, she married George Robert Graves, an accountant, in the local parish church, St Swithin’s, where Jane Austen’s parents and brother were buried. Also lowly born, the son of a mason, George gave his address as Clerkenwell in London.
However, he had links with Bath, having been educated at Portway House Academy in Weston on the Bristol side of the city. Since his widowed mother could not have afforded this edu
cation, he was certainly a scholarship boy. He stayed in touch with his old school: Thomas Cousins, the headmaster, was a witness when George married Caroline. Indeed, the establishment played a significant part in their relationship and the 1851 census lists, among the sixty or so pupils, an eleven-year-old boy called William Compton, who was born in Toddington, Gloucestershire, and who was almost certainly Caroline’s younger brother.
Shortly after their marriage, the Graveses moved to London, to Cumming Street,198 just north of the Pentonville Road, close to where the new King’s Cross railway station was being built. Their future looked rosy when George, who had shorthand skills, found a job as a clerk in a solicitor’s office. Early in 1851, barely nine months after her wedding, Caroline gave birth197 to a daughter, Elizabeth Harriet. The census a couple of months later shows that the young family was also playing host to George’s widowed mother, Mary Ann Graves, who doubtless helped in looking after the baby.
Caroline’s determined efforts to improve her lot suffered various setbacks over the next couple of years. In April 1852, her mother died in Combe Hay. By then Sarah Compton was forty-three, and the number of her children was in double figures. Her death may have precipitated a move back to the West Country, since less than a year later, Caroline had to cope with another devastating loss – her husband George’s death from tuberculosis in Bath on 23 January 1853. At the time he was living at Moravian Cottages, on the Weston Road, close to his old school. Caroline does not seem to have been there; perhaps she remained with her daughter in London, perhaps she was helping her father look after her motherless siblings, or perhaps her marriage was in difficulties. The fact is that George’s death was reported to the authorities not by his wife, but by his mother, who was clearly present.
Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation Page 15