Mary Ann Graves subsequently returned to London where she opened a tobacconist’s shop in Hertford Street in the heart of what came to be called Fitzrovia, the favourite stamping ground of so many of Wilkie’s artist and writer friends over the years. Her daughter-in-law Caroline soon followed and must have considered that her efforts to better herself were doomed when she was forced to open a marine or junk store in the rather seedier Charlton Street nearby.199 This was a lowly form of mercantile life, even by Victorian standards, in a rough area that accommodated labourers, carpenters, charwomen, seamstresses and prostitutes.
Wilkie portrayed these surroundings in an article for Household Words in June 1856, two months after he moved to Howland Street. ‘Laid up in Two Lodgings’ contrasted his experiences in two hostelries – one in Paris, where he delighted in the view from his window, and the other in London, where he ‘looked out upon drab-coloured walls and serious faces through a smoke-laden atmosphere’. In ‘Smeary Street’, his name for Howland Street, his room was flea-ridden, dirty and uncomfortable; the other tenants passed through rapidly (as did the maids).
Wilkie made a point of saying that he had chosen this particular location because it was close to his doctor. But this was typical dissimulation. In fact, 22 Howland Street was bang in the middle of the walk Caroline took from her marine store in Charlton Street to her mother-in-law’s tobacconist’s shop in Hertford Street. And if he wanted to stroll home to see his mother, he was likely to pass through Charlton Street.
The circumstances of his first meeting with Caroline are not known, but the encounter has since taken on significance since she has been identified – in most detail by John Guille Millais,200 the son of Wilkie’s artist friend – as the model for the eponymous character at the centre of one of his greatest novels, The Woman in White, published in 1859–60. The elder Millais told his son of the evening he had accompanied the Collins brothers on a walk back from their mother’s house in Hanover Terrace to his own family house in Gower Street. Suddenly the three of them were stopped in their tracks by the sound of a scream coming from the garden of a house they were passing. Their initial fears that a woman was in considerable distress were confirmed when an iron gate was flung open, and they were presented with the extraordinary sight of a beautiful young woman dressed in flowing white robes that shone in the moonlight.
She then fled into the shadows and, according to Millais, Wilkie ran after her, saying he must see what he could do to help. The other two heard no more until the next day when a sheepish Wilkie told them how he had caught up with the woman and discovered she had somehow fallen into the hands of an unscrupulous man who lived in a villa in Regent’s Park. For several months this person had controlled her by mesmerism and kept her prisoner. It was only when he threatened to kill her with a poker that she decided she must escape.
Couple this dramatic story with the observation from Dickens’s daughter Katey201 that Wilkie (later her brother-in-law) had a mistress called Caroline who was the inspiration for The Woman in White, and one can easily see why this moonlit apparition has been linked to the young widow from Gloucestershire.
However, both these sources are suspect. By the time their accounts were made public, the protagonists were all dead. There is no evidence for Caroline having been kept captive, let alone by an evil mesmerist. The story has the air of an engaging fantasy spun by Wilkie for the amusement of fellow dinner guests, and hints at just enough of the truth to be taken for the real thing.
Wilkie probably liked to imagine that, in Caroline, he was helping a woman who was suffering, both mentally and physically. The fact that she was illegitimate only added to her déclassée allure. Her living quarters suggest she was on the verge of becoming a ‘fallen woman’ of the type that so fascinated Victorian artists and writers in the abstract, but that in reality required financial assistance from philanthropists such as Angela Burdett-Coutts. He had helped Caroline avoid the drop into prostitution. As a quid pro quo, he wove a web of fantasy around her, using her as a model for many of the wilful but disadvantaged women who featured so prominently in his fiction.
The progress of Wilkie’s relationship with Caroline is nevertheless difficult to follow as no correspondence between them has survived. Over time he would introduce her to his closest friends, usually at his home. Dickens had little time for her, though Frederick Lehmann hinted at her coquettish appeal when he recalled her emerging from the kitchen in a ‘very décolleté white silk gown’.202 Such occasions were seldom repeated; aside from the occasional visit to the theatre, Wilkie and Caroline were never seen in public together. Although his work showed considerable empathy with disadvantaged women like her, he kept his new mistress in the shadows, preferring the easy-going bachelor lifestyle to which he was accustomed.
Wilkie’s stay in Howland Street was short-lived. Dickens visited him there in early May 1856, but by the end of the following month his mother was ensconced in her new house at 2 Harley Place. Wilkie did not join her immediately, but he used this as an accommodation address while he contrived to follow a carefree peripatetic existence.
He made little obvious effort to help Harriet with her move, preferring to go sailing with the Pigott brothers, John and Edward (the ‘Ancient Mariner’,203 as Dickens called him). Having been clawed back from Italy, John was beginning to settle as lord of the manor in Weston and Brockley. As a treat to himself, he bought a 47-ton schooner called the Coquette, a toy he shared with Edward for the next year, until he unexpectedly married Blanche Arundell, a member of a leading Roman Catholic family, and adopted her religion.
There was no place for Caroline Graves, or any other women, on this bachelors’ voyage on the Coquette which sailed from Gravesend to the Isle of Wight – then, as now, the headquarters of yachting – and across the Channel to Cherbourg, where it loaded some fine wines, before returning to its home port of Weston. Edward Pigott had been introducing several literary friends to a taste of this nautical life: he had already taken Thornton Leigh Hunt and Herbert Spencer to Cherbourg, and later in July he promised George Lewes and Marian Evans a trip across the Bristol Channel from Tenby, though this did not materialise.
Wilkie liked feeling the wind in his hair and forgetting his cares. However, his experience of seamy urban life and of Caroline’s predicament had affected him. He was genuinely touched by the situation of a maid at Howland Street who could only look forward to ‘dirty work, small wages, hard words, no holidays, no social station, no future’. In his piece for Household Words,204 he added in Dickensian mode, ‘No human being ever was created for this. No state of society which composedly accepts this, in the cases of thousands, as one of the necessary conditions of its selfish comforts, can pass itself off as civilised.’ He concluded, ‘I have witnessed some sad sights during my stay in Smeary Street, which have taught me to feel for my poor and forlorn fellow-creatures as I do not think I ever felt for them before.’
This more compassionate and socially aware Wilkie was evident in ‘The Diary of Anne Rodway’,205 his next assignment for Household Words. This unfussy piece broke new ground in several ways, notably as a detective story (the first ever to feature a woman as the sleuth) that drew cleverly on the media frenzy surrounding a recent murder case to ratchet up tension.
Its real-life forerunner was the Rugeley murder trial, which had taken place in May 1856, resulting in the conviction of the surgeon William Palmer for killing a gambling colleague. This was the first criminal prosecution to use forensic evidence – in this instance, to prove that the victim had been poisoned. Wilkie attended the trial and was fascinated by the way various pieces of conflicting evidence came together to present a convincing case.
The general public was familiar with the Rugeley murders (Palmer was suspected of others) because the circulations of newspapers had risen sharply following the abolition of the stamp tax the previous year. As papers competed to report the gruesome details, the doctor’s name became synonymous with evil.
Wilkie’s story for Household Words centred on Anne Rodway, an impoverished seamstress, living in the manner of Caroline Graves in a run-down lodging house in a road similar to ‘Smeary Street’. Significantly perhaps, Anne is the same age as Caroline, twenty-six. She has a fellow lodger called Mary Mallison, who has low self-esteem and a problem with drink and laudanum. One night, after a prolonged absence, Mary returns home, the bedraggled victim of a violent assault, and dies shortly afterwards. When Anne seeks to discover her friend’s killer, all she has to go on, her only clue, is a black silk strand from a man’s cravat.
On her way back from work, she stops to buy candles at an emporium which, in Wilkie’s description, is a mixture of Caroline’s workplace and that of her mother-in-law, Mary Ann Graves – ‘a small shop with two counters, which did business on one side in the general grocery way, and on the other in the rag and bottle and old iron line.’ Having bought her candles, Anne is told there is no paper to wrap them in. At this point she spies by chance, among some rags, a cravat which matches the strand she has found on Mary. She contrives not only to have her candles wrapped in this piece of cloth, but also to discover where it came from. As a result she is able to follow the trail further and find out who murdered her friend. The details of the story emerge fluidly in the form of diary entries by Anne.
This slightly self-conscious process shows Wilkie writing a new type of detective story. Halfway through Anne’s tale, she relates a dream about the strand of cravat: ‘I thought it was lengthened into a long clue, like the silken thread that led to Rosamond’s Bower. I thought I took hold of it, and followed it a little way, and then got frightened and tried to go back, but found that I was obliged, in spite of myself, to go on.’ Wilkie is here picking up on a new meaning for the word clue (or clew) – originally a thread of yarn, but, more recently, by extension, something which guides you from one place or idea to another. Clues in this latter sense had started to appear in the detective fiction of writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, who used the word in ‘The Purloined Letter’ in 1845.
The first part of ‘The Diary of Anne Rodway’ was published on 19 July, a month after Palmer’s execution. Dickens recognised its importance in Wilkie’s literary development. He told him how much he admired it, adding that it gave him ‘a personal pride and pleasure’,206 which suggests he saw his own influence having a positive effect on Wilkie’s work. Always an emotional man, Dickens was so moved when he originally read the story in a railway carriage that, to the consternation of his fellow passengers, he broke down and cried. He described it to his actor friend William Macready as having ‘great merit, and real pathos’207 and asked his colleague Wills to give Wilkie a £20 bonus as he ‘wished to remove it from ordinary calculations’.208
Wilkie devoted the rest of the month to his personal affairs in London before departing on holiday with the Dickenses in Boulogne. After his recent literary successes, his standing with his friend was high. However, the general holiday spirit was dampened by an outbreak of diphtheria, which killed several local people, including two members of the Dickens circle, the humorist Gilbert à Beckett and his son Walter. Although staying comfortably outside the town, Dickens swiftly sent his family home, though he prolonged his own homeward journey by walking most of the way from Dover to London in the company of Wilkie and Pigott. One reason was that he wanted to show his friends Gad’s Hill Place, the country house set in twenty-six acres of grounds outside Rochester, which he had finally committed himself to buying for £1,790 in March. The vendor was Mrs Eliza Lynn Linton, a formidable anti-feminist writer and journalist, who had worked for Household Words. She wrote one of the stories in The Seven Poor Travellers, the Christmas omnibus issue of 1854, which also included one of Wilkie’s first contributions to the magazine. After months of uncertainty about what Dickens would do with Gad’s Hill, he finally decided to live there. It was clear that he was just as unsettled as Wilkie, as he moved from house to house, in search of distraction from his failing marriage.
Wilkie hoped to stay at Harley Place when he returned to London, but his mother was away visiting the Langtons in Maidenhead. He had clearly spent very little time at her new house, since he had to ask her for the names of the servants. Nevertheless, he took the opportunity to soldier on with the new play that he and Dickens had been discussing since Paris in April. Dickens had the original idea for a production to be staged at Tavistock House the following January – on Twelfth Night, his son Charley’s twentieth birthday. He wanted to base it on Captain Sir John Franklin’s 1845 expedition through frozen Canadian waters to find a north-west passage to Asia. Like its predecessors, this quest was unsuccessful, and worse, since no one returned.
Wilkie and Dickens developed a storyline about two members of a rescue party for a similar expedition and their rivalry for the hand of the beautiful Clara Burnham. As a result of regular discussions about the play during the summer, Dickens had identified one of these men, Richard Wardour, as an excellent part for his acting talents, while Wilkie would play the other, Frank Aldersley. By early October, when Wilkie had almost finished writing the script, Dickens was visibly excited. He grew his beard and set about transforming the school room at Tavistock House into a suitable theatre. (Wilkie almost certainly followed suit tonsorially at this stage.) With his usual forcefulness, Dickens then roped family and friends into acting, designing and staging the play. The intensity of the fictional relationship between Wardour and Aldersley seemed to mirror that between him and his collaborator.
Wilkie was now entering a period of great industry as he poured out both fiction and non-fiction copy for Household Words and other publications. Impressed by this output, Dickens invited him in October to join the staff of his magazine, describing him to Wills as ‘exceedingly quick to take my notions . . . industrious and reliable besides,’209 and justifying his employment as an economy measure: given the amount of work Wilkie was producing, paying him a salary of five guineas a week would be cheaper. Wilkie was initially underwhelmed, worrying that his contributions – which appeared anonymously in Household Words – would be muddled with Dickens’s. But Dickens worked out an acceptable compromise, so that at least some of these pieces would be advertised with Wilkie’s name attached.
As rehearsals of The Frozen Deep began, Wilkie was collaborating with Dickens on the next Household Words Christmas number. This year the ‘conductor’, as Dickens termed himself, wanted a nautical theme, and Wilkie, with his yachting experience and knowledge of John Franklin’s ill-fated expedition, was just the man to help with a series of related stories about a ship that went down after hitting an iceberg in the freezing waters of the Southern Ocean bordering Antarctica. Dickens started ‘The Wreck of the Golden Mary’ in the voice of the ship’s captain. But still preoccupied with Little Dorrit, he handed over narration to Wilkie who, as the first mate, related the tribulations of the passengers and crew, as well as providing the account of their eventual rescue.
In commending the festive issue to Angela Burdett-Coutts, Dickens specifically noted, ‘I am the Captain of the Golden Mary; Mr Collins is the Mate.’210 However, Wilkie was responsible for the bulk of the writing and, though Dickens had the final word, the balance of power in the two men’s professional relationship was beginning to shift.
One of Wilkie’s recent pieces, ‘My Black Mirror’,211 drew on his experience of the delights (particularly the food) and miseries (the bureaucracy and discomfort) of travel in Europe, but concluded that he preferred being at sea ‘in the fastest fairest schooner-yacht afloat . . . taking our pleasures along the southern shores of the English coast’. He was recalling his trip on the Coquette: ‘Here is no hurrying to accommodate yourself to other people’s hours for starting, no scrambling for places, no wearisome watchfulness over baggage.’ Instead, there was the sense of freedom he had revelled in over the years. ‘We can make our own road, and trespass nowhere. The bores we dread, the letters we don’t want to answer, cannot follow and annoy us. We are the freest trave
llers under Heaven.’
Now he was employed by Household Words, his articles became more personal, even if one has to read between the lines to understand this. In ‘To Think, or Be Thought For’,212 Wilkie showed how far he had moved from his father’s Academicism as he canvassed a populist approach to art, attacking the waffle of professional critics with their admiration of old masters, and pleading for art to be enjoyed by the common man. He could not have put his case more forcefully when he declared, ‘The sort of High Art which is professedly bought for us and which does actually address itself to nobody but painters, critics and connoisseurs is not High Art at all, but the lowest of the Low, because it is the narrowest as to its sphere of action.’
‘A Petition to the Novel-Writers’213 was an opinionated piece about trends in modern fiction. Wilkie lampooned the average reader who was put off by the occasional licence, even frisson of excitement, he or she found in the novels and preferred the tedium of traditional long-winded travel books. Offering advice he did not always follow himself, he also took authors to task, calling on them to banish clichés, such as putting heroes on horseback and limiting their readers to a choice between two leading ladies – invariably a tall dark one who is serious and unfortunate and a short fair one who is flirtatious and happy.
In this context, Wilkie could not avoid airing his prejudices – jokingly presented but no less firmly felt – as he noted disapprovingly the emergence of a new type of literary heroine: the lip-curling man-hater. He suggested that such a woman could never be a suitable wife for any son of his, who would be better purchasing a Circassian slave in Istanbul. At least then she would not despise him for his masculinity. His own fantasy wife was flutteringly submissive: ‘Can I ever forget the mixture of modest confusion and perfect politeness with which that admirable woman heard me utter the most absolute nonsense that ever issued from my lips?’
Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation Page 16