He left his most outspoken comment on Victorian sexual politics until the end of the year when, in ‘Bold Words by a Bachelor’,214 he made a passionate plea for traditional male friendship. He argued, with a touch of irony, that a certain type of modern woman was so demanding of the attentions of her husband that the latter had no time, let alone emotional energy, to share with his friends. Such exclusive marriages were selfish, he wrote, because they led to a married man ‘leaving all his sympathies in his wife’s boudoir, and all his affections upstairs in the nursery, and giving to his friends such shreds and patches of formal recognition, in place of true love and regard, as consist in asking them to an occasional dinner-party, and granting them the privilege of presenting his children with silver mugs.’
Wilkie might have been thinking about Dickens or another of his male friends. But, more likely, he was setting out his stall with Caroline. She had made a strong impression on him, but he wanted to reinforce his position that he had no intention of giving up his bachelor ways, which involved evenings at the Garrick Club, visits to friends in the country, and leisurely trips en garçon with Dickens.
His attitude to his leisure time was not purely selfish. He had strong views on the institution of marriage, whose ‘scope and purpose’ he felt was ‘miserably narrow’. And in the ‘Bold Words’ article he introduced a theme he would often return to in his writings – the stupidity of the divorce laws, which meant that some people ‘would rather see murder committed under their own eyes than approve of any project for obtaining a law of divorce which shall be equal in its operation on husbands and wives of all ranks who cannot live together’. He claimed to have a higher idea of marriage: ‘The light of its beauty must not be shut up within the four walls which enclose the parents and family, but must flow out into the world, and shine upon the childless and solitary, because it has warmth enough and to spare, and because it may make them, even in their way, happy too.’
These were not idle words. He had an equally strong sense of how the institution might not work for the opposite sex. He knew how disastrous it had been for friends such as Frances Dickinson, and he understood that it could be as much of a trap for women as for men. So this was another subject for his fiction, as marriage and divorce came increasingly under the same rational scrutiny as other issues in society. In 1857, the Matrimonial Causes Act would remove divorce from ecclesiastical courts, making it a civil rather than church issue. It would also give married women partial protection of their earnings. However, the law remained heavily weighted in favour of men, who retained rights to their wives’ property and enjoyed less onerous requirements of proof in divorce. These continuing inconsistencies and inequalities would provide Wilkie with ample scope for cliffhanging plotlines over the following years.
9
THE UNKNOWN PUBLIC
WILKIE’S RELATIONSHIP WITH Caroline Graves was unusual but by no means unique. He knew several men with girlfriends and mistresses, often from a lower class. But his liaison was not public, and it betrayed his own tendency to secretiveness, a feature of the age at variance with another contemporary phenomenon – the thirst for knowledge and exactitude. Now, with a mixture of perverseness and intuitive brilliance, Wilkie was to make the dichotomy between these two trends a centrepiece of his work.
His new novel, The Dead Secret, showed the way. Its subject was no ordinary secret but an ancient family mystery, details of which had been committed to paper and deliberately hidden. For the task of investigation, Wilkie opted for a plucky young woman. The fact that the secret related to her own legitimacy and thus her right to inherit the part-ruined Porthgenna Tower in Cornwall added poignancy and made the story a particularly gripping page-turner. It could almost be read as an alternative version of how life might have turned out differently for Caroline at Toddington Manor in Gloucestershire.
Wilkie’s previous novels Hide and Seek and A Rogue’s Life had featured painters. The Dead Secret focused on a different branch of the arts, the theatre, which excited him in a way his father’s profession no longer did. He originally wrote the story in a series of ‘acts’, starting with the dying chatelaine of Porthgenna, a one-time ‘play-actress’, Mrs Treverton, who sets the plot in motion by confiding her secret in a letter she entrusts to her maid Sarah Leeson to give to her absent seagoing husband.
The secret, it transpires, is about the parentage of the Trevertons’ daughter, Rosamond, who is really the maid Sarah’s daughter by a lover who had died while she was pregnant. Because of Captain Treverton’s desire for a child, his wife and Sarah passed the now fatherless infant off as his own. The dying Mrs Treverton’s letter is intended to inform her husband about this. But Sarah is emotionally disturbed by the contents and she decides to bury it in the Myrtle Room in the derelict north wing of the house, hoping it will be forgotten. The novel takes Sarah through a series of adventures in which she acts essentially as a detective, until she finally discovers the letter, and the truth about her birth and her inheritance.
The year 1857 started briskly for Wilkie with the serialisation of the first part of The Dead Secret in Household Words on 3 January, followed two days later by the dress rehearsal of The Frozen Deep at Tavistock House, where his fellow cast members included not only Dickens and members of his family but also Mark Lemon, Augustus Egg and Edward Pigott. The first full performance took place, as planned, on Twelfth Night, followed by four more shows over the next eight days.
The play proved so distracting that Wilkie had to lock himself away in a house overlooking Richmond Park for the next month or so, so he could keep up with his punishing weekly schedule for serialisation of The Dead Secret. (This was the first time he had published a full-length novel in this manner, and it was a struggle.) Dickens was equally under pressure to complete not only Little Dorrit but also construction work at his new house at Gad’s Hill. The two men typically sought some distraction in early March and want to stay at the Bedford Hotel in Brighton, from where the only information that emerged was that they both got soaked walking on the Downs.
Wilkie’s literary and theatre productions now progressed in tandem. He had a following in the United States, where The Dead Secret was serialised in Harper’s Weekly, a new outlet based on the Illustrated London News from the stable of Harper and Brothers, a leading New York publisher. But he needed a firm to get behind his books in Britain, so, with Bentley still financially strapped and Smith, Elder not interested, he plumped for Dickens’s (and Thackeray’s) publishers Bradbury and Evans, who were on hand as the printers of Household Words.
Wilkie took time off on 19 May to attend a party at Gad’s Hill, which must have been a bizarre occasion as it was both a house warming and a celebration of worn-down Catherine Dickens’s forty-second birthday. He allowed himself only a short break as he still had work to do: until almost publication day in mid-June, he was correcting proofs of The Dead Secret as soon as they arrived from Household Words and sending them on immediately to his new publisher, Frederick Evans. The dedicatee of the finished volume this time was Edward Pigott, in whose company he had spent a lot of time while writing it. (It seems that the house where he holed up in Richmond Park belonged to either Pigott or one of his close friends.)
Critics were muted in their response, and thought that Wilkie had spoiled the plot by giving away the secret at the start. In his preface to a revised version in 1861 he acknowledged the risks, but said he wanted to draw out the process of the investigation, or as he put it, ‘to let the effect of the story depend on expectation rather than surprise’.
Wilkie was now influential enough to elicit support from his and, particularly, Dickens’s circle of friends. The prolific Edmund Yates obliged with a favourable profile in his ephemeral weekly, the Train. When this appeared in June, it was illustrated by a studio photograph of a now extremely hirsute Wilkie, taken by Herbert Watkins of Regent Street. Yates emphasised his subject’s conscientiousness and industry, as well as his mastery of the art of plotting a novel.
He declared him to be the fourth best English novelist, behind Dickens, Thackeray and Charlotte Brontë. Wilkie was, in modern parlance, running a public relations campaign, for that same month his portrait by Millais was shown at an exclusive exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite art at 4 Russell Place,215 Fitzroy Square.
There were persistent rumours that Queen Victoria wanted to see The Frozen Deep, but Dickens, with his radical sympathies, did not make it easy. He declined to put on a performance at Windsor Castle on the unconvincing grounds that his daughters, who were yet to be formally presented at court, might suffer socially from appearing there as mere actresses. The Queen agreed instead to attend a special private performance on 4 July at the Royal Gallery of Illustration in Lower Regent Street, where she took a large party, including her four eldest children and her uncle, the visiting King Leopold I of Belgium. Among Dickens’s own guests was Hans Christian Andersen, the Danish author best known for his fairy tales, who was beginning to outstay his welcome at Gad’s Hill, where he had annoyed Wilkie by surreptitiously attaching some daisies to his hat and allowing him to walk thus into the village.
The cast had seen some minor changes since the start of the year, with Wilkie’s friend Frances Dickinson now taking over the role of the Scottish nurse from Wills’s wife Janet, who had become lame. Frances had at least picked up the right accent during her problematic marriage. Once again Dickens made life difficult for himself, declining an invitation to receive the Queen’s personal congratulations because, he claimed, he was inappropriately dressed in his actor’s costume. The Queen was unfazed, professing to find the play ‘most interesting, intensely dramatic, & most touching & moving, at the end’. She asked an equerry to convey her ‘high approval’ of Wilkie’s performance.
Dickens was enjoying his acting so much that he seized an opportunity to present extra performances at the Gallery of Illustration to raise money for the family of his early mentor, Douglas Jerrold, who had recently died. Though the Jerrolds protested that they had been well provided for, they were not too unhappy to pocket the proceeds.
Dickens was not finished yet. He had promised his friend’s family a sum of £2000, and when that total fell short, he readily accepted another invitation to stage the play in Manchester’s vast Free Trade Hall. Adjudging that the women in the cast were not up to this task, he took advice from his actor-manager friend Alfred Wigan, and hired the seasoned actress Mrs (Frances) Ternan. She had three daughters with stage experience, two of whom also joined the company, including the youngest, a pretty, blue-eyed slip of a girl called Ellen (known as Nelly).
The upshot, Dickens informed his friends, was an extremely emotional series of performances, with many of the actors breaking down in tears at the sadness of the final scene. He neglected to reveal that, in this heightened atmosphere, he had fallen deeply, if not obsessively, in love with Nelly Ternan. For two years he had been looking for someone or something to fill a void in his life. Now he believed he had found it in this unassuming eighteen-year-old, young enough to be his daughter.
Wilkie was temporarily distracted by the professional premiere of The Lighthouse on 10 August. He had long wanted to see one of his plays produced on the London stage proper. At last the actor-managers Frederick Robson and W.S. Emden had found a slot for his melodrama at their Royal Olympic Theatre, off the Strand. Wilkie was so delighted by the enthusiastic reaction of the first-night audience that he felt he had to share the news immediately with his mother. Even while celebrating after the performance in the supper room of the Albion Tavern in Great Russell Street, he grabbed some paper and wrote to tell her of the calls for him at the end of the first act, and then ‘a perfect hurricane of applause at the end of the play – which I had to acknowledge from a private box. Dickens, Thackeray, Mark Lemon, publicly appearing in my box. In short an immense success.’216 This was the general consensus, and the play would run for over two months, though his own takings were limited to a modest advance of £100.
In early September, Wilkie again turned his attention to Dickens, whom he found in a depressed mood, having finally steeled himself to admit to John Forster that his marriage was over. However, Dickens’s passion for Nelly was so novel and so overwhelming that he had no idea how to proceed. His solution was to call on Wilkie, who was more tolerant of his foibles than Forster, to join him on a diversionary trip, which he hoped would jolt him out of his listlessness and allow them jointly to pen a light travelogue for the somewhat neglected Household Words.
Wilkie suggested Norfolk as a destination, but Dickens insisted they should go to Cumberland and then proceed to Doncaster, where he claimed he wanted to attend the annual St Leger race meeting. However, his real motive was that Nelly Ternan and her sister Maria would be acting there at the Theatre Royal at the very same time. Even before he and Wilkie set out from Euston station on 7 September, he had already booked two bedrooms and a sitting-room at the Angel Hotel in Doncaster.
Having acquired a smart new brown suit for the trip, Wilkie had only been on the road for two days when he suffered a slight accident of a type to which he was prone. He and Dickens decided to climb Carrock Fell, an undistinguished but still challenging peak of 2,169 feet. Wilkie was disappointed to reach what he was told was the top and find that he could see nothing: the view was entirely obscured by mist. On his descent, calamity struck when he tripped and fell into a rivulet, from which he emerged with a badly sprained ankle. Dickens had to support him all the way down, an intimate process he compared to his experience as Richard Wardour holding up Frank Aldersley in The Frozen Deep. Over the next few days, as they continued gingerly to Wigton, Allenby on the Solway Firth and back to Lancaster, he became irritated with having to act as nurse-maid, particularly when the invalid Wilkie created a lake of potions and healing baths around him in their hotel, and later when he showed signs of his old stinginess in complaining about the price of a meal.
The ankle soon began to heal and, shortly after arriving in Doncaster, Wilkie was able to hobble around on a stick (Dickens called him the ‘gouty admiral’, after a character in Jane Austen’s Persuasion). On the day of the St Leger, Dickens hired an open carriage and took the redoubtable Mrs Ternan and her nubile daughters, Maria and Nelly, to the racecourse. Dickens then invited Nelly to join him on a jaunt in the country, but she – or more likely her mother – objected, and he returned to London more emotionally confused than ever, while Wilkie made his way to Scarborough, ostensibly for further convalescence, but perhaps also to buy time at a difficult juncture in his affair with Caroline Graves.
Indications of niggles in Wilkie’s relationship with Caroline can be discerned in his story ‘Mrs Badgery’,217 which appeared in Household Words at the end of September. It took the form of a plea by an exasperated bachelor with ‘a large circle of acquaintance’ who wants to buy a house owned by a widow (the eponymous Mrs B). But she is ‘too fond of the memory of her late husband’ whose presence she keeps recalling in every room. This scenario, involving the purchase of a suburban villa, was far removed from Caroline’s world. But her loyalty to George Graves, and perhaps the position of her young daughter, Harriet, may have created tension with Wilkie.
Wilkie and Dickens wrote up their recent journey as ‘The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices’,218 a title that drew on ‘Industry and Idleness’, a series of William Hogarth engravings which contrasted the lives of two apprentice weavers – one hard-working and virtuous (the persona adopted by Dickens) and the other feckless and no good (Wilkie). ‘The Lazy Tour’ played off these two different personalities against each other, and provided a lively commentary on contemporary modes of travel, and in particular the paradox of the express train, which caused the world to flash by, without providing much comfort, relaxation or indeed opportunity for laziness.
Wilkie’s professional skills were appreciated at Household Words and in October he was given a salary rise of £50 a year. His easy, non-judgemental companionship was also valuable to Dickens, who, on his return from Donc
aster, had grumpily ordered a solid partition to be built between his dressing room and the matrimonial bedroom at Gad’s Hill. The message to Catherine was that he intended to continue his life in peace in his own space. In stark contrast, a new personal closeness was acknowledged the next time Dickens wrote to his friend, addressing him as ‘My Dear Wilkie’ rather than ‘My Dear Collins’.
Dickens vented his personal frustrations in an unseemly invective against Indians, which appeared not only in his letters but in his latest Christmas collaboration with Wilkie, entitled ‘The Perils of Certain English Prisoners’. He was infuriated by what he had heard about the atrocities committed earlier in the year during the Indian Mutiny. He was particularly exercised because, only a few months earlier, his son Alfred had joined the East India Company in Calcutta. Wilkie also had a personal link through his cousin William Carpenter, who had recently returned after spending most of the decade in India, where he gained a reputation as a water-colourist with close ties to the Mughal court. In Wilkie’s case, this connection helped mitigate his attitude to events in the subcontinent, and he prevailed on Dickens to change the location of these latest tales of British heroism in the face of native brutalities from India to some unspecified island in the Caribbean.
Wilkie maintained this emollient line towards India the following February when, at the start of another phase of prolific writing for Household Words, he penned ‘A Sermon for Sepoys’,219 which suggested that Indians did not need Christian missionaries since they had perfectly good and morally uplifting myths of their own. This did not mean that Wilkie was opposed to all British forays abroad. Only the previous month he had turned in a piece praising the bravery and spirit of adventure shown by the missionary and explorer Dr Livingstone in Africa.220
Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation Page 17