Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation

by Andrew Lycett

  But Wilkie was not known for consistency in either his opinions or his private life, which remained unsettled as he flitted between addresses, using his mother’s house in Harley Place as his principal abode, and, as far as is possible to discern, leaving Caroline and her daughter to fend for themselves.

  For the time being he had a more important role to fulfil as Dickens’s friend, rather than employee. In early February 1858, he was one of only two people (the other was Forster) invited to celebrate Dickens’s birthday in Gravesend. ‘The Inimitable’ seemed happy to steer clear of Gad’s Hill as long as his domestic circumstances remained fraught, causing him to mope to Wilkie that he had not enjoyed ‘a moment’s peace or content’221 since his ‘Doncaster unhappiness’.

  Since he was arranging a nationwide reading tour and tongues were starting to wag about his marriage, Dickens decided to tell his agent, Arthur Smith, what was going on. He wrote to him explaining the background to his forthcoming separation from Catherine, in case the matter was raised by any of Smith’s clients. What became known as the ‘violated letter’ was somehow published in the United States and the details seeped back to the British press. As a result, Dickens was forced to pen an extraordinary denial, which he pressured potential allies to print. When Mark Lemon, the editor of Punch, and Frederick Evans and William Bradbury, the magazine’s owners (and also the publishers of both Dickens and Wilkie), declined, Dickens was furious and cut them all from his life.

  This vengeful act was followed shortly afterwards by another impulsive gesture. After hearing someone at the Garrick Club repeat the common enough rumour that Dickens was having an affair with his sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth, Thackeray retorted that the woman was actually an actress. Dickens did not take this kindly, and a smouldering feud became worse after Thackeray objected to a profile of himself in the magazine Town Talk, owned and edited by Edmund Yates. Since Yates was not only a member of the Garrick but a friend of Dickens, Thackeray complained to the Club committee, which saw fit to expel Yates. At this juncture, while remaining a member of the Club, Dickens resigned from the committee, ostensibly in sympathy with Yates, but really as a gesture against Thackeray who, for a while at least, joined his circle of the damned.

  Meanwhile, Wilkie continued to provide unobtrusive support. Dickens may have used Forster, his literary executor, as his preferred go-between when his solicitor Frederic Ouvry drew up a legal deed of separation from Catherine. But as soon as this official business was completed in mid-May, Dickens contacted Wilkie, thanking him for his friendship and asking him to come and see him. ‘I can then tell you all in lieu of writing. It is rather a long story – over, I hope, now.’ It was typical of Wilkie that, despite his closeness to Dickens, he remained on good terms with Catherine, whom he later visited in her new house in Gloucester Crescent in Camden, across Regent’s Park from his mother.

  There is no record of Wilkie reciprocating and telling Dickens about his relationship with Caroline, although he must have done so. One can only imagine how Dickens’s separation, and Wilkie’s role in it, appeared to her. At a time when, to Wilkie’s intense interest, the subjects of marriage and divorce were firmly on the public agenda as the first cases began to be heard in the civil courts following the passage of the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, the widowed Caroline must have wondered about her own status and future.

  Wilkie’s mobility was restricted owing to his still unstable ankle, and not helped by a flare-up of gout. However, his pain did not prevent him joining Pigott on a sailing trip in June. There is no evidence of any women accompanying the two friends on a voyage that took them to Wales, where Wilkie was amused to be introduced to a local Bard as Dr Collins. A couple of months later, he again took time off in Broadstairs.

  Wilkie’s leisure allowed him to work on various projects he had been contemplating, such as a play Frederick Robson of the Olympic Theatre had asked him to write following the relative success of The Lighthouse the previous year. Wilkie came up with The Red Vial, a mish-mash of theatrical hyperbole in three acts, taking in lunacy, poison, murder and intrigue, as it moved disjointedly from a German merchant house in London to a Frankfurt morgue. Although it ran for four weeks in October, it was panned by the critics, most damningly by the Daily Telegraph, which accused it of ‘transgress[ing] all the limits which good taste and propriety suggest’. The paper added that the play’s excesses might have been mitigated if it had been written as ‘a series of chapters’, rather than committed to stage. Wilkie bridled at this criticism, but took the advice to heart, endeavouring to introduce a theatrical sense of immoderation and surprise into his novels. (Years later he reworked The Red Vial as the novel Jezebel’s Daughter.)

  Although Wilkie again craved success in the theatre, he had not given up on his fiction, which was in demand in the American market. Earlier in the year he had written ‘A Marriage Tragedy’ for Harper’s Monthly. When collected in The Queen of Hearts in 1859, this was called ‘(Brother Griffith’s Story of) a Plot in Private Life’, a title that pointed less at the contents than at the type of fiction Wilkie was aiming for – an intricate domestic mystery, requiring a sleuth of some sort to gather and resolve the loose ends. It told of James Smith, a landowner with a passion for yachting. After leaving his wife, Smith makes a bigamous second marriage with a woman he meets while sailing his schooner in Scotland. Returning to his original home, he quarrels with his first wife and then disappears, leaving a blood-stained undergown. This allows a malevolent maid to try to pin a charge of murder on a faithful servant who, with the help of a lawyer’s clerk in the role of a quasi-detective, had earlier pursued Smith and tracked down his movements. This heady mixture of bigamy, suspected murder and dogged investigation showed the direction in which Wilkie wanted to take his fiction. Drawing on aspects of his earlier story ‘The Diary of Anne Rodway’, ‘A Marriage Tragedy’ looked ahead to The Moonstone a decade later, not least in its domestic setting and its use of a stained piece of clothing as a clue.

  Wilkie followed this up with ‘Who is the Thief?’222 (later known as ‘The Biter Bit’), also written for an American magazine. Adopting a light-hearted epistolary form, this early police procedural exposed incompetence and rivalry within the emerging detective force as it pitted an ambitious young trainee against a seasoned sergeant, both trying to solve a theft while under the baleful eye of a chief inspector.

  In the early autumn he added ‘The Poisoned Meal’ to his output of detective stories. This was a gripping study, set in eighteenth-century France, of an investigation into a death involving arsenic, which, because of its widespread availability, had become the poison of choice for mid-Victorian murderers. It was subtitled ‘from the Records of the French Courts’, but the details were similar to the tale of Eliza Fenning, a servant who was controversially executed for attempted murder in 1815, after adding arsenic to a family’s dumplings. Wilkie’s imagination may also have been stimulated by the recent trial of Madeleine Smith,223 a middle-class Glaswegian alleged to have poisoned her former lover, a Frenchman, when he threatened to expose details of their affair. Wilkie was clearly intrigued by this case since he drew directly on it for his 1875 novel The Law and the Lady.

  Before the end of the year he again went back in history, to the theme of bank forgery in ‘A Paradoxical Experience’,224 a gentle fiction based on the story of Henry Fauntleroy, the last Briton to be hanged for this crime in 1824. He also worked on a new Christmas issue of Household Words with Dickens, who had completed his intensive reading tour in mid-November. Dickens was still so angry with Bradbury and Evans’s refusal to publish his ‘personal statement’ about his marriage that he was planning to close his magazine and start another. That did not stop him and Wilkie collaborating (together with Elizabeth Gaskell and the writer Barry Cornwall’s feminist daughter Adelaide Anne Procter) on the Christmas offering ‘A House to Let’, about strange happenings in a house supposedly for rent.

  Otherwise, Wilkie concentrated on his journalistic
work for Household Words, where he certainly earned his salary increase during 1858. With Dickens involved in personal matters, Wilkie revelled in his job requirement to be opinionated, prolific and essentially lightweight. He could turn out amusing lifestyle articles, such as his protestations about the proliferation of crinolines (and the vast amount of space they took up).225 He could do quirky political pieces, including his advocacy of a series of consumer strikes to protest against poor service on trains and buses.226 And as was clear from his fiction, he was not afraid to enter the realm of sexual politics, taking on the persona of a woman to address the problem of female bores.227 He liked the freedom of adopting different personalities, talking about his (fictional) wife and daughters in his crinolines piece, before reverting firmly to bachelor mode when he examined the problems of shyness when proposing marriage.

  Occasionally he took on a more serious persona, particularly when he tackled aspects of his profession. Ruminating on the poor state of English theatre, he attributed it to the inadequate financial returns it gave writers. He suggested that the situation was different in France, where famous writers were properly rewarded.

  On the whole, Wilkie now rarely reviewed books, but in one piece228 he took strongly against The Heir of Redclyffe, a popular novel by the Tractarian author Charlotte M. Yonge, after discovering that Sidney Herbert, the former secretary of war who had championed Florence Nightingale in the Crimea, had promoted it as an example of great literature, and had quoted in his support the French historian and statesman François Guizot, who had observed that this kind of ‘domestic novel’ was the only type of book in which England was superior to France. Wilkie attacked Herbert for his hypocrisy in taking on a subject he knew nothing about, but his real vitriol was reserved for Yonge’s novel, which he dismissed as a hodgepodge of sentimental religious tosh, calling it a ‘Pusey-Novel’. Wilkie’s tirade suggested he was still troubled by his Tractarian demons, which was all the more remarkable since his mother retained close links with this faction of the Anglican Church. He was also genuinely concerned that Yonge’s medieval religiosity (her book was much praised by the Pre-Raphaelites) should be feted as an example of the British domestic novel at a time when he and other authors, such as Dickens and Thackeray, were trying to steer it in more challenging directions. Even Dickens thought Wilkie’s criticism excessive, and asked his colleague Wills to tone it down.

  Wilkie’s interest in the publishing business was again clear from one of his most influential articles, ‘The Unknown Public’,229 published in August 1858. It argued that a vast market for books was being ignored. Estimates of the number of readers in Britain had been artificially low, he believed, since they failed to include the newly literate working classes who bought penny journals at railway stations and cheap stores. He calculated that journals such as Reynolds’s Miscellany and the Family Herald, which offered a mixture of suspense, romance and titbits of educational information, had a weekly circulation of one million, with each copy read by three people. Although he mocked their often homely content, he understood the significance of their readers, whose appetite for diversion would play an important part in the development of his own approach to novel writing.

  Underlying his thesis was a thorough understanding of how changes in society were affecting his market. Increases in population and disposable income inevitably created a wider readership, whose tastes might not be as elevated as before, but who were eager for print of some kind. This process was helped by other factors, including the Public Libraries Act of 1850, which encouraged councils to set up free libraries (the first was in Manchester), increased discounting of books following John Chapman’s campaign against restrictive practices earlier in the decade, and the success of W.H. Smith’s railway bookstalls, which spawned a variety of cheap editions such as George Routledge’s shilling Railway Library. The market domination of Mudie’s and their subscribers would continue for some time, and the triple-decker would die out only in the 1890s. Over the next three decades, publishers would be forced to adopt new approaches, and Wilkie would only benefit.

  After this heavy schedule of work, he was happy to put aside his prejudices and on 4 November attended the wedding of Joseph Stringfield, the Weston-super-Mare doctor he had befriended through Pigott. Not only that, but Wilkie signed the official register after Stringfield had married his second wife Mary Ann (Teresa) Garment at St Luke’s Church, Chelsea on 4 November, 1858. His brother Charley tried unsuccessfully to see the newly-wed Stringfields when they passed through Paris on their honeymoon a few days later. Charley had given up painting (it only caused him ‘extreme suffering and anxiety’,230 he told Holman Hunt) and was visiting the French capital, with a view to developing a career as a writer. He was already producing articles for Household Words and seemed to be enjoying himself, as he called on his mother to ‘caution Willie against committing himself to London lodging before he has tried Paris again’.231

  This suggests that Wilkie’s domestic arrangements with Caroline were still far from resolved. After so much frenetic creative activity, there was something sad about the way he felt obliged to turn down an invitation from his cousin Jane Ward to join her and her husband Charles over Christmas 1858. ‘My term, at my own house, is up this Christmas,’232 he told Jane, referring to the end of his mother’s lease at Harley Place. ‘I have no idea where to go to – and I think it quite likely that I may be at Paris, or by the seaside, in search of relief to body and mind, or in bed on Christmas Day. I never felt less certain of my future proceedings than I do at this moment – and I should, on that account, have been afraid of engaging myself to you, even if I had been a free man, this year, so far as the social proceedings of the 25th are concerned.’ It sounds as though he was, somewhat reluctantly, committed to spending the festive season with Caroline and her daughter Harriet.

  10

  LUNACY PANIC

  FOR HIS HOLIDAY in August 1859 Wilkie opted again for the sea breezes and intermittent sunshine of Broadstairs. The previous year he had parked himself in the centre of town, but this time he rented Church Hill Cottage, which looked out over the sea on the road towards Ramsgate. One reason was that he was tired of the noise of tourists: he wanted peace and quiet, for he had work to do. More significantly, he had family in tow: Caroline and her eight-year-old daughter.

  In February he began for the first time to live openly with Caroline and Harriet at 124 Albany Street, a lodging house with a dubious reputation close to the church where William Collins had once worshipped. Only eighteen months earlier,233 Reynolds’s Newspaper had published a titillating news item under the headline ‘The Dashing Widow and the Amorous Colonel’, which reported a court case involving a well-born woman who had had an illegitimate child by a retired army officer, Colonel D’Aguilar. When she sued for financial support, he claimed that he had thought she was a prostitute. At one time she had lived at 124 Albany Street but had been thrown out after her landlady found her in her room with an unknown man.

  But this unsavoury place was only a staging post: two months later Wilkie and his fledgling family moved again to a similar establishment, 2A New Cavendish Street, along the road from where he was born. (The Collinses clearly liked pirouetting around Regent’s Park: his mother had recently settled into a new house at 2 Clarence Terrace, another elegant Regency development around the Park, and close to where she had once lived in Hanover Terrace.)

  Caroline was now not only participating in Wilkie’s life but being recognised as doing so. In early May, he asked Charles Ward to dinner but, at the last minute, was invited to the opera. He requested Ward to come anyway; they would be able to spend a couple of hours together before he had to go, and then he would leave his guest with Caroline who, he promised, ‘keeps you company and makes you your grog – and you stay as long as you feel inclined’.234

  Earlier in the year Wilkie had struggled with his health. In February, he declined an invitation to a dance at the (Henry) Bullars, citing continuing problems wi
th his ankle. But he always perked up in the comfortable surroundings of Gad’s Hill, where Dickens celebrated his new life – without Catherine – by commissioning a handsome portrait by his friend William Powell Frith. For some time Dickens had been underwriting the Ternans’ expenses. He almost certainly paid for the lease on their four-storeyed house in Mornington Crescent, not far from Wilkie in Albany Street, and for singing lessons for Nelly’s sister Fanny in Florence. His bank account coyly recorded payments to ‘N’. To add to his emotional turmoil, his brother Augustus had recently abandoned his wife and decamped to America.

  On the work front, Dickens was still furious with the ‘Whitefriars Gang’, as he called Bradbury and Evans, for refusing to print his ‘personal statement’ in Punch. Drawing inspiration from Wilkie’s essay ‘The Unknown Public’, he began planning a rival journal, All the Year Round, and made clear he would cease ‘conducting’ Household Words after May 1859. Having acquired an office for his new publication in Wellington Street, a few doors from the old one, he did exactly as he had threatened. The first issue of All the Year Round (a 75:25 per cent joint venture between him and Wills) was published on 30 April and, by the time Household Words duly closed at the end of the following month, Dickens was ready to tempt its readers with the first episode of his new novel A Tale of Two Cities.

  Wilkie inevitably followed him into the new venture, where Dickens soon approached him to produce an exciting new serial that would follow immediately after his own and so maintain its robust circulation – at one stage running three times higher than its predecessor’s.