When Wilkie visited Gad’s Hill in July, Dickens was suffering from ‘a small malady’235 he claimed had been ‘engendered’ by his ‘bachelor state’. This is likely to have been a dose of gonorrhoea, since he joked that there was no silver nitrate236 (a cure for the disease) in the sea at Broadstairs, where Wilkie soon went on holiday.
For a while, until they were joined by Wilkie’s brother Charley, the only other guests at Gad’s Hill were Anne and Adelaide Procter, wife and daughter of Dickens’s affable long-term friend, Bryan Waller Procter, otherwise known as the writer Barry Cornwall. Wilkie had seen a lot of this family in recent months. Anne had a reputation as a literary hostess, while her daughter Adelaide was a poet and regular contributor to Household Words. Adelaide was also a leading member of the Langham Place group of moderate but committed feminists who lobbied strongly for greater opportunities for women, particularly in education. She had been involved in two of their recent initiatives, the English Woman’s Journal and the Society for the Promotion of Employment for Women.
Wilkie was uncertain where he would take his main summer vacation. He toyed with the Isle of Man, the Isle of Wight, Hastings, Wales and Yorkshire, all of which had their attractions. But, as he told Charles Ward, ‘I have nothing particular to record but the history of my own doubts.’237 His indecision may well have resulted from having to consider Caroline and her daughter. But if he hankered after a bachelor jaunt, Caroline put her foot down and demanded a family holiday. The compromise was six weeks by the seaside in Kent.
He was still not clear where he would stay. Once he had made up his mind about Broadstairs, he travelled the short distance to reconnoitre there on Saturday 23 July. Through Dickens he knew James Ballard, landlord of the Albion Hotel, who directed him slightly out of town to the tranquil Church Hill Cottage. But it was still occupied and he could not immediately move in. So Wilkie made his way back to London, which would have enabled him to check on the progress of The Queen of Hearts, a collection of his recent stories which was going through various stages of production before being published by Hurst & Blackett in October. This volume, which included neatly framed tales like ‘The Diary of Anne Rodway’, was dedicated to Emile Forgues, a Paris-based critic and friend of Dickens, who had done much to introduce Wilkie’s writings to the French market. Forgues’s piece ‘Etude sur le roman anglais’238 in the Revue des Deux Mondes led the way in this respect, and he went on to translate several works of Wilkie’s including The Woman in White and The Moonstone. Wilkie would describe him as ‘a gentleman, an admirable English scholar, and a translator who has not his equal in France’.239
After picking up Caroline and Harriet, he returned to Broadstairs to start his tenancy on 3 August. When he informed his mother about his plans, he was careful to use the first person singular, because it seems clear that she had taken against Caroline, and Wilkie had no desire to provoke her wrath further. Since Harriet left no record of her reasons for this coolness towards her son’s lover, it must be assumed that she did not consider this illegitimate widow with a young child a good enough catch for her dear son.
Mindful of Dickens’s requirements for All the Year Round, Wilkie was soon at work on The Woman in White, the novel he had been contemplating for well over a year. As far back as April 1858 he had mentioned having to write a long serial story, at that stage for Household Words, and claimed that the plan was ‘all drawn out’.240 In August that year, on his previous holiday in Broadstairs, he had enthused about having ‘hit on what is (so far as I know) an entirely new form of narrative’241 for this work. But the conflicting demands of theatre, journalism and domestic responsibilities had allowed little progress.
According to a note he later appended to the original manuscript,242 he began writing the new book on 15 August 1859. However, he had obviously started earlier, since that same day he posted a registered packet to Wills, saying he would ‘go distracted if it was lost’. It contained the first eight or nine pages of his closely written text, describing Walter Hartright’s first meeting with the distraught Anne Catherick, the eponymous woman in white. Wilkie apologised if it was on the long side, but added, ‘I must stagger the public into attention, if possible, at the outset.’243
His letter to Wills contained his first reference to the title of his new book, which he claimed had come to him while walking at night on the North Foreland. Edmund Yates later expanded on this to reveal how,244 after an extended hike around Broadstairs, Wilkie flopped down, exhausted, on a grassy headland looking out over the North Foreland Lighthouse, which warned of the dangers of the nearby Margate Sands. According to Yates, the lighthouse looked awkward and stiff in the eerie evening light. Turning this over in his mind, Wilkie thought it looked like Anne Catherick, the ‘white woman’ or ‘woman in white’ he had just started writing about. At that point, the penny dropped and he decided this was what he should call his book. John Forster did not consider it appropriate, but Dickens was enthusiastic, describing it as the ‘name of names, and very title of very titles’.245
Spurred by Dickens, Wilkie wanted to write a mystery novel that was both psychologically true and socially engaged. He had a great capacity for absorbing contemporary information and trends, and for recycling them in an entertaining manner. In this book, he gathered various strands – crime, lunacy, identity, inheritance, marriage and the sexes – and turned them into compellingly readable art.
The Woman in White focuses on two contrasting types of contemporary women – Laura Glyde (née Fairlie) and her half-sister Marian Halcombe – or three, if one includes Anne Catherick, who also turns out to be a half-sister, though through an illegitimate line. Laura is an heiress – pretty, self-effacing and programmed to make a conventional marriage. Marian is more modern, less obviously attractive (with her shadow of a moustache), but with the intelligence and tenacity to galvanise the phlegmatic ‘drawing master’ Walter Hartright into helping her unravel a series of mysteries that led to Laura, whom they both love, being incarcerated in a private lunatic asylum in the place of Anne.
In their roles as sleuths (for this is also a variation on a detective story), Marian and Walter are confronted by Count Fosco, one of the most convincing monsters in English literature. An overweight comic grotesque, with delicate Italian manners and a troupe of pet white mice, Fosco befriends his brother-in-law Sir Percival Glyde, the man Laura has reluctantly been forced to marry. As both Sir Percival and Fosco are strapped for cash, they hatch a plan to lay their hands on Laura’s £20,000 wedding settlement. Fosco, the prime mover, sees a way of obtaining this money – by swapping the identities of Laura and Anne, who has escaped from an asylum and is making life difficult for Sir Percival by hinting that he is hiding some dark secret.
The Woman in White provides a masterclass in the art of storytelling. From the start, Wilkie played with the idea that he was presenting his tale as if it were evidence in a court of law. Thus different characters put forward their versions of events, leaving the reader to arrive at his or her take on the truth. Wilkie hit on this as a ploy when he attended the Rugeley murder trial three years earlier. It came naturally to him since he had trained as a lawyer. However, he was aware of the related difficulties, such as the fallibility of witness testimony. Even a diary, seemingly a secure repository of the truth, can be questionable, as when Marian’s tails off and her intimate thoughts cease to be legible.
Wilkie also introduces a key ingredient into what would soon become known as sensation novels. A feature of mid-Victorian psychology was the idea that individuals are a bundle of sensations and nerves, making them not only irrational but vulnerable to authors playing on their anxieties and exciting their emotions by creating sensational effects. The mutability of the human personality was being acknowledged in science and literature for the first time. Added to this were developments in the study of psychology and vision, which confirmed the idea that perceptions were not always what they seemed. Everything took on added significance in an intellectual cl
imate where established truths were under fire from scientific inquiry, particularly in 1859, the year of publication of the ur-text on this process, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
In its effort to achieve social relevance, The Woman in White focused on one particular contemporary issue – the role of private lunatic asylums. In recent years there had been many reports of people being wrongly incarcerated and without adequate oversight or supervision.
This scandal was highlighted – and brought painfully close to home – in a heavily publicised court case that concluded at the end of June 1859, just as Wilkie was contemplating the details of his new book. The case in the Court of Queen’s Bench was billed as ‘Ruck versus Stilwell and Another’. The plaintiff Lawrence Ruck, an Oxford-educated landowner, was seeking damages for being confined against his will in Moorcroft Asylum in Hillingdon, a private institution run by Dr James Stilwell. Ruck’s wife had him placed there after he allegedly displayed delusional behaviour, including accusing her of ‘general prostitution’. Stilwell was assisted by Dr John Conolly,246 the ‘Another’ in the case, who had hitherto been feted as a reforming ‘alienist’, or mental health doctor, as a result of his work to end the practice of restraining patients in asylums. But he had fallen on hard times and needed money. After having earlier testified that he had nothing to do with this asylum, it transpired that he had been paid regularly and handsomely for referrals to Moorcroft. Not only had he illegally signed the certificate for Ruck’s internment but had received a fee of 15 per cent of the internee’s boarding costs.
The case was embarrassing for Dickens, who had been one of Conolly’s most fervent advocates, in Household Words and elsewhere, at a time of intense public debate on reform of the lunacy laws. It also raised questions about the temporary committal a year earlier of Rosina Bulwer-Lytton, the woman who had threatened a rumpus at the premiere of her husband’s play Not So Bad As We Seem. As the aristocratic owner of Knebworth, Bulwer-Lytton had recently been concentrating on his political rather than literary career, and been appointed colonial secretary in the Conservative government of Lord Derby. Still fuming at her treatment by her estranged husband, Rosina denounced him on the hustings while he was standing for re-election in Hertford in June 1858. His patience worn thin, he responded by having her confined to Inverness Lodge, a private lunatic asylum in Brentford. He was advised on his course of action by none other than John Conolly.
Rosina was visited by the lunacy commissioners, including Bryan Procter, wearing a different hat, and after considerable lobbying from her friends, she was released three weeks later. The case gained wide coverage, particularly as it came in the wake of a recent liberalisation in the divorce laws, which highlighted questions about the rights of women in marriage.
It is inconceivable that Wilkie did not discuss Rosina’s case with Dickens and Procter, who significantly was later the dedicatee of The Woman in White. Wilkie was unusually well informed about such matters, partly through Dr Joseph Bullar who, being unmarried, lived in the Bullar family house at Basset Wood where Harriet Collins was staying in the summer of 1859. As a notably eclectic doctor, Joseph had promoted the use of opium and chloroform in clinical practice. He was also involved in the certification of lunatics, albeit from a doctor’s angle, since he devised a form247 to ensure that members of his profession were not legally liable if they sent patients to asylums.
Another of Wilkie’s sources was Pigott’s brother-in-law,248 Edwin Fox, a surgeon who helped run a well-established lunatic asylum at Brislington, outside Bristol. This was generally considered a benevolent establishment, though inmates did occasionally commit suicide or become involved in legal action, which threw light on its workings. In one case, a woman was committed by her husband because of her spiritualist tendencies. In another, which was rather more influential, John Perceval, son of the assassinated former prime minister, Spencer Perceval, inveighed against the abuses he had experienced there,249 including physical restraint, beatings and, a particular bugbear, being forced to associate with ‘vulgar persons below me in society’. Perceval’s complaints played an important role in the agitation for the 1845 Lunacy Act. They were given additional currency, since his brother was a lunacy commissioner and a prominent Irvingite ‘apostle’.
The Commission of Lunacy had existed in various guises since the late eighteenth century, before becoming a statutory body in 1845, a centralising initiative by the great reformer Anthony Ashley Cooper, or Lord Shaftesbury, who was its chairman. It consisted of eleven commissioners, six of whom were salaried professionals (three doctors and three lawyers). Wilkie had probably first learned of it from Edmund Southey, his fellow pupil at school, whose father Henry Herbert Southey was a medical commissioner and remained so until his death in 1865.
Wilkie did not lack for background detail about the Commission and the asylums it oversaw. Through Procter and his family, he would have learned about another case with intriguing similarities with The Woman in White. In the mid-1840s, Louisa Nottidge and three of her sisters, all heiresses with fortunes of £6,000, had been drawn to a utopian religious sect, The Abode of Love, or Agapemone, which was widely painted as promiscuous and immoral. After the other three girls had been told it was God’s will that they should marry elders of the sect (and thus give up their money to the community), their mother feared that Louisa might be forced to follow suit. So, together with her son-in-law, Frederick Ripley, she arranged to have Louisa kidnapped from the sect’s headquarters near Bridgwater in Somerset in November 1846. Ripley took Louisa to his house in Marylebone before committing her, like Lawrence Ruck, to Moorcroft House asylum in Hillingdon, run by Dr James Stilwell’s uncle, Arthur. Once again, John Conolly was supportive of the woman’s confinement. But, like Anne Catherick, she managed to escape in January 1848 and travelled to London to meet William Cobbe, an elder of the sect who had married one of her sisters. Before she could make her way to Somerset, she was apprehended and returned to the asylum. At this stage she applied – not for the first time – to the Commissioners in Lunacy to examine her case.
Since they could not make up their minds, it fell to Bryan Procter, when he visited her in May, to determine that, though she seemed deluded in her religious beliefs, she was no danger to the community and should be released.
By 1858–59, the clamour over the detentions of Rosina Bulwer-Lytton, Lawrence Ruck and others became so loud that commentators would later talk about the ‘lunacy panic’ of those years. When Wilkie met Procter’s wife and daughter at Dickens’s house in July 1859, he is likely to have received a feminist perspective on the phenomenon, and particularly on the Nottidge case, since one of Adelaide Procter’s associates in the Langham Place group was Frances Power Cobbe, whose brother William was the elder in The Abode of Love married to one of the Nottidge sisters.
A quarter of a century later, Frances Power Cobbe became a regular correspondent of Wilkie’s, particularly on the topic of vivisection, against which she lobbied strongly. In the intervening years she emerged as a leading theorist about women and marriage. In What Shall We Do With Our Old Maids?250 she pointed out that, partly because of emigration and deaths in the Crimean War, many more members of her sex were having to fend for themselves. She estimated that three million women were now earning their own living and one in four was destined not to marry. As a result, it was imperative to provide them with employment opportunities. In Celibacy vs. Marriage,251 she expanded on this line when she acknowledged, in a cheery female parallel to Wilkie’s views about bachelors, that women needed to get used to co-habiting in amicable spinsterhood (as she herself did). In the same article she argued that the new secular divorce courts had ‘revealed secrets which must tend to modify immensely our ideas of English domestic felicity’.252 Wilkie absorbed these details and wove them into his novels with an evident understanding of the underlying feminist polemics.253
He was often reminded about The Abode of Love in years to come. His friend William Hepworth Dixon, the
editor of the Athenaeum magazine, made it the centre-piece of Spiritual Wives, his 1868 study of polygamy in religious communities. Astonishingly, towards the end of the century, The Abode would be led by someone much at home in its Somerset surroundings – Edward Pigott’s nephew, John, the son of his brother Henry, who had died of his syphilis.
While Wilkie drew on contemporary Britain for the basic plot of The Woman in White, he looked to France for its colour and romance. His story ‘The Poisoned Meal’, published in Household Words the previous autumn, showed his liking for fictionalising snippets of news from France. Throughout 1858 the British press ran a number of stories (often couched in anti-Catholic tones) about a young girl’s sighting of a woman in white, alleged to be the Virgin, by the river Gave in the Pyrenees. The Times printed a version of this on 26 August 1858, in the same issue as an account of Lawrence Ruck’s action against Stilwell and Conolly.
Wilkie claimed that he took the story of The Woman in White (along with ‘some of my best plots’) from Maurice Méjan’s ‘Receuil des causes célèbres, et des arrêts qui les ont décidées’, a collection of French legal cases published at the start of the century and catering for the same market for ‘true crime’ as the Newgate Calendar in Britain. Included in his copy of the book, which he had found on a visit to Paris with Dickens in 1856, was the tale of Adélaide-Marie Rogres Lusignan de Champignelles. In 1764, Marie, as she was known, married the Marquis de Douhault, who lived in a castle at Chazelet in central France. When he proved mentally unstable and tried to kill her, her father managed to have him locked up as a lunatic. Over the years Marie became greatly respected as trustee of the Marquis’s estates. However, when her brother Armand began to swindle her, she decided to go to Paris to confront him. En route she stopped in Orléans, where she was refused entry to the house of her usual host, a relation of her husband, and was directed instead to stay with a neighbour she did not know. On the eve of her departure for Paris, she was taken by her hostess for a drive beside the Loire, during which she accepted a pinch of snuff and fell into a deep sleep from which she never awoke. On 18 January 1788, she was declared dead and quickly buried.
Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation Page 19