Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation

by Andrew Lycett

  Or so one version of the story went. In Paris ten days later, a woman in a white gown was unceremoniously deposited by the police at the Salpêtrière Prison, which served as a dumping ground for the city’s down-and-outs, including the insane. She was admitted under the name of Blainville and appeared very dozy, but she recovered her senses and began to question why she was being held there, when she was really the Marquise de Douhault. Members of the prison staff were unimpressed by her protestations since they were used to inmates with various delusions.

  Several months later a man claiming a connection with the court of Louis XVI arrived at the Salpêtrière with an order for the release of Madame ‘Blainville’. She left, still dressed in white. But on her way home she found that her relations had begun to plunder her estates. Worse, when she met her brother, he claimed not to recognise her. By now, France was in the throes of Revolution; law and order had broken down, and no one was interested in the domestic problems of a minor aristocrat. However, when she finally reached her original home of Champignelles, she was accepted as the Marie of old. And two years later, when she sought to confirm her identity in a court of law, she was supported by the local peasantry, who regarded her detention as another example of the hated lettres de cachet system that gave the Ancien Régime arbitrary powers of arrest. But the court was not convinced, claiming she was Anne Buiret, a notorious criminal who, after being detained in the Salpêtrière, had taken advantage of the confusion caused by the Revolution to impersonate the Marquise de Douhault, whom she had heard was dead.

  After a series of inconclusive law suits, it was generally agreed that the claimant could not be proved to be Anne Buiret, but neither could Marie’s original death certificate in Orléans be dismissed as a forgery. It was never determined whether Marie was the victim of a dastardly plot by her relations or had been impersonated, in striking white garb, by a fellow inmate in the Salpêtrière. Marie was left as ‘la femme sans nom’, or, as she put it in a despairing plea to the Emperor Napoleon, ‘In civil life, I am neither daughter, wife, French, nor foreigner.’254 This idea that one’s identity was fragile and easily lost in the cut and thrust of modern society was one to which Wilkie would frequently return in his books.

  Having alighted on this historical silhouette of a woman in white, Wilkie needed to introduce her to his readers in suitably striking circumstances. For this he chose to place Walter Hartright’s moonlit encounter with Anne Catherick in an area of north London he knew well. The two of them met255 at the junction of Pratt’s (now Platt’s) Lane and Finchley Road as Hartright walked back into the steaming city one summer night after visiting his family in Hampstead. Continuing on his journey, he reached Avenue Road (where Wilkie had once lived), when he heard two men in a carriage asking a policeman if he had seen a woman in white who had escaped from their asylum. John Guille Millais’s claim that this fictional concurrence was based on a similar event as his father was accompanied to his home by Wilkie and Charley Collins remains fanciful. Dickens neverthless regarded Wilkie’s version as one of the two ‘most dramatic’ scenes in literature (the other was Magwitch emerging from the prison hulk at the start of Great Expectations,256 a book serialised at the end of the following year, in which Dickens tried to trump his friend with his own woman in white, Miss Havisham).

  Wilkie’s desire to present the ensuing story as if it were evidence in a court of law showed him consciously addressing the issue of crime in the modern world. In making Count Fosco the model of a cultivated Italian gentleman, he touched on a mid-century unease that lawlessness was becoming part of the fabric of society. Whether an act of poisoning or forgery, it (and its silky perpetrators) all too often went undetected. As Fosco himself boasted, ‘The fool’s crime is the crime that is found out, and the wise man’s crime is the crime that is not found out.’ And he went on to goad Laura and Marian, ‘The machinery [society] has set up for the detection of crime is miserably ineffective . . . and yet only invent a moral epigram, saying that it works well, and you blind everyone to its blunders, from that moment. Crimes cause their own detection, do they? And murder will out (another moral epigram), will it? Ask Coroners who sit at inquests in large towns if that is true, Lady Glyde.’

  This challenge to the easy consensus on crime raised many questions. It gave Wilkie an expanded canvas as he tried to enlighten his readers about these cleverer, more elusive transgressions and to guide them through the process of tracking down the villains. All this was vital to the evolution of the detective story. For it required him to draw on the principles of nineteenth-century rational enquiry to probe into the more obscure workings of the community. He and fellow seekers after the truth needed to observe and heed clues in the same way as Marian when she stands in the brambles looking for Laura: ‘I saw on one thorny branch some fragments of fringe from a woman’s shawl. A closer examination of the fringe satisfied me that it had been torn from a shawl of Laura’s, and I instantly followed the second path.’ She had discovered another graphic example of a clew or clue.

  Wilkie tried to steer clear of the tourists in Broadstairs, but he could not avoid the town’s rapacious traders. As he struggled with ‘all but insuperable . . . difficulties at the beginning’257 of his new novel, he complained about the prices he was having to pay in the local market – a skinny chicken cost three shillings and sixpence and vegetables three times the London price. His mood was not helped by a painful boil in his groin. As a result, he could not work for much more than four hours, between ten in the morning and two or three in the afternoon.

  At the start of September, Dickens came to visit, though, suffering from a streaming cold, he stayed at the Albion Hotel and later joined Charley Collins at a popular seaside mesmerism show. Owing to the mid-century vogue for spiritualism, the paranormal was now a legitimate subject for entertainment. Wilkie, ever alert to cultural nuances, was keen to reflect this, not only in the mesmeric tricks practised by Count Fosco, but in his representation of the supernatural in stories such as ‘The Ghost in the Cupboard Room’, his offering for the 1859 Christmas number of All the Year Round.

  Wherever new, quasi-spiritual ways of experiencing the world were making themselves felt in mid-Victorian England, traditional religion was not far behind, often wagging its finger in disapproval. Dickens told his daughters Mary and Katey how two ‘disagreeable’ Evangelical girls258 were going around Broadstairs distributing tracts against the mesmerism show. He and Charley Collins had decided to attend after reading one of these leaflets, though they found the proceedings dire.

  However, the Evangelicals did seem to impress young Harriet Graves, if Dickens’s comment to Wilkie is to be interpreted correctly. He told his friend that he was ‘charmed with the Butler’,259 a nickname he had given the child, reflecting the withdrawn and formal manner of someone who had lost her father at an early age and was struggling to find herself amid the vicissitudes of her mother’s and Wilkie’s relationship. Dickens went on, ‘O why was she stopped! Ask her flinty mother from me, Why, Why, didn’t she let her convert somebody! – And here the question arises – Did she secretly convert the Landlord?’

  The implication is that, like many children of her age, Harriet enjoyed imitating people she met. In this case, doubtless to a mixture of horror and amusement in Wilkie, she played the game so convincingly that she appeared to be proselytising herself. Although Dickens did his best to maintain cordial relations with Caroline, his description of her as ‘flinty’ suggests he regarded her as unsympathetic and as having a chip on her shoulder.

  Back in London later in September, Wilkie took time off from his novel to accompany Pigott to one of the latter’s regular musical evenings at the house where George Lewes lived with Marian Evans. Pigott brought another friend, George Redford, a surgeon with artistic leanings who had served in the Crimea. Evans (or George Eliot) wrote to Lewes’s son Charles about the ‘charming’ occasion, commending Pigott’s ‘delicious tenor voice’260 and Redford’s ‘fine baritone’, which h
ad featured to great effect on Beethoven’s ‘exquisite song’ ‘Adelaide’. She did not mention Wilkie’s musical interests, which were unsophisticated, but he often attended such gatherings. A year earlier, he had dined with the couple, causing Eliot to remark on ‘a sturdy uprightness about him that makes all opinion and all occupation respectable’.261

  On 26 November, Wilkie’s novel started running simultaneously in All the Year Round in Britain and Harper’s Weekly in the United States. In the meantime, his collection The Queen of Hearts had been published by Hurst and Blackett, and he had written his ghost story for the Christmas issue of All the Year Round. Intrigued by the subject, in December he accompanied Dickens, Wills and a colleague John Hollingshead on a ghost hunt in an allegedly haunted house in Cheshunt. He was keen to gather as much information as he could about another topic he could turn into page-turning stories.

  By early in the New Year, the serial of The Woman in White had been appearing long enough to spark considerable interest and it was time for Wilkie to talk to publishers about a volume edition. After toying with Smith, Elder, he signed a contract with Sampson Low, a small, entrepreneurial company with roots in printing and bookselling. George Smith at Smith, Elder had put only £500 on the table and later regretted it, saying he should have offered at least ten times that amount. It can be assumed that Sampson Low’s offer was significantly higher (though the exact figure is unknown). They were also prepared to accept Wilkie’s terms of a three-year licence, with any reprint to be limited to three volumes. In this way, as was his practice throughout his life, he astutely held onto his copyright.

  Having dealt with this important stage in the book’s cycle, Wilkie, together with Caroline and her daughter Harriet, moved again in March 1860 into a more permanent rented property at 12 Harley Street, in the heart of the medical district, where their landlord was a dentist called George Gregson. Since the place was a mess and needed refurbishing, Wilkie had to hire a carpenter, who proved a distraction. It was also very cold, which did not help either his health or the smooth progress of The Woman in White. He turned down several invitations to dinner, as well as a couple of requests to stage his plays The Red Vial and The Lighthouse, and was forced to rely more than ever on Charles Ward to pay his bills and generally keep his business affairs in order. In the course of these communications, he also treated Ward to domestic confidences, such as the eccentric behaviour of a temporary maid who liked to watch him go in and out of the lavatory: she tried the door ‘every time I make water’ and ‘I have reason to believe . . . [she] must have seen My Person!’262

  The big news in the family was that, on his return from France, Charley had begun courting Dickens’s flirtatious daughter Katey. It was not exactly a love match, but Charley had decided he needed to marry. Only the previous summer Wilkie had noted that his brother ‘continues to spin madly in the social vortex, and is still trying hard to talk himself into believing that he ought to be married’.263 Now an opportunity had presented itself, since the atmosphere at Gad’s Hill had grown so poisonous in the wake of Catherine Dickens’s unceremonious ejection from the premises that Katey could no longer bear to live there. With her auburn hair and trim, curvaceous figure she had been muddling along as a model for her artist friends. At the start of the year she sat for Millais as the female interest in his striking painting The Black Brunswicker. But she wanted more from life. When in London she often called in to see Harriet Collins, before crossing the park to visit her mother in Gloucester Crescent. At one stage she had been smitten with Edmund Yates, but he had rejected her. So she settled on a marriage with Charley, who seemed to get along well with her father while he forged a new career as a writer on All the Year Round.

  The wedding took place at Gad’s Hill on 17 July 1860. As Wilkie was in the final stages of The Woman in White, he was relieved that, from his point of view, the event passed without fuss. He described it to Anne Procter in the chatty, objective style of his letters as ‘a pattern wedding in two things – nobody made any speeches and the bride and bridegroom had to go away before the breakfast was over. There was also only the most moderate allowance of tears, at the last moment – and they were shed to the accompaniment of cheerful howling from Forster and a shower of old shoes flung after the married pair as they fled into the carriage.’264

  Wilkie’s friend, Frederick Lehmann, saw it differently.265 He had married Nina Chambers and they were now living with their son in London. He did not like Katey, whom he described as a ‘little hussy’. Having been to Sardou’s play A Scrap of Paper the previous evening, he had overslept and missed the special train taking guests from London Bridge to Higham, the closest station to Gad’s Hill. When he did eventually get there just before midday (the service had started at eleven), he found the assembled party streaming from church to the house. He told his wife, Nina, that certain figures were patently absent: the bride’s mother was cruelly banned, and also, to Katey’s consternation, any member of the Thackeray or Lemon families, following Dickens’s falling-out with his former friends over their attitude to his rift with Catherine.

  After their wedding breakfast, Katey and Charley disappeared. When they returned for their going away, she was wearing a black dress, which annoyed her new mother-in-law, Harriet Collins. This seemed to signal that something untoward had happened: according to Lehmann, Katey was ‘crying bitterly on her father’s shoulder, Mamie [her sister] dissolved in tears, Charlie [sic] as white as snow. No end of God Bless yous, King John Forster adding in his d—d stentorian voice, “Take care of her, Charlie, you have got a most precious treasure.”’ After the couple departed for a honeymoon in France,266 everything seemed to settle down and the remaining guests had dinner, before catching the special train back to London at eleven. But all was not finished: at some stage that evening Mamie found her father on his knees in Katey’s bedroom. He was sobbing into her wedding dress and saying that he was the reason his daughter had left home. In retrospect, Katey’s black dress might have been a statement of protest about the ghost in the room – her mother who had not been allowed to attend.

  Wilkie must have known about this emotional outburst and its background, but he kept mum. Nor did he or anyone else comment on another obvious absence, that of Caroline Graves and her daughter. He was contemplating another newly-wed couple – Walter and Laura in The Woman in White who, following the death of the conniving Sir Percival Glyde in a fire as he is trying to destroy evidence of his illegitimacy, are finally able to set the seal on their long-simmering romance. It was ironic that Wilkie, with his attachment to bachelorhood, should conclude his novel with a traditional marriage in this way.

  On 26 July, little more than a week after Charley and Katey’s nuptials, Wilkie finished The Woman in White. He immediately wrote to his mother, ‘Hooray!!!!! I have this instant written at the bottom of the four hundred and ninetieth page of my manuscript the two noblest words in the English language – The End – and, what is more, I have wound the story up in a very new and very pretty manner.’267 At the start of the following week he received a letter that crowned his achievement. It came from Gad’s Hill and contained Dickens’s congratulations on ‘having triumphantly finished your best book’.268

  11

  BASKING IN SUCCESS

  HAVING COMPLETED THE Woman in White, Wilkie needed to think carefully about his future. At the age of thirty-six, he was finally settling down with a woman in a proper house of his own, and that meant he had to take responsibility not only for her, but for her chubby, good-natured daughter Harriet, who was now nine.

  Wilkie’s experience of children was limited. He was invariably kind to those he knew, such as Ned and Henrietta Ward’s daughter Alice, who was his god-daughter, but the truth was that most young people found his appearance and behaviour a trifle daunting. This was certainly the impression of Alice’s brother Leslie,269 who was discomfited by Wilkie’s unfocused and often inflamed gouty eye. Leslie preferred Charley Collins, who he remembered as ‘sur
rounded by a halo of mystery and wonder’.

  Wilkie took a more pragmatic approach to the younger generation. Leslie recalled with pleasure how, the previous year, Wilkie and Pigott had taken him to Astley’s Theatre in Westminster Bridge Road. The occasion was Tom Taylor’s play Garibaldi, which was advertised as a ‘hippodrome on the life’ of the Italian patriot, involving ‘full company of the greatest riders from all quarters of the globe’, including the ‘premiere equestrians’ of St Petersburg, Monsieur and Madame Zempo. Young Leslie thought it was magical, and the taste of his first ever strawberry ice cream bought by Wilkie remained with him for ever. Another youngster who came within Wilkie’s orbit was Nina and Frederick Lehmann’s son, Rudolph,270 who recalled Wilkie helping him in his schoolwork with an effortless translation of Horace’s Odes from Latin into English.

  Wilkie now prepared himself to act more formally in loco parentis to Harriet Graves. He must have treated her well because she remained devoted to him throughout his life. He was helped in this since, following his brother’s marriage to Katey, he was now officially part of a wider family centred at Gad’s Hill. Not that Dickens had much time for Caroline, nor did he have much faith in the potential of their relationship to endure, as was clear from his barbed comment to Frances Dickinson, ‘Wilkie has finished his White Woman (if he had done with his flesh-coloured one, I should mention that too).’271