Nevertheless, Wilkie’s long-term future was becoming slightly clearer. A useful, if unintended, consequence of Charley’s dash into matrimony was that Wilkie now had a bank account of his own.272 Until recently, both brothers had helped themselves from the family deposits at Coutts, which were formally held by their father’s executors. But Charley now required a separate facility for his affairs. It was natural for Wilkie to follow suit, and it made particular sense, not only because he was also setting up home, but because he needed a secure repository for his substantial earnings.
At this stage, Wilkie might have felt confident enough to branch out and concentrate on his novels. But, conscious of his domestic commitments, he decided he still needed the double safeguard of regular employment and proximity to Dickens. So on 7 August 1860, he agreed a new two-year contract with All the Year Round.273 For a salary of seven guineas a week (an appreciable advance on the five guineas of four years earlier), plus one eighth of the annual profits of the business, he would continue to produce a mixture of articles and a serial of similar length to The Woman in White. However, he would be allowed to retain his copyrights and would be given five months free of other commitments to produce this serial.
Once the agreement was in place Wilkie was able to relax, and accept dinner and travel invitations. His first culinary blow-out was at home – a celebratory dinner at Harley Street, where he could now afford to employ a chef (from Genoa). He invited several of his best friends, including Holman Hunt, Ned Ward and Augustus Egg, and asked Charles Ward to arrange the wines: he had enough champagne to last him a year, but was keen to lay in some Chateau Lafite,274 which Wilkie later admitted he found ‘very genuine and good – but, to my taste, rather thin’. The meal itself could not have been better: ‘The Genoese cook really did wonders. I never eat [sic] a more perfect dinner in Paris.’275
Before this indulgence, he had been to pay his respects to the Procters.276 No doubt The Woman in White and the Lunacy Commission were discussed. Afterwards he went in mid-August to stay in great style at Fryston Hall in Yorkshire with the literary-minded MP Richard Monckton Milnes. Among the other guests was Ricciotti Garibaldi,277 the sickly son of the Italian patriot, whom Wilkie uncharitably found ‘remarkably stupid’. Before the end of the month he went south again to visit the Lehmanns at their holiday house at Franklin on the Isle of Wight.
Frederick Lehmann and his wife Nina were fast becoming his very good friends. Wilkie enjoyed their engaging mixture of cosmopolitanism, culture and opulence. He had always been fond of Nina, one of several lively, intelligent women he admired. Over the years he had grown close to her husband, Frederick, who came from a family of gifted German-Jewish artists. His father Leo was a well-known portrait painter in Hamburg. Two of his brothers – Heinrich (later Henri) and Rudolf – had followed in this business. (Another brother, Emil, worked as a translator, in which capacity he later rendered Wilkie’s books into German.) Despite showing talent as a violinist, Frederick was encouraged to follow a business career by a cousin, Ernest Schlesinger Benzon, a successful homme d’affaires who came from an equally cultured background in Germany, where his father, Adolf Martin Schlesinger, founded a famous Berlin music publishing house that numbered Beethoven and Mendelssohn among its clients. Ernest Schlesinger was more geared for the cut and thrust of industry. After travelling to New York, he became the United States agent for the Sheffield iron and steel manufacturer Naylor, Vickers, in 1840. So successful was he in introducing Yorkshire-made steel to the burgeoning American market that he was made a partner.As a result he was able to bring Frederick, his ambitious kinsman (and before long his brother-in-law, since he had married Frederick’s sister, Elizabeth Lehmann), into this company. Frederick was posted to Edinburgh’s port of Leith, with responsibility for expediting Naylor Vickers’s shipments of iron ore from Northern Europe, a job which suited him well as it allowed him to lead a peripatetic and often libertine bachelor existence. At one stage, he plucked an English-born prostitute from a Hamburg brothel and set her up as his mistress in St John’s Wood.
In 1859, Lehmann, now a partner in Naylor Vickers and married to Nina, settled in London. They could afford a substantial house at 139 Westbourne Terrace, Bayswater, as well as a place in what they called the country – actually, a seven-acre estate called Woodlands in Muswell Hill, close to Highgate Woods and Hampstead Heath in North London. They also had their seaside cottage on the Isle of Wight. Wherever they went they liked to surround themselves with writers, artists and musicians. Several times a week they would invite between twelve and twenty people to Westbourne Terrace for dinner, after which a further twenty or thirty others would join them for a musical soirée. This was usually of the highest quality, because Frederick knew many top immigrant composers and instrumentalists, including Joseph Joachim, Karl Hallé, Giacomo Meyerbeer and Clara (widow of Robert) Schumann. Any impromptu concert was often enhanced by turns from the hosts – Frederick on the violin and Nina at the piano. (Wilkie once joked that Hallé, the founder of the eponymous orchestra, was the second-best piano player in England, after Nina.)
Although Wilkie himself had little real feeling for classical music, aside from the opera, such events extended his knowledge and provided him with material for the musical references that resonate through his books. In The Woman in White, Count Fosco emerges as an advocate of Rossini. He accompanies himself on the concertina in a rendering of Figaro’s aria from The Barber of Seville, where the words ‘Figaro qua, Figaro la, Figaro qua, Figaro la’ reflect his own elusiveness. Later the Count takes to the piano to try to prove that Moses in Egypt is the equal of any German opera. Meanwhile, Laura Fairlie woos Walter Hartright with ‘the heavenly tenderness of the music of Mozart’, in the same way that Magdalen Vanstone in No Name plays a selection of pieces from Mendelssohn, Chopin, Verdi and Mozart to evoke the spirit of her love for Frank Clare. Wilkie uses music in this way to give an added sensory dimension to his search for dramatic effect.
Frederick Lehmann’s influence was significant in other ways, since he approached life with a degree of European sophistication that the well-travelled Wilkie respected. Despite having indulged in some racial caricature in A Rogue’s Life, Wilkie was now notably philo-Semitic (a legacy partly from having had a Jewish tutor in Nice). During the 1860s, he became friends with a number of highly distinguished Jews, not only Lehmann and his artist brother Rudolf, who would marry Nina’s sister Amelia in 1861 and settle in England, but also Sir Francis and Lady Goldsmid, Sir David Salomons, Charles Oppenheim and, Frederick’s cousin and business partner, Ernest Schlesinger Benzon.
Goldsmid and Salomons were particularly prominent in the fight for Jewish rights and causes in Victorian England. Scion of a prominent banking family, Sir Francis was a philanthropist who had been Britain’s first Jewish barrister and later became an MP. His wife Louisa sought out Wilkie’s opinion on literary matters and did much to promote women’s education. Also originally a banker, Sir David was sheriff and later Lord Mayor of London, an MP and High Sheriff of Kent, who at every stage overcame prejudice to secure his place in public life.
Wilkie liked the relaxed company of such people, who were prepared to indulge his foibles and did not expect him to change for dinner. One of his enduring habits was that he abhorred full evening dress of tailcoats, wing collars and silk top hats. He considered such sartorial paraphernalia pretentious, so ‘he would sit down to dinner in a light camel hair or tweed suit, with a broad pink or blue striped shirt, and perhaps a red tie, quite as often as he would in a dark suit or regulation evening dress.’278 These were the clothes of someone who preferred to please himself rather than society. They helped develop his standing among his friends as a man who was eccentric and fun to be with, a civilised flâneur but definitely not a dandy.
As he travelled around the country during the summer of 1860, Wilkie basked in the success of his new novel, which was published in three-volume form by Sampson Low on 15 August, and quickly went into a second impression. (There woul
d be seven in all, plus a new edition before the end of the year.)279 It was almost an anti-climax when the last instalment of The Woman in White appeared across a dozen pages in All the Year Round on Saturday 25 August.
But while Wilkie was prospering, Dickens was less upbeat. Soon after his bout of self-recrimination over Katey’s departure, his mood was further blackened by the death of his brother Alfred.280 The move to Kent meant that he had to give up Tavistock House in London by the first week in September, which required considerable organisation, particularly to ensure that all his cherished paintings came to Gad’s Hill. It also meant the discarding of memories. At the start of the month, Dickens gathered together all the personal letters he had received over the years (from political and literary figures, as well as from members of his family) and set fire to them in a field behind Gad’s Hill.281 He later intimated that he disliked the way that the confidential correspondence of famous men was being misused. In retrospect, this wilful act of arson dealt a cruel blow to Wilkie Collins studies. One hundred and sixty letters from Dickens to Wilkie exist and have been published. This suggests that there would have been an equal number in reply, but of these only three are known to survive.
The following week, Wilkie went to Gad’s Hill, ostensibly to discuss his collaboration with Dickens on the forthcoming Christmas issue of All the Year Round. Competition among the middle-market weeklies was now fierce, and he found himself taking part in a ‘council of war’ over the future of the magazine. By then it was already clear that Wilkie’s successor in the serial spot, A Day’s Ride: A Life’s Romance, by the Irish novelist Charles Lever, was not attracting sufficient readers. Looking for a big name, Dickens approached Bulwer-Lytton but received no reply. He also called on Charles Reade, but quickly realised that he himself would have to ‘strike in’ (as he put it to Forster) and come up with another blockbuster,282 which turned out to be Great Expectations.
Back in London, Wilkie’s book had become a genuinely popular phenomenon. He could boast to his mother that, on the basis of his postbag, he knew that The Woman in White was ‘soothing the dying moments of a young lady283 – it is helping (by homeopathic doses of a chapter at a time) to keep an old lady out of the grave – and it is the first literary performance which has succeeded in fixing the attention of a deranged gentleman in his lucid intervals!!’
Correspondents sent him themed poems and songs. While no examples of reported spin-off merchandise – including ‘Woman in White’ cloaks and bonnets, as well as the perfumes and toiletries – have survived, his characters were celebrated in the ‘Woman in White Waltz’ and later ‘The Fosco Galop’. Further evidence of his book’s popularity came in an unauthorised play version at the Surrey Theatre in Lambeth towards the end of the year. Few people were convinced by James Whistler’s claim that his 1862 painting The White Girl had nothing to do with Wilkie’s book. It was originally displayed at the Berners Street Gallery as The Woman in White, before an outcry caused Whistler to alter the title to Symphony in White, No 1: The White Girl.
The critics were initially slow to pontificate and, when they did, they were not always as well-disposed as the general public. Wilkie, the sharp literary operator, had already asked Charles Ward to intercede with his friend John Walter,284 the proprietor of The Times, to see if the paper might run an early notice. One of the first full-length pieces, published anonymously in the high-minded Saturday Review on 25 August 1860, was sniffy about the book’s main protagonists (‘they have characteristics, but not character’) and about what it considered its all too visible structural underpinnings. It described Wilkie as ‘a very ingenious constructor, but ingenious construction is not high art, just as cabinet-making and joining is not high art’, and added for good measure that he was ‘an admirable story-teller, though . . . not a great novelist’. The idea that Wilkie’s novels concentrated on plot at the expense of character would become a staple of commentary on his work over the next thirty years. However, the Spectator disagreed, describing The Woman in White two weeks later, in what was clearly a rejoinder, as ‘the latest, and by many degrees the best work of an author who had already written so many singularly good ones’.285 Taking issue with the criticism of over-plotting, it said, ‘If The Woman in White were indeed a protracted puzzle and nothing more, the reader’s attention would often grow languid over its pages.’
Like many authors, Wilkie reacted in schizophrenic fashion to such opinions. ‘I see no reviews,’286 he professed to his mother in September, yet added in the same letter, ‘I send the Spectator by this post. Look at page 864. A review of The Woman in White287 answering the Saturday Review.’ Not that he needed to worry. He had already made £1,400 (the equivalent of well over £100,000 in 2013), he retained the copyright, and, having sold out the expensive guinea and a half edition, Sampson Low was now talking of cheaper editions. ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ Wilkie chirrupped. ‘The critics may go to the devil.’
In the manner of his father three decades earlier, Wilkie continued his progress around the British countryside in September, spending a leisurely few days with a doctor friend, George Gregory, just outside Stroud in Gloucestershire, and a night with Pigott’s relation Edwin Fox at his family-run asylum at Brislington. Then at the end of the month he could not resist the lure of another voyage with Pigott and a companion, Charles Benham. The three of them had hoped to sail to Ireland, but gales prevented them getting beyond the Bristol Channel.
Twenty-eight-year-old Benham is a difficult man to pigeonhole. He was born in Uxbridge, the home of Pigott’s doctor friend George Redford, who had introduced him to the circle. Redford’s son, also called George, would marry into the Benham family and take over from Pigott when the latter was appointed official Examiner, or censor, of Plays. Later in the decade, Wilkie began to deal with a firm of solicitors called Benham & Tindell, based in Essex Street off the Strand. This has given rise to the erroneous idea that Charles Benham was a solicitor, when in fact he did very little, except, almost certainly, introduce Wilkie to his kinsman, Ebenezer, the principal of Benham & Tindell. Indeed, the name Benham crops up with confusing regularity in Wilkie’s life around this time, since he was in touch with Ebenezer’s sister, Jane Benham Hay, a Bloomsbury-based artist who, after a brief career on the fringes of the Pre-Raphaelites, had married young but had subsequently abandoned her family and decamped to Florence with her Italian lover. The father of Ebenezer Benham, the solicitor, had once been an ironmonger and appears to have been linked to the Benhams who ran a celebrated kitchenware shop in Wigmore Street. As a result Wilkie’s references this year to substantial payments to Benham & Sons had nothing to do with legal services but relate rather to purchases of pots and grates for his Harley Street house.
Around this time the town of Farnham began to feature in Wilkie’s letters. This had nothing to do with his recreational tours. Rather he and Caroline chose a small school in this distant corner of Surrey to educate Harriet. The establishment, which boasted only nine pupils, was run by Suzanne Milne, a woman in her early sixties, with help from her unmarried daughter Ann. Harriet would attend it until August 1863 – a detail which is clear because Wilkie’s bank account shows that he regularly paid her school fees by cheque,288 starting with £15 8s 6d in January 1861.
Harriet had not played a prominent role in Wilkie’s life until now. She accompanied him and her mother on holidays, where her skills as a mimic suggested some artistic talent. Sending her away to boarding school could be interpreted as a sign of his wanting her out of the newly established house, but given his generally sympathetic attitude towards women, he was almost certainly acting in a more positive manner. He cannot be faulted for wanting to contribute to Harriet’s education.
Wilkie’s wealth made such financial commitment easier to afford, along with the regular purchases of groceries from Fortnum and Mason and of wine from Justerini and Brooks. It also inspired him to make an unusually expansive gesture and invite Caroline on a two-week trip to Paris in mid-October, wi
th no expense spared. He had been away frequently during the summer and perhaps felt he needed to woo her with a taste of the good life. Their decision over Harriet’s schooling was indicative of a new stability in their relationship, a statement of their determination that, even if they did not marry (and Wilkie still seemed averse to this), they were committed to a future together.
Because of the emotional significance of all this, Wilkie told his mother very little about his forthcoming trip. Even on 3 October he appeared to be hedging when he wrote, ‘I am going abroad next week (probably).’289 As usual, he made no reference to Caroline or Harriet; indeed he again stuck firmly to the first person singular when he added, ‘Only to Paris – and first class all the way, with my own sitting room at the best hotel when I get there – and every other luxury that the Capital of the civilized world can afford. No horseflesh for me – unless in the form of cookery, in which case (with a satisfactory sauce) I see no objection to it.’ ‘Horseflesh’ was a reference to the enterprising honeymoon journey on which Charley and Katey had embarked, travelling with their own horse and cabriolet to Paris and then on to Lausanne. Wilkie never failed to mock this venture, even though it led to the publication of Charley’s most successful book, A Cruise Upon Wheels: The Chronicle of Some Autumn Wanderings among the Deserted Post-Roads of France.290
Once in Paris, Wilkie made sure that Caroline enjoyed the best the city could offer. He booked them both into the Hotel Le Meurice, the favourite of rich and discerning English visitors, and he took her to restaurants such as Les Trois Frères Provençaux, presided over by the great chef Adolphe Dugléré, who had learned his trade working for the Rothschild family. Unusually, but perhaps not unsurprisingly, he did not send an account of his trip to his mother (or, at least, nothing survives). However, he was careful to ensure that he also returned with a gift for her – a fashionable Parisian cap, which was a cause of family mirth as Harriet had a habit of enlarging her bonnets and decorating them with what her new daughter-in-law Katey described as cauliflowers. Katey urged her not to ‘disfigure Wilkie’s cap in that way and . . . not to make it so large as to overshadow your body’.291 However, Charley told her that his mother would already have done this.
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