Indeed, Harriet seems to have given up all pretence at fashion. Young Leslie Ward,292 the son of Ned and Henrietta, who would make his name as Spy, the cartoonist in Vanity Fair, recalled her wearing her kid boots carefully down on one side, then reversing them and wearing them down on the other. This ‘quaint old lady’, as he put it, ‘had a horror of Highlanders because they wore kilts, which she considered scandalous’. Old Mrs Collins, who had always been her own woman, was getting more eccentric by the year.
On their return to London, the best-selling Wilkie was inundated with offers from publishers to reprint his back list. He also found that The Woman in White had been seized on by the book trade to challenge the virtual monopoly enjoyed by Mudie’s circulating library. Because of its dominant position, Mudie’s demanded generous terms from publishers. But now the smaller libraries, acting in concert, protested that they would not stock Wilkie’s book unless given the same terms as Mudie’s. One such minnow, Cawthorn and Hutt, said it would take fifty copies if offered them on Mudie’s terms, but none if not. Sampson Low refused to buckle and the smaller libraries soon gave in. Wilkie somehow forgot his free trade principles and his enthusiasm for the unknown public. As he no doubt foresaw, he was rewarded with greater sales than ever, followed before Christmas with a personal invitation to the grand opening of the vast new classically fronted reading hall that Mudie’s had been forced to build to meet demand at its premises in New Oxford Street. Having agreed to attend, Wilkie uncharacteristically failed to do so, offering a feeble excuse293 that he had been delayed by a dinner engagement in Sydenham. Charles Mudie, the owner, was not put out at all, however, and invited the author of perhaps his most sought-after book of the moment to visit the following day.
Wilkie suffered a temporary setback at the end of October when The Times review finally appeared. Written by the respected critic E.S. Dallas (though it appeared anonymously),294 its tone was generally favourable but it reiterated the often made point about the preponderance of plot over characterisaton. It added that for plots to work, their internal chronology must hold together, which was not the case with crucial details (duly spelled out) of Laura Glyde’s visit to London. Wilkie was mortified by his mistake, and wrote immediately to Edward Marston, his editor at Sampson Low, asking him not to print any further impressions until he could rectify the error.
He also had news of a personal tragedy to digest – the suicide of his old family friend George Agar Thompson. Seven years earlier Thompson had abandoned his wife and children and emigrated to Australia, hoping to make his fortune from the boom in gold. His journey had not started promisingly: from the Cape Verde islands off the west coast of Africa, he had written Charles Ward ‘a journal of misfortunes’.295 But he seemed to have found his feet in the Antipodes and, if he did not prosper hugely, his organisational talents were recognised, for in 1858 he was appointed a police magistrate and warden of the gold fields at a salary of £750 per annum.
However, the pressure and the loneliness, exacerbated by a severe drink problem, got to him, and in July 1860 took his own life. Wilkie informed his mother, ‘He has died at Melbourne (or near it) by his own hand. The fatal drinking-mania brought on delirium tremens – he was left with a razor within reach for a few minutes only and he cut his throat. The act was not immediately fatal – but his constitution was gone, and the doctors could not save him. He recovered his senses at the last, and died penitently and resignedly.’296
Within days of returning from his holiday in Paris with Caroline, Wilkie was off again on a quick tour of Devon and Cornwall with Dickens, ostensibly to research the background to ‘A Message from the Sea’297 for the Christmas issue of All the Year Round. By then Dickens had almost finished Great Expectations, which began serialisation on 1 December, pushing Charles Lever’s story from the front page. Written mainly by Dickens and Wilkie (but also by others, including Charley Collins), the Christmas offering was a light detective tale about the search for the rightful owner of £500 mentioned in a message found in a bottle at sea. Set in the village of Steepways (based on Clovelly), it featured an American sailor, Captain Silas Jonas Jorgan, as an amateur sleuth.
While on this trip, Wilkie and Dickens are likely to have discussed the efforts of another detective, Inspector Jonathan Whicher, to discover the brutal murderer of a four-year-old boy in Road Hill House near Frome in Wiltshire in June. This case inspired widespread interest, not least in Dickens, who had written about Whicher in his earlier articles on the Detective Branch. Whicher was convinced that the child had been killed by his sister, Constance, but Dickens believed, as he had already written to Wilkie,298 that young Samuel had woken up to find his father in flagrante with his nursemaid. Wilkie took note and returned to this story when he wrote The Moonstone at the end of the decade.
Now that Charley was away from Clarence Terrace, Harriet Collins seemed at a loss. There was a vague plan for the newly-weds to take over the house on their return. But what was she to do in the meantime? She talked of going to look after the Bullars at Bassett Wood near Southampton – a notably male-dominated household – and perhaps returning to London for one or two days of the week. But was this for altruistic, practical or simply parsimonious reasons? Around Christmas time, Katey, back in Paris with her husband, was furious to hear that Harriet was trying to cut costs by vacating the main upstairs room in Clarence Terrace. ‘Unless you immediately have that carpet put down, and unless you have a fire in that room, and go and sit there I shall never write to you again,’ she thundered in a letter in which she called herself Katinka, her family nickname. ‘I am in earnest when I tell you that Charlie [sic] and I are made unhappy if we think you are making yourself in the least degree uncomfortable.’299 After Christmas, Charley took up the matter of the move to the Bullars.300 ‘It seems to me such an undertaking for you with so little strength to have the care and responsibility of all the Bullar family resting on you. Do tell me why you undertake it?’ Katey added her trenchant voice in an addition to the same letter: ‘Do leave the Bullar family to take care of itself and you take care of yourself.’
In these circumstances it is not clear where Wilkie spent Christmas. On New Year’s Day 1861, he was back in Harley Street telling Henrietta Ward he had been in the country. With his liking for light entertainment, he accompanied Dickens that evening to St James’s Hall, where Buckley’s Serenaders were performing a variety of popular songs, including some for which they blacked-up as negro minstrels. A week later he and Dickens were up in arms against the Britannia Theatre for putting on an unauthorised production of ‘A Message from the Sea’. They had written their own adaptation and lodged it with the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, as much to forestall other productions as anything else. Being even more militant than Wilkie on the issue of piracy, Dickens wrote to The Times301 relating how his prompt action had forced the theatre’s owner to withdraw the show. The pair of them later relented and, on payment of a stiff fee, allowed the rogue production to go ahead.
Wilkie had domestic duties to attend to in early January when Harriet was back from school. He had to decline an invitation from the (Edward) Wards because one of their children had measles, a disease Caroline’s daughter had yet to catch. A couple of months later Charley and Katey returned from their extended honeymoon and were staying at Clarence Terrace. However, the prognostications for their future happiness were not particularly good. Commenting on Charley’s ambition to write, Dickens stated bluntly that he would rather he painted. He added, perhaps sensing an element of sexual frustration in the marriage, that there were ‘no “Great Expectations” of perspective [sic] Collinses’, and admitted sotto voce that he thought this ‘a blessed thing’.
True to form, Dickens was no more confident about the future of Wilkie’s domestic arrangements. He allowed that his close friend had made his house in Harley Street ‘very handsome and comfortable’. However, he told a correspondent, ‘We never speak of the (female) skeleton in that house, and I therefore have not the lea
st idea of the state of his mind on that subject. I hope it does not run in any matrimonial groove. I can imagine similar cases in which that end is well and wisely put to the difficulty. But I can not imagine any good coming of such an end in this instance.’302 To complete his baleful picture of the Collins family, Dickens referred to a dinner attended by Harriet Collins, who ‘contradicted everybody upon every subject for five hours and a half, and was invariably Pig-headed and wrong. So I was very glad when she tied her head up in a bundle and took it home.’
Nevertheless, the mood at 12 Harley Street remained positive. When the census was taken on 7 April 1861, Caroline, the ‘skeleton in that house’, appeared on the returns as Harriet Collins, ‘author’s wife’. As well as this little fabrication, she, or perhaps Wilkie, lopped a full five years from her age, which was given as twenty-six.
Around this time came the first inklings that Wilkie was contemplating a new novel, which would later be called No Name. In May, he told his mother he was ‘building up the scaffolding of a new book’,303 a phrase he repeated the following month to Charles Reade, a fellow novelist and social campaigner, whose book Hard Cash, published in 1863, would address the issue of private lunatic asylums even more directly than Wilkie had.
Over the next few months Wilkie continued to revel in plaudits and honours, including his election to the Athenaeum Club by the fast track Rule II which favoured men of ‘distinguished eminence’, and his chairing a meeting of the Newsvendors’ Benevolent Institution, which tickled him as this role was a new departure for him and he felt he did it creditably. The Woman in White was now being translated into French and German. In May it was also published by Sampson Low in a cheap one-volume edition, complete with a pasted-in photograph304 of the author (a publishing first), which he estimated would result in at least 50,000 extra sales.
Buoyed by his success, Wilkie was happy to accept an offer from Smith, Elder for Armadale, which would follow his ongoing project, No Name. Still chastened by his failure to bid sufficiently on The Woman in White, the eponymous George Smith offered £5,000 (£366,000 in 2013 money) for both serial and volume rights, which had Wilkie whooping for joy and telling his mother that no one but Dickens had ever been paid so much: ‘if I live & keep my brains in good working order, I shall have got to the top of the tree, after all, before forty.’305
Smith’s commercial acumen had been sharpened by his entry into the increasingly competitive periodicals market. In January 1860, he had launched the Cornhill, which, although a monthly selling at a shilling, was aimed directly at the growing middle-class readership targeted by All the Year Round. It even boasted a similarly well-known author, Thackeray, as its editor. Two other publications launched around this time (Macmillan’s Magazine in late 1859, and Temple Bar the following year) attested to the attractions of this field.
Smith had been itching to lure Wilkie back. On 31 October 1860, he wrote to Thackeray,306 ‘At present we are badly off for matter for the December number . . . I am going to try Wilkie Collins for a story, but I am not very sanguine of success – and I don’t know where else to look for that bit of fiction we want for [issue] No 12.’
If he did not succeed then, he did nine months later. But since anything Wilkie wrote for Smith would be serialised in the Cornhill, it created a potential conflict of interest with All the Year Round, where The Woman in White had recently proved so successful. However, Dickens realised it was an offer Wilkie could not refuse and generously agreed not to stand in the way. By the time Wilkie’s story appeared in the Cornhill, his two-year contract with All the Year Round would have ended anyway.
The only thing holding him back was an ‘old enemy whose name is Liver’,307 an affliction which took him, together with Caroline and her daughter, back to Broadstairs, this time to the Albion Hotel for a couple of weeks in July. The following month he and Caroline went to Whitby in Yorkshire,308 a very different stretch of English coast – on the North (German, as it was called) Sea, facing Scandinavia.
Despite the noise of fellow holiday-makers in the Royal Hotel, Wilkie loved it there: ‘everything in and about this place is on the grandest scale,’ he told his mother. ‘It is like journeying into another world, after the spick-and-span prettiness of the Southern watering places.’ He was happy that she should continue to flit between her regular hosts – the Combes in Oxford, the Langtons in Slough, the Bullars in Southampton – a list to which she had recently added the Armytages in Tunbridge Wells, who were relations of Henry Brandling, the artist who had accompanied Wilkie on Rambles Beyond Railways. After several false starts, Wilkie even managed to write some of his new as yet unnamed novel, in which the resorts of the east coast featured heavily. In this context, he also visited York, Huntingdon, Cambridge, Ipswich and Aldeburgh, before returning to London.
Once settled back in the more peaceful surrounds of Harley Street, he began seriously to put pen to paper, though without feeling under any great pressure, since Bulwer-Lytton was already signed up to write the next serial in All the Year Round, once Great Expectations finished in August.
Wilkie’s new offering featured the contrasting fortunes of twin sisters, Norah and the more lively, minxlike Magdalen (names which had come to him in Whitby from where he had implored his chatterbox mother not to divulge them to anyone). It started with a pleasing evocation of settled family life in a Somerset house, not unlike Pigott’s, where the main recreation was amateur dramatics, along the lines of those once staged by the Collinses. Indeed the book focuses on a production of Sheridan’s The Rivals, which was one of the plays staged more than a decade earlier at their Theatre Royal, Back Drawing Room, in Blandford Square.
The Vanstone girls’ futures seem assured, until their parents die in quick succession and it is revealed that they were never properly married; thus the girls are not only illegitimate but unable to inherit the family home. Owing to a legal loophole, they are left as ‘nobody’s children’, forced to make their way in the world with ‘no name’.
They deal with this calamity in different ways, according to their temperaments. Norah opts for the quiet life by becoming a governess, while the adventurous Magdalen, who has been the star of the theatricals, uses her sexual and other wiles to seek to regain her rightful property and name. To this end, she becomes an actress, which allows Wilkie to digress on the state of the theatre, particularly in the provinces. The book’s underlying motif is role-playing, developed in a series of scenes, as if on the stage, with a series of personal letters inserted between the acts to help explain some of the detail. Gone is the suggestion found in The Woman in White that evidence is being presented as if in a court of law. Here the law is evidently an ass, and those involved even more so, prey as they are to the ‘latent distrust which is a lawyer’s second nature’.
One of Magdalen’s ruses involves her marrying a cousin, Noel Vanstone, whom she despises. Much reduced in circumstance, she later concocts a scheme to change places with her maid Louisa. In this manner, Wilkie reinforces the idea that social and even moral differences can be mutable. In No Name the two women bond when Magdalen realises that her current situation is little different from Louisa’s, who has been forced to give up an illegitimate child. Both Magdalen and Louisa are in their different ways victims of marriage laws that discriminate against women. And there is an added, more personal, dimension: Wilkie clearly regards Magdalen’s marital status as legitimised prostitution, while Louisa, with her baby born out of wedlock, is the purer woman of the two. The similarities between Louisa’s and Caroline Graves’s situations are not hard to discern.
Given Wilkie’s personal inclinations, it is again strange to discover that Magdalen is later saved from her unhappy fate by marriage to Captain Kirke, ‘a man to be relied on’, who has returned from the colonies on a merchantman called Deliverance. Not to read too much into this, Wilkie must have realised that he could push his readers only so far with his explorations into identity and legitimacy and that they required a happy ending afte
r forty-four episodes in All the Year Round.
The story is sometimes silly, with its melodramatic ebbs and flows. It suggests that Victorians had an unhealthy obsession with wills and heredity, as if these were almost the only engines of social mobility. But the finished product was exciting and very readable, as Dickens acknowledged after poring over the first scenes ‘with strong interest and great admiration’.309
Because of this commitment, Wilkie produced very little for All the Year Round during 1861, aside from a couple of stories based on French archival records (a stop-gap when he was pressed for time), plus the usual tale for the Christmas number. Having met his first deadline for his new serial in March 1862, he went to Broadstairs with Caroline the following month to look for a place where he could finish the book over the course of a leisurely summer. He decided on Fort House, a spacious, turreted mansion on the cliffs overlooking the sea, which Dickens had often happily used for holidays. Having contracted to rent it for four months starting at the end of June, Wilkie ensured it was provisioned with all the latest creature comforts, including an icebox, while he made plans to play host to a stream of friends, including Charles Ward, Edward Pigott, Henry Bullar, Augustus Egg and Dickens. He was feeling more prosperous than ever after Sampson Low offered £3,000 in July for the rights to publish No Name in book form (a total of £4,600, he told his mother, when American and other receipts were included).
However, it was soon clear that all was not well, and he was having difficulty finishing No Name. In London, he had talked about ‘the slashing battle (still undecided) of Collins against the printer’.310 Once he was settled at Fort House, his hopes of steady progress were dashed by another worry, his health, particularly problems with his liver, his joints and his dreaded gout.
Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation Page 22