Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation

by Andrew Lycett

  He called on the ministrations of his new doctor, Frank Carr Beard, who lived in apparent style in Welbeck Street in the heart of Marylebone, with his American-born wife, Louisa, four children and three servants. Beard came from a rich and well-connected Sussex brewing family. His maternal grandfather Sir Thomas Carr had been high sheriff of the county and his brother Thomas was one of Dickens’s oldest friends – a journalist who had worked with him on the Morning Chronicle and acted as his best man.

  As often the case with Wilkie, there was rather more to the story. Beard was intellectually curious, unconventional and public-spirited: after taking a degree at University College, London, he dabbled in alternative therapies and was employed as a lowly surgeon at the subscription-based Hospital for Consumption and Diseases of the Chest in Margaret Street, around the corner from Welbeck Street. In 1854 he participated with Dickens’s friend Dr John Elliotson311 in a mastectomy that was carried out solely under the influence of mesmerism. However, he was plagued by debts, leading to bankruptcy in 1855 and two years later he was struggling to pay back his creditors at a rate of five pence in the pound.

  Dickens first started using Beard’s professional services around 1859, when he greatly appreciated the considerate manner in which his venereal symptoms were dealt with. The doctor was engaging and knowledgeable, yet he did not ask too many questions – qualities which doubtless endeared him to Wilkie, who took him on a couple of years later. After being recommended ‘some wonderful Turkish Baths,312 with excellent shampoos and great care in the attendance’ by Beard, Wilkie was soon enthusing about his new medical practitioner. (The word shampoo, of Hindi extraction, meant massage at the time.)

  An added attraction was that Beard used opiates as a regular part of his pharmacopoeia. Wilkie now had a doctor who was prepared to indulge his habit for laudanum. On 10 October, Wilkie pleaded to Beard, ‘Is there any hope of you being able to come here tomorrow? . . . for my stomach and nerves are terribly out of order again. Yesterday at 1 o’clock P.M. I had to give up work with deadly “all-overish” faintness which sent me to the brandy bottle.’313 He proceeded to relate his symptoms, which included sleeplessness. He added, ‘My stomach wants tone, and my nerves want soothing and fortifying at the same time. If you are too much engaged to come tomorrow, will these particulars enable you to send me a prescription?’

  Because he feared the ‘possibility of breaking down at the close of my book’, Wilkie returned to London a week later to be nearer his doctor. Beard was worried enough to contact Dickens who, in the latest of a series of encouraging letters, offered to write the closing sections of No Name, if he was provided with the necessary notes and a brief explanation. ‘If you should want help, I am as safe as the Bank,’314 he stated supportively.

  But Wilkie was too much of a professional not to finish what he had promised. When he needed precise information he corralled his friends for details. Charles Ward, in particular, was asked to find out how long letters took to travel between Zurich and England (ten days) and how much notice was required in order to obtain permission to marry by licence (a fortnight). Wilkie’s experience with laudanum no doubt helped him when Magdalen, at a low ebb in her journey, acquired a bottle of the drug and considered using it to help her commit suicide.

  On Christmas Eve, Wilkie was finally able to tell Beard, ‘You will be almost as glad as I am to hear that I have Done! – for you have had no small share in the finishing of the book. I ended at two o’Clock this morning.’315 The word ‘Done!’ was written on its own in large letters on one line. He wanted to ask Beard, the source of his pharmacological support, to a celebratory dinner at Verrey’s restaurant in Regent Street at 6 p.m. the following day. However, he was sensitive to the fact that Beard would be required at home. ‘As you are a “family man” I dare not say – “come too!”’ Once again, the domestic politics of his own situation were hazy: he did not stipulate the other members of his Christmas Day party, except to refer to ‘we’ and say that Pigott would be ‘with us’. This suggests that he was taking Caroline and Harriet. But was his mother, the scourge of Wilkie’s mistress, also there? The record is unclear. One thing was evident, however: Wilkie was extraordinarily grateful to Beard for helping him through his ordeal. When No Name was published in three volumes by Sampson Low on 31 December 1862, it was dedicated with feeling ‘To Francis Carr Beard (Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England); In Remembrance of the Time when the closing scenes of the story were written.’

  12

  MID-VICTORIAN SENSATION

  WILKIE WAS ONLY dimly aware of it in 1862, but The Woman in White and now No Name had, in the manner of their carefully wrought, reader-friendly mysteries, pioneered a popular literary genre that would endure through the 1860s and come to epitomise a decade of great social and political change.

  The genre was dubbed the sensation novel. No one can determine exactly where the term was first used – probably in the United States in the previous decade to describe a rather more downmarket type of fiction. But by the end of 1861 a writer in the Spectator was observing, ‘We are threatened with a new variety of the sensation novel, a host of cleverly complicated stories, the whole interest of which consists in the gradual unravelling of some carefully prepared enigma. Mr Wilkie Collins set the fashion, and now every novel writer who can construct a plot, thinks if he only makes it a little more mysterious and unnatural, he may obtain a success rivalling that of The Woman in White.’316

  The use of the masculine pronoun belies the fact that many of the most successful practitioners of this new approach were women, such as Mrs Henry Wood, author of the best-selling East Lynne in September 1861 and the prolific Mary Elizabeth Braddon, often described as the queen of the genre, whose Lady Audley’s Secret appeared the following year.

  Sensation fiction ranged over the themes Wilkie had made his own – mystery, crime, secrets, duplicity and identity. Not that there was anything particularly new in these topics. Gothic novels, the Newgate Calendar and penny dreadfuls had used them to keep their readers on the edge of their seats. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre bore many of the hallmarks, as did several of Dickens’s works.

  What made sensation novels innovative was that they took excitement into ordinary homes. No longer was the drama situated in some far-off castle, as in gothic romances, or even a thieves’ kitchen, as in Oliver Twist. As Wilkie’s output, stretching back to Basil, demonstrated, it could all take place in one’s back room. And the villain plotting murder and mayhem could, like Count Fosco, be the charmer next door.

  In this manner, readers were seduced into sensation novels. Their involvement was often further encouraged by introducing a detective element into the plot. They could feel engaged in the unravelling of the mystery. Their participation was also encouraged by making the narrative up to date, through topical details such as the ‘lunacy panic’ in The Woman in White.

  In keeping with their domestic settings, sensation novels went where their predecessors had feared to tread. In particular, they dealt with the secrets of marriage. Adultery and bigamy (the theme of Lady Audley’s Secret) became accepted literary fare. The tribulations of passionate women, oppressed by matrimony, law and other social conventions, took centre stage. Once again, Wilkie led the way.

  The critics realised that something unusual was happening, and did their best to explain it. One of the first was the Scottish novelist Mrs (Margaret) Oliphant who, writing specifically on ‘Sensation Novels’ in Blackwood’s Magazine in May 1862, identified that, so far as Wilkie was concerned, his success came not from his outrageousness, but from his restraint. He was sparing in his use of blatant spine-chilling techniques, such as the occult or bloody murder. ‘His effects are produced by common human acts, performed by recognisable human agents, whose motives are never inscrutable, and whose line of conduct is always more or less consistent. The moderation and reserve which he exhibits; his avoidance of extremes; his determination, in conducting the mysterious struggle, to tr
ust to the reasonable resources of the combatants, who have consciously set all upon the stake for which they play, but whom he assists with no weapons save those of quick wit, craft, courage, patience, and villainy – tools common to all men – make the lights and shadows of the picture doubly effective.’317

  Mrs Oliphant was clear that the action-filled plots favoured by Wilkie and his co-writers were a direct reflection of the fast-changing world they inhabited. ‘It is only natural, in an age that has turned out to be one of event, that art and literature should attempt a kindred depth of effect and shock of incident.’ She argued that these developments were encouraged by a growing market, with readers in libraries and railway bookstalls demanding new literary experiences. In particular, she pointed to ‘the violent stimulus of serial publication – of weekly publication – with its necessity for frequent and rapid recurrence of piquant incident and startling situation’. Wilkie’s ‘unknown public’ was having its say.

  These points were taken up by no less a figure than H.L. (Henry) Mansel, professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford University (and later Dean of St Paul’s), when he reviewed a batch of twenty-four sensation novels in a seminal article in the Quarterly Review in April 1863. He took a harder line, railing against a genre in which ‘excitement, and excitement alone, seems to be the great end at which they aim.’ The result was a debasement of literature that now lacked any higher ideal; instead, ‘a commercial atmosphere hangs around works of this class, redolent of the manufactory or the shop.’ And he too placed the blame on those three same phenomena, ‘periodicals, circulating libraries, and railway bookstalls’.

  This charge of trivialisation became the main line of attack from high-minded critics, who argued that it undermined the advances made by literature towards respectability over the past century. Another widespread objection was that sensation novels were not only populated by, but designed to appeal directly to, women, and they were not the kind of books that should be doing this. The acerbic critic (and friend of the Lehmanns), Henry Chorley, adopted this approach319 in an article in which he voiced his uneasiness that ‘the ideas of women on points of morals and ethics seem in a state of transition, and consequently of confusion.’

  A related worry was that female characters in sensation novels, particularly Wilkie’s, were unduly assertive. In the manner in which they sought to take control of their lives, they often displayed masculine characteristics. As Mrs Oliphant bemoaned, they provided ‘a very fleshly and unlovely record’318 of femininity. And this raised the most significant, but as yet barely articulated, concern about sensation novels – that they blurred accepted social distinctions, crossed hitherto firmly demarcated limits and entered taboo areas. In the jargon of modern critics, they were liminal and transgressive.

  Few people doubted Wilkie’s role as the main progenitor. As Miss Braddon declared in a later interview, ‘I always say that I owe Lady Audley’s Secret320 to The Woman in White. Wilkie Collins is assuredly my literary father.’ Her admiration was evident from the amateur sleuth Robert Audley’s remark in her most popular novel: ‘I haven’t read Alexandre Dumas and Wilkie Collins for nothing. I’m up to their tricks, sneaking in at doors behind a fellow’s back, and flattening their white faces against window panes, and making themselves all eyes in the twilight.’

  Like Wilkie and many of his friends, she also enjoyed an unconventional love life, having struck up a relationship with John Maxwell, the publisher of the short-lived magazine Robin Goodfellow, which had first serialised Lady Audley’s Secret. He was married with five children, but his Irish wife was in a lunatic asylum. Braddon moved in with him, and their joint earnings from sensation ventures enabled them to live grandly in Lichfield House in Richmond and have five children of their own. Inevitably her lifestyle intensified and personalised the criticism from her opponents. She and Maxwell were married only in 1874, after the death of his first wife.

  Wilkie was fortunate to live in the heart of London’s medical district, since the atmosphere at his house in Harley Street during the first few months of 1863 again resembled a convalescent home. No sooner had he finished No Name than his gout flared up. With more time on his hands to indulge his illness, he adopted increasingly unorthodox palliative measures, such as draping troubled parts of his body with ‘a simple poultice of cabbage leaves covered with oiled silk’.321

  When his gout spread to both feet and he could no longer climb the stairs to his bedroom, he called in Dr John Elliotson, since Frank Beard was incapacitated with an attack of erysipelas, a severe reddening of the skin. Wilkie had a high regard for Elliotson, who he would refer to as ‘one of the greatest of English physiologists’ in The Moonstone later in the decade. As stand-in general practitioner, Elliotson prescribed a tonic of wormwood, together with a course of his trademark mesmerism, which would be carried out by Caroline, with the aim of anaesthetising Wilkie’s feet and helping him to sleep without opium. But this regime was undermined a few days later when Caroline herself was laid low by what Wilkie described to Beard as ‘another nervous-hysterical attack. She was up all last night with the “palpitations”.’322 As a result, she now had to be sedated with opium herself.

  To add to the catalogue of woes, Harriet Collins was seriously ill in Oxford. Wilkie told Charles Ward that, although she was improving, she was ‘still too weak to leave her bed – except when . . . carried for a little while, wrapped in blankets, to the fire.’323 He was frustrated that his own maladies meant that he could not visit her, nor attend the wedding in February of the daughter of Frances Dickinson – a lavish affair at the latter’s family house, Queen’s Charlton, near Bristol. Frances had recently cut back her Italian sorties, as she was looking forward to her own solid, status-defining marriage later in the year to Gilbert Elliot, the Dean of Bristol – an unlikely alliance that amused Wilkie and Dickens, since the groom was prim and puritanical, while the bride had a notably rackety past.

  Caroline’s hysterical episodes were clearly not unprecedented but, in the absence of obvious clinical illness, their cause remains a matter of speculation. It seems that even now, several years after meeting Wilkie, she was still nervous about her position in their relationship and in the wider world. Her illegitimacy made her particularly sensitive on the subject of marriage which, it later became clear, was something she wanted for herself. But Wilkie had other ideas and her resentment built up.

  One way or another, Harley Street was proving a useful test bed for sensation novels. The heroines in this genre, whether depicted by the pens of Miss Braddon, Mrs Wood or Wilkie himself, were often women of heightened awareness, battling against the restrictions of modern society. They did not have to be dour: like Magdalen Vanstone in No Name, they tended to be spirited and keen for new experiences (or sensations). Their adventures made good copy, but so did their reverses and the often inevitable consequences. Buffeted and hemmed in by circumstances, they sometimes became hysterical or mad – a diagnosis reinforced by men threatened by their assertiveness.

  This is not to say that the Collins household followed this model, but Caroline was obviously feeling the strain of living with Wilkie. Her ‘nervous-hysterical’ behaviour was similar to that of the jumpy, intelligent women in his fiction, who felt frustrated in their desire for a fulfilled life. With her history of illegitimacy and struggle to bring up her fatherless daughter, she was more of a model for Wilkie’s quirky, assured heroines than has generally been supposed. (He, in sick mode, clutching at poultices of cabbage leaves, acted out another trope of sensation fiction – the ineffectual, valetudinarian man.)

  As was evident in No Name, Wilkie had little compunction about portraying the less edifying characteristics of these modern sensation-seeking women, even if they emerged as manipulative, greedy and immoral. The critics tended to prefer heroines who were fair of complexion and pure in heart. Henry Chorley set the tone when he suggested in the Athenaeum324 that Magdalen had been ‘let off with a punishment gentle in proportion t
o the unscrupulous selfishness of her character’. Women in Victorian England were not supposed to behave as she did – brazenly swindling others and entering loveless marriages – and expect to get away with it. Alexander Smith,325 in the North British Review, believed he had located the problem: ‘Everything in these books is feverish and excited; the reader is continually as if treading on bombshells, which may explode at any moment.’ But these intense effects were exactly what sensation novelists were seeking.)

  Margaret Oliphant provided the textbook version326 of this shocked reaction when she lambasted Wilkie in Blackwood’s Magazine for throwing his leading lady ‘into a career of vulgar and aimless trickery and wickedness, with which it is impossible to have a shadow of sympathy’, and then having the audacity to allow her to emerge from all her ‘pollutions . . . at the cheap cost of fever, as pure, as high-minded, and as spotless as the most dazzling white of heroines’.

  One result of this cool critical response was that sales of No Name fell sharply, after a spectacular start that saw most of the initial 4,000-copy print run sold on the first day. The combination of this widespread antipathy and his own physical pain made Wilkie unusually irritable. When his mother contemplated staying as a paying guest in Slough, he spluttered, for no apparent reason, ‘Ladies who take in boarders, under the pretence of “their homes being too large for them”, are bores I don’t believe in.’327

  By early March he was feeling better and able to go out. Every afternoon, from two to six, friends would find that he was incommunicado as he took his regular drive in a carriage, followed by a visit to the London Medical Electrical Institution in York Place at the top of Baker Street, where he would immerse himself in ‘Dr Caplin’s Electro-Chemical Bath’,328 designed to draw out the impurities in the body.