Wilkie’s mood was not helped by news of the death in Algiers in late March of Augustus Egg, aged forty-six. Ever since the two of them had travelled with Dickens around Europe a decade earlier, Wilkie had kept up with Egg, a fellow Garrick Club member, who was close to several of his artist friends, such as Ned Ward, Holman Hunt and Frith. Wilkie’s multi-perspective narrative style (epitomised in The Woman in White) owed something to Egg’s artistic techniques, particularly to his 1858 triptych painting Past and Present, which showed the disintegration of a marriage from three points of view. At one stage Egg had been a spurned suitor for the hand of Georgina Hogarth. In April 1860, around the time he became ill and began wintering in Algiers, he married Esther Brown, a low-born East End girl whom his friends hardly knew or saw. Like Wilkie, Egg kept a woman out of public view, but, unlike him, he married her.
As Wilkie gradually regained his strength, he decided to treat himself to further recuperation in the German spa town of Aachen (which, as a Francophile, he insisted on calling Aix-la-Chapelle). Situated on the Rhine, it was easy to reach by train, but Wilkie grumbled about the prospect of ‘hateful railway travelling,329 which disgusts and depresses me even when I am in health’. This was ironic, since the railways were an essential device in sensation fiction, giving the impression of speed and modernity.
Having decided to employ a Swiss guide-cum-courier who was offered courtesy of Coutts Bank, he overcame this phobia and by the end of April he was established in the Nuellens Hotel in Aachen, close to the Cathedral where Charlemagne was buried. Every morning before breakfast, he was required to drink a glass330 of ‘steaming hot [spring water], perfectly bright and clear, and in taste like the worst London egg you ever had for breakfast in your life.’ But he found that this foul-smelling brew only whetted his appetite, which seemed to take precedence over his daily regime of baths. The hotel employed a Parisian chef who, he admitted, encouraged his ‘natural gluttony’ by serving ‘a continuous succession of entrées which are to be eaten but not described’, while its cellar stocked the best hock and Moselle wines he had ever tasted.
When, unsurprisingly, his gout did not improve, he continued south to the Hotel de l’Ours in Wildbad, a cosier, self-contained but cosmopolitan spa town in the Black Forest, where he was relieved to find that the water did not have the off-putting sulphurous smell of Aachen.331 As he underwent a course of twenty-four often painful treatments in the splendid town baths, he began developing an idea for the new novel he had promised George Smith. It would be called Armadale and, showing no retreat from his sensation style, it would open with a gripping deathbed scene in Wildbad.
When he returned to London at the end of June, he had been away for two months and needed to attend to business affairs. With Sampson Low wanting to publish a one-volume edition of No Name, Wilkie prevailed on Millais to produce a frontispiece illuminating the scene in which Magdalen Vanstone contemplates using laudanum to commit suicide. Sampson Low also made plans to publish a collection of Wilkie’s articles as My Miscellanies. However, he was forced to turn down an offer from John Hollingshead to edit a new literary journal underwritten by the Scottish publisher Alexander Strahan. He felt that, having just left Dickens and All the Year Round to join Smith and the Cornhill, it would be wrong to link himself to a rival, which turned out to be the magazine Argosy.
He thought that a cruise with Pigott in August might help build on the treatments he had had in Germany, but he ended up feeling worse, with a bad back to boot. So he decided to take Caroline and Harriet to the Isle of Man, on the pretext of finding some background detail for his new novel. He complained about the island’s capital, Douglas, where ‘every third shop [was] a spirits shop, and every second inhabitant drunk.’332 But the research pickings proved promising.
His doctor at Wildbad had predicted that his gout would recur in ‘the fall of the year’, and so it turned out. Having resolved to spend the winter months in a better climate abroad, he retraced his teenage steps and returned to Italy. This meant removing Harriet from school and taking her and Caroline with him through France to Marseilles, where he decided it was too windy for the two-day voyage to Civitavecchia. Instead, they travelled by carriage to Genoa and from there down the coast by land and sea to Livorno, Rome and Naples.
Wilkie had developed the habit of calling young Harriet ‘Carrie’. Conceivably it was used to differentiate and even distance the twelve-year-old girl from Wilkie’s mother, who still showed no desire to acknowledge, let alone embrace, her son’s little family. Friends were in the know, as was clear from Wilkie’s remarks when the three travellers took an overnight boat from Livorno to Civitavecchia in conditions that were still extremely turbulent. ‘The two Carolines suffered sea-martyrdom,’333 he reported to Charles Ward. ‘Caroline Junior had a comparatively easy time of it, and fell asleep in the intervals of retching – but Caroline Senior was so ill that she could not be moved from the deck all night, and she has hardly got over the effect of the voyage yet. The sea (as usual) did me good – but I have registered a vow to take my companions on no more night-voyages.’
The political situation in Italy had changed considerably since Wilkie’s previous visits with his parents a quarter of century earlier and with Dickens and Egg in 1853. After a prolonged campaign by Garibaldi and other nationalists (the repercussions of which Wilkie had experienced among his friends in England), Italy was now a united kingdom in every place but one – Rome, which, in a compromise guaranteed by the French Emperor Napoleon III, was still nominally under the control of the Pope. Nevertheless, Wilkie found the city very familiar, though the public garden on the Pincian Hill was now better laid out. Comfortably established in a five-room apartment in their hotel, with a dedicated cook, he and his family had only one bugbear – the intrusive French military presence.
The same sense of familiarity greeted him in wet and thundery Naples, where the bankers, the Igguldens, continued to rule the British roost. From his rooms in the Hotel d’Angleterre overlooking the bay, Wilkie informed Pigott that he was still ‘ruminating his story’, which would include memorable Neapolitan scenes. Pigott passed on this intelligence to his friend G.H. Lewes, who had been helping to edit the Cornhill following the resignation of the original editor, Thackeray, in 1862. Thackeray continued to write for the magazine, but when he died on Christmas Eve 1863, Lewes feared that a gap in the schedule would open up and asked George Smith, the owner, if they should press Wilkie to start his promised new serial in April or May. Otherwise, he added, they might have to ask Trollope – whose Barchester novel The Small House at Allington was running at the time – to start immediately on something new. Such was the wealth of talent the magazine could call on at this juncture, when it was at the height of its influence and enjoyed a circulation of 100,000 a month. However, Smith had already read the runes and given Wilkie until the following December to produce the first number of his new story.
Having decided against taking the winter sun in Egypt, Wilkie returned with his family to Rome, where his mood soon perked up for his fortieth birthday, which he regarded as a significant milestone. As he contemplated his ‘gray hairs springing fast,334 especially about the temples – rheumatism and gout familiar enemies for some time past – all the worst signs of middle-age sprouting out on me’, he marvelled that ‘in spite of it all, I don’t feel old.’ Indeed, he congratulated himself, ‘I have no regular habits, no respectable prejudices, no tendency to go to sleep after dinner, no loss of appetite for public amusements, none of the melancholy sobrieties of sentiment, in short, which are supposed to be proper to middle age. Surely, there is some mistake?’
He received birthday greetings from his brother, who was back in London with Katey and living temporarily at 5 Hyde Park Gate, since Harriet Collins had finally given up her lease on Clarence Terrace. Charley had been unusually productive and was looking forward to having two novels published in the summer – The Bar Sinister, under the Smith, Elder imprint, and Strathcairn from Sampson
Low. Both were gentle sensational works: the first drew on Charley’s time in France and dealt with the consequences of illegitimacy, while the second looked back to his experience of Scotland with Millais, while tackling the issue of hereditary madness and toying with the idea of how much one could rely on the evidence of one’s eyes. Charley now claimed to be writing a farce based on the story he contributed to Mrs Lirriper’s Lodgings, the latest Christmas number of All the Year Round. He said he was doing this at the request of Charles Fechter,335 the brilliant actor whom Wilkie had first seen in the Théâtre de Vaudeville in the Place de la Bourse in Paris in the 1850s. Belying Wilkie’s dictum about the superiority of the French theatre, Fechter had quit the Paris stage and crossed the Channel to London where, having befriended Dickens and later Wilkie, he soon made a name for himself as a passionate interpreter of Shakespeare. Large and irascible, Fechter abjured the old-fashioned declamatory style of acting and developed a new, much appreciated realism. As the Athenaeum once remarked, Fechter ‘is Hamlet’.
Charley kept his brother informed about their mother,336 who had found a more or less permanent berth in Tunbridge Wells. She had been going there since the end of 1860, when she began to tire of London. She could now no longer find refuge in her usual bolt-holes, since the Bullars and Langtons were now spending most of their time in the capital, and since, by her own admission, she had antagonised the Combes by behaving atrociously.
Her point of contact in Tunbridge Wells was Frances Brandling, sister of Wilkie’s old friend Henry. A couple of years earlier Frances had married Henry Armytage, a former colonel in the Coldstream Guards, who lived at Broomhill Bank just outside the town, where the Regency atmosphere must have reminded Harriet of living by the Park in Marylebone. The elderly Colonel died soon afterwards, leaving his widow to find solace in the arms of Arthur Pott, a former high sheriff of the county, who lived at Bentham Hill, an equally grand house designed by Decimus Burton in Southborough. However, Harriet tended not to stay with the Potts but with two or three families in the vicinity who were grateful for her rent.
Determined to make progress with his book, Wilkie kept himself to himself while in Rome. The only people he saw were Joseph Severn, who was now the British Consul, and Frederick Lehmann’s artist brother, Rudolf, who was in town with his wife. Occasionally he went to the opera, which he liked because, unlike in London, it was cheap and informal. He was not the first or last tourist to be confused by Italian currency rates – a consequence of the still fluid political situation where ‘there is one price for the Pope’s gold,337 and another for Victor Emmanuel’s, and another for Louis Napoleon’s and another for silver.’ He opened an account at Freeborns, the local English bank, which gave him a chequebook. When his mother wrote fussing that he might need more money, he told her not to worry338 as he had a thousand guineas at Coutts and ‘if I can only go on, as I am going on now, I shall soon make some thousands more. No fear at present of my being worried by want of “means”.’ Charles Ward had helped by posting a £500 letter of credit, as well as sending some snuff, which provided a point of contact when (in a repeat of a fleeting encounter a decade earlier) he passed the Pope in a narrow street in Trastevere. Having just taken a pinch of snuff, Wilkie was amused to see the Pontiff doing the same as he clattered past him in a carriage.
By now Caroline was beginning to fret about getting home. ‘How like cats women are!’339 Wilkie joshed to Charles Ward, who was the closest of his friends to his mistress. (His comparison was benevolent since cats were undoubtedly his favourite domestic animals.) He added that Caroline was looking forward to pouring Ward a glass of dry sherry. She and her daughter had both been under the weather, but were recovering. Harriet (as she will continue to be called) was now managing to astonish the locals with the ‘essentially British plumpness of her cheeks and calves’.
Back in London at the end of March 1864, Wilkie’s intense preliminary planning had borne fruit and he was ready to begin Armadale. Rich and tightly plotted, this book incorporated all the themes of sensation fiction, but more interestingly and intelligently than in other authors’ attempts. It centred on the relationship – part friendship, part rivalry – between two distant cousins, both called Allan Armadale, whose fathers had once clashed over ownership of property in Barbados. Because of this background, one of them has been specifically warned by his father not to have dealings with anyone with his name, which he changes to Ozias Midwinter. But this general advice is ignored when he meets his cousin and they become unlikely friends.
The one who retains the name Allan Armadale is a naïve, trusting soul who inherits an estate at Thorpe Ambrose in Norfolk where he falls in love with the steward’s beautiful daughter, Eleanor (Neelie) Milroy. But Lydia Gwilt, a sexy, ambitious, red-headed widow with a treacherous past involving murder and bigamy, is familiar with the Armadale family background as a result of her former employment as a maid. She sees an opportunity to inveigle her way into Allan’s life, marry him, and inherit his substantial demesne and fortune.
Along the way, the novel ranges across the full gamut of sensational themes – extraordinary coincidences, mistaken identities, confusing doubles, scheming individuals and warring generations, all leavened with a dose of the supernatural. It takes in more specific obsessions, such as poisoning, marriage, inheritance, race and drugs (Lydia Gwilt turns out to be addicted to laudanum). The action culminates in a dramatic scene in a Hampstead sanitorium when Lydia has to murder Allan Armadale with a deadly but undetectable gas, gets muddled between him and cousin Ozias (whom she has fallen in love with and genuinely wants to marry), and ends up killing herself with the same poison.
But underneath these now familiar devices, Armadale is about destiny, and whether it is possible for people to escape the grim determinism of their pasts (whether hereditary or otherwise) and so establish their individuality. And is this a matter of ‘Fate or Chance?’, as one of Wilkie’s chapter headings has it? In this way, the book offers another, more sophisticated take on his favoured theme of identity.
The novel showed signs of Caroline’s influence since the name Midwinter, used for Armadale’s alter ego, was also that of a carpenter in Toddington. As her father had worked in the same profession, it is reasonable to imagine that she suggested it to Wilkie.
Stimulated by discussion with G.H. Lewes and others, Wilkie also drew on recent developments in two areas of science – epistemology and psychology. In each he found a dichotomy that neatly reflected the binary theme of his novel: in the first, between rational and irrational ways of experiencing the world and acquiring knowledge, and in the second, between the conscious and unconscious processes of the mind. In this context, Allan and Ozias provided two archetypal versions of the human psyche – one bluff, light-hearted and matter of fact, the other dark, thoughtful and intuitive, or, by extension, the masculine and the feminine. No great imaginative leap is needed to see a model of the opposing sides of Wilkie’s own personality.
By mid-July, he felt he was making good progress. He told his mother he had completed three parts,340 including the ‘hardest’ chapter in the book, but needed to go to Norfolk to check some points for his next section. This suggests he had just finished the dramatic dream sequence off the Isle of Man, and was preparing to explore the Broads, the location of Allan’s grand house at Thorpe Ambrose.
However, his need for local colour did not mean he should not enjoy himself. So he was joined on his trip to East Anglia by Edward Pigott and Charles Ward, two of his regular companions on this type of jaunt. They almost certainly travelled by train, availing themselves of the Great Eastern Railway’s special excursion rates (20 shillings first-class return from London, and 15 shillings second class). It was the height of the holiday season, when flotillas of sailing boats took to the sea in regattas organised by their local yacht clubs – at Great Yarmouth on 2 August, Oulton Broads two days later, and Lowestoft the following week.
Wilkie loved this nautical display: to his mother’s c
onsternation he had recently, and unrealistically, talked of acquiring, perhaps even buying, his own yacht. Having established themselves at Yarmouth’s most expensive hotel, the Victoria, he and his party mixed cruising on the sea with leisurely sightseeing in the Broads.
After ten days disporting himself on the east coast, Wilkie consulted his Bradshaw’s Guide and made his way alone by train to stay once again with Richard Monckton Milnes, now Lord Houghton, at Fryston Hall in Yorkshire. On his return to London, he ploughed on with his novel, where his depiction of Norfolk had none of the frenzy of the regattas. Instead, Allan Armadale’s house at Thorpe Ambrose is described in deceptively bland terms: ‘nothing picturesque, nothing in the slightest degree suggestive of mystery and romance’. The surrounding landscape takes on a surreal feel as an old lifeboat carries Allan and his guests through the flat, lonely Broads – ‘gliding slow and distant behind fringes of pollarded willows, the sails of invisible boats moving on invisible waters’ – until they reach Hurle Mere, where the new governess, Miss Gwilt, appears, standing by an open pool in the sunset, the shadow of a woman, as predicted in a dream by Allan.
Hurle Mere seems to have been based on Horsey Mere, a freshwater lake five miles north of Yarmouth. The lake is approached by boat from the River Thurne. It features in John Betjeman’s poem ‘East Anglian Bathe’, which contrasts the calm of the Mere with the swirling North Sea on the other side of the reeds.
Wilkie later boasted about the ‘personal investigation’ he had made to ensure that the details of the Broads were correct. In his quest for authenticity, he also drew on his recent excursions to Wildbad, the Isle of Man and Naples. An important early location in the novel was Somerset, a county he knew well through Pigott, whose cousin was a parson near Taunton, like the Reverend Decimus Brock who befriends both Allan and Ozias in the book. Wilkie had never been to the West Indies, scene of the opening chapters, but one source might have been his cousin, Edward Carpenter, who worked in a bank in Jamaica. Or more likely, he called on Frances Elliot, whose Dickinson fortune originated in the trade in sugar and slavery in Barbados.
Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation Page 24