This geographical range allowed him to indulge his love of the sea as he conjured up a variety of boats in different waters – a 300-ton schooner-rigged ship in the Atlantic, a 35-ton yacht off the coast of Wales, the wreck of a merchantman off the Isle of Man, another yacht (affiliated to the Royal Yacht Squadron) off Naples, as well as assorted craft in the Broads.
He was not afraid to seek information when it was required. ‘Wherever the story touches on questions connected with Law, Medicine, or Chemistry,’ he claimed in an appendix, ‘it has been submitted before publication to the experience of professional men.’ He made enquiries of Dickens’s solicitor Frederic Ouvry who had been married by licence rather than traditional banns. This way he confirmed a crucial piece of information for his plot – that a licence could be obtained after three weeks’ residence in one place and, significantly for the tortuous wedding plans of Lydia and Ozias, did not need to include any information about where the bridegroom had lived before that period.
He later checked further legal details with his own solicitor Ebenezer Benham. And when he came to his final section, where Lydia Gwilt attempts to gas Allan Armadale, he found himself held up by ‘difficulties in reconciling necessary chemical facts with the incidents of the story’.341 So he approached Thomas Hyde Hills, who ran the Wigmore Street pharmacy John Bell (later John Bell & Croyden), which he often used. Hills would go on to become President of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, in which role he was painted by Millais.
After returning from Norfolk in August 1864, Wilkie took steps to put Harriet back into school. The teenager had had no formal education since leaving Miss Milne’s academy the previous summer, prior to the family’s trip to Italy. If Wilkie’s bank accounts are to be correctly interpreted, she was now sent to an establishment run by a Miss Cresswell, though its whereabouts are unknown.
The beneficial effects of his Norfolk holiday did not last long. By the end of September Wilkie was complaining that his gout had returned, and with a vengeance, since he now felt it was attacking his brain (a medical impossibility, but clearly Wilkie’s health was poor). Frank Beard was not particularly concerned, but forbade his patient from working. Wilkie was put out because the first instalment of Armadale was due to appear in the Cornhill in November and he knew the issue would shortly be made up by the printers and he would need to look at the proofs at a time when George Smith was away and he himself was indisposed. He impressed on Pigott not to say anything to his mother about his relapse. ‘For the present, keep all this a profound Secret,342 on the chance of my rallying back to my work,’ he pleaded, in an unusual admission of the family pressure he’d always struggled under. ‘If I can conceal my condition from my mother, I must. I have concealed it so far.’ As ever, secrecy remained the watchword.
Within a month, Wilkie managed to find the time and energy to stay with Dickens and Georgina Hogarth at the Lord Warden Hotel in Dover, where his first proofs arrived. Between breezy walks and warm seawater baths, he was relieved to find that both Dickens and Georgina liked the excerpt, while, unusually and particularly gratifyingly, even the printers had expressed an interest in it.
This proved one of the few bright spots of the autumn, as his health continued to trouble him. When he felt giddy in December, Beard referred him to Dr Charles Radcliffe, Britain’s foremost specialist in diseases of the nervous system, who again reported no cause for alarm, but put Wilkie on a light diet (though claret and hock were allowed) and counselled him against ‘exciting [him]self with “Society” and dinner parties’.343
Wilkie still took laudanum to ward against pain. But now, for the first time, his intake seems to have affected his writing which, while never hallucinogenic, does reflect thought patterns associated with opiates (in its emphasis on shadows and doubles, for example). He undoubtedly empathised with Lydia Gwilt’s rhetorical outburst: ‘Who was the man who invented laudanum? I thank him from the bottom of my heart whoever he was. If all the miserable wretches in pain of body and mind, whose comforter he has been, could meet together to sing his praises, what a chorus it would be! I have had six delicious hours of oblivion; I have woke up with my mind composed . . . “Drops,” you are a darling! If I love nothing else, I love you.’
For months he had been muttering about the noise he was having to endure at Harley Street – ‘nothing but pianos at the back of the house and organs, bagpipes, bands and Punches in front’.344 He raised the possibility of moving to the country (by which he probably meant somewhere like the fringes of Hampstead or Highgate, where the Lehmanns had a house), and at one stage he thought there was ‘nothing for it but the Temple’, the area of London frequented by lawyers, where at least he could find some cloistered peace. But the attractions of the area where he had been born and lived for so long proved too strong, and after Christmas he performed another typical Collins shuffle across the Marylebone Road to 9 Melcombe Place, a short-lease property off Dorset Square.
He was accompanied by his little family, and ensured that Caroline Graves was the name on the ratebook. It was a significant move, one ‘in the right direction’,345 Charley told his mother elliptically, adding, ‘I hope he will get safe through his hard work, poor fellow.’ (Charley and Katey had returned to the Continent, partly for health reasons and partly so he could make headway with another novel, At the Bar.)
By now the first instalments of Armadale had been published and Wilkie could begin to relax. After settling into his new house, he suddenly found that his work was not too pressing and his illnesses not too debilitating: what he needed was a holiday. On 25 February 1865, he cashed a cheque for £40 and left on a ten-day trip to Paris. In his usual bland letter to his mother he reported the city as busy as usual, requiring him and his companion, probably Lehmann, to book their nightly visits to the theatre well in advance. The good thing was that ‘my book is as entirely off my mind here, as if my book was done.’346
On his return to London, he found himself ‘over head and ears in arrears of letters, “club”-difficulties (the eternal “Garrick” again), and all the other small worries which accumulate in one’s absence’.347 His problems with the Garrick had been brewing over the previous two years, following his election to the Club’s general committee,348 where his fellow members included Sir George Armytage, nephew of the Tunbridge Wells squire who had taken his mother under his wing. Wilkie was proud of such peer recognition, but found being a committee member a frustrating experience. His only recorded committee attendance was in May 1864, when the Club got into bureaucratic difficulties over its proposed move from 35 King Street to new premises in what, after being carved out of the stews of Covent Garden, would be called Garrick Street. (There was controversy over the name: the Club committee had originally wanted it called Shakespeare Street, the Metropolitan Board of Works countered with New King Street, and they compromised on Garrick Street.) Wilkie vented his anger to another member, George Russell, to whom he wrote, ‘I leave the little puddle in King Street to stink without any further stirring on my part.’349
His association with the Club came to an abrupt end the following February when Dickens’s colleague Wills was blackballed. Wilkie promptly resigned in protest and Dickens followed suit. Wilkie had experienced a similar rebuff after he claimed to have put up Frederick Lehmann (though there was some confusion as he somehow failed to sign his friend’s page in the candidate’s book).
His summer schedule in 1865 was disturbed by the demands of his mother, who had moved into a house in Tunbridge Wells where she could be more independent and keep a room for her son. He was able to work there, as he told Wills in July; indeed, he informed another correspondent350 that he was hardly ever in London. It seems to have been a time of domestic turbulence all round – a supposition given credence by the lack of any overt (or at least extant) communication between him and his great friend Dickens. On 9 June the latter was involved in a horrific rail accident at Staplehurst in Kent. He was travelling on the boat train on his way back from Franc
e, accompanied by Nelly Ternan and her mother. Ten people were killed and forty injured in the crash, which left several carriages dangling from a bridge over the River Beult. Dickens tended the casualties, but was left very shaken. His biographer Clare Tomalin has suggested that he had recently (and frequently) accompanied his mistress to France, where Nelly had had a baby who died there. However, neither the crash nor its circumstances is mentioned in any letter between Wilkie and Dickens. This indicates another example of the code of silence these two men adopted when it suited them. The logical conclusion is that their correspondence from this time has been destroyed. In this case, it seems that Wilkie was just as eager for the record to be interrupted, since he was experiencing unprecedented difficulties in his relationship with Caroline.
It was left to Charley, who had returned from the Continent, to make the only comment by one of the Collinses on the Staplehurst crash. Since Katey had wanted to check that her father was all right, they went to Gad’s Hill to find him ‘look(ing) something the worse’ for his accident. Charley enjoyed working in Dickens’s new Swiss chalet,351 a gift from Fechter, which had been erected in the grounds, providing magnificent views of the Thames from its second floor. Interestingly, Katey was the only member352 of the Dickens family, aside from her brother Henry, who was prepared to admit that Nelly had experienced the personal tragedy of losing a child.
Wilkie hoped to relax on a sailing holiday with Pigott in July. ‘I want the sea badly – to freshen me after my work,’353 he told his mother. However, his regular nautical companion was now the political correspondent of the Daily News and was required to report on the general election that month. (Earlier in the decade, Pigott, like Ozias Midwinter, had spent time in Italy as a journalist.) The paper, which had been founded and briefly edited by Dickens, strongly supported the Liberal Party, which, under Lord Palmerston, was duly returned to government with an increased majority.
A disappointed Wilkie had to content himself instead with another of his trails around the comfortable country houses of Frances Elliot and the Lehmanns. He did, however, travel to Lowestoft at the beginning of August and it is a fair bet that he also went to Yarmouth for the regatta. But he does not seem to have been accompanied by any of his regular companions, nor indeed by Caroline and Harriet, for, after returning to London, he told Charles Ward in strangely disengaged tones, ‘C. & the child have come back, both languid & dismal. I am myself far from well.’354 This suggests they had been on a separate holiday, perhaps with Caroline’s mother-in-law, who had been notably absent from the scene of late.
In previous summers, Wilkie had often railed against the oppressive heat, dirt and noise of London. He now found himself appreciating a capital that was ‘wonderfully quiet . . . I roam the empty streets,355 and inhale the delightful London air (so much healthier than those pretentious humbugs the seaside breezes!), and meet nobody, and come back with the blessed conviction that I have not got to “dress” and go out to dinner, and feel that London in August is London under a most attractive aspect.’
With his novel’s end in sight, he found life strangely imitating art when, in November, he learned that three men had died from gas poisoning after sleeping on board a ship called the Armadale in Liverpool’s Huskisson Dock. He took pains to explain in the appendix to his book that he had set down the details of the attempted asphyxiation in a Hampstead sanatorium a year and a half earlier. However, it was a coincidence to be savoured.
As he struggled to complete the last chapters in early 1866, Beard put him on a loathsome-sounding mixture which Wilkie described as ‘a fortifying compound of drugs, Quinine, Acid, and Dandelion’.356 Luckily, he felt it did him ‘infinite good’ and, as a result, he was eager to accompany Frederick Lehmann to Paris in March, though the trip had to be postponed when Nina fell ill. Instead, he visited the Ned Wards, who both continued successfully to plough a traditional artistic path, with their aristocratic and royal clients. Wilkie was especially impressed by a recent historical portrait by Henrietta of Bernard Palissy, the French Huguenot potter who struggled in vain to reproduce the qualities of Chinese porcelain.
Finally, on 12 April, he finished his toils, signalling his relief to his mother with his customary epistolary flourish, ‘I Have Done’. Now he could celebrate with his delayed trip to Paris. Ten days later, he and Lehmann were staying in the Hotel du Helder, near the Opéra, where, as they made the rounds of concerts, theatres and races in the spring sunshine, Wilkie delighted in having cast off ‘a heavy responsibility’ and was feeling ‘content to idle about in the open air, without going anywhere or seeing anything in particular. And yet, such is the perversity of mankind, I am half sorry too to have parted from my poor dear book.’357
FOURTH EPOCH
13
MARTHA ARRIVES
CAROLINE MAY HAVE contributed the name Midwinter to Armadale but she was otherwise strangely absent from Wilkie’s life at this time. A few years earlier, at the turn of the decade, she had played a modest but nevertheless defined role at his side. She rarely went out with him, but she kept house and was known with varying degrees of affection to his close friends. In 1860, her support had been recognised when Wilkie took her on an expensive holiday to Paris, and in October 1863, she and Harriet accompanied him on a six-month-long tour of Italy. But following this journey, mother and daughter faded from view.
After Harriet was bundled back to school in the autumn of 1864, Caroline featured only twice in some five hundred letters over the next seven years. In the summer of 1865, Wilkie referred distractedly to ‘C & the child’ returning from their holiday. Then a year or so later he thanked Charles Reade for a copy of the proofs of Reade’s sexually explicit novel Griffith Gaunt: or Jealousy, and sent him ‘Mrs Graves’ thanks’ as well. Reade lived openly with a colourful actress called Laura Seymour whom Wilkie liked. She had also been married, so the two couples often spent evenings together, free from the moralising brickbats of society. Wilkie had clearly asked Reade’s opinion about a proposed revival of his play The Frozen Deep and told him that if he needed any more copies, he had ‘only to let Mrs Graves know it, and you can have them.’358 This suggests Caroline’s role was now little more than functionary, as was confirmed when she next cropped up as his amanuensis in February 1868, following the death of his mother.
During the period between the two earlier letters – August 1865 and October 1866 – Wilkie might even have stopped giving Caroline money. At the start of that August, he made over three small amounts, presumably for her holiday, and then paid her nothing for over a year, until October 1866, when she received £80, a substantial sum, and considerably more than she received either before or in the immediate aftermath. It is wrong to make too much of this, as not only were his payments to her irregular, but he also paid over money for the house in Melcombe Place. However, the evidence of his correspondence and his bank account suggests that Caroline had been relegated to a minor role.
One does not have to look far for a reason: Wilkie had added another, equally mysterious, woman to his life. At some stage in the mid-1860s he became friendly with Martha Rudd,359 an agricultural labourer’s daughter, who worked in a pub in Great Yarmouth. They almost certainly met when he was visiting the town with Pigott and Ward during the 1864 regatta season. Martha, then nineteen, was working in the Vauxhall Tavern in Runham.
She was a buxom wench with the physicality of the girl in Manet’s painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergères. Caroline was more petite and conventionally pretty, with a love of fine clothes, which reflected her social ambitions. Martha had no such pretensions. Behind her distracted gaze, she was as near as Wilkie could reasonably get to his ideal of the broad-buttocked Italian woman, the Venus Callipyge. She was his literary approximation to the conventional Pre-Raphaelite stunner.
Martha’s family came from the village of Winterton, on the coast, eight miles north of Yarmouth and three miles south-east of Horsey Mere, which featured in Armadale. It looked out on the Yarmouth Roads,
a stretch of sea with the highest density of traffic in the world, as colliers and other vessels ploughed down from the north-east to London and back again. When the winds blew up, these waters were also among the most treacherous. Winterton ‘beachmen’ were often called out to rescue capsized or stranded ships – a dangerous, if lucrative, occupation.
Although most male inhabitants were involved with the sea, either as fishermen or sailors, Martha’s father, James, was unusual in that he worked on the land as a shepherd. Such ‘greenhands’ were second-class citizens in a moderately prosperous village, which explains why many, like James, came from out of Winterton. He was born at Sparham on the other side of Norwich. He and his wife Mary were almost certainly illiterate, though Martha is likely to have received a basic education at Winterton’s national school, established in 1845.
At the start of the 1860s, Martha had joined her elder sister Alice working at the Vauxhall Tavern. Nothing is known about how Wilkie met or courted her. He may have stopped off at the Tavern on arriving in Yarmouth by train. More likely, while staying at the Victoria Hotel, he strolled over the new bridge to the Vauxhall Gardens and had a drink at the pub. Perhaps he was with Pigott or Ward and they thought that, as in London, the Gardens were a place to pick up a young woman.
Significantly, Wilkie returned to Lowestoft the following summer when Caroline and Harriet were elsewhere. He almost certainly continued to Yarmouth and reacquainted himself with Martha. By April 1868, she had moved to London and was living in Marylebone, among the artisans of Bolsover Street, in lodgings paid for by Wilkie. It was a street he knew well, in the heart of the Portland estate, just around the corner from his own former home in New Cavendish Street. In his more impecunious days, his godfather David Wilkie had lived there too. As Martha settled into her new life, her presence must have exacerbated Wilkie’s difficulties, particularly with Caroline.
Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation Page 25