In this context certain events need to be reassessed. The fault lines in Wilkie’s relationship with Caroline emerged almost as soon as he returned from meeting Martha in Norfolk in the summer of 1864. As a result, Harriet was sent back to school that autumn. Wilkie’s move a few months later to Melcombe Place can also be seen in a new light, especially since he chose to put Caroline’s name on the list of ratepayers. Either he wanted to appease her by showing her she still had a role at his side or, as was mooted, he really did intend spending more time with his mother in Tunbridge Wells.
He certainly kept a room at Harriet Collins’s place, as she wrote a chatty letter to Holman Hunt in July 1866, telling him that she had been visited by Frances Elliot (née Dickinson), who was ‘as droll as ever, thinner but youthful still’,360 and ‘Wilkie gave up his room to her & slept at the nice little hotel opposite’. Hunt had recently married Fanny Waugh, and, to Harriet’s evident displeasure, was about to depart on a painting tour of the Middle East. She complained that she would never live to see him come back, and added, suggesting her close relationship with the Pre-Raphaelites – maternal yet flirtatious – ‘I always told you that you would at last find a Miss Right that would supersede the poor old Harriet, but I shall go on loving you for all that. You are now off my hands in that way & my most serious affairs are Henry Bullar & Henry Brandling . . . I send you a pho. of me. I look like an old [indecipherable] nurse who has had a snug glass of hot & strong gin & water.’
Meanwhile, what did Martha do with herself? Much as she liked Wilkie, she is unlikely to have left her family in Norfolk for London and a future that held little except as an alternative mistress to a successful but nevertheless jobbing writer. In the wake of Wilkie’s death in 1889,361 a story was published suggesting that she had worked as a maid for his mother. It is possible (though no evidence has been found to substantiate it) that, having fallen for Martha in 1864, Wilkie made his second trip to Lowestoft and Yarmouth the following year to tell her that he had found a position for her in London and to negotiate the terms of her move. It is doubtful that Martha was employed by Harriet Collins, who was already at a peripatetic stage of her life, but, as later happened with her sister Alice, Wilkie could well have found her a position as a domestic servant in the house of one of his professional friends in Marylebone. However, it was not until 20 April 1868,362 when Wilkie made his first payment to Mrs Wells, Martha’s landlady at 33 Bolsover Street, that it can be said with certainty that the Yarmouth barmaid was established in London.
Such a job might have enhanced her appeal, for a feature of mid-Victorian sexuality was that men were often aroused by women in socially inferior positions. The best-known of such fetishists was Arthur Munby, a lawyer turned civil servant who spent his leisure time sketching and collecting information about working girls. Munby kept a detailed diary of his life, from fashionable soirées to trails round the streets in search of women to document. On 23 November 1866, he went to dinner with the Thackeray sisters in Onslow Gardens, where his fellow guests included Charley Collins and his wife Katey, whom Munby found ‘a lively pretty little creature, piquante & clever’.363 Wilkie does not feature in the diary, but Munby is likely to have met him through Charley.
The country was in the middle of a twin crisis by the time Smith, Elder published Armadale in two volumes on 18 May 1866. The political world was in turmoil after the introduction of the second Reform Bill in March. When the government failed to get it through Parliament in June, its leader Lord John Russell resigned. It took one of the most dramatic volte-faces in British politics for the new Conservative Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, to force the measure through fourteen months later. But he could not hold the confidence of the country either, and himself resigned in December 1868.
This mid-century political wobble was reflected in a parallel economic crash. On ‘Black Friday’, exactly a week before Armadale was published, Overend and Gurney, a leading City of London bank, collapsed, causing a knock-on effect that sent interest rates soaring, businesses folding and investors running for cover. Wilkie had a front seat on these events since his new friend Charles Oppenheim was a leading creditor of the bank.
Before the end of the month Wilkie was invited to dinner with the Oppenheims at their grand house in Upper Hamilton Terrace, St John’s Wood. His entrée was Charles Oppenheim’s wife, Isabelle, the daughter of his artist friend, William Powell Frith. Over the years he had kept in touch with Frith, another Victorian with a complex domestic life. Not satisfied with the seven sons and five daughters produced by his first wife, also called Isabelle, the artist had taken a mistress, Mary Alford, by whom he had seven further children. Frith’s second family was greatly resented by his first, causing friends to have to choose between them. Wilkie opted for the first, and, having known them from infancy, kept in touch with the children, including Isabelle, who had married Oppenheim in October 1864.
Oppenheim was a member of an influential international banking family, originally from Frankfurt. An uncle was financier to the Khedive of Egypt, a brother went on to own the Daily News, where Pigott worked. In the wake of the Overend and Gurney crash, Charles had emerged as the frontman acting on behalf of the bank’s creditors.
A couple of years later, he consolidated his reputation as a safe pair of hands when he proposed the construction of a statue of the late Prince Consort, subsequently erected in Holborn Circus and known as ‘the Politest Statue in London’ because it showed the Prince doffing his hat. He then went surprisingly quiet: nothing was heard of him after the mid-1870s, and his wife Isabelle was left to bring up their two daughters and present them at court. Wilkie probably got a sense of irregularities at the firm, which he parodies in his 1871 novella Miss or Mrs? as the troubled Levantine trading house Pizzituti, Turlington & Branca. Not surprisingly, his social dealings with the Oppenheims did not last into the new decade.
In the middle of these political and economic problems in the summer of 1866, the first reviews of Armadale came in, offering the usual range of opinions, with Henry Chorley, Wilkie’s old sparring partner on the Athenaeum, lambasting a ‘most perverse novel’. Wilkie took comfort from the more sympathetic comments of Dickens and Forster on his final chapter, which he had finished in mid-April. Referring to the demise of the scheming Miss Gwilt, the area that caused critics most problems, Forster, the book’s dedicatee, called it ‘a masterpiece of Art which few indeed have equalled to bring even pity and pathos to the end of such a career as hers.’
In no hurry to start a new book, Wilkie’s next project was to produce a theatrical version of Armadale, which, as customary, was necessary to deter pirates. Twenty-five copies of the play were published in pink wrappers by Smith, Elder, and there were vague plans to stage the work later in the year. When these were not realised, Wilkie, still eager for renewed theatrical success, took up an offer from Horace Wigan to provide a West End premiere of The Frozen Deep, his play originally performed at Tavistock House in January 1857. Horace was the younger brother of Alfred Wigan, Dickens’s actor-manager friend who had first recommended that the Ternan family should act in the play when it went on tour in 1857. As far back as 1855, Wilkie had tried to interest him in producing commercial versions of The Lighthouse and another of his books (probably the stage-orientated Basil) at the Olympic Theatre. Neither idea had come off, but now Horace gathered some financial backers and was also trying his hand as a producer. To this end he had himself taken a lease on the Olympic, where he was keen to put on The Frozen Deep, with himself in the part of Lieutenant Crayford. He hoped that the play would come on before Christmas, following the run of The Whiteboy, the latest offering from Wilkie’s friend,364 the popular playwright Tom Taylor, whose The Ticket-of-Leave Man (1863) had provided Horace Wigan with his most successful role as Inspector Hawkshaw, an early example of the detective story on the stage.
With his gout playing up and making him feel depressed, Wilkie let these business matters run their course, while he got out of tow
n as much as possible in the late summer, visiting his mother, Dickens, Frances Elliot and the Goldsmids, as well as embarking on two sailing trips around the Isle of Wight with Pigott.
As it happened, Taylor’s play at the Olympic enjoyed a shorter run than expected, so the production The Frozen Deep was brought forward to open there towards the end of October. Still in relaxed post-novel mood, Wilkie was loath to put off a further planned holiday with Pigott on the Continent. So he left Dickens to attend the dress rehearsal and Charles Ward to deal with his business affairs, which included fielding any potential interest in the play from the provinces.
He arranged to spend a day in Paris with Dickens’s old friend,365 François Regnier of the Comédie-Française, who was eager to work with him on a revision of Armadale for the French theatre. He and Pigott then proceeded through Switzerland to Rome. En route they had hoped to stay in Florence with Thomas Trollope, the good-natured brother of the novelist Anthony. But he was unable to receive them at Villa Ricorboli, his rambling house just outside the city, since he was marrying Fanny Ternan, the sister of Dickens’s mistress Nelly, in Paris that week.
Wilkie took this alteration to his travel arrangements in his stride, telling Nina Lehmann, the correspondent with whom he tended to be most chatty, ‘A woman has got in the way . . . and so, there is an end of the Florence scheme.’366 He added, ‘I don’t complain – I am all for Love myself – and this sort of thing speaks volumes for women, for surely a man at a mature age, with a growing daughter, doesn’t marry again without knowing what he is about and without remembrances of Mrs. Number One, which surround as with a halo Mrs. Number Two? But this is mere speculation.’
This comment is hard to interpret, given the ups and downs of Wilkie’s own romantic life. It suggests that men invest their second wives with an aura related to their predecessors, but whether these are good or bad memories is not clear. Was the spectre of Caroline hanging over his more recent affair with Martha, and forcing him, perhaps, to seek solace abroad? He tried to leave behind such concerns by attending a public ball in Milan, but was disappointed to find it was held in a seedy hall, attended by only a handful of people, including (a feature he disliked) a couple of women smoking cigars. He was more comfortable when he and Pigott reached Rome, and he took his companion to see ‘the illustrious’ Shelley’s grave at the Protestant cemetery. However, his attention was engaged not so much by the ghosts of dead poets but by a black tomcat, which disported itself seductively in the sun and, as told Nina Lehmann, proceeded to pronounce ‘in the language of cats: – “Shelley be hanged! Come and tickle me!” I stooped, and tickled him. We were both profoundly affected.’367
On his return journey Wilkie had hoped to visit Nina in Pau in south-west France, where, plagued with health problems, she had taken a house for the winter. But again he had to revise his plans, opting to go back to London, after learning that Wigan’s production of The Frozen Deep had flopped. Although it was still only October, he had already counselled Nina to wrap up well368 against the cold and not to be afraid to wear thick boots. It was wrong to think that women could not look attractive in such footwear, he declared with an air of authority, adding that men understood such matters, as was evident from the influence of British-born couturier Charles Worth on French fashion. Forced to exclude Pau from his itinerary, he returned home, via Paris, where he snatched a few more hours discussing his new version of Armadale with Regnier.
Back in London before Christmas, he was disappointed to find that The Frozen Deep had already closed. The reason might have had something to do with the timing: the play had been forced onto the stage at the Olympic in October, rather than taking its turn, as planned, a little later, when it would have benefited from the Christmas market. Another factor was the depressed economy following the business failures associated with Overend and Gurney. Wilkie also blamed his refusal to pander to the masses in the content of the play, while the critics seemed to think it was simply a poor production.
Dickens’s old paper, the Daily News, frowned on a comment in the playbill reminding the audience that The Frozen Deep had originally been performed ‘by royal command’ before the Queen and the Prince Consort in July 1857. It added, ‘Royal commands will not make a successful piece, any more than a Lord Chamberlain’s licence will make a well-managed theatre and a moral drama.’369 This was a political point about the censorship laws, which were being examined by George Goschen’s Parliamentary committee for the first time since being tightened in 1843. An irony was that the Daily News employed Edward Smyth Pigott, who would later become the Censor of Plays.
At this stage in his career, Wilkie might have felt peeved at his lack of theatrical success. But he was not the sort of person to appear downhearted. ‘Is my tail put down?’370 he asked Nina. ‘No – a thousand times, No! I am at work on the dramatic “Armadale” – and I will take John Bull by the scruff of the neck, and force him into the theatre to see it – before or after it has been played in French, I don’t know which – but into the theatre John Bull shall go.’
He spent Christmas with his mother in Southborough, where he attended a party at his friends’, the Salomons. The fact that he was not with Caroline is again indicative of an impasse in their relationship. His family problems continued, as neither his brother nor his sister-in-law Katey was in good health. And if he had hoped that the New Year would bring a boost to his literary fortunes, he received a setback when Smith, Elder declined to renew its six-year licence to carry on publishing six of his earlier novels. Smith, Elder still had the rights to Armadale, whose sales had slowed down after a promising start. But the other books, including The Woman in White, had not taken off in Smith, Elder’s cheap editions. Wilkie good-naturedly declined to blame George Smith, suspecting that Sampson Low, the previous licensee of the copyrights, had flooded the market with its own editions, before selling the licence to Smith, Elder in mysterious circumstances in 1865.
With his instinct for popularisation, Wilkie decided to deal with this rebuff by taking his product downmarket. Stung by suggestions that the dramatised Frozen Deep had been too ‘slow’, he contemplated extending A Rogue’s Life to make it into a ‘lively’ two-volume novel371 that would astonish the ‘ideotic [sic] British Reader’. He also toyed with turning to the penny journals sold at railway bookstalls to republish some of the books that Smith, Elder had turned down. He would start with The Woman in White and, if that took off, he would boil down The Lighthouse, The Frozen Deep and The Red Vial into one sensational volume for this market. And, as always, he retained his optimism, telling his mother he was full of ideas for new books and plays, and adding (unnecessarily), ‘I have got my name and my brains – and I will make a new start, with a new public!’372
For the time being he was preoccupied with revising Armadale (the play) with Regnier. He was still not sure if the finished product (now running to five acts) would appear in English or French. However, with the Frenchman also keen to collaborate on The Woman in White, he inclined to the latter, echoing his earlier articles on the French theatre when he told his mother from Paris, ‘Successful play-writing means making a fortune here – and there is no really great French writer now in our way.’373
This foolhardy boast meant putting his own immediate literary goals to one side. He was adamant that ‘everything that can be sacrificed to the play, must be sacrificed to it. A great chance is open to me – and I must make the best possible use of it.’ He made regular sorties to Paris to continue his work with Regnier. Did he, like Dickens, also take his mistress to France? There is no record of such a romantic journey. However, he certainly indulged his physical appetites. One morning in February 1867 he reported that he had breakfasted on ‘eggs and black butter, and pigs’ feet a la Sainte Ménèhould! Digestion perfect.’374 For some reason he thought this rich fare might be good for his ailing brother: as he told his mother, with no particular factual basis, ‘St Ménèhould lived to extreme old age on nothing but pigs’ trotters.’
(The reference to the saint was to a rich style of cooking in breadcrumbs practised in a town called after him in the Champagne region.) Charley heard independently about this epicurean existence and concluded that his brother was again suffering from gout. Wilkie told him this was not the case and not to worry. Rather he was enjoying himself – participating in the carnival, meeting writers, and visiting the theatre – and would be unlikely to be back in London in time for his friend George Russell’s wedding to Constance Lennox on 5 March 1867.
When he did reappear in Britain a few days later, he was bearing his customary gift for his mother – two pairs of boots, with fashionably high heels, which he reassured her she could shave down. Now it really was time for him to to stop playing the flâneur and begin thinking about his next novel. It was clear from an early stage that his honeymoon with Smith, Elder was over and he would be returning to Dickens’s fold, at least to All the Year Round for his serial publication. This was more or less set in stone in May when he agreed to collaborate with Dickens on a Christmas number, his first for six years, to be called No Thoroughfare.
Before the month was out, he was discussing terms with Dickens and Wills for another project, a new novel, which he was determined would be shorter than the forty-five instalments of No Name. The process of serial publication would inevitably be quicker than Armadale, since All the Year Round was a weekly journal, rather than a monthly like the Cornhill. If the first episode appeared in January of the following year, he would expect to be finished by the late summer.
Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation Page 26