Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation

by Andrew Lycett

  Dickens quickly got the point of The Moonstone, as the book would be called. After reading the first three episodes he described it to Wills as ‘a very curious story – wild, and yet domestic’.375 He pinpointed the story’s appeal: it again brought the mystery and excitement of the sensation novel into the home – and so helped establish the tradition of English crime novels for years to come. As a result, All the Year Round offered £750 for the serialisation rights, with a similar sum to come from Harper’s in the United States.

  Now that professional matters were more or less under control, Wilkie could turn his attention to personal affairs. His mother was not a particular concern as she was settled in Tunbridge Wells. But Charley continued to worry him. Dickens tried his best to look after him – publishing his work, allowing him and Katey to stay at Gad’s Hill, and even making an additional marriage settlement on the couple in May. But Charley was still financially strapped. In order to raise money for his brother, Wilkie offered to share their father’s remaining paintings between them (the idea being that Charley could sell those he did not want). After tossing a coin to ensure fairness, Charley chose first, but Wilkie was still very satisfied with his pickings, which included a seascape at Sorrento, a study of trees at Pond Street in Hampstead, and a portrait of his grandmother. His friend Frith subsequently came round to make a valuation of the works.

  Before Wilkie could relax and go sailing around the Isle of Wight with Pigott and Charles Ward, he had two other domestic matters to attend to. One was the vexed issue of his relationships with Caroline and Martha. But, raddled by his opium consumption, he either proved unable or chose not to deal with it. The other was more practical since the lease on Melcombe Place was shortly due to run out. He had had his eye on somewhere in Cornwall Terrace, but in the end he opted for a large five-storey house at 90 Gloucester Place,376 which led northwards from Oxford Street to Regent’s Park skirting his native Marylebone. Since it was a fairly busy road, it was a surprising choice for a man so fastidious about noise, which bothered him even in secluded Melcombe Place. But by the end of August, he had paid £800 to buy the lease, and hired a crew of workmen. And by then he was at last making good progress on his new novel.

  14

  DETECTION AND ALL CHANGE

  DETECTIVE STORIES HAD a history. Some commentators look back to Voltaire’s Zadig or even the Biblical Book of Daniel, but, leaving aside the true-life crime that appeared in the Newgate Calendar and fuelled the penny press, a good starting date for the modern fictional version was 1841, when Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue established many of the features of the genre – the closed environment (the forerunner of the ‘locked room’ beloved of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple), the brilliant if eccentric sleuth, the bumbling constabulary, and the overall account given by a friend.

  During the 1860s such stories proliferated, in parallel with the growth of the popular press and its appetite for accounts of murder. They slotted into the publishing catalogue as a well-defined branch of sensation fiction, with Mary Elizabeth Braddon again leading the way with The Trail of the Serpent in 1860. They invaded the theatre in plays such as Tom Taylor’s The Ticket-of-Leave Man. Wilkie, with his keen cultural antennae, was already ahead of the game and had made detection an important part of the plot in several works of fiction, including The Woman in White and Armadale. Only in September 1867 he had sent his mother a copy of The Female Detective by Andrew Forrester,377 which featured a woman sleuth.

  By now, the detective story, like sensation fiction in general, had become popular enough to provoke a backlash. In a petulant essay in the conservative Saturday Review in 1864, James Fitzjames Stephen argued378 that ‘this detective-worship appears one of the silliest superstitions that ever were concocted by ingenious writers.’ He was unhappy about the way fictional detectives assumed almost godlike powers that enabled them to visualise a whole sequence of events from a single clue. He felt it was more like guesswork than the proper sifting of evidence that went on in an established court of law.

  Such polemics provided Wilkie with the spur to enter the fray with a full-scale detective novel, since Fitzjames Stephen was engaging with the ongoing debate about the nature of evidence, which provided much of the theoretical underpinning for Wilkie’s work. As his father’s son, he had observed painters trying to represent different aspects of reality. As a writer, he transferred this concern to the page as he struggled to find ways to express the truth of an event. Did it emerge by consensus, something teased out from different points of view, as in a court of law – the premise of The Woman in White? And how much could any observation, let alone an account, of an incident be relied on?

  These questions went to the heart of nineteenth-century ideas about observation and knowledge. By the 1860s, scientists and philosophers were suggesting that the eye was not necessarily a trustworthy instrument. Their old model for sight, derived from Locke, suggested the eye was a tabula rasa that directly absorbed sensory data reaching the retina. But this had been superseded by a reinterpretation of the ideas of George Berkeley and Kant, which put the observer (not the mechanical eye) at the centre of the process. According to this approach, one does not actually see an object; instead one’s mind infers what it is on the basis of previous experience and other inputs. This introduces an element of uncertainty Wilkie was quick to latch onto for his literary purposes.

  This way of looking at the world had ramifications for other aspects of his output, such as ghost stories. Earlier commentators, including Walter Scott, had regarded sightings of ghosts as optical illusions, which could be explained as manifestations of the eye not working correctly. But, in line with the latest ‘associationist’ theories of cognition, Wilkie’s friend G.H. Lewes now argued, ‘When a man avers that he has “seen a ghost”, he is passing far beyond the limits of visible fact, into that of inference. He saw something which he supposed to be a ghost.’379 Similarly, madness was being reinterpreted: once regarded as the failure of a fevered mind to process outside stimuli, its causes were now seen as much more subjective.

  Reflecting the way that man, rather than God, was taking centre stage in cosmology and history, the individual was now the master of his universe in matters of cognition. But this brought uncertainties. As John Stuart Mill,380 the archetypal Victorian philosopher, put it, ‘What we are said to perceive is usually a compound result, of which one tenth may be observation, and the remaining 9/10ths inference.’

  All this was exciting for a writer of detective stories – and particularly a clever one like Wilkie – willing to play with and gently subvert the genre. One consequence of the associationist approach was to give weight to the interpretation of events. And, as would become clearer later in the century, notably with Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, the detective’s business was to discover the true course of events by interpreting signs or clues. Another result of associationism, one that affected the man in the street as much as the detective, was that everyone’s interpretation could be questioned. There was no absolute truth, for, as Lewes would later put it, ‘With inference begins error.’381 The concept of inference, which was virtually interchangeable with interpretation, added to the uncertainty, since it bordered on intuition, and from there it was but a small step to telepathy and even spiritualism. Such was the direction of psychology and philosophy, always well monitored by Dickens and Wilkie in the pages of All the Year Round.

  The Moonstone is basically a locked-room mystery about the theft of a much-revered Indian gem from an English country house. However, nothing is that simple in a Wilkie Collins novel. There was an earlier theft: the jewel had originally been looted by British forces at the siege of Seringapatam in 1799. The search for its whereabouts by three Brahmins continues in parallel to the mid-Victorian detective story, giving it an aura of exoticism. The Indian holy men’s techniques of clairvoyance add a paranormal dimension to Wilkie’s exploration of knowledge, while their ritual retribution brings a karmic frisson
to another theme that plays throughout Wilkie’s work – the nature of revenge and punishment.

  The magnificent yellow gem is bequeathed by the looter to his niece, Rachel Verinder, on her eighteenth birthday, and brought to her family’s sumptuous country house in Yorkshire by her cousin Franklin Blake. However, on the night of her birthday, her new present goes missing from her bedroom cabinet. The local police superintendent does little to advance the case, except by establishing an enduring trope for such stories with his bungling inquiries. Her mother calls in Inspector Cuff from Scotland Yard, who conducts an investigation along modern professional lines. He inspires everyone with ‘detective fever’ as he sets about his business. When a smear on the paint of Rachel’s bedroom door is discovered, the local man dismisses it as a ‘trifle’, causing Cuff to respond dismissively, ‘In all my experience . . . I have never met with such a thing as a trifle yet.’ He resolves to find the piece of clothing that shows evidence of brushing the door and creating the smear. Initially, the suspicion falls on the troupe of mysterious Indian jugglers (the three Brahmins in search of the gem) who have been in the vicinity. But when Rachel’s maid, Rosanna, a hunchback with a criminal past, is found to have taken a garment for laundering in the nearby village, the finger points to her.

  The investigation only progresses when Franklin Blake returns to the scene of the crime (Frizinghall, based on Monckton Milnes’s house Fryston Hall in Yorkshire) and discovers that Rosanna has hidden the tell-tale garment in quicksand on the coast. But when he alights on this vital item of clothing, he realises that it is his own night-shirt and thus, by deduction, he must be the culprit. Rachel then confirms that she had indeed observed him taking the diamond, and, since she (like Rosanna) is in love with Blake, this explains her earlier reluctance to co-operate with Cuff.

  Among several well-realised subsidiary characters is Mr Candy, a doctor, who attended the house party celebrating Rachel’s birthday, where he argued with Blake about the powers of modern medicine – he advocating the latest procedures and drugs, and Blake provocatively dismissing them all as hocus-pocus. However, after Blake admitted suffering from insomnia, Candy, wanting to prove his point, slipped some laudanum into the young visitor’s drink. (This was later ascertained at the medical man’s deathbed, in a hazy statement taken down by his assistant, Ezra Jennings.)

  The drug proves the vital ingredient in unravelling the mystery. With ‘his gipsy-complexion’, ‘dreamy eyes’ and murky past, Jennings is very much the outsider in such social situations. It turns out that he himself is an opium addict, which allows him to suggest an alternative way of solving the fate of the Moonstone. If Blake were to recreate the circumstances of the night of the theft by taking laudanum, he might go through his exact motions again and so reveal what had happened. As a learned, if unorthodox, practitioner, he quotes the associationist physiologists, Drs John Elliotson and William Carpenter, in his support. Elliotson, who had treated Wilkie earlier in the decade, had written of an Irish porter who could only remember his actions when drunk by becoming drunk again. Carpenter, more theoretically, had reported, ‘There seems much ground for the belief, that every sensory impression which has once been recognised by the perceptive consciousness, is registered (so to speak) in the brain, and may be reproduced at some subsequent time, although there may be no consciousness of its existence in the mind during the whole intermediate period.’ So, under the influence of laudanum, Blake in The Moonstone relives the events of that fateful night. As a result, it becomes clear where he put the diamond for safe keeping, and that another guest, the apparently upright Godfrey Ablewhite, has stolen it to pay off his debts.

  Wilkie was drawing on his own experience of the drug. He was also straying into a contentious area of psychology – the power of the unconscious mind, which can be both a wellspring of truth and a source of enough bizarre behaviour to wrong-foot the most rational detective. However, as Jennings shows, its secrets can, under the right conditions, be accessed and interpreted, even if it requires a process of inference.

  Secrets were, of course, a favourite literary commodity of Wilkie’s. In The Moonstone he sought to explore the inside of a well-ordered country house (whose occupants resented any intrusion), while throwing light on not only a robbery but the processes of the unconscious mind. He was reprising several other regular themes, such as the position of women. Rachel Verinder and her maid Rosanna enjoy an important relationship at the centre of his story – the former proving to be a vapid heiress who is weaker than her much disadvantaged maid. Looking back to the scene in No Name where Magdalen Vanstone swapped roles with her servant Louisa, this again hinted at the iniquities of a social system that excluded Caroline Graves and Martha Rudd.

  In touching on class in Victorian society, the novel is generally caustic. Rosanna pines for Franklin Blake, but clearly cannot have him. After her death, when he is informed of her unrequited passion for him, he casually remarks, ‘I never noticed her.’ In this hierarchic world she simply did not exist. Little wonder that her friend, Limping Lucy, another outcast, predicts that ‘the day is not far off when the poor will rise against the rich.’

  While not advocating revolution, Wilkie was affirming his dislike of any form of oppression, as was also apparent in his representation of the colonial aspects of his story. Although the Moonstone serves as a symbol of upheaval – the ‘cursed Diamond’ which ‘cast a blight on the whole company’ – he, unlike Dickens, treats Indians and the Hindu religion with respect: the Brahmins behave with dignity as they go about finding the Moonstone in England, and it is fitting that the gem is eventually restored to its rightful place in the Indian holy city of Somnauth.

  In this way, as in discovering what really happened in Rachel Verinder’s room, the novel reaches a satisfactory conclusion. However, this resolution does not come through Inspector Cuff’s conventional, rational, mid-Victorian sleuthing methods. The restitution of the Moonstone results from a religiously inspired quest, while the mystery of the theft is arrived at in an unorthodox manner, which involves tapping Blake’s unconscious memory and reliving the incident. On the surface, the book’s various narrators offer different perspectives on events, and so, as in a court of law, increase the possibilities of arriving at the truth. But it remains an elusive commodity. As Blake, who has picked up some of this intellectual background while studying in Germany, puts it, ‘One interpretation is just as likely to be right as the other.’ Wilkie orchestrates this debate on the nature of evidence with humour and verve. It is easy to see why The Moonstone has been claimed as a modernist (or proto-modernist) novel.

  Wilkie did not need to do much research on the British aspects of the novel, but, as a writer who prided himself on the veracity of detail, he worked hard to ensure that the Indian side of his story was correct. He ended up taking even more pains than usual. With the help of the Athenaeum Club library, he consulted many books on precious stones, the Hindu religion and the history of India, as well as the eighth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. When he took some of these volumes home, Caroline copied out relevant passages to act as aides-memoire.

  With a nice sense of synchronicity, diamonds were in the news. New, potentially vast, deposits had recently been discovered in South Africa, from where the Eureka diamond was sent to the Paris Exhibition of 1867. Before long these sources would bring diamonds within the purchasing power of the well-off middle classes. In his preface to The Moonstone, Wilkie recorded how he based the eponymous jewel on the histories of two massive diamonds, both originally from India, that ended up in distant royal collections – the Orloff diamond, part of the Russian crown jewels, and the Koh-i-Noor, or Mountain of Light, which was presented to Queen Victoria following the defeat of the Sikh kingdom in the Punjab in 1849 and which was shown at the Great Exhibition a couple of years later.

  Wilkie took his information where he could find it, and there was another source closer to home. In her book Swallowfield and its Owners, Lady Constance Russell sug
gested that his interest in precious stones might at least in part have derived from accounts of the extraordinary 410-carat Pitt Diamond that he heard of when visiting Swallowfield Park, the Berkshire estate of her husband, George Russell. This gem had been owned by Thomas ‘Diamond’ Pitt, an East India Company nabob (and great-grandfather of the Prime Minister, William Pitt) who lived at Swallowfield at the start of the eighteenth century, before the property passed in 1820 to Sir George’s father, Sir Henry Russell, the former Chief Justice of Bengal, whom the Collinses had met in Italy.

  This theory is entirely plausible since, only in September 1866, Wilkie had written to Lady Constance,382 under her maiden name of Miss Lennox, sending her photographs of himself (taken by Elliot and Fry) and signing off ‘with kindest remembrances to all at Swallowfield’. (It was not until the following March that she married George Russell, Wilkie’s barrister friend from the Garrick Club, who was often at Swallowfield, though he did not inherit it until the death of his bachelor brother Charles in 1883.)

  Wilkie was in a mellow mood as he settled at his desk in his new house in Gloucester Place one evening in mid-September 1867. He had just returned from dining with Dickens at the Athenaeum, the temperature had been in the mid-sixties that day, and the smell of paint was still in the air. So the windows were open, allowing a kitten to stray into the drawing room and drape itself around him. He admitted that having it ‘galloping over’ his back and shoulders made ‘writing difficult’. But, like the cat in the Protestant cemetery in Rome, animals tended to gravitate towards him, and he usually reciprocated. Before long a Scottish terrier called Tommy was added to the household.383