By the end of the month the carpenters and painters had finished their work, the prints and paintings were on the walls, and Wilkie was enjoying the spaciousness of his new home. To ensure his creature comforts, he hired three new servants, two of them women, whom he provided with new ‘gowns’. His centre of operations was a double drawing room, dominated by a large writing table with a smaller inlaid desk, similar to the one used by Dickens. There was a separate study and a large, airy bedroom. The building was constructed on dry soil, which Wilkie, like his father before him, seemed to think was good for his health. At the back was a stable which was surplus to requirements, so he was able to let it out at £40 a year.
Not everyone loved the result. Visiting some years later, the novelist Hall Caine found it ‘large and rather dingy.384 The walls were panelled, the stairs were of stone, the hall was cold, and the whole house cheerless,’ even if it was hung with ‘pictures of the greatest interest’.
At the end of October, Wilkie gathered various friends for a dinner that was both a house warming and a farewell to Dickens, who was shortly embarking on a much-mooted speaking tour of North America. Because of this imminent departure, Wilkie was not able to spend much time on The Moonstone. Instead, the two friends were busily discussing their collaboration on No Thoroughfare for the Christmas number of All the Year Round. The plot of this new story resembled The Frozen Deep in that it centred on two rivals who confront each other in harsh foreign climes – in this case, an avalanche on the Simplon Pass into Switzerland (a route Wilkie had travelled in the past). Jules Obenreizer was the thieving London agent of a Swiss wine supplier; George Vendale, a new recruit to the firm, who had fallen in love with Obenreizer’s niece. Add in issues about birth and legitimacy, and present the resulting melodrama in the form of an overture and three acts, and they had a cliffhanger (often literally) that would transfer easily to the stage. After the idea had been raised at their dinner at the Athenaeum in September, Wilkie regularly dashed to Gad’s Hill to confer with Dickens on the story. His patient and reliable friend Charles Ward helped by copying each instalment for sending to Harper’s in New York.
After the gathering at Wilkie’s, Dickens was feted at further farewell dinners – one a grand event, chaired by Bulwer-Lytton (with Wilkie as a steward), for 450 people at the Freemason’s Hall; another a more intimate occasion hosted by Frank Beard, whose wife Louisa had recently died. Even so, Dickens insisted that Wilkie accompany him and a small party to Liverpool to see him off on his transatlantic liner on 9 November.
Only two days later, Wilkie was invited to dinner by his friend’s estranged wife Catherine in Gloucester Crescent, Camden Town. This was curious, as it gave the impression that their meeting had been held off until after Dickens’s departure. However, Wilkie had always tried to stay on good terms with Catherine, not least because she was his brother’s mother-in-law.
Wilkie was left with several responsibilities by Dickens. One was to help Wills with ‘conducting’ the magazine. Another was to work with the experienced actor-manager Benjamin Webster on adapting No Thoroughfare for the theatre in time for Christmas. The story had been written with this end in mind, with Charles Fechter slated for the lead role of Obenreizer. As soon as he and Webster completed each section, Wilkie would send it for comment and alteration to Dickens, who was enjoying extraordinary acclaim in America. At the end of November, Wilkie was juggling this responsibility with reading the first proofs of The Moonstone, which was due to start appearing in All the Year Round and Harper’s Weekly on 4 January. At the same time he had to keep writing regular instalments of his novel, so as to ensure that he was always ahead of the printers. No wonder he told his mother that he had never worked so hard in his life.
Despite this punishing schedule he was able to snatch a couple of days off to spend Christmas with his ailing mother in Tunbridge Wells. He always brought her something to drink – some brandy or wine – and, as festive offerings, he added some eau de cologne and some chocolate that Charley had purchased in Paris. On Boxing Day he was back in London to see the first night of No Thoroughfare at the Adelphi Theatre in the Strand. Although it had now grown to six acts and ran for four hours, it was enthusiastically received. The consensus was that it was rather better than the published serial, which was too obviously written by two different hands. His capacity for self-promotion undiminished, Wilkie was soon writing to a producer in San Francisco offering him West Coast rights to the work.
On 3 January 1868, he was again in Southborough, where his mother had moved to Bentham Hill Cottage, closer to the Potts, so she could be better cared for. A couple of weeks later he was telling her that he was halfway through The Moonstone, but the following day he admitted to Holman Hunt that she was ‘sinking’385 and he had to drop everything to return to her bedside. He called in Frank Beard to tend her and did his best to share caring duties with Charley, but he found he had to work in London, which came as something of a relief. ‘I am (luckily) obliged to work,’386 he told Hunt, ‘in other words obliged to resist the suspense and distress of this anxious time. All the leisure I can spare from my mother, must be devoted to my book.’
The relentless pressure got to him, and before long he was immobilised by an excruciatingly painful combination of rheumatism and gout. As a result he could not travel when, with cruel inevitability, his mother died on the morning of 19 March. Nor could he attend her funeral at Speldhurst on the 25th. He was gratified that Holman Hunt was able to represent him and support Charley, who made the arrangements.
This failure compounded his feeling of uselessness and exacerbated his pain. He described his mother’s death to George Russell as the ‘bitterest affliction of my life – and a pang has been added to that affliction by my miserable inability to follow her to the grave.’ This did not mean he felt suicidal, but that he was mortified at being unable to see her laid to rest.
Back in Gloucester Place, his aggravated stress meant that he was unable to write and had to call on the services of an amanuensis, probably young Harriet Graves. As he recalled in a second preface to The Moonstone in 1871, ‘At the time when my mother lay dying in her little cottage in the country, I was struck prostrate, in London – crippled in every limb by the torture of rheumatic gout.’ But, always aware of his duty to his public and taking pride in the fact that he had never missed a deadline, he remembered, ‘In the intervals of grief, in the occasional remissions of pain, I dictated from my bed that portion of The Moonstone which has since proved most successful in amusing the public – the “Narrative of Miss Clack.”’ (She was a hypocrite who went around distributing Bible tracts with titles such as ‘Satan under the Tea Table’.)
Once again work proved a solace and helped him overcome his pain and grief, for he added, ‘Of the physical sacrifice which the effort cost me I shall say nothing. I only look back now at the blessed relief which my occupation (forced as it was) brought to my mind. The Art which had been always the pride and the pleasure of my life became now more than ever “its own exceeding great reward”.’
Wilkie struggled through the next couple of months and somehow finished the physical task of writing The Moonstone at the end of June. As Dickens was back from America, he was able to oversee L’Abîme, a French version of No Thoroughfare for the theatre, and he made no secret that he thought it was superior to Wilkie and Webster’s English-language effort. The last instalment of The Moonstone appeared in All the Year Round and Harper’s Weekly on 8 August, by which time the book had been published in a three-volume edition by Tinsley Brothers, a specialist in sensation novels, who had enjoyed great success earlier in the decade with Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. Wilkie was probably drawn to the firm by a combination of this track record and his friendship with Edmund Yates, who had recently gone into partnership with the firm to edit Tinsley’s Magazine, a self-professed ‘illustrated monthly magazine of light literature’ which was the latest challenger to the Cornhill magazine and Temple Bar for the
bookish middle-class market.
After a couple of lukewarm reviews of The Moonstone388 in the Athenaeum, which referred to the ‘sordid detective element’, and the Spectator, which judged the book ‘not worthy of Mr Wilkie Collins’s reputation as a novelist’, critical reaction, spurred by an anonymous notice in The Times, was generally positive, even if, to Wilkie’s disgust, Mudie’s took only five hundred copies, a drop of 75 per cent on Armadale. As it was, the first edition of 1,500 copies quickly sold out. William Tinsley, the publisher, recorded387 how ‘even the porters and boys were interested in the story, and read the new number in sly corners, and often with their packs on their backs,’ whereas The Woman in White had rather gone over their heads.
A second edition of 500 soon followed. By then, however, relations between publisher and author had broken down over money. Wilkie even tried to acquire Tinsley’s blocks of type and have this edition published elsewhere. His concerns were not unreasonable since Tinsley Brothers had a reputation for sharp practice. Indeed, when they ran into financial difficulties, Yates soon moved on, and Wilkie never returned to them after this book. It is surprising that a man with his knowledge of the book business should have entered what from all accounts was a flimsy agreement with this particular publisher at this stage of his career. One reason might have been that, as would soon become apparent, he was now estranged from his solicitor, Ebenezer Benham, who had overseen the negotiations with Tinsley, as well as other efforts to reach a wider market through, for example, a penny edition of The Woman in White.
Once the task of writing was over, Wilkie was able at last to catch up on other matters in his life. One of his first moves in early July was to book an appointment with his dentist, George Gregson, who was also his landlord when he lived in Harley Street. In a small notebook (which survives in the New York Public Library) he drew up a list of people to visit and those to receive copies of his book. It contains no real surprises: both Russell brothers (of Swallowfield) are there, as well as Mrs Elliot and a note to ‘return Indian books’ to Pigott.
Otherwise, the main interest was a note of items to collect, including a gold locket and watch key, for which he paid the South Audley Street jeweller Tessier £15 7s on 20 July. The locket was important because it was a memento of his mother, containing her portrait on one side and a lock of hair (presumably hers) on the other. He would later give it to Martha.
Wilkie’s respite from work did not mean his problems were over. Charley continued to worry him. He was staying with his father-in-law at Gad’s Hill, from where came news that he had been vomiting profusely and seemed on the point of death.389 Wilkie became so alarmed that he asked his brother’s doctor, Henri de Mussy, if he and Beard could accompany him on his next visit to Gad’s Hill.
Wilkie also had unusually pressing financial concerns, the catalyst being the Weston-super-Mare doctor Joseph Stringfield, who had contacted him a couple of years earlier at Harley Street. Since this address was by then already eighteen months out of date, they cannot have seen much of one another. Nevetheless, Wilkie replied positively, sending his ‘kindest remembrances’390 to Mrs Stringfield and his ‘love’ to their daughter Florry.
Wilkie’s good wishes were misplaced, as became clear when Stringfield’s wife Mary sued him for divorce in December 1866, citing charges of drunkenness and cruelty towards her and their three children. The doctor’s case was not helped when, the following June, he threatened to kill the solicitor conducting Mary’s case. He seems to have been treated leniently on this score, perhaps because Wilkie stood bail on a surety of £250. The divorce court judge had no hesitation in granting Mary a judicial separation, with costs and custody of the children. But when Stringfield counter-sued, he got into financial difficulties and was unable to pay her what he owed. As a result, by June 1868, Wilkie became worried about his bail money and asked Benham for advice.391
He does not seem to have paid anything out, and Stringfield died shortly afterwards. However, Wilkie had another financial matter to resolve with his solicitor. The previous summer, when he had needed to raise £800 to buy the lease on Gloucester Place, he had borrowed the money from a client of Benham’s. Why he did this is unclear, since his Coutts account had a healthy surplus – £1,931 in April 1867 and £2,301 in January 1868. Nevertheless, for all his earning power, he was always worried about financial affairs. Only a few weeks before his mother died, he had asked her to sign a document which would ensure that, after her death, he and Charley would have no problems inheriting and passing on their half-shares in £5,000, which had been left by her aunt, Mary (Easton) Davis. Harriet did not make a will, since, as was enshrined in the law of the time, she had no assets of her own and no property; all her money coming from her interest in her late husband’s estate.
Since ‘Aunt Davis’s’ inheritance (or the prospect of it) had been used to guarantee Wilkie’s loan for the house, his solicitor Benham did not wait long after Harriet’s death before issuing a writ (or distringas) threatening to distrain this money. This seems to have been remarkably bad manners on his part, but Wilkie took it in his stride, resolving to settle the matter before going abroad in August. His bank records confirm that he paid Benham £800 on his return at the end of the following month.
Benham’s precipitate action may have been caused by his own urgent need to raise money to save a business in which Dickens’s son Charley was involved. That same August, the Kennet Paper Making Company392 was wound up in the High Court at the request of Edward (as he now liked to call himself instead of Ebenezer) Benham, of Isleworth, who was a creditor and shareholder (as was Charley Dickens). The managing director of the firm went bankrupt later in the year.
Wilkie seems to have been an entirely innocent party, but the incident soured his relations with Benham, whose partner William Tindell took over his affairs from around this date. It also affected his friendship with Dickens, who became appreciably cooler towards him. It was sad if, after all their shared experience, the two men fell out over money. But there were other factors. Perhaps feeling aggrieved, Dickens reversed his opinion of The Moonstone, describing it to Wills as ‘wearisome beyond endurance’393 in construction, ‘and there is a vein of obstinate conceit in it that makes enemies of readers’. He was also, perhaps unfairly, critical of what he considered Wilkie’s blinkered approach to his brother Charley’s physical well-being. As he told Wills, ‘It is a part of the bump in Wilkie’s forehead that he will not allow his brother to be very ill . . . The obstinacy of said Wilkie is something perfectly inconceivable. His bodily condition is robust health, when compared with his mental.’394
As in a good sensation novel, the trail that might explain Wilkie’s troubled mind led back to his home. His tribulations had recently taken on a much more personal nature, relating to Caroline Graves. It was no secret that she and his mother had never got on. But now that Harriet Collins was dead, Caroline was no longer prepared to maintain the status quo. She certainly did not want to stay hidden at home, particularly as Wilkie had now set up his new mistress in Bolsover Street. Once again the details are frustratingly difficult to pin down, as the written evidence appears to have been methodically destroyed.
What is clear is that Caroline quit Gloucester Place, and on 29 October she surprised everyone by walking up the aisle at St Mary’s parish church in Marylebone on the arm of Joseph Charles Clow – the son of a distiller’s agent – who was aged twenty-three. She was thirty-seven and quite what she saw in this mere stripling is hard to determine.
She must have known her new husband for a while. He cannot have appeared out of the blue after Harriet Collins’s death. He had probably been in the wings since Wilkie first took up with Martha four years earlier. But how had Caroline become friendly with him? His upwardly mobile family gives little clue. Having grown rich from selling liquor and then in property, the Clows now lived in some style on the north side of Regent’s Park on Avenue Road, where the Collinses once had a house. Joseph Charles’s London-born father,
also called Joseph, first surfaced in the public records as a ‘proprietor of houses’, while visiting relations in the Leicestershire village of Great Easton in 1851. At the time, when newly married Caroline Graves had just given birth to her first child, Joseph Charles was five and living with his mother in the family house in Kentish Town. By 1861 the Clows had moved to a better address in Kentish Town and the boy’s father was working as a commercial traveller and distiller. Five years later they were ensconced at 2 Avenue Road.
However, the paterfamilias – and the probable reason for Caroline’s knowing them – was Joseph’s cousin Leonard, who lived and worked in Fitzrovia, close to where Caroline had lodged on her return to London in 1852. She had then been at Charlton Street, around the corner from Leonard Clow, a ‘spirit and wine merchant’ at 22 Grafton Street. He later moved to nearby Russell Place, and kept a number of off-licences, all within walking distance of Fitzroy Square.
After marrying the daughter of a Cheltenham music seller, Leonard became a respected member of the community. He was involved in local politics and, from the early 1860s, was secretary and treasurer of the Fitzroy Market ragged school – a thankless task since, until the introduction of state education in 1870, such establishments stood at the bottom of the pecking order after private, endowed, Church and national schools.
Caroline’s relationship with Wilkie had been problematic for some time, and it had not been improved by the arrival of Martha. Dickens throws more light than anyone on Caroline’s brittle character. Reading between the lines of his letters, she must at some stage have given Wilkie an ultimatum: he should either marry her or face the consequences. This could have happened at any time after 1864. But this year in particular he was in no frame of mind to be cajoled. By the summer she had decamped, leaving Wilkie to seek refuge with the Lehmanns in Highgate, before departing for Switzerland and Germany in August. Frederick Lehmann was to have accompanied him, but he was initially detained by business and was only able to join Wilkie later in the Black Forest resort of Baden-Baden, where he had travelled with his son Rudolph. At one stage while they were together, Frederick Lehmann had to trail round four chemists395 in one town in order to obtain enough laudanum to satisfy Wilkie’s habit (the limit that each outlet was allowed to prescribe not being enough).
Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation Page 28