Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation

by Andrew Lycett

  By now, with his usual insouciance (aided by amnesiac qualities of opium in various forms), Wilkie’s mind was onto other things. He was thinking of his next book, Man and Wife, which has been described as his first ostensibly didactic novel. Here, he again added his voice – surprisingly, given his situation – to the demand for reform of Britain’s matrimonial laws. A new Liberal government under William Gladstone had been returned to power at the start of the year, and John Stuart Mill would publish his powerful treatise ‘The Subjugation of Women’ a few months later. One result was the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870, which, for the first time, would allow women to own money and property.

  Wilkie chose to focus on a couple of other anomalies in the matrimonial laws, which varied in England, Scotland and Ireland. By October, he was asking his solicitor Benham (they were still communicating) about the complexities of the ongoing Yelverton case, in which a Protestant Irish aristocrat exploited a century-old statute that nullified any marriage involving a member of his religion if the ceremony had been conducted by a Catholic priest. Major William Yelverton, later Viscount Avonmore, tried to use this legislation to revoke his marriage in Ireland to a Catholic woman, to justify not paying her any maintenance, and to seek to marry another woman. One of the endless legal actions in the dispute took place in an Edinburgh court, which, under Scottish law, allowed marriages to be solemnised on the declaration of the two participants without the need for intervention by any priest. This was not the case in England, a difference around which Wilkie would spin an important aspect of the plot of Man and Wife. This particular anomaly was also dealt with in the 1870 Marriage Act, so his novel did not lack for up-to- the-minute detail.

  Wilkie now took a more relaxed attitude to Caroline’s departure from his life. He attended her wedding to Clow in Marylebone parish church, and his friend and doctor, Francis Beard, was on hand to sign the register as a witness. As Harriet had recently finished her schooling (Wilkie signed the last cheque for £75 on 15 July 1868), she stayed on at Gloucester Place, swapping roles with her mother as Wilkie’s secretary and housekeeper. In return, he helped Caroline get established in her new matrimonial home, paying her a small sum in December 1868, followed by a more substantial sum of £50 in June the following year.

  Wilkie was no doubt relieved to have more time with Martha in Bolsover Street. In early October, a few weeks before Caroline’s wedding, he impregnated his young mistress with his first child, who would be born the following July.

  Dickens was not able to attend Caroline’s wedding, since he was away on a reading tour. He clearly knew about it since, on 25 October, he wrote to Wills from the Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool, acknowledging his colleague’s excited news about the forthcoming ceremony, and adding, ‘Let me communicate another point of interest which may not have reached you – Frank Beard will give away the Ber-ri-i-ide!’396

  However, even Dickens’s knowledge of the nuptials was limited. For, four days later, on the day of the marriage, Dickens wrote (still from Liverpool) to Georgina Hogarth, ‘Wilkie’s affairs defy all prediction. For any thing one knows, the whole matrimonial pretence may be a lie of that woman’s, intended to make him marry her, and (contrary to her expectations) breaking down at last.’397 In other words, Caroline may have tried emotional blackmail on Wilkie, but failed. She was clearly not popular in the Dickens household. But, for all Wilkie’s coolness at this stage, the tensions of the relationship must have taken a fearful toll on him when his mother was dying and he was working so hard on The Moonstone.

  Years later, Dickens’s daughter and Wilkie’s former sister-in-law Katey put a different spin on events when she told her friend and biographer Mrs Storey, ‘Wilkie had a mistress Caroline with whom he lived for twenty years & then she married & afterwards Collins said to her I suppose you could not marry a man who had ----- & she said “No”.’398 Katey’s statement, recorded thus in Mrs Storey’s diary, with its tantalising omissions, suggests that Caroline precipitated the break-up, since there was something about him that prevented her marrying him. What could she have been referring to? She might simply have meant ‘a mistress’ or ‘another woman’, or, conceivably, a medical condition, perhaps a recurring venereal disease. Either way, it seems that she wanted a formalisation of their relationship, and he refused or she did not think he was up to it.

  Wilkie typically stayed mum. If, as Dickens had detected, he had shown emotional obtuseness in his attitude towards his brother Charley, he was not now going to make a fuss about a breakdown in his sexual ménage. Instead he moved to draw a decisive line under the matter and, from November, as noted in the records of the parish of St Marylebone, it was he, rather than Caroline, who now paid the rates on the house in Gloucester Place.

  15

  BECOMING A FATHER

  SINCE CAROLINE HAD played only a peripheral part in his life for some time, and since he generally preferred a bachelor existence, Wilkie’s day-to-day schedule barely changed as a result of her wedding. He had a pregnant girlfriend living less than a mile away but he did not let this concern him too much. After publication of The Moonstone, he went through his usual round of literary housekeeping duties, such as arranging foreign translations. Although the book sold well in Britain, it did not prevent Tinsley from suffering financial problems, and Wilkie had to be tough about obtaining payments which were frequently late.

  Following his mother’s death, his bank balance was again looking healthier, as indeed was Charley’s. The two brothers could now inherit under their father’s will, which meant sharing some £16,000 in various securities, as well as just under £2,000 in further assets. Although he was only able to enjoy the income on these investments, Wilkie had, by the end of September, added to his portfolio with his own purchases of around £1,500 worth of Russian and US bonds, as well as Indian railway stocks. Casting aside his occasional frugality, he was again able to spend freely on clothes, drink and items such as the locket he commissioned in memory of his mother. With an amazing lack of rancour, he continued to subsidise both Caroline and her daughter, while Martha also began receiving modest sums towards the end of 1869.

  He was now more reliant than ever on the Lehmanns for his social life. They had moved from Westbourne Terrace to an imposing town house in Berkeley Square, but they also liked to spend time at Woodlands in Muswell Hill.399 Still obsessed by the theatre, Wilkie invited the vivacious Nina Lehmann to join him at a pantomime at the start of 1869 at the revamped Marylebone Theatre (now named the Royal Alfred in honour of the Queen’s second son). She had been hoping to employ his cook, but this proved not possible, as he had just sacked her. ‘She has done all sorts of dreadful things,’400 he explained. ‘Alas! such but too frequently is the fatal gift of Genius!’ He offered his own services, in the absence of any obvious alternative, but warned that his style was expensive since he looked ‘on meat simply as a material for sauces’.

  The following month Wilkie accompanied Elizabeth Benzon (Frederick’s sister) to a concert of Schumann’s work at St James’s Hall in Regent Street. He did not enjoy himself, bluntly informing his fellow guest, ‘Herr Schumann’s music, Madame Schumann’s playing, and the atmosphere of St James’s Hall, are three such afflictions as I never desire to feel again.’401

  He had reason to feel grumpy since he was trying to wean himself off laudanum, and believed he could do this by injecting himself with morphine. As he told Mrs Benzon, ‘My doctor is trying to break me of the habit of drinking laudanum. I am stabbed every night at ten with a sharp-pointed syringe which injects morphia under my skin – and gets me a night’s rest without any of the drawbacks of taking opium internally.’402 He believed that, if he persevered, he would be ‘able, before long, gradually to diminish the quantity of morphia and the number of the nightly stabbings – and so emancipate myself from opium altogether.’

  Morphine was a modern drug and injection the latest means of taking it. Its synthesis at the start of the century had been a triumph for rational sci
entific endeavour, and for organic chemistry in particular. It was a pure and consistent substance, unlike laudanum, which was unreliable and more of a vehicle for the dreams of poets. Morphine’s delivery had been greatly improved by the development of the hypodermic needle in the 1850s. As a result, it was widely used for pain relief in both the Crimean War and the American Civil War. Like methadone in the twentieth century, it was supposed to wean users off their habit, but it was actually stronger and more addictive. And in Wilkie’s case, it did not work. He was taking opiates to deaden the pain of his gout. As that did not go away, he became increasingly addicted to opium in one form or other.

  This, in a strange way, made him more prosaic. Opium no longer opened the door to the romantic hallucinations of The Woman in White or even the eerie dreams of The Moonstone. It was now more of a painkiller than ever, and the evidence would show in Wilkie’s writing, where sensationalism gave way to greater realism. Despite his artistic background and cerebral interests, he was out of tune with his contemporary Walter Pater’s remark that ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.’403 Wilkie wanted structure and content, which set him on a different path from the emerging aesthetic movement.

  Although Wilkie had decided to write a new novel focusing on the marriage laws, he was initially more interested in further theatrical success. Since No Thoroughfare had been a commercial hit, particularly in the provinces, he hoped for a repeat of this with a new drama, written in conjunction with Fechter.

  Black and White tackled the thorny issue of race, which was beginning to be discussed in the wake of Darwin. It told of Miss Milburn, an heiress in Trinidad in 1830, before the emancipation of slaves. Before marrying her fiancé, a local landowner called Stephen Westcraft, she goes to Paris where she meets the swarthy Count Maurice de Layrac. He pursues her back to the Caribbean, where he discovers he has mixed blood and is technically a slave. Miss Milburn initially baulks at the idea of marrying a man with this background, but later agrees, assisted on her way by a useful turn in the plot – the discovery of a letter proving that the Count has already been released from slavery.

  Although the idea came from Fechter, who saw a good part for himself in the Count, the story was developed by Wilkie, with help from Frederick Lehmann’s recollections of slavery in America. As a result of his business dealings in the United States, Lehmann had taken a strong stand against slavery, befriending Martha Griffith Browne, a poet and abolitionist from Kentucky. Her Autobiography of a Female Slave, written in 1856, was one of the first of a genre known as a pseudo-slave narrative. Through it she aimed to raise funds to emancipate her slaves and settle them in the free North. When she came to London in 1860, she visited the Lehmanns and almost certainly met Wilkie.

  Fechter was reunited with Carlotta Leclercq, his leading lady from No Thoroughfare, when Black and White opened at the Adelphi Theatre on 29 March 1869. Dickens thought the first night went ‘brilliantly . . . It was more like a fiftieth night than a first.’ However, though the play won critical plaudits, it failed to attract audiences. The Daily News suggested it was too similar to Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon,404 which had run ten years earlier, as well as to Poe’s classic story ‘The Purloined Letter’. Wilkie seemed to accept this lack of novelty when he admitted that the British public had been exposed to too many adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

  He also took his personal financial loss on the chin. This proved worse than expected since, over the past year, he had been lending regular sums of money to Fechter, who was notorious for getting into debt. At one stage, after Wilkie had given the actor a cheque for £100,405 Lehmann became concerned that his friend was over-extending himself. Wilkie assured him that there was nothing to worry about, but was touched by this cultivated businessman’s solicitude. ‘Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for your kind letter,’406 he wrote. ‘No man – whatever his disappointments may be – can consider himself other than a fortunate man, when he has got such a friend as you are.’

  Wilkie was solvent enough to spend £60 on having two hundred copies of the play printed by Charles Whiting. He then methodically set about finding an outlet for Man and Wife, his book about the marriage laws. He skilfully used an offer from Cassell’s Magazine for weekly serial rights, starting in November, to negotiate with various American publishers, including Putnam’s and Appleton. Eventually he went back to Harper and Brothers, though for their £750 fee they required an assurance that the publication of the Cassell’s book would not appear in America before their own serial. As often before, Wilkie was plagued by the complexities of copyright in the United States, where piracy was still rife since it had yet to sign any international agreement on the matter.

  Not that the situation was much better in Europe, as became clear when he was approached by the Dutch publisher Belinfante Brothers. He dealt elegantly enough with their effrontery in addressing him as Madame Wilkie Collins. ‘I am not the charming person whom you suppose me to be,’407 he replied. ‘I wear trowsers; I have a vote for Parliament; I possess a beard; in two dreadful words, I am – a Man.’ But he was incensed at their offer to pay him with a single copy of their Dutch-language Stuivers Magazijn. At least he now had Benham’s partner William Tindell to provide solid advice on contract and copyright matters.

  He did not take his usual summer holiday that year, largely because on 4 July Martha gave birth to his (and their) first child, a daughter called Marian. The baby’s arrival was not officially registered, so it almost certainly took place in the hurly-burly of Bolsover Street, and the news was kept quiet. Wilkie, predictably, made no comment about the new arrival, though it is noticeable that she carried the first name of his best-known heroine, Marian Halcombe. The Woman in White also provided a surname for Martha, who was now known as Mrs Dawson, after the doctor who tended Marian in the novel. It is surprising that history has tended to associate The Woman in White with Caroline, when it has more enduring links to Martha.

  Wilkie was thrilled by this addition to his extended family. Before the end of the year he took steps to include all his dependants – Martha, Marian, Caroline and Harriet – in a new will.408 He showed further evidence of his earnest in October when his payments to Martha became regular – £20 per month, rising to £25 per month in September 1871.

  Without any travels to occupy him, Wilkie was now, in the latter half of 1869, free to concentrate on writing Man and Wife. The result was the last of his meandering plot-driven sagas. His subsequent books would be shorter, showing something of the new realism he also hoped to bring to his efforts for the stage.

  Man and Wife opens in the comfortable Hampstead villa of Mr Vanborough, a gentleman with Parliamentary ambitions, who is tired of his wife, Anne, a former actress, and wants a younger, better-class replacement. He is helped by the judgement of a slick lawyer called Delamayn, who tells him that his marriage is in fact null since his wife is a Roman Catholic and, as in the Yelverton case, their original ceremony had been conducted by a Catholic priest. The lawyer goes on to become Attorney General and is ennobled; Anne wastes away and on her deathbed has only one request of her best friend Blanche – that her daughter, also called Anne, become a governess. Otherwise, she plaintively asks, ‘Will she end like me?’

  Twelve years later Delamayn’s smooth, Oxford-educated son, Geoffrey, enters a relationship with this younger Anne, without either of them knowing this back story. Anne has duly become the governess to Blanche, the daughter of her mother’s best friend. While she and Geoffrey are both at the house of Lady Lundie, the younger Blanche’s stepmother in Scotland, Anne becomes worried that she is destined to follow her mother’s fate and threatens suicide if he does not marry her. Since they are in Perthshire, he suggests a ‘private marriage’, or a Scottish wedding ceremony, requiring nothing more than their assent. They arrange to meet at a nearby hotel to go through with this. But he has been wavering and, when he is recalled to London because his father is ill, he fools his friend Arnold Brinkworth into
going to the hotel, in his guise, to explain the situation to Anne.

  Once there, the decent-minded Arnold, who is eager to save Anne embarrassment, goes through the charade of being her husband, since this is what the hotel was expecting. He even spends the night in her room. As a result, everyone there is prepared to say they were married, though Delamayn’s letter explaining the real situation to Anne has been stolen by one of the staff. Delamayn later seizes on these circumstances to inform Anne that they cannot go through with their nuptials since, under Scottish law, she is now married to Arnold. By then his family has a well-heeled young widow, Mrs Glenarm, lined up as a wife for him.

  In her efforts to prove this has all been a mistake, Anne is helped by Blanche’s uncle, the charming and sophisticated Sir Patrick Lundie, who joins her as a quasi-detective – a now almost obligatory role in much of Wilkie’s fiction.

  In presenting his usual mixture of mistaken identities, villainous behaviour and revenge, Wilkie’s general aversion to matrimony is never in doubt: it is a functional institution. ‘Done, in the name of Morality. Done, in the interests of Virtue. Done, in an age of progress, and under the most perfect government on the face of the earth.’ At one stage, he satirises an actual marriage ceremony: ‘There was the proper and pitiless staring of all the female spectators when the bride was led to the altar. There was the clergyman’s preliminary look at the licence – which meant official caution. And there was the clerk’s prelim-inary look at the bridegroom – which meant official fees. All the women appeared to be in their natural element; and all the men appeared to be out of it. Then the service began – rightly-considered, the most terrible, surely, of all mortal ceremonies – the service which binds two human beings, who know next to nothing of each other’s natures, to risk the tremendous experiment of living together till death parts them – the service which says, in effect if not in words, Take your leap in the dark: we sanctify, but we don’t insure, it!’