While his obvious target, as set out in his preface, was Britain’s marriage laws, which deprived women of their property and condemned them to servitude, he was also tilting at the coarsening of British culture, which he held at least partly responsible for this situation. As his preface also stated, he was concerned about the ‘spread of grossness and brutality among certain classes of the English population’. Echoing Matthew Arnold’s reference to Barbarians and Philistines in his recent polemic ‘Culture and Anarchy’, Wilkie noted the offensive presence of ‘Roughs’ in all areas of society, including medicine, the City and the universities (where riots at Oxford had been followed by the sacking of Christ Church Library). He equated these ‘hearties’ with the rise of Muscular Christianity, which emphasised the development of the body at the expense of the mind. And no one epitomised this uncivilising trend more obviously than the smarmy, insensitive lawyer Geoffrey Delamayn, who had rowed for Oxford and competed in a national road race that killed him.
Wilkie was also interested in the contemporary theme of destiny and free will. The publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species a decade earlier had highlighted the extent to which people’s lives were dictated by outside forces. The cult of athletics was related to this, since physical fitness was regarded as a way of enhancing one’s chances in a world ruled by natural selection. Wilkie ridicules this idea by suggesting that running could actually be harmful to one’s health.
Like all Wilkie’s books, Man and Wife is littered with his prejudices. There is no mistaking his disdain for the legal profession and, particularly, its attitude to women. His mildly progressive views about the opposite sex’s role in society filter through, as when the indolent Blanche is told that she suffers from a malady common to English young ladies ‘and the name of it is Nothing-to-Do’. However, Wilkie can also be more conventional, as when he editorialises that ‘the natural condition of a woman is to find her master in a man. Look in the face of any woman who is in no direct way dependent on a man – and, as certainly as you see the sun in a cloudless sky, you see a woman who is not happy.’
In such contexts, he is often being mildly satirical, as when he describes the main attractions of English women as ‘youth, health, plumpness’. His own preferences are apparent in his portrayal of the younger Anne, who, although no beauty and indeed suffering from physical defects, was nevertheless ‘one of those women – the formidable few – who have the hearts of men and the peace of families at their mercy. She moved – and there was some subtle charm, Sir, in the movement, that made you look back, and suspend your conversation with your friend, and watch her silently while she walked. She sat by you and talked to you – and behold, a sensitive something passed into that little twist at the corner of the mouth, and into that nervous uncertainty in the soft gray eye, which turned defect into beauty – which enchained your senses – which made your nerves thrill if she touched you by accident, and set your heart beating if you looked at the same book with her, and felt her breath on your face. All this, let it be well understood, only happened if you were a man.’ In this he was conveying his idealised appreciation of Martha Rudd’s sex appeal.
Wilkie had already researched the Yelverton case and other legal precedents for his story. For guidance on athleticism, a little-known area for him, he contacted J.C. Parkinson, a crusading journalist (and prominent Freemason),409 who had worked on Household Words and was now at the Daily News, who supplied him with details about rowing and running. This was ironic since the book was dedicated to the Lehmanns, whose son Rudolph would become one of the leading oarsmen of his generation at Cambridge. However, his friends were in on the joke since much of the book was written at their house, Woodlands, and their name clearly resonated in that of Delamayn.
When he was abroad on business, Frederick Lehmann often sent Wilkie a gift from wherever he was visiting. His present from the United States in October 1869 was a box of Stoughton’s Bitters, a sought-after ‘mixer’ of the time. Wilkie thanked him profusely: ‘I suspended an immortal work of fiction, by going down-stairs, and tasting a second bottle, properly combined with Gin. Result delicious! Thank you a thousand times!’410 But in his letter, sent just three months after the birth of his daughter, he never mentioned his domestic situation. Instead, he stated categorically that he had little news. ‘I sit here all day, attacking English Institutions – battering down the marriage laws of Scotland and Ireland, and reviling athletic sports – in short writing an unpopular book, which may possibly make a hit, from the mere oddity of a modern writer running full tilt against the popular sentiment, instead of clinging to it.’
As Wilkie worked his way through the instalments of his novel, he found Cassell’s as demanding as any other publisher: although he had negotiated that he would have the final say on what went into the magazine, they asked him to remove the words ‘damn it’ from his copy. He reluctantly agreed, but asked that this should not be regarded as a precedent: ‘Readers who object to expletives in books, are – as to my experience – readers who object to a great many other things in books, which they are too stupid to understand.’411
Aside from this, his progress went smoothly, and by early the following June he had finished all thirty-seven instalments. On the very day (the 9th) that he completed his task, he fell asleep from exhaustion and awoke to learn that Dickens had died that morning at Gad’s Hill, following a stroke.
Their relationship had been clouded for the last year or so. Wilkie had benefited from his old friend’s generosity in January 1870 when he had asked for (and received) a formal letter confirming that, as the author, he held the copyright on everything that he had written for Household Words and All the Year Round. But underlying problems persisted, one being Charley Collins and what Dickens felt was Wilkie’s ineffectual response to his brother’s plight. Although Charley was solvent, following the death of his mother, his capital was still tied up and he seldom had much ready cash. Katey, his prima donna-ish wife, who had been modelling for various artists, even discussed a possible acting career with the impresario Horace Wigan. Dickens tried to help by offering Charley a chance to draw the illustrations for what would be his last (unfinished) novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Although he wanted to return to painting, Charley was unable to complete more than the cover, so the main task passed to the young Luke Fildes, who was also on hand to execute an evocative watercolour of Dickens’s library, with its now empty chair, on the day of the master novelist’s death.
Another bone of contention was Edwin Drood. Perhaps Wilkie felt that this story, which places opium at its centre, drew too much on The Moonstone. He was certainly not kind in his description of it as ‘Dickens’s last laboured effort, the melancholy work of a worn-out brain’.412
Wilkie attended Dickens’s funeral in Westminster Abbey on 14 June, but showed little overt emotion. He seemed more interested in ensuring that The Times had a list of the mourners, on which point he wrote to William Stebbing, a fellow member of the Athenaeum Club, who was chief leader writer. The paper reported the following day that fourteen people had attended the funeral,413 but listed only thirteen, which has led to speculation that Nelly Ternan’s name was omitted. If so, this would have provided a fitting finale to the long-running farce in which the two friends colluded (rather successfully) to ensure that no evidence of their dalliances seeped out.
When Wilkie told William Tindell that ‘the day of Dickens’s Funeral was a lost day to me’, he was thinking how it had kept him from preparing proofs for the next stage of his story’s development – its appearance at the end of the month in three volumes under the imprint of F.S. Ellis, a smallish firm with origins in the bookselling trade, whose main claim to fame was as the publisher of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
By then, the combined effect of Dickens’s death and his own exertions on his book had set him back physically. He dragged himself to Antwerp with Frank Beard, more for the air of the cross-Channel voyage than anything else, but reported that he was so we
ak he could ‘hardly write even a note’. The widowed Beard was in many respects worse than he, and in July Wilkie showed his capacity for friendship when he took off a further week to tend to his doctor, who ‘stands in some need, poor fellow, of rest and peace, and of the help and company of a friend’.414
Wilkie was never out of action for long. Although the first 1,000-copy edition of Man and Wife sold out immediately, he was soon complaining about the lacklustre way in which F.S. Ellis had gone about selling his book. He was particularly incensed by the failure to advertise in either The Times or the Daily Telegraph. Perhaps his chivvying was effective, or perhaps the publisher had done the right thing in the first place, for the book quickly went into a second and third edition (even if copies were remaindered four years later). It was helped by a clutch of positive notices, as in the Saturday Review,415 which found it ‘exceedingly entertaining’. The main criticism was that it was too didactic, though Mrs Oliphant in Blackwood’s Magazine416 had changed her tune, describing it as ‘one of the cleverest of recent works of fiction’.
Before the end of August, Wilkie completed a four-act stage adaptation of the book, the usual preventative measure he took to ward off piracy. When he discovered his works were still being illegally published in Canada, he found himself a publisher in Toronto, the rapidly expanding firm of Hunter, Rose. He deftly achieved this feat without alienating Harper and Brothers, his main outlet in the United States, which tended to look on its northern neighbour as a captive subsidiary market.
In this, as in other areas of his life, Wilkie had learned to compromise. Although he was annoyed when the New York manager Augustin Daly put on Man and Wife at his Fifth Avenue Theatre, purporting that it was the author’s original text, he reached an agreement with the influential Daly, who before long was presenting Wilkie’s official renderings of not only Man and Wife but No Name. For a while their relationship remained rocky: when Daly sent him $1,000 ‘purely out of courtesy’ at the end of Man and Wife’s run, Wilkie made clear that he regarded this approach as offensive417 since their dealings were entirely commercial, but nevertheless he accepted the money and a friendship soon developed. In this accommodating mood, Wilkie even signed a contract with Belinfante Brothers, who later paid him one hundred guilders (under £9) for the privilege of printing Man and Wife. He considered this a triumph, since they had ‘never hitherto paid sixpence to any author (not a Dutchman) in the civilised universe’,418 and he agreed to let them publish his next book, which would be Poor Miss Finch.
Wilkie’s readership was international, which explained his muddled concerns about the repercussions of the Franco-Prussian War during the autumn of 1870. On the one hand, he wrote to his translator Emil Lehmann telling him that, ‘like the rest of my countrymen’, he was ‘heartily on the German side in the War’.419 On the other, as the German armies converged on Paris, he tried to help his old friend François Regnier, who was holed up there, offering him not only a bed, but also the use of his banking services at Coutts. He was ridiculed at the Athenaeum Club when he told fellow members that he expected fierce French resistance. They told him to return to his fiction and not trifle with politics. But he felt strongly about the issue, telling Regnier of the rousing support for the French cause he had witnessed at the Alhambra before Christmas. By then Regnier had quit Paris and was living out of harm’s way in Boulogne.
Wilkie’s attitude arose from a deep-felt pacifism that despaired of nations being ‘still ready to slaughter each other, at the command of one miserable wretch whose interest it is to set them fighting! Is this the nineteenth century? or the ninth?’ He became an early advocate of the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction when he mused, ‘I begin to believe in only one civilising influence – the discovery one of these days, of a destructive agent so terrible that War shall mean annihilation, and men’s fears shall force them to keep the peace.’420
Early in 1871, Wilkie was to be found playing the genial host at a ‘pic-nic dinner’ at Gloucester Place. This was his way of describing an informal gathering of his closest friends – Lehmann, Frith, Charles Reade and his mistress Mrs Seymour, his brother Charley, and ‘another woman’, as he coyly put it to the final invitee, his doctor Frank Beard. (Of his usual coterie only Charles Ward and Pigott were missing.) In the absence of other evidence, we can only speculate on the identity of this mystery lady, but she was almost certainly Caroline Clow (formerly Graves), who had returned to base after a brief experiment in matrimony.
She was definitely at Gloucester Place two months later, when she was listed as a resident (albeit as housekeeper and domestic servant) in the 1871 census taken on 2 April.421 Caroline’s marriage had probably ended rather earlier, for in January 1870 there was a record of a J. Clow arriving in Brisbane, Australia, on the Melmerby, a 1,500-ton sailing ship registered in Liverpool. The man’s age was given as twenty-five, near enough to Caroline’s husband’s, and he was not listed in the 1871 English census. Caroline’s husband, as he remained until her death, certainly went to Australia, where he worked as a mining engineer and maintained a pattern of relationships with the opposite sex that was every bit as complex as it had been in Britain.
If Caroline’s marriage was over by 1870, she may have accompanied Wilkie on his most recent visit to the Kentish coast in September that year. Broadstairs now held too many ghosts for him. Instead he went to Ramsgate, a childhood haunt, which was now enjoying a mid-Victorian renaissance. He stayed at the Granville Hotel, designed by Edward Welby Pugin, son of the Gothic architect, A.W.N. Pugin, who had lived locally. The hotel was in St Lawrence on Sea, an up-market development on the east side of the town, which was intended to cash in on the popularity of the main resort. Although magnificently appointed, the hotel, adjacent to the estate of the Jewish financier and philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore, never caught on. Within a few years it was in financial difficulties and is described in Pevsner’s Buildings of England as ‘a monstrosity’. But Wilkie liked such lavish hotels and, thinking back to the Meurice in Paris, may have considered it a good place to resurrect his relationship with Caroline.
Her reappearance in Gloucester Place must have made life more difficult, and more lonely, for Martha and her young daughter in Bolsover Street. This was especially true because Martha was pregnant again. At least she had the company of her sister Alice, who had been working with her in the Vauxhall Tavern in Great Yarmouth when she met Wilkie. Alice was now living around the corner from her in Harley Street, where she cooked for a well-known doctor, John Hall Davis. She later acted as housekeeper for her sister and Wilkie’s growing family.
On the work front, Wilkie was increasingly disillusioned by the state of British publishing. As he complained to Harper and Brothers in New York,422 their transatlantic counterparts remained in thrall to Mudie’s, which continued to dictate public taste and purchases. As a result, they were totally uncommercial and he was ‘seriously contemplating turning to dramatic writing for the future instead of novel-writing. The publishers here who have money, have no enterprise. The publishers with enterprise have no money. The small booksellers are being ruined. The public is as badly supplied as possible. And all for want of the courage, among English publishers, to issue a book, as you do, at a price which the reader can pay.’ He claimed to have put forward ideas for improving the situation, but British publishers were averse to risk – ‘in other words they object to that bold speculation on the public taste which is the essence of a publishers business!’
This meant that Wilkie was even more eager for success in the theatre. At this stage he was juggling dramatic versions of three books – Man and Wife, No Name and The Woman in White. But before he could allow himself licence to pursue these interests, he had two new print projects to complete. His novel Poor Miss Finch returned to the subject of disability, which he had explored most recently in Man and Wife. This time, he offered an original twist: although the heroine Lucilla Finch was blind, she preferred this condition to full sightedness, which for
her was fraught with unhappiness.
The book is another typical Wilkie Collins concoction involving doubles and confusion about identity. A synopsis makes it sound more than faintly ridiculous. Lucilla, the daughter of the rector of Dimchurch, near Lewes in Sussex, falls in love with Oscar Dubourg, who is later struck down with epilepsy after being hit on the head. Their wedding is postponed while he goes away in search of a treatment, which turns his skin a blackish shade of blue since it is based on silver nitrate. She is not aware of this until Oscar’s twin brother Nugent, who is also in love with her, suggests that she should seek a cure for her cataracts from a well-known ophthalmologist. Previously she had only known Oscar by his feel; she had no idea what he looks like. This gives the malevolent Nugent an opportunity to pass himself off as his brother. When she goes to Ramsgate to recuperate from her eye operation, he follows and presses her to marry him. He goes so far as to obtain a marriage licence in his absent brother’s name. But Lucilla now senses that something is wrong, and, under the stress, her sight deteriorates. When Oscar comes back from abroad, she, partially sighted again, immediately recognises him by his ‘delicious tingle’. Nugent confesses and offers the couple his fraudulent licence for a wedding in Sydenham two days later. Once again a complex saga ends in marriage – this time, a happy one.
Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation Page 30