However, the book’s overall theme was one Wilkie had often chewed at – the nature of perception. Since the seventeenth century, philosophers had pondered what blind people might experience if their sight were restored. Was an ability to interpret the world through one’s eyes an innate gift or a learned skill? The surgeon William Cheselden had subsequently written about how patients experience the world after the removal of cataracts. Wilkie’s own ophthalmologist George Critchett, based in Harley Street, was perhaps the most distinguished practitioner in his field, having recently been elected to the Council of the Royal College of Surgeons. Drawing on these sources, Wilkie showed empathy in understanding not only the bewilderment Lucilla might feel when her sight was restored, but how, in her state of blindness, she might have developed other sensitivities, or equally valid ways of reading the world.
This raised another aspect of the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate. When the (male) Dubourg twins first appear in Dimchurch, they are seen doing something ‘worse than crying’: they kiss one another on the cheek. As Lucilla’s old nurse comments disgustedly, ‘Two men! Foreigners, of course.’ Wilkie was poking fun at British reserve. Having no such inhibitions himself, he regularly kissed his male friends, particularly the effusive Fechter. In his story, he notes how Lucilla, despite her blindness, is remarkably outgoing. This leads her carer (as she would now be called) to observe that ‘modesty is essentially the growth of our own consciousness of the eyes of others judging us’. Without this pressure from society, Lucilla had grown up with the passions of a woman but ‘the fearless and primitive innocence of a child’.
The prominence of children in this book reflected Wilkie’s new role as a parent. His second daughter, Harriet, was born in May,423 just as he was finishing the first chapters. Her elder sister, Marian, was a possible model for Lucilla’s half-sister, the gypsyish three-year-old Jicks. However, Wilkie hedged his bets: Lucilla’s stepmother is a slovenly breast-feeding machine surrounded by a vast brood. This suggests he still had mixed feelings about having his own demanding daughters around him. He no doubt preferred them to let off steam in Bolsover Street, leaving Gloucester Place a haven of peace for himself.
While working on Poor Miss Finch, Wilkie was also thinking about his other main literary commitment – a tale for the Christmas edition of the Graphic, the latest challenger in the picture newspaper market dominated by the Illustrated London News. Miss or Mrs? tells of a respected City trader who, having fallen on hard times, thinks he can resurrect his fortunes by marrying the daughter of a rich friend. She has other ideas since she is in love with her cousin and they arrange to marry, but keep their plans secret since she is fifteen and technically underage. When the trader discovers this, he plots to murder her father.
Aside from its sensationalist themes of deception and murder, the story showed several personal touches. Its depiction of sailing owed much to Wilkie’s yachting with Pigott, the City background drew on his friends Charles Oppenheim and Frederick Lehmann, while the underage marriage looked back to Ned and Henrietta Ward. Since such subject matter was potentially actionable, he consulted his new solicitor, Tindell,424 about the relevant law.
With these work commitments and a growing family, there was no question of his sailing or taking the waters in Europe this summer. The farthest he would go was the unlikely spot of Upper Norwood in Surrey, where he spent a week in August at the fashionable Queen’s Hotel, which, because of its elevated position close to the Crystal Palace, was promoted as a healthy alternative to the heat and grime of central London. Wilkie agreed, describing how ‘drunk’ he was with ‘this fine air’,425 and the ‘good and dry’ champagne no doubt helped.
Wilkie returned to London feeling better for his time away. His gout had subsided and he was able to climb the stairs at Gloucester Place, even if, by the time the first episode of Poor Miss Finch appeared in the September issue of Cassell’s magazine, his medical regime had been extended426 to include regular enemas and doses of quinine, as well as his usual laudanum.
However, Wilkie was determined to enjoy living at Gloucester Place. The domestic upheavals of the last three years seemed a distant memory when, the following month, he invited Charles Reade to dinner, promising that ‘a new stock of Moselle427 is at this moment being put into the cellar.’ He admitted he was ‘all in arrear with “Poor Miss F.”’, and emphasised that ‘the two Carolines send you their love, and join in asking you not to forget No 90’ (his house at 90 Gloucester Place). The two Carolines were of course Mrs Graves (a name she quickly re-assumed) and her daughter Harriet.
He had further reason to feel cheerful because, in early October, a cherished theatrical project, a new version of The Woman in White, had come to fruition. After the extravagances of Black and White, he had taken pains to make this one less melodramatic. He stripped the novel back to basics, eschewing several of its most obviously theatrical scenes, including Walter Hartright’s initial encounter with Anne Catherick. Peripheral characters were dropped and, rather than disappearing to Central America, Hartright was involved throughout.
Wilkie found a home for it at the Olympic Theatre, which had staged The Frozen Deep five years earlier. The play opened on 9 October and proved a huge success, running over an extended Christmas season until 24 February 1872. Wilkie was delighted at the financial returns, which flowed regularly into his bank account – £47 10s after the opening week, £56 2s 9d after the second. The only problem was that, although the critics were positive, they did not like the new Fosco, who, now that Fechter was in America, was played by the experienced George Vining. The Daily Telegraph stated dismissively that he was ‘not Fosco’, an opinion that pushed Wilkie to respond with a letter in the actor’s defence. However, he was sympathetic to this view for, when the production later toured, the part of Fosco was taken by Wybert Reeve, the original Walter Hartright in the London production, whom Wilkie much preferred in the role.
The production played an interesting part in the development of the illustrated poster. Wilkie had originally asked Frederick Walker, a dapper artist in his early thirties who had been born and raised in the same streets of Marylebone, to see what he could produce. Walker’s dramatic, swirling rendition of a woman looking over her shoulder as she passed through a door was done in the week before the play’s opening at Charley Collins’s small house in Thurloe Place, South Kensington. The model may well have been Katey. (This is the suggestion of her biographer Lucinda Hawksley, who adds that Walker was greatly attracted to her.) Once the image was deemed suitable, Walker enlisted his friend W.H. Hooper,428 a pupil of Ruskin and later the engraver at William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, to do a ‘vigorous wood-cut’ four feet six inches to five feet high. Walker was ‘warmly’ thanked by Wilkie, encouraging him to think that such posters could ‘develop into a most important branch of art’.
Shortly after The Woman in White opened, Wilkie was at his brother’s home in South Kensington when Luke Fildes, another admirer of Katey, was also present. By then Wilkie was thinking about Miss or Mrs?, his forthcoming story in the Graphic, and asked young Fildes, who had successfully completed his work on The Mystery of Edwin Drood, to do the drawings. Fildes was happy to oblige, but could not engrave them. So Charley contacted Fred Walker, who again called on W.H. Hooper, who was paid £9 17s by Wilkie on 13 October (whether for this latest or for both commissions, is not clear).
Wilkie’s behind the scenes activity did not save him from Arthur Locker, editor of the Graphic, who refused to print some light swear words in Miss or Mrs?, claiming they could be harmful to children. Wilkie objected strongly to such censorship. ‘My story is not addressed to young people exclusively – it is addressed to readers in general,’429 he told Locker. ‘I do not accept young people as the ultimate court of appeal in English literature. Mr Turlington must talk like Mr Turlington – even though the terrible consequence may be that a boy or two may cry “Damn” in imitation of him.’ Despite quoting the works of Scott and Dickens in his suppo
rt, Wilkie failed to impress Locker, who proceeded with his bowdlerisation.
At the same time, Poor Miss Finch was coming together. Wilkie was approached by Samuel Tinsley, a bookseller unknown to him, but apparently a brother of William, who had put out The Moonstone, and a man who was now keen to develop a publishing business of his own. This new Tinsley came up with the sort of competitive proposal Wilkie liked – a potentially lucrative package that included putting the book out as a one-volume hardback. But after asking advice from Tindell, taking up references and meeting Tinsley, Wilkie opted for caution and declined. He was put off by Tinsley’s inability to look him in the eye. Nevertheless, this unsolicited approach encouraged him to tell Cassell’s that he had been ‘pressed by so many proposals for republication’ that he was now asking £1,500 for a three-year licence to print the hardback of Poor Miss Finch.430
When this opportunistic negotiating gambit was politely rebuffed, Wilkie took up an offer from George Bentley,431 who had been waiting on the sidelines since publishing Hide and Seek in 1864. Bentley had recently asked him to intercede with John Forster, whom he feared would traduce his late father’s name in his life of Dickens. Wilkie was unable to do anything, and Bentley was outraged when Forster’s account of his father’s quarrel with Dickens was included in the biography. However, Bentley was now solvent and agreed to pay £750 for the rights to publish 2,000 copies of a three-volume edition of Poor Miss Finch, which duly appeared, with a dedication to Frances Elliot, at the end of January 1872.
The reaction was unenthusiastic, suggesting that Wilkie might have misread the public’s taste. Normally, he was astute at striking the right balance between heightened drama and acceptability. But on this occasion he seemed caught between the two conflicting poles. On the one hand, the implausibility of his plot failed to please the Nation, which declared, ‘Whatever may be said against the vanity of existence,432 it is not all a com-bination of missing trains, listening behind doors, and mysterious meetings.’ On the other, he was taken to task for being too tame and sentimental, leading even the usually conservative Athenaeum to dismiss his book as ‘Sunday reading’433 which could ‘be confidently recommended to the notice of parents and guardians’. In particular, the magazine’s critic bemoaned the lack of staple sensational characters, such as ‘red-headed Messalinas, aged Jezebels, rascally doctors, or spurious baronets’, and attributed this ‘sanctifying influence’ to Cassell’s Magazine’s cowed response to widespread criticism of the salaciousness of its recent offering A Terrible Temptation by Charles Reade. Wilkie might have countered that the experience of blindness was by definition sensational. Nevertheless, although Poor Miss Finch was a typical page-turner, it did lack some of the visceral excitement of his novels of the previous decade. Perhaps his sensibilities had been affected by having a family. Perhaps he was feeling the loss of Dickens. Or perhaps he was aware that public morality was changing. After a relatively liberal period, which had allowed the sensational school to flourish, a puritanical reaction was setting in,434 leading to the introduction of new licensing laws, the banning of prostitutes in public houses and the formation of the Social Purity Alliance in 1873.
At this stage, Wilkie had had enough. He told a correspondent he was ‘going away soon to get a little rest and change after a year’s hard work’.435 He took the South Eastern Railway to Ramsgate, but after a few days at the Granville Hotel, the sea air failed to work its usual magic, and he returned to London still feeling exhausted.
Wilkie had at least had the opportunity to contemplate his future. Ever since Dickens’s tour of the United States five years earlier, Wilkie had harboured a desire to follow him on the lecture circuit there. Now, in answer to a query from an enquiring American journalist, he said that he could not envisage crossing the Atlantic in the next few months. However, he had ‘positively resolved not to saddle’436 himself with ‘the heavy strain of another long story, for a year to come at least.’ That way he hoped he could ‘train’ himself for a visit to the United States.
FIFTH EPOCH
16
THE NEW MAGDALEN
NOW THAT HE was nearing fifty, Wilkie was showing his age. At around this time he was recalled by the actor Wybert Reeve as ‘a short, moderately thick-set man, with beard, moustache, and whiskers slightly tinged with white; a bent figure, caused by suffering’.437 However, nothing could disguise his mental energy, with his ‘full, massive, very clever head and forehead; and bright, intellectual eyes, looking out of strong eye-glasses mounted in gold’. This engaging, contradictory impression was reinforced when he was caricatured by the talented Italian Adriano Cecioni in the 3 February 1872 issue of Vanity Fair. Cecioni was one of several artists employed by the publication before Ned Ward’s Etonian son Leslie made the ‘Men of Today’ slot his own with his ‘Spy’ cartoons. Wilkie was pictured sitting down, full bearded and alert. His image was captioned ‘The Novelist who invented Sensation’, and the accompanying blurb quoted him saying that the best things about his stories were ‘the interest of curiosity and the excitement of surprise’. There was a valedictory tone in its verdict that his finest work was Armadale, from the height of his sensation period. The literary caravan was moving on, though no one could fault its opinion that ‘his special merit is that he treats a labyrinthine story in an apparently simple manner, and that the language in which he writes is plain English.’
Predictably, Wilkie did little to cut back his workload in 1872. He suggested that his next book, The New Magdalen, would be ‘a trifling literary project’. But what was originally a short story and then a modest serial grew over the course of a year into a major 100,000-word novel published in Britain by Bentley the following May (after serialisation in the publisher’s in-house Temple Bar magazine) and in the United States by Harper’s and its eponymous monthly magazine.
After suffering brickbats for Poor Miss Finch, Wilkie was determined to rebut his critics with a hard-hitting storyline. Over the years he had written about fallen women in various guises, but this time there would be no ambiguity about his main character, a reformed prostitute. His plot centres on Mercy Merrick who, after being tricked into a life on the streets, seeks rehabilitation as a nurse in the Franco-Prussian War, where she is inspired by a sermon given by a charismatic young priest, Julian Gray. When the respectable Grace Roseberry appears to have been killed by a German shell, Mercy sees an opportunity to escape her past by assuming her colleague’s identity. She steals a letter of introduction to Grace’s distant relation Lady Janet Roy, who adopts her as a companion. At this stage Grace reappears, having been restored to health by a German surgeon (a breed in which Wilkie had inordinate faith). Mercy is inclined to come clean and admit that she is an impostor, until she is put off this course of action by Grace’s high-handedness. As a result, no one believes Grace and she is confined to an asylum. In the meantime, Mercy, who was set to marry a war correspondent, has been reintroduced to Julian Gray, who turns out to be Lady Janet’s nephew. The two of them fall in love, but at first she refuses to marry him because she fears he will be socially ruined when the truth of her origins are known. Instead, she insists on returning (as a nurse) to a Urania Cottage-like refuge where she had once stayed, seeking respite from sexual abuse by her employer and, later, from life as a prostitute. However, when Julian becomes ill, she relents and the novel finishes with them making their way to the New World to rebuild their lives beyond the bounds of conventional society.
The result is a curious mish-mash. Wilkie reprises several sensational tropes, such as the confusion of identities between Mercy, the tart with a heart (one of his old-style strong women) and goody-two-shoes Grace Roseberry, who is a nasty piece of work. He is vehement about a world that can find no place for penitent prostitutes, except in a stigmatised refuge. His account of Lady Janet’s ball for the newly-married Mercy and Julian is great satire: the privileged matrons attend, but unaccompanied by their unmarried daughters, as a form of protest against Mercy and her origins. So scat
hing are Wilkie’s observations that he seems to be getting back at society for all the slights heaped on Caroline and Martha over the years.
However, the book is more than mockery, as is apparent from its depiction of Julian Gray. Wilkie is determined to defy convention by having a clergyman marry a fallen woman. But Gray is almost too perfect; in earlier novels he might have served as a vehicle to attack the hypocrisy of religion. But, as he neared his sixth decade, Wilkie turns his parson into a virtual saint.
A clue to his thinking comes in the final scene when Julian and Mercy flee Britain. This is reminiscent of the would-be emigrants in Ford Madox Brown’s 1855 painting The Last of England. Indeed, the whole of The New Magdalen reprises the Pre-Raphaelitism of Wilkie’s youth. Its theme of the fallen woman harks back to the experiences of the Pre-Raphaelites as they fumbled towards an understanding of female sexuality that moved beyond the stereotypes of the whore and the angel in the house.
Wilkie’s renewed interest in this topic was influenced by Holman Hunt’s recent return from Jerusalem. He found his old friend ‘the same sweet fellow as ever, and’438 (unlike himself) ‘without a grey hair on him’. Hunt was a past master at depicting fallen women in his art. He had anticipated Wilkie and Martha when he plucked his former girlfriend and muse Annie Miller from a bar. He subsequently married another woman and had a son, but his love life continued to be fraught and unconventional. After his wife Fanny died in late 1866, a year after their wedding, he fell in love with her sister Edith – an action proscribed in English law. The couple’s subsequent estrangement from their families (their equivalent of Mercy being cast out by society) would force them to Switzerland for a legal marriage in 1875.
Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation Page 31