Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation

by Andrew Lycett

  Hunt’s impact was apparent in other ways. His simple Christianity seems to have encouraged Wilkie in his own undemonstrative, non-denominational faith and led him to experiment with a new approach to sensation fiction, which had more or less run its course after its successes in the 1860s. When it came down to it, he really had little sympathy with the alternative model for the novel – the realism of George Eliot, whose Middlemarch had been appearing in Blackwood’s Magazine since December 1871. He was temperamentally more attuned to an allusive, even allegorical style – a literary equivalent of the Pre-Raphaelites’ paintings. He gave his book a Biblical title (Mary Magdalen was the former prostitute who became a disciple of Jesus) and developed it as a religious fable. Julian Gray became an idealised Christlike figure who, in contrast to the unforgiving snobs around Lady Janet, offers real redemption to the once sinful Mercy. Hunt was not Wilkie’s only inspiration here, but also his pious brother Charley, to whom the work was dedicated and who also played an influential role.

  Once again marriage is presented as the fitting conclusion to Mercy’s troubles. In the context of The New Magdalen it takes on a sacramental significance, which may have been at the back of Wilkie’s mind whenever he wrote about the subject. As far back as No Name, Magdalen (that religiously charged name again) atones for her former sinful ways by becoming the lawful wife of the virtuous Captain Kirke. In The New Magdalen, the fallen Mercy finds similar redemption at the side of Julian Gray, though the material world is still not satisfied and forces them abroad. Wilkie’s attitude makes his dealings with Caroline and Martha all the more curious. No wonder he found the writing difficult. As he explained to Frederick Lehmann, ‘The principle [sic] female character this time is a reclaimed woman from the streets – a glorious creature who requires constant attentions. She is matched by a remarkable clergyman, who declines entirely to run in the ordinary clerical grooves, and who gives me nearly as much trouble as my beautiful reclaimed woman.’439 He might almost have been referring to Caroline herself.

  During the summer of 1872 Wilkie was distracted by other matters, including a flying visit by Fechter from the United States, which required him to lend his actor friend a further £100. To his relief, he finally resolved the long-running problem of the stable at the back of his property. His former tenant had always been slow in paying, but now he had a new one who did not baulk at the rent of £40 a year. The actual cash was not important, but it provided welcome pocket money for Caroline and her daughter.

  As so often before, he was agitated about copyrights – this time, following a lengthy correspondence with an official at the Customs House about the need to register his works so as to prevent the importation of foreign editions. This was the kind of bureaucratic procedure he abhorred and which made him increasingly fed up with the book trade. Another example was the unilateral demand by Canadian publishers to be able to print any book they wanted by simply paying a royalty of 12.5 per cent. He described this as ‘a flat denial of the right of property in the production of a man’s brains to publish that man’s book without his leave, on any conditions and under any circumstances whatever.’440 Wilkie’s anger led him to join the Copyright Association, which had recently been set up to fight this and other matters of authors’ rights. He would later work closely with the Society of Authors, which succeeded it.

  His attitude towards the British book business was not improved by the opportunistic unilateral decision by W.H. Smith’s Railway Circulating Library to bind together the extracts from Cassell Magazine’s version of Man and Wife and sell four hundred copies directly to its customers. Wilkie was upset on behalf of Bentley, who had purchased the volume rights to the book and stood to make not a penny. He was also furious that he himself had lost four hundred good sales, which would have resulted in the Bentley edition selling out.

  But while Wilkie was the most professional of writers, he now had other things to think about – in particular, the well-being of his young family. During the summer he had a worrying time when his elder daughter Marian broke her leg.441 Frank Beard put it in plaster and looked after her, before her mother took her ‘to the seaside’, which probably meant Norfolk. Fred Lehmann did his bit by offering the young invalid a new pram, but Wilkie declined, saying, in effect, that he preferred the sentimental associations of the old one.

  Wilkie also had his brother to consider. Charley had ‘a horrible sore on his leg’442 and ‘a red swelling’ on his ankle (apparently gout), when Wilkie visited him in August. He was ‘very gloomy about himself and about human destiny generally’, so Wilkie irreverently tried to cheer him by suggesting he adopt a Gnostic approach to life’s problems, which essentially meant seeing them as illusions, though Wilkie’s later synopsis of this creed in a letter to Lehmann suggested he had only a cursory understanding of it.

  As Lehmann was in Germany in August, he invited Wilkie to join him. But Wilkie could not face the journey as his rheumatism was playing up. His cure was to dissolve three pounds of powdered alum, and lie in the bath soaking in ‘something which feels like liquid velvet’.443 The result was ‘an untied back and a straight left arm (for the time being)’. But he then spoiled the effect by eating a grouse and drinking a bottle of Schartzhofberger: ‘Just like Germany, without the trouble of going there, and the horrid necessity of speaking the language, or of communicating in serious pantomimes with the people about me.’

  Instead, he settled for the summer breezes of Ramsgate, which Frank Beard never failed to recommend for health reasons. This time, rather than stay at the Granville Hotel, he took a house in Nelson Crescent, in the centre of town, overlooking the sea. His landlady at number 14, an elegant, brick-fronted house dating back to Ramsgate’s earlier heyday as a Regency resort, was Catherine Shrive, the daughter of a licensed victualler from Northamptonshire. As he began to relax, he asked Charley to stay, and also invited Tindell, telling him, ‘I am comfortably established here with my womankind.’444 This seigneurial term referred to Caroline, her daughter and possibly her mother-in-law, Mary Ann. On this occasion, in late September, Martha and her two daughters were elsewhere, having been to the seaside the previous month.

  By the time Wilkie returned to London, the serialisation of The New Magdalen had started in Temple Bar, and he was able to turn his attention to a new theatrical project – the dramatisation of Man and Wife, his complex novel about the marriage laws. His frustrations with the book business made him more eager than ever to succeed on the stage, which he thought was much more professionally run than publishing. No one epitomised this commercial approach more than the actor-manager Squire Bancroft who, with his actress wife Marie Wilton, had transformed the Prince of Wales Theatre, off down-at-heel Tottenham Court Road, into a fashionable venue. The Bancrofts had done this by revamping their auditorium, replacing the cheap benches near the stage with comfortable seats, restricting their bills to one play, and serving up a dish of light realism known as ‘cup and saucer drama’.

  Wilkie again made changes from his novel, such as cutting out the character of the mute Hester Dethridge and any mention of her involvement in murder – all designed to make the play more realistic. When he came to read Man and Wife to the cast in December, Bancroft thought he did it ‘with great effect and nervous force, giving all concerned a clear insight into his view of the characters’.445 The opening night a couple of months later showed how competitive the London theatre scene had become. The Prince of Wales had taken a risk by departing from its recent crowd-pleasing repertoire, and it was packed with theatregoers eager to see if the Bancrofts had managed to pull off this trick. Wilkie had no illusions about what this meant and handed out tickets to anyone he could, including Tindell, Ned and Henrietta Ward, and his brother Charley, who came with his wife Katey and Holman Hunt. Even so, he was disappointed to count only thirty friends in the house to match against a picked band of the “lower orders” of literature and the drama assembled at the back of the dress circle to hiss and laugh at the first chance’.
As a result, he sat in Bancroft’s dressing room for most of the performance ‘in a state of nervous terror painful to see’. He need not have worried; the audience’s reaction was enthusiastic, and he was glad to find that ‘the services of my friends were not required. The public never gave the “opposition” a chance all through the evening.’446

  This proved to be Charley Collins’s last appearance in public. Shortly afterwards, his health deteriorated and his stomach ulcers were diagnosed as an advanced case of cancer. Two of Britain’s most illustrious surgeons,447 Sir James Paget and Sir William Jenner, were called in, but they could do nothing to arrest or even mitigate the painful disease, which led to Charley’s death on 9 April 1873, aged forty-five.

  On a mild Monday morning, five days later, his funeral took place at the Government cemetery in Brompton. Wilkie was there with members of the Dickens family, as well as a smattering of artists, including Holman Hunt, Millais, Frederick Walker and Leighton. Hunt, who had just sold two versions of his painting The Shadow of Death to Agnew’s for the massive sum of ten thousand guineas, had been at Charley’s bedside, where he had drawn a sketch of him finally at peace. This he gave to Wilkie, with a request that he should return it after his own death. Wilkie instructed his solicitor to arrange this, once ‘life’s idle business has ended for me’.448

  Following Charley’s death, Katey wasted little time in moving out of their little house and going to live with her siblings, Mamie and Henry, and their aunt Georgina Hogarth, at 81 Gloucester Terrace in Bayswater. Wilkie had to liaise with Millais, who was the somewhat reluctant executor of Charley’s will. For all his financial problems during his life, Charley died comfortably off. His estate was worth over £10,000, which included the leases on two houses.

  Charley’s death drew a further line under the past. Aside from the regular small sums Wilkie paid under the terms of his father’s will to relations such as his cousin William Jones in Ireland, he now had no more financial involvement with his parents’ families. Even his aunt Margaret Carpenter, a remarkable example of a successful, self-motivated Victorian woman, had died the previous November. Wilkie’s responsibilities were now limited to the two women in his life, Caroline and Martha, and their respective families.

  He delivered the last instalment of The New Magdalen to the printers on 7 April, two days before Charley’s death. By then he was already working on a dramatic adaptation of the text and hoped to stage it at a venue he knew well, the Olympic Theatre, which was also enjoying a renaissance after being revamped under the management of Ada Cavendish, a favourite actress of Wilkie’s who had made her name in burlesque. He was keen to take more of an initiative in the business side of such proceedings, so, with Tindell’s help, he acted as an impresario, hiring an agent, Stefan Poles, to represent him in negotiations. Mindful of his problems with George Vining over The Woman in White, he also drew up a detailed agreement with Miss Cavendish, stipulating that he was responsible for half the costs of the production and would reap half the profits. (His care was sadly misplaced as Poles turned out to be a confidence trickster.)

  The New Magdalen opened at the Olympic on 19 May, the very day Bentley published the book version. There was a last-minute hiccough when Mudie’s objected to the title, because of its connotations of prostitution. Wilkie, who had generally tried to maintain amicable relations with the largest lending library in Britain, could no longer contain himself. ‘Nothing would induce me to modify the title,’449 he fulminated to his publisher. Then, referring to the firm’s owner, Charles Mudie, he added, ‘His proposal would be an impertinence if he was not an old fool . . . But the serious side of this affair is that this ignorant fanatic holds my circulation in his pious hands.’

  When the theatre production proved an immediate success, Wilkie crowed, ‘That fanatical old fool Mudie will be obliged to increase his order.’450 However, despite translations into several foreign languages, including Russian, sales of Bentley’s edition were modest. At least the play was widely hailed, with the Sunday Times leading the way in describing it as ‘one of the most signal triumphs of modern days’.451 The paper did have reservations about the ending, adopting a moralistic stance to argue that, although Mercy’s penitence was commendable, it was dangerous ‘that she should be extolled at the expense of those who have not erred, and that the soul that has just cleansed itself from dismal surroundings of sin and falsehood, should immediately be held up as a type of highest excellence’. Such criticism only reinforced the personal nature of Wilkie’s project, since any rejection of the fallen woman by extension condemned Caroline and Martha, his own two imports from the fringes of society.

  Wilkie was at last able to think seriously about his long imagined trip to the United States. Earlier in the year he had been approached by Charles S. Brelsford, of the American Literary Bureau in New York, who offered to arrange a programme of talks. Wilkie was not impressed by ‘the Speculator who offers to buy me for the U.S.’,452 but asked Tindell to liaise on his behalf, making sure not to commit him to more than ten performances so that he could go elsewhere if the relationship did not work out.

  Wilkie was aware that he had little experience of the kind of presentation he would be required to give on such a tour. As practice, he arranged with Ada Cavendish to participate in a charity concert she was sponsoring at the Olympic Theatre on the afternoon of 28 June. The programme included music by the French composer Charles Gounod and his litigious lover Georgina Weldon, as well as Cavendish’s rendering of Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, and Wilkie’s reading of ‘A Terribly Strange Bed’, his twenty-year-old story about peculiar happenings in a French hostelry. His turn was not a great success:453 according to the Pall Mall Gazette, ‘the audience sat it out, listening to words which were not very audible, smiling at jokes which were by no means laughable, and finally applauding a story which no-one could quite have understood who had not previously met with it in print . . . We should counsel Mr Wilkie Collins to adopt the tone and method of a lecturer, which anyone can acquire, rather than attempt those of an actor which lie beyond his reach.’ Georgina Hogarth thought much the same, damning Wilkie with faint praise in a letter to her friend Annie Fields in Boston, ‘I have heard he is to read but I cannot imagine his reading well. He seems to me to have no physical qualification for it . . . He is agreeable and easy to get on with – and he has many fine qualities but he has an unusual amount of conceit and self-satisfaction – and I do not think any one can think Wilkie Collins a greater man than Wilkie Collins thinks himself.’454

  He could afford to be chirpy as he had two successful plays running in London. The Prince of Wales had seen Man and Wife twice, on one occasion accompanied by the Tsarevich and Tsarevna of Russia. Wilkie had only to beware of falling between two competing managements. One can imagine the aggrieved enquiry that led him to tell Squire Bancroft in July, ‘The least I can do, if all goes well, is to write for the Prince of Wales’s Theatre again, and next time to give you and Mrs. Bancroft parts that will be a little more worthy of you.’455

  Before proceeding any further, and certainly before embarking for the United States, Wilkie was determined to make lasting arrangements for his two families. Caroline had been back at Gloucester Place for at least two years, and Harriet had resumed her role as his amanuensis. Martha continued to lead a more unsettled existence. She and her children were now living at 55 Marylebone Road, a few hundred yards from her previous lodgings in Bolsover Street. It is not clear when they moved – probably in January 1873 when Wilkie made his last payment of £25 to her landlady,456 Mrs Wells. On 1 February, Wilkie took Martha to Hewetson and Thexton, a furniture shop in Tottenham Court Road (conveniently close to the Prince of Wales Theatre, which was then rehearsing Man and Wife). They spent £100 on a range of goods,457 including a five-foot six-inch medieval sideboard and, the most expensive items, two black and gold chimney glasses, which together cost £15 10s. The invoice was made out to ‘Dawson Esq’, which showed Wilkie sti
ll living the hypocritical double life he so often ridiculed in his writings.

  After discussing these matters with Tindell, Wilkie disappeared on a short holiday, which took him to the Hotel Granville in Ramsgate and, a week later, to Eastbourne. He decided on two locations, it may be assumed, because he wanted to spend time with his two families, first with Caroline and Harriet, and then with Martha and their children, in which capacity he doubtless signed the hotel register as Dawson. He subsequently went to Paris for a few days, almost certainly with a male friend, since he stayed at an old bachelor haunt, the Hotel du Helder.

  On his return, he finalised details of yet another new will, this time specifically dividing his estate between Caroline and Martha (with their children as subsidiary beneficiaries). He asked Tindell to advise both families should they need it.458 He also asked him to attend to various domestic details such as the insurance of ‘Mrs Dawson’s furniture at 55 Marylebone Road’, and ensuring that a character reference for his manservant Edward Grosvisier was in order. Then he was ready to take the train to Liverpool and board the Cunard liner, the SS Algeria, for the start of his voyage to the United States on 13 September. The actor Wybert Reeve was to have accompanied him, but he could not make it, so Wilkie crossed the Atlantic on his own, with only the prospect of composing a new Christmas story to distract him.459

  17

  AMERICA AND AFTER

  ASIDE FROM PROFESSIONAL aspects, Wilkie had never spent much time thinking about the United States. He had a vague sense of the Boston Brahmin intellectual establishment from his father’s friendship with Washington Allston. He was familiar with literary representations of the frontier, as found in the work of James Fenimore Cooper, whom he surely drew on for his portrayal of the maverick Mat Marksman in Hide and Seek. He also knew something of the country’s history and economic potential from Frederick Lehmann. But otherwise he had been surprisingly uninterested in transatlantic developments. He tended to regard the country as a huge market for his work, but a frustrating one, because it failed to protect the copyrights of foreign writers such as himself.