Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation

by Andrew Lycett

  Following the book’s publication by Chatto & Windus in February, the reviews were poor. While praising Wilkie for his readability, the Observer declared, ‘Anything less literary, in any sense of the word, it would be impossible to conceive than this novel. There is no attempt at any sort of style, unless it be the style of studied baldness.’494 The Pall Mall Gazette could not cope with the surrealism of the characters of Miserrimus Dexter and his female sidekick Ariel: ‘If a man has the misfortune to be visited by such dreams the best thing he can do is to try and forget them as soon as possible afterwards.’495

  Since he liked to share his experiences of publishers with writer friends, Wilkie warned Charles Reade to steer clear of the Graphic. As professional authors, both men had a similar approach to the literary world, fighting their corners against publishers (Reade was particularly active in the struggle for international copyright), and working hard to ensure their novels were topical and well-researched. They certainly had a mutual respect for one another. On one of Wilkie’s letters to him, Reade scribbled approvingly, ‘For literary ingenuity in building up a plot and investing it with mystery, give me dear old Wilkie Collins against the world.’496 On a personal level, their relationship flourished owing to the similarity of their domestic situations. Reade’s mistress, Mrs Seymour,497 was known as his ‘housekeeper’, which was also Caroline’s official designation. Reade had a son from a previous liaison, who was described as his ‘godson’, in the same way that Harriet would call Wilkie her ‘godfather’.

  Having finished The Law and the Lady in March, Wilkie treated himself to a short restorative break in Paris. On his return, he contentedly described himself as ‘the idlest man living’.499 But he was not the sort of person to stand still for long. He had been contemplating a pared down version of Armadale, which would be staged as Miss Gwilt at the Alexandra Theatre in Liverpool in December. Ada Cavendish took the title role, which had been restructured to make the scheming minx of the book into a more sympathetic character and her accomplice Dr Downward, played by Arthur Cecil, as the unmitigated villain.

  As for stories, he told the forgiving George Bentley that he was considering a serial for his magazine Temple Bar. He gave a hint of his intended subject matter in ‘The Clergyman’s Confession’, an interim tale that appeared in The World in August. Sometimes described as a ghost story, it was really about the power of second sight, chronicling the inexorable course of events leading to the murder of a sweet-natured Frenchwoman.

  Inspiration for his Temple Bar piece struck the following month when, as he put it to Bentley, he holed up in Lowestoft, after ‘wandering about the Eastern coast’.500 This was Wilkie’s way of saying (or, true to fashion, not saying) that he had been spending time with Martha and her family at nearby Winterton. This year there was an added reason for his being there since Alice Rudd, who had been working for her sister Martha in London, had followed her in another way and had become pregnant out of wedlock. The conception of Alice’s illegitimate daughter Anne is impossible to date since the baby has no birth certificate. It may have occurred in the previous few months, providing a reason for this trip. Or it may have taken place during this holiday. (Anne’s given age in subsequent censuses suggests that she was born in 1875 or 1876.)

  Her father was James Spooner, an agricultural labourer in Winterton. However, Alice did not hang around to bring up her daughter. She left Anne with her grandparents, James and Mary Rudd, and returned to London to help her sister Martha. Since Wilkie supported the Taunton Place household, she was doubtless able to make more money to support her child there as the housekeeper (as she was described in the 1881 census) than in Norfolk. While she was away, her daughter and James Spooner lodged with her parents in Winterton. It was not until 1891, after Wilkie’s death, that Alice was definitely back in Winterton, living in Beach Road with her daughter and her husband. No marriage is recorded, but she is described in the census of that year as Alice Spooner, James’s wife. Living with them also was her daughter Anne, as well as her (and Martha’s) doughty eighty-four-year-old father. Her mother Mary had died three years earlier in 1888.

  After his trip to the east coast, Wilkie was to have joined George Bentley on a climbing trip in Wales, but something, either in his relationships or his own health, had gone wrong, and he did not feel up to it. However, he cheerfully told the publisher that he had ‘got an idea of another new story (of the fanciful kind with a touch of the supernatural in it) – but it would occupy four or five numbers at least.’501

  This was The Two Destinies, which drew on his Suffolk surroundings to tell of George and Mary, two childhood sweethearts who for a long time defy and then finally fulfil her grandmother’s prophecy that their lives are inextricably linked. In the meantime, George goes to America and returns as the heir to the considerable Germaine fortune, while Mary suffers a serious illness that results in a complete change in her looks. They subsequently bump into each other without any spark of recognition. George is attracted to her but she is now the wife of a bigamous Dutchman. George and Mary develop a powerful telepathic communication, which leads to his being summoned to her side on three occasions. At the last of these encounters, in Holland, they finally recognise each other and resolve to marry. However, the whiff of scandal attached to her past means that, like Mercy and Julian in The New Magdalen, they are ostracised by English society. In a scene reminiscent of Lady Janet’s ball in that story, the newly-wed Germaines hold a dinner party to which none of the men (apart from a visiting American) bring their wives. As a result, again like Mercy and Julian, but without the moral hand-wringing, they emigrate, this time to Naples.

  Although its immediate inspiration was his trip to Suffolk, the story harks back to Wilkie’s visit to Wallingford in Connecticut. That had sparked his interest not only in polygamy but in communal living, which led him to look into New Harmony, an atheist utopian society in Indiana started by the Scottish industrialist Robert Owen and continued by his son, Robert Dale Owen, a spiritualist who advocated radical causes such as divorce reform.

  Wilkie would return later to the theme of communal living. For the time being he was interested in the younger Owen’s spiritualism. Although he had no truck with this set of beliefs as a quasi-religion, he was fascinated by its exploration of extrasensory powers. Following his journalistic forays into mesmerism and animal magnetism in the early 1850s, his books often touched on the hidden psychic forces at play in everyday life.

  The Two Destinies drew inspiration from Robert Dale Owen’s book Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World, a brisk digest of paranormal experience through the ages. There was leavening too from Emanuel Swedenborg,502 the eighteenth-century Swedish spiritualist with a scientific bent, who had a strong following among writers, including Coleridge, Balzac and Julian Hawthorne, son of the author of the classic American novel The Scarlet Letter, who was then living in London.

  Wilkie was still writing The Two Destinies when he visited Brussels with Caroline in October. Following the route his father had taken in 1828, they continued to Antwerp, where he paid homage to Rubens, and then on to The Hague, where he saw his now authorised Dutch publishers, Belinfante Brothers, and gathered local details about Holland for the end of this story.

  After Miss Gwilt’s successful premiere, attended by Wilkie, in Liverpool in early December, the play had to wait until the following April before opening in London at the Globe Theatre. By then, The Two Destinies was running as a serial in Temple Bar, and would be published by Chatto & Windus in August, with a dedication to Charles Reade, ‘my old friend and brother in the Art’. (As usual, it was published more or less simultaneously in serial and volume form by Harper’s in America.)

  Miss Gwilt received a mixed reception when it reached London. The consensus was that Wilkie had failed to boil down a complicated story into digestible theatrical fare, and that it was too long. He did not see the production himself because his rheumatic gout was playing up and badly affecting his eyes. He was
consulting George Critchett, a leading Harley Street eye surgeon, who forbade him from public appearances. (Critchett was familiar with the theatre since his son Richard had just embarked on a career at Henry Irving’s Lyceum under the stage name Claude Carton.) All a chastened Wilkie could do was ‘work, walk, visit to my morganatic family – such is life’.503

  Once able to venture out with an eye patch, he took himself (and perhaps Martha and the children) to Worthing in July 1876. In his usual non-committal style he referred in a letter to ‘wandering about the south coast’,504 so he may also have travelled to Brighton to see a spoof version called The Gwilty Governess and the Downey Doctor. At the end of August, The Two Destinies was published, but the reaction was again disappointing. The Observer found it simply implausible and chastised Wilkie for failing to make clear whether he believed in the supernatural or not. The Saturday Review did not waste words in demolishing ‘an amazingly silly book . . . almost silly enough to be amusing through its very absurdity.’505

  Within days of the novel’s publication, Wilkie turned his back on this harsh competitive world and went to Paris and then Switzerland with Caroline and Harriet. Continental Europe was still his favoured destination when his spirits needed lifting. En route, his party travelled with Henry (known as Harry) Powell Bartley, a twenty-one-year-old trainee solicitor. Harry’s late father had followed the same profession in a family firm in Portman Square, close to Wilkie in Gloucester Place. He had also enjoyed a significant side-line as a property developer in West London, but since his death his relations had been squabbling over his assets.

  Wilkie and Caroline liked young Harry and identified him as a potential suitor for Harriet, who was now twenty-five and getting to the point when, if she did not marry soon, a lifetime of spinsterhood loomed. There was a sense of purpose in the way Wilkie wrote to Harry from the Hotel Westminster in Paris on 17 October, declaring, ‘I am indeed sorry that the claims of business obliged you to leave us here. We all miss our travelling companion,’506 and concluding, ‘I hope we shall meet in Gloucester Place.’

  Paris still offered special attractions, for Wilkie returned there in February 1877 for a post-Christmas jaunt of the kind he used to enjoy with Dickens. For a variety of reasons, his health being the most obvious, he was having difficulty conceiving full-length novels and now fell back on his proven skills at producing short stories. Chatto made life easier for him by purchasing the monthly magazine Belgravia from John Maxwell, who had married Mary Elizabeth Braddon a couple of years earlier and wanted to concentrate on other things. Belgravia had been the house organ of sensationalism under the Maxwells, but Chatto, who now not only owned but edited it, aimed to steer it away from these roots.

  Wilkie had no problem finding a home for ‘The Captain’s Last Love’ in Belgravia in January. Before long he was working on ‘Percy and the Prophet’, which appeared in July in a special summer number of All the Year Round, which was now under the direction of Dickens’s son Charley. He also completed two further stories for Christmas issues at the end of the year – ‘My Lady’s Money: An Episode in the Life of a Young Lady’ for the Illustrated London News and ‘The Duel in Herne Wood’ for Belgravia. These were unremarkable potboilers, which offered a combination of exotic locations, romantic triangles, detection and the supernatural.

  ‘My Lady’s Money’ was the most interesting because it picked up on the widespread dissatisfaction with the police force, and in particular with its detective branch. Echoing Count Fosco, a character observes, ‘Every crime is more or less a mystery. You will see that the mysteries which the police discover are, almost without exception, mysteries made penetrable by the commonest capacity, through the extraordinary stupidity exhibited in the means taken to hide the crime. On the other hand, let the guilty man or woman be a resolute and intelligent person, capable of setting his (or her) wits fairly against the wits of the police – in other words, let the mystery really be a mystery – and cite me a case if you can (a really difficult and perplexing case) in which the criminal has not escaped.’ So Lady Lydiard, the victim of a theft, is prevailed on to engage a retired sleuth, Old Sharon, who lives in run-down lodgings, smokes a pipe, wears a tattered flannel dressing gown and reads French novels (a version of Sherlock Holmes a decade avant la lettre). The story also includes an affectionate portrait of a Scottish terrier called Tommie, the subject also of an in-joke since Wilkie had a much-loved dog of that name, but spelled with a ‘y’, which the story suggests is more vulgar than the ‘ie’ of the text. Tommie even turns investigator and unearths evidence of the stolen £500 bank note, leading some commentators to dub him unconvincingly as the first canine detective.

  Unable to make much progress in the current literary market, Wilkie was keener than ever to succeed in the theatre. His great hope now was his collaboration with the actor-manager Henry Neville on the first official dramatic version of The Moonstone at the Olympic Theatre. As with his previous adaptations, Wilkie worked hard to compress his meandering text into suitable theatrical form. Certain characters were killed off, the love interest between Franklin Blake and Rachel Verinder became the main focus, the Moonstone was now stolen in an alcoholic stupor rather than an opium-induced reverie, and the whole play took place over the course of twenty-four hours on a single set in the inner hall of the Verinder house.

  Wilkie struggled through until the opening night on 17 September, and then departed with Caroline for ‘a little rest and change’507 in Southern Germany and Northern Italy, including a trip to Venice.508 Caroline was due a holiday since her former mother-in-law Mary Ann Graves,509 had died four months earlier at the age of seventy-nine. Having played an important part in Harriet’s early years, Mary Ann had lived latterly at nearby 21 Molyneux Street, which meant she was available if assistance was required. Her close liaison with Wilkie’s household is attested by the fact that his cook, Sarah Masey, provided the authorities with the details of her death.

  This time Harriet did not accompany her mother and Wilkie but stayed in Gloucester Place, signing letters and performing odd jobs on his behalf. With her grandmother no longer around, she probably welcomed an opportunity to get to know her near neighbour, Harry Bartley, who had just qualified as a solicitor.

  Wilkie’s holiday got off to a bad start. He had been negotiating a New York transfer for The Moonstone with Augustin Daly, and was even prepared to change the title so his work could be protected from pirates. In this respect he put forward various alternatives,511 including The Yellow Diamond (his favourite), Dreaming and Waking and False Appearances. However, he got no further than Brussels when he read in Galignani’s Messenger, the leading English newspaper on the Continent, that Daly was in serious financial difficulties. And by the time he reached Munich, three weeks after the play’s opening in London, he learned that receipts there had plummeted. So he agreed with Henry Neville that the production should close on 17 November 1877.

  Back home, a Christmas profile of Wilkie510 in the ‘Celebrities at Home’ slot in Edmund Yates’s The World could disguise neither his own disappointment nor his physical decline. At the age of fifty-three, his hair was almost white and he was smoking incessantly, it reported. However, he was, as always, prepared to air his opinions. Joseph Addison was dismissed as ‘a neat but trivial writer, not in the least vigorous or dramatic’, so different from Byron whose letters displayed the best English he knew – ‘perfectly simple and clear, bright and strong’. As the reporter noted, Wilkie demanded ‘dramatic power and poetic insight’ in his prose writers. Thus Goldsmith always scored over Fielding and Smollett. And it was ‘the same on the great stage of the world’, where Wilkie argued for the greatness of Napoleon,512 who had been debunked of late. ‘But you cannot break the idol, for his deeds strike the imagination. He was a dramatic man.’

  Despite the robust nature of these pronouncements, Wilkie’s low spirits were again evident when he sent end of year greetings to Nina Lehmann and her family, who were enjoying winter cheer in Canne
s. He apologised for being unable to join them, since there were ‘all sorts of impediments – literary and personal – which keep me in England at the most hateful of all English seasons (to me), the season of Cant and Christmas.’513

  Wilkie still hoped to get stuck into a full-scale novel. He had an idea for a major work, a further spin-off from his experience of communal life in the United States, but when the complexity of his domestic life prevented him committing himself, he marked time with The Haunted Hotel, a novella that drew on his recent visit to Venice.

  The restraints on his progress inevitably included his health. As he told fellow author (and fellow gout sufferer) James Payn in early February 1878, ‘I am (say) half alive. While I was away last year in the Tyrol and Italy, I was 25 years old. Towards the end of [18]77, being obliged to return to my native damp and changes, I became, by rheumatic reckoning, 95.’514