Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation

by Andrew Lycett

He usually managed to overcome such afflictions, but the event holding him back from any major initiative was Harriet’s imminent marriage to Harry Bartley. Although Wilkie was not the type to spend much time in elaborate planning, he regarded this as an important event. On 4 February he gave Harriet a wedding gift of £50515 (it was clearly thus because the sum differed so greatly from the five or six guineas he usually paid her for her secretarial duties).

  Five weeks later, on 12 March, the ceremony took place at St Mary’s, Bryanston Square. Taking a leaf out of her mother’s book, Harriet managed to tell a couple of fibs when she signed the register,516 claiming that she was twenty-four, when in fact she was twenty-seven, and that she was the daughter of an army captain, when her father had been nothing of the sort. Harry correctly stated his age as twenty-three, and that he was living at 14 Upper Hamilton Terrace in Maida Vale, where the Bartleys had moved following the death of Harry’s father. The service was conducted by Harry’s uncle, the Reverend Henry Powell, who was also a trustee of his father’s will, with help from the church’s vicar, the high-minded Reverend the Honourable W.H. Fremantle, who had been a fellow of All Souls, Oxford. Wilkie signed the register as a witness, the first time he had done so since Joseph Stringfield’s wedding twenty years earlier. After the ceremony, everyone filed back to Gloucester Place for an extravagant wedding dinner.517 The menu, all in French, offered Cotelletes de homard, Ris de veau aux truffes and Cotelletes d’agneau aux petits pois, as well as salmon, ham, chicken, pâté and innumerable puddings.

  The newly-weds went to live in Alexandra Road, less than a quarter of a mile from Finchley Road, and just down from where Walter Hartright had first met the Woman in White. St John’s Wood was expanding northwards into Swiss Cottage. From there Harry could take the omnibus to Baker Street and walk to his office. In 1879 South Hampstead railway station opened at the bottom of the Bartleys’ garden, offering a quick connection to Euston.

  One immediate consequence of the marriage was that Wilkie abruptly replaced the long-suffering Tindell with the neophyte Bartley as his solicitor. Doubtless there was some logic in this, perhaps it was even part of the marriage deal, but Bartley, while perfectly competent, had none of Tindell’s specialist interest in contracts and copyright. As a result, Wilkie was on his own in May 1878 when he was approached by William Tillotson, a Bolton newspaper proprietor, who was trying to expand fiction coverage in his many print outlets in the north-west. As Wilkie was still trying to reach as much of his ‘unknown public’ as possible, he was happy to sign a contract to produce a novel, Jezebel’s Daughter, for serialisation in Tillotson’s papers the following autumn. In the same vein, he had recently made a deal with Leader and Son, a floundering Sheffield publisher, whose Sheffield and Rotherham Independent would serialise The Black Robe in 1880.

  In the meantime, he persevered with The Haunted Hotel, a curious fusion of sensation and horror fiction, revolving around a murder and insurance fraud. Serialised in Belgravia over the latter half of 1878, it had genuinely macabre moments, as when a severed head floats around a Venice hotel room. But, despite some amusing travellers’ tales, such as the Americans unable to endure the lack of heating in their freezing hotel, it failed to conjure up the special atmosphere of La Serenissima, found in his early story Volpurno.

  As a diversion, particularly from the tribulations of gout, Wilkie enjoyed keeping up with his American contacts, above all those involved in the theatre. He carried on a flirtatious relationship with the feisty American writer and actress Kate Field, to whom he had been introduced by Trollope. He also struck up an epistolary friendship with William Winter, whose regular slot at the New York Tribune made him the most influential American theatre critic of his generation. When Winter sent him a book of his poems, Wilkie admitted he was ‘an incorrigible heretic in the matter of modern poetry . . . I positively decline to let the poet preach to me or puzzle me.’518 He remained an old-fashioned romantic, wanting verse ‘to express passions and sentiment in language which is essentially intelligible as well as essentially noble and musical’. He added that his favourite poets were Byron, Scott and the little-read George Crabbe.

  Another American visitor was the temperamental actress Rose Eytinge, a friend of Charles Reade. Wilkie met her on only one occasion, because his ‘never sufficiently-to-be-damned-and-blasted rheumatic gout’519 was again affecting his eyes. She could not hide her disappointment when, as she reported in her memoirs, she found that, unlike the ‘big, portentous, heavy’520 male characters in his fiction, Wilkie was modest, mild-mannered ‘and almost the smallest [man] I ever met, who was not positively a dwarf. His hands and feet were almost dwarfed, and as he sat perched up on a rather high chair at his writing-table, with his grizzled beard flowing over his breast, and his low, soft voice flowing out in silvery accents, his head surmounted with a quaintly shaped skull-cap, he looked rather like a wizard who had fallen under the ban of his fairy godmother, who in anger had deprived him of his legs.’

  On hearing from her that Wilkie was suffering from gout when she met him, Reade informed her ‘and there seemed to be a sort of gusto, a sense of satisfaction in his tone: “Ah! Wilkie has been drinking champagne! He will do it, though he knows it’s poison to him. The very moment he gets a bit better, off he will trot to the club and have a good ‘tuck-in’ of lobster and champagne, and so gets another attack.”’ Eytinge was amused at this ‘gloating over the weakness of his literary brother’, particularly as Reade was prone to dyspepsia if he gorged himself, ‘with the inevitable result of reducing him to repentance, abstemiousness, and bad temper’.

  Although Wilkie’s doctors often restricted his movements, they seldom saw fit to advise on his diet (or, if they did, he tended to ignore them). Frank Beard, in fact, shared his taste for gourmandising. Once, when Wilkie visited him in Welbeck Street, they cooked a Don Pedro pie,521 a meat-heavy meal Wilkie had enjoyed on his travels. The recipe required large amounts of garlic, perhaps rather too much, because Frank’s son Nathaniel and the rest of the Beard family could not stomach the strongly flavoured dish, which was eaten only by the two chefs. According to Nathaniel, both men subsequently took to their beds and were ill for days.

  As soon as he felt well enough, Wilkie dragged himself down to Ramsgate, where his amanuensis, Harriet Graves, helped him complete The Haunted Hotel. The finished product, published by Chatto & Windus in October 1878, was dedicated to Sebastian Schlesinger and his wife Berthe, in gratitude for the safe haven they had provided him in Boston a few years earlier.

  Back in London, Wilkie polished off a couple of inconsequential tales for the Christmas market – ‘The Mystery of Marmaduke’, a £50 commission from Bentley’s Temple Bar, with a similar sum from Spirit of the Times in New York, and ‘A Shocking Story’, which netted a more modest £31 10s from Belgravia, though Wilkie had to chase up payment522 with the stern admonition that Chatto’s ‘financial partner’, Windus, had got it ‘on unusually cheap terms, and that I expect him to pay for it punctually’.

  In the autumn of 1878, Wilkie finally turned his attention to the novel he had been putting off. Envisaged as a trilogy, which indicated its importance to him, The Fallen Leaves was another spin-off from his few hours at Wallingford four years earlier. It told the disjointed story of Amelius Goldenheart, a self-proclaimed Primitive Christian Socialist, and four women, each in her way a fallen member of her sex.

  Amelius has been forced into exile from his religious community in Illinois because of an unauthorised liaison with an older woman. Coming to London, he has a letter of introduction to a loathsome businessman, John Farnaby, whose beautiful niece, Regina Mildmay, he becomes infatuated with. Farnaby had earlier ruthlessly seduced Emma, the young unmarried daughter of his employer, so that he could have a child with her (out of wedlock), force her into marriage and thus inherit her father’s thriving stationer’s business. He then despatched the inconvenient illegitimate girl to a baby-farmer. Sixteen years on, Mrs Farnaby is trapped in a loveless marri
age, which she interprets as punishment for the ‘sin’ she committed in allowing her daughter to be given up, and she asks Amelius to help her find her long-lost child.

  Having begun to lose interest in the boringly conventional Regina, Amelius is walking in a rough area of Lambeth, south of Waterloo Bridge, where he hears a girl, clearly a prostitute, call out, ‘Are you good-natured, sir?’ He sees her as delicate, frail and beautiful: ‘robed in pure white, with her gentle blue eyes raised to heaven, a painter might have shown her on his canvas as a saint or an angel.’ It does not take much acquaintance with Wilkie’s work to predict that this waif turns out to Mrs Farnaby’s lost daughter, whom the pitying Amelius sets up in ‘a pretty bachelor cottage in the neighbourhood of the Regent’s Park’. Before long he is in love with her, moves in, and marries her.

  Along the way Amelius and Sally chance on a wedding, which allows Wilkie to indulge in a bravura attack on traditional marriage as a mode of commerce: ‘The bride was a tall buxom girl, splendidly dressed: she performed her part in the ceremony with the most unruffled composure. The bridegroom exhibited an instructive spectacle of aged Nature, sustained by Art. His hair, his complexion, his teeth, his breast, his shoulders, and his legs, showed what the wig-maker, the valet, the dentist, the tailor, and the hosier can do for a rich old man, who wishes to present a juvenile appearance while he is buying a young wife. No less than three clergymen were present, conducting the sale. The demeanour of the rich congregation was worthy of the glorious bygone days of the Golden Calf.’

  When one guest describes the scene as ‘disgraceful’, her young relation remonstrates with her, ‘How can you talk so, grandmamma! He has twenty thousand a year – and that lucky girl will be mistress of the most splendid house in London.’ But the old lady, a surrogate for Wilkie, persists, ‘I don’t care. It’s not the less a disgrace to everybody concerned in it. There is many a poor friendless creature, driven by hunger to the streets, who has a better claim to our sympathy than that shameless girl, selling herself in the house of God!’

  Wilkie was making his familiar case that women in degraded situations, the Carolines (as once was) of this world, are often morally superior to those in regular society, and that most marriages are no better than legalised prostitution. Once again he presented it in religious and allegorical terms (there is no escaping the significance of the name Goldenheart), but he couched it in an unusually strong political manner, portraying the horrors of life on the streets and betraying his leanings towards Christian Socialism of the type followed in communities such as Wallingford.

  He had good professional reasons for tilting at capitalism. Following the demise of sensation fiction, the British public was demanding more down-to-earth reading material. His competitors were realists, such as the emerging Thomas Hardy and Emile Zola, whose 1877 novel L’Assommoir, about alcoholism and poverty in the suburbs of Paris, would be staged in London that summer as Drink (in a version by Charles Reade). Even the work of Mary Elizabeth Braddon had taken a naturalist turn with Joshua Haggard’s Daughter in 1876. Although this was not Wilkie’s natural inclination, he felt he now needed to address what a character in his book calls ‘the people who have drawn blanks in the lottery of life – the people who have toiled hard after happiness, and have gathered nothing but disappointment and sorrow; the friendless and the lonely, the wounded and the lost’.

  That does not explain the religious underpinnings. Here Wilkie may again have been encouraged by Holman Hunt, who had just returned from another extended stay in Jerusalem. But, as someone who regarded the life of Christ as exemplary, he was no less sincere for that. The Fallen Leaves was a very personal work, which he told Bentley ‘excites and exhausts me in the writing – as no other story of mine as [sic] ever excited me’.523 He showed what it meant to him by dedicating it to Caroline, which some commentators have seen as evidence that his mistress not only came from the streets but had once been a prostitute. However, she would never have allowed this to appear if it were really so.

  Wilkie’s composure was jolted when he learned that Ned Ward, the friend of his youth, had slit his throat on the morning of 10 January 1879, having been ill and depressed for some time. Ward’s son Wriothesley discovered his father screaming, ‘I was mad when I did it; the devil prompted me,’524 and had to hold him down until a doctor arrived. His injuries were initially not considered life-threatening, so on the 14th Wilkie wrote to Henrietta Ward, saying how sorry he was to hear that Ned was ‘seriously ill’ and bemoaning the fact that the Wards’ now permanent residence in Windsor meant they had not seen each other for some time. The following day, Ned’s continual writhing caused a deterioration in his condition and he died that evening. An inquest later concluded that he had committed suicide (still an illegal act) while temporarily insane. As had been the case with his mother eleven years earlier, Wilkie’s health prevented him attending Ned’s funeral.

  Within a month Henrietta Ward was contemplating a book about her late husband and asked Wilkie if he possessed any of his letters. Wilkie replied that he had never received more than two or three lines from Ned and these he had given to autograph hunters. Old letters seemed to haunt him. Georgina Hogarth had recently asked his advice about publishing an edition of Dickens’s correspondence. Eager to help, Wilkie called on Chatto to cost 2,000 copies of a two-volume work running to 400 pages.525 The quotation was £172 per volume, made up of £50 for composition, £45 for presswork, £60 for paper and around £17 (or 2d per copy) for binding. Dickens’s solicitor, Frederic Ouvry, later calculated that they could make £1,100 profit if the book sold at thirty shillings. Georgina considered the situation and, after fierce negotiation, The Letters of Charles Dickens was put out by Chapman and Hall in 1880.

  When not keeping up with the schedule for serialising his novel in The World, Wilkie was occupied with his usual round of negotiations with foreign publishers. But for every Baron Tauchnitz, the scrupulous Leipzig-based publisher who had included Wilkie’s work in his Collection of British and American Authors in Europe since the mid-1850s, there were others who took liberties with copyright. Wilkie was now forced to threaten legal action against a French writer who had put out a version of Dickens’s unfinished Edwin Drood, claiming that it had been completed by Wilkie. However, when the writ reached the courts, it had to be withdrawn because the defendant had no money. Wilkie comforted himself with the thought that British authors were working closely together to fight cases of piracy, and an international agreement on copyright would soon follow.

  By the end of June he had completed The Fallen Leaves (or at least the first part of it), though the book did not appear in volume form from Chatto & Windus until 1 July 1879. When, a week later, Harriet gave birth to her first child, a daughter called Doris Edith, Wilkie took this as an omen to go straight to Ramsgate, where he hoped to enjoy much of the next three months in the company of his extended family.

  In the meantime, he had to endure a spate of unfavourable reviews of The Fallen Leaves. The Sunday Times mocked his attempt to rewrite the story of Christ:526 ‘If . . . Mr Collins thinks he can accomplish, without being crucified, an attempt in which Godhead failed he is sanguine. His views about socialism and about women are as much unsuited to the world of today as to that of two thousand years ago.’ The Saturday Review said, ‘All his characters are forced and unnatural,527 and no less so are the incidents of his story. Everything, in fact, is so extravagant, so absurd, and so grossly improbable that a kind of low harmony is preserved throughout.’ When such reactions were repeated, Wilkie cancelled the intended second ‘series’ of the novel and concentrated for the rest of the year on other projects.

  His holiday mood did not improve when he received the not unexpected news of the death of his old friend Charles Fechter on 5 August. Kate Field later asked Wilkie to contribute to a memoir of the actor. He agreed, on condition528 that his words were printed in full since he felt there had already been too much speculation about Fechter’s life. In the publish
ed Recollections529 of Charles Fechter, which he contributed to Field’s book, he expanded on this, saying he might have included the actor’s own words from his letters ‘which I thought it right to preserve’. But, in a statement of his deep regard for privacy, though perhaps a curious admission for a writer with his track record of seeking to unearth the ‘dead secrets’ of his times, he felt, ‘Even these are not only too personal to be present[ed] to the public, but they are, in many places, so expressed (unconsciously on his part, it is needless to say) as to be in danger of leading to erroneous impressions of him in the minds of strangers. This memorial portrait of Fechter would not be improved as a likeness by borrowing his own words.’

  SIXTH EPOCH

  19

  GROWING IMMOBILITY

  ‘WILKIE COLLINS . . . STILL lingered, not superfluous, but not indispensable; like an historic edifice, respected, but unoccupied. Like many other fiction-mongers before and since, he had come to regard himself as a reformer, seer, and prophet; and if the people didn’t give ear, as formerly, they and not the book were to blame.’530 The date of this pejorative judgement by Julian Hawthorne is not certain: it could have appeared any time between 1874 and 1881, when the American novelist and his wife were living in London.

  Hawthorne was clearly unimpressed by Wilkie, perhaps seeing him as a rival for a market where mystery and the supernatural came together. He was unusually damning in his description of Wilkie ‘sitting in his plethoric, disorderly writing-room’, a prime example of the ‘hopelessly ramshackle’ rather than ‘raspingly tidy’ kind of bachelor. ‘Though the England of his prime had been a cricketing, athletic, outdoor England, Wilkie had ever slumped at his desk and breathed only indoor air. He was soft, plump, and pale, suffered from various ailments, his liver was wrong, his heart weak, his lungs faint, his stomach incompetent, he ate too much and the wrong things. He had a big head, a dingy complexion, was somewhat bald . . . His air was of mild discomfort and fractiousness; he had a queer way of holding his hand, which was small, plump, and unclean, hanging up by the wrist, like a rabbit on its hind legs. He had strong opinions and prejudices, but his nature was obviously kind and lovable, and a humorous vein would occasionally be manifest. One felt that he was unfortunate and needed succour.’