Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation

by Andrew Lycett

  As a writer and a seeker after the truth himself, Hawthorne showed a remarkable lack of sympathy. Wilkie, in his way, was sincerely groping for a philosophy in keeping with this latest stage in his life. As his novel The Black Robe would show, he remained averse to organised religion. And if he had problems with the Anglican Church, he had even more with Roman Catholicism. Nevertheless, influenced by Holman Hunt’s gentle faith, by his own attraction to the Christian message, and by his new-found experience of fatherhood, he was still searching for sustenance from the smorgasbord of quasi-religions, such as Swedenborg-ism, spiritualism and Christian Socialism, which he mixed on his plate with his idiosyncratic synthesis of contemporary scientific research into the power of the mind.

  Disappointed by the negative reaction to The Fallen Leaves, he still felt he would be vindicated when his story appeared in a cheap edition. He believed there would then be a clamour for a second volume dealing with Amelius and Sally’s married life, which he pessimistically told a correspondent would be ‘essentially’ happy, ‘but the outer influence of the world which surrounds the husband and wife – the world whose unchristian prejudices they have set at defiance – will slowly undermine their happiness, and will, I fear, make the close of the story a sad one.’ Chatto put out a one-volume edition in 1880, but again it did not become the best-seller Wilkie had hoped for.

  Instead, Wilkie worked on turning his 1858 play The Red Vial into a novel called Jezebel’s Daughter. He had been advised more than two decades earlier that the story might be better written in chapters. And so it turned out. His sensationalist hodgepodge for the theatre became on the printed page a measured plea for the humane treatment of lunatics – in this case, a character called Jack Straw incarcerated in the Bethlehem Hospital, or Bedlam – interlaced with an entertaining and well researched exploration into the nefarious uses of poisons and their antidotes. The story revolves around a widow, Madame Fontaine, who uses the toxic remnants of her late husband’s medicine bag to try and secure her daughter’s position in a German trading house. In an introduction addressed to Antonio Caccia, his Italian translator, Wilkie said that he had tried to provide ‘two interesting studies of humanity’, the enfeebled intellect of Jack Straw and the wickedness of Madame Fontaine, whom he interprets as an interesting moral study, driven by the over-riding instinct of maternal love. He also stressed the depth of his research,531 which included visiting a morgue in Frankfurt.

  As an indication of Wilkie’s religious sympathies, Mrs Wagner, the well-intentioned widow of the London partner of the trading house, secures Jack Straw’s release from Bedlam and places him in a Quaker retreat in York. She and Madame Fontaine provide contrasting examples of the determined woman who so often featured in Wilkie’s novels. Improbable events still occur, such as Jack Straw’s madness having been caused by a poison provided by Madame Fontaine’s late husband. Wilkie, the eternal bachelor, cannot stop himself from concluding his book with a blissful wedding. But Jezebel’s Daughter, published by Chatto at the end of March 1880, following serialisation in Tillotson’s newspapers, was a fine novel and showed that Wilkie had lost none of his authorial touch.

  Wilkie could now relax a bit. Having been overlooked for Henry Irving’s gala dinner to celebrate his hundredth performance of The Merchant of Venice at the Lyceum in February, he accepted an invitation from the actor’s secretary, Bram Stoker, to see the play later in the month. Wilkie also found time to sit for a portrait which Fred Lehmann had commissioned from his brother Rudolf. This showed him in a heavy overcoat with a thick fur collar, sporting a wispy white beard, looking alert but pensive, as if contemplating the spiritual dilemmas of his books.

  Sorely troubled by his gout, he spent longer periods in Ramsgate, visiting it in March and April 1880, and again that summer and autumn. He was now so established in the town that, at one point, he rented two houses, installing Caroline and her immediate family in one (in Nelson Crescent) and Martha, or ‘Mrs Dawson’, and her children in the other (in Wellington Crescent on the other side of the harbour overlooking the railway terminus).

  Maintaining good relations between his mistresses was not easy. Wilkie insisted on access to his children, wherever he was living, as was suggested in the census of 3 April 1881, when Martha’s eldest daughter Marian (named as Marian Collins rather than Dawson), was staying at Gloucester Place, where the long-suffering Caroline Graves was still listed as the ‘housekeeper’. Martha meanwhile remained in Taunton Place, with her other children Harriet and William, as well as her elder sister Alice, who looked after them all.

  Two days after this poll Wilkie’s new novel, The Black Robe, was published in three volumes by Chatto. This was a darker, more complex tale than Jezebel’s Daughter, addressing another of his pet subjects, the marriage laws, again served up with lashings of religion. Reflecting his long-standing antipathy to Roman Catholicism, and particularly the Jesuits – a secretive, foreign force ideally suited to be cast as the villains of a sensational novel – the book tells of Lewis Romayne, a landowner wracked with guilt after killing a man in a duel. He returns to his Yorkshire home, Vange Abbey, which came into his family after being confiscated at the Reformation. There he is dogged by a Jesuit priest, Father Benwell, who preys on Romayne’s vulnerability to wrest back control of the estate for his ‘true’ religion. As Romayne is split between the demands of love and Catholicism, the drama hangs on whether his wife’s earlier marriage had been formalised in ecclesiastical as well as civil law. As in many of Wilkie’s novels, the story focuses on the interpretation of wills. When the dying Romayne throws his will into a fire (thus denying Benwell’s plans to repossess his property), he says he has done it for his ‘wife and child’ – a motive not too far from Wilkie’s when he methodically changed his will every time Martha gave birth.

  He enjoyed the controversy his book created, telling his American friend Jane Bigelow that had received ‘some tremendous letters from Roman Catholics’532 about it. ‘They are all shocked that I should not know better than to doubt the Jesuits – the most harmless and innocent assembly of Gentlemen on the face of the earth.’

  Over the summer he was unusually inactive, after submitting to a course of treatment for gout based on colchicum and calomel (otherwise known as mercury chloride, a poison used as a laxative). Rather than his preferred dry champagne, he was reduced to the ‘nastiest drink’533 possible, weak brandy and water, which left him ‘filled with morbid longings to destroy’ himself ‘by getting drunk on the excellent port in the solemn coffee-room at the Athenaeum’. Once the inflammation subsided he felt extremely weak: ‘my knees tremble on the stairs, and my back aches after half an hour’s walking – no, tottering – on the sunny side of the street. I am told to “drive out” – but I won’t. An “airing in a carriage” is (to me) such a depressing proceeding that I am ready to burst out crying when I only think of it.’534 Consequently, he was forced to turn down an invitation to meet the visiting Russian author Ivan Turgenev. ‘I don’t remember whether Dante’s Hell includes among its tortures Gout in the Eyes,’535 he told William Ralston, Turgenev’s translator and promoter.

  He still managed to put in long hours contacting publishers and translators abroad. His anger at continuing literary piracy in the United States led him to compose a pamphlet, ‘Considerations on the Copyright Question’,536 which was printed there by Alfred Smith Barnes’s International Review, though his demand that nothing should be cut led the editors to add a note stating that, while they supported his plea for an international copyright treaty, they ‘disclaim all responsibility for the language adopted by him in his argument’. His strong views led to a temporary breakdown in his relations with Harper and Brothers, whom he had singled out for criticism. Through his contacts on this issue, he met Alexander (A.P.) Watt, a tough-minded Scotsman with a track record in publishing, who had set up as London’s first full-time literary agent. Feeling weighed down by unnecessary paperwork, Wilkie invited Watt to visit and immediately appointed hi
m his business representative. Watt helped him negotiate the intricacies of an ever-changing market place, where the falling circulations and revenues of traditional outlets, including Belgravia, required writers to seek simultaneous, often lowly-paid, publication in provincial newspapers, such as those run by Tillotson in the north-west. This so-called ‘belt and braces’ approach to serialisation called for a considerable exchange of letters about fees and dates of publication. Watt also responded to requests, such as that from Sir Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, a rich Conservative MP, who had asked Wilkie for a ‘good story for a paper in which I am interested’. This was England, the first Conservative penny weekly, which he kept going at his own expense. With a nod to Britain’s changing demographics, Ashmead-Bartlett added,537 ‘It is principally for the masses and therefore the more sensational the more effective.’

  A more esoteric diatribe penned by Wilkie addressed the topic of air pollution in theatres. ‘The Air and the Audience’538 started in playful manner, complimenting a New York playhouse for having introduced a form of air conditioning (‘ozoned air’) that maintained a constant temperature in its auditorium. Wilkie reasonably suggested that it was in the ‘pecuniary interests of a manager to consult the health and comfort of his audience’, though he feared this was not the case in Britain, where, to take one example, only a couple of theatres had introduced electric light, while the others ‘persist in poisoning us with gas’. At this point, his tone changed dramatically as he inveighed against contaminated air, which threatened people’s health because it contained ‘minute particles . . . “given off” by us and by our perspiring fellow creatures’. Worse still, and here he showed that he had been influenced by contemporary theories of degeneration, ‘if there happen to be any playgoers of consumptive tendency present, their particles may be actually charged with diseases, and may sow the seeds that result in the future on which . . . we had better not dwell.’

  Wilkie’s basic thesis echoed that of the impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte, whose Savoy Theatre became the first public building in the world to introduce electric lighting (at a performance of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta H.M.S. Pinafore in October 1881). Twelve hundred of Joseph Swan’s newly patented incandescent light bulbs helped illuminate the event. D’Oyly Carte was quoted, ‘The greatest drawbacks to the enjoyment of the theatrical performances are, undoubtedly, the foul air and heat which pervade all theatres. As everyone knows, each gas-burner consumes as much oxygen as many people, and causes great heat beside.’ Wilkie was in touch with D’Oyly Carte at the time, though he had declined an invitation to the Savoy’s opening as he was going to Ramsgate.539

  In this latest article Wilkie let slip that he had altered his opinion about English theatre: he now referred to ‘loathsome burlesques and idiotic adaptations from the French’, while praising such ‘original English plays’ as Masks and Faces by his friend Charles Reade, along with the works of Tom Taylor, the comedies of T.W. Robertson, and Our Boys by Henry James Byron, which had enjoyed ‘the longest “run” on record’ (four years at the Vaudeville in 1875). However, this was dated fare by the 1880s, when the artistic world was being challenged by social realists such as Ibsen on the one hand and aesthetes including Oscar Wilde on the other.

  Wilkie’s changed perspective might have had something to do with his friend Ted Pigott’s appointment as Britain’s official theatre censor. This was amusing, given that Pigott had accompanied him to so many small theatres and dives in London and Paris over the previous thirty years. But Pigott was now respectable. His correspondence with Wilkie, once so prolific, had petered, or been weeded, out. As poacher turned gamekeeper, Pigott took his official duties seriously, seeing himself as not only an arbiter of plays but a guardian of public morals, such as taking a stand against any form of prostitution in playhouses. And he revelled in the public relations side of the job. Having defended his role to the Parliamentary Committee on Censorship in 1882, he would state the following year, ‘What is sometimes rather invidiously called “censorship” is nothing, in effect, but the friendly and perfectly disinterested action of an adviser who has the permanent interests of the stage at heart.’540 This paternalistic approach would result a decade later in his rejecting Oscar Wilde’s play Salome as ‘a miracle of imprudence . . . half-biblical, half-pornographic’. George Bernard Shaw later dismissed him as a hypocritical mediocrity.

  Wilkie was now working on a new novel, Heart and Science, whose subtitle ‘A Story of the Present Time’ signalled its contemporary relevance. It addressed the debate on vivisection, which had been raging since the mid-1870s when a doctor performed an operation on a howling dog at a conference of the British Medical Association. The ensuing controversy led to a licensing system for medical experiments using live animals, but not before several anti-vivisection societies, including the Victoria Street Society (VSS), headed by Wilkie’s feminist friend Frances Power Cobbe, had sprung up and garnered support from personalities such as Lewis Carroll, Thomas Carlyle and Robert Browning.

  Vivisection received a renewed airing in August 1881 when the International Medical Congress in London declared that animal experimentation was ‘indispensable’ to the future of medicine. Cobbe’s VSS brought an action against Professor David Ferrier, an Edinburgh-trained neurologist, for performing vivisection on monkeys without the required licence. (The matter of his post-mortem experiments on patients from the West Riding lunatic asylum was overlooked.) The case collapsed through lack of evidence, but Cobbe attended and wrote passionately about it.

  Wilkie’s love of animals, together with his interest in a gentle Christian Socialist-cum-Quaker philosophy, made him sympathetic to the anti-vivisectionist cause. However, he did not want to write a mere manifesto, as he had done on ventilation in theatres. He was tired of the persistent criticism that his novels were driven by the demands of plot rather than character (a line Anthony Trollope took in his autobiography published posthumously in October 1883). So, as Wilkie wrote in his preface to Heart and Science, he was determined that qualities of character and humour should feature strongly in the book.

  The result was a complex love story involving a young surgeon with the improbable name of Ovid Vere (the ‘heart’ of the title), overlaid with the machinations of Dr Nathan Benjulia, a specialist in nervous diseases, who experiments on animals in the interests of science. Benjulia is not wholly bad, but becomes corrupted by his work, which he is convinced is ‘all for knowledge’. As Wilkie points out in his preface, ‘You are purposely left in ignorance of the hideous secrets of Vivisection. The outside of the laboratory is a necessary object in my landscape – but I never once open the door and invite you to look in. I trace, in one of my characters, the result of the habitual practice of cruelty . . . in fatally deteriorating the nature of man – and I leave the picture to speak for itself.’

  Throughout 1882, Wilkie scoured specialist literature, corresponded with experts such as the Queen’s honorary physician, Surgeon General Charles Alexander Gordon, and interviewed avowed activists, including Frances Power Cobbe. He told Frederick Lehmann, ‘Some critic said “The Woman In White”541 was “written in blood and vitriol”. This book is being written in blood and dynamite.’ Despite his strong commitment to the cause (he described vivisectionists as ‘wretches’), he found the work more demanding than usual. He shed light on his intensely cerebral process of creativity when he told William Winter that the book ‘so mercilessly excited me that I went on writing week after week without a day’s interval of rest. Rest was impossible. I made a desperate effort, rushed to the sea, went sailing and fishing, and was writing my book all the time, in my head (as the children say). The one wise course to take was to go back to my desk, and empty my head – and then rest.’542 Luckily, he had a remedy: an armchair, a cigar ‘and a hundred and fiftieth reading of the glorious Walter Scott (King, Emperor, President, and God Almighty of novelists) – there is the regimen that is doing me good!’ Scott was now one of his three acknowledged ‘kings of ficti
on’,543 along with Fenimore Cooper and Balzac. (Significantly, perhaps, he did not include Dickens.)

  Wilkie’s robust taste in literature stood oddly with his increasingly eccentric behaviour in other areas of his life. ‘Yesterday, being out for a little walk, and wearing a paletot with a hood for travelling,’544 he informed Nina Lehmann, ‘I heard a woman remark as I went by, “To think of a man wearing such a coat as that – at his time of life!”’ A paletot was a close-fitting coat with a hood, but the point was that it was usually worn by women. Hearing this pricked Wilkie’s vanity, and he went on to ask Nina, ‘The question that arises is – Shall I dye my beard?’ Such quirkiness extended to other aspects, such as food. Wybert Reeve noted, ‘His diet was singular. At dinner he would sometimes take some bread soaked in meat-gravy only. In the night he was fond of cold soup and champagne. For exercise he often walked quickly up and down-stairs so many times by the aid of the banisters.’545

  Heart and Science was published in three volumes by Chatto in April 1883, after being serialised in various newspapers and in Belgravia.546 The response was positive; it was only later that Wilkie was seen as a polemical writer, as lightly pilloried in Swinburne’s posthumous put-down:547

  What brought good Wilkie’s genius nigh perdition?

  Some demon whispered – ‘Wilkie! have a mission’.