Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation

by Andrew Lycett

  Wilkie proudly informed William Winter how Benjulia now ‘matched’ Fosco as a popular demon,548 while he described the novel to his most recent French translator, Count Robert du Pontavice de Heussey as ‘a great advance’549 on The Black Robe. In this case, he had an added motive since Heussey had been trying to find a publisher for The Black Robe in France, without success, probably because the subject matter was controversial in a Catholic country. Wilkie suggested that if Heart and Science were to jump the queue, Heussey might subsequently find it easier to place his earlier effort.

  While writing Heart and Science, Wilkie was also working on a play, Rank and Riches, which took him longer than expected and was not staged until June 1883. (He may have been trying too hard to write the sort of ‘original English play’ he had advocated in ‘The Air and the Audience’). Despite a distinguished cast, which included Alice Lingard, George Alexander, Myra Holme (Mrs Pinero) and Charles Hawtrey, Rank and Riches folded after just six nights at the Adelphi Theatre. Hawtrey recalled550 how the producer Edgar Bruce had earlier talked up the show and told him rather fancifully that no dramatic offering by Wilkie had ever failed before. Wilkie had seen Lingard in Camille at the Gaiety in April and was greatly taken by her, though he found the play the ‘very worst adaptation’ of Dumas’s La Dame aux Camélias. But neither his words nor her acting could do anything to save Rank and Riches, an unfocused story that rambled over topics such as bigamy and embezzlement. The Times referred to the ‘outrageous improbability of the characters’551 and the ‘want of dramatic purpose’. The management hurriedly brought in Lingard’s Camille as a replacement, while Wilkie blamed the notoriously volatile ‘Adelphi audience’552 for the failure. He had to take consolation from the continuing success in the provinces of Ada Cavendish’s production of The New Magdalen, which would find its way back to London for a revival at the Novelty Theatre in January the following year.

  The cast of Rank and Riches included Pigott’s nephew Jim. One of the sons of the ill-fated Henry Smyth Pigott, he was now forging a career in the theatre, where Wilkie tried to help him. Towards the end of the decade, J.W. Pigott, his stage name, finally enjoyed some success with his comedy The Bookmaker, which toured Britain and crossed the Atlantic. He later acted with Lillie Langtry’s company.

  After this theatrical setback, Wilkie escaped for the summer to Ramsgate, where he hired a steam yacht called Phyllis. He described it to Pigott as ‘a capital little vessel . . . Two reefs in the mainsail, and the top mast on deck, and such a sea off the Foreland!’553 Since Harriet Bartley had just given birth to her third daughter, he invited her to stay. ‘Come – the sooner the better – and bring all the children. Good heavens! don’t I like Dah, and the quiet little curlyhead? I wish I was a baby again – with nothing to do but suck and sleep.’554 (Dah was Doris, now four, while the curlyhead was either Cecile, who was two, or the newborn Evelyn.)

  Wilkie confided to Harriet, ‘Don’t tell anybody – I am quite mad over my new book. It is at the present writing half a dozen books, with four or five hundred characters – and full of immoral situations.’ He managed to cut down this behemoth to manageable proportions, but it was a wrong move, because I Say No failed to engage. Ostensibly the story was promising, as it followed an orphaned schoolgirl, Emily Brown, in her gradual discovery of the circumstances surrounding her father’s gruesome murder. But Emily and her schoolfriends had none of the spark of Magdalen Vanstone or Marian Halcombe.

  As usual, Wilkie worked as fast as his disabilities allowed. At one stage he misquoted Pope555 that ‘the life of a writer is a warfare on earth.’ (He should have said ‘the life of a wit’.) By the following June of 1884, he had completed his task and the novel was published by Chatto that October, after being serialised in a syndicate of newspapers put together (such was the changing nature of publishing) by Kelly’s, best known for its Post Office directories. Wilkie was able to retire to Ramsgate, where Pigott joined him in his family yacht and took him out to sea.

  Wilkie returned to London feeling ‘infinitely the better for’ his ‘thorough salting’,556 but within a short time the awful cycle began again. As he launched into a new novel, The Evil Genius, he looked in the mirror and saw a red streak in his left eye, which three days later turned the colour of a cooked lobster.557 He took to the third person to explain to an American correspondent how ‘the Gout-Fiend had got him’ and ‘bored holes in his eye with a red-hot needle. Calomel and colchicum knocked him down, and said (through the medium of the doctor) “Wilkie, it’s all for your good”. Laudanum – divine Laudanum – was his only friend.’ His condition improved but he remained weak and half blind and needed to cover his eyes.

  As his spiralling bill at his chemist (Corbyn and Company in New Bond Street) attests, laudanum was more of a necessity than a friend. His experiment with morphine had ended (partly as a result of the passage of the Poisons and Pharmacy Act of 1868), but proprietary brands of laudanum were still widely available and he was able to down a tincture that the surgeon Sir William Ferguson said would be enough to kill a dozen people.558 When he was out, he carried a hip flask of the drug. An actor friend recalled seeing ‘Collins drink a wineglassful of laudanum at one swallow without affecting him in the least,’559 and he was manifestly right to conclude, ‘Life would have been almost unbearable to him without it.’

  With the help of this medicinal crutch, Wilkie was generally able to cope. Sometimes, as with The Moonstone, the drug enhanced his writing, but the effects now began to show in less benign ways. When he went up the stairs, he was confronted by ghosts who, he imagined, wanted to push him down. When he tried to sleep, he often saw a ‘shapeless monster, with eyes of fire and big green fangs’. The writer Alethea Hayter later suggested that Wilkie’s youthful ability to paint a scene in words deteriorated as he grew older and more addicted to opium. He no longer saw what he was describing, but conjured it up from his narcotised dreams in an intellectual rather than a visual manner.560

  Not that he lost confidence in opium’s therapeutic qualities.562 When his friend Charles Kent was unable to sleep,561 Wilkie arranged for Corbyn to supply him with laudanum, and when that did not work (he explained that the drug sometimes acted as a stimulant rather than a sedative), he advised Kent to consult Beard for a professional opinion.

  During 1885, he was beset by another problem – a pain in his chest, which was diagnosed as angina. This required him to add further ‘devilish drugs’563 to his regime: sal volatile (smelling salts), a stimulant; chloroform, a depressant; and amyl nitrite, a specific muscle relaxant. All of these worked on his heart, though he asked friends not to mention it in case of newspaper publicity. At around the same time, he was also prescribed white arsenic as an additional cure for gout.

  Wilkie admitted that this intoxicating brew inspired him to write ‘The Ghost’s Touch’, which he called a ghost story but which was more of a psychological thriller with strong supernatural undertones. At its core was the question of whether the ‘invisible presence’ felt by its female protagonist was a supernatural revelation or an indication of madness. The story had a matrimonial subplot relating to a man marrying his dead brother’s widow. This made reference to legal restrictions that, as Holman Hunt had found to his cost, prevented a man from marrying his deceased wife’s sister.

  ‘The Ghost’s Touch’, which appeared in Tillotson’s newspapers in the autumn of 1885, was the latest and one of the most accomplished in a series of stories Wilkie had written over the previous few years, usually for the Christmas numbers of Belgravia and similar magazines. These stories played with his most enduring themes, such as love, marriage, detection and the supernatural. One of the earliest, ‘Who Killed Zebedee?’, offered an interesting variation on the detective story, taking the reader through a police investigation into a murder, before the detective involved confesses on his deathbed that he had concealed crucial evidence because he was in love with the perpetrator and wanted to save her from the gallows. This romantic policem
an is Roman Catholic, which shows that Wilkie was not always prejudiced in matters of religion.

  Having decided on collecting his stories, he was uncertain what to call his compilation. An inspirational meander around the streets left him with a list of twenty titles, which he whittled down to three – Drawing-Room Stories, Little Novels and Mrs Zant and the Ghost; and Other Stories. He preferred the last, but it proved too long, so he settled for Little Novels, though he dented his fading feminist credentials with his comment to Chatto, ‘And if it should turn out that some damnable female writer has already got this title, let us stick to it nevertheless.’564 Like many authors of his sex, Wilkie was put out to find that a new generation of women were following in the steps of Miss Braddon and Mrs Wood and selling more copies than he did.

  As well as these stories, Wilkie kept up his output of novels. The Evil Genius,565 his offering for 1885, provided another light trot over the hurdles of marriage and the inconsistent laws that governed it. Originally titled (with some irony) Home! Sweet Home!, it has an attractive governess, Sydney Westerfield, falling in love with the father of her charge, Kitty Linley. When she tries to leave her employers’ household, Kitty is upset, becomes ill and demands her return. Matters are not improved when her mother seeks a divorce under Scottish law. However, they become unredeemably contrived when the Linley parents get back together and remarry.

  The story has biographical implications since, before marrying a wayward aristocrat, Sydney’s mother had worked as a barmaid in a public house. Wilkie takes up the cudgels on behalf of Martha Rudd when someone asks, ‘By what right does Mr Westerfield’s family dare to suppose that a barmaid may not be a perfectly virtuous woman?’ In a sense, Kitty’s mother also takes after Caroline Graves in making her bid for freedom when her husband (or partner in Wilkie’s case) finds another woman. She then regrets the separation and returns to the status quo.

  The novel was serialised in Tillotson’s newspapers from October 1885 to May 1886, before being published by Chatto in September 1886. Although serious in intent, the book’s light-hearted elements were more suited to the theatre, so that, even at this stage in his career, Wilkie felt the need to produce his own dramatic version, which was given a run-through at the Vaudeville Theatre at the end of October.

  Although agreeably ensconced in Ramsgate for most of the time, he was not happy with ‘this most accursed Irish business’ (a racheting up of the debate over Home Rule), which caused a delay in the book’s publication. Ireland was one of the few political issues that exercised him. This was a legacy of his family’s Irish origins and Protestantism. While he was generally unsympathetic to gestures of imperial aggrandisement (and the following year would describe Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee as simply ‘idiotic’),566 he remained an unreconstructed Unionist, implacably opposed to any demonstrations of Irish nationalism. He also retained a romantic sense that the world of books was more important than politics, as was clear in his complaint to his friend Charles Kent, apropos the situation in Ireland: ‘Nobody seems to know whether there is to be another general election – or a Civil War – and your old Literature hides her diminished head.’567

  He remained occupied with ‘the Irish business’, which would feature at the centre of his last novel, Blind Love (originally titled The Lord Harry). In the meantime, he worked on The Guilty River, looking once more at the psychological effects of disability, and on The Legacy of Cain, which took up much of his time in 1887.

  The spectre of his young daughters again appeared in the latter work, the story of two girls who grow up together, though one, Eunice, is adopted and the daughter of a murderess. As in Armadale, an underlying theme is the influence of one generation on another: is it inevitable that the innocent young ‘tigress’ Eunice will revert to the evil ways of her mother? (In his own girls’ case, the question preying on his mind seems to have been whether they would be able to overcome the disadvantages of their illegitimate birth.) The Legacy of Cain offers a contemporary variation on the old ‘nature versus nurture’ debate, except that Wilkie’s views on heredity were now influenced by post-Darwinian thinking on eugenics. Although often dismissed as one of his later didactic novels, the story is a more nuanced exploration of the pretensions of biological determinism, which is given short shrift as a scientific theory since it is the other, supposedly good daughter who goes to the bad and attempts to poison her former lover with digitalis. The book was serialised in Tillotson’s papers in the first half of 1888 and published by Chatto in November.

  Wilkie appreciated a welcome interruption to his unremitting round of hard work and poor health through his relationships with two very different members of the opposite sex. One was Mary Anderson, a glamorous American actress who had come to London in 1883 to further her career. After being introduced by Winter, the theatre critic, she and Wilkie became firm friends. He showed his old Stagedoor Johnny spirit in the gushing fan letter he wrote after seeing her in Pygmalion and Galatea by W.S. Gilbert, another Chatto author who was creating successful light musicals with Sir Arthur Sullivan. Wilkie invited himself to tea so he could tell her ‘of the strong impression that your acting produced on me’.568

  A year later he proposed writing a play for her, provided he could find an interesting American theme that was not related to war. He sent her a draft of the first act, but she was not impressed and returned it. Nevertheless, she enjoyed his company and soaked up his stories of Dickens and other authors.

  Wilkie’s other female friend was very different – not a woman at all, but a twelve-year-old girl called Anne or ‘Nannie’ Wynne, with whom he carried on a strange, affectionate correspondence, as if they were a married couple and he was jealous of her admirers. She was the daughter of Emily Le Poer Wynne, the Irish-born widow of a senior civil servant in India, who was now living in Delamere Gardens, Maida Vale. Wilkie seems to have been inroduced to the family by Pigott.

  It was odd that, having stuck out against marriage for sixty years, Wilkie should now call a pre-pubescent girl ‘Mrs Collins’. She became ‘my darling’ and ‘carissima sposa mia’ (my dearest wife), from whom he looked forward to a ‘conjugal embrace’.569 From a twenty-first-century perspective, such forms of address are suspect, though there was no suggestion of impropriety. Wilkie took trouble to include Nannie’s mother in his exchanges. Taking his cue from Holman Hunt, he had a romantic idea, to which Lewis Carroll also subscribed, that young girls personified the spirit of innocence. Nannie acted as a substitute for his elder daughters, Marian and Harriet, who were now teenagers and safely ensconced at the Maria Grey School in Fitzroy Square. Nannie also provided a non-judgemental sounding board for Wilkie, who could prattle on about his ‘excellent friends Opium and Quinine’570 and his need to sniff ‘Amyl’, which he protested ‘is not the Christian name of another wife.571 It is only a glass capsule.’

  His sexual preferences were made clear in an exchange with Napoleon Sarony in March 1887.572 In thanking his New York friend for the gift of photographs of some of his mildly erotic drawings, Wilkie said, apropos one of the images, ‘I too think the back view of a finely-formed woman the loveliest view – and her hips and her bottom the most precious parts of that view. The line of beauty in those quarters enchants me, when it is not overladen by fat.’ He confirmed that his ideal was the Venus Callipyge (the latter word meaning ‘beautiful buttocks’), which he had almost certainly seen in Naples. He claimed he had spent his whole life searching for a woman like her.

  As it happened, A.P. Watt, the man he called his ‘good genius’,573 had been sent a better, tinted version of this drawing, which showed a woman looking over her shoulder as she steps into a bath. He gave it to Wilkie, who compared his ‘draped darling’ to a chalk drawing by an old master. He exhibited it prominently beside his desk, allowing him to present the slightly inferior version (the gift from Sarony) to Frank Beard. Wilkie showed his gratitude to the photographer by ordering new copies of his own portrait taken in New York, telling Sarony it
was still much in demand.

  One effect of Wilkie’s general immobility was that Caroline consolidated her position as the woman, both gatekeeper and housekeeper, at the centre of his life. Her sense of herself had strengthened since she was also the respected grandmother of a growing family, to whom Wilkie took pleasure in acting as honorary grandfather. There was no disguising his excitement in Ramsgate in July 1886 when, as he told Beard, ‘The Bartleys are within two doors of us and the children are in and out a dozen times a day.’574

  Meanwhile, Martha got on with bringing up Wilkie’s three children. She sometimes suggested she would rather have a more binding relationship, as when she insisted that Wilkie maintain the outward signs of respectability on a visit to Ramsgate. As he reported to Sebastian Schlesinger in August 1888, ‘Wilkie Collins . . . has disappeared575 from this mortal sphere of action, and is replaced by William Dawson 27 Wellington Crescent Ramsgate.’576 He explained that he was staying at the Kent seaside with his ‘“morganatic family”, and must travel (like the Royal Personages) under an alias – or not be admitted into the respectable house now occupied by my children and their mother. So . . . address W. Dawson Esq. for the next fortnight.’ The idea that Wilkie should go by an assumed name in a town where he was well known was ridiculous. Perhaps such proprieties were required by the landlady, but it is more likely an indication of Martha’s insecurity that she requested this petty deception.

  Her peace of mind was not helped by the fact that the Graveses now commanded the purse strings in Wilkie’s household. This was largely because Harry Bartley was not only his solicitor but, since Charles Ward’s death in 1883, his main financial confidant.

  Without Ward at his side, some of Wilkie’s old insecurities about money returned, and he might have wished he was still earning the extravagant amounts he had enjoyed in the 1860s. Throughout much of the mid-1880s, his income hovered around the £2,000 mark, though in 1887 it dropped to £1,350. This was still an appreciable amount: £2,000 in 1884 was the equivalent of £163,000 in today’s money.