Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation

by Andrew Lycett

  Having tended to spurn his wider family, Wilkie was now happy to renew contact with his cousins. He liked the way Marion Gray used to bring him fresh eggs from her landlord’s chickens. Having once worked as a photographer’s assistant, she now lived on her own, following the deaths of her mother and father, Catherine and John (the latter still in Thun). Wilkie occasionally gave Marion Gray financial help, which she may have passed to her elder brother William, an artist, who was an inmate in the Wiltshire County Lunatic Asylum in Devizes. Another Gray brother, Charles, had recently died in South Africa, where, under the name Charles Lascelles, he had pioneered opera in Pietermaritzburg. Another brother, Alexander, continued to live in San Francisco, where Wilkie might have visited him in 1874. Writing to him there, Wilkie gave a concise summary of his situation, ‘As for me, I gave up, what is called “Society” some years since, in the interests of my health . . . I live in retirement (with a few old friends still left) – devoted to my art.’577

  Following the deaths of both Ward brothers, and of Charles Reade, Wilkie could count those ‘few old friends’ on the fingers of one hand. He was still close to Ted Pigott, with whom he occasionally ventured to the theatre. Having spent so many years trying to avoid permanent entanglement with the female sex, they now acted like a pair of old women. ‘Be very careful about draughts on the railway tomorrow,’578 Wilkie counselled Pigott. But he showed excessive concern when he carried on, albeit with a hint of irony, ‘I need not remind you to sit with your “back to the horses”. And don’t forget that the “joiners’ work” is more carefully done in the first class carriages than in the second – and that the small unheeded currents of air, sneaking through window frames are capable of finding their way to weak bronchial tubes.’

  Otherwise, Wilkie’s most constant companions were the ever-hospitable Lehmanns. At lunch at their house in Berkeley Square in December 1887, he was introduced to Horace Pym, a book-loving solicitor, who told him about an elaborate insurance fraud carried out a few years earlier by a German adventurer called Scheurer (who inevitably passed himself off as Baron von Scheurer). This was the story which, wrapped up with topical details of the Irish Land League, Wilkie used for the basic plot of his final novel, Blind Love.

  Since Frederick Lehmann was still often away, Wilkie continued his playful relationship with Nina. ‘That’s me, Padrona – that’s me,’579 he wrote to her at one stage. And then, unsure if this was correct, he added, ‘Good God! is “me” grammar? Ought it to be “I”? My poor father paid ninety pounds a year for my education – and I give you my sacred word of honour I am not sure whether it is “me” or “I”.’

  This was a typically unaffected admission from a man who, though no longer at the summit of his profession, was still much admired. He had been vice president of the Society of Authors since its inauguration (with the novelist Walter Besant as general secretary) in 1884. Although visibily decrepit, he acted as a steward580 at a dinner given by the Society at London’s Criterion Restaurant four years later in honour of visiting American authors who had helped lobby their government on copyright. There had been considerable progress over this matter, and an international agreement on copyright law (the Berne Convention) was signed in 1886. But there was still work to do: the United States did not recognise payment of copyright fees to foreign authors until the passage of the Chace Act of 1891, and it did not formally join the Berne Convention until 1988, more than a century after its inauguration.

  Among the other guests at the Criterion was a young writer, Oscar Wilde, who edited a magazine called The Woman’s World. A decade earlier, as an Oxford undergraduate, he had been given the nickname ‘Fosco’ because of his flamboyance. He and Wilkie had recently met at the house of the novelist Ouida.581 But literary and social tastes were changing and Wilkie made no effort to keep up. Conversely, Wilde was no great fan of his, and advised Elizabeth Robins, a young American actress, not to appear in a proposed production of Man and Wife since ‘the English public finds it tedious’.582

  Also present at the dinner was the stout Manchester-born Frances Hodgson Burnett, whose children’s novel Little Lord Fauntleroy Wilkie had enjoyed. He skittishly asked Andrew Chatto, who had given him the book, whether she would have known that ‘her charming little boy’583 had ‘the name of the last man hanged for forgery in England’, the subject of Wilkie’s story for Household Words three decades earlier. Hodgson Burnett had recently contributed a footnote to copyright law by taking legal action against E.V. Seebohm’s unauthorised theatrical production of Little Lord Fauntleroy and preventing it from taking place.

  Wilkie made it clear that he had no intention of writing his memoirs. Too many were being published, he said, and ‘it will soon become a distinction not to have written one’s autobiography.’584 However, he did relent to produce a light-hearted piece, ‘Reminiscences of a Story-teller’,585 for his rich young friend Harry Quilter, who had started a new periodical, the Universal Review. Quilter had studied at the bar before branching into art criticism, where his attacks on aestheticism infuriated Whistler, particularly after he purchased the artist’s former home in Tite Street and refurbished it according to his own conservative taste.

  Under his small publishing imprint, the Universal Review Library, Quilter had just produced Is Marriage a Failure?, which followed up on the intense debate about matrimony that had led 27,000 people to write to the Daily Telegraph on the subject. In his book, Quilter noted Wilkie’s various written references on the subject, suggesting it had been a topic of mutual discussion between the two of them.

  For his article, Wilkie recalled an episode in a railway carriage with a clergyman and his two daughters. When the parson went to sleep, one of the girls whipped out a book and blushed when Wilkie caught sight of a cheap edition of The New Magdalen. When her sister asked if it was interesting, she replied, ‘It’s perfectly dreadful.’ When her father awoke, ‘The New Magdalen instantly disappeared, and the young person caught me looking at her cheek. It reddened a little again. Alas for my art! . . . it was stuff concealed from Papa, stuff which raised the famous Blush, stuff registered on the Expurgatory Index of the national cant.’

  Wilkie was happier to pen occasional pieces that were literary rather than autobiographical in subject matter, among them ‘Books Necessary for a Liberal Education’, which appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette in February 1886. The Liberal-oriented Gazette had been yet another venture of George Smith of Smith, Elder and the Cornhill, until he had passed over ownership to his son-in-law at the start of the decade. This allowed him to concentrate on a new project, the Dictionary of National Biography, for which Wilkie provided an entry on his brother Charley in 1887. Smith could afford this expensive indulgence since he had added to his fortune as the importer of the popular Apollinaris mineral water from Germany.

  The Pall Mall Gazette was edited by the crusading journalist W.T. Stead, who had recently been jailed for purchasing an underage girl as part of his campaign against child prostitution. This was the sort of issue that Wilkie, in earlier days, might have written about. But now he was happy to write a gentle piece, making clear that he had little sympathy with proscriptive lists. ‘I pick up the literature that happens to fall in my way, and live upon it as well as I can – like the sparrows who are picking up the crumbs outside my window while I write.’586 He then quoted Johnson, ‘I would not advise a rigid adherence to a particular plan of study. I myself have never persisted in any plan for two days together. A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.’ Wilkie added that these words (from Boswell’s Life, which he regarded as ‘the greatest biographical work that has ever been written’) had consoled him when he had first read them while floundering at school.

  He also expressed difficulty in understanding what was meant by a liberal education, saying that he supported ‘any system of education the direct tendency of which is to make us better Christians’. Some of his readers might have been star
tled at this claim, but it was evident from his output over the past decade that he regarded simple, non-dogmatic Christianity as the best form of society. He went on to mention favourite authors such as Goldsmith (whose The Vicar of Wakefield he thought particularly fitting), Byron, Scott, Dickens, Balzac and Fenimore Cooper. He also said he ‘never got any good out of a book unless the book interested me in the first instance’. By that criterion, he admitted he had cast aside works by Ben Jonson, Samuel Richardson and Edmund Burke.

  His agent Alexander Watt tried to keep him appraised of new authors, such as Rider Haggard. However, Wilkie refused to be overwhelmed by King Solomon’s Mines, describing it in early 1888 as ‘a very clever book – of its kind’.587 He was more impressed when Watt told him that, while on holiday in Scotland, he had visited Walter Scott’s home at Abbotsford. Wilkie was madly envious and claimed he had just been reading A Legend of Montrose588 for the hundredth time.

  20

  HANGING ON

  WILKIE HAD KNOWN for some time that he would have to move from Gloucester Place, the house that in retrospect was most associated with his life. Much to his annoyance, his landlord, Lord Portman, had been demanding the sum of £1,200 to renew his lease. Wilkie thought this sum excessive and that the noble lord was quite rich enough anyway. Since there was little he could do, he was forced to look for somewhere else to live.

  He found what he wanted at 82 Wimpole Street, less than a mile eastward across Marylebone, his favourite piece of real estate. A dentist called Joseph Walker wanted to let the upper floors of the house he used for his consulting rooms. Since the move took longer than expected, Wilkie experienced an uncomfortable hiatus in February 1888 when he was left in Gloucester Place without carpets and curtains. However, he told a visitor, the diminutive Manx author Hall Caine, that he was ‘still possessed of a table and two chairs – pen and ink – cigars – and brandy and water’589 – no doubt the items he thought essential for a writer’s existence (and clearly in strong doses since he had earlier denounced weak brandy and water). Caine, later a huge best-seller, was beginning to enjoy success as a novelist with The Deemster and wanted advice about dramatising his work. Wilkie, always happy to help fellow writers, was intrigued by a man who had lived with his wife since she was thirteen, marrying her when she was seventeen in a secret ceremony in Edinburgh.

  After several false starts, Wilkie transferred to Wimpole Street in March that year, but family morale was low following the death of Harriet’s fourth child, two-month-old Violet Clara, from whooping cough. He gave Harriet his usual matter-of-fact counsel, ‘I cannot honestly suggest topics of “religious consolation” . . . Time is the only consoler.’590

  The new house was a haven of peace compared with Gloucester Place. ‘There is no mews at the back of this house’,591 he explained to Tillotson. ‘In other words, no organs, no crashing carriage-wheels, no noisy children, no hideous Salvation Army celebrations, nothing in short but the silent storehouses of the tradesmen in Wigmore Street. My irritable nerves consider themselves to be in The Garden of Eden.’

  That did not mean his move was noise-free. He left a vivid picture of the commotion caused by removal men, builders and family. “If you please, sir,592 I don’t think the looking glass will fit in above the bookcase in this house,” suggested one of the workmen. “Your father’s lovely little picture can’t go above the chimney-piece, the heat will spoil it,” said another voice, clearly Caroline’s. “Take down the picture in the next room,” Wilkie replied, “and try it there.” “But that is the portrait of your grandmother.” “Damn my grandmother.” At the day’s end Caroline piped up, “I say, Wilkie! when you told Marian and Harriet that they might help to put the books in their places, did you know that [Les Amours du chevalier de] Faublas and Casanova’s Memoirs were left out on the drawing-room table?”’ At least this reference to two mildly erotic works in Wilkie’s library showed that the move was a joint family effort and his two eldest daughters by Martha Rudd were involved.

  After settling in and starting work on The Lord Harry, as Blind Love was still called, Wilkie had an abrupt intimation of his mortality when he was involved in one of the more unexpected phenomena of his age, a potentially fatal traffic accident. At the start of 1889, he was returning from dinner with Sebastian Schlesinger in Wilton Place, when suddenly his four-wheel cab hit another vehicle and he was thrown out of the door. Although covered in glass, he suffered no damage to his face, eyes or hands. He only admitted to feeling a bit shaken the following day.

  Schlesinger had recently moved to London as the European agent for the controversial Philadelphia and Reading Railroad Company. One reason was the break-down of his marriage to his beautiful first wife, Berthe, who had sat for Millais in 1876. He was being hounded for a financial settlement and regarded Wilkie as a man to consult on this sort of matter.

  Unaccustomed though he was to the role of marital counsellor, Wilkie advised his friend to act tough and avoid contacting her again, except to tell her that he was prepared to pay her a yearly allowance, on a quarterly basis. ‘You will very likely receive a penitent letter – perhaps a “heart-rending” letter. Don’t answer! . . . I have had between 40 and 50 years’ experience of women of all sorts and sizes.’593 His response once again showed that he had lost some of his earlier sympathy for married women in potential financial predicaments.

  Wilkie enjoyed Sebastian’s company and enjoyed trading mildly suggestive comments with him. In March, he mentioned a constitutional drive he had been taking under ‘a cloudless sky’ with a pretty woman (presumably a nurse). However, he was ‘dumb to the utterance of Love’594 since he had a mouth abscess, which required hot laudanum and water. In their communications, Wilkie revealed more about Caroline’s nature to Schlesinger than to anyone else – as when a box of game birds, a present from Sebastian, had failed to turn up at Wimpole Street. Wilkie suggested that Caroline would be the right person to chase this up, as she was ‘a woman who is not to be trifled with – who will insist and persevere – and take advantage of the “privileges of her sex”, and bother the authorities till they will wish they had never been born.’595

  Wilkie’s main task was completing the serial version of The Lord Harry for John Dicks, the publisher of Bow Bells, a new penny periodical. At the same time he was discussing a similar commission with the Illustrated London News, and, although he claimed to have several ideas in mind, including a sequel to The Moonstone, nothing had been finalised. In March 1889, he suddenly found he was falling behind with his serial for Dicks and felt unable to complete it in the required time.

  At this juncture, Watt came into his own as an agent. Since Dicks had yet to find any other publisher willing to share the risk of serialising The Lord Harry, he was happy to forgo his rights, which were passed to the Illustrated London News. This was a double victory for Wilkie: he no longer had to worry about thinking up a new idea for the Illustrated London News, which nevertheless was happy to pay him the money he would have received from Dicks. Wilkie was greatly relieved and ladled out compliments to Watt, telling him he was ‘a born diplomatist’596 whose name was now united with that of Talleyrand in his mind.

  Failing health made Wilkie unusually worried about keeping his bank balance topped up. The copyrights of his lifetime’s work were his main asset, and he had been in contact with Chatto about selling or leasing them. A few months earlier he had agreed to a minimal sum (£250) for a seven-year lease on several of his lesser novels. He now hoped to obtain £2,500 for an outright sale of all his copyrights. When Chatto offered only £1,800, plus £500 for the book version of The Lord Harry, Wilkie was grudgingly forced to accept.597 There was no escaping that this was a significant drop from the amounts he used to command.

  For a short period in June, when it was particularly hot in London, Wilkie travelled to Ramsgate. On 30 June, ten days after his return, he suffered a stroke while reading the radical Sunday broadsheet Reynolds’s Newspaper. His left side was paralysed and for a w
hile it seemed that his brain was affected. ‘It is a terrible shock – to see such a wonderful genius struck down in an instant,’598 Harriet Bartley told Mary Elizabeth Braddon, asking her not to mention this development to anyone ‘as we hope it is not generally known’.

  For a while Wilkie was seen only by Caroline and his medical attendants – Frank Beard, Dr Samuel Fenwick (a Harley Street specialist) and a nurse. In August he rallied slightly, enabling Harriet to go to Brighton with her children, and Wilkie’s daughter Marian took over secretarial duties. A few select people were allowed to visit, among them Pigott’s friend George Redford, who recalled Wilkie grasping his hand ‘with all his old warmth’599 and saying, ‘“You see, I’m all right – feel my arm” – but I had hard work to hide my eyes lest he should see what I really dreaded.’ Wilkie even prevailed on Caroline to allow him to smoke a cigar with Redford, who had witnessed his original will twenty years earlier.

  Sustained work was now out of the question. On 17 August, Beard told Watt that ‘Wilkie’s absolutely incapable of finishing the present number of his work within the next three or four weeks.’ A couple of days later Watt called at Wimpole Street to pick up the ‘Black Book’ in which Wilkie had jotted down his notes for Blind Love. There was a suggestion that Hall Caine might complete it, but he was away and the task fell to Walter Besant.600

  Wilkie hung on precariously for another month. On 21 September he managed to pencil a note to Beard, ‘I am dying old friend. They are driving me mad by forbidding the hy—[which probably meant the hypodermic needle].601 Come for God’s sake. I am too wretched to write.’ Beard made his way to Wimpole Street and administered what was required. Two days later it was all over: on the morning of 23rd September, Wilkie was dead.