Those around him were heartbroken. Harriet Bartley, who had remained close to her ‘god-father’ and cared for him through many ups and downs for almost thirty years, wrote to Wilkie’s friend Frank Archer the next day, ‘My news is so sad.602 I coudnt [sic] write to you before it has all been so miserable. Our dear one left us at 10.35 yesterday morning. We are so sad. He died so peacefully & so quietly – and his face is beautiful with such a calm expression. Poor dear Wilkie.’
The day after, Nina Lehmann informed her son Rudolph, ‘And so our poor dear genial delightful matchless old Wilkie has gone. It made me very sad but he could never have enjoyed life again even if he had recovered . . . Wilkie was almost the very last link left that bound us to the glory of departed days. Dickens, Lytton, Houghton, Wilkie, Charlie [sic] Collins, poor old Chorley – it seems like a former life, not on this earth at all . . .’603
21
LEGACY
DESPITE OVERCAST CONDITIONS on the morning of Friday 27 September, a crowd gathered outside 82 Wimpole Street, eager to see Wilkie begin his journey to his final resting place in Kensal Green cemetery. Bona fide mourners were received at the door of the house by Caroline, Harriet and Harry Bartley, before disappearing to the back room where Wilkie was laid out. At around 10.30, his coffin was solemnly placed in a glass-panelled hearse covered in wreaths, including what the Standard described as ‘a handsome cross of white crysanthemums from Mrs Dawson and family’. A quarter of an hour later the horse-drawn vehicle pulled away, followed by more than a dozen carriages transporting family members and friends, including Pigott, Lehmann, Watt, Chatto, Schlesinger and Beard.
The procession wound through north London to the cemetery, where it was met by the Reverend Edward Ker Gray, minister in charge of St George’s Chapel in Albemarle Street. Possibly because of his connections with the stage, Ker Gray had been singled out to conduct the funeral service, which was ironic since his chapel had regularly clashed with the ecclesiastical authorities for not having a licence to perform marriages. Doubtless this local difficulty endeared him to Wilkie, several of whose theatrical friends were present.604
The ambience at the graveside was subdued, since Wilkie had asked for a simple ceremony, costing no more than £25. However, the sun had begun to shine and it was unlikely that the dead man’s strangely puritanical request that ‘no scarves, hat bands or feathers shall be worn or used at my funeral’ was fully adhered to. One mourner was reported to be Oscar Wilde, though this identification was the result of a confusion with Wilde’s brother Willie, a journalist.605
Martha and her children took no part in the official ceremony, though one newspaper did refer to Mrs Dawson and her children being present,606 ‘but they were not among the chief mourners and kept out of view as much as possible’.
The obituaries lamented the loss of a great storyteller. Several echoed the Penny Illustrated Paper’s note that Wilkie ‘was remarkable . . . for his independence of character, and always said precisely what he thought; and no mind was ever more entirely clear of cant and humbug.’607 According to Andrew Chatto in the Pall Mall Gazette, he ‘was one of the kindest and most modest of men’.608 One or two friends, such as Edmund Yates, wrote lengthier appreciations, though Hall Caine’s encomium in the Globe grated with Harriet, who thought he was cashing in with his ‘personal recollections’. ‘Mr Hall Caine and I are antipathetic,’609 she told Watt, uncompromisingly.
Harry Quilter, one of Wilkie’s newer friends, embarked on an ill-fated attempt to raise money for a memorial to him in Westminster Abbey or St Paul’s Cathedral. On 3 October, ten days after Wilkie’s death, Quilter wrote to The Times soliciting subscriptions on behalf of a committee that he said included Andrew Chatto, Hall Caine and Ted Pigott. However, Pigott claimed to know nothing about this initiative, telling Edmund Yates that Wilkie’s ‘work was the only monument he cared for, and he was the last of men to claim the honour of a medallion in the crypt’.610 Although the Daily Telegraph came out firmly against the proposal, arguing sniffily that ‘the mere fact that it is found necessary to “agitate” for the admission of a memorial . . . affords the strongest possible presumption that the proper place for such a memorial is elsewhere’,611 Quilter persisted and over £300 was raised, including five guineas from Henry James. Neither place of worship showed any interest, and Quilter later revealed that the dean of St Paul’s had told him that ‘“other considerations than Mr Wilkie Collins’s literary excellence” had to be taken into account.’612 This no doubt meant that Wilkie’s domestic arrangements (which had become open knowledge after his will was proved on 11 November) had stymied the idea. Quilter subsequently arranged for the money to be used to buy books for a Wilkie Collins Memorial Library at the People’s Palace in Mile End Road.
The Palace was a large cultural centre for the inhabitants of the East End, first mooted by Walter Besant in his story ‘All Sorts of Conditions of Men’ in 1882, and opened five years later, incorporating a library run exclusively by women. Besant, whose contribution to Blind Love started shortly after Wilkie’s death, retained close links with the institution and almost certainly assisted in the setting up of the Wilkie Collins Memorial Library, which was generously supported by some of his old publishers, such as Bentley and Sampson Low. However, when in 1911 all the books in the main People’s Palace had to be moved to the local Mile End public library, the Wilkie Collins section, which was housed in its own room, does not appear to have made the transition. No one now knows what happened to it.
Since Wilkie had already written forty-eight chapters of Blind Love, Besant had only sixteen more to complete – a task he found surprisingly easy because Wilkie had typically planned the framework of his novel with great precision. As Besant wrote in the preface, ‘I found that these were not merely notes such as I expected – simple indications of the plot and the development of events, but an actual detailed scenario, in which every incident, however trivial, was carefully laid down: there were also fragments of dialogue inserted at those places where dialogue was wanted to emphasise the situation and make it real.’ Serialisation in the Illustrated London News was completed on 28 December, and publication of the three-volume book by Chatto & Windus followed in January.
Meanwhile, as soon as Wilkie was buried, it became a matter of urgency to clear and vacate his house. Since Caroline could not afford to run the place, she moved a short distance to Newman Street. The auction of the contents of Wimpole Street on 24 October proved a low-key affair. According to the St James’s Gazette, ‘The day was gloomy, the house was gloomy, and the occasion was gloomy.’613 The paper was put off by the spectacle of people traipsing through Wilkie’s house eyeing ‘bundles of odds and ends which only a dustman would have thought worth the carriage’. These included bed linen, mattresses and pots and pans. Even the main item on sale, the ‘4ft. 6 in. mahogany table, on castors with four drawers in frame, top lined with leather’, elicited little enthusiastic response. Previously the property of his father, this was where Wilkie had written all his books. But now, with its ink stains and scuffed leather, it was knocked down to £10. The writing slope, which Wilkie placed on this desk, in emulation of Dickens, realised only £3 5s. More interesting was a folding version, with a compartment for writing materials, which looked like a miniature gun case and which he used when travelling.
A few days later Wilkie’s will was proved.614 He had taken particular care to ensure that his affairs were in order and that there should be no grounds for friction within his extended family after his death. He had frequently rewritten his will, adding a codicil as recently as 18 July. Aside from small bequests totalling £490 to servants and relations, plus a further £1,000 kept back to pay life annuities of £20 to his cousin Marion Gray and to his one surviving aunt Mrs Dyke (the ‘aunt Christy’ of his childhood), the remainder of his estate was divided equally between Caroline and her daughter, and Martha and her (and Wilkie’s) three children. The resulting document was remarkable because it provided his first p
ublic acknowledgement of his children and his two families.
The proceeds were initially valued at £10,831 11s 3d. But after further sales of his library (at Messrs Puttick and Simpson), paintings (at Christie’s) and manuscripts (at Sotheby’s) during the first half of 1890, his estate was revalued at £11,414 16s 1d in April 1892. This was the equivalent of just over £1 million in 2013.
Recalling the plight of Laura Fairlie in The Woman in White, who was inveigled into signing over her fortune to her husband, Wilkie tried to be as fair as possible, stipulating that his daughters’ (and their daughters’) inheritances should be for their ‘sole and separate use free and independent of any husband’ and that none of them should ‘have the power to deprive herself of the benefit thereof in anticipation’. In other words, their money could not be used by any husband as a charge on his debts – a fate that had befallen Laura Fairlie.
This was all well and good, but Wilkie had overlooked a couple of his own unwritten rules about the proper treatment of women in matters of inheritance. Despite his apparent fairness in apportioning his money and property, he laid down that his son, William, would receive his share of the estate in full at the age of twenty-one, but his daughters Marian and Harriet would only be entitled to the income from their equal shares. Moreover, Wilkie put oversight of these matters in the hands of four male trustees, Harry Bartley, Frederick Lehmann, Sebastian Schlesinger and Frank Beard. And he specified that Bartley or any further trustee who was both a relation and a lawyer could charge the estate for his professional services. It was odd that someone once so sceptical about the law should now put so much faith in its workings.
After the death of Lehmann in 1891 and Beard two years later, Harry Bartley became by default responsible for the financial side of the estate. At the start of the decade, he appeared to have all the trappings of a prosperous Victorian solicitor, after moving a few hundred yards to a more substantial house on the Finchley Road, where he lived with his wife, three daughters and four servants.
This domestic solidarity was mirrored on the professional front in Somerset Street, Portman Square, where Harry had been joined by his younger brother Richard in running the family firm. However, the Bartleys were still snared in litigation over their property interests. This may have contributed in March 1892 to the suicide of the Reverend Henry Powell, the clergyman who had presided over his nephew Harry’s marriage to Harriet. He shot himself in mysterious circumstances while in temporary charge of a parish in Bedfordshire. Two bottles of laudanum were found beside him. His death only exacerbated the disputes in the Bartley family, leading to the dissolution of the partnership between the two brothers in May 1893.
By the following year Harry was beginning to suffer financially. He had bought Millais’s affectionate portrait of Wilkie at the posthumous Christie’s auction. But in August 1894 he was forced to write to the National Portrait Gallery, offering it for sale at £100. After liaising with the artist, the Gallery was prepared to pay £52 10s, a mere two guineas more than Bartley had bid for it four years earlier. Harry’s financial difficulties were in retrospect evident from the brusque manner in which be demanded payment and when, five days later, this had not appeared, he wrote again asking, ‘When may I expect a cheque?’615
The exact date when Harry began siphoning off money from Wilkie’s estate is not clear. However, after he began being regularly absent from home, it emerged that he was seeing another woman. In 1895 he decamped to Reading where in May that year he was forced to sue for bankruptcy. This disgrace was too much for his ever prim mother-in-law Caroline, who died the following month.616 Its burden also told on Harry who, just over two years later, himself succumbed to cancer and died in Guildford, aged just forty-four.
Harriet simply had to get used to living in reduced circumstances. She moved to Kilburn Priory, close to the Bartleys in Upper Hamilton Terrace, and, for a while, her mother-in-law supported her with an allowance. But when old Mrs Bartley died in 1900, she left Harriet a mere £50, with the abrupt prescription that this would ‘give her a reasonable time for making arrangements for herself and her children that may become necessary’.
By then Doris, the eldest of this brood, had left home and was pursuing a career in the theatre. Making the most of her blue eyes and golden hair – legacies from her grandmother – she joined the Gaiety Girls, a troupe of dancing girls (originally started by Wilkie’s friend, John Hollingshead, in homage to Paris and the can-can) which had been reinvented and gained some respectability as a musical comedy turn. She was entertaining her mother in her theatrical digs in Richmond in February 1905 when, to her consternation, her mother dropped dead at the premature age of fifty-four. Doris’s three sisters then tried to follow her on to the boards, but with less success.
Around this time Joseph Clow, a forgotten figure from the past, returned to England from Australia. After working as a mining engineer, he had raised a family (two sons and two daughters) in Bairnsdale, Victoria, with a woman called Ellen Watson. At some stage his sons (Charles and Hector) were fostered out to the Hollow family,617 who were vague relations of Ellen’s and had a history of taking in children. Following the death of Caroline Graves, the woman who was still legally his wife, in England in 1895, Clow was at last free to marry again. He did this in June 1902, after Ellen Watson had passed away in Melbourne the previous year. His second wife was Louisa Maguire, who three years earlier had obtained a messy divorce618 from a violent and abusive husband. However, she had four children, and the mixture does not seem to have worked, because, by 1911, Clow had returned to England with his son Charles. Although Charles died soon afterwards, his father, Joseph Charles Clow, the man who married Caroline Graves, survived in Willesden until 1927.619
Without even in-laws to lend support, Martha Rudd (or Dawson, as she still preferred to call herself) soldiered on as best she could at Taunton Place, with her three children. At least she was used to being out of the limelight. She was initially cushioned by proceeds from Wilkie’s will, which helped pay her daughters’ fees at the Maria Grey School. But after Harry Bartley’s bankruptcy this source of funds dried up. Martha was forced to move steadily further out of London, first to Kilburn, then to Willesden, and finally by 1911 to Southend, where she, Marian and Harriet lived modestly in a house half a mile in from the seafront. Her son Charles fought with distinction in the Boer War and then, after marrying, flourished briefly as an up-market motor mechanic. But he too died young on the eve of the First World War. By then, his sisters, Wilkie’s daughters, had long reconciled themselves to a life of obscurity. Marian Dawson had over the years been employed as a governess and her sister Harriet as a mother’s help, but, although Martha described herself as a widow, they, even more than Caroline Graves, were both acutely aware of the stigma of illegitimacy. As she approached her death in 1919, Martha opened up slightly and used to tell the world unrealistically that she could have married Wilkie at any time.
Wilkie Collins has never been easy to pigeonhole. But this is what makes him so appealing more than a century after his death.
He was certainly not a typical self-righteous Victorian male. If there was a model, he was the exception who proved the rule. His whole life was carried on in a curious struggle between the forces of illumination and obfuscation. While he strove publicly for the advancement of knowledge, writing obsessively about the unearthing of secrets, his inner self remained shrouded in mystery, which was all the more difficult to fathom because he himself appeared so down-to-earth. As Nathaniel Beard, the son of his doctor, observed, ‘He was the least posé620 public man I ever met. He would tell amusing anecdotes, and make very pertinent remarks, but never talked “for effect”.’
Yet this undemonstrative character was a best-selling author who scandalised his readers with his carefully crafted imaginings. As he pushed back the boundaries of literary taste, he managed to live privately and unostentatiously with two women in two separate households. Only towards the end of his life did his most unexp
ected secret begin to emerge – that one of his enduring principles had been a deep-felt Christian ethic that set him against any organised religion.
As Beard suggested, Wilkie was seldom pretentious. His affectations did not stretch much beyond a liking for flamboyant clothes and a taste for laudanum and fine cigars. He had little time for convention, whether it involved dressing up for dinner or putting his name to a marriage register. His early immersion in European culture contributed to his general lack of inhibition and his attachment to cosmopolitan families such as the Lehmanns.
As a friend he was attentive and supportive – qualities that endeared him to people as wide-ranging as Dickens, Charles Fechter and Nina Lehmann, who, after receiving a ‘charming’ letter from Wilkie, wrote to her husband, ‘Ah me! yes, steady friendship that continues for nearly twenty years, always the same, always kind, always earnest, always interested, always true, always loving and faithful – that is worthy the name of friendship indeed. I value my Wilkie and I love him dearly.’ His capacity for affectionate relationships with women helped him gain insights into the minds, aspirations and frustrations of the opposite sex.
Behind his bluff exterior, he was a gentle, often emotional man, rarely troubled by ambition, except in his chosen profession as a writer. As was clear from Man and Wife, he did not like competitive sports. In geo-political terms, he was a pacifist, who opposed the Crimean War, and he had no interest in the swagger of Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee celebrations. His lack of enthusiasm for imperial adventures was one of the few things that set him apart from Dickens.
Wilkie’s cerebral side took over when he was writing his novels and guided him through the hard grind of his intricate plots. When this aspect of his personality was in the ascendant, he was often disposed, as his children noted, to live ‘in his head’. This tendency was compounded, certainly in his later years, by his opium consumption, which anaesthetised him against his immediate surroundings and made him oblivious to all but the task of completing his work. At such times, his proto-feminist principles were forgotten and he kept his two women in their economically and socially disadvantaged positions, ignoring any desire they might have had for matrimony and respectability.
Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation Page 40