271 ‘Wilkie has finished his White Woman’: CD to Frances Dickinson, 19 August 1860, Brotherton Library, Leeds, P. v9, p.287
272 ‘Wilkie had a bank account’: His first deposit was a sum of £300 on 23 August 1860
273 ‘agreed a new two year contract’: see WC to CD, 7 August 1860, Johns Hopkins
274 ‘keen to lay in some Chateau Lafite’: WC to CW, 11 July 1860, Morgan
275 ‘The Genoese cook really did wonders’: WC to CW, 14 August 1860, Pembroke
276 ‘pay his respects to the Procters’: this was on 30 July 1860
277 ‘Among the several other guests was Ricciotti Garibaldi’: at the time, Ricciotti’s father, Giuseppe Garibaldi, was much feted in Britain. He had recently moved decisively towards the unification of Italy, following the defeat of the Neapolitan army at the battle of Volturno
278 ‘he would sit down’: Beard, ‘Some Recollections’
279 ‘There would be seven in all’: Andrew Gasson in ‘The Woman in White: A Chronological Study’, London, Wilkie Collins Society, 2010
280 ‘death of his brother Alfred’: 27 July 1860
281 ‘set fire to them all’: this mirrored the fire in The Woman in White in which Sir Percival Glyde sought to destroy the evidence of his illegitimacy; CD thus did away with any evidence about his relationship with, say, Nelly Ternan, which might compromise him. He did not realise that in the process he also laid himself open to all sorts of speculation. For an overview of Dickens’s burning of his letters, see Paul Lewis’s website: http://www.web40571.clarahost.co.uk/wilkie/Burning/burn.htm
282 ‘another block-buster’: see Slater, Charles Dickens, p.486 ff
283 ‘soothing the dying moments’: WC to HC, 12–15 September 1860, Morgan
284 ‘asked Charles Ward to intercede’: WC to CW, 14 August 1860, Pembroke
285 ‘the latest, and by many degrees’: Spectator, 33, 8 September 1860, p.864
286 ‘I see no reviews’: WC to HC, 12–15 September, 1860 Morgan
287 An interesting personal reaction to The Woman in White came from the sociologist Harriet Martineau in a letter to her friend, Samuel Lucas, the editor of the Morning Star who strongly supported the anti-slavery cause in the United States. She had read the book out of a sense of duty and ‘found it simply a bore – at least till the latter part where the question of evidence constitutes the interest. There is to me no charm of character whatever (unless in Mrs Mitchelson the housekeeper), no moral interest, and the horrors are done by a mere chafing of the reader’s memory and imagination. I can’t conceive how it can be so popular. I don’t believe I know anything about fiction writing.’ 18 October 1862, Berg
288 ‘he regularly paid Harriet’s school fees by cheque’: Paul Lewis has calculated that he paid almost £100 before she left this school. See his ‘Educating Elizabeth Harriet Graves’: http://www.web40571.clarahost.co.uk/wilkie/Educating_EHG.pdf Also published as a supplement to the newsletter of the Wilkie Collins Society, 2010
289 ‘I am going abroad next week (probably)’: WC to HC, 3 October 1860, Pembroke
290 A Cruise Upon Wheels: The Chronicle of Some Autumn Wanderings among the Deserted Post-roads of France. Routledge, 1862
291 ‘disfigure Wilkie’s cap in that way’’: CAC and KC to HC, 3 December 1860, Morgan
292 ‘Young Leslie Ward’: see Ward, Forty Years of Spy
293 ‘offering a feeble excuse’: WC to Charles Mudie, 18 December 1860, Illinois
294 ‘Written by the respected critic E.S. Dallas’: The Times, 30 October 1860
295 ‘a journal of misfortunes’: WC to EP, 31 January 1853, Huntington
296 ‘He has died at Melbourne’: WC to HC, 12–15 September 1860, Morgan
297 ‘A Message from the Sea’: by CD, WC et al. Christmas Number, All the Year Round, 13 December 1860
298 ‘as he had already written to Wilkie’: CD to WC, 24 October 1860, Morgan, P v9, pp.329–31
299 ‘I am in earnest when I tell you’: KC to HC from Paris, 20 December 1860, Morgan
300 ‘Charley took up the matter of the move’: CAC to HC from Brussels, 30 December 1860, Morgan
301 ‘Dickens wrote to The Times’: The Times, 8 January 1861
302 ‘We never speak of the (female) skeleton’: CD to Esther Nash, 5 March 1861, Princeton, P. v9, p.388
303 ‘building up the scaffolding of a new book’: WC to HC, 24 May 1861, Morgan. This was a phrase he repeated WC to CR, 4 June 1861
304 ‘a pasted-in photograph’: photograph by Cundall, Downes & Co, 168 New Bond St
305 ‘if I live & keep my brains’: WC to HC, 31 July 1861, Morgan.
306 ‘On 31 October 1860 he had written to Thackeray’: George Smith to Thackeray, Alpin (ed.), Correspondence Thackeray family, vol. 1, B173
307 ‘old enemy whose name is Liver’: WC to EM Ward, 27 June 1861, Texas
308 ‘he and Caroline went to Whitby’: see letter to George Gregson, 7 August 1861. They arrived at the Royal Hotel on 6 August 1861
309 ‘with strong interest and great admiration’: CD to WC, 24 January 1862, Morgan, P. v10, p.20
310 ‘the slashing battle (still undecided)’: WC to F.C. Beard, 30 June 1862, Princeton
311 ‘participated with Dickens’s friend Dr John Elliotson’: see Standard, 2 May 1854
312 ‘some wonderful Turkish baths’: WC to HC, 12 December 1861, Morgan
313 ‘Is there any hope’: WC to F.C. Beard, 10 October 1862, Princeton
314 ‘If you should want help’: CD to WC, 14 October 1862, Morgan, P. v10, p.142
315 ‘You will be almost as glad as I am’: WC to F.C. Beard, 24 December 1862, Princeton
316 ‘We are threatened with a new variety of the sensation novel’: review of The Castleford Case by Frances Browne, Spectator, 28 December 1861
317 ‘His effects are produced’: Margaret Oliphant, ‘Sensation Novels’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 91, May 1862, pp.564–84
318 ‘a very fleshly and unlovely record of femininity’: Margaret Oliphant, ‘Novels’, Blackwood’s Magazine 102, September 1867, p.259, quoted Gilbert, A Companion to Sensation Fiction
319 ‘Henry Chorley, took this approach’: quoted Gilbert, Companion to Sensation Fiction
320 ‘I always say that I owe Lady Audley’s Secret’: ‘Miss Braddon at Home’, London Society, January 1888
321 ‘a simple poultice of cabbage leaves’: WC to HC, 16 January 1863, Morgan
322 ‘up all last night with the “palpitations”’: WC to F. C Beard, 5 February 1863, Princeton
323 ‘still too weak to leave her bed’: WC to CW, 15 January 1863, Morgan
324 ‘Henry Chorley set the tone’: Athenaeum, 3 January 1863
325 ‘Alexander Smith’: North British Review, February 1863
326 ‘Margaret Oliphant provided the textbook version’: Blackwood’s Magazine, August 1863
327 ‘Ladies who take in boarders’: WC to HC, 21 April 1863, Morgan
328 ‘Dr Caplin’s Electro-Chemical Bath’: the bath had been developed by Jean Francois Isidore Caplin, a medical entrepreneur who over the years had developed a variety of ingenious patent cures, including an improved corset and a gymnastic apparatus designed to cure curvature of the spine. Lately he had concentrated on his electrical baths, leaving the corset business to his Canadian-born wife, Roxey Ann, who also ran an ‘anatomical museum’ for ladies only, though medical gentleman were able to visit on Friday afternoons if they showed their cards
329 ‘hateful railway travelling’: WC to HC, 19 March 1863, Morgan
330 ‘required to drink a glass’: WC to CAC, 22 April 1863, Morgan
331 ‘the off-putting sulphurous smell of Aachen’: WC to HC, 21 May and 2 June 1863, Morgan
332 ‘every third shop’: WC to CW, 29 August 1863, Morgan
333 ‘The two Carolines suffered sea-martyrdom’: WC to CW, 4 November 1863, Morgan. To confuse matters, Harriet/Carrie was often known as Lizzie in the family circle
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br /> 334 ‘gray hairs springing fast’: WC to HC, 8 January 1864, Morgan
335 ‘at the request of Charles Fechter’: CD was continuing to look after his son-in-law. CAC wrote a further story – ‘Mrs Lirriper’s Legacy’ – for the 1864 Christmas annual. WC did ‘No Thoroughfare’ for the Christmas 1867 number
336 ‘Charley kept his brother informed’: see CAC to WC, 17 February 1864, Berg
337 ‘there is one price for the Pope’s gold’: WC to CW, 14 January 1864, Morgan
338 ‘he told her not to worry’: WC to HC, 8 January 1864, Morgan
339 ‘How like cats women are!’: WC to CW, 14 January 1864, Morgan
340 ‘he had completed three parts’: WC to HC, 19 and 26 July 1864, Morgan
341 ‘difficulties in reconciling necessary chemical facts’: WC to HC, March 26 1866, Morgan
342 ‘keep all this a profound Secret’: WC to EP, 24 September 1864, Huntington
343 ‘exciting (him)self with “Society”‘: WC to HC, 18 December 1864, Pembroke
344 ‘nothing but pianos’: WC to HC, 26 July 1864, Morgan
345 ‘in the right direction’: CAC to HC, 29 January 1865, Morgan
346 ‘my book is as entirely off my mind’: WC to HC, 27 February 1865, Morgan
347 ‘over head and ears’: WC to HC, 8 March 1865, Pembroke
348 ‘election to the Club’s general committee’: he was elected to the General Committee at the Annual General Meeting on 27 April 1863. He was originally elected to the Club on 3 June 1854
349 ‘I leave the little puddle’: WC to George Russell, 6 June 1864, noted at Woolley and Wallis auctioneer Salisbury, Wiltshire
350 ‘informed another correspondent’: WC to John Edmund Reade, 11 June 1865
351 ‘Charley enjoyed working in Dickens’s new Swiss chalet’: CAC to HC, 3 June 1865, Morgan
352 ‘Katey was the only member’: Tomalin, Charles Dickens, p.332
353 ‘I want the sea badly’ WC to HC, 1 July 1865, Morgan
354 ‘C. & the child have come back’: WC to CW, 17 August 1865, Harrowby
355 ‘I roam the empty streets’: WC to HC, 17 August 1865, Pembroke
356 ‘a fortifying compound of drugs’: WC to HC, 6 February 1866, Pembroke
357 ‘I am half sorry too to have parted’: WC to HC, 22 April 1866, Pembroke
358 ‘only to let Mrs Graves know it’: WC to Charles Reade, 12 October 1866, Private. This letter was published in December 2011 by the Wilkie Collins Society in the seventh Addenda and Corrigenda to the Collected Letters
359 ‘Martha Rudd’: born 10 January 1845
360 ‘as droll as ever’: HC to WHH, 24 July, n.y. (1866), Princeton
361 ‘In the wake of Wilkie’s death’: New York World, 29 September 1889
362 ‘not until 20 April 1868’: this first payment of £4.17s was made on 20 April 1868. The 1871 census shows Martha Dawson at 33 Bolsover St, with her daughter Marian, RG 10 154
363 ‘a lively pretty little creature, piquante & clever’: Hudson (ed.), Munby
364 ‘the latest offering’: Taylor’s ‘Our American Cousin’ was playing when Lincoln was assassinated in 1865
365 ‘Dickens’s old friend, Francois Regnier’: adopting the style of Carlyle, CD referred to Regnier in a letter of 13 March 1867 as ‘a deft and shifty little man, brisk and sudden, of a most ingenious carpentering facility, and not without constructive qualities of a higher than the Beaver sort’
366 ‘A woman has got in the way’: WC to NL from Milan, 26 October 1866, Princeton
367 ‘in the language of cats’: WC to NL, 9 December 1866, Lewis
368 ‘counselled Nina to wrap up well’: WC to NL, 26 October 1866, Princeton
369 ‘Royal commands will not make a successful piece’: Daily News, 29 October 1866
370 ‘Is my tail put down?’: WC to NL, 9 December 1866, Lewis
371 ‘lively’ two volume novel’: WC to HC, 6 Jan 1867, Pembroke
372 ‘I have got my name and my brains’: ibid.
373 ‘Successful play-writing’: WC to HC, 26 February 1867, Morgan
374 ‘breakfasted on ‘eggs and black butter’’: WC to HC, 26 February 1867, Morgan
375 ‘a very curious story’: CD to Wills, 30 June 1867, Huntington, P. v11, p.385
376 ‘90 Gloucester Place’: now renumbered 65
377 ‘The Female Detective by Andrew Forrester’: Andrew Forrester was a pseudonym for J.R. Ware, who had written on the Road murder in 1862. See J.R. Ware, ‘The Road Murder. Analysis of This Persistent Mystery, 1862. Now Re-Printed, with Farther [sic] Remarks, by J.R. Ware’, London, W. Oliver, 1865
378 ‘James Fitzjames Stephen argued’: ‘Detectives in Fiction and Real Life’, Saturday Review 17, 1864, pp.712–13
379 ‘Wilkie’s friend G.H. Lewes now argued, ‘When a man avers that he has ‘seen a ghost’’, quoted Smajic, Ghost-seers
380 ‘As John Stuart Mill’: A System of Logic, 1843
381 ‘With inference begins error.’: G.H. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, first series 1875, quoted Smajic, Ghost-seers
382 ‘Had written to Lady Constance’: WC to Miss Lennox, 15 September 1866, Lewis
383 ‘Before long a Scottish terrier called Tommy’: Tommy featured in the short story ‘My Lady’s Money’ in 1878. See letter to A. P. Watt, 7 September 1885, Pembroke, on his anguish at Tommy’s death
384 ‘large and rather dingy’: Caine, My Story, 1908. Keen still to furnish his house, he acquired a portrait of his grandmother from ‘Coosey’ – his cousin, Margaret Ward, who was Charles Ward’s daughter. She was happy to give it to him, but he insisted on buying her a new silk dress in recompense. See WC to HC, 11 October 1867, Morgan
385 ‘she was ‘sinking’’: WC to WHH, 18 January 1868, Huntington
386 ‘I am (luckily) obliged to work’: WC to WHH, 28 January 1868, Huntington
387 ‘William Tinsley, the publisher, recorded’: William Tinsley, Random Recollections of an Old Publisher, London, 1900, vol. I, pp.114–17
388 ‘lukewarm reviews of The Moonstone’: Geraldine Jewsbury in the Athenaeum, 25 July 1868, and unsigned in the Spectator, 25 July 1868
389 ‘seemed on the point of death’: CD to J.T. Fields, 7 July 1868, Huntington, P. v12, pp.148–150
390 ‘kindest remembrances’: WC to Joseph Stringfield, 16 August 1866, Princeton
391 ‘asked Benham for advice’: WC to Ebenezer Benham, 2 June 1868, Mitchell
392 ‘Kennet Paper Making Company’: see London Gazette, 7 August 1868
393 ‘wearisome beyond endurance’: CD to W.H. Wills, 26 July 1868, Huntington, P. v12, p.159
394 ‘It is a part of the bump’: CD to Wills, 17 July 1868, Huntington, P. v12, p.153. CD mentioned his son’s bankruptcy to Mr and Mrs J T Fields on 30 October 1868. He also said, ‘Wilkie always has the gout – and is always chronically injured by the public.’
395 ‘trail round four chemists’: see Lehmann, An Artist’s Reminiscences
396 ‘Let me communicate another point of interest’: CD to W.H. Wills, 25 October 1868, Huntington, P. v12, p.210
397 ‘Wilkie’s affairs defy all prediction’: CD to Georgina Hogarth, 29 October 1868, Dickens Museum, P. v12, p.211
398 ‘Wilkie had a mistress Caroline’: Mrs Storey’s diary records of meeting with Kate Perugini née Dickens, 27 May 1928, Charles Dickens Museum
399 ‘spend time at Woodlands in Muswell Hill’: Wilkie was often there at the same time as the critic Henry Chorley, who seemed to have difficulty remembering where he was, and would give orders to the Lehmanns’ man-servant, Martin, as if he was his own. Once, when going to bed, he asked Martin to make sure that Wilkie had the wine he desired. Another time, when Fred Lehmann was absent, he became perturbed when Wilkie lit a cigar. He told Wilkie that he really could not allow smoking in the living room, which caused Wilkie to respond angrily that this was Fred’s house, not Chorley’s; he had always been allowed to smoke when Fred was at home, and ‘h
e should certainly smoke now he was away.’ Princeton Lehmann Family papers, box 123
400 ‘She has done all sorts of dreadful things’: WC to NL, 4 January 1869, Princeton
401 ‘Herr Schumann’s music, Madame Schumann’s playing’: WC to Elizabeth Benzon, 26 February 1869, Private
402 ‘My doctor is trying to break me of the habit’: ibid.
403 ‘All art constantly aspires’: Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 1873
404 ‘too similar to Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon’: Daily News, 30 March 1869
405 Wilkie had given him a cheque for £100’: 3 March 1869
406 ‘Thank you, from the bottom of my heart’: WC to FL, 24 April 1869, Princeton
407 ‘I am not the charming person’: WC to Belinfante Brothers, 10 November 1869, Unknown
408 ‘a new will’: George Redford acted as witness, and Henry Bullar as executor. Although Wilkie no longer had much direct contact with the art world, he was still enough in touch with his roots to contribute £15 2s (over £1,000 in 2012 terms) to the Slade Fund which had been set up to supplement the substantial legacy given by the recently deceased solicitor Felix Slade to finance three art lectureships at Oxford, Cambridge and University College, London, where the Slade School of Art would be operational by 1871
409 ‘a crusading journalist (and prominent freemason)’: Wilkie was not a mason – though Pigott, Frith and Yates were
410 ‘I suspended an immortal work of fiction’: WC to FL, 25 October 1869, Princeton
411 ‘Readers who object to expletives’: WC to Cassell, Petter and Galpin, 25 September 1869, Texas
412 ‘Dickens’s last laboured effort’: marginalia in a copy of Forster’s Life of Dickens. See Collins, Dickens: Interviews and Recollections
413 ‘fourteen people had attended the funeral’: see Slater, The Great Charles Dickens Scandal, p.108
414 ‘stands in some need’: WC to Georgina Hogarth, 20 July 1870, Charles Dickens Museum
415 ‘as in the Saturday Review’: 9 July 1870
416 ‘Mrs Oliphant in Blackwood’s Magazine’: November 1870
417 ‘he regarded this approach as offensive’: WC to Augustin Daly, 4 March 1871, Houghton
418 ‘never hitherto paid sixpence’: WC to Hunter Rose, 12 August 1871, Texas
Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation Page 43