Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation

by Andrew Lycett

  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