Wilkie Collins

by Peter Ackroyd

  He was close enough to his mother to write her a stream of affectionate, if mildly sarcastic, letters. “Give my love to the Governor,” he wrote in one of them, “and tell him that I will eat “plain food” (when I come back to England) and read Duncan’s Logic and Butler’s Analogy (when I have no chance of getting anything else to peruse).” Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed is a key work of Anglican apologetics. In a letter three days later Wilkie remarked that “Mr. Collins evinces a most unchurchmanlike disposition to scandalise other people.” Since Mrs. Collins would have read these letters to her husband, it seems likely that they had a relaxed attitude towards their son’s soft religious barbs.

  He visited the Louvre and the Morgue, that depository of corpses lost and found which was a great favourite with English travellers. He bought opera glasses and visited the theatres; he purchased a box of soda powders so that he might indulge in feats of gastronomy. He bought some boots in the Parisian style and purchased a subscription with Galignani’s Library, the English bookshop in Paris.

  In the process he began to run out of money, and asked if his mother could raise £100 from Chapman & Hall on the strength of his manuscript of Ioláni which had not at this stage been rejected. “You said you hoped I should make my Cheque last for my trip,” he told her. “It has lasted for my trip but not for my return.” He was philosophical about the possibility of debtors’ prison; it might even be preferable to imprisonment in the Strand, to which condition he was now obliged to return. The Paris adventure was, for the time being, over.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Triumph

  On his return to London Wilkie Collins began serious work on what became his first published novel. Antonina: or The Fall of Rome is an historical romance set in Rome of the fifth century AD. He started writing it at night, in his father’s studio, and all the evidence suggests that he approached his task carefully and professionally. After the failure of Ioláni to find a publisher, he wanted to ensure that the theme and the style of the new work were acceptable to a nineteenth-century audience. He was ready for a career as well as a vocation.

  One of his principal sources was Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in which he read of the siege of Rome by “the king of the barbarians,” Alaric. As always he allowed his imagination to be stirred by documented facts, or at least by reputable sources. He acquired a pass for the Reading Room of the British Museum, where he could pursue his researches into the life of pagan Rome; in the first edition of the novel he listed his reading in footnotes and, in the preface, declared that he has sought “the exact truth in respect to time, place and circumstance.”

  Its immediate precursor is Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii, an immensely successful novel published twelve years earlier; Collins was clearly eager to emulate that success, and his somewhat ornate and overwrought style is modelled on that of Lytton. The fashion for historical romances was in any case still in full flood. In 1837 G. P. R. James’s Attila was published, followed two years later by William Ware’s Zenobia, or the Fall of Palmyra. But Antonina also draws on his experience of Rome as a child. Once more he is back on the Pincian Hill which he had explored ten years before, where he had noticed the crack in the Aurelian Wall that plays so large a part in the plot; he walks again in imagination through the picturesque, if malodorous, passages of the city.

  Yet his historical fantasies were interrupted by present realities, when “everybody seemed to conspire to shut the gates of the realms of fancy in my face.” A friend of William Collins proposed to him that his son should be called to the Bar, since barristers were eligible for many well-rewarded government appointments. Wilkie assented to the plan and, in the spring of 1846, he was enrolled as a student at Lincoln’s Inn. He may have reflected that his great literary hero, Walter Scott, had also been called to the Bar and he may have believed that legal studies were not incompatible with literary achievement; he was soon disabused. He was introduced to the practice of conveyancing, and was obliged to study Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, dry fare after Gibbon and Bulwer-Lytton. “I worked hard and conscientiously,” he wrote at a later date, “but at the end of two months I had conceived such a disgust for the law that I was obliged to tell my father that I could endure the drudgery no longer.”

  So instead he embarked on another continental journey. In the early summer he travelled to Belgium with Charles Ward, his companion in Paris two years before. This vacation lasted only for a week, in conditions of sweltering heat, and was comprised of little more than forays into Antwerp and Brussels and Bruges.

  William Collins was perhaps displeased by his son’s apparent disinclination for any of the professions, but by now his health was so broken down that he was in no position to intervene. He tried to continue work, but was often brought down by exhaustion and debility; he seems to have developed dropsy as well as an ailing heart. Wilkie wrote that “his breathing was oppressed, as in the last stages of asthma…his cough assailed him with paroxysms.” William Collins took opiates, but they afforded only transitory relief. On 17 February 1847, in the company of his immediate family, he died.

  Wilkie stopped work at once on Antonina, marking the place which he had reached on the night of his father’s death; he noted in the manuscript that “thus far I have written during my father’s lifetime—this portion of chapter 3rd was composed on the last evening he was left alive.” Then, almost at once, he began planning his work upon The Memoirs of the Life of William Collins R.A. It was in a real sense a labour of love since Wilkie had a genuine respect and affection for his father. His mother furnished him with her own recollections and mentioned the names of friends and patrons to whom he might write for information. Within six weeks he had acquired most of the necessary material, and had advanced the narrative of his father’s life to 1815.

  He broke off in the summer of 1847 to visit France once more in the company of Charles Ward; his father had left the family financially independent, and so there was no need to seek out employment. Both young men were amateur artists, and had conceived a painting tour to take them through part of the French countryside. Four years later he would depict the journey in an essay for Bentley’s Magazine, “A Pictorial Tour to St. George Bosherville,” in which two young artists are driven to distraction by the heat and the gnats of Normandy. The narrator took with him a painting box stocked with a “wonderfully complete assortment of colours, brushes, mill-boards, palette-knives, palettes, oil-bottles, gallipots, and rags” but not all the artistic tools in the world could favour the enterprise. The expedition was a disaster, and the narrator buried his botched painting in a shallow grave.

  Collins and Ward did indeed leave Normandy after ten days, and of course migrated to Paris. He told his mother that “we find provincial cities insupportably oppressive to our mercurial characters”; so Collins returned to the Hôtel de Tuileries on the rue de Rivoli. But Paris came at a price. Collins managed to over-spend, and asked his mother to send him a £5 note. The recently widowed mother may have decided to teach her son a lesson. No money arrived. Ward himself went back to London while Collins remained in Paris waiting for the “needful.” A week passed without any relief in sight. In a state of some desperation, veiled by humour, he wrote to Ward asking him to forward £10; otherwise he would be obliged to pawn his watch and coat or take to the gaming tables to try his luck. By some means or other, he managed to cross the Channel.

  He had told Ward that he was anxious to get back to his work on the Memoirs. But his attention was not entirely devoted to its composition. In the spring of the following year, for example, he was deep in a plot for the marriage of Ned Ward, Charles Ward’s younger brother, to a much younger lady. This was the kind of scenario that he re-created in his fiction, and in which he seems to have been adept in life. Ned Ward, at the age of thirty-two, became engaged to Henrietta Ward, aged fourteen and a half; the coincidence of name was, in truth, coinciden
tal. Her parents, naturally enough, were opposed to the marriage.

  Wilkie Collins, hoping to ease the path of true love, opened his law books. He discovered that parental consent was required before a marriage could take place; nevertheless a false declaration did not impair the validity of a marriage. It simply rendered it illegal, leaving Ned Ward open to a period of imprisonment. The peculiar state of the marriage laws furnished much material for the novelist in later years. The two lovers obviously considered it worth the risk and, on 4 May 1848, were joined at All Souls’ Church in Langham Place. Collins seems to have delighted in violating Victorian convention while, according to Henrietta, enjoining “great caution and secrecy, as he planned out the whole affair with zest and enjoyment.” She added that he enjoyed “the spice of romance and of mischief.”

  After the ceremony the young bride returned to the house of her parents without saying a word. She had become part of what Collins once called, in a memorable phrase, “the secret theatre of home.” Three months later she eloped with her husband for a honeymoon to Iver, near Slough; Wilkie had found rooms for them, and had seen them off in a cab. In recognition of his central role he became godfather to their first child. Mr. and Mrs. Ward relented, when faced with the fact of the marriage of their young daughter, and so all ended happily.

  By the early summer of 1848 Collins had finished the life of his father and resumed work on his postponed novel, Antonina. He was also deep in negotiation with the publisher and engraver of the Memoirs; the firm of Longman was willing to take on the book, but only at the author’s risk. Harriet Collins agreed to put up the money for the venture, thus honouring the husband while helping the son.

  The Collins family moved once more to a smaller house, 38 Blandford Square, in Marylebone; the square is now no more than a sawn-off block of houses beside Marylebone Station, but in the 1840s it was part of a relatively new development. Collins was always acutely aware of the spread of London, with half-made gravel paths, scaffolding poles and boards and brick-kilns everywhere among patches and plots of waste ground.

  Blandford Square becomes Baregrove Square in one of his novels, Hide and Seek; it is notable only for “the dismal uniformity of line and substance in the perspective of the square.” In the rain and fog of a November morning the garden in the middle of the square is drab and dreary, with its close-cut turf and empty flower-beds and withered young trees “rotting away in yellow mist and softly-steady rain.” The blinds of the brown brick houses are all drawn down, and the smoke from the chimney pots is lost in the fog. It is a perfect expression of a wet London winter.

  Yet it was here that Mrs. Collins entered a further and brighter phase of her existence; she became gregarious and vivacious, reclaiming some of the gaiety of her youth. She entertained her sons’ friends, both artistic and literary, and acquired a reputation as a “hostess.” Her sons themselves clearly adored her; Charles addressed her in his letters as “my darling,” and her death was the occasion for perhaps the greatest grief of Wilkie Collins’s life.

  Memoirs of the Life of William Collins R.A. was published by Longman, in November 1848; it was in two volumes and was dedicated to Sir Robert Peel, who had been one of William Collins’s patrons. The son had paid his tribute to his father. In the process Collins had proved that he could master the long labour of composition and that he had an instinctive gift for narrative. It was published in an edition of 750 copies, and six weeks after publication, more than half of them were sold. Harriet Collins was no doubt happy, and relieved, when the book turned a small profit.

  It is an agreeable and entertaining narrative, with just a hint of formal pedantry in its observations. But, for a young man of twenty-four, it is a formidable achievement with a judicious sorting of diaries, letters and biographic commentary to achieve a fully objective portrait of his father. Wilkie Collins himself does not intrude, except in the vigorous description of his father’s painting; as Sir David Wilkie had said at his christening, he sees.

  The reviews were excellent, further strengthening his sense of himself as a writer. The Observer said that “no better work upon art and artists has been given to the world in the last half-century.” It was the best possible beginning for a professional novelist. On the title page the author inscribed himself as “W. Wilkie Collins,” which was itself an act of independence; he was no longer William, like his father. “An author I was to be,” he wrote, “and an author I became in 1848.”

  In the summer of the following year the Collins household was thrown into disorder by a bout of amateur theatricals. These theatricals were a staple entertainment of the Victorian age; with no other diversions than the piano or the parlour game, these colourful and often costly productions offered all the pleasures of the theatre without any of the disadvantages of a “low” audience. Great care was taken over the creation of a proper stage and over the provision of costumes and theatrical props. It was one of those communal and convivial activities for which the nineteenth century ought to be best remembered. Collins himself also seems to have enjoyed dressing up; at a “Fancy Ball,” a few months before, he had shaved off his whiskers and put on the wig, breeches and embroidered waistcoat of an eighteenth-century French rake.

  The Good-Natur’d Man, a comedy by Oliver Goldsmith, is set in the same period. It was performed in the “Theatre Royal, Back Drawing Room” of Blandford Square, and fourteen years later Collins looked back with nostalgia at the entertainment and excitement of a production in which he was actor as well as producer; he even wrote a verse prologue in the style of the eighteenth century. Ned Ward was part of the ensemble, as were some of Charles Collins’s artistic acquaintances. They went on to act Sheridan’s The Rivals in the same back drawing room.

  Another actor in Goldsmith’s comedy, Henrietta Ward, recalled that “one day, just before the play was to be produced, the leading lady told Wilkie that she declined to act unless the leading gentleman was changed. Her reason was that he was ‘hideous.’ ” The leading man then asked to resign on the grounds that the actress was an “ogress.” Collins seems to be rehearsing these scenes in a novel of 1862. “Private Theatricals!!!” a young woman announces in No Name. “The Rivals is the play, papa—The Rivals by the famous what’s his name—and they want ME to act!” This is only the prelude to “the breaking of furniture and the staining of walls, to thumping, tumbling, hammering and screaming; to doors always banging, and to footsteps perpetually running up and down stairs.”

  In the novel the actors frequently became hysterical, or fell ill at the wrong moment, or declined to act the part they had been given. “Silence, gentlemen, if you please,” the actor-manager calls out, “as loud as you like on the stage, but the audience mustn’t hear you off it.” Stop. Toss your head. Pause. Look pertly at the audience. At the performance itself, “a bursting of heated lamp-glasses, and a difficulty in drawing up the curtain.” Yet Wilkie Collins seems to have loved it all. These episodes presage his theatrical ventures of a later period.

  In the cast of The Good-Natur’d Man were two young artists who soon enough would achieve great fame. William P. Frith and John Everett Millais, like Charles Collins, were associated with the Royal Academy and had been introduced to the rest of the Collins family. Millais himself had in the previous year established the “Pre-Raphaelite” Brotherhood, at his parents’ house in Gower Street, and its members were invited to evenings at Blandford Square. Harriet was the centre of attention, “Jack” Millais was always asking her to “fix the day” when they might be wed, and she struck up a lasting friendship with Holman-Hunt.

  So we may imagine the circle of talented and even precocious young artists around Wilkie Collins. He was never entirely at ease with their work, but there is no doubt that he appreciated their company. All his life he had been surrounded by artists. He was himself once mistaken for a member of the “PRB,” and in 1850 Millais painted his portrait. The young Collins is portrayed in a reflective, even solemn mood; his small hands touch at the finge
rtips suggesting contemplation of some difficult matter; his large grey eyes are partly hidden by a pair of spectacles; his mouth seems to be formed in a pout; he sports two rings, a large shirt-stud, and a watch chain.

  Collins promised a magazine editor, at a later date, that he would “do something amusing…about the Pre-Raphaelite Painting School in the country”; but he never did. Yet he gently mocks them in his genial portrait of a minor artist, Valentine Blythe, in Hide and Seek. He also seems to advert to them in a later novel, The Black Robe. “Every little twig, on the smallest branch, is conscientiously painted—and the result is like a coloured photograph. You don’t look at a landscape as a series of separate parts; you don’t discover every twig on a tree; you see the whole in Nature, and you want to see the whole in a picture.”

  Artistic success, of a kind, was also won by Wilkie Collins himself. In the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition of 1849, a painting by Collins was accepted. The Smugglers’ Retreat was displayed high up in the Octagon Room, close to the ceiling, in which disadvantageous position it failed to find a purchaser; Collins brought it home with him, and in later years it was hanging in his dining room. When he observed the much more accomplished artist William Holman-Hunt gazing at it he told him that “you might well admire that masterpiece. It was done by that great painter Wilkie Collins, and it put him so completely at the head of landscape painters that he determined to retire from the profession in compassion for the rest.”