Even more welcome news soon followed when Richard Bentley, the publisher, decided to accept Antonina. Collins had written to him in the late summer of 1849, introducing himself and his book; he reassured Bentley that his research had been thorough and that he had taken pains to present it in a style that would be to the taste of the modern public. Secretly he was not confident of success, and had vague plans of publishing it himself.
Dickens had called Bentley “the Burlington Street Brigand” on account of his high-handed dealings, but he seems to have dealt considerately with Collins. He read the first two volumes of Antonina, and liked what he saw. He was ready to come to an agreement. The young novelist had demanded £200. Bentley offered him £100 down, and a further £100 when the book had sold 500 copies. It was a fair enough arrangement, under the circumstances, and Bentley never had reason to regret his decision.
The novel was published at the end of February 1850, and it is clear from his letters that Collins was screwed up to the peak of excitement and expectation. He had already tried to arrange favourable reviews, from the magazines in which he had been published. He told Bentley that “the proper letters have been written” to ensure favourable notice. He had no need to worry about its reception, however, and Antonina received more favourable reviews than any of its successors. Collins was even compared to Shakespeare. Certain reviewers warned the Victorian public about “strong effects” and “revolting details,” but all were united in their praise. The Morning Post declared that the novel was sufficiently good to place its author “in the very first rank of English novelists.” This, for a writer in his mid-twenties, was superlative praise. He also received congratulations closer to home. “My mother,” he wrote, “thinks that I have written the most remarkable novel that ever was produced!” A second edition was published three months later.
Antonina would now be considered to be too highly pitched and melodramatic, but at the time it represented the familiar discourse of the historical romance in which lovely women and sinister men, sensitive souls and profligate wastrels, clean-limbed citizens and verminous soldiers, all strove for mastery. It has a dash of Walter Scott and a sprinkling of Bulwer-Lytton, combined with a very healthy respect for the tastes and predilections of the great public.
The novel is set at the time of Alaric’s first siege of Rome and in a landscape of fear and threat the Romans and the Goths are portrayed as the opposite forces of humankind. Goisvintha, a harridan of ferocious temper, represents all the supposed fierceness of the Gothic female; unfortunately her brother, Hermanric, falls in love with a young Roman girl, Antonina. He finds her in the armed camp to which she has fled in fear of her father, Numerian, who is a grim-faced religious fanatic; meanwhile, back in Rome, the pagan Ulpius finds a crack in the Aurelian Wall through which he hopes to lead the Gothic forces. Long speeches are followed by lavish descriptions, all in the service of a melodrama driven by contrasts of character and of scene. Collins was always impressed by unfashionable moral loyalties and by parallel destinies. “Here appeared a young girl, struggling half entombed in shields. There gasped an emaciated camp-follower, nearly suffocated in heaps of furs. The whole scene, with its background of great woods, drenched in a vapour of misty rain…” The narrator explains the whole effect as a “gloomy conjunction of the menacing and the sublime,” which is not an inappropriate description of the novel itself.
It is all sufficiently arresting to detain the reader, and there are marvellous passages of descriptive writing that culminate in a magnificently morbid Banquet of Famine and a vivid apocalyptic scene in a pagan temple reminiscent of the paintings of John Martin. Collins had told Bentley that he was anxious “to make the last part of the story the best part.” In this, he succeeded. Yet Antonina is essentially hokum, crafted brilliantly by a young author already equipped with great technical powers. Unusually for a youthful novel, there is no oddity of style; there is no quirkiness or idiosyncrasy but, rather, that lucid and even tone that Collins never abandoned.
The novel also acquires a sober, and contemporary, flavour. London was even then being compared to imperial Rome, with premonitions of decay and dissolution. It was one of the great commonplaces of the period. Collins seems instinctively to sympathise with the poor and outcast of Rome. One of the Romans, unhappy with the enervated aristocrats who rule his city, calls out to the Goths “with thousands who suffer the same tribulation that I now undergo—‘enter our gates! Level our palaces to the ground! Confound, if you will, in one common slaughter, we that are victims and those that are tyrants!’ ” Collins is entering a debate on the “condition of England question,” inaugurated six years before by Thomas Carlyle when he wrote that “A feeling very generally exists that the condition and disposition of the Working Classes is a rather ominous matter at present.” It was a subject to which he would return.
Two days before the publication of Antonina, he had advanced a step further in the theatrical world. He translated a French melodrama and adapted it for the stage as A Court Duel at Miss Kelly’s Theatre in Dean Street, Soho; the play, with Charles Collins in the lead, was performed at the end of February 1850 on behalf of the Female Emigration Fund, a charity that assisted poor women to settle in the colonies. It was Collins’s first attempt at dramatic composition and his first exercise in the professional, or at least semi-professional, theatre. He always believed that he was, at heart, a dramatist.
CHAPTER SIX
Modern Times
The success of Antonina meant that Collins’s literary career was assured. He was no longer the young man about town, living off his mother’s income, but a young novelist with the London world before him. Yet he was also eager to extend the range of his writing. In the summer of the year, therefore, he embarked on a walking tour of Cornwall in search of the picturesque. His companion on this journey was a young artist from the Royal Academy, Henry Brandling, and their tour was meant to be practical rather than picaresque. Travelling books of a light-hearted nature, with text and illustration combined, were then fashionable; most parts of the British Isles had in fact been “done,” with the glaring exception of Cornwall. The county also had the attraction of being as yet beyond the ferocious maw of the railway network, and thus relatively unspoiled. The book was to be called Rambles Beyond Railways.
They reached the end of the line at Plymouth and then, with knapsacks on their backs, they took to the road. They were mistaken for pedlars and for “mappers” in advance of the railway, which did in fact arrive a year later, but they received a cordial welcome from the natives who were not used to “foreigners” in their neighbourhood. Collins was surprised and delighted by what he saw, and took copious notes. “Rocks like pyramids—rocks like crouching lions…rocks pierced with mighty and measureless caverns.” Pilchards cost a penny per dozen. “A distant, unearthly noise becomes faintly audible—a long, low mysterious moaning, that never changes, that is felt on the ear as well as heard by it…” No one dies of starvation in Cornwall, although 5 per cent of the population of the Penzance area have migrated to New Zealand or Australia. “Far out on the ocean the waters flash into a streak of fire.” The people of Looe once cleared a plague of rats by cooking and eating them with onions.
Collins himself appears in the familiar role of the hapless traveller, a small man in a large county. When he descended into a copper mine at Botallack, their guide inspected him. “Only let me lift you about as I like,” he said, “and you shan’t come to any harm.”
Collins wrote the book in his study at 17 Hanover Terrace, the house on the fringe of Regent’s Park to which Harriet Collins had moved in his absence. This was to be his home for the next six years, a large and commodious dwelling in what was considered to be healthy air. Its size can be deduced from the fact that, in 1852, the family gave a dance for seventy guests. It was here that the Collins family held numerous dinner parties. “Nothing could well exceed the jollity of those little dinners,” Holman-Hunt recalled. “In any case Mrs. Collins did
not often make our smoking after the meal a reason for her absence from our company. We were all hard-worked people enjoying one another’s society and we talked only as such can.” Millais himself treated Hanover Terrace as his second home. It was to this house, too, that Collins invited the most famous novelist in the world.
He had met Charles Dickens in the spring of 1851. They had come together over their shared passion for amateur theatricals, when in this year Dickens decided to perform a comedy by Bulwer-Lytton, Not So Bad As We Seem, for the sake of a literary charity. Dickens had known William Collins, and now was happy for the opportunity to enlist the services of the son. “I think you told me that Mr. Wilkie Collins would be glad to play any part in Bulwer’s Comedy,” he wrote to a mutual friend, Augustus Egg, “and I think I told you that I considered him a very desirable recruit.” Dickens was to be the star of the drama, and Collins was to play the part of his valet.
Dickens and Collins met at the house of John Forster, later to become Dickens’s biographer, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Dickens was some twelve years older than Collins but they amused or impressed each other; soon enough, they had become firm friends. Dickens’s “young men” were an assorted bunch of young journalists and aspiring writers who worshipped at the shrine of “the Inimitable,” but from the beginning Collins seems to have held a higher place in the older novelist’s affections. They explored London together, in search of the quaint or the queer; they attended the theatre, dined at good restaurants and collaborated both on stories and on plays. Collins was already an habitué of London night life, with all of its social and sexual possibilities, and there is little doubt that Dickens enjoyed the company of his genial and unconventional partner on what he called their “Haroun Alraschid” excursions to dance halls and other places of entertainment. Alraschid was of course the protagonist of One Thousand and One Nights, the caliph of Baghdad who slept with a different virgin every night.
It was first agreed that Not So Bad As We Seem should be played at the London home of the Duke of Devonshire, Devonshire House. The audience was to include Victoria and other members of the royal family; it was, in other words, to be in every sense a glittering occasion. Dickens rehearsed his cast, in his usual relentless fashion, two nights a week for five hours at a time. The first performance was given in the middle of May, 1851, in front of the Queen and the Prince Consort as well as the Duke of Wellington. Victoria noted in her diary that “all acted on the whole well.” Dickens told his wife that “Collins was admirable—got up excellently, played thoroughly well, and missed nothing.” The play was very much in demand; further performances were given in the Hanover Square Rooms and, towards the end of the year, a provincial tour was organised in which Collins still played his part.
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On its publication by Richard Bentley at the beginning of 1851 the narrative of Collins’s Cornish adventures, Rambles Beyond Railways: Or Notes in Cornwall taken a-foot, proved to be a success, with a second edition published two years later. Collins, however, was still eager to write for the public prints. “The Twin Sisters” appeared in Bentley’s Miscellany, a short story only notable for being his first exercise in contemporary melodrama; it was the genre in which he would excel. He was also writing essays and reviews for the Leader, a weekly newspaper of radical persuasion; he owed the connection to a fellow student at Lincoln’s Inn, Edward Pigott, who had become its editor.
His first signed essay, “A Plea for Sunday Reform,” was essentially an attack upon the Sabbatarian views of his father; it was an eloquent request that the lot of the working classes could be ameliorated if places of innocent entertainment were allowed to open on Sunday. Museums might therefore be preferred to public houses. “You set the church doors open and tell him to go in,” he wrote. “If he turns away, you abandon him to the gin palaces at once.” Collins also wrote book reviews and dramatic notices for the magazine, and maintained his connection with it for several years.
The fact that Collins wrote for a radical magazine has often been suggested as a clue to his politics, if in fact he had any politics. He was essentially liberal in his social and political views, averse to coercion and conflict; he showed some sympathy with the principles of socialism as it was then understood, and was instinctively on the side of the oppressed. As he wrote in The Fallen Leaves (1879), these were “the people who have toiled hard after happiness and have gathered nothing but disappointment and sorrow; the friendless and the lonely, the wounded and the lost.” In the same novel the principal character rails against “those organized systems of imposture, masquerading under the disguise of banks and companies,” with the exploitation of cheap labour “regarded, on the highest commercial authority, as ‘forms of competition’ and justifiable proceedings in trade.” Yet it remains very doubtful whether Collins had a coherent political philosophy, being in most respects a conventionally Victorian freethinker. “I hate controversies on paper,” he told Pigott, “almost more than I hate controversies in talk.”
Collins’s religious views are almost as vague. He might best be described as a Christian humanist who accepted Christ as his Saviour but detested all formal and outward shows of religion. He preserved his particular wrath for evangelicals. He was neither an Anglican nor a Nonconformist; he was not Roman Catholic, and not an agnostic. In an age when unbelief was more common than is generally supposed, he was not an atheist. He rarely entered a church, and his actual beliefs are hard if not impossible to unravel. He is perhaps best described as an antinomian, happily contemplating diversity of opinion as well as a variety of churches. He may have believed with Charles II that God would not punish him for a few sins of pleasure.
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He could now be considered a journalist as well as an author, and a stream of reviews and articles issued from his pen. Another of his stories, “Mr. Wray’s Cash-Box,” was published by Richard Bentley as a “Christmas Book,” a synthetic piece of seasonal comic fiction in the Dickensian manner; the reviewers liked it, but the public did not.
He may have decided that he was overworked, however, and certainly by the end of the year he needed the attentions of a doctor who forbade him to “use” his brains at all. So he retreated to the country for “a week of rest and restoration.” It was the beginning of a life that would come to be dominated by ill health and by the ministrations of the medical profession.
Bad health did not preclude him, however, from a lavish celebration in November after he had been called to the Bar. He had done no work for the past four years; he had simply attended the appropriate number of dinners in hall and paid the requisite fees. Nevertheless he decided to reward himself with what was known as a “call-party.” “What a night!” he wrote. “What chicken! What songs! I carried away much claret…and am rather a seedy barrister this morning.” He never practised his new profession, and at a later date declared himself to be a barrister of fifteen years’ standing without ever once receiving a brief or attending a courtroom. Yet the workings of the law play a vital part in most of his subsequent fiction. In eight of his novels, lawyers are prominent characters. They are part of his interest in plot and in detail, in the painstaking depiction of circumstance and in the melodramatic possibilities of wills and marriage settlements. “I am a lawyer,” one of his characters reveals, “and my business is to make a fuss about trifles.”
Even as he was touring in Not So Bad As We Seem, in the early months of 1852, Collins was deeply and energetically at work on his fiction. He published several stories, and prepared himself for his next novel. “A Passage in the Life of Mr. Perugino Potts” is an entertaining spoof on the life and ambition of an artist who bears a passing resemblance both to his father and to his brother. “I may be wrong,” Potts writes, “but my impression is that, as an Historical Painter, my biography will be written one of these days…” Collins also parodies the various styles that suggest themselves to a young artist in search of success.
He also wrote three stories of an occult or Gothic nat
ure. “Mad Monkton” dealt with the theme of inherited familial madness, and was found to be too disturbing for Dickens to publish in his weekly periodical, Household Words; it eventually found a home in Fraser’s Magazine. “A Terribly Strange Bed” did appear in Household Words, and reveals the workings of an ingenious instrument of suffocation and death in a Paris gambling den. It may owe something to Edgar Allan Poe; Poe had died three years before, but some of his short stories were not unknown to readers of the more lurid English periodicals. A copy of the “Baudelaire edition” of Poe’s collected works was also part of Collins’s library. Collins, too, liked to make the flesh creep. “Nine O’Clock!” is the story of fatality and clairvoyance that fits very well with the nineteenth-century fascination for mesmerism, hypnotism and spiritualism in all of its forms. Collins himself wrote a series of letters for the Leader on the subject, entitled “Magnetic Evenings at Home.” He may have been attracted to the phenomena out of melodramatic, rather than scientific, interest.
Yet even when engaged in these fugitive pieces he was applying himself to his next novel. A very curious and interesting theme had occurred to him. What if a young man of breeding falls instantly in love with a young woman whom he sees on an omnibus? But what if that young woman is in all respects unworthy of him? What then? This is the story of Basil, a novel of fatality and obsession that might almost earn a place beside the great Russian novels of love and madness.
He began writing it at white heat, filling his square sheets with tiny handwriting, and it was concluded in the middle of September. He finished it while staying with the Dickens family in Dover, relaxing at the end of the gruelling dramatic tour in which the performers had been deafened by cheers and blinded by gas-light. The sea air acted on Collins as a restorative. The company of Dickens may have inspired his work on the sensational narrative; certainly Dickens’s habit of sustained and professional composition offered Collins the best possible example. Dickens once told him that “I was certain from the Basil days that you were the writer who would come ahead of all the field—being the only one who combined invention and power, both humorous and pathetic, and that profound conviction that nothing of worth is to be done without work.” Yet work was interrupted, at Dover, by long walks and by sea-bathing. One visitor to the Dickens household described Collins as “a nice, funny little fellow but too much fond of eating and snuff.”
Wilkie Collins Page 5