The first edition sold out on publication day, and a further five editions were published in the subsequent two months. Thackeray stayed up all night to finish it, and Gladstone cancelled a theatre engagement in order to continue reading it. It was the sensation of the moment. “Woman in White” bonnets and cloaks were now being sold, as well as “Woman in White” perfumes; there were “Woman in White” quadrilles and waltzes. Stories of women in black, in grey, green, blue and every other colour were issued.
The reviews did not seem to reflect the popular success. The Times discovered a major flaw in the construction of the plot, the kind of mistake Collins looked upon with horror, while another critic described the author as “a very ingenious constructor; but ingenious construction is not high art just as cabinet making and joining is not high art.” The reviewer in The Times at least had the merit of humour. In the original preface Collins had asked the reviewers not to reveal the end. Not to let the cat out of the bag. The Times was incredulous. “The cat out of the bag! There are in this novel about a hundred cats contained in a hundred bags, all screaming and mewing to be let out. Every new chapter contains a new cat.” Collins contrasted these responses with the enthusiasm of the general public, and decided that the public was right. He may be excused on this occasion for confusing popularity with merit.
It was in fact Collins’s most elaborate and ingenious novel to date, in which a succession of mysteries are slowly resolved. In the conspiracies thereby uncovered, the protagonists are equally matched. One of them is “the exact opposite” of another. It is as if a number of characters were playing chess with each other in some grand tournament of intrigue. Count Fosco is an admirable villain, and Marian Halcombe is a superb heroine. She represents one of the typical Collins characters, as a spirited and clever woman of independent mind. She is also of uncommon appearance. “The lady’s complexion was almost swarthy and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a moustache.”
The Woman in White presents two complex types, the strong-minded and “masculine” woman as opposed to the ineffectual and “feminine” man. Some of the male characters are prone to affliction of “the nerves,” for example, and Count Fosco is described as “nervously sensitive” and “a fat St. Cecilia masquerading in male attire.” The males are often melancholy and passive, while the women are bursting with independence and energy; only the latter are capable of unflinching moral ardour, indeed of ardour at all. The best villains, in his subsequent fiction, are generally women. It is Collins’s way of assaulting the sexual conventions and preoccupations of his time. There are always elements of sexual confusion in his novels. “Physiology says, and says truly,” a character in The Moonstone remarks, “that some men are born with female constitutions—and I am one of them!”
Men often tyrannise and victimise the women in Collins’s fiction, for example, but on almost all occasions the women fight back. That is why, in this story of stolen identity and false imprisonment, Collins is able to dramatise the plight of Victorian women in memorable form; they had no property rights and were deprived of their identity, as wives, while at the same time they were incarcerated in a domestic world. The Woman in White thereby became the subject of unsurpassed interest and even fascination.
The technique of the narrative resembles that of a criminal trial in which the various witnesses tell only as much as they know and have no inkling of the general purport of their evidence. Collins said that he had been inspired by his attendance at a real trial, but the merits of the method are clear enough. It encourages suspense and speculation that can only be satisfactorily resolved by the master storyteller himself. It is also a way of emphasising the elusive nature of truth. What is the appearance and what is the reality? What is hidden beneath the surface? A brooding air of gloom, a sense of impending calamity, suffuses the narrative. “How little I knew then of the windings of the labyrinth which were still to mislead me!” It is a novel of coincidence and double identity, of fatality and suspense. It is a novel of events rather than persons, of plot rather than character. One of Collins’s narrators refers to “the long oppression of the past” and “the chain” of events. The chain binds all of them together; it imprisons them. “I felt the ominous Future coming close; chilling me, with an unutterable awe; forcing on me the conviction of an unseen Design in the long series of complications which had now fastened around us.” It is a special kind of novel that requires a particular art and a singular imagination.
It was the first novel by Collins that became known as a “sensation novel,” and he was once described as “the novelist who invented sensation.” This may be interpreted in a literal sense. The design of the sensation novel was “to electrify the nerves.” The experience of perpetual suspense may be deleterious to the nervous system; many of the characters in the novel seem themselves to be in an hysterical state and may communicate that fever to the reader. The fact that The Woman in White was also first published as a series intensified its ability to shock and to excite the reader who waited for the next instalment in a state of breathless anticipation. But these alarms and tensions may also have disclosed larger fears. Collins was writing about mysteries “deep under the surface” three decades before Freud began his own enquiries. He was concerned with doubles and double identity, with monomania and delusion. He traced the paths of unconscious associations and occluded memories.
The apparent increase in cases of insanity or “brain disorder” in the middle of the nineteenth century was widely noted. One doctor linked it to the effect of “a spurious and hollow civilisation” while the Edinburgh Review speculated that it was the result of intense anxiety and competition in both social and commercial life; the commentator noted that madness derived from “the extreme tension to which all classes…are subjected in the unceasing struggle for position and even life.” The sensation novel thus complemented a world of rapid and alarming change. Collins’s attacks upon Victorian orthodoxies were part of his awareness of a greater malaise.
A review in the Quarterly Review described the sensation novel of the 1860s as “the morbid phenomenon of literature—indications of a wide-spread corruption…called into existence to supply the cravings of a diseased appetite.” That appetite was provoked by the morbid and the brutal. The novels took their plots from the police courts and the new divorce courts; they were concerned with family secrets, with seductions and bigamies and murders. Collins himself was fascinated by suicide and death by poison. The novels of sensation found vice and melodrama in the suburbs and in the respectable city streets. They exploited the darker aspects of the Victorian world, and were therefore dismissed by moralists as degenerate publications. They were devoted, according to Punch, to “Harrowing the Mind, making the Flesh Creep, causing the Hair to stand on End, Giving Shocks to the Nervous System; destroying the Conventional Moralities; and generally unfitting the Public for the Prosaic Avocations of life.” This is a perfectly reasonable account of The Woman in White.
It has remained, for more than 150 years, Collins’s most popular novel; and, in the end, he himself knew that it was also his greatest. On his grave at Kensal Green he is identified as “Author of The Woman in White and other works of fiction.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Hot Brandy and Water
On the conclusion of The Woman in White he made plans to escape from his desk. He first went down to Gad’s Hill Place to stay with Dickens, and then travelled up by train to Yorkshire in order to visit some friends there. In the early autumn of 1860 he was sailing with Edward Pigott in the Bristol Channel where it rained for two days and blew hard for the rest. He loved the great waves, however, and declared the voyage to be a decided success.
Then in October he travelled to Paris with Caroline, insisting on “first class all the way, with my own sitting-room in the best hotel when I get there—and every other luxury that the Capital of the civilised world can afford.” He had the means to be more lavish; the success of his latest novel had assured his prosp
erity. From this time forward he always travelled first class. He was at last earning a respectable income, and in the summer of the year he had opened up his own bank account at Coutts; he had previously used his mother’s account for his income and his expenses. Certainly he felt secure enough to finance the education of Carrie Graves at a private academy; she was first of all sent to a boarding school in Surrey. He had also renewed his agreement with All the Year Round for two years, thus further securing the immediate future.
He and Caroline were staying at the Hôtel Meurice, from where they ventured out to the restaurants and theatres of the capital. It is likely to have been her first journey abroad, but of course her reactions are not recorded.
On his return he discovered, to his dismay, that an unauthorised dramatisation of The Woman in White was about to appear at the Surrey Theatre on the Blackfriars Road in Lambeth. The pirated version lasted only for a short time, however, before the manager withdrew it. Collins would often be plagued by problems of dramatic copyright, since any novel could be dramatised without the consent of the novelist; only if the author arranged for a dramatisation, or organised a semi-public performance, could the rights be preserved. It testifies, if nothing else, to the immense popularity of novels dramatised for the stage.
In the following year Dickens and Collins found that one of their joint collaborations, “A Message from the Sea,” was about to be staged at the Britannia Saloon in Hoxton. On the first night the authors visited the theatre and remonstrated with the manager; he seemed to have accepted the justice of their case, and taken off the play, but then resumed performances. Dickens and Collins had no rights in the matter.
In the winter of 1860 the two novelists had journeyed to Devon in order to collect some local colour for their collaboration on “A Message from the Sea.” They stayed at a hotel in Bideford where they dined on bad fish. “No adventures whatever,” Dickens wrote. “Nothing has happened to Wilkie.” They chose the pretty, if steep, seaside village of Clovelly as the setting for their adventure. Collins was uncharacteristically blocked and spent much of the time staring out of the window. The story he eventually produced, concerning a message in a bottle that causes consternation in a Devonshire fishing village, is not memorable.
At the age of thirty-six Collins had now become something of a literary and social “lion” with an open invitation to the more artistic circles of London. He sometimes attended, on Saturday afternoons, the musical parties given by George Eliot and G. H. Lewes. He delighted in Mozart, but seems to have disliked Beethoven whose Kreutzer Sonata he described as “the musical expression of a varying and violent stomach-ache, with intervals of hiccups.” He detested Schumann.
He also became closely acquainted with Nina and Frederik Lehmann, an artistic and gregarious couple who invited Collins to their house in Westbourne Terrace; they were both excellent musicians, the husband on the violin and the wife on the piano. Lehmann had attended the celebratory dinner on the completion of The Woman in White, but Collins was equally at home in the company of Nina Lehmann whom he called the “Padrona.”
He was now prominent enough to play the role of public speaker. In the spring of 1861 he presided at a dinner of the Newsvendors Benevolent Institution, a last-minute substitute for Dickens himself. He turned out to be an engaging and fluent public speaker, and was inclined to exploit “this newly discovered knack of mine.” Here is the seed of his later public readings of his novels.
His vocation was never for a moment forgotten, even in the round of his daily engagements. By the spring he was engaged in the preparation for his next novel or, as he put it, “building up the scaffolding of the new book.” He knew that it would be difficult to repeat the success of The Woman in White, but he hoped that he might capture the attention of the public with a completely different kind of story.
As he was engaged in these essential preliminaries he received an unexpected and welcome proposal. George Smith, of Smith Elder, having miscalculated the advance for The Woman in White, was now determined to recapture the prominent young novelist. He was too late to bid for the next novel which had already been purchased by Sampson Low, but now he offered £5,000 for the fiction that would follow. It was to be published in the Cornhill, of which George Smith was the founder, rather than in All the Year Round before emerging in volume form. This was larger than any sum Collins had previously received, and he was naturally elated. Only Charles Dickens could command such sums. His future was now fully secure, and he believed himself to be truly “at the top of the tree” even before reaching the age of forty. Dickens himself was sanguine about Collins’s removal to a rival magazine; it was, after all, the considered decision of a fellow professional.
Yet now, ominously, his health took a turn for the worse. His liver was tormenting him. He tried pills, and a change in diet, but then decided to recuperate in a change of air. He visited the Suffolk coast and then, in the early summer, Caroline Graves and he returned to Broadstairs where they stayed at the Albion Hotel with its views across the harbour and Viking Bay; Carrie, out of school, was also with them. He encountered here the familiar seaside scene; middle-aged women were still wearing absurdly youthful straw hats, and the men were still looking through telescopes at nothing in particular. The children still dug in the sand, and the young women read cheap novels, while all around them was the sound of the sea and of the seagulls mewing.
With vistas of the coming book opening in front of him, he next decided to travel north to Whitby where they took rooms at the Royal Hotel. The railway journey across the moors inspired in Collins “astonishment and admiration.” The hotel itself was high on the west cliff and commanded views of the beaches and the old harbour; their sitting room had three bow windows from which they could survey the boatmen and fishermen below. On the side of the room two more windows opened upon the prospect of the town and the ruined abbey. The place had a grandeur and a wildness that Broadstairs conspicuously lacked.
Yet they discovered that Whitby had its disadvantages. The hotel, if comfortable, was also noisy. One family had fourteen children, and the cacophony was a further irritant to Collins’s already strained nerves. A brass band played regularly for four hours each day. He decided that he would never try to work in a hotel again. So the Collins party moved on, while all the time he was looking out for locations in which to set his new novel. They travelled to York and then to Huntingdon, Cambridge and Ipswich before alighting on Aldeburgh.
He noticed here how the sea had encroached upon the land, swallowing up what had once been the streets and marketplace of the old town. The port itself had fallen victim to the waves, and the natives of the place had been forced back upon a strip of land between the marshes and the sea. They had created here what in the novel he would call “a quaint little watering place,” with a line of villas overlooking the dyke which separates them from the sea. Behind them is the one street belonging to the town, “with its sturdy pilots’ cottages, its mouldering marine storehouses and its composite shops.” This was Aldeburgh in the middle of the nineteenth century.
By September they had returned to Harley Street where he could properly work upon his manuscript. Although it was destined for All the Year Round Collins had decided that he was now earning more than enough money to leave the staff of the periodical. Dickens took his decision with good grace, realising that his erstwhile protégé was now sturdy enough to support himself. They did not collaborate again for another six years.
By the spring of 1862 the new novel began its public career in All the Year Round. The title came, once more, at the last minute. Dickens had made several suggestions but none of them was entirely suitable; at last No Name occurred to Collins. He had already shown the early instalments to Dickens who was enthusiastic about the general tone and momentum of the narrative that he had read with interest and admiration. He found one scene, and one character, “too business-like and clerkly.” This was similar to the one objection he had raised against The Woman in White; h
e believed that the narrators had had a “DISSECTIVE property in common, which is essentially not theirs but yours.” Since this was one of the principles of Collins’s art, it was not advice that he was disposed to accept.
The novel begins in a light enough key, with a portrait of the Vanstone family at home; mother, father and two daughters are the epitome of respectability. But the mood soon darkens with the death of the father in a train crash; this was one of the horrors of the new age. The report of her husband’s death kills Mrs. Vanstone, following the premature birth of a son who also dies. The plot now begins to quicken. It transpires that the Vanstones were never married, and that the two sisters are subsequently illegitimate They have “no name.” They can inherit nothing. They have no claim. The estate will go to Mr. Vanstone’s estranged brother.
The reaction of the sisters is very different. Norah Vanstone decides that she will become a governess. Magdalen Vanstone, who has already displayed dramatic propensities, travels to York where she wishes to become an actress. Yet she also decides on revenge. She wishes to reclaim her inheritance by means foul or fair. She will marry the young man, the son of the estranged brother, upon whom her parents’ estate has been bestowed. So the scene is set for a drama in which double identity, disguise and suicide all play a part.
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