Wilkie Collins

by Peter Ackroyd

  Collins had decided to rent Fort House, in Broadstairs, for the summer and autumn so that he might work undisturbed. This was the house on a headland in which Dickens had also stayed for two summers in 1850 and 1851; Collins may have visited the Dickens family in the latter year, and liked what he saw. No doubt he used the same room for a study as his predecessor; it had large windows overlooking the bright sea. The house was too large for him and Caroline Graves but he was, after all, now a substantial man of letters. Ten packages of indispensable items were sent down on the goods train, among them a refrigerator or ice-box. Old friends such as Charles Ward and Augustus Egg took up some of the bedrooms, and he went sailing once more with Edward Pigott. Yet all was not as well as it seemed. He quarrelled with his two servants; both left his service, either because they were dismissed or because they gave in their notice.

  It is perhaps significant that his doctor, Frank Beard, was one of his guests. By September Collins’s big toe had turned scarlet and had swollen to the size of a small fist. He felt very ill. “Don’t seem to notice it,” Dickens told his sub-editor, W. H. Wills, “for he is nervous.” He was now working under pressure; his publishers wanted him to complete the narrative by October or November, in time for publication in December, but he did not think he would be able to finish it until the end of the year or even the end of January. He sent out a series of letters, to friends in London, seeking out information for the twists and turns of the narrative. How long did letters take from London to Zurich in 1847? How long was the sea voyage from London to Hong Kong? Tell me about the landscape of Dumfries. Flat or hilly? It is not that he distrusted his imagination. But he knew that readers would persist in sending him letters and putting him right. Accuracy in detail also helped to authenticate his sometimes improbable plots.

  At the beginning of October Collins wrote to Beard asking him to come down to Broadstairs. He was afflicted by a general faintness, accompanied by sickness and trembling. He could not sleep and the slightest noise startled him. It may be that his severe hard work had helped to exacerbate these symptoms. He came back to London as soon as he could, in the fear that a sudden breakdown in his health would seriously impair his work on the book. He was confined to his bed for a while and his general ill health was followed by rheumatism and a bad liver. Beard recommended quinine and potassium as well as the ever potent mixture of opium and alcohol known as laudanum. Collins was in any case living in an unhealthy city of fogs and rain and damp; it was a dank and dirty city, of coughs and colds, in which no one was ever wholly well.

  Dickens heard the news of Collins’s ill health from Frank Beard, who was also his own doctor, and promised to assist Collins; he also had known the fear of not being able to complete successive instalments in time and he assured Collins that, if necessary, he would do the work himself. “I could do it, at a pinch, so like you as that no-one should find out the difference.” The offer was well meant but perhaps a little insulting; it suggested that there was nothing unique to Collins’s style that could not immediately be copied and manufactured.

  At the beginning of November Collins told his mother, who was now living permanently out of London in Tunbridge Wells, that he had “cold in the head, cold in the throat, cold in the chest.” The only remedy seems to have been hot brandy and water. Yet his professionalism was such that he struggled on and never missed any deadline. He even wrote in bed, sometimes dictating the lines to Beard himself. He was still very weak in the middle of the month, but at last finished No Name on Christmas Eve at two o’clock in the morning. He had pulled through.

  The nervous terrors and general faintness may have been in part due to the laudanum that Beard prescribed. The drug took away, or helped to alleviate, the intense pain of what he believed to be rheumatism and gout. It was widely available as a patent medicine in such concoctions as “Battley’s Drops” and “Mother Bailey’s Quieting Syrup,” and could be bought at threepence an ounce in many shops. Like gin in the eighteenth century it helped to alleviate the misery of life. It encouraged dependency, however, and few were able to wean themselves from helpless resort to the drug. Collins was prescribed laudanum by Beard in 1861 or 1862, and was never subsequently free of it. He did in fact take larger and larger quantities, until it was said that he could swallow in a single glass enough to kill twelve people.

  He might have been said to have joined the company of De Quincey and Coleridge, except that he was entirely free of their extravagance and self-pity. He never considered himself to be one of a doomed race; he was simply an invalid in need of relief. In fact he was inclined to praise laudanum. One of his characters asks: “Who was the man who invented laudanum? I thank him from the bottom of my heart, whoever he was. If all the miserable wretches in pain of body or mind, whose comforter he has been, could meet together to sing his praises, what a chorus it would be!” The sentiment is that of Collins himself. He also believed that the drug had a stimulating, as well as a sedative, effect. It cleared the brain and composed the mind.

  Yet in the end it had a degenerative effect and became a serious addictive rather than a restorative. On a journey to Switzerland he discovered that the chemists of the country could only supply a limited measure of the drug; his travelling companion had to visit four separate establishments to make up the amount that Collins needed. In later life, too, he began to suffer from nervous hallucinations as a result of his addiction. A second Wilkie Collins sat at the desk with him, trying to take control over the writing pad, struggling with him until the inkstand was upset. Then the “real” Collins woke up. When he ascended the stairs at night he was confronted by a swarm of ghosts who tried to push him down. Sometimes he saw a woman with green tusks, and sometimes a monster with “eyes of fire and big green fangs.”

  One of the characters in The Moonstone, Ezra Jennings, laments that “even the virtues of opium have their limit. The progress of the disease has gradually forced me from the use of opium to the abuse of it; I am feeling the penalty at last. My nervous system is shattered; my nights are nights of horror.” This may not have been the precise condition of Collins’s nerves but it must represent what he most feared; his fragility, and susceptibility, would then have terrified him. It was a moral, as well as a physical, failing. His will and his judgement would have been affected. It was weak and humiliating.

  —

  The first edition of No Name consisted of 4,000 copies; by the evening of publication day, only 400 were left. “Literary gossip,” the Morning Advertiser reported, “assigns an almost fabulous sum to the clever writer for this able work.” Its success even merited a parody, No Title by Bret Harte. The response of the reviewers was not quite so enthusiastic. The Reader said that “with us, novels turn upon the vicissitudes of legitimate love and decorous affection; while in France they are based upon the workings of those loves and passions which are not in accordance with our rules of respectability.” Collins was of the unpleasant French school.

  Collins had introduced the subject of illegitimacy, after all, and his female protagonist is adept at impersonation and deceit. How could she be a Victorian heroine? Yet she is undoubtedly a Collins heroine. She is, in his words, “resolute and impetuous, clever and domineering; she is not one of those model women who want a man to look up to and protect them—her beau ideal (though she may not think it herself) is a man she can henpeck.” This is a woman who is resourceful and determined, quite unlike the Victorian stereotype of “the angel in the house.”

  All the resources of Collins’s art go into the portrayal of Magdalen Vanstone who is at once ferocious, vindictive and high-spirited; she is also remorseful even as she plans her greatest coup of marriage to the enemy, and at one stage contemplates suicide as she looks out to sea at Aldeburgh. If an even number of ships passes by, she will live; if not, she will die. It is one of the most remarkable scenes in what is by any standards an intriguing and eventful novel.

  His portrayal of Magdalen, and of other women, has led certain critics t
o suggest that he was a feminist before his time. The story of a young woman who must battle and defeat the whole world of Victorian propriety must have appealed to those women (and men) who were weary of the conventions. The fact that she is eventually redeemed by the love of a good man does not alter the passion and the guile with which she becomes the mistress of her own destiny. “ ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she answered quietly, out of the darkness. ‘I am strong enough to suffer and live. Other girls, in my place, would have been happier—they would have suffered, and died. It doesn’t matter; it will be all the same a hundred years hence…’ ”

  The women are often lost in a male world. Marian Halcombe, in The Woman in White, had burst out with her protest. “Men! They are the enemies of our innocence and our peace…they take us body and soul to themselves and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they chain up a dog to his kennel. And what does the best of them give us in return?”

  He was intent upon exploring the female sensibility in ways foreign to other Victorian novelists, and he created heroines quite unlike those of his male contemporaries. Only George Eliot, perhaps, is his superior. In his own relationship with Caroline Graves, as we have seen, he was attracted to women with a complicated and perhaps compromising past. He also enjoyed the company of independent and strong-minded women, like his mother.

  It is hard, however, to see him in any contemporary sense as a feminist. He disliked the female writers of sensation novels, no doubt because they posed a challenge to him; he also seems to have had a horror of female doctors, a prejudice widely shared at the time. He was more willing to champion women as outcasts rather than to praise those who had achieved independence. He preferred the female penitent to the female professional. Yet this is not to minimise his importance in the re-creation of female character in the English novel. He was, in that sense, a pioneer.

  So at the close of 1862 he had the world before him. With The Woman in White he had achieved a sensation and with No Name he had managed a success. His next novel was worth £5,000. Of all the novelists in England he was the one with the brightest future. And yet, after the publication of No Name, the woes of Wilkie Collins were only just beginning.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Chain

  The ill health of the previous year did not disappear. In the early months of 1863 he was so crippled that he could not get out of bed and in so much pain that work was out of the question. It began with what he believed to be gout in the right foot that incapacitated him; he could only just hobble down the stairs. He reassured his mother by telling her that it was soothed by a poultice of cabbage leaves “covered with oiled silk” but this was less than the truth. The gout, if such it was, then proceeded to attack the left foot as well.

  The situation was not improved by a decline in the health of Caroline Graves at the same time. She had begun to suffer from some kind of nervous disease, one of those mysterious nineteenth-century complaints that admit of no easy diagnosis. His doctor, Frank Beard, was also bedridden; he had been afflicted by erysipelas, an acute skin condition that produces blisters and fevers. Is it any wonder that Collins’s novels are filled with sick and ailing people? In this emergency Collins turned to John Elliotson, whom he was to describe in The Moonstone as “one of the greatest of English physiologists.” Elliotson was a friend of Dickens, and was well known for his practice of mesmerism as a cure of physical and mental disorders.

  Yet his theoretical prestige did not, for Collins, result in any practical benefits. Elliotson did not approve of Beard’s opium treatment, and much to his patient’s discomfort tried to discontinue it. He attempted to mesmerise Collins so that he might sleep without opium; he succeeded for one night, but then Collins was beset by nervous irritation and what he called “the fidgets.” The attempts at the mesmerism of Caroline were even more deleterious; she was plunged into another nervous attack and was up all night with “palpitations.” Collins reported that Elliotson “has done and can do nothing for me.” When Elliotson visited Harley Street Collins told him that “I am so weak, I have no writing power left in me—give me a tonic. I must have strength.” Elliotson proposed a dose of wormwood. So Collins waited impatiently for Beard’s recovery.

  He was quite unable to work on the novel already bought by Smith, Elder, and was obliged to write to them in order to put off publication. Eventually the publisher allowed him to postpone delivering the first episode until the beginning of December. Collins also refused other work. He was offered the editorship of a new periodical, Good Words, but he declined the proposal. By the beginning of March he was starting to feel a little better; he could manage a ride in a carriage if his feet were propped up on the front seat.

  In the spring of the year he decided to try a water cure on the Continent. He had already been visiting “Dr. Caplin’s Electro-Chemical Bath” off Portman Square. In the British Medical Journal Caplin advertised his baths for “the extraction of Mercury and other Metallic or Extraneous Substances”; Collins said that the waters worked wonders for him.

  In the middle of April he and Caroline went to the spa town of Aix-la-Chapelle, where it was hoped that the medicinal water of the hot springs would bring out the “suppressed” ailment; the mixture of sodium, chloride and hydrogen carbonate was supposed to be particularly efficacious for rheumatic diseases. He knew of a good hotel there and of an experienced doctor who could advise him on the time and length of his immersions. The water was hot, at 98 degrees, and smelled of sulphur; he was hosed down with it, and then wrapped in a very hot linen toga. He was also obliged to drink a tumbler of the spring water before breakfast; it tasted “like the worst London egg you ever had for breakfast in your life.” But after a few days the treatment seemed to be working, and he felt himself to be stronger. After his bout in the springs, he always drove out into the surrounding hills and took short walks where the path was dry. In a letter to his mother he added that in the hotel he was continually being asked for his autograph, the requests coming from French, German and American as well as English readers. He had become a public man.

  In the following month he and Caroline travelled on to the springs of Bad Wildbad in the Black Forest, where he stayed at the Hôtel de l’Ours already filled with invalids hobbling around on sticks or crutches. The water, with traces of carbonic acid, was quite different from that of Aix. It was clear and odourless, and Collins enjoyed the sensation of the hot springs bubbling up around him. He was told that twenty-four separate treatments would be sufficient, although he believed that the gout would return for one final attack before being dispersed altogether. In this belief he was mistaken. Bad Wildbad conferred one benefit on him, however. It gave him the setting for the first chapter of his next novel. Even if he was not ready to begin writing, he could at least start to plot and to plan.

  On his return to England he found that he could walk more easily; he even managed to make a round trip from Harley Street to the Serpentine in Hyde Park. But he decided that a bout of sea air might improve him still further. In July he and Pigott hired a yacht at Cowes with the intention of sailing around the English coast to the Isle of Man; this also would be a setting for the new novel. But the damp air only served to irritate Collins’s rheumatism further, and they abandoned the voyage at Torquay after ten days.

  He was still determined to see the Isle of Man, and at the end of August he travelled with Caroline and Carrie Graves by train to Liverpool before taking a steamer to the island. The crossing was calm enough but the Isle of Man was very cold. They found apartments in a damp hotel in Douglas which materially increased the misery of Collins’s rheumatism; he determined to see what he needed and then leave. By dint of much enquiry, walking and riding, he found the appropriate spot in the Calf Sound between the Calf of Man and the south-west tip of the island; it was “wild and frightful, just what I wanted.” “Far or near no sound was audible but the cheerless bubbling of the broken water ahead, pouring through the awful hush of silence in which earth and ocean waited
for the coming day.” He then returned to his hotel, for a day or two of rest, before travelling back to London.

  The hot springs and the sea air had done very little to alleviate Collins’s painful condition, and so he decided to travel south to warmer climates. He now dreaded the damp English winter. He stayed in London for a little time, to “collect my forces,” but then with Caroline and Carrie he set his face towards the sunny land of Italy. He would sail from Marseilles to the port of Civitavecchia on the Tyrrhenian Sea, and from there take the train to Rome; from Rome the little party would go on to Naples.

  Before he left for Italy, however, he arranged to keep his name before the public with the two volumes entitled My Miscellanies. These were essentially articles taken from Household Words and All the Year Round, from the account of his lodgings in London and Paris to his examination of “The Unknown Public.”

  And so on to Italy. The Collins family, if they can so be called, rested in Paris for a week before travelling to Marseilles. They were supposed to take the sea-crossing to Genoa but the weather prevented them; so they travelled by vettura or four-wheeled carriage. Their route took them along the coast from Nice to San Remo before proceeding to Genoa itself. Already he felt the blessings of the warm air and of the cloudless sky, of the palm trees and the lemon groves. He was now able to walk up the hills with a firm step and felt infinitely better. From Genoa they took the steamer to Livorno, the port 10 miles from Pisa. When they arrived at Pisa they were greeted by a sirocco which proved torture to Collins, “and the pangs of Sciatica wrung me in both hams at once.” A sea journey at night to Civitavecchia also proved a misery for Caroline and Harriet, who both became violently seasick. But a two-hour train journey took them to Rome, where they found a good first-floor apartment of five rooms. But the weather was against him; he was preoccupied with it, because his health and well-being depended upon it. He was greeted with rain, thunder and a cold north-east wind. He had become a complete valetudinarian, driven out of public places by the pervading dampness, shutting the windows against the chill and then opening them again to get some air. He did not intend to stay in the capital for long, however, and instead wished to make Naples his home for the season.