Wilkie Collins

by Peter Ackroyd

  He did much of his research for the novel in the library of the Athenaeum; it was one of the London clubs which he frequented. There he consulted volumes on the Hindu religion and on Indian lore. He read C. W. King’s The Natural History of Precious Stones and of the Precious Metals and Talboys Wheeler’s various accounts of India. He met Englishmen who had travelled to, or lived in, India. He was about to call this novel The Serpent’s Eye, until he hit upon the more suggestive title of The Moonstone.

  In the summer Collins moved house once more to 90 Gloucester Place, Portman Square. He was beset by difficulties with the builders, and the general upheaval of repairs and alterations; at one point he had to take refuge with the Lehmanns in Highgate in order to work undisturbed. He signed a twenty-year lease for the property, which suggests that he had the definite intention of taking root; in fact he stayed in the house, with Caroline Graves, for most of the rest of his life. It was a terraced house on five floors, built at the beginning of the nineteenth century; the dining room and sitting room were on the ground floor, while Collins’s study was on the first floor overlooking the street. The study was originally a double drawing room, and was spacious; it was, for him, the heart of the house. Caroline Graves had her own bedroom. His bedroom seems to have been at the top of the house, perhaps to escape the noise of the street. The rooms were in general large and airy and, for Collins, Gloucester Place had the inestimable benefit of being located on dry soil. He fled from damp.

  He leased out the stables in the mews behind Gloucester Place, although he had difficulties with the tenant. The household was completed by three servants, generally two women and a man or boy, and by a dog. Tommy was a Scottish terrier of voracious appetite but gentle manners. It might be described as a large and comfortable London house, with the oddity that Collins refused to have gas. The house is now numbered 65 Gloucester Place, and has a blue plaque to Wilkie Collins to one side of the door. The present author has spent many pleasant evenings there in the company of a friend who rented the third floor in what is now a house of flats.

  The pressure of work was now compounded by the time spent with Dickens upon their first Christmas collaboration for seven years. “No Thoroughfare” was written principally in the Swiss chalet that Dickens had erected at the bottom of his garden at Gad’s Hill Place. The two novelists planned it as a drama as well as a story, and as a result it is divided into an “Overture” and four “Acts.” It has to do with a foundling who has been given the wrong name, with all the possible misfortunes that might arise from mistaken identity; there is an attempt at murder on the Simplon Pass, and the villain dies in an avalanche. True love prevails. It has all the ingredients that Dickens wished, including “ghostly interest, picturesque interest, breathless interest of time and circumstance.” These were the conditions for pleasing the Victorian public. They finished the fourth act working side by side in Dickens’s bedroom, moving ineluctably towards the climactic scene. The end of the third act sets the tone for what follows.

  OBENREIZER: I am the thief and the forger. In a minute more, I shall take the proof from your dead body!

  VENDALE (confusedly; feeling the influence of the laudanum): You villain! What have I done to you?

  Dickens was already making urgent preparation for his reading tour of America, and so left much of the final dramatisation of the story to Collins. The play itself was long, at a length of some four hours, but the audiences were enthusiastic; it ran at the Adelphi in the Strand for 151 performances before transferring to the Standard Theatre in Shoreditch where it remained until the summer of 1868. It was Collins’s first great success upon the London stage. Dickens believed that it was too long and that it dragged a little. Collins had a habit of explaining everything to the audience, sometimes more than once; the interruptions naturally impeded the dramatic action.

  Yet the play was immensely benefited by the presence of Charles Fechter, a French actor who became a close friend of both Dickens and Collins. He had helped to assist in the dramatic adaptation and, in Collins’s words, “fell madly in love with the subject.” He assumed the part of Obenreizer, the villain, and according to Collins played the role in every moment of his waking life. He was Obenreizer in the morning and Obenreizer at the dinner table. He was the champion of what might be called French naturalism; he spoke, rather than delivered, his lines.

  After their work together Collins and Fechter became close friends. Collins recalled later that

  Fechter’s lively mind was, to use his own expression, “full of plots.” He undertook to tell me stories enough for all the future novels and plays that I could possibly live to write. His power of invention was unquestionably remarkable; but his method of narration was so confused that it was not easy to follow him, and his respect for those terrible obstacles in the way of free imagination known as probabilities was, to say the least of it, in some need of improvement.

  He was always heavily in debt, and was inclined to borrow from one friend in order to pay another.

  With Fechter, too, Collins shared a passion for food. The actor had his own cook, whom Collins described as “one of the finest artists that ever handled a saucepan.” Fechter once persuaded her to create a potato dinner in six courses and an egg dinner in eight courses. Collins also had decided tastes. He disliked the stolid Victorian diet of boiled pork and greens and pease pudding, of mutton and stewed beef and parsnips and carrots. In A Rogue’s Life he depicts with horror a dinner of “gravy soup, turbot and lobster-sauce, haunch of mutton, boiled fowls and tongue, lukewarm oyster patties and sticky curry for side-dishes; wild duck, cabinet-pudding, jelly, cream and tartlets.” At this late date it sounds exotic but, as Collins notes, not when you have to eat it every day. In a late novel, Blind Love, a landlady provides food “cooked to a degree of imperfection only attained in an English kitchen.”

  His idea of perfection was French cooking, and he once described meat as simply “a material for sauces.” He adored black pepper and garlic; on one occasion he applied so much garlic to a pie that he was obliged to take to his bed with a gastric attack. He sometimes gorged himself on pâté de foie gras, and had a passion for eating steamed asparagus cold with salad oil. In France he dined on oysters and Chablis, and on omelettes garnished with radishes. He hated the flummery of formal dinners, however. In his own invitations he would add “without ceremony as usual,” or would put “no company” and “no dress.”

  With wine, too, he was something of a connoisseur. His drink of choice was the driest possible champagne. “Isn’t a pint of champagne nice drinking, this hot weather,” one of his characters remarks. “Just cooled with ice…and poured, fizzing, into a silver mug. Lord, how delicious!” He also professed to believe, like many others, that champagne was “good” for the health, but he also drank burgundy and hock and Moselle. He had great faith in the restorative powers of tobacco, too, which revived and calmed him. He relished cigars, and felt nothing but pity for those who did not smoke. He also took snuff incessantly.

  —

  After Collins had “seen off” Dickens on his American tour, at a grand banquet in the Freemasons’ Hall that Caroline and Carrie Graves also attended, he returned to his desk at Gloucester Place in order to continue work on The Moonstone. The first episode of the novel was published in All the Year Round at the beginning of 1868, and the omens for a prodigious success were already visible. Soon enough the crowds assembled outside the offices of the periodical on publication day.

  Two weeks after first publication, however, he received the unwelcome news that Harriet Collins was seriously ill. She had the familial complaint of nervous prostration, but now it had taken the alarming form of complete breakdown of her faculties. He went down to her country cottage, but nervous complications of his own brought him back to London where he summoned Frank Beard. He said that he had been “struck prostrate” and was “crippled in every limb”; but the principal agony was reserved for his eyes that were so inflamed he could neither read nor wri
te.

  He confessed that he had been obliged to dictate the novel from his bed “in the intervals of grief, in the intermissions of pain.” He was exaggerating a little, since only five pages of the manuscript are in the hand of Carrie Graves, but there is no doubt that this period represented one of the great trials of his life. He had always been close to his mother, and when her death came in the middle of February he was so overcome with grief that he could not attend her funeral. The gout in the eyes might have prevented his attendance, in any case, but the pain of the occasion would have been too great. He said that her death was the “bitterest affliction of my life” and fifteen years later he told a correspondent that “when I think of her, I still know what heartache means.”

  Yet, in a preface to a revised edition of the novel, he wrote that his painful labours on The Moonstone were for him a “blessed relief” from his mental agony. “I doubt,” he wrote, “I should have lived to write another book, if the responsibility of the weekly publication of this story had not forced me to rally my sinking energies of body and mind—to dry my useless tears, and to conquer my merciless pains.”

  The amount of laudanum he took, while writing the narrative in these distressing circumstances, was considerable. He professed to have no memory of much of the plot. “I was not only pleased and astonished at the finale,” he is supposed to have said, “but did not recognise it as my own.” It is ironic, perhaps, that the plot of the novel itself devolves upon the erasure of memory by the use of opium. But the laudanum did not otherwise affect his faculties; the narrative remains sharp and detailed.

  The death of Harriet Collins might have meant that, in theory, Caroline Graves could come into the open. It was his mother’s disapproval that had previously required his circumspection and secrecy on the matter of their relationship. He put the situation delicately in a later novel, The Evil Genius:

  “Free to marry if you like?” she persisted.

  He said “Yes” once more—and kept his face steadily turned away from her. She waited a while. He neither moved nor spoke.

  Surviving the slow death little by little of all her other illusions, one last hope had lingered in her heart. It was killed by that cruel look, fixed on the view of the street.

  “I’ll try to think of a place that we can go to at the seaside.” Having said these words she slowly moved away to the door…

  This is of course a fictional conversation, and may not be related to any actual scene. Yet it is suggestive. In any case a further obstacle arose between Collins and Caroline Graves in the shape of another woman.

  In the year of Harriet Collins’s death Martha Rudd emerges by Collins’s side. It had previously been thought that, as a native of Norfolk, Collins had discovered her on one of his excursions to that region. She was a daughter of a shepherd. Yet a very well-informed obituary, after Collins’s death, states that Martha Rudd had been one of Harriet Collins’s servants. She “was a housemaid in the employ of Wilkie Collins’s mother and was very devoted to her while she lived.” The timing of her appearance, therefore, makes perfect sense. He may have seduced her while she was in his mother’s employment, or he may have taken the opportunity of Harriet’s death to bring her to London.

  Martha Rudd, given the name of Mrs. Dawson, had been placed in lodgings in 33 Bolsover Street, a ten- or fifteen-minute walk away from Gloucester Place. This was the street in which Collins’s grandfather had once had a picture-dealing business. She was now twenty-three years old, while he was forty-four. Even though she was to bear him three children, she is only ever directly mentioned by Collins in his correspondence with his solicitor. To his closest acquaintance she was described as his “morganatic marriage”; a morganatic marriage is one contracted between persons of unequal rank. It is possible that he never introduced her to Caroline Graves, and it is unlikely that he ever took her among his friends. He was, perhaps, a little ashamed of her. But he needed her society and her bed; she remained with him until the end of his life.

  Another Victorian, Arthur Munby, loved to penetrate the class barriers of Victorian society with his obsession for working-class women. He fell in love with a “robust hardworking peasant lass, with the marks of labour and servitude upon her everywhere,” for example, and he was enamoured of many others. Collins may have had a similar taste.

  —

  The Moonstone ran for thirty-two episodes, or eight months, in All the Year Round. In the month before the final episode appeared, the novel was published in volume form by the Tinsley Brothers. One of their employees in their office at Catherine Street said later that “Wilkie’s solicitors sent in a draft which was a regular corker; it would pretty well cover the gable of an ordinary sized house.”

  The Moonstone has held its place as one of Collins’s most successful and popular novels. In the course of the narrative eleven different narrators give their accounts of the theft of a magnificent jewel from a country house. It is on one level the paradigm of the detective story. The detective, Sergeant Cuff, is an eccentric whose principal passion is for the cultivation of roses; he is also one of the first fictional characters to employ a magnifying glass. Other aspects of traditional detective fiction also appear here. The members of the country-house party can all in turn be considered suspects. The perpetrator of the crime is in fact the least likely of them all. The astute detective is contrasted with a bumbling and inefficient local police force, but in the end an amateur solves the crime that has baffled all the professionals. The blame shifts from person to person in an apparently endless game of pass the parcel while the whole complex affair is eventually resolved by a dramatic reconstruction of the events of the fatal night. In all these aspects The Moonstone can be seen to be the true source and spring of the English detective mystery.

  Criminology was in its infancy when Collins wrote The Moonstone, but the idea of the detective had already caught the public imagination at a time when it was believed that the incidence of crime was rising. Collins himself coined the phrase “detective fever.” The detective was the official meant to restore order to a chaotic world; he was the secret policeman who would be able to infiltrate the groups or societies poised to create terror in the streets. An essay in Chambers’s Journal of 1843 notes that “at times the detective policeman attires himself in the dress of ordinary individuals.” The detective became the symbol of urban anonymity and a symptom of the new interest in the professional expert. In The Moonstone he is supposed to resolve the issues and to remove all the fear or neurosis that has attended them; his role is to re-establish the old and familiar patterns of existence.

  The multiple narratives of the novel lend substance to the unending suspense. As one character says, “from all I can see, one interpretation is just as likely to be right as the other.” Nothing is what it seems. “I saw the pony harnessed myself. In the infernal network of mysteries and uncertainties that now surrounded us, I declare it was a relief to observe how well the buckles and straps understood each other!” Collins counsels us to wait for the buckles and straps of the plot to be fastened together at the end.

  Yet it is more than a mystery. The moonstone itself is a piece of sacred Indian theatre, and a group of Indians come to England in order to recover it. In the wake of the Indian Mutiny it was common enough to portray them as bloodthirsty savages, but Collins takes them and their religion seriously. They, too, have been wronged; the stone was in fact originally stolen by an English soldier, grown drunk on rapine and riot, who brought it home with him. It was part of his imperial legacy.

  When the stone is later stolen from a young woman’s bedroom at night, the theft becomes a symbol of rape, which might be construed as the rape of India. The house steward, Mr. Betteredge, sums up the bewilderment which is then engendered in a “right-thinking” Englishman. “Here was our quiet English house suddenly invaded by a devilish Indian diamond—bringing after it a conspiracy of living rogues, set loose on us by the vengeance of a dead man…Whoever heard the like of it—in t
he nineteenth century, mind; in an age of progress, and in a country which rejoices in the blessings of the British constitution?” At the end of the novel it is returned to its rightful place in the city of Somnauth.

  If Collins states the grievances of the Indians, he also draws attention to the plight of the English lower class. “Ha, Mr. Betteredge,” one poor girl says, “the day is not far off when the poor will rise against the rich. I pray Heaven they may begin with him.” Betteredge himself reflects on the differences between the high life and the low life. “Necessity, which spares our betters, has no pity on us.” Collins was always aware of the shadows that Victorian civilisation cast, and there is not one novel that does not on one level or another draw attention to the poor and the outcast.

  Collins waited with apprehension for the response. “I awaited its reception by the public,” he wrote later, “with an eagerness of anxiety I have never felt before or since.” He believed that The Moonstone was the best novel he had ever written with a stronger degree of “popularity” in it than in any of his books since The Woman in White. In this judgement he was proved correct. William Tinsley recorded that

  there were scenes in Wellington Street that doubtless did the author’s and publisher’s hearts good. And especially when the serial was nearing its ending, on publishing days there would be quite a crowd of anxious readers waiting for the new number…Even the porters and boys were interested in the story, and read the new number in sly corners, and often with their packs on their backs…