Wilkie Collins

by Peter Ackroyd

  Miss Gwilt was essentially a new work, having been extensively rewritten to protect the sensibilities of the English public who might not relish the portrayal of an unapologetic bigamist and murderer on the stage. She becomes a more sympathetic figure, more sinned against than sinning.

  Eight months later, in November 1876, a production of No Thoroughfare opened at the Olympic Theatre in Wych Street; the manager, however, had incurred Collins’s displeasure by choosing a cast without his approval. He declined to have anything more to do with the production, other than the stipulation that it should have a guaranteed run of thirty nights. Yet he relented, and eventually agreed to attend the rehearsals. In the following summer The Dead Secret opened at the Lyceum, and in the early autumn it was succeeded by a production of The Moonstone at the Royal Olympic. The latter was not a success. Collins had “adapted” it almost out of existence, with the removal of several key characters and the excision of any reference to opium. It lasted for nine weeks only.

  He had been in the habit of taking short vacations, to Paris and Switzerland and elsewhere, as a way of “laying in” a stock of good health; when his brain was “fagged” with overwork or when he had survived a more than usually uncomfortable bout of rheumatic gout, he longed to remove himself to the dry air of the Continent. In the summer of 1877 he was so crippled that he could enter a carriage only with difficulty. It was time to escape the unwholesome atmosphere of London. So in the autumn of the year he proposed a more adventurous tour of the Tyrol and of northern Italy with Caroline Graves; Carrie Graves remained in London to deal with the management of the household as well as correspondence in which she referred to Collins as her “godfather” or “godpapa.” The position of Caroline Graves was now settled beyond the possibility of any doubt. She was his official companion.

  He decided to travel wherever the prospect of dry air took him. He and Caroline rested at Brussels, and then proceeded in slow stages to Munich. They travelled erratically in northern Italy, and reached Venice by the end of November; the fruit of the sojourn in Venice was a frantic piece of Grand Guignol, “The Haunted Hotel,” that was eventually serialised in Belgravia magazine. It had been a serpentine journey in search of health which seems to have succeeded; he reported a great improvement in morale and strength to support him in the face of the coming winter. His friends told him that he looked twenty years younger. But it was his last trip to the Continent.

  His domestic arrangements were about to change when in the spring of the following year Carrie Graves married a respectable young solicitor to whose practice Collins transferred his business. On her marriage certificate, registering her union with Mr. Henry Bartley, she followed her mother’s practice by reducing her age by three years; she also described her father as “captain in the army” when he had in fact been a solicitor’s clerk. Three daughters appeared in quick succession. Collins became godfather to the first of them, but all were embraced within the larger family.

  Carrie still acted as Collins’s amanuensis whenever possible, but there were times when other secretarial help was needed. His working habits, however, were now fixed. By the window of his study on the first floor of Gloucester Place stood a large writing table, fitted with a shabby desk; he had retained this portable desk since his schooldays. Beside it was a box containing notes for stories and for characters. Here also were two books of cuttings from the newspapers, one entitled “hints for scenes and incidents” and the other entitled “hints for character.”

  He revised endlessly, with many alterations and substitutions and crossings-out making a mess of his manuscripts. He always used a quill pen. The manuscripts gave the impression that he was, as Walter de la Mare put it, “lapped in the condition of the worm in the cocoon spun out of its own entrails; ink his nectar, solitude his paradise, the most exhausting earthly work at once his joy, his despair, his anodyne and his incentive.” The first revision was given to the copyist, and then the copyist’s manuscript was subject to two more revisions before being sent to the printer. The printer’s proof was then revised, and sent back for correction. When it passed from periodical to volume form, it was corrected once more. He also owned a “Hektograph,” a machine that could make multiple copies from an original. He was always a hard worker, even though he tended to complain of the consequent fatigue.

  Certainly there was no diminution of effort and concentration in his later years. At the beginning of 1879 a new novel began its serialisation in the World. The Fallen Leaves is devoted to the outcasts of the Victorian world. It is in part concerned with the reclamation of a prostitute by a young Christian socialist with the inauspicious name of Amelius Goldenheart. He warned his Canadian publisher that “I am treating some very difficult and delicate subjects this time.” He derived his young American hero from Charles Nordhoff’s The Communistic Societies of the United States and in particular from the account of the Oneida communities in New York and in New England; he pitted the young man’s socialism against the tyrannical forces of the contemporary world. “On the floor of a kitchen, men, women and children lay all huddled together in closely packed rows. Ghastly faces rose terrified out of the seething obscurity, when the light of the lantern fell on them. The stench drove Amelius back, sickened and shuddering.” When Goldenheart marries the prostitute it might seem that the forces of goodwill win through, but any lasting resolution is still in doubt.

  It was a success neither with the critics nor with the public. It was considered “low.” He had been planning a sequel but the poor sales deterred him from trying the experiment; in his next book he said that The Fallen Leaves had reached “only a comparatively limited class of reader in England.” He had hoped that a six-shilling edition would sell, but he was to be disappointed. The subject was, perhaps, just a little too risqué even for the more enlightened Victorian reader.

  It is in fact one of his most ambitious and polemical novels in which he assaults what he described as “the clap-trap morality” of his contemporaries. Throughout all of his work he strives to undermine what might be called the masculine structures of society—whether it be in the sexual ambiguity of his characters, in his ridicule of the cult of muscularity, or in his direct onslaught on the property rights of husbands. “The world is hard on women,” one of the characters in The Fallen Leaves reflects, “and the rights of property is a damned bad reason for it.” Victorian business is denounced as an “imposture” and a “masquerade,” with the unspoken assumption that other aspects of nineteenth-century society are involved in the same illusion. In a phrase from the novel, “the men have settled it so.” In the middle of the century a term had come to epitomise this state of bondage; it became known as “the system.”

  In defiance of these man-made constraints Collins took for his heroines independent and strong-minded women who rise above their conventional roles. He reserves his contempt for the males who, as in Man and Wife, are “all profoundly versed in horse-racing, in athletic sports, in pipes, beer, billiards and betting. All profoundly ignorant of everything else under the sun.”

  The religion of the nineteenth century also comes under attack in The Fallen Leaves. “The Christian religion, as Christ taught it,” another character declares, “has long ceased to be the religion of the Christian world. A selfish and cruel Pretence is set up in its place.” Goldenheart says, of the House of Lords, that “that assembly is not elected by the people, and it therefore has no right to existence in a really free country.” As for the House of Commons, “modern members belong to classes of the community which have really no interest in providing for popular needs and lightening popular burdens.” They also were frauds. It is a common mistake, of course, to confuse character with author; but it is hard not to suspect some authorial sympathy with Goldenheart’s sentiments. The Fallen Leaves is one of the most powerful and impassioned critiques of Victorian society ever composed by a novelist. He dedicated the novel “to CAROLINE.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

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  Ramsgate had now become his chosen resort, a sure resting place and refuge. He hated Brighton, where for some reason he could neither eat nor sleep; the town brought him out in “cold perspiration.” He avoided Broadstairs, also, because it contained too many memories of happier days with Dickens and his family; it had become for him “the most dreadful place in the world.” So it was Ramsgate. The sea air acted on him as a restorative, and his doctor recommended frequent applications of it. He told Edward Pigott that “Beard seems to think that my destiny is to live at Ramsgate.” With two establishments to maintain in London, that was impracticable. Nevertheless he arranged to spend more and more time on the sea coast.

  He could reach it by steamer or by train from London Bridge Station. He hired a steam-yacht, the Phyllis, that was moored in the harbour; he described it as “a lovely little steam-launch…the admiration of nautical mankind. The engineer is bigger than the funnel, and can only just squeeze himself into the engine-room.” He used to say that the perfection of enjoyment could only be found “when you are at sea in a luxurious well-appointed steam-yacht in lovely summer weather.”

  He would stay with Caroline at 14 Nelson Crescent, or with Martha at 27 Wellington Crescent where he was known as William Dawson. The families—now including Carrie’s daughters as well as Martha’s children—mingled happily together; Martha and Caroline, however, never met. He would write at his portable desk in the morning and then spend the time in fishing, walking, or sailing; he would be at sea for two or three hours at a stretch.

  Yet work was never very far from his mind. “Surely,” a character remarks to himself in a subsequent novel, Heart and Science, “I may finish a chapter, before I go to sea tomorrow?” Only two months after the publication of The Fallen Leaves, a new novel started with a newspaper syndication. Jezebel’s Daughter appeared as a serial in the Bolton Weekly Journal and twelve other newspapers of northern England; the arrangement was made with an entrepreneur, William Frederic Tillotson, who had set up a “Fiction Bureau” to market novels in as wide a fashion as possible. Collins, always eager to reach and to exploit a new audience, readily concurred.

  At the beginning of 1880 he reported to Andrew Chatto that he had a “new story ready for book publication.” He expressed some hesitation that he might be going ahead a little too fast for his publisher; he was aware of the perils of overproduction. In the event Jezebel’s Daughter sold well.

  The novel was in effect a reworking, or rewriting, of The Red Vial; this was the melodrama that had been performed more than twenty years before, and had effectively been laughed off the stage. Collins clearly hoped that time would be once more a great healer with the reprise of an idiot, a female poisoner, and a rising from the dead in a mortuary. Once more he invokes the power of destiny in the life of his characters. “Never could any poor human creature have been a more innocent instrument of mischief in the hands of Destiny than I was, on that fatal journey.” Once more he relies upon the machinery of outrageous coincidence. And once more he introduces letters and other documents to lend authenticity to the narrative. But these are the pleasures, not the problems, of the plot. It takes an exquisite art to bring matters to fulfilment at a gradual and steady pace, to baffle expectations, to add ingenious clues and contrivances. It requires much caution and concentration. That is why Collins was exhausted at the end of each novel.

  His appearance might have given some cause for concern. Julian Hawthorne, the son of the novelist, was a visitor to Gloucester Place during this period. He described him as “soft, plump, and pale, suffered from various ailments, his liver was wrong, his heart weak, his lungs faint, his stomach incompetent…his air was of mild discomfort.” He also had acquired “a queer way of holding his hand, which was small, plump and unclean, hanging up by the wrist, like a rabbit on its hind legs…One felt that he was unfortunate and needed succour.” Hall Caine, a young novelist, recalled that he had a “vague and dreamy look sometimes seen in the eyes of the blind, or those of a man to whom chloroform has just been administered.”

  Edmund Yates, a friend of early date, described him as “very bent and gnarled and gnome-like, very much changed, indeed, from the dapper little man I had met thirty years before.” Frank Beard’s son completes the portrait with the image of him “walking up the street with the aid of a heavy stick, bowed nearly doubled, and looking like an old man of eighty, though he was but sixty-five.”

  Collins believed that Tillotson’s syndication of Jezebel’s Daughter had been a success; and so, in the autumn of 1880, his new novel appeared in the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent Supplement as well as in other provincial newspapers. The Black Robe is an account of a Jesuit priest, Father Benwell, who wishes by any available means to obtain the estate of an English gentleman for his order. He believes it to have been improperly stolen from its rightful owners by Henry VIII, and plots to have it bequeathed to the Church by its present possessor. It is an ingenious and entertaining story that appealed to a contemporary audience whose anti-Catholic prejudices were already well known. Nevertheless Collins told an acquaintance that the novel was considered “in Roman Catholic countries as well as Protestant England to be the best thing I have written for some time.”

  He was not aware of any diminution in the quality or the value of his writing, and in this period he approached a representative of the new profession of literary agent in order to protect his interests. Alexander Pollock Watt had set up his agency a few years previously, and had already acquired a high reputation. Since Collins now had approximately twenty novels in print, with all the attention to contracts and payments they required, it was natural for him to seek professional assistance. It could save him time as well as make him money. He had grown tired of dealing personally with the managers of the provincial newspapers, for example, whom he called “curious savages.”

  So at the beginning of December 1881, he consulted Watt on the next novel that he planned for newspaper syndication. He was already plotting a new play by the time he had completed The Black Robe, but an idea for a new novel would not let him rest. Heart and Science was a powerful statement of his belief in the dehumanising effect of science in general and of the practice of vivisection in particular. His audience now included the “unknown public” he had once assiduously courted; one of the newspapers that printed the instalments of the novel was the South London Press. By June he had sent the first six chapters to Chatto, for publication in Chatto’s Belgravia magazine, with the message that “my own vainglorious idea is that I have never written such a first number since The Woman in White.” He became so wildly excited by the story that he wrote day after day, without any rest; on one day he worked for twelve hours at a stretch. He wrote furiously for six months, when he was “one part sane and three parts mad,” but during that period he never once suffered from gout. He contemplated the end of the narrative with growing excitement that left him exhausted. As soon as he had completed the novel, the affliction came back.

  Heart and Science is one of Collins’s most unjustly neglected novels. It contains some of his most vividly imagined characters, as if his simple distaste could bring people to life. Mrs. Gallilee is a woman of scientific interests. “I have always maintained that the albuminoid substance of frogs’ eggs is insufficient (viewed as nourishment) to transform a tadpole into a frog—at last, the professor owns that I am right. I beg your pardon, Carmina; I am carried away by a subject that I have been working at in my stolen intervals for weeks past.”

  Dr. Benjulia, the vivisectionist, is also one of his most comic creations. He had a propensity for tickling a little girl named Zo with the cap at the end of his cane. “I wish I could tickle her some more,” he says before meeting his death. Does the vivisectionist love Zo, or does he think of her as another specimen? There are subtleties of characterisation in this novel that are generally believed to be beyond Collins’s reach.

  The small girl herself is a convincing creation. Here is her description of a Scotsman. “
He skirls on the pipes—skirls mean screeches. When you first hear him, he’ll make your stomach ache. You’ll get used to that—and you’ll find you’ll like him. He wears a purse and a petticoat; he never had a pair of trousers on in his life; there’s no pride about him. Say you’re my friend and he’ll let you smack his legs.” Of her cousins she remarks, “Nice girls—they play at everything I tell ’em. Jolly boys—when they knock a girl down, they pick her up again, and clean her.” Her speech is a token of the vivacious and boisterous tone of the entire narrative.

  The reviewers, sensing a return to Collins’s old form, were enthusiastic. The Academy reported that it was “thoroughly readable and enthralling from its first page to its last.” One critic remarked that if The Woman in White was “written in blood and vitriol,” Heart and Science was written with “blood and dynamite.” His most ferocious attack was upon vivisection itself, a practice much discussed and debated at the time; Collins, with his strong attachment to animals, violently disapproved. “My last experiments on a monkey horrified me,” Benjulia says. “His cries of suffering, his gestures of entreaty, were like those of a child.” He opts to continue his experiment. Collins suggests, rather than describes, the horrors. This renders them all the more fearful. According to Collins himself, “the literary critics congratulate me on the production of a masterpiece.”

  The relative success was followed by a relative disaster. Ever since completing The Black Robe he had been working on a new play. Rank and Riches opened at the Adelphi Theatre in the early summer of 1883. It had a strong cast, including George Alexander and Charles Hawtrey, but not even the most prestigious casting could save it. The plot itself was complicated, including a “bird doctor,” a consumptive employee of a communist club, and the startling revelation that certain peers of the realm were the illegitimate children of a bigamous marriage. It can be construed as another assault by Collins on the conventions of Victorian social life.