Gracious God! after going through all the unutterable horror of that time, am I going the same way again?
It came to me…
Collins evidently decided it would be more effective to bury all direct reference to Lydia’s criminal past.
10. I read the letters. The manuscript continues:
Most of them made me angry; but some of them made me cry. I daresay I am the wickedest woman breathing – the newspapers said it, I remember, at the time, and the newspapers are always right. I don’t care. Most of them made me angry – but some of them made me cry.
I came to the last…
11. representing herself… drowned. This seems to be another reference to the Tichborne case (see Book the Third, Chapter XI, note 2). Collins may also have been thinking of another sensational ‘personation’ case of the period, that of ‘Mrs Longworth-Yelverton’. This case also seems to have suggested to Collins part of Lydia Gwilt’s subsequent marriage-conspiracy schemes.
During the Crimean War, Captain Charles Yelverton, a combatant in the war and heir to the Marquis of Avonside, met Maria Theresa Longworth, who was nursing as a Catholic Sister of Mercy (i.e. a lay nun). They evidently fell in love, and he probably seduced her. In 1857 Major Yelverton (as he now was) became the ‘husband’ of Theresa Longworth by means of an irregular Scotch marriage. In the same year, the couple went through an unwitnessed form of service in a Roman Catholic church. In 1858, Major Yelverton left Theresa and ‘married’ another woman (this time with a more regular ceremony). Mrs Longworth-Yelverton subsequently brought a suit against the Major for the ‘restitution of her conjugal rights’. Scottish and Irish courts declared her two ‘marriages’ valid. Yelverton appealed his case before the House of Lords, and on 28 July 1864 it found in his favour: ‘Mrs Longworth-Yelverton’ was merely personating his wife. The case aroused huge interest in England, and provoked a spate of ‘bigamy’ and ‘is she or is she not his wife’ novels – including one by Mrs Yelverton herself. (See ‘Bigamy: The Rise and Fall of a Convention’, Jeanne Fahnestock, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, June 1981, 47–71.)
12. in your place. The manuscript continues:
I read no farther. When I had got on, line by line, to those words, it all burst on my mind in an instant. There is no doubting, no denying, what has happened to me. The frightful temptation under which I now feel myself sinking, has come straight out of that other temptation to which I yielded in the bygone time.
This was eliminated, in proof presumably, as were other references to Lydia’s psychopathic criminality.
Chapter XI
1. the blacksmith at Gretna Green. Collins was intensely interested in the vagaries of British marriage law, and this section, Love and Law, hints at his later sensation novel on the subject, Man and Wife (1870). The situation in Scotland and Ireland had long been anomalous. As Dougald B. McEachen points out, ‘Easy Scotch marriages had been a-source of irritation to the English ever since the passing of Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act in 1753.’ In the 1840s, Lord Brougham sponsored a bill that would eliminate irregular Scotch marriages. A law was finally enacted in 1856 (a year or two after the supposed action here) requiring that one of the parties in a Scotch marriage should have resided there for twenty-one days. As McEachen notes, ‘This law put an end to quick Gretna Green marriages, but otherwise left the Scots law on irregular marriages essentially unchanged.’ In 1868, a Royal Commission reported on Marriage Statutes and their anomalies. Irregular marriage figures centrally later in Armadale. (See D. B. McEachen, ‘Wilkie Collins and the British Law’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, September 1950, 121–39.)
Chapter XIII
1. ‘You mustn’t bleed him, sir’. Pedgift Junior has been reading Charles Reade’s Hard Cash. In that novel, the Scottish Doctor Sampson, who treats his patients with unorthodox ‘modern’ methods, sends a telegram to the hero with a list of instructions:
Out visiting when yours came. In apoplexy with a red face and stertorous breathing, put the feet in mustard bath and dash much cold water on the head from above. On revival give emetic; cure with sulphate of quinine. In apoplexy with a white face, treat as for a simple faint; here emetic dangerous. In neither apoplexy bleed.
There is a diatribe against bleeding in most of Reade’s novels.
2. harden once more. The manuscript continues:
His first suspicions of Mr Bashwood’s motive – suspicions not even remotely approaching the truth – now dawned on his mind. After a moment’s considering, he determined to state them openly, and to bring the interview in that way, if no other way, to an end.
One of us…
3. before he said anything more. The manuscript continues:
It was quite plain to him that in putting the question which had so violently agitated the Deputy Steward, he had unintentionally offered Mr Bashwood a chance of misleading him, which Mr Bashwood had eagerly – too eagerly – accepted on the spot.
‘One thing is clear…
4. and in making the discovery within a fortnight from the present time. This detail was, apparently, added in proof.
Chapter XIV
1. in my maiden name as ‘Miss Gwilt’. It is a nice question as to whether by doing this (and knowingly falsifying the banns) Lydia is invalidating the marriage. Her lawyer’s advice, a little later, seems to follow the normal legal wisdom that so long as her husband is ignorant, and does not conspire with her, the marriage is valid – but vulnerable should he petition against its legality on the grounds that he was deceived. But Lydia is in murky legal waters. (See Fahnestock, pp. 58–9: ‘Any error in the formalities could and in fact occasionally did annul an honestly intended marriage.’) This situation was cleared up in the late 1860s, partly in response to pressure brought by novelists like Collins.
2. go no further. Crossed out in the manuscript there follows:
His engagements are too numerous to permit him being my friend; and in the event of legal advice being required, he begged I would recommend the lady to apply to some other person. The meaning of all this was plain to me. ‘I can see plainly you are going the bad way again; and I won’t run the risk of having anything to do with you.’ If a lawyer’s tongue ever went to the truth [illeg] that was what my lawyer would have said.
3. he will tell me. In the manuscript there continues, crossed out:
The major must have received my letter yesterday afternoon, and something must have been done on the same day. If Armadale wrote to Miss Milroy from the hotel (as I firmly believe he did) by yesterday’s post, he ought to hear from her tomorrow – and if this result is to make any change in his plans, I must know what the change is. My whole future actually depends on what that booby may do, between this and my wedding day!
4. After solemnly announcing. The manuscript has ‘After informing her disconsolate swain’.
5. I hailed a passing omnibus, and was a free woman again. In the late 1840s, horse-drawn omnibuses became more popular as taxes on them were lifted and various improvements were made in their design. Women were able to travel without hindrance in the lower, enclosed deck of the vehicle (men were expected to go to the open upper deck – or knifeboard – where they might smoke). As Altick notes, ‘when London was flooded with Crystal Palace visitors in 1851, buses really came into their own as a democratic means of travel’ (Altick, p. 374).
6. from the hotel. The manuscript continues:
It is not ten o’clock yet. How am I to get through the long lonely hours before he comes. I can’t read. If I had a piano – no even if I had a piano I could not touch it. Oh, the weariness of this empty, solitary day! If I could sleep through it from now to the evening!
Five o’clock…
7. Great Western… South Eastern… tidal train. Lydia takes her cab from Paddington to London Bridge – the respective terminus stations of the two railway lines. The GPO head office was at Mount Pleasant, near King’s Cross. Tidal trains (now called boat trains) were designed to meet ferries coming in, or leaving, at hig
h tide. They would have appropriately flexible timetables through the year.
Chapter XV
1. whose business is steadily enlarging. The manuscript has a long, crossed-out passage emphasizing the despicable nature of the private detective, on the theme of ‘People paid this man to be shameless and pitiless (when their interest required it) and he was shameless and pitiless.’ Collins may well have been thinking about investigations into his and Dickens’s private lives. The private-detective industry effectively began with the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, which for the first time made divorce generally available to the middle classes on the production of the necessary evidence of adultery and abuse. Collins draws a distinct line between the professional detectives of Scotland Yard (such as Sergeant Cuff in The Moonstone) and private detectives like James Bashwood.
2. a travelling quack-doctor. Catherine Peters points out that ‘Madame Rachel Leverson’s first husband was a chemist’s assistant, who taught her to concoct cosmetics.’
3. till she was eight years old. This odd detail, which recalls Great Expectations (1861), suggests that Collins was holding in reserve the possibility of revealing Lydia Gwilt’s mysterious origins later in the narrative.
4. Miss Gwilt, in the character of a Nun. Theresa Longworth was a lay nun when she met Captain Yelverton in the Crimea. (See Book the Fourth, Chapter X, note 11.)
5. Women are queer creatures. The manuscript continues: ‘Nine out of ten of them don’t know what of them is uppermost half the time.’ This was presumably deleted because of the mildly indecent misconstructions that could arise.
6. the Trial of the famous Mrs Waldron. As Altick points out, Collins is conflating two sensational cases in the history of Lydia Gwilt, alias Mrs Waldron. In 1857, Madeleine Smith, the daughter of a Glasgow architect, was tried for killing her lover with arsenic-laced hot chocolate. She got off, on the Scottish legal technicality of ‘Not Proven’ (see Book the Fourth, Chapter V, note 1). The other case was that of Thomas Smethurst, tried for poisoning his wife the next year. As Altick records:
The doctor was convicted but the evidence against him was so flimsy and the trial had been conducted with such palpable bias that there was a great outcry in the medical and legal professions and the press. The Home Secretary, with the reluctant acquiescence of the judge, was forced to turn the case over to Sir Benjamin Brodie, a highly respected surgeon – but not a forensic scientist, let alone a lawyer – who proceeded to adjudicate, not the controversial medical evidence alone but the jury’s verdict itself… The upshot was that Smethurst was granted a pardon, but since the proverbial pound of flesh had somehow to be extracted, he was rearrested and tried and convicted on a charge of bigamy.
Collins has Lydia convicted of poisoning her husband, pardoned by the Home Secretary, rearrested and convicted of the lesser charge of theft. As Altick points out, ‘it is evident that Collins, bucking the tide of public opinion, thought Smethurst had been fairly convicted’ of poisoning (Altick, pp. 526–7).
7. the medical witnesses. One concern arising from the sensational poison trials of the 1850s was the inadequacy of the forensic science and expert witnesses. The question was discussed in ‘The Medical Evidence of Grime’, Cornhill Magazine, March 1863. The article notes that recent poisoners had shown themselves ‘alarmingly familiar with some of the most recondite secrets of toxicology’.
8. the Scotch marriage. Collins deliberately confuses the issue as to whether Lydia is bigamously married, or whether her marriage to Manuel is invalid (doubly suspect since he may be previously married, and his ‘marriage’ to Lydia is an irregular Scotch union).
BOOK THE FIFTH
Chapter I
1. the cloud first rose between us. The manuscript version of this section reads:
I only know that the cloud came; that he felt it, and kept the feeling a secret; that I felt it and kept the feeling a secret; that it has grown and darkened ever since that time; and that it is growing and darkening still, with every day that passes over our heads.
I could bear it…
2. circular notes: Instruments for raising cash in foreign banks (early versions of travellers’ cheques). Collins had much trouble with currency on his spring 1864 visit to Italy (Robinson, p. 186).
3. It is the vessel from Gibraltar. The manuscript continues:
Armadale has kept his engagement to join us at Naples. Half an hour since, he walked into the room – having contrived to miss Midwinter in his usual blundering way. The first two questions he asked me, after we had shaken hands, were whether I had heard from Thorpe-Ambrose, and whether I could tell him any news of Miss Milroy.
Collins evidently did not at first intend an instalment break here.
4. When you find… drop your pen. Collins had been warned off writing in early 1863. He was continously worried during the writing of Armadale that ‘gout’ was attacking his brain; ‘the nervous misery is indescribable’, he wrote in a letter of September 1864 (Clarke p. 102). Writing was particularly prone to bring on one of his nervous attacks. During his eighteen-month sabbatical from writing (1863–4) he went to various resorts on the Continent, including Naples, which he did not much like (Robinson, p. 184). The Irish doctor here is, apparently, a version of Collins’s physician Frank Carr Beard.
Chapter II
1. Bellini’s lovely melodies. They are apparently watching Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma.
2. tell me of it. The manuscript continues:
‘No words can say what a relief it would be to my mind, if you could satisfy me that I have deluded myself, in any important respect, as to what took place in the other room an hour since.’
3. never mind what! Lydia has presumably put a small amount of arsenic in Allan’s drink, with the aim of poisoning him with a cumulative dose over a long period. This was a favoured method of domestic poisoners of the period.
4. that he wished me to read. Crossed out in the manuscript there follows:
‘Read that’, he said, ‘and you will believe that my one anxiety in coming here was to test my recollection of the circumstances by yours. You will understand that the last desperate hope I had to cling to, was the hope that your memory of the night’s events might yet prove to be wrong. Read that – and you will want no explanation of the direction that I gave you when I entered this room [illeg]’
I read these…
5. the Mole. i.e. breakwater.
6. a political refugee. Cuba in 1850–68 was seething with political opposition and uprising against the Spanish colonial regime.
Chapter III
1. On the third of November. The manuscript has ‘On the second of November’.
2. On the ninth… On the thirteenth. The manuscript has ‘On the eighth… On the fourteenth’.
3. the Royal Yacht Squadron. Formed in 1812 and based at Cowes it served as a general news service for amateur sailors.
4. to inform me? The manuscript continues:
I can’t go to the lawyer whom I consulted when I was last in London, after such a reception as he then gave me; and it would be little less than madness to try a man whom I don’t know. What is to be done? I must shut up my diary and think, [white line]
5. Oh Lydia! Lydia! why are you not at church?: This was originally the end of the eighteenth monthly number.
6. Doctor Downward! Collins reshaped his manuscript to create a new instalment break here.
7. Fairweather Vale… new neighbourhood. Catherine Peters points out that this description ‘corresponds closely to the Vale of Health, Hampstead Heath, originally a small hamlet, where a number of new villas were built from 1862 onwards’. Altick (p. 413) also notes the topicality of this description.
8. my galvanic apparatus. Designed to give therapeutic electrical shocks. As Catherine Peters notes, Collins was treated at this period with ‘electro-magnetic baths’ for his gout.
9. This is no madhouse, my dear lady. Jenny Bourne Taylor notes the similarity of Downward’s regime to that outlined in the (res
pectable) physician John Conolly’s Treatment of the Insane without Medical Restraints, (1856). Conolly had an asylum for ladies from 1845 to 1866. There is also another more sinister aspect hinted at in Dr Le Doux’s regimen. The ‘nervous derangement (parent of insanity)’ which he refers to may well be female masturbation, about which there was a panic in the 1860s. Extreme measures – such as clitoridectomy – were practised, as well as various kinds of laceration, scarification and mutilation (see Hartman, Victorian Murderesses, Chapter Three). The favoured, and less brutal, method was physical prevention via ingenious ‘preservative belts’, vigilant inspection, and institutionalized ‘rest’ (i.e. confinement) of the kind Downward specializes in (it is clear that his rooms have means by which occupants can be spied on). (See Alex Comfort, The Anxiety Makers, London, 1968.) This section of Collins’s novel is also clearly influenced by Charles Reade’s campaign against private asylums in Hard Cash (which invited anyone wrongfully incarcerated in an asylum in the last five years to get in touch with the author). In his sliminess, the character Dr Downward owes a lot to the crooked physician and confidence trickster, Dr Firmin, in Thackeray’s Philip (1862).
10. Harvey… Jenner. William Harvey (1578–1657) made pioneering discoveries about the circulation of the blood; Edward Jenner (1749–1823) pioneered vaccination for smallpox. Collins is here echoing the Scottish physician Dr Sampson in Reade’s Hard Cash, who boasts about his discovery of the principle of’ ‘remittency’ (a doctrine similar to Downward’s ‘rest’ cure): ‘And I discovered this, and the new paths to the cure of all diseases that it opens. Alone I did it; and what my reward? hooted, insulted, belied, and called a quack by the banded school of professional assassins who in their day hooted Harvey and Jenner’.
Armadale Page 95