Wilkie Collins Read online

  He sailed for America on 13 September, but before he left England, he arranged his affairs in good order. He drew up a new will in which he made ample provision for Martha Rudd and her children as well as for Caroline Graves and her daughter. He had also asked his solicitor, William Tindell, to take care of both families in his absence. He also insured Martha’s new furniture. He boarded the Algeria at Liverpool and, after an unremarkable voyage, arrived in New York harbour twelve days later. Fechter was waiting to greet him on the quayside, and escorted Collins to the Westminster Hotel where they dined together. “You will find friends here wherever you go,” Fechter told him.

  There were friends, and reporters, in large numbers. He was aware of his popularity in America, which was second only to that of Dickens himself. The sales of The New Magdalen, for example, had been enormous in comparison with those of England. Since there was no copyright agreement with America, however, his rewards were not as high as they might have been. He was told that one American publisher had sold 120,000 copies of The Woman in White, to which Collins’s response was that “he never sent me sixpence.” Nevertheless his real American publishers, Harper & Brothers, issued a new “Library Edition” in honour of his arrival. The newspapers carried accounts of his activities even before his first reading.

  On 27 September, for example, he was guest of honour at the Lotos Club in the presence of many New York worthies; he delivered a speech in which he interpreted his welcome as “a recognition of English literature, liberal, spontaneous and sincere.” In this first week on American soil he was living in what he called a “social whirlwind” with dinners and breakfasts and meetings and speeches. A breakfast for twenty-four people at the Union Club in New York included strong drink, speeches and canvasback duck.

  Like other famous English visitors he found the attentions of the press very disagreeable. They waited for him in corridors and in public rooms; they even followed him into private houses. One afternoon Collins had made a call upon an acquaintance when their meeting was interrupted by a lady with “a little black dog in one hand and her card in the other.” She represented one of the newspapers and wanted a few minutes’ conversation. Collins turned to his hostess, in order to apologise for the impertinence, but the hostess thought nothing of it. She laughed and said that it was the journalist’s “daily bread.” It was the difference between an American and an English sensibility.

  He was so pestered by journalists, in fact, that he arranged to meet them in groups rather than individually. On one occasion he was confronted by a posse of twelve female journalists waiting for him in the sitting room of his hotel. “Let me embrace you for the company,” one of them said. According to Collins she was “the oldest and the ugliest…I suppose I did look grim, for I felt it.”

  Yet he was generally beguiled and charmed by the Americans whom he met. They were frank, cheerful and free; they did not obey the conventions of Victorian England that Collins himself cordially detested. They lacked the hypocrisy and frigid good manners of the English middle class. They had minor failings, however; they did not hum or whistle; they did not keep dogs; and they never walked anywhere.

  He had committed himself only to ten readings, and he gave the first of them in Albany. Here he read an expanded version of “The Dream Woman,” the story of the murderous wife. He asked his audience to imagine themselves to be a group of friends seated in a parlour with an old acquaintance; this was precisely the mood which Dickens tried to summon before his own readings. Collins went on to remind them that he was not an actor. He would not, in other words, emulate Dickens’s manner. He told an English friend that “my way of reading surprises them…because I don’t flourish a paper knife and stamp about the platform, and thump the reading desk.” These were all aspects of Dickens’s public readings. Collins was altogether a more modest and self-effacing figure. Yet he seemed to be a success. The first reading “so arrested the audience that not a soul stirred.” He did have the power of storytelling if not of personality.

  He read “The Dream Woman” in Philadelphia also, in the middle of October, but one newspaper reviewer commented that “it was not pleasant to hear a famous Englishman describing, before several hundred pure girls, how one wretched, fallen woman, after mysteriously killing her man, had captivated two more, and stabbed another to death in a drunken frenzy.” Collins’s sensationalism was sometimes too strong for the sensitive.

  He gave two or three readings in Boston at the end of the month, and the music hall in particular was “crowded to every part.” The Boston Evening Transcript reported that “he gave evidence of great power in facial expression and a good command over his voice.” One lady in high Bostonian society was not so impressed. Annie Fields complained that “his talk was rapid and pleasant but not at all inspiring…A man who had been feted and petted in London society, who has overeaten and overdrunk, has been ill, is gouty, and in short is no very wonderful specimen of a human being.”

  At the beginning of November he returned to New York in order to assist a production of The New Magdalen at the Broadway Theatre. This was almost as successful as its London counterpart, with calls of “Collins, Collins” from the audience at the end of the fourth act; he came before the curtain three times to acknowledge the applause. The New York critics, however, were more easily shocked than their London colleagues by this story of a reformed prostitute. The reviewer for the Daily Graphic wrote that “a play so utterly vicious, so shamefully profligate in its teaching, has never before been produced at a New York theatre.” Nevertheless it remained a favourite of the public and, after three weeks in the city, began an extended tour of the country.

  On the evening after the first night’s performance, Collins read “The Dream Woman” from a desk on the stage of the Association Hall. The audience, according to the New York Times, “hung in breathless silence on the reader’s words” together with “a large number of young ladies who watched the reader with that steadfast fixity of gaze which only ladies can fasten on a gentleman of literary eminence.” His fame preceded him everywhere. While walking in the streets of New York, on his way to another public breakfast, he was stopped by a young man who recognised him from his photographs. The young man asked for his autograph and promptly produced a piece of paper, a pen and an ink bottle from his pockets. “How am I to write it?” Collins asked him.

  “You can write it on my back.” He turned round and gave him “a back” as if they were playing leapfrog. Collins was astounded.

  Despite his fragile health Collins survived the long train journeys from city to city. He even managed to endure a journey of fifteen hours from Montreal to Toronto, albeit with the assistance of dry champagne and a cold turkey. Toronto left him feeling rheumatic, and the prospect of Niagara left him underwhelmed. “What will the waterfall do? Besides I don’t like waterfalls—they are noisy.” In the event, however, he was suitably impressed.

  At the beginning of 1874 he returned to the United States with the intention of travelling west. He had originally hoped to reach Salt Lake City, the home of the Mormons, but got no further than Chicago. The incessant travelling by railway did now begin to affect his health, and he found it impossible to find rest in the sleeping cars. He was not sorry to leave Chicago where “the dull sameness of the great blocks of iron and brick overwhelm me.” He decided to turn back to Boston, and over the next two months he read in various New England towns. The dry air of that region was of material benefit to him. He had not one ache or pain, and the gout left him entirely. “In your country,” he told one American acquaintance, “I felt five and twenty years old. In my country, I (not infrequently) feel five and ninety.”

  At Boston a reception was given for Collins in which the great American authors—Longfellow and Twain among them—came to pay their respects. Mark Twain made a speech, and Oliver Wendell Holmes recited a poetic tribute. Each gentleman was then presented with a bon-bon box, covered in Turkey morocco, which contained the photograph and the autograph
of the English author.

  He had originally intended to stay in America until the end of March, but news from England hastened his departure. Martha Rudd’s landlord wished to sell the house on the Marylebone Road, thereby obliging Martha and her two daughters to leave, unless “Mr. Dawson” would consent to buy the lease. Collins did not wish to do so and, although Martha had three months’ notice, he now had to find his family somewhere else to live.

  He had made approximately £2,500 from his extended reading tour; it was only a tenth of what Dickens had gathered, but it was enough to make the journey worthwhile. He had earned less because, for the sake of his health, he could not read more. Yet he had thoroughly enjoyed the experience; he had made new friends and had enjoyed the unaffected admiration of his audiences. “The enthusiasm and kindness are really and truly beyond description,” he wrote. “I should be the most ungrateful man living if I had any other than the highest opinion of the American people.” On 7 March he took the Parthia from Boston to Liverpool.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Clap-Trap

  He landed at Liverpool on 18 March and had returned to London by the following day. He made his way to Gloucester Place, but must have gone very soon afterwards to Martha Rudd and the two daughters in Marylebone Road. That reunion is not in doubt, since Martha gave birth to their third child nine months and seven days later.

  The most urgent matter was to find her a new house but clearly Martha, or Collins’s solicitor, had anticipated him. Only a week after his return the family had moved to Taunton Place, a few yards north of their previous address; it was one in a row of cottages close to Regent’s Park where she and her growing family were to live for the next fifteen years. Such a cottage, “in a by-road, just outside the park,” is described in a subsequent novel. It was on two floors, with three rooms on each floor; it was “simply and prettily furnished; and it was completely surrounded by its own tiny plot of garden-ground.” This was to be the principal site of Collins’s family life. “Work, walk, visit to my morganatic family,” he told Frederick Lehmann, “such is life.” There were benefits, however; he believed that it was sometimes possible to “walk off” his rheumatism. As soon as he returned, however, he became afflicted by all of his English ailments; his eyes turned yellow, and his head ached.

  The fact that he now had the responsibility of a third child made him look to his finances. There was no respite from the continual labour of composition and soon after his return from the United States he began work on what was to become his thirteenth novel. The Law and the Lady began its serialisation, in the Graphic, in the autumn of this year. He also arranged for a “novelisation” of The Frozen Deep in Temple Bar magazine and contributed a short story, “A Fatal Fortune,” to All the Year Round now under the management of Charles Dickens junior.

  He was also concerned to “work” his copyrights. He had been about to sign an agreement with George Bentley to reprint all of his old novels in a cheaper edition; he had told Bentley that he had been obliged to make some large payments “and there are more ‘outgoings’ looming on the horizon,” no doubt in the shape of an infant. He was about to sign an arrangement when a relatively inexperienced publisher, Andrew Chatto, stepped forward with a better offer. He agreed to pay Collins the sum of £2,000 for the right to publish all of Collins’s earlier fictions; he was to be given a seven-year licence, while Collins himself retained the copyrights. It was an advantageous offer and, in time, Collins’s novels were issued in two-shilling editions; it was a move towards that larger public of which he had written. All of Collins’s subsequent novels were published under the imprint of Chatto & Windus.

  Collins’s third child, and first son, was born on Christmas Day 1874. Collins informed his solicitor that he had been presented with “a Christmas box in the shape of a big boy.” He named him William Charles Dawson in recognition of his father and brother; in accordance with a new law the birth was registered by Martha Rudd two months later. The child soon became known as “little Charley.” Another Christmas memento may be mentioned here. Collins had Christmas greetings printed on small cards, with some of his novels named beside his photograph. “Wishing you a Happy Christmas. Hide and Seek ’neath the mistletoe, played for a kiss—I hope you may try it tonight—I mention No Name, A Dead Secret is this, with some beautiful Woman in White.”

  The Law and the Lady was published by Chatto in February 1875, at first in the familiar three-volume format so vital to the interests of the circulating libraries. It was in essence a murder mystery without a murder, revolving around the Scottish verdict of “not proven.” Valeria Macallan has married a man who is immensely secretive about his past; it transpires that Eustace has married her under a false name, not wanting her to know that he had been tried for the murder of his first wife only to be acquitted on the verdict of “not proven” rather than “not guilty.” Valeria sets out to prove his innocence, thus joining the company of Collins’s female detectives.

  It is all very ingenious and very entertaining, with the complex marital relations of Eustace Macallan acting as a lightning rod for Collins’s own peculiar situation. “Don’t ask!” he tells his bride. “Don’t look!” He is much older than she, has a beard streaked with grey and walks with a limp. It is by no means a self-portrait, but it bears a passing resemblance to the novelist himself. A legless invalid also enters the plot as a nightmare image of Collins; Miserrimus Dexter is cared for by a simple-minded cousin to whom he relates long stories. “Her great delight is to hear me tell a story. I puzzle her to the verge of distraction; and the more I confuse her the better she likes the story.” He has a powerful imaginative life, but it is one marked by cruelty and lust. Again it is not a self-portrait but the novel allows the author to fantasise about certain tendencies within his own character. On one occasion Dexter dresses in pink silk; Collins wore pink shirts.

  It was not to the taste of the critics who suggested that it was, in the words of the Athenaeum, “an outrageous burlesque upon himself.” There are indeed elements of the circus about it as Collins parades some of his pet obsessions. The reviewer of the Leader remarked that to him “life is in the most literal sense a riddle and an enigma. The causes of human actions must be sought in dark corners and in crooked ways…He dwells in a world of strange and lurid imaginings, which is entirely his own.” But if The Law and the Lady is touched by phantasmagorical desires, it is also a well-disciplined and well-executed mystery story with an ending that will come as a surprise to most readers. In sum it represents all the driven, wilful, energetic aspects of mid-Victorian civilisation. The public was also kinder than the critics; Collins held on to his readership, and there is no sign of any decline in sales.

  He had gone on his travels once again, as was his custom at the end of any long project. He visited Paris for a week and then, to preserve his failing health, had made his way to the eastern coast. He was having trouble with his kidneys. In October he determined to try Brussels and Antwerp, in the company of Caroline Graves, in order to prepare himself for the ordeal of the coming winter. No sooner had he returned, however, than he set to work on another novel “with a touch of the supernatural in it.” The Two Destinies has the unfortunate distinction of being the least successful of Collins’s novels, although on this occasion a more than usually painful period of “gout in the eye” may act as an excuse for some of its weaknesses; he was forced to dictate passages to Carrie Graves, and the monthly parts were shorter than usual. He was in any case living like a hermit, going nowhere and seeing nobody.

  The Two Destinies narrates the strange fate of two lovers who are separated early in their romantic lives; they meet again unexpectedly but, for reasons that remain partially obscure, they are unable to recognise each other. There follows a number of supernatural visitations where the two lovers call to one another, in dream or apparition; after a number of melodramatic adventures, they are finally reunited when she recognises a childhood memento which he has carried with him everywhere.
It is the merest hokum made up of sentiment and sentimentality; yet it is also evidence of how much his touch might falter under the burden of severe ill health.

  Curiously for Collins, also, it incorporates all the most obvious Victorian conventions in which the merest allusion to sexuality would break the spell of over-anxious and over-refined men and women. In an age when some women were traded on the streets it was all the more important for a gentlewoman to be completely pure and completely untouched. If a man put his hand upon her arm, she called out for help. This is the atmosphere of The Two Destinies. When Collins’s critical faculties are in abeyance he falls back upon Victorian sentiment; when his intellect is clouded, he reverts to the standards of conventional morality.

  Yet his dramatic activities showed no sign of abating. An adaptation of Armadale, Miss Gwilt, opened in Liverpool before “going in” to the capital. “We had great luck,” Collins said of the performance at the Alexandra Theatre in Liverpool. “The audience received the piece with open arms.” He was not so sanguine about the London production at the Globe Theatre in Newcastle Street. The scenery was not completed and the management of the theatre was in the hands of “incapable idiots and blackguards”; when he visited the theatre one evening, at eight o’clock, the carpenters were all drunk. Such was his dismay that he was afraid to ask any of his acquaintance to the first night. He predicted a disaster but, to his delight, the public were entertained and amused by the production.