Wilkie Collins Page 7

  The dedication was apt enough since the novel has a decidedly Dickensian flavour. Its heroine is a deaf mute known as Madonna, who has lost her senses of speech and hearing while performing an equestrian act at the circus. One of the central protagonists is Valentine Blythe, an artist of “slight intellectual calibre” who specialises in no particular style; he is married to a woman who is so severely disabled that she cannot rise from her bed. Madonna and Mrs. Blythe might fairly be said to represent the restricted lives of the Victorian female, even if Collins was more concerned to illustrate “the patience and the cheerfulness with which the heavier bodily afflictions are borne.” Another important character is Mat Marksman, who wears a black skullcap to disguise his scalping at the hands of Native Americans; he is looking for the lost daughter of his dead sister who by curious coincidence…The novels of Wilkie Collins are bursting with curious coincidences.

  The first part of the narrative is devoted to the hiding of secrets, in the course of which Collins attacks all those forms of Victorian convention that had afflicted him in the past, from Sabbatarianism to office work in a tea-importing business. The second part of the narrative concerns the seeking-out of a truth that can only be known when various forms of evidence become available. Such chapter headings as “The Finding of the Clue,” “The Brewing of the Storm” and “More Discoveries” suggest the tone.

  Hide and Seek is lively and entertaining, which is as much to say that it lacks the intensity and fatality of Basil; but it has more incidental colour, with a high-spirited narrative not immune from facetiousness. It is diverting enough, with that element of extreme suspense that Collins can bring to any story. That was his greatest gift. The novel is an extremely well-manufactured device, with an intricate mechanism at its centre. That is why Collins was a master of plot rather than of character.

  After his labours on the novel he spent six weeks of the summer once more in Boulogne with the Dickens family. Dickens had written to him from the Villa du Camp de Droite, saying that he would be briefly in London and inviting him to return to France with him. While in the capital he would be ready for “a career of amiable dissipation and unbounded licence”; Collins was now clearly his companion of choice. They travelled to Boulogne towards the end of July, where they engaged in more domestic pastimes such as playing rounders and flying kites with the children.

  The relative failure in the sales of Hide and Seek, and the uncertainty of writing fiction against the background of the continuing war, persuaded Collins to consider “dramatic experiments” as a way of securing future income. His relationship with Richard Bentley was also more precarious; the firm was in financial difficulties, and Richard Bentley had already asked Collins if he might like to buy back the copyrights of Antonina and Basil; Collins, himself hard-pressed, declined the offer. So he would try his hand at plays. He wrote a short story for the Christmas number of Household Words and, to complete the seasonable festivities, he acted in a pantomime with the Dickens children at Tavistock House. Dickens christened him, in recognition of his Italianate proclivities, Wilkini Collini.

  Yet his real attention was now given to a melodrama entitled The Lighthouse. He already had a plot to hand, in a short story that he had written for Household Words two years before. “Gabriel’s Marriage” concerns the estrangement between a son and father, in the son’s belief that his father is a murderer; in a twist natural to a Collins narrative, the alleged victim then appears. Collins simply moves the narrative from Brittany to England, and sets it in the Eddystone Lighthouse a century back. The short story also has premonitions of Collins’s most famous novel, The Woman in White. “The White Women! The White Women!…You’ll see them bright as lightning in the darkness, mighty as the angels in their stature, sweeping like the wind over the sea, in their long white garments…” Collins was also working on another play, in five acts, adapted from a “book”; nothing is known of this work, but it may be that he had decided to wring a play out of Basil or Hide and Seek.

  He travelled to Paris with Dickens in February 1855, but became ill soon after his arrival; they were staying in an apartment in the Hôtel Meurice, overlooking the Tuileries, where Dickens described him to his sister-in-law as “in a queer state.” He went on to say that “I go out walking all over Paris while the invalid sits by the fire or is deposited in a café.” Yet they still dined in a different restaurant, and went to the theatre, every night.

  The nature of the illness is not known, and in his letters to his mother Collins neglects to mention it. There may have been a reason for his reticence, however. On their return to England, Collins not yet fully recovered, Dickens wrote that “I hope you will soon begin to see land beyond the Hunterian Ocean.” John Hunter, an English surgeon, had written A Treatise on the Venereal Disease; the “ocean” may be a light-hearted reference to the discharge of urethritis or gonorrhoea. Collins was still confined to the house in the middle of March and, in a letter to Ned Ward, he described the illness as “a long story which I will not bother you with now.” He could manage at the most a half an hour’s walk. He was not completely recovered until the middle of April. It is possible, therefore, that he was afflicted by a venereal infection rather than conventional gout or neuralgia; it is well known that certain infections of the genitals can be followed by arthritic symptoms that may last for several months and can flare up repeatedly over many years. Inflammation of the eyes is also common in such cases, if the finger strays from penis to eye. One of the causes of Collins’s ill health, therefore, might be an early bout of urethritis.

  He worked on The Lighthouse through the spring, and in May showed the manuscript to Dickens. The older novelist became so deeply interested in what he called “a regular old-style melodrama” that he decided to take on the lead role of Aaron Gurnock, a lighthouse keeper who is filled with remorse for his supposed part in a murder; he suffers from what one member of the audience called “a horrible sense of blood-guiltiness.” Dickens built a stage for its performance in the children’s schoolroom at Tavistock House with space for an audience of approximately twenty-five. Rehearsals began within a fortnight of his first reading; they were held at seven each evening, and Dickens’s oldest son recalled how carefully his father arranged all the scenic effects. A sheet of iron was used for the rattle of the thunder, and the rolling of cannon balls for the sound of the sea striking the lighthouse itself. Clarkson Stanfield, well known for his sea views, painted the scenery. There was even an orchestra. It ran for four nights from 16 June 1855, with a cast including Augustus Egg and Collins himself.

  It was a triumph; at least it reduced some of the spectators to tears, which was the next best thing. Dickens remarked that it was “the chief topic of conversation” at a dinner party given by Lord John Russell. Collins had not achieved the commercial success he had once hoped for but, two years later, The Lighthouse was staged at the Olympic on Wych Street by the Strand. It thus became Collins’s first professional production, and his career in the theatre formally began.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Secret Life

  In the absence of a great “hit,” either fictional or dramatic, Collins was relying for his income on the periodical press. He was writing reviews for the Leader and short stories for Household Words; in the latter capacity he had begun collaborations with Dickens himself.

  In the summer of 1855, after his participation in The Lighthouse, he joined the Dickens family at Folkestone. Folkestone was considered to be quieter than Broadstairs, previously favoured by the family as a holiday destination. Collins was not particularly impressed by the summer visitors, however, and concluded that the majority of the female contingent were unattractive women in large and ugly hats. Dickens still took his prodigious walks and had discovered a passion for “climbing inaccessible places.” It is not clear whether Collins himself was as energetic and as nimble as his fellow novelist.

  He took with him a manuscript that his mother had written, concerning her early life before her ma
rriage, in the hope that he might be able to batter it into a shape suitable for publication. He did not prove successful but he may have used one of her motifs—a modest painter supported by a resourceful wife—to introduce a series of short stories, all but one taken from Household Words. By reprinting the stories in volume form, in a collection of his own work entitled After Dark, he earned a double financial consideration.

  In the early autumn of the year he allowed himself another holiday in the company of Edward Pigott; Pigott was a keen and able sailor and invited Collins to join him on a yacht he had rented at Bristol. They hired three brothers from the docks there to be their crew, and during the month of September they sailed along the Cornish coast and visited the Scilly Isles. He was an excellent sailor, never once succumbing to seasickness, and this mode of transport became his fashion. The sea was always his “old old friend.” It was handy, for a lazy man, to be carried from place to place in comfort. He was not troubled by importunate and boring visitors; he was not pestered by the post. Collins suggested that some of the provisions should be purchased at Fortnum & Mason’s, thus ensuring the quality of what in other circumstances might be called rations. The preserved meat paste, in particular, was known to be excellent.

  Always ready to use material close at hand, he reworked the sailing expedition and turned it into his first non-fiction contribution to Household Words; “The Cruise of the Tomtit” is a celebration of life on board a small yacht. “We are a happy, dawdling, undisciplined, slovenly lot. We have no principles, no respectability, no stake in the country, no knowledge of Mrs. Grundy.” “Mrs. Grundy” was the nickname given at the time to the more pious or prudish sensibilities of the Victorian public. It is clear that Collins enjoyed taking a holiday from nineteenth-century conventions.

  It may have been in this period, in fact, that he became acquainted with Caroline Graves. The circumstances of their first meeting are shrouded in doubt. One version comes from the son of John Millais. In his account the two Collins brothers and his father were walking back from Hanover Terrace to the house of Millais’s parents in Gower Street when “they were suddenly arrested by a piercing scream coming from the garden of a villa close at hand.” Suddenly the iron gate to the garden was thrown open “and from it came the figure of a young and beautiful woman dressed in flowing white robes”; she hesitated in front of the three young men, with a look of supplication and terror, and then fled into the shadows.

  “I must see who she is and what is the matter,” Wilkie Collins said before hurrying after her. He did not return and, on the following day, seemed strangely reluctant to talk about the experience. He did tell them, however, that she had told him her history. She was a young lady “of good birth and position” who had been kept captive by an unnamed man in a villa by Regent’s Park, where he had mesmerised her and threatened her. In desperation she had finally managed to escape him. The year is unknown. It might have been as early as 1854.

  This sounds like a plot of a Collins novel and it is, indeed, hard to take seriously. Millais’s memoir of his father was published when all of the participants in the intriguing scene were dead. It is of course possible that Collins himself made up the story as a way of evading the facts concerning Caroline Graves.

  She had not been imprisoned in a villa off Regent’s Park, nor had she been mesmerised. She was a widow with a young daughter who kept a “marine store,” or shop of assorted small goods, under her original name of Elizabeth or “Lizzie” Graves. The shop itself was in Charlton Street, Fitzroy Square, and was indeed on the route that took Millais and the Collins brothers from Hanover Terrace to Gower Street. It is possible, to put it no higher, that she had indeed run out in distress for reasons unknown. Nevertheless she remained in her shop for the next two years.

  At a subsequent date she claimed that her late husband, George Robert Graves, was “of independent means.” In fact he was a shorthand writer, or solicitor’s clerk. She described her father as “a gentleman” by the name of Courtenay. He was in reality John Compton, a carpenter from a village near Cheltenham. She also reduced her age, in official documents, by several years. She was in other words liable to take liberties with the truth and to exaggerate her standing in the world. Nevertheless she retained the affection of Wilkie Collins and, except for one brief interval, remained with him for the rest of his life. They now lie buried within the same grave. She may also have been a model for the spirited and intelligent women of his mature fiction.

  He seems to have been staying with her in late January and February 1856; in this period he declined Dickens’s increasingly urgent invitations to Paris, where the Dickens family and assorted guests were staying. He must have hinted at the truth because in a letter of 10 February Dickens replied that “I told them at home that you had a touch of ‘your old complaint’ and had turned back to consult your Doctor”; he said this in order to avoid any “contretemps with your mother on the one hand and my people on the other.” Dickens often referred to Caroline Graves, in later correspondence, as “the Doctor.”

  He had told Collins, on inviting him to Paris, that “it strikes me that a good deal might be done for Household Words on that side of the water.” He had decided that he and Collins should explore the more colourful and sensational life of Paris in a series of articles; he had, for example, already been looking at the possibilities of setting up a guillotine. Collins needed the money, of course, and so set off across the Channel at the end of February. Before he left England, however, he witnessed the publication of his first collection of short stories. It had been taken on by Smith, Elder, in a two-volume edition; George Smith had previously declined to publish Antonina, but now took the opportunity of snapping up the rising young author. Richard Bentley, and his son George Bentley, would not publish him again for another eighteen years.

  After Dark included what may be considered to be the first English detective story, “A Stolen Letter,” a reworking of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” and also a Poe-like piece of Gothic nonsense entitled “The Yellow Mask.” The affinity between Collins and Poe has often been observed; both are interested in the possibilities of Gothic fiction, and both have a taste for the macabre and the sensational. They also both dwell on the problems of false or mistaken identity. They were artists of the improbable, by which they maintain the utmost verisimilitude in order to encompass the wildest impossibilities. Like Poe, also, Collins was one of the most calculating of writers and revised continually; unlike Poe, however, he does not manage to touch upon the most universal or deeply rooted fears. There was even a resemblance in physiognomy; Poe had a very high forehead, with a great development of the temple.

  One story published at the end of 1855 was too late for inclusion in After Dark; “The Ostler,” later retitled as “The Dream Woman,” is a vividly imagined account of a murderous wife, and thus may be said to represent all of Collins’s misgivings about the marital state. It was better to keep a mistress, perhaps, than to marry.

  When Collins arrived in Paris he found the Dickens family ensconced in an apartment above a carriage factory on the Champs-Elysées. He was lodged in separate accommodation in the grounds, in a pavilion that “resembles in size, brightness and insubstantiality a private dwelling house in a Pantomime.”

  He became ill in Paris once more with “rheumatic pains and aguish shivering,” and was confined to his little bed. From this vantage, surrounded by pills and potions, he could observe the porter’s lodge and the animated life of the great street outside the gates. “If my pavilion had been built on purpose for me to fall sick in with the least possible amount of personal discomfort, it could not have been better contrived.” He watched the quick step and liveliness of the porter’s wife; he noticed a nursemaid “with a hopeless consumptive languor in her movement”; he observed “a sober brown omnibus, belonging to a sanitary asylum” and he reflected upon the possible ailments afflicting its passengers. Sickness was much on his mind.

  Yet he may have been cheere
d by the good reviews that After Dark had garnered. The critic on the Atlas commented that “very few works of fiction that have been sent to us in a long while are half so good” while the Leader declared that “no man tells a better story.” This indeed was his charm; he was born to be a teller of stories. A more substantial account of his work came from Paris itself. At the end of the previous year the French critic Emile Forgues, editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes, had written a long and penetrating review of Collins’s writing career. He praised his liberal opinions and his hostility to the hypocrisy, prejudice and venality that seemed native to the English; it was obvious that Collins despised “cant” and “false Puritanism.” “I read that article,” Collins wrote at a later date, “at the time of its appearance with sincere pleasure and sincere gratitude, and I have honestly done my best to profit from it ever since.”

  Illness did not prevent him from working, however, and he finished a short novel on the career of a charming charlatan. A Rogue’s Life was written in a gay and artificially bright style that seemed to appeal to the readers of Household Words, where it was eventually published. It is the story of Frank Softly, an artist turned forger and then coiner; the man cannot be serious for more than one moment at a time, and Collins conveys all of his vivacious cheerfulness in a narrative that gallops from one adventure to the next. It was another attack by Collins on Victorian respectability. Dickens himself was sure of its worth and told his partner on the periodical, W. H. Wills, to offer Collins £50 for the rights.