Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation Read online

  CONTENTS

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY ANDREW LYCETT

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  MAP OF WILKIE’S LONDON

  WILKIE COLLINS FAMILY TREE

  INTRODUCTION

  FIRST EPOCH

  1. REGENCY PRELUDE

  2. EARLY YEARS AND TRAVELS

  3. A PLAN OF INSTRUCTION

  4. GETTING INTO PRINT

  SECOND EPOCH

  5. DICKENS AND A NOVEL

  6. REDISCOVERING EUROPE

  7. LEAVING HOME

  THIRD EPOCH

  8. ENCOUNTERING CAROLINE

  9. THE UNKNOWN PUBLIC

  10. LUNACY PANIC

  11. BASKING IN SUCCESS

  12. MID-VICTORIAN SENSATION

  FOURTH EPOCH

  13. MARTHA ARRIVES

  14. DETECTION AND ALL CHANGE

  15. BECOMING A FATHER

  FIFTH EPOCH

  16. THE NEW MAGDALEN

  17. AMERICA AND AFTER

  18. TWO HOUSES, TWO FAMILIES

  SIXTH EPOCH

  19. GROWING IMMOBILITY

  20. HANGING ON

  21. LEGACY

  NOTES

  PICTURE SECTION

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  INDEX

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  COPYRIGHT

  About the Book

  1868, and bestselling author Wilkie Collins is hard at work on a new detective novel, The Moonstone. But he is weighed down by a mountain of problems – his own sickness, the death of his mother and, most pressing, the announcement by his live-in mistress that she has tired of his relationship with another woman and intends to marry someone else. His solution is to increase his industrial intake of opium, and write the book T. S. Eliot called the ‘greatest’ English detective novel.

  Of Wilkie’s domestic difficulties, not a word to the outside world: indeed, like his great friend Charles Dickens, he took pains to keep secret any detail of his ménage. There’s no doubt that this arrangement was unusual in nineteenth-century England, particularly since Wilkie’s own books focused on uncovering deeply held family secrets. He was the master of the Victorian sensation novel, fiction that left readers on the edge of their seats as mysteries and revelations abounded.

  In this colourful investigative study, Andrew Lycett draws Wilkie Collins out from the shadow of his friend and mentor, Charles Dickens. Wilkie is revealed as a brilliant, witty, friendly, contrary and sensual man, deeply committed to his work. Here he is given his rightful place at the centre of the literary, artistic and historical movements of his age.

  About the Author

  Andrew Lycett has a degree in history from Oxford University. He spent several years as a foreign correspondent, and has been a biographer since the early 1990s. His books include highly praised lives of Ian Fleming, Dylan Thomas, Rudyard Kipling and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Geographical Society. He lives in North London.

  ALSO BY ANDREW LYCETT

  Qaddafi and The Libyan Revolution (with David Blundy)

  Ian Fleming

  Rudyard Kipling

  Dylan Thomas: A New Life

  Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes

  Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation

  Andrew Lycett

  To my sisters, Caroline and Charlotte

  ‘Nothing in this world is hidden for ever.1 The gold which had laid for centuries unsuspected on the ground, reveals itself one day on the surface. Sand turns traitor, and betrays the footstep that has passed over it, water gives back to the tell-tale surface the body that has been drowned. Fire itself leaves the confession, in ashes, of the substance consumed in it. Hate breaks its prison-secrecy in the thoughts, through the doorway of the eyes; and Love finds the Judas who betrays it with a kiss. Look where we will, the inevitable law of revelation is one of the laws of nature: the lasting preservation of a secret is a miracle which the world has never yet seen.’

  No Name, first scene, Chapter 4

  INTRODUCTION

  IN THE SPRING of 1868, Wilkie Collins was living a nightmare that could have come straight out of one of his best-selling sensation novels.

  A visitor to his recently acquired five-storey house in Gloucester Place, Marylebone, would have found him propped up in bed, squinting through round spectacles as he desperately tried to dictate the latest chapter of his new book, The Moonstone, to the teenage girl he grandly called his amanuensis, but who was actually the daughter of one of his two mistresses.

  Visible above the bedclothes would have been Wilkie’s large, friendly face, framed by a bushy beard and straggly whiskers, though marred by a slight bump on the right of his forehead.2 He was an incurable fidget, so, unless it was very cold (and it often was, since he refused to have gas of any kind in the house), he would have been orchestrating his words with expansive gestures from his tiny, delicate hands,3 which, it was often observed, matched his under-sized feet – another physical quirk that marked him out from the crowd.

  When he wrote, he normally kept what he called his ‘stock-in-trade’ beside him – a japanned box containing a well-thumbed pile of papers on which he scribbled ideas for the extraordinary plots his readers so enjoyed. Nearby in the flickering candlelight stood another vital prop – a bottle of laudanum, his palliative draught of choice when he needed to alleviate his pain, which was now excruciating.

  The ostensible reason for his discomfort was gout, a long-standing affliction, which had spread from his limbs to his bloodshot grey eyes and made reading near impossible. But a host of other troubles now bore down on him and added to his malaise. His beloved mother had recently died in Kent and, to his eternal regret, he had been bedridden and unable to attend her funeral. An old friend was going through an ill-tempered divorce that promised to add to Wilkie’s financial woes and expose the secrets of the rackety lives he and some of his close friends had led. At the same time, his long-term mistress, Caroline Graves, had decided she had had enough of their curious double life, which required her to hide away in Gloucester Place and share him with another woman, Martha Rudd, who lived nearby. Caroline wanted to marry someone younger, and soon.

  These developments threatened not only to upset Wilkie’s peace of mind but to tarnish his respectable Victorian image. Despite his reputation as a literary iconoclast, he had worked hard over the years to present himself as a bachelor clubman with impeccable bookish inclinations. Like his friend Charles Dickens, he would have been distraught if any details of his intimate personal relationships had become public knowledge.

  Wilkie could do little about these concerns, at least for the time being, since he had a book to finish. As a professional who took pride in his work ethic, he had not developed a name as a sensation novelist over the past decade by missing his deadlines. Now he could only increase his intake of laudanum and focus his energies on the schedules for the monthly serialisation of his work in Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round.

  His current compromised situation was ironic, since his sensation novels were based on exposing the double standards and hypocrisy beneath the surface of Victorian society. This particular genre had emerged in recent years to satisfy a public that had tired of both the formulaic exoticism of gothic tales and the limp, aristocratic ‘silver fork’ novels that had flourished in the 1830s. As the number of outlets for stories expanded at a time when the harshness of the industrial world crowded in, readers craved more visceral excitement when they opened a book. Authors responded by adopting the approach of the Fa
t Boy in the Pickwick Papers, ‘I wants to make your flesh creep.’

  Aimed specifically to shock, sensation novels specialised in plots that exposed deep-rooted domestic or family secrets. They took their readers through the experience of uncovering illegitimacy, bigamy and matrimonial irregularity; of unearthing complex wills that authenticated some people and disinherited others; of vicariously observing apparently decent citizens engaged in criminal activity, including murder; and of delving into cases of legalistic deception and financial skulduggery.

  Part of their success came from audience participation. Sensation novels encouraged their readers to get in on the act of uncovering these secrets, and to do so in that most personal of environments, the home. Henry James referred respectfully to their unravelling of ‘those most mysterious of mysteries,4 the mysteries which are at our own doors’. A less sympathetic contemporary, Henry Mansel, commented on the excitement, or rather horror, of discovering that a recent casual acquaintance might be a monstrous Count Fosco (from Wilkie’s The Woman in White) or the woman you found so charming, a bigamous Lady Audley (the heroine of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret).

  In The Moonstone, Wilkie would take these themes and give them a modern twist in a fully-fledged detective novel, a category of fiction ideally suited to questing, enquiring, scientifically minded Victorians. T.S. Eliot would describe the book as ‘the first and greatest English detective novel’.5 Though there were in fact earlier examples, it is still one of the very best, not least for Wilkie’s deft mocking of his contemporaries’ demands for exactitude. In this respect it was also an anti-detective novel avant la lettre.

  One feature of such stories was the gap between appearances and reality – something that Wilkie highlighted in his recurring references to the injustices perpetrated against women as a result of the unthinking hypocrisy of laws and conventions, particularly relating to marriage. The irony was that in 1868 the author was himself living secretly with two women, neither of whom was his wife. His duplicity involved no great crime, but it hinted at a fascinating, wilfully muddied story about the interplay between his own complex domestic arrangements, the racy, topical books he wrote, and the cant-ridden world he inhabited. It was definitely something worth exploring. It was time to become a literary sleuth.

  FIRST EPOCH

  1

  REGENCY PRELUDE

  WILKIE COLLINS WAS a Georgian manqué in a world of earnest Victorians. He was born on 8 January 1824, at a time when Britain was beginning to cast off the frothy excesses of the Regency period and knuckle down to the ‘long’ nineteenth century. Although George IV had been on the throne for almost four years, the playful spirit of his youth survived in London’s new buildings as his capital city continued to expand in competition with Paris. In the process, John Nash’s Regent Street had pushed through the dank slums of the West End to join up with the Adam brothers’ grand Portland Place and open the way to the rural expanses of Marylebone Park, around which a number of elegant stucco terraces bearing Hanoverian names were then being built. (This would soon be called the Regent’s Park,6 while the New Road, just to its south, would become known as the Marylebone Road.)

  These developments confirmed the position of the Duke of Portland’s land as a prime piece of London real estate. For the best part of a century, successive Dukes had been building town houses in grid-like fashion across his holdings in the wider Marylebone area (west of Portland Place, north of Oxford Street and south of New Road). Wilkie was born in the centre of this urban village, at 11 New Cavendish Street, an east–west thoroughfare that incorporated part of the Portland family name.

  He remained close to these roots. Although he later enjoyed visiting France, Italy and other European countries, crossed the Atlantic, and took frequent trips to the English seaside, he always returned to the area in or just outside the bounds of Marylebone. More than most nineteenth-century writers, including Dickens, he was a London man.

  This was the part of town where his grandfather, William, had settled when he arrived from County Wicklow forty years earlier. According to family tradition, the Collinses were originally English but had emigrated to Ireland from Sussex in the wake of William III. One of their ancestors is said to have been Samuel Collins, an anatomist who travelled widely in Europe and took his medical degree in Padua, before becoming one of Charles II’s doctors and later President of the College of Physicians.

  After marrying an Edinburgh woman, William pursued a topsy-turvy career as a writer and picture dealer, working out of a house in Great Titchfield Street (another Portland family name), where the couple had two sons, William and Francis (or Frank), born in 1788 and 1790 respectively.

  The elder William was a sociable man with wide-ranging, often radical, enthusiasms. Around the time his sons were born, he still saw a literary future for himself as a writer and editor. In 1787 he put together the New Vocal Miscellany, a collection of unpublished verse, whose tone is boisterous and Hogarthian, as in ‘The Kept Miss’, a song about a courtesan called Sally, which starts:

  See the Park throng’d with coaches – the Nobles all run

  To view the dear Angel! Her ruin’s begun;

  Princes, Dukes, Lords, and Bankers are first in her train,

  In raptures they ogle – as yet but in vain . . .

  After a special admirer tires of her, she throws herself into pleasure: ‘Wherever the Ton goes she’s sure to resort.’ Soon reduced to earning her living on the streets, it is not long before ‘worn with disease’ she ‘crawls’ to the Lock Hospital for sufferers of venereal disease.

  Six years later, at the height of the French Revolution, William wrote ‘The Slave Trade’, a pamphlet poem attacking the global trafficking of humans. His brother James would take its message to heart: after becoming a priest, he joined the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and was posted to the old slaving ‘grand emporium’ Cape Coast Castle, in modern Ghana. William’s son, also called William, described this as a ‘lucrative’ appointment,7 but expressed ‘great agitation’ in a letter to a friend about the ‘considerable risk’ involved. It was a valid concern, since James died within a couple of years of taking up his post, and his son Francis, who worked as an assistant teacher of native children, suffered the same fate.

  However, William Collins Senior was not cut out to be a penitent or a missionary. In his other occupation as a rackety picture dealer, he befriended local artists, including the hard-drinking, debt-ridden George Morland, about whom he wrote some reminiscences which appeared as the second of the three volumes in his Memoirs of a Picture, published in 1805.

  In the cut-throat Georgian art market there were inevitably charlatans, who faked works and duped their customers. This book, later described by the author’s grandson Wilkie as a ‘Shandean profusion of . . . digressions and ancecdotes’,8 related the picaresque progress of a painting by the ‘immortal Guido’ (Guido Reni) as it passed through a succession of dealers and forgers. One of its underlying themes was the changing nature of the artistic profession: no longer was it necessary to have an influential patron. Morland, who specialised in rustic and moralising genre scenes, showed it was possible to make a living by selling his output directly to customers. Dealers such as William Collins Senior helped facilitate this, publishing and selling art at different stages of production, from canvases to engravings and prints.

  Morland, the old roué, clearly provided good copy because there were at least three further biographies of him in the next two years. Half a century later Wilkie Collins followed suit, using this same colourful background for an equally opportunistic novella, A Rogue’s Life. As his vocation as an author would show, he drew his own lessons from this material – creative works, whether painted or written, were commodities that required marketing and protecting from exploitation.

  One of William Collins’s sons, Frank, saw enough of a future in the family business to follow his father as a print dealer. The other, William Junior, preferred t
he more high-minded tradition of painting, and was no doubt influenced by the artists he met at the Collins family houses in Great Titchfield Street and then in nearby Great Portland Street. While still in his teens, he decided to enroll at the Royal Academy Schools, whose job of nurturing new artistic talent had been one of the two declared aims of the founders of the Academy in 1768 (the other being the holding of annual exhibitions to promote their own work).

  The Schools still emphasised the skills of copying rather than self-expression, preparing their pupils for a market that favoured neo-classical and historical works of art. Young William sat through lessons in anatomy from Sir Anthony Carlisle, a surgeon who would illustrate his talks by bringing in muscular models, including Indian jugglers. William also experienced the eclecticism of the remarkable Swiss-born professor of painting Henry Fuseli, whose love of dramatic effect prefigured the Romantic movement.

  Eschewing, as he put it, any desire to rush ‘into rivalry with Michel Angelo’, William turned his talents to landscapes and other genre pictures, though, in keeping with evolving taste, he often added significant narrative threads to his paintings;9 in other words, he made them tell a story. In this respect, he drew on his experience as the son of a dealer, investing his carefully crafted paintings with the immediacy of the great English caricatures found in his father’s print shop.

  His first real success came in 1812, the year of his father’s death, when his painting Disposal of a Favourite Lamb sold for 140 guineas. Wilkie later described this work as having ‘simple yet impressive pathos’10 (others might describe it as sentimentality). It proved popular: one small engraving went through 15,000 impressions, and so helped keep the now fatherless Collins family solvent.

  Two years later William met Harriet Geddes, the woman who would become his wife. Short, dark-haired and pleasant-featured (rather than beautiful), she hailed from a different Regency background, one familiar to readers of Jane Austen. Her family were respectable country folk, borderline gentry, usually pressed for money and constrained by social convention, but nevertheless eager to make their mark in the post-Napoleonic world. She was the eldest of six children of Captain Alexander Geddes, a retired infantry officer of Scottish origin, and another Harriet (née Easton), whose family had been prominent traders in the cathedral city of Salisbury. Born in Worcestershire towards the end of her father’s military career, the younger Harriet was brought up in Alderbury, a village six miles outside Salisbury.