Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation Read online

  For the time being Wilkie was content to put the finishing touches to a Christmas story. Since this was the sort of thing Dickens specialised in, Wilkie was positioning himself directly in the steps of the master. Mr Wray’s Cash-Box was a neatly turned, if seasonally sentimental, tale about the theft of a prized statue of Shakespeare from a retired actor. In the preface he stressed that it was based on a true story, a conceit he often repeated in his later fiction. He sold the piece to Bentley as a stand-alone Christmas special, hoping it would be illustrated by Charley and his Pre-Raphaelite friends. As he explained to Bentley, ‘One of these “Brothers” happens to be my brother as well.’113 In the event, only one sketch, by Millais, appeared with the story, which was published in the nick of time on 23 December. Wilkie’s confidence in Bentley faltered when an advertisement appeared in The Times referring to the artist as Willais and himself as the author of a work called Antonini.

  As a result of this effort, along with concerns about his future and Charley’s, Wilkie was suffering from nervous exhaustion. This was not exactly a breakdown, but the first of the anxiety attacks that would blight him in years to come. For rest and recuperation over Christmas he accepted an invitation to visit Joseph Stringfield, a doctor in Weston-super-Mare, to whom he had been introduced by Pigott. He even turned down further work for the Leader, telling Pigott that he would have done this with pleasure, but his own doctor forbade from using his ‘brains just yet; and I feel that the doctor is right’.114

  Stringfield had recently lost his wife, Jane, following the death of a premature son. The Bristol Mercury considered Wilkie important enough to announce from Weston-super-Mare on 27 December: ‘Wilkie Collins Esq., author of ‘Antonina’, ‘Rambles Beyond Railways’, the new Christmas work entitled ‘Mr Wray’s Cash-Box and other literature, is spending a few days with J. Stringfield Esq. at Verandah-house in this town.’

  Still in Somerset, after dinner on New Year’s Day 1852, Wilkie was taken to visit a foreign Count who lived nearby with his British wife. The object of the evening was to test the claims of animal magnetism, the then fashionable idea that the body contained a vital fluid that allowed subjects to be put in a trance, or mesmerised (the word ‘hypnotism’ was not yet familiar). Over the previous decade the practice had been given scientific credence by the physician Dr John Elliotson, of University College, London, whose friend Dickens had investigated and written sympathetically about it. There were now serious hopes that it could be used for therapeutic purposes. In search of enlightenment, Wilkie attended several further evenings of experiments in animal magnetism and wrote them up for the Leader, where he stated that he wanted to confine himself ‘as strictly as possible to simple narrative – or, in other words, to be the reporter, rather than the judge’.

  In one of his six pieces for the newspaper he told how Mademoiselle V., a French associate of the Count’s wife, was made sleepy after contact with magnetised objects, such as a thimble and a mirror. Initially, the trials aimed to show how suggestible she had become. Some worked and others did not. On one occasion she was given a glass of water and Wilkie was asked to imagine that it contained a non-lethal dose of poison. While he was thinking of strychnine, she went into convulsions and appeared to be in agony. When she requested some milk to take away the taste, she lapped up the contents of another glass of water, which the Count had ‘magnetised’.

  At another house, a larger crowd became agitated when a ‘patient’, this time a novice at the game, began to laugh hysterically after being magnetised. When Mademoiselle V. turned her talents to clairvoyance, Wilkie was astonished when she gave him an accurate description of the person he was imagining – his brother Charley.

  In his articles for the Leader,115 Wilkie called for further investigation into mesmerism, stressing its practicality (though his main example – that it would allow life models at the Royal Academy to maintain static positions – was esoteric). G.H. Lewes, who was still involved with the paper, published a counter-blast, ‘The Fallacy of Clairvoyance’, which argued that these apparently objective happenings resulted from the suggestibility (he did not quite say gullibility) of the audience, who unwittingly provided the information for the medium’s work. (He was referring to what, in modern parlance, is called ‘cold reading’.) Wilkie objected to this insinuation and fired off a measured response. It was the start of a lifelong interest in the powers of the mind, the significance of different ways of seeing and experiencing reality, and the potential of alternative states of consciousness.

  Whether it was this new intellectual diversion, or simply the opportunity for rest, Wilkie’s short stay in Somerset seems to have worked. He returned to London in improved spirits; having hired a local upholsterer to refurbish his study,116 he was soon working hard on new projects. First, he penned further thoughts on the Leader’s future, which had been discussed with Pigott in Weston-super-Mare. Addressing the paper’s content and layout, Wilkie suggested it should print more law reports – perhaps in the hope that they might provide background material for his fiction. He was also concerned that religion had crept into the Leader’s pages in a manner he considered profane. ‘I am neither a Protestant, a Catholic – or a Dissenter,’117 he noted in an unusually clear statement of his beliefs. ‘I do not desire to discuss this or that particular creed; but I believe Jesus Christ to be the son of God; and believing that, I think it a blasphemy to use his name’ in the manner of a couple of recent pieces. This was surprising, as was the vehemence of his opinions, which led him to declare he did not want his name appended to any future contributions. However, it was a statement of his beliefs that remained fairly consistent throughout his life.

  Turning his hand back to fiction, he wrote ‘A Passage in the Life of Mr Perugino Potts’ which he sent to Bentley’s Miscellany. It was an entertaining vignette that mixed autobiography and invention to tell of a painter who, after exhausting his career possibilities in London, goes in some desperation to Rome to learn to paint in the style of Raphael and Michelangelo. After several misadventures Potts finds a protectress in the form of a stout Marchesina who, as her price, wants to marry him. When he flees in terror, she follows him to England, causing him to exclaim, ‘Marriage and murder – murder and marriage, will alternately threaten me for the remainder of my life! Art, farewell! henceforth the rest of my existence is dedicated to perpetual flight!’ With its sardonic tone and clear sense of place and time, this story shows Wilkie’s emerging authorial voice, as well as his invention of a fictional editor to provide a framing device of a sort he would often use in future.

  In his articles on animal magnetism he emphasised how he had researched the subject in scientific books. His background reading was also clear when he tackled ‘monomania’ in The Monktons of Wincot Abbey,118 a less successful tale about a family afflicted by hereditary madness and an ancient curse. Wilkie injected considerable suspense into his account of the narrator’s efforts to repatriate to England the body of his uncle, who had been killed in a duel in Italy. However, when he sent it to Household Words, his first submission there, Dickens surprisingly baulked at the lurid content, and Wilkie had to wait another three years before it was published in Fraser’s Magazine.

  Undeterred, Wilkie offered Dickens’s paper something else, ‘(The Traveller’s Story of) a Terribly Strange Bed’.119 This was scarier in content but lighter in touch, a tale in the style of Edgar Allan Poe about a man who, after breaking the bank in a sleazy Parisian gambling house, is encouraged by the management not to venture home because they are situated in a dangerous area (at the back of the Palais Royale) and his winnings could be stolen. Instead he is invited to stay in an adjoining room, where he wakes up during the night to find himself the victim of an attempted and clearly premeditated murder, as the canopy of his four poster bed bears terrifyingly down on him in a tortuous screw-like manner. This time Dickens was more enthusiastic and offered Wilkie £7 10s to publish it in Household Words.

  Away from his writing desk, Wilk
ie continued to indulge his Francophilia as he dragged his friends to French plays. He became intrigued by the realist novelist Honoré de Balzac, who died two years earlier. Around the time he was arguing with Lewes over animal magnetism, he saw, apparently twice, A Game of Speculation, the latter’s dramatisation of a Balzac comedy at the Royal Lyceum Theatre. And he helped an unidentified friend120 (possibly Charles Ward) get a translation of Balzac’s short story ‘Un Episode sous la Terreur’ published in Bentley’s Miscellany.

  As he became more prolific, Wilkie took more interest in the professional side of authorship, and this was encouraged through his involvement with the Guild of Literature and Art. In May 1852 he joined Dickens at a public meeting convened by George Eliot’s employer,121 the publisher John Chapman, to protest against restrictive practices in the book trade. This was an emotional issue for writers: the combination of growing literacy and improved printing technology was making the business increasingly competitive, and established publishers such as Longman and John Murray were lobbying hard to maintain their positions by preventing widespread discounting. Wilkie was a free marketer in this respect, his attitude informed by a keen sense of the politics and economics of his profession, and how he could best make them work on his behalf. He would be tenacious in securing the best publishing deals for himself, and would campaign for the adoption of international copyright laws.

  Meanwhile, Dickens was getting to know Wilkie’s family. The previous month he had attended Harriet Collins’s dance in Hanover Terrace for around seventy people. John Millais reported to Mrs Combe in Oxford on ‘a delightful evening’122 at which Charley ‘never got beyond a very solemn quadrille’ but showed great flair at the waltz and polka. His hostess had lost her voice as a result of a bout of influenza, but she was delighted that ‘there were many lions, amongst others the famous Dickens, who came for about half an hour and officiated as principal carver at supper.’

  When Harriet went on holiday to Southsea, she took a second-class train, which Wilkie, with the arrogance of youth, considered beneath him. ‘I am glad to hear that you could travel comfortably by second class’,123 he declared. ‘I cannot. I must either pay 1st Class fare, or defer the pleasure of going to Southsea.’ His youthful restlessness was clear from the way he gloated over thrashing Chops, the latest household cat, for daring to sip some milk off the breakfast table. But he was able to lay in a leg of lamb and some gooseberry pudding, so he could entertain his friends Henry Bullar and George Agar Thompson, son of the Irvingite John.

  During the summer, Wilkie was again asked to perform on stage with Dickens’s Guild company. Following the withdrawal of Douglas Jerrold from the cast of Not So Bad As We Seem, Wilkie took over his rather more substantial part as the upwardly mobile Shadowly Softhead, which he played eleven times in various provincial cities. As usual, when Dickens was involved, the actors lived in style. Wilkie was impressed by the company’s reception in Manchester, where it drew an audience of two thousand seven hundred and was feted by the mayor at a magnificent dinner with ‘French dishes that would make you turn pale if you looked at them’.124

  For Wilkie the highlight was the Guild’s visit to Newcastle, where he stayed with the Brandlings at their estate, Gosforth Hall. Theatrical company brought out his frisky side, for he decided that Mary, the eldest Brandling daughter, was ‘the cleverest and the most agreeable woman I think I ever met with – all the elegance and vivacity of a Frenchwoman – and all the sincerity and warmheartedness of an Englishwoman.’125

  Mary was not his only female interest in the north-east. Visiting friends there at that time was the sparkling, dark-haired Nina Chambers from Edinburgh. Her father, the writer and publisher, Robert Chambers, was a beacon of Scottish intellectual life. As well as pioneering the influential Chambers’s Encyclopaedia and the Edinburgh Journal, he wrote Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which promulgated one of the most important and popular pre-Darwinian theories of evolution.

  Nina was one of eight sisters (eleven children in all) who lived at 1 Doune Terrace, a substantial Georgian house in Edinburgh’s New Town, where the Chambers family was famous for its hospitality, particularly towards artists and writers. She met Wilkie through her sister, Janet, who had married William Wills, Dickens’s right-hand man at Household Words.

  Wilkie and Nina had already struck up a flirtatious friendship, as is clear from a poem he wrote for her earlier in the year:

  Miss Chambers has sent me a very sharp letter126

  With a gift of some toffy (I never sucked better!)

  ’Tis plain, from her note, she would have me infer

  That I should have first sent the toffy to her.

  I will only observe, on the present occasion,

  (Thinking first gifts of sweets, so much sugar’d temptation),

  That in tempting of all kinds, I still must believe

  The men act like Adam – the women like Eve:

  From mere mortal frailties I don’t stand exempted,

  So I waited, like Adam, by Eve to be tempted –

  But, more fitted than he with “The Woman” to grapple

  I return her (in Toffy) my bite of “The Apple”!

  Nina subsequently became engaged to Frederick Lehmann, a cultivated young German-born businessman who attended her parents’ regular musical evenings. However, his job at Naylor Vickers, one of Britain’s largest steel manufacturing firms, regularly took him abroad, and towards the end of August 1852, she found herself visiting friends in Newcastle when Dickens’s theatre group was in town.

  From there she described the Guild’s performance to her fiancé in Berlin:127 ‘We got home in time to dress for the performance of Dickens’s company to which I went in a sort of a dream and I remember only of it – very very hard seats without backs, a stifling atmosphere, Wilkie Collins’ really lovely face, Augustus Egg’s accommodating bows to myself when he found me out, and my uncle [Wills] (who is the secretary to the Society) suddenly breaking out in three new characters during the performance & then rushing out & saying ‘God bless you my darling Nina’.

  Nina was not the only person to remark on Wilkie’s pleasing presence on stage. An article in the New York Daily Times noted how, after Jerrold dropped out, ‘The amateurs did not lose for Wilkie Collins’128 who ‘studied the part and made it nearly the most effective in the play. His low stature, pretty features and juvenile appearance were all in his favour, no doubt, but the natural ease with which he individualized the character was inimitable.’ Dickens agreed, telling his friend John Forster, ‘You have no idea how good Tenniel, Topham and Collins have been in what they had to do.’129

  Having worked closely with Dickens on tour and started to get to know him socially, Wilkie was gratified shortly afterwards to be invited to join the Dickens family on holiday in Dover, where he gave an idea of the palliative drugs he had been using for his nervous condition when he declared that he found ‘the sea air acts on me as if it was all distilled from laudanum.’ Both he and his host had novels to complete (Basil and Bleak House respectively). Wilkie took advantage of a disciplined environment, putting in regular hours of work, interspersed with long walks and plenty of bathing in the sea, followed by unusually early nights. After two weeks of this regime, he expressed his delight at having finished his ‘hitherto interminable book’,130 declaring to Pigott, ‘Yesterday morning [15 September] I wrote those two last welcome words “The End”.’

  Basil had taken two years to reach this stage. It was his first effort at writing about the modern world at this length, and he found it a struggle. But it had been worthwhile, for he had produced an adult novel, dealing with sex, class and society. The story told of the consequences of the instant passion stirred in Basil, a wealthy young man of noble birth, after he sees Margaret Sherwin, a draper’s daughter, on an omnibus. Driven by an obsession (something Wilkie had written about in ‘The Twin Sisters’), Basil finds out where she lives, courts her and makes clear his intention to marry her. But
this all has to be done in secret because he knows his father will disinherit him if he finds out about his affair with a girl of inferior status. Mr Sherwin agrees to give Basil his daughter’s hand, but stipulates that their relationship cannot be consummated for a year, as she is only seventeen (though Basil suggests lasciviously that she could pass for a girl three years older). The night before her eighteenth birthday, with his wedding still unknown to his family, Basil goes to Margaret’s house and finds that she has gone to a party with the mysterious Robert Mannion, who has infiltrated himself into her family as Sherwin’s confidential clerk. Basil follows them to a hotel where he overhears them making love. In his fury he attacks and disfigures Mannion, causing him to lose an eye.

  It emerges that his victim is the son of a forger, once patronised by Basil’s father. When the older Mannion was tried and sentenced to be hanged, Basil’s father refused to help. After many setbacks, Robert Mannion found work with Mr Sherwin, making himself indispensable and looking on the nubile Margaret as his eventual prize. Basil’s appearance only compounded the earlier family offence and encouraged Mannion to seek revenge, using his sexual powers to seduce the woman for whom Basil was willing to give up his entire inheritance.

  In dedicating the book to Charles Ward, Wilkie stated that he had ‘founded the main event out of which this story springs on a fact within my own knowledge’. This has led to speculation about who or what he had in mind. One deduction is that he himself had experienced the coup de foudre on the omnibus. Although he was impressionable enough for such a thing, no obvious instance is known. In a letter to Edward Pigott around this time, he expressed a yearning for a ‘sweet-tempered and lovely’ girl called Alice. However, would have had to perform a change of character, for, in the novel, her alter ego Margaret is a dark-haired beauty who turns out to be shallow, manipulative and self-centred.