Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation Read online

  As she chronicled in an unpublished memoir,11 written ostensibly as fiction but following closely the course of her early life, Harriet Geddes looked back on her upbringing in Wiltshire with a mixture of affection and frustration. Her easy-going father rented a cottage and smallholding from the Earl of Radnor, owner of nearby Longford Castle. Owing to his army background, he was socially acceptable enough to mix with the local elite, both in country drawing rooms and within ‘the Close’ (the secluded world of high-minded clerics associated with the Cathedral). He survived on a tiny inheritance, but was always looking forward to gaining a substantial capital sum from a lawsuit in Edinburgh. When the case finally reached court, he received considerably less than he had hoped, and this dwindled to nothing after he entrusted the proceeds to a couple of dubious stockbrokers. His financial difficulties were exacerbated since five of his six children were girls, who needed furnishing with attractive dowries.

  Harriet settled into a joyless round of provincial balls at a time when eligible army officers were notably absent on campaigns abroad. Always keen on the theatre (her favourite play was Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer), she toyed with becoming an actress and was offered a position at the Theatre Royal in fashionable Bath. But her mother was opposed to her taking a job that was at the time equated with loose living and even prostitution, so Harriet reluctantly agreed to receive training from a family friend with a view to becoming a governess. This friend converted her to Evangelicalism, the popular strain of Protestantism that combined Biblical fundamentalism with aspirations to social improvement.

  Eventually Harriet found a teaching job in London, where her younger sister Margaret, who had also been forced to earn a living, was already enjoying considerable success as a painter. Margaret had shown such talent from an early age that the Earl of Radnor had allowed her to copy pictures from his excellent art collection and introduced her to sitters. After deciding to pursue her studies in the capital, Margaret was initially offered help by one of her father’s less scrupulous stockbrokers, who promised to present her to the leading portrait painter, Sir Thomas Lawrence. When that arrangement fell through, the generous Earl again stepped in with an offer to finance a further year in London for her to test the market and find her professional feet.

  Margaret duly prospered, exhibiting at both the Royal Academy and the Royal Institution. In the bitterly cold winter of 1814, she was visited in her lodgings in Mortimer Street (at the heart of the Portland estate) by Harriet, who was about to take up employment at a small nearby school run by a Frenchwoman. Margaret introduced her sister to a circle of young painters, including William Collins, who was also starting to make his way in the art world.

  In her memoir, Harriet tells how she had heard so much about Collins from Margaret that she was rather disappointed by the pale figure with ‘very refined and regular’ features when she eventually met him at a ball. Nonetheless, there must have been a powerful mutual attraction because he subsequently invited her to meet his mother and brother, to whom he was close. He also asked her to accompany him to the hay fields of Hendon, a popular day’s outing from London. However, William was almost as penniless as Harriet. His father had died encumbered with debts, so William and his family were forced to rent out half their house (thus saving sixty guineas a year) and sell practically everything they owned: at one stage a friend found them eating off a box in place of a table.

  William only survived because of the generosity of his first patron, Sir Thomas Freeman-Heathcote. Still responsible for his recently widowed mother, he did not feel financially secure enough to offer Harriet his hand in marriage. When his son Wilkie touched on this matter in his first book, a biography of his father (written with a sense of filial obligation in 1848, when he was twenty-four), he hinted at his own aversion to the social conventions of marriage when he commented that William ‘honourably shrunk from the responsibility of fettering a young girl with the anxieties and disappointments of that most weary of social ordeals, “a long engagement”’.12

  Harriet had little option but to return home to the country and make the most of any positions she might obtain as a governess, while William, having pledged ‘to abstain from any compliance with desires calculated to weaken my faculties’,13 set about expanding his professional contacts and his range of subject matter. After being made an Associate of the Royal Academy in late 1814, he teamed up the following year with James Stark, another of the artists whom Harriet had met through her sister in London, for a trip to the Norfolk coast, close to Stark’s home in Norwich. As a result, British seascapes became part of William’s repertoire (one of them being snapped up by the Prince of Wales for 150 guineas three years later).

  The Collins family finances now began to improve and they were able to move into a larger house, 2a New Cavendish Street. In 1817, William visited Paris, where he hoped to hone his skills by studying the masterpieces in the Louvre. He was accompanied by Washington Allston and Charles Leslie, two like-minded American artists, whom he had welcomed into his family. The Harvard-educated Allston, sometimes known as the American Titian, was a more overtly Romantic painter. He was also a deep thinker who liked to engage in philosophical debate with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom he had befriended in Rome a decade earlier. After returning to Boston in 1818, Allston wrote regularly to William, praising his talents and telling him how on one occasion he had been dreaming of London and of sitting ‘opposite to each other by the fireside, with your good Mother & Frank and Leslie between us’.14

  By then, William’s output was becoming sought after. He had several aristocratic clients, including Lord Liverpool and the Duke of Newcastle, whose country houses he would visit for lengthy periods of artistic endeavour. When not working on coastal or rural genre subjects, he busied himself with money-spinning portraits – to the dismay of some fellow painters, such as Benjamin Haydon, who felt that true art was to be found in grand historical subjects rather than mundane likenesses of individuals. Despite Allston’s influence, William’s sensitive, painstaking style remained conservative and Academic; he was aware of, but by no means eager to emulate, the searing Romanticism of contemporaries such as J.M.W. Turner.

  He was supported in this approach by Sir George Beaumont, a dilettante and collector who preferred no-nonsense naturalists such as Collins over the more innovative Turner, Constable and Blake. In 1818, William accepted Beaumont’s invitation to experience the beauty of Cumberland, where he met William Wordsworth and his circle of friends, including Robert Southey. William enjoyed tramping over the Lakeland hills with Wordsworth, hearing the ‘poetical associations connected with the scenes’.16 However, he found himself at the centre of a literary dispute when he painted Coleridge’s fifteen-year-old daughter Sara as ‘The Highland Girl’ of Wordsworth’s poem. At that time Wordsworth had fallen out with Coleridge and did not think Sara a suitable model. But Coleridge was delighted: owing to his estrangement from his wife and from Wordsworth, he had not seen his daughter for six years, so when his friend Washington Allston’s pupil Charles Leslie brought the canvas to him in Highgate, he was not even certain of the identity of ‘the most beautiful Fancy-figure I ever saw’.15

  When Coleridge discovered who it was, he sent William a letter of thanks for the ‘exquisite picture [which] . . . has quite haunted my eye ever since’, and which he kept above his desk for the rest of his life. He also enclosed a couple of tickets to one of his forthcoming lectures. It was the start of a warm and productive period of friendship between the philosopher-poet and the artist. The portrait was highly praised when exhibited at the Royal Academy in London, helping William gain election as a full Academician two years later.17

  For a traditionalist such as William this was recognition indeed. In May 1821, Allston wrote encouragingly to him from the United States, ‘Sommerset [sic] House [the headquarters of the Royal Academy] I suppose is now in its glory, and you shining away there amongst the stars of the first magnitude: Turner, like the Great Bear, turn
ing the lesser lights around him into utter darkness – and [David] Wilkie, like a Chaldean Magician, conjuring sentiment out of pots and kettles . . . & Leslie winning the hearts of the ladies by his spells of grace and beauty.’18

  The Academy may have been in its glory, but it was also the battleground of artistic cliques, with some painters, such as Haydon and Constable, feeling a real sense of grievance about the privilege and patronage associated with the place. In this tainted atmosphere William found a soulmate in David Wilkie, a contemporary at the Royal Academy Schools, who mixed psychologically astute portraiture with historical naturalism. Despite Wilkie’s diffident manner, which did not always endear him to others, the two men became friends.

  At short notice they travelled together to Edinburgh in August 1822 to record George IV’s visit to Scotland – the first ever by a reigning British monarch. Determined that his progress through his northern kingdom should be marked with suitable pageantry, the King, who was known for his love of ostentation, took advice from Sir Walter Scott, who suggested that he should wear full Scottish regalia, including a kilt, which for many years in the previous century had been banned as a symbol of Jacobitism. As a strong monarchist with a docile dog called ‘Prinny’ (the King’s nickname), William Collins should have been ideally suited to paint an evocative version of this great event. But he failed to produce the work of historical art he had wanted, and his propagandist project never proceeded beyond a few sketches.

  One reason was that William’s mind was elsewhere. Over the years he had seen Harriet Geddes a few more times when she visited her sister Margaret. The latter’s career continued to flourish, even after her marriage in 1817 to William Hookham Carpenter, the son of a prosperous Old Bond Street bookseller, print publisher and art dealer, and the birth of four (eventually eight) children.

  However, it was not until January 1822 that William and Harriet’s romance was rekindled, as a result of a chance meeting in Piccadilly and later a party where she taught him to dance the quadrille. After he invited her to the theatre to see a show by the ‘personator’ (impressionist) Charles Mathews, said to be the inspiration for Dickens’s Alfred Jingle in The Pickwick Papers, she became separated from her chaperone – her brother-in-law William Carpenter – and, as she recalled, ‘I soon found my hand in his, and when I gently tried to withdraw it, a whisper asked me to let him retain it. From that time I knew nothing of Mathews. In vain he sang, danced, changed into seven people at once etc. etc. I was as one blind and deaf to all but one . . .’

  With marriage now on the agenda, Harriet felt compelled to tell William that her prospects, as a governess, were rather different from her successful artist sister’s. He did not mind this, but made clear that he too was constrained by domestic problems: his mother, who was still dependent on him, was concerned that her high-flying son should marry such a lowly and inconsequential figure. Harriet brushed any objections aside, declaring she would be happy to live with the Collins family in their house in New Cavendish Street. A tentative date for the wedding was set in August. But when William received notice that he was required in Scotland for the royal visit, they agreed to postpone their nuptials.

  Once the King’s visit was over, William contacted Harriet, saying he had made arrangements for her to travel to Leith on the steamer James Watt. He pointed out that marriage in Scotland was much easier than in England.

  Harriet duly followed William’s instructions, which led her, after a two-night passage on the North Sea, to the Edinburgh house of his friends, the sculptor Samuel Joseph and his wife. On 16 September 1822 they were married in the English Episcopal Church, a ceremony attended only by the Josephs and one other friend of Harriet’s. The minister who officiated was Dr Archibald Allison, a beacon of the Scottish Enlightenment and a celebrated essayist, who refused to accept a fee because William had the same name as the eighteenth-century poet.

  After a short honeymoon on an island in the Firth of Forth, the newly-weds were back in London before the month was out. It was all something of a surprise to their friends. Even though David Wilkie had been in Edinburgh with William a few weeks earlier, he had known nothing of the impending marriage. He commented to his sister that the couple had been ‘sighing for years, till they could sigh no longer . . . She seems a nice woman, not particularly handsome, but accomplished and intelligent, and I dare say much attracted to him.’19 She needed to be, because Harriet and her new husband were about to start married life in New Cavendish Street, in the company of old Mrs Collins and her younger son Frank.

  2

  EARLY YEARS AND TRAVELS

  WILKIE COLLINS’S BIRTH in Marylebone on Thursday 8 January 1824 coincided with an event thirty miles away. The previous day, the assizes in Hertford reached a verdict in the trial of John Thurtell, who was accused of the notorious Radlett murder, and Britain’s newspapers were determined to record every last gory detail. Little more than two months earlier, an investigation by the Bow Street Runners had led to the arrest of Thurtell, a shady promoter of illegal prizefighting, who was charged with the gruesome killing of a London solicitor in a lane in Radlett, Hertfordshire. Thurtell’s trial for this murder over a gambling debt started on 6 January. By the end of the following day it was all over; in sentencing Thurtell to be hanged, the judge declared that he was satisfied with the accused man’s guilt ‘as if he had seen him commit the crime with his mortal eyes’.

  On 8 January, newspapers overflowed with news of the verdict. The Morning Chronicle devoted three of its four pages to the trial, and The Times three of its eight pages, plus an editorial. Other print media eagerly followed suit; indeed, in many respects they led the way. Since labourers and servant girls could not afford newspapers, whose prices were kept artificially high by swingeing stamp duties, they devoured a range of cheaper, rougher chapbooks, pamphlets and broadsheets. Operating out of the Seven Dials slums in London’s Covent Garden and selling through hawkers across the realm, James Catnach, one of the most successful printers of such material, is reported to have sold a quarter of a million copies of a pamphlet relating to the Radlett murder in the weeks before the trial, and a further half million of a sequel in the months following the verdict. Crime stories, particularly murder, attracted readers of all classes, and the more lurid the details, the better.

  Thurtell was executed on 9 January, but his name lingered on in people’s memories as the personification of evil. After his body was sent to St Bartholomew’s Hospital for dissection, the shape of his head was argued over by practitioners of phrenology, who were keen to demonstrate physical evidence of his debased nature. He became a prize exhibit in the Chamber of Horrors when Madame Tussaud’s wax museum opened in Baker Street the following decade. When the interest in him refused to die, Thackeray described Thurtell as ‘the best friend the penny-a-line men had for many a day’.

  Serious writers were just as fascinated with this killer. Walter Scott visited the site of the Radlett murder. Edward Bulwer-Lytton conjured up20 a version of Thurtell when he needed an assassin in his novel Pelham. And when Wilkie Collins and his friend21 Charles Dickens wrote an account of their visit to the races in Doncaster in 1857, they called on Thurtell and another murderer, William Palmer, the so-called Rugeley poisoner, who had been executed the previous year, for suitable comparisons for the malevolent-looking bookmakers they saw there.

  By then, murder, and crime in general, had become as much a part of the fabric of nineteenth-century existence as fog, omnibuses and seaside holidays. Summoning an unwelcome frisson became an art form and an antidote to the monotony of daily life. And when a new genre of writing, sensation literature, was developed to reflect this demand for edgy material, Wilkie Collins would be found in its vanguard.

  Since there was no bureaucracy to register births until 1837 (and no statutory requirement before 1875), Wilkie Collins’s arrival in the world in early January 1824 went without official record. It was a home delivery in New Cavendish Street and appears to have been a difficult
accouchement since the right side of his forehead had a pronounced bump, which might have been caused by the midwife or obstetrician manipulating the forceps.

  At his baptism six weeks later at the local St Marylebone church, the infant was marked down in the parish register as William Wilkie Collins, reflecting the family’s traditional practice of calling its eldest males William, seemingly in tribute to the Dutch-born Protestant monarch who had quelled the Jacobite rebellion in Ireland. He was given his middle name after his father’s great friend, the Scots artist David Wilkie, who was his godfather. Wilkie was the name by which he was later known, but for the first two decades of his life he was known as Willie or Willy.

  Built in neo-classical style, with an elegant steeple, the church was an imposing symbol of the neighbourhood’s growing significance. Dedicated to St Mary the Virgin, it stood on the New Road looking out over Regent’s Park. Nearby was the ancient Tyburn stream, which wound down from Hampstead to the River Thames (thus the conjoined name Mary-le-bourne or burn, later Marylebone). Although there had been a place of worship there for centuries, this latest building dated only from 1817, when it had been refashioned and greatly expanded by the architect Thomas Hardwick to cater for new parishioners from the Portland estate and other nearby areas stretching to St John’s Wood.