Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation Read online

  Indeed, one consequence of (perhaps even a contributory reason for) William’s recent move to Avenue Road was that he was closer to Christ Church, Albany Street, a new church on the eastern side of Regent’s Park, which the first incumbent, his clerical friend Dodsworth, was developing into a centre for the Oxford Movement in London. The building itself was one of the first tangible results of Bishop Blomfield’s great church construction programme in the capital, undertaken partly for demographic reasons – to cater for growing numbers – and partly as an Anglican propagandist exercise – to counter the pincer movement influences of dissent and Roman Catholicism. As a devout member of the congregation, William Collins recommended for the altar a copy of Raphael’s Transfiguration (originally from the Vatican) which had been painted by Thomas Brigstocke, one of the artists who had helped him in Rome. William further demonstrated his closeness to Dodsworth by making him an executor of his will – a choice which failed to impress his son. When Dodsworth died in 1855, Wilkie sent his mother The Times obituary, enquiring if this referred to ‘poor old pompous Doddy’ – a comment which suggested that she was complicit and thought much the same.

  A shared enthusiasm for the reactionary precepts of Tractarianism was an important reason for William Collins to entrust his elder son to Henry Cole. Another was the Academy’s reputation in thinking conservative circles. The name of Edmund Southey on the list of pupils in the 1841 census suggests this. He was the nephew of the diehard anti-Catholic Poet Laureate, and son of Dr Henry Herbert Southey, a metropolitan lunacy commissioner who lived in Harley Street in the centre of Marylebone and who had studied with William Collins’s friend, the late royal physician, Sir William Knighton.

  To reach his new boarding school, Wilkie would have crossed Regent’s Park and taken two horse-drawn omnibuses, a journey of some eight miles. A short walk then brought him to 39 Highbury Place, a large double-fronted Georgian house with a fine view across the open spaces of Highbury Fields.

  Given Cole’s outspoken views, Wilkie was surprisingly reticent about him and the two and a half years he spent under his tutelage. He left no obvious pen portrait of Cole, though he did refer in one of his letters home to his head’s wife, Frances, with a mixture of affection and condescension: ‘There has been nothing new here except this: the beautiful and amiable wife of the governor of this fortress told me with her own lips that I can tell a lie! beautifully. She is a bit inclined, poor dear to anger.’51

  Wilkie did indeed regard his school as a prison, where he was cut off from the outside world and from the kind of gossip and excitement he had come to enjoy over the past two years abroad. He once complained, ‘In this cursed place one cannot get any news.’ Not that he provided much communication in the other direction: he seems to have been so cowed by the school’s dismal atmosphere that he clammed up. His eight surviving letters to his parents were dutiful in tone, as if he were trying to impress on them that he was making the most of an establishment that cost them £90 a year53 (the equivalent of £9,300 in today’s money). Two of these letters were devoted to uninspired regurgitations of books in Virgil’s Aeneid. In another, he rehashed in careful copperplate hand some arguments from Homer on the uselessness of democracy. But then rote learning was one of Cole’s much vaunted pedagogic methods: he made his pupils recite back everything they had learned each day, arguing that this helped them to retain what they had studied.

  Twice, in show-off manner,52 Wilkie lapsed into Italian in his letters home, playfully purporting to write from ‘Piazza di Highbury’. Otherwise he gave little evidence of enjoying himself, though he did like skating and playing with model boats, as well as a ‘delectably luscious’ cake his mother had sent him through the post. Health, particularly his father’s, seemed to be a regular concern, and, a taste of things to come, he once referred to his own eyes, as if he had been experiencing problems with them.

  The subtext of his letters was that he was bored, not particularly happy, and not much of a scholar. His response was to turn in on himself and inhabit a world of the imagination. Mrs Cole had implied as much in her comment about his ability to ‘lie beautifully’ – an essential quality for a future novelist, and a talent appreciated by his fellow pupils. Almost half a century later, at the end of his life, he recalled how a martinet dormitory ‘captain’ forced him to tell stories. ‘The oldest of the boys, appointed to preserve order, was placed in authority over us as captain of the room. He was as fond of hearing stories, when he had retired for the night, as the Oriental despot to whose literary tastes we are indebted for “The Arabian Nights”; and I was the unhappy boy chosen to amuse him. It was useless to ask for mercy and beg leave to be allowed to go to sleep. “You will go to sleep, Collins, when you have told me a story.” In the event of my consenting to keep awake and to do my best, I was warned beforehand to “be amusing if I wished to come out of it with comfort to myself”. If I rebelled, the captain possessed a means of persuasion in the shape of an improved cat-o’-ninetails invented by himself. When I was obstinate, I felt the influence of persuasion. When my better sense prevailed, I learnt to be amusing on a short notice – and have derived benefit from those early lessons at a later period of my life.’54

  This story is odd, since, when Wilkie entered the school, he was one of the senior boys. However, he was smallish in stature, which might have resulted in his being victimised. In retrospect, his period abroad had proved a mixed blessing: his fluency in French enabled him to rattle off set pieces such as Voltaire’s epic poem La Henriade, which may have been satisfying for him but which caused resentment among his fellow pupils, who gave him the unendearing nickname, ‘French frog’.55

  Doubtless he was well equipped to keep his vile dormitory head enthralled with racy tales of travels. Even this had its occasional rewards: ‘Like other despots, the captain had his intervals of generosity,’ and would ply Wilkie with cakes, encouraging him in a ‘passion for pastry’,56 which, along with his mother’s confections and the French and Italian cuisine he had grown to love, would make him portly in later years.

  His account of the captain’s autocratic behaviour suggests the school had an uncouth, bullying culture at variance with Cole’s claims. This undermined another of the principal’s arguments in favour of his Academy’s limited numbers:57 that the larger roll in public schools required senior boys to be appointed as monitors, with dark powers of supervision over their juniors.

  Instead, he offered a regime of tight surveillance: ‘Whereas with us, this dominion is held by myself and masters over all the pupils, from the moment they rise in the morning till they return to rest. They are never left without a watchful eye, and ear, and guide, either in school or out of school. In all their play-hours, walks &c. a master or masters are ever with them. And I can conscientiously testify that no evil communication passes between my pupils, from half years’ end to half years’ end; excepting, on an occasion, from new pupils, who have been under a very different system and element of things’. One suspects Wilkie was included in this latter category. Having enjoyed considerable freedom in the warmth of southern Europe, he reacted defiantly to this chilling level of control. As a result, he was, in his own words, ‘perpetually getting punished as “a bad boy”’. Cole used him as an example, telling his other pupils if they misbehaved, ‘If it had been Collins I should not have felt shocked and surprised. Nobody expects anything of him. But You!! &c &c.’58

  By the summer of 1840, Wilkie was sixteen and a half and aching to get away from Mr Cole’s clutches. He might have left earlier, had it not been for his father’s health. In the last couple of years, the inflammation in William’s eyes had worsened: it was probably related to what he called rheumatic fever, but was more likely a symptom of advanced gout. Either way, it was a terrible affliction for an artist. At one stage a rumour went round that he had completely lost his sight. So in July he went in search of a cure at a spa in Bad Schwalbach, near Wiesbaden, and Wilkie was condemned to a further few months in Highbur
y Place.

  William was accompanied on his travels by several members of the Otter family, his neighbours in Avenue Road. With their blood ties to his old Irvingite friend, Dr Thompson, they were part of an extended network of a kind that featured regularly throughout Wilkie’s life. Living at number 10 were Elizabeth Otter, the widow of a naval officer, who was about seventy and had her main home in the town of Portsmouth, and several of her nephews and nieces, including Charles, a barrister, and his unmarried sister Amelia. Collins family correspondence around this time is full of references to them. The two families were in and out of each other’s houses, and the Otter women would frequently look after Charley and Wilkie when home from school. On his trip to Germany William was accompanied by old Mrs Otter and her niece Amelia, as well as by a friend of the latter called Ann Musgrave, a twenty-nine- year-old teacher at a small boarding school for girls in Newark, Nottinghamshire, run by Amelia Thompson, Dr James Thompson’s sister, whom the Collinses had met in Paris.

  After returning home in better shape, William took a part-time job as librarian at the Royal Academy, which appealed to his sense of loyalty to the institution. However, a doctor impressed on him that the underlying cause of his health problems was the damp clay in Avenue Road, and that he would experience a marked improvement if he lived somewhere with dryer soil. William found a handsome, four-storey house, newly built on gravel, at 85 Oxford Terrace in Bayswater.59 In the autumn of 1840, the family moved across town and again found itself living close to Hyde Park.

  This was the catalyst for Wilkie to leave his school. Henry Cole boasted that pupils left him at sixteen or seventeen, trained for the world and ‘soundly educated as gentlemen, both classically and mathematically, so as to sit at ease by the side of any university educated man, and possessing solid and dignified moral sentiments and principles.’

  Although this may have been broadly true of Wilkie, it was irrelevant since he lacked conventional ambition and had other ideas about his future. In Hide and Seek, one of his most autobiographical novels, a young man spoke of wanting a life of adventure – on board a merchant ship, prospecting in Australia or exploring in the Arctic. But these were the fantasies of an adolescent; Wilkie’s real preoccupation was already fiction. He had lapped up the novels the American lent him in Naples. Now, when not spinning stories, he was reading and contemplating how to improve on them.

  That October he begged his mother60 to send him a book called Tales for an Idler, in which he mentioned four stories with particular enthusiasm – all by women, one by the Irish writer Mrs S.C. Hall and three by the Honourable Mrs Caroline Norton. This was an unusual request for a schoolboy, but a timely enquiry since the high-born dandy found in the silver-fork style of fiction of the previous decade was already being reclothed in more democratic garb as the urban flâneur or idler, and given an English makeover as a quirky observer of humanity by Dickens in Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers, both published in 1836. The latter book included the famous account of the breach of (matrimonial) promise case, Bardell v. Pickwick. This was based in part on the real-life law suit involving the same Caroline Norton, in which her abusive husband unsuccessfully sued the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, on the grounds of adultery with her. (Dickens himself wrote about the court case in his daytime role as a reporter for the Morning Chronicle.)

  Already a prolific polemicist, fiction writer and editor, Caroline Norton would go on to campaign for many causes, particularly the rights of women, beset by inequitable matrimonial laws which, in her case, allowed her husband to keep custody of their children, even after he had regularly beaten her. Her activism led to the passage of the 1839 Custody of Infants Act, which mitigated the existing situation and gave women, albeit limited, rights of access to their children. This early piece of feminist legislation opened the way later in the century for further changes in the law that would confirm women’s property rights and make marriage a more equal relationship.

  It was a theme Wilkie would feature sympathetically in his novels. However, at this stage his interest in Caroline Norton reflected his general inquisitiveness, coupled with a canny sixth sense that women were an emerging force in the world of letters.

  Liberation from Henry Cole’s Academy came from an unexpected quarter. Until recently, William Collins had entertained hopes that his elder son might go up to Oxford University and prepare to become a clergyman. To this end, Wilkie was confirmed at Dodsworth’s Christ Church, Albany Street, in early 1841.

  But William’s dream of a clerical career for his son proved short-lived. Instead, he arranged for him to join a firm of London tea merchants, run by a youngish businessman called Edmund Antrobus.

  Wilkie’s new employer was something of an art connoisseur and would commission William to paint a study of his three children. While there is no evidence of him as a Tractarian, he was also a conservative polemicist in the same, if rather more secular, style as Henry Cole. He became a magistrate with a particular interest in female drunkenness and juvenile delinquency. When, in 1848, London was threatened by Chartist unrest, Antrobus penned two alarmist pamphlets,61 whose main call was for an increase in the police force. He followed these up in 1853 with a work entitled The Prison and the School62 – all suggesting that Wilkie was in for a disciplined time, which was exactly what his father intended.

  ‘My son requires the most unremitting parental discipline and control,’ remarked the father of Wilkie’s alter ego, Zack Thorpe, in his 1854 novel Hide and Seek, adding, ‘When he is not under my own eye at home, he must be under the eyes of devout friends, in whom I can place unlimited confidence. One of these devout friends is ready to receive him into his counting-house; to keep him industriously occupied from nine in the morning till six in the evening; to surround him with estimable examples; and, in short, to share with me the solemn responsibility of managing his moral and religious training.’

  Wilkie remonstrated with his father in the manner of Zack, who argued that ‘he had no head for arithmetic . . . and felt perfect horror at the bare idea of entering a tea-broker’s office . . . It was all very well for mother to say “hush” when his father was breaking his heart. Yes, breaking his heart! Make him anything but a tea-broker. He didn’t care what.’

  But William refused to be swayed. In January 1841, around the time of his seventeenth birthday, Wilkie reluctantly made his way from Bayswater to Antrobus’s offices at 446 Strand (West), where he would spend the next five years. In his efforts to maximise passing trade, Antrobus had situated his premises in the busiest part (close to Trafalgar Square) of one of the liveliest streets in London. The surrounding area buzzed with theatres, offices, hostelries and booksellers. At night it was given over to prostitutes. Just across the Strand, past what is now Charing Cross station, were the Hungerford Steps, where young Charles Dickens had worked in Warren’s blacking factory a decade and a half earlier. At the other end of the street, close to the Aldwych, was Coutts Bank, where Sir Edmund Antrobus, a cousin of Wilkie’s boss, was a director, and Charles Ward, father of the artist Ned, was a senior manager.

  Edmund Antrobus himself had been in the tea business since 1823, though his firm had been trading for a century and held a royal warrant. A few years earlier he demonstrated his professional expertise in evidence to a House of Commons enquiry into tea duties, where he expounded on the differences between congou and bohea varieties of tea, revealing that the average Englishman had a clear preference for the former, and it was no use trying to change his taste as he would not buy any alternative.

  Wilkie’s duties were not particularly onerous, allowing him plenty of time for his ‘tale-writing’. When Antrobus found his young apprentice distracted in this way, he would reprimand him and give him extra tasks. But Wilkie was still able to find ‘an hour or two in the day for my favourite pursuit’.63

  In the summer of 1841, William and Harriet Collins spent time apart, as had become their habit. She and her son Charley stayed for most of July and August at old Mrs O
tter’s other house in Southsea, a Portsmouth suburb favoured by genteel service families. William, who had been mourning the death in June of Sir David Wilkie, was left holding the fort at Oxford Terrace with Wilkie.

  Living together in these circumstances, the complexities of their relationship became more apparent. Beneath the stern disciplinarian was a loving father longing to reveal his feelings. In a letter to his absent wife, William showed parental pride in referring to a poem Wilkie had written: ‘Don’t say a word to him however about it, I should never be allowed to see another, the most remarkable thing about it is supposing that Berger is in love with Miss R.b.rts.’64 It seems Wilkie was already taking an interest in the thriving book trade around his workplace and was referring to G. Berger, a fiercely Protestant bookseller-cum-publisher in Holywell Street off the Strand.

  In September, William departed on his own vacation, leaving Wilkie ‘Master at the great house’,65 as he described Oxford Terrace to his wife, while he spent three weeks at Seaford in Sussex, where he was joined by Wilkie’s boss, Edmund Antrobus. William had now exhausted his Italian repertoire and, after a period of markedly religious works, reverted to his old mixture of seaside paintings and portraiture.

  From Seaford William wrote in unusually brusque terms to Harriet, accusing her of sending him an ‘unsatisfactory letter’ which contained no information about their children. As a result, he had thought of returning the next day, ‘but as I find I shall not be a welcome guest, I must I suppose remain a little longer.’66

  Almost a year later, not much had changed in Wilkie’s life. He was still going through the motions in the tea business, and still seizing any opportunity to write his own stories. Despairing slightly, his father approached his old patron Sir Robert Peel in May 1842, hoping he might find Wilkie a job in the Civil Service. Peel was again Prime Minister, but even he had nothing to offer.