Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation Read online

  Three months earlier William’s deteriorating health forced him reluctantly to give up his part-time job as librarian at the Royal Academy. It was a responsibility he had always taken seriously, remonstrating with Benjamin Haydon, in modern trade union style, ‘If it were not for the Academy, depend on it, Artists would be treated like Carpenters.’67 Even Haydon, an entrenched opponent of this official institution, was won over by his manner, if not by his arguments, observing, ‘Collins is one of the most amiable of men.68 He is a submissive Conservative, without servility, and an Academician without hypocrisy. He is an academical limbeck or retort – whatever comes into his mind, comes out Academical paste – you cannot help loving the fellow.’

  At a loose end, William accepted a commission from the Edinburgh publisher Robert Cadell to illustrate the Abbotsford edition of Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Pirate. This coincided with an invitation to visit Captain Henry Otter, one of the younger generation of that family, who was involved in surveying off the west coast of Scotland for the Royal Navy. Since The Pirate was set in the Orkney and Shetland Islands, and Wilkie was still interested enough in ships not totally to dismiss talk of a possible naval career, it seemed a good opportunity for father and son to journey north together.

  After a choppy voyage up the east coast, Wilkie felt an almost forgotten sense of excitement at being in a strange place. He loved Edinburgh (or at least the lively, dirty Old Town as opposed to the melancholy, well-ordered New Town, where he and his father visited his mother’s old friends, the Smiths). He rushed around, clambering up Arthur’s Seat, and casting his inquisitive youthful eye over ‘Rizzio’s blood, Queen Mary’s work basket, the Calton Hill, dirty children, filthy fish wives’,69 and much more besides, until, as he told his mother, ‘I’m out of breath and so will you be if you read this description through once.’ He and William paid a pilgrimage to Abbotsford, Walter Scott’s former home in Melrose on the Borders, and he even managed to visit Lasswade, where his maternal grandmother once lived in the Midlothian countryside.

  Henry Otter was temporarily quartered in the very north, at Thurso in Caithness, which suited William as it was close to the islands he wanted to visit. The Collinses boarded the weekly steamer to Wick, where they were met by Otter, who took them on his tandem to Thurso. As it was mid-June, Wilkie was fascinated to experience the effects of the midnight sun and be able to read in the open air at all hours. He probably also noted a nearby town called Armadale, a name he later used as the title of a novel.

  After a visit to John O’Groats (which involved a gruelling thirty-six-mile ride), Wilkie and his father returned to Wick, before embarking to their ultimate destination, Lerwick in Shetland, where William, impervious to the elements, pushed himself to complete his commission for The Pirate. His son wrote a comical portrait of him ‘with one knee on the ground, steadying himself against the wind; his companion holding a tattering umbrella over him, to keep the rain off his sketch-book.’70 There were no suggestions of conflict between the two on this occasion. Wilkie enjoyed the quirkiness and sociability of Scottish inns, which he would recall in novels such as Man and Wife. However, he preferred the more varied terrain around Thurso, which he described in a manner that betrayed his artistic background, as he noted his surroundings with a painterly eye and described the colour of the sea, ‘as deeply and brilliantly blue, on sunny days, as the Mediterranean itself – and the extraordinary northern clearness of the atmosphere, lighted to a late hour of the night by a small dull glow of sunlight lingering in the western hemisphere.’71

  The combination of dramatic Scottish stories and sparkling light effects stimulated Wilkie’s imagination, for, back in London in August, he alarmed his aunt Catherine Gray with his animated renderings of ‘the most terrible portions’ of two early nineteenth-century novels that epitomised the lurid Gothic genre: The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. He reported to his mother, who was visiting the Otter ‘clan’ in Southsea, ‘Every sentence that fell from my lips, was followed in rapid succession by – “Lor!” – “Oh”! “Ah!” “He! He!” “Good Gracious”! &c &c.,’72 adding that he did not think his ‘country relations [had] ever encountered . . . such a hash of diablerie, demonology, & massacre with their Souchong and bread and butter.’ Not content with making their hair stand on end, he intended serving up another course of fantastical interpretations of ‘the Ancient Mariner, Jack the Giant Killer, The Mysteries of Udolpho and an enquiry into the life and actions (when they were little girls) of the witches in Macbeth’. He was enjoying himself as he began to find a voice as a narrator of creepy tales.

  Aunt Catherine was one of Harriet’s younger sisters who had married a local Wiltshire artist, John Westcott Gray, and spawned a large family. Like her sibling Margaret Carpenter, she was an accomplished portrait painter who would exhibit Portrait of Two Sisters, said to be two of her daughters, at the Royal Academy in 1844. She had recently moved to London and was living in straitened circumstances at various addresses in Marylebone, not far from her sisters.

  Wilkie’s depiction of the Grays as ‘country relations’ betrayed some snobbery on Harriet’s side of the family. He regarded Aunt Catherine with amusement, once imagining a French farce in which she was in one drawing room and his mother in another. Over the next couple of years she and her children featured regularly in Wilkie’s life, before fading from the picture.

  One of his Gray cousins came to the rescue, when, left in charge of the ‘great house’, Wilkie agreed to accommodate three unexpected female visitors from the Clarkson family, another of the High Church clans the Collinses collected around them. They were Sarah Clarkson, widow of a Cambridgeshire vicar, who, together with her two daughters, had been living with her son, George Clarkson, vicar of Amberley. Wilkie fussed over whether he had done the right thing in enlisting Marion Gray’s assistance, enquiring of his absent mother, ‘A woman is wanted in the house isn’t she?’73 Rather belying his vaunted experience of the opposite sex in Italy, he seemed particularly worried about the more intimate duties of housekeeping: ‘Good God, suppose they should want a change of chemises!’

  Getting back to work after giving up his honorary post at the Royal Academy meant that William could again concentrate on his painting. He moved around the corner from Oxford Terrace to 1 Devonport Street, where he found a house with the proper studio he had always wanted. Until then, he had made do with a room with a high ceiling or a skylight.

  Despite his change of address, he remained close to the Bullars, his next-door neighbours in Oxford Terrace, who adhered to the general pattern of high-minded churchiness found in friends of the Collinses. Living there in Bayswater were John Bullar and his brother Henry, both barristers, as well as John’s bright, independent-minded wife, Rosa, who became a good friend of Harriet.

  The Bullar boys were sons of John Bullar, a philanthropic schoolteacher in Southampton who, among his many roles, was local secretary for the British and Foreign Bible Society. He combined political radicalism (being a profound opponent of slavery) with social conservatism (writing, as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography puts it, ‘a collection of edifying poetry with which he sought to counter the anti-religious tide of popular culture epitomised by the poetry of Lord Byron’). Two more of his sons, Joseph and William, were distinguished doctors in Southampton, where they would help found the Royal South Hampshire Infirmary (later Hospital). In 1841 Joseph published a book about his recent winter travels in the Azores with his brother Henry.74 This was illustrated with his own sketches, which were engraved, according to his preface, by Mr Thompson and ‘his clever daughters’, suggesting that the connection between the Bullars and Collinses also involved James Thompson, the Irvingite Apostle in Southampton. In an anonymously published book of philosophical essays entitled Evening Thoughts, by a Physician,75 Joseph Bullar later presented William Collins (‘our own Collins’) in the unusual guise of a religious painter, whose depictions of nature were, like those of Claude and
Ruysdael, ‘the outward and visible image of an internal and Divine power’. As a forward-looking doctor, Joseph would correspond with Darwin and go on to publish papers on subjects such as lunacy, epilepsy and the medical uses of chloroform and opium – studies which, given the closeness between their families, were almost certainly significant in educating Wilkie Collins in these subjects.

  Now in his mid-fifties and increasingly frail, William asked John and Henry Bullar to act as witnesses to his will in May 1843. John was also appointed one of his executors, along with two clergymen, the Reverends William Dodsworth and Francis Thomas New, the vicar and curate of Christ Church, Albany Street.

  Still fondly imagining his son might be suited for a naval career, William approached Charles Ward Senior at Coutts Bank in June 1843 to see if his connections might find an opening for Wilkie in the Admiralty, but again he was rebuffed. William took the news stoically, telling Harriet that if Wilkie ‘does justice to the abilities the Almighty has given him and takes care of his soul & body, all must be well.’

  Wilkie did come good, but not necessarily in the way his father wanted. In the summer, his perseverance with ‘tale-writing’ at last brought dividends as his vivid stories began to find markets. His first known success was ‘Volpurno’, a well-turned vignette about the ill-fated marriage of an English beauty and a moody student of astronomy with a history of derangement. It was set in Venice, with a palpable sense of the muggy splendour of the city Wilkie had visited five years earlier. Its initial appearance was in the New York magazine the Albion, or British, Colonial and Foreign Weekly Gazette on 8 July 1843, which suggests there was an earlier version published in Britain, but where is unknown. This was followed the next month by ‘The Last Stage Coachman’ in the Illuminated Magazine, edited by the prolific playwright and man of letters, Douglas Jerrold. A lament for an earlier mode of transport in an age when the railway was beginning to encroach, it provided a convincing portrait of an old-style coachman and his working environment, though Wilkie was keen not to appear too realistic, for he concluded his short story with a description of a magnificent phantom coach of a now disappearing kind.

  For all his aspirations to fairness, William Collins could not help regarding his younger son as less of a liability than Wilkie. Although weak in physique and timid by nature, Charley had shown a considerable talent for painting, and in January 1844 won a coveted place at the Royal Academy Schools. Unlike his brother, Charley was devout and was confirmed a few months later by the Bishop of London,76 Charles James Blomfield, at Christ Church, Albany Street. This time the event was noted in William’s diary. In the official church record, Charley’s name appeared a couple of pages ahead of Christina Rossetti, from another artistic family living in Charlotte Street, who was confirmed in 1845, aged fourteen.

  Charley’s acceptance as a student at the Schools came a few days after his brother’s twentieth birthday, which Wilkie celebrated with a series of drunken parties. In a letter to his mother, which is notable for his calling himself ‘Wilkie Collins’ for the first time, he claimed to have got home from one of these sprees at ten past four in the morning. Until this moment the name ‘William’ had always comprised part of his signature, and he had been known as ‘Willy’ or ‘Willie’. But now the time had come to assert his identity and, in a gesture of Oedipal significance, he discarded his father’s moniker. Henceforth, he was to be simply Wilkie Collins.

  Strangely, his ebullience and apparent independence did not stop him attending a reunion at Henry Cole’s Academy later that month. His former headmaster’s wife seemed to have a lingering erotic charge. As he told his mother, one item on the timetable was, ‘Mrs C to be embraced by the scholars at ½ past six precisely’,77 suggesting a prim woman who demanded attention from her former charges.

  In April, William went to stay with Dr James Norris, President of Corpus Christi College in Oxford, where he observed with relish the latest developments in the controversy involving the Oxford Movement. The battle lines were now drawn between the Anglican establishment and the Tractarians, who attacked moral and theological laxity and advocated traditional religious practices which, for some, were uncomfortably close to the Roman Catholic Church. The previous May, the leading Tractarian Edward Pusey had been suspended from preaching in Oxford for two years after voicing unorthodox ideas about the Holy Eucharist. William showed his colours when he described Pusey’s treatment as ‘persecution’ by ‘the steady-going jog-trots of this learned and powerful University’. He also arranged for his host to read some of Wilkie’s writings. Norris was impressed and expressed the wish that the young man had had the advantage of a university education. But William realised it was too late, feeling also that, having now briefly experienced college life himself, he was not sure if it would have been right for his son.

  It was indeed too late. In August, Wilkie was due to leave for Paris with Charles Ward, his friend Ned’s elder brother. At the time the Ward family lived in Russell Place, Fitzroy Square, next door to the artist Daniel Maclise, who had enjoyed his first break when he sketched Sir Walter Scott in his native city of Cork in Ireland. After moving to London he had gained a reputation as a painter of portraits and history subjects (like Ned Ward), and as a magazine and book illustrator who mixed easily with authors such as Dickens. With his good looks and flowing dark hair, Maclise was a womaniser, who had enjoyed an affair with Benjamin Disraeli’s former mistress, Lady Henrietta Sykes. This had led to an abortive divorce case, not unlike the one involving Caroline Norton. With Dickens and their mutual friend, the actor W.C. Macready, Maclise was also deeply involved in the London theatre.

  The Wards were not only neighbours of Maclise but also good friends: in 1846 Ned Ward would paint the portrait of the Irishman that now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Whenever Wilkie visited the Ward brothers, he would have been spurred by the air of artistic endeavour, both there and next door.

  Wilkie had not recently spent much time at Russell Place, however. In July he complained that he had only seen ‘Romeo Ward’ once in the previous fortnight. This was a reference to Charles, who was romancing Wilkie’s sweet seventeen-year-old cousin Jane Carpenter. However, since Charles was thirty and working with his father at Coutts, this caused consternation to both families.

  The trip to Paris promised to be an extended stag party, with Charles Ward enjoying his last months as a bachelor, and Wilkie re-enacting the excitements of earlier Continental escapades in Rome with his companion’s younger brother Ned. The two men established themselves in the central Hotel de Tours, from where Wilkie sent back curious (and, one imagines, carefully edited) accounts of his exploits, in the manner of disaffected youth through the ages. He visited Versailles and the Louvre, but was only impressed by a couple of history paintings in the latter. Otello at the Opéra was ‘monotonously dismal’, the Théâtre-Français a bore. Even a wedding proved tedious: ‘[I] don’t take much interest in Matrimony,’78 he wrote to his mother, ‘so can’t tell you anything more about the ceremony of marriage here than that the bridegrooms looked foolish and wore ill-cut coats and that the Priests looked sulky and had generally speaking red noses.’ He would remain unconvinced about matrimony and would never himself take a bride. However, he was fascinated with the institution, which he observed and regularly commented on in his novels.

  He was happy to admit to ‘dissipating fearfully – gardens, theatres and Cafés’, but avoided any reference to encounters with the opposite sex, and his letters give little sense of the vitality of street life during the latter years of the July Monarchy, when new ideas were circulating, writers such as Balzac were surfacing, and the cancan was flourishing in boulevard cafés. His enjoyment of this side of Paris was doubtless enhanced when they met Charles’s louche neighbour, the artist Daniel Maclise.

  Wilkie’s apparent indifference to mainstream Parisian culture did not stop him asking his parents if they could wring some extra holiday for him from his boss. References such as this, together with
records of William Collins’s bank accounts, which show him paying sums regularly to his son as well as occasionally to Antrobus, suggest that Wilkie was never more than an apprentice, possibly unsalaried and subsidised by his father.

  After returning home via Southampton, and visiting his mother at the Otters’ in Southsea, Wilkie once more assumed his perch in the Strand. His surreptitious writing now became more ambitious as he began a novel called (in full) Iolani; or, Tahiti as it was; A Romance, which told the thrilling if improbable story of Iolani, the villainous high priest and brother of the king, his involvement in sorcery, revenge and bloody inter-tribal conflict, and his cruelty after his concubine Idia seeks to prevent their daughter being sacrificed, according to traditional custom.

  Wilkie drew heavily on his copy of Polynesian Researches, a travelogue by the missionary William Ellis, published in four volumes in 1832–4. This was an account of Ellis’s efforts to introduce Christianity into a corrupt, primitive society where practices such as infanticide and polygamy existed. Despite his own family’s links with muscular Christianity (epitomised by the death of his great uncle in the Gold Coast), Wilkie did not adopt the civilising narrative of Ellis’s story, using only its detail, including the names of his main protagonists, various tribal customs and aspects of the island’s history.

  Iolani was notable for introducing several themes that would become staples in Wilkie’s later fiction – notably, his vivid portrayal of an evil villain (reprised in Count Fosco in The Woman in White) and his sympathetic treatment of strong, independent women. His splitting of the book into three separate parts gave it the sense of a drama, divided into acts – another idea he used in later novels. Its full title was significant because, in labelling it a romance, Wilkie sought to place himself in the tradition of Walter Scott, who in his 1824 ‘Essay on Romance’ had defined the genre as ‘a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents’. Wilkie was happy to describe several of his other books as romances, including his next work Antonina (1850) and his great mystery story The Moonstone (1868).