Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation Read online

  Wilkie used his father’s contacts to send his manuscript to the established publishers Longman. Although it was accepted by the firm’s reader, negotiations for its publication broke down after they failed to agree terms (despite William offering to cover a third of the costs). Wilkie then sent it to Chapman and Hall, until recently Dickens’s publishers. However, he heard nothing from them during the summer of 1845, by which time he was itching to get back to Paris. His travelling companion of the previous year was now, at least temporarily, indisposed: on 4 February, Charles Ward had married his sweetheart Jane Carpenter and was occupied with family affairs.

  So in early September 1845, Wilkie journeyed back to Paris on his own. He again showed a strange mix of enthusiasm and disdain, extravagantly comparing a history painting exhibited at Versailles, Horace Vernet’s The Capture of Abd-el-Kader’s Camp at Taguim, to Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, while concluding that two shows of up-and-coming landscape and history painters were dire – ‘the worst Suffolk street landscape is superior to the best picture’79 in the former, while the standards in the latter were ‘ineffably below those of the Royal Academy students’.

  By chance he met William Hookham Carpenter, his uncle by marriage and Charles Ward’s new father-in-law, who was in Paris ‘on government business’ linked to his recent appointment as Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. When his father scolded him for failing to answer his letters, Wilkie responded indignantly, poking fun at the old man’s religious convictions: ‘Considering that he is a lamb of Mr Dodsworth’s flock, Mr Collins evinces a most unchurchmanlike disposition to scandalise other people.’80 His scripturally-minded mother saw Paris as a Babylon where Satan more or less walked the streets. This caused Wilkie to remonstrate with her too: ‘“The Evil One”81 (whom you mention with somewhat unladylike want of courtesy at the close of your letter) is such an exceedingly gentlemanlike dog in this city, with his theatres and his kitchens, that I find it rather difficult to “cut his commission”.’

  Again there was no mention of women. But he did ask for an advance of £100, later cut to £10, arguing cheekily that he had been given money for the trip to Paris, but not for his return. He threatened that, without the cash, he would have to remain in situ, ‘the actual difference between imprisonment at Paris and imprisonment at the Strand being too inconsequential to be worth ascertaining to a nicety.’82

  When he did get back to his office, he must have learnt that Chapman and Hall, like Longman, was not interested in Iolani. No letter specifically states this, but nothing more was heard of the manuscript until it was sold in an auction in 1900, and it was not published until 1999.83 Feeling this rejection, Wilkie began contemplating another novel, Antonina, a grand historical saga about the fall of Rome, a subject he had been mulling over since visiting the city almost a decade earlier. He had read Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but he wanted to do further research and with the help of the Librarian at the British Museum, Sir Henry Ellis, he obtained a reader’s ticket there in March 1846.

  Six months earlier, in September, his mother had been holidaying as usual on the south coast and had stayed with the Antrobuses in Torquay, but soon afterwards relations between the two families broke down. A letter from Wilkie to a friend (perhaps a colleague in his Strand office or even Charles Ward) referred to ‘old tea-bags’84 (Antrobus) reneging on a promise to pay Wilkie £200 a year, after declaring ‘that he could have had plenty of young men in his office, my equals in birth and education’. As a result there was ‘a mighty feud “henceforth and forever” between the “houses twain” of Collins and Antrobus.’ Wilkie asked his correspondent to furnish him with any relevant details he came across, promising ‘whatever you tell me shall be kept “as secret as the grave”, or one of your domestic epistles’. He ended with the request, ‘Burn this immediately’.

  The records are sparse during this period. The manuscript for Antonina shows that Wilkie started it on 23 April 1846, less than a month after receiving his British Museum ticket. On 18 May he was admitted to train as a barrister at Lincoln’s Inn. He almost certainly left Antrobus several weeks or even months earlier. But, as long as his father was alive, there was no question of his being allowed to concentrate on writing. He had to make another attempt at an accepted profession. Luckily, several close family friends, including Charles Otter and John and Henry Bullar, his neighbours in Oxford Terrace, were connected to Lincoln’s Inn. So it was like paying an entry subscription to a conservative Tractarian clan when Wilkie handed over his initial fees and began to go through the motions of a legal career.

  The Inn’s terms were hardly taxing and so, by July, he was able to take a short holiday in Belgium with Charles Ward, who left his young wife and their seven-month-old daughter in London.85 Wilkie was also turning his back on responsibilities. His father’s health had deteriorated, and his parents spent some time in the countryside at Iver in Buckinghamshire. Despite resorting to Battley’s Drops, a tincture of opium, to give him respite from pain, William was wasting away, and in November he reluctantly called a halt to all involvement with the Royal Academy. He struggled on a little longer, and died on 17 February 1847. After a small private funeral six days later, he was buried in the same cemetery as his mother and brother, in St Mary’s Church, Paddington Green. Aside from legacies to his cousin, Mrs Elizabeth Jones in Dublin, and four of Harriet’s sisters, he bequeathed the remainder of his estate in trust to provide an income to his wife during her lifetime, and then to be shared equally by his sons and their heirs after her death. His main asset was £11,548 in government securities, known as consols, but this amount increased with the sale of various paintings and his estate was eventually worth over £16,000 – at least £1 million today. This was a notable achievement for an early Victorian who had grown up in relative poverty and made his living as an artist. And it would provide a welcome and rather essential financial cushion as Wilkie set out into adulthood.

  4

  GETTING INTO PRINT

  ONE WARM SPRING morning in May 1848, Wilkie had a date he could not ignore. Despite its proximity to the street where he was born, All Souls, Langham Place, John Nash’s elegant church at the top of Regent Street, was not a place he had often visited. But his friend Ned Ward was getting married there on 4 May, and Wilkie had an important role to perform. Thirty-one-year-old Ned’s intended bride was his neighbour Henrietta Ward (no relation). But, at fifteen,86 she did not have her parents’ permission to marry. Thus the whole process of arranging the wedding, in which Wilkie was intimately involved, had to be done carefully and secretly.

  The two Wards’ passion for each other had been clear for over four years – more or less since the day Henrietta’s artist father George Raphael Ward, who lived in Fitzroy Square, walked around the corner to Ned’s family house in Russell Place after the coincidence of their surnames led to one too many mix-ups in the delivery of his post. George Raphael had liked young Ned and engaged him to teach his precocious dark-haired daughter.

  Benefiting from Ned’s tuition, Henrietta had her first painting accepted at the Royal Academy in 1846. She was still only fourteen when, soon afterwards, she accepted his proposal of marriage. But her parents objected, and asked them to wait a couple of years. This did not stop Ned celebrating their engagement with a magnificent ball in his studio. Henrietta wore a dazzling yellow tarlatan dress, with a double skirt, tied with satin ribbons and looped at the side with a white rose.

  Despite the happy occasion, Henrietta was taken aback when the celebrated baritone Henry Russell, who was providing the evening’s entertainment, sang ‘The Madman’ (or ‘The Maniac’). This melodramatic song told of a prisoner who, haunted by visions of his lover, protests his sanity in deranged fashion. It ‘made us all shiver’,87 Henrietta later recalled, and it was meant to, for Russell regarded himself as a musical Charles Dickens, using songs to educate his audience about social problems. In this one, h
e was exposing the evils of the private lunatic asylum, where individuals could be confined and forgotten, a theme Wilkie later took up in his novels.

  Henrietta put aside any presentiments as she struggled with her mother who, she said, was ‘jealous at my affection being given so fully to my future husband’. Her parents insisted she should be chaperoned wherever she went. But when she found that Ned’s letters to her had been opened, she was incensed and, being a wilful young woman, planned her secret marriage in the Royal Academy’s Octagon Room, where the paintings for that year’s Summer Exhibition were being displayed.

  Wilkie, who had been asked to give the bride away, also acted as Cupid, using his legal training to help obtain a special marriage licence. ‘He impressed great caution and secrecy, as he planned out the whole affair with zest and enjoyment’,88 Henrietta recalled. The plan was that on the morning of the wedding she would tell her parents she was spending the day with Jane Ward, the wife of Ned’s brother Charles, in St Johns Wood. Once there, she would make her way to All Souls in Langham Place.

  Having gone through this diversionary procedure, she arrived at the church to find Ned standing brazenly outside in a brilliant white waistcoat with a matching gardenia in his lapel. As usual, he had been carried away by his own enthusiasm and she feared that his casual ostentation might have alerted her parents. But the service went without incident. Wilkie ‘gave me away to the best of men, with a hearty good will’, she recalled.

  After the ceremony there was a surreal moment when Wilkie hailed a cab. Before the newly-weds could pull away, their party was accosted by a crowd of revellers dressed in tree-like foliage, who were acting out parts of the traditional pagan ritual of Jack in the Green in belated celebration of May Day. Any suggestion of mob rule was alarming since, only the previous month, the Chartists had marched on London in protest against living and working conditions – the British equivalent of the revolutions then taking place in France and across Europe. The threat of the Chartists was taken seriously in both Ward families, with Ned and his new father-in-law serving as volunteer special constables.

  The couple returned to Charles and Jane Ward’s house in Grove End Road, St Johns Wood, where they were joined for dinner by Henrietta’s unwitting mother and father, and by Wilkie and Charley Collins. After the meal she and Ned walked back to Fitzroy Square, accompanied by her parents. She later described how her heart was racing as she imagined ‘how furious they would be when they found out that I had disobeyed’.

  Three months later, her parents still, extraordinarily, gave no indication of knowing about the marriage. However, the tension of enforced secrecy was making Henrietta ill. On 1 June she reached the age of sixteen and Ned could no longer be accused of abducting her if they ran away together, which was their plan, with Wilkie again making the arrangements. He booked for them to stay initially in Iver, Buckinghamshire – possibly at the place his father had visited on his final holiday the previous year. From there Henrietta and Ned proceeded on a more leisurely honeymoon in Holland and Belgium, taking care to avoid Paris, which was still in the throes of insurrection. Wilkie would mull over the experience and return to the issue of marriage to an underage girl in his novel Basil (1852) and his later extended short story Miss or Mrs? (1872).

  Since studying in Rome a decade earlier, Ned Ward had associated with a group of painters known as the Clique, most of whom had been at the Royal Academy Schools in the mid-1830s. Other members included William Powell Frith, Augustus Egg and Richard Dadd, though the latter’s involvement was curtailed after he was committed to the Bethlem (or Bedlam) mental hospital for murdering his father in 1843. The Clique met regularly to sketch, but had no particular agenda, aside from maintaining the unholy fusion of Academic traditionalism and Hogarthian populism that had been the hallmark of both David Wilkie and William Collins. Frith, a friend of Dickens, specialised in literary themes, though he would later find fame with large narrative paintings, such as Life at the Seaside (1854) and The Derby Day (1856–8). Egg, the sharp-featured son of a gunmaker from Alsace, was noted for his hospitality, particularly after moving to Bayswater in 1847.

  Influenced by his friend Thomas Babington Macaulay, Ward specialised in historical subjects. He was promoted professionally by Samuel Carter Hall,89 a prolific Irish-born journalist who edited the Art Journal, the first periodical to report on the art market. A prim character (often said to be the model for Mr Pecksniff in Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit), he was married to Anna (Mrs S.C. Hall), one of the writers whose work Wilkie had asked his mother to send him at school, and together they had a wide circle of literary and artistic friends.

  Wilkie was surrounded by such talented people as he strove to make his mark on the world in the wake of his father’s death. He temporarily stopped work on his novel Antonina, and turned to writing William Collins’s biography. It says something about Wilkie’s easy-going nature that he was prepared, out of a sense of filial duty, to put his own career on hold, forget differences of opinion and carry out this task.

  Wilkie set about asking his father’s friends – mainly artists, authors and actors – for accounts of his life. He was still studying for the Bar, but that summer he allowed himself a few weeks in Normandy and Paris with Charles Ward. Then he returned to work. After unsuccessfully sounding out John Murray, he reached an agreement with Longman to publish Memoirs of the Life of William Collins on the old-fashioned subscription basis, which meant asking William’s former patrons and friends to pay one guinea in advance. This was too much for the rigid Tory, John Wilson Croker, who said he would prefer to wait until the book appeared. But others were happy to put up the money, including Sir Robert Peel, who was now in opposition after failing to carry his party over the Repeal of the Corn Laws and who, crucially for the success of the exercise, consented to have the Memoirs dedicated to him. Potential subscribers were relieved to learn that the veteran man of letters Alaric A. Watts would help the inexperienced Wilkie edit the book.

  In the spring of 1848, Wilkie’s attention was temporarily distracted by Ned Ward’s marriage to Henrietta. However, with Watts’s help, the Memoirs proceeded smoothly and proofs were available in August. Forgoing his usual holiday, Wilkie helped his mother move – together with her sons, a couple of servants and the family cat, Snooks – to a smaller, more manageable house at 38 Blandford Square. This was an up-and-coming area just north of the Marylebone Road and favoured by several of Wilkie’s friends, including the newly married Wards.

  By December that year, the Memoirs were ready for publication. Although favourably reviewed in the Observer,90 the book did not win universal plaudits. After reading it on a Boxing Day train journey,91 the diarist Henry Crabb Robinson declared it ‘an ordinary work, which to one unacquainted with the art could give no pleasure’. He recalled meeting William in Rome, while travelling with Wordsworth a decade earlier. As a practising Unitarian, he had decided not to follow up the acquaintance after a friend told him of William’s withering comment, ‘I would not shake hands with a Unitarian knowingly.’

  This pronouncement displayed the worst of William’s Tractarian prejudices against Nonconformism. The last few years of his life had seen an intensification of the dispute between a laissez-faire Anglican Church establishment and Tractarian fundamentalists pushing for a return to more traditional rites. In 1845, John Newman, one of the latter, had taken the argument to its logical conclusion and embraced Roman Catholicism, where he was followed by others, including both Dodsworth and New, the vicar and curate at Christ Church, Albany Street.

  Having completed the Memoirs, Wilkie was free to return to Antonina. However, he was determined not to ignore his other interests: in January 1849 he informed Washington Allston’s nephew, Richard Dana Jr, in Boston, that although he did not ‘follow my father’s profession’,92 he did dabble in ‘painting in leisure moments, in humble amateur-fashion, for my own amusement’. (Dana, a lawyer by training, had enjoyed great success a few years earlier with his sea-faring mem
oir, Two Years Before the Mast. However, he had sold the rights to Harper Brothers for $250: the book is reputed to have made the company $50,000.)

  As a result it was not unexpected when in May a painting of his called The Smuggler’s Retreat appeared at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Wilkie had been working up to this moment, as three drawings now held in the Morgan Library in New York demonstrate. The first is a sketch of a castle by a river, signed ‘W. Wilkie Collins’ and dated April 1841. Given the date, it may have been a doodle from his early days at Antrobus. The second drawing shows an Italianate group of buildings, and the third, a rural scene reminiscent of his father’s work, carries an 1844 watermark.

  As he intimated to Dana, his artistic endeavours were never particularly serious. In this spirit, he had taken his ‘cherished painting box’ to France on his trip with Charles Ward almost two years earlier, and produced three works, two of which he admitted were failures (including one executed at the abbey of St Georges de Boscherville, outside Rouen, on an outing he wrote up for Bentley’s Miscellany), but the third he described as ‘exceedingly good, and a most elaborate undertaking – for it occupied three days of my time’.93 This may well have been the canvas he submitted to the Summer Exhibition. Unfortunately, its current whereabouts is unknown and no image has survived.

  Charley Collins, who had shown a portrait of Rosa, John Bullar’s wife, there two years earlier, was also represented on the walls of the Royal Academy in 1849. However, the most interesting and controversial works in the exhibition came from two of Charley’s friends, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, whose paintings Lorenzo and Isabella and Rienzi Vowing to Obtain Justice for the Death of his Young Brother were the first to carry the initials PRB, designating a new artistic group, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.