Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation Read online

  No sooner had this story been published than Wilkie received an approach that was to alter his life radically. Charles Dickens was now at the height of his powers, a celebrated novelist and the owner and editor of a weekly magazine, Household Words, with offices in Wellington Street, close to where Wilkie had worked in the Strand. The location gave the phenomenally energetic Dickens access to one of his great loves, the stage. He frequently attended West End productions and promoted the theatre whenever he could. When he established the grand-sounding Guild of Literature and Art, it was natural that he should put on a play to raise funds.

  The Guild’s more mundane aim was to provide assistance to writers and artists who had fallen on hard times. Dickens was supported in this by his friend, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, novelist and playwright and owner of a substantial recently Gothicised seat at Knebworth in Hertfordshire. With the specific intention of raising money for the construction of cottages for these deserving toilers on land he had donated at Knebworth, Bulwer-Lytton had written a five-act comedy called Not So Bad As We Seem, which Dickens arranged to be staged at Devonshire House in Piccadilly, the London home of the Duke of Devonshire.

  As usual, Dickens rallied his friends to take part in the production. However, William Wills, the sub-editor who did the day-to-day work at Household Words, suddenly decided that he did not fancy amateur theatricals and pulled out. Left with a gap in his cast list, Dickens wrote to another of his actors, Augustus Egg, who was also a member of the Guild, ‘I think you told me that Mr. Wilkie Collins would be glad to play any part in Bulwer’s Comedy, and I think I told you that I considered him a very desirable recruit. There is a Valet, called (as I remember) Smart – a small part, but, what there is of it, decidedly good; he opens the play – which I should be delighted to assign to him . . . Will you undertake to ask him if I shall cast him in this part?’104

  SECOND EPOCH

  5

  DICKENS AND A NOVEL

  LITTLE MORE THAN two months later, Wilkie donned a valet’s costume and appeared before the Queen in the gilded library at Devonshire House. It was not a great part, but it would transform his life by bringing him into the orbit of Dickens, the greatest writer in Britain, who would become his firm friend.

  Wilkie’s role in Not So Bad As We Seem reflected the two men’s current unequal standings. In this eighteenth-century pastiche, he played a lowly servant whose job was to announce visitors to his master, Lord Wilmot, portrayed by the domineering Dickens. In real life, twenty-seven-year-old Wilkie was merely a student – both in matters of law and in the ways of the world – while Dickens was a hugely successful author with a large family and vast experience.

  Wilkie had the innocence and potential of youth. His recent portrait by Millais showed an agreeable man tapping his fingers thoughtfully as if aware of domestic responsibilities (the shield in the top left-hand corner symbolised his attachment to home), yet alert to opportunities. Meanwhile Dickens was showing signs of middle age. At thirty-nine, he was tiring of domestic responsibilities and concerned that his wife, Catherine, was suffering from chronic depression.

  With the first performance of the play due at the end of April, there was little time for familiarisation. Wilkie met Dickens over dinner on 12 March, followed that same evening by a reading of the text in John Forster’s rooms in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. There was another run-through a few days later at Miss Kelly’s Theatre, and then several rehearsals. Wilkie’s fellow actors were literary and artistic associates of Dickens, including Forster, Douglas Jerrold and Mark Lemon, the editor of Punch. The only member of the cast Wilkie really knew was Augustus Egg.

  Dickens oversaw all aspects of the production. Eager to construct a portable stage for use at different venues, he liaised with carpenters, tailors and musicians, as well as briefing the artists Clarkson Stanfield and David Roberts, who were painting the backdrops. Dickens also had to deal with the possibility of Rosina – Bulwer-Lytton’s estranged and unstable wife – turning up, as she threatened, in the costume of an orange girl and handing out copies of a libellous memoir about her husband. To ensure no unwanted intrusion, Dickens arranged for his friend Inspector Charles Field, head of the Metropolitan Police detective department to patrol the venue and, if necessary, prevent her entry. Dickens was fascinated by the recent phenomenon of the detective, whose investigative and surveillance powers he felt brought a sense of order to London’s teeming streets. The department had only been in existence for less than a decade, but already Dickens had written several pieces celebrating its activities for Household Words. Even in the middle of the frenzied preparations for Not So Bad As We Seem, he found time to write a report with Wills on the workings of Bow Street police station, which appeared in his paper on 26 April.

  Rehearsals suffered a setback when Dickens experienced two family bereavements in quick succession. On 31 March 1851 his father died, and a fortnight later, when he was presiding at a meeting of the General Theatrical Fund and his wife was taking a rest cure in Malvern for her depression, his daughter Dora was snatched from him, aged only eight months. He might have coped with the first loss, but the second floored him. In calling Catherine back to London, he could not bring himself to tell her that their daughter was dead (he couched his letter to say that Dora was very ill and that Catherine should brace herself for the possibility that she might be dead before she returned to the capital). This could be interpreted as an act of cowardice, but it was actually a gesture of kindness to a woman who was already emotionally vulnerable. Dickens was forced to ask the Duke to postpone the play’s first night – a delicate task, since Queen Victoria was scheduled to attend.

  Not So Bad As We Seem was finally ready for its dress rehearsal at Devonshire House on 14 May. This performance was reserved for the families and friends of the participants, including Harriet Collins, her son Charley, and Ned Ward, who had designed the invitation, and his wife Henrietta.

  Although the Guild had been set up partly in protest against the alleged inefficiency of the Royal Literary Fund, the Queen took no offence and rearranged her calendar so that she, Prince Albert and their guests, the Crown Prince and Princess of Prussia, could attend the postponed first night on 16 May. In all, some two hundred people, paying £5 a head, crammed into the gallery of the library at Devonshire House. The venture was a financial success, even if the critical consensus was mixed, suggesting that the five-act play lacked plot and was too long, ending at half past twelve (the Duke of Wellington voted with his feet and left after the second act).

  Dickens was soon planning further performances, which necessitated making cuts to the play and adding a short farce called Mr Nightingale’s Diary, which he had written with Mark Lemon. Based on the ‘personator’ Charles Mathews, who had featured in Harriet Collins’s courtship, this was little more than a showcase for Dickens’s wide-ranging talents as an actor, and, in its subject matter, a forerunner of his speaking tours. Wilkie’s performances were also recognised since, in a reduced cast, he was asked to play the landlord of an inn – still a menial role, but indicative of his acting abilities.

  This was all good fun, but hardly cutting edge. Nor did it do much to dispel the idea that, for all their charitable aims, Dickens’s theatrical exploits were acts of shameless self-promotion. Before his family losses, he had intended his play to provide a curtain raiser to the main spectacle of the summer, the Great Exhibition, a display of the best of Britain’s industry, which was inaugurated by the Queen in Hyde Park on 1 May.

  Dickens may also have hoped to piggy-back on another event, the regular Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy, which opened its doors a few days later. The main body of work that year comprised a conventional mix of historical and literary paintings, some by members of Dickens’s cast, including Egg’s saucy study of Pepys being introduced to Nell Gwyn, and Frank Stone’s rather safer scene from The Merchant of Venice. Ned Ward also contributed a powerful historical tableau of the French royal family.

  These works co
uld not disguise the stir caused by the latest offerings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Since their first appearance in 1849, the reaction to this group had not only intensified but become dangerously personalised, with Frank Stone using his position as art correspondent of the Athenaeum105 to vilify them, and William Rossetti striking back with a vituperative attack on Stone in a piece in the Critic, written with his brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a member of the Brotherhood.

  At the 1850 Summer Exhibition Dickens leaped instinctively to the support of his friend Stone, using Household Words to mock the backward-looking tendencies of the Brotherhood (the progressive ethos of the Great Exhibition was more to his taste). He particularly took against Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents, mocking its hyperrealism and describing the whole as ‘mean, odious, repulsive, and revolting’.106 His criticism was puzzling, since, in his own writing, he was attempting much the same as the Pre-Raphaelites – to show the reality of the human condition, using whatever uncompromising hues and perspectives were required.

  In 1851, Millais was back at the Royal Academy, together with Holman Hunt and Charley Collins who, although not formally a member of their group, worked closely with them. Convent Thoughts, Charley’s painting for the exhibition, showed a novice nun in a walled garden full of exquisitely detailed flowers, and was as Pre-Raphaelite as anything by Millais, Hunt or Rossetti. It also indicated how different a character he was from his brother. For while Wilkie had rejected his father’s religion (and in particular its institutionalised side), Charley still followed it. The traditional practices of Tractarianism were the guiding principles of his art, and he shared them with the high-minded Rossetti family, his fellow parishioners at Christ Church in Albany Street, who lived in Charlotte Street (later Hallam Street) in the heart of the Portland estate. Gabriele, the Rossetti paterfamilias, had been forced to flee his native Italy because of his involvement with the Carbonari secret society. After coming to England and marrying, he taught Italian at the new Anglican King’s College, London, and had four children of roughly Charley’s age – Maria, Dante Gabriel, William Michael and Christina. The atmosphere in the Rossetti household was noisy, emotional and conspiratorial, as noted by Holman Hunt when he chanced on a gathering of ‘all escaped revolutionists’.107

  Charley was closer to the Rossettis than Wilkie, partly through the church, and partly because he was infatuated with Maria Rossetti, the most devout of the four children and said to be the model for Convent Thoughts. Although the painting was executed in the Oxford garden of Thomas Combe, a Tractarian printer who had prospered as owner of the Oxford University Press, Charley also had in mind the new ‘Puseyite Nunnery’, or Sisterhood of the Holy Cross, in Park Village West, off Regent’s Park, where he now lived. Linked to Christ Church, Albany Street, this community, formed in 1845, was the first Anglican convent of modern times, an attempt by the Tractarians to revert to traditional Church practices.

  Such places were not obvious outposts of feminism. Nevertheless, like Charley’s painting, the convent raised pertinent questions about women in Victorian society. Should they remain traditional ‘angels in the house’, committed to child rearing and domesticity? Or should they be allowed to make their own way in the world? And what if this meant rejecting the male sex, like the members of the Park Village Sisterhood? As Maria’s sister Christina would write in her poem ‘The Convent Threshold’, such communities offered refuge to victims of violence and even love. They also gave succour and hope to fallen women, which provided a new twist to the traditional male problem of differentiating between angels and whores.

  These questions had a particular resonance for Charley, since Maria Rossetti had recently rejected him as a lover (she later joined a different nunnery), and at much the same time, after an indecisive vote, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood declined to admit him as a member. These two setbacks were to scar him for life.

  At the 1851 Summer Exhibition the attack on the Brotherhood was joined by The Times, which accused the Academicians of ‘disgrac(ing) their walls’108 by showing the works of Millais, Hunt and Collins – ‘a class of juvenile artists who style themselves “P.R.B.” . . . Their faith seems to consist in an absolute contempt for perspective and the known laws of light and shade, an aversion to beauty in every shape, and a singular devotion to the minute accidents of their subjects, including . . . every excess of sharpness and deformity.’ Charley was still identified in the art world as a member of the Brotherhood.

  This stimulated a robust riposte from the art critic John Ruskin, who had so far been lukewarm towards a group he suspected of dangerously Roman Catholic tendencies. He now leaped to their defence in a letter to The Times, praising the ‘honesty’ of their work and forecasting they could ‘rise to very real greatness’.

  Dickens on this occasion was too taken up with family and thespian matters to re-enter the fray. Instead, Wilkie had his say in Bentley’s Miscellany. With his background, he was well placed to comment on the art world. However, his report was strangely oblique, suggesting he felt compromised at having to review an exhibition in which his brother was represented. After summarising the other paintings on show, he commented grumpily on the Pre-Raphaelites, echoing the near universal complaint about their unusual use of perspective, though he did manage to strike a positive note in his conclusion that ‘Mr Collins was the superior in refinement, Mr Millais in brilliancy, and Mr Hunt in dramatic power.’109

  Wilkie’s critique reflected his ambivalent response to the Brotherhood. His attitude was coloured by worries about Charley, who he felt was becoming too constrained by ‘extreme Church discipline and rigorous self-denial in matters of fasting and calendar observances’ at a time when he himself was trying to throw off all vestiges of his father’s beliefs. So, like Dickens, he tended to ignore the PRB’s claim to be realists and to look on them as a retrogressive force.

  As a result of his concerns about his brother, Wilkie paid a fraternal visit during the summer to the Surrey farm where Charley was painting with two of his closest Pre-Raphaelite friends, ‘Johnny’ Millais and ‘Maniac’ Hunt. Millais had successfully sweetened the blow of Charley’s rejection by the group by prevailing on Thomas Combe’s wife to purchase Convent Thoughts, which was appropriate since it was painted in her Oxford garden.

  Wilkie was reaching the end of his five-year apprenticeship for the Bar. His letters give a sense of his lifestyle: aside from a few additional performances with Dickens’s Guild of Literature and Art, he amused himself by gambling (though his stakes were small) and by frequenting risqué French plays at the St James’s Theatre, in the company of Joseph Cridland, a Lincoln’s Inn solicitor, who was a friend of Wilkie’s fellow law student Edward Smyth Pigott.

  Wilkie also continued to write for Bentley’s Miscellany, where his pieces that summer included a series on Britain’s picture galleries. However, he was happier in the autumn when he expanded his range of outlets and began writing for the Leader, a weekly radical newspaper nominally edited by George Henry Lewes and Thornton Leigh Hunt. This was the obvious home for his essay ‘A Plea for Sunday Reform’,110 a direct refutation of his father’s Sabbatarianism, in which he argued that museums and galleries should be allowed to open their doors on Sundays, thus helping to expand the minds of the people and keep them out of gin palaces.

  By then, Thornton Leigh Hunt had had a child with his colleague Lewes’s wife and another was on the way. Lewes’s response was an affair with Marian Evans, a radical, agnostic writer, later known under the pen name George Eliot. So intense was the sexual energy that it was not unexpected when the Leader fell into financial difficulties, from which it was rescued by Wilkie’s friend Edward Smyth Pigott, the son of a wealthy West Country landowner.

  In early November 1851 Wilkie was staying with Pigott at Grove House in Weston-super-Mare. This was one of two large estates (the other was Brockley Hall in North Somerset) owned by the Smyth Pigotts, a dynamic and often spectacularly dysfunctional family, which, in on
e way or another, would provide plenty of copy for Wilkie over the years.

  Both young men were about to be called to the Bar and needed to consider their futures. For Pigott, matters were simple enough. Although a younger son, he had plenty of money to indulge his interests, which currently included running the Leader. For Wilkie the future was not so clear cut. Having no desire to continue with the law, he was determined to make his living as a writer. But, as his father had warned, it was a precarious existence. He stood to inherit some money when his mother died, and for the time being he had a generous allowance, but his prospects were by no means assured though, for now, he was happy to write the occasional piece for the Leader.

  From Weston-super-Mare, Wilkie joined Dickens’s Guild company for its next performances of Not So Bad As We Seem in Bath and Bristol. The audience in the Assembly Rooms in Bath was large but remarkably po-faced. Dickens, who liked to enjoy himself, insisted that his cast hold a party at their hotel in Bristol, where everyone, including Wilkie, ended up playing his favourite game of leapfrog.111

  In November, Wilkie and Pigott celebrated after being called to the Bar. Wilkie invited several friends, including Sir Thomas Henry, a respected Bow Street magistrate. He ended up getting pickled. ‘What a night!’112 he told Pigott the following day. ‘What speeches! What songs! I carried away much clarets (sic) and am rather a seedy barrister this morning.’