At least there was a friendly, florid face to meet him when he stepped off the Algeria at the Cunard pier on the eastside of Manhattan. Charles Fechter, who was now living in Pennsylvania, rescued him from the journalists, who made up a large proportion of the noisy crowd on the quayside, and took him to the Westminster Hotel on the corner of Irving Place and 16th Street, where Wilkie was given the suite Dickens had once occupied, with a private entrance and staircase to the street. Later in the day, Fechter introduced his fellow gastronome to the delights of American cuisine. At the end of the meal, he told Wilkie encouragingly, ‘You will find friends here wherever you go’,460 and added, ‘Don’t forget that I was the friend who introduced you to soft-shell crab.’
Wilkie was well known in the United States, albeit through the widespread pirated editions of his work. One publisher had reportedly sold 120,000 copies of The Woman in White, but, as Wilkie plaintively remarked, ‘He never sent me sixpence.’461 His American readers were keen to find out more about the man touted as the new Dickens, and journalists and autograph-hunters pursued him throughout his trip. But they were never quite sure what they were getting and he refused to be typecast. With his thick beard, he was likened in appearance to the late Edwin M. Stanton, who had served as Lincoln’s Secretary of War. But, as the Boston Commonwealth noted, he was ‘not quite what is suggested by his portraits’.462 Perhaps he needed to be more demonstrative, more pantomime English.
Wybert Reeve told how, before departing on his trip, Wilkie bought himself a cheap ready-made suit at E. Moses and Son. Once in the United States, this tawdry piece of cloth became, in the eyes of a reporter at the New York Herald, a stylish suit463 ‘of a fashionable cut, by which an Englishman of taste is known’. Reeve pompously suggested that this was ‘a very good illustration of what housekeepers have to put up with in servants in that part of the world’. In fact, it emphasised how difficult Wilkie was to categorise.
On his second night in New York464 he plunged into the first of many calorie-rich dinners when he was the guest of honour at the Lotos Club, a gathering of authors and journalists, presided over by Whitelaw Reid, the editor of the New York Tribune who would later become American ambassador to both France and Britain. Wilkie amused his audience by telling them of his first experience of ‘American kindness and hospitality’ when he was in Sorrento, aged thirteen, and one of their countrymen lent him two novels, The Sorrows of Young Werther and A Sentimental Journey.
An early priority was a visit to his publishers Harper and Brothers, who had worked hard to promote his American tour, including running a feature on him in their monthly magazine. They were preparing a special ‘Harper’s Illustrated Library Edition’ of his works, with each novel priced at $1.50 and containing a piece in Wilkie’s hand (reproduced in facsimile) which read, ‘I gratefully dedicate this collected edition of my works to The American People. Wilkie Collins September 1873.’ He created a slight problem when he asked specifically for dry champagne at a dinner hosted by one of the partners, Joseph W. Harper Jr, on 22nd Street. He claimed he preferred it because it was better for his gout. However, his request was not easy to fulfil as Americans usually drank sweet champagne.
Before embarking on any reading, Wilkie travelled to Pennsylvania to spend a few days with Fechter on his 56-acre farm at Quakertown in Bucks County. As was only too clear, Fechter was now but a shadow of his former self. His theatrical ventures in the United States had flopped, and he was drinking heavily. He had been forced to deny persistent rumours of an affair with his long-term leading lady Carlotta Leclercq. More seriously, the newspapers were beginning to refer to his relationship with a married Philadelphia actress called Lizzie Price, whose husband was threatening legal action. However, Fechter was not the sort of person to let such matters obstruct him. He had recently knocked down the fences around his property, saying that a gentleman did not need them. After Price obtained a divorce the following year, Fechter would marry her bigamously. His problems were not helped by his being in greater financial difficulties than usual, a result not only of the mortgage he took out to buy his $10,000 property, but of the economic downturn that was beginning to hit the country following the recent collapse of the Jay Cooke banking house in Philadelphia only thirty miles south of Quakertown. Cooke had failed to raise enough capital to fund the expansion of the Northern Pacific Railway. As a result, the New York Stock Exchange was closed for over a week, and Wilkie now witnessed some of the ensuing panic.
In this uneasy atmosphere, he tried to relax before his first reading in Albany the following week. En route northwards from New York City, he stopped to see his friend John Bigelow, the former American ambassador to France, who lived at a grand house, The Squirrels, at Highland Falls on the Hudson River. While in Europe, Bigelow had lobbied France and Britain to support the Confederacy. Wilkie had met him in Paris and particularly liked his pretty wife Jane. On this occasion Wilkie sang for his supper with the latest literary gossip from England. He revealed that he still had many letters from Dickens, but had been unable to agree terms with Forster for their use in his biography. One of these letters apparently set out Dickens’s reasons for leaving his wife. Bigelow recalled how ‘Collins enjoyed his dinner, but his brandy after it, yet more so.’465
Wilkie continued his journey to Albany by steamboat for the first leg of his tour. Despite advance publicity, his reception was generally modest, in sharp contrast to the regular standing ovations experienced by Dickens. His initial reading of ‘The Dream Woman’, a reworking of his creepy 1855 story ‘The Ostler’,466 went well enough, but the audience at the Opera House in nearby Troy a couple of days later was below expectations. The Troy Daily Press judged that Wilkie was ‘no actor, and only the thrilling nature of the story redeemed his reading from dullness’.467 He found the same underwhelming response in Utica and Syracuse, where the local Daily Courier opined that he was ‘unquestionably a failure’468 as a reader. Already it was clear that he was out of his depth, and he was not helped by the Amercan Literary Bureau, which was charging too much for his tickets. He decided to skip his scheduled appearance in Rochester and return to Manhattan. The official explanation was that he was suffering from ‘nervous prostration and a severe cold’,469 which were affecting his voice.
One bonus was that while in Troy he was given a pamphlet called ‘The Trial, Confessions and Conviction of Jesse and Stephen Boorn’, detailing a legal scandal in 1812 when a man who had apparently been murdered and disposed of was found alive and well. This gave Wilkie an idea for a story, which he worked on in idle moments during his travels. This grew into ‘John Jago’s Ghost’, which told an identifiable version of this true tale through the eyes of an Englishman who was visiting America after being advised by his doctor to take some rest and enjoy the sea air of the Atlantic. It was ready for publication at the end of the year in the New York Fireside Companion and in Britain in the short-lived penny weekly Home Journal. It later appeared in book form in the United States with the deliberately chilling title of The Dead Alive, which also happened to be a chapter heading in The New Magdalen.
Undeterred by an inauspicious start to his tour, Wilkie decided to consolidate by spending most of the next two months in New York, with sorties to Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore and Washington. Of these last two cities, Wilkie ‘greatly preferred Baltimore. The prodigious streets and “avenues” at Washington depressed me indescribably – and I never could get over the idea that the enormous cupola of the Capitol was slowly squeezing the weak and attenuated building underneath into the earth from which it had feebly risen.’470 His attitude may have been coloured by the inebriated congressman in Washington who insisted on calling him ‘Milky’ and saying how much he liked his books, including The Lay of the Last Minstrel, which was by Walter Scott.
In Boston he was happy to renew his acquaintance with Frederick Lehmann’s cousin, Sebastian Benzon Schlesinger, whom he had met in London at the start of the decade. Schlesinger was a cultivated composer who ac
ted as the local German Consul and earned his living at the family firm, the Vickers affiliate Naylor and Co. Wilkie had taken advantage of this connection to arrange for his godson Frank Ward (Charles’s son) to work there. When he asked if Frank could be spared to accompany him as his tour assistant, Schlesinger readily agreed.
Wilkie’s main reason for remaining in New York was that The New Magdalen opened at Augustin Daly’s Broadway Theatre on 10 November, with Carlotta Leclercq in the lead role of Mercy Merrick. He was keen to reinforce the idea that this was the official version of his text and anything else was pirated. The play, which had been touring the United States since before its London opening, went down well, even if some individuals still claimed to be outraged. A correspondent of the Daily Graphic in New York, for example, thought that ‘the author of The New Magdalen has opened a recruiting office for prostitutes471 and has made a direct attack on virtue and honesty. In the whole range of English dramatic literature, there is not a drama so vicious in its teaching, so shameless in its infamous purpose as The New Magdalen.’
New Yorkers, suffering from the financial downturn, had little appetite for perceived salaciousness. After a relatively short run, the play was replaced before Christmas by The Woman in White, with Wybert Reeve now in New York and playing the role of Count Fosco. This standby received good notices, but it again failed to capture the popular imagination and was closed after running for only two weeks.
Meanwhile, Wilkie’s readings continued to meet with a muted reaction. The New York Herald reported on his appearance at the Association Hall, ‘Some of the audience went to sleep,472 some rose and left the hall, and expressions of disappointment were numerous. Our opinion is that Mr Collins has made two mistakes. One consists in reading a piece of trash . . . and the other in having assumed that his vast and deserved success as a novelist was sufficient to waft him triumphantly through an enterprise demanding qualities of the very opposite to those he is universally admitted to possess.’ At least there was a ready escape route: he decided not to renew his contract with Brelsford at the American Literary Bureau and instead put himself in the hands of the rival Boston Lyceum Bureau, headed by James Redpath, a former journalist from Scotland.
At some stage he sat for publicity pictures taken by the photographer Napoleon Sarony, who worked out of a studio on Broadway. The business arrangement is not clear since the flamboyant Sarony liked to pay a fee to his celebrity sitters and then recoup his costs by retaining and exploiting the copyright. He noticed that Wilkie adopted a particular expression when talking about his work, especially The Woman in White, and endeavoured to capture it. Finding they shared an interest in mildly pornographic pictures of women (one of Sarony’s sidelines), the two men became firm friends. Until his death, Wilkie would regard Sarony’s images of him looking thoughtful (sometimes wearing a fur coat) as the best ever taken of him.
Before Christmas, Wilkie left on the next lengthy stage of his tour, which took him (and Frank Ward) by rail to Canada and then, via various cities, westwards to Chicago. He was duly feted by his publishers Hunter, Rose in Toronto. In Buffalo on 6 January 1874, he sent an upbeat letter to the actor Frank Archer, who was keeping him informed about the London theatre scene, declaring that his readings were ‘getting on famously’,473 ‘the one drawback’ being that he could not fulfil enough engagements to make decent money, without putting his health at risk. ‘Everywhere there is the same anxiety to see and hear me, but I cannot endure the double fatigue of railway travelling and reading on the same day. Thus three or four days a week are lost days (in the matter of money), but gained days (in the matter of health), and I have suffered enough to make health my first consideration.’
For the time being he struggled on. On 8 January, he celebrated his fiftieth birthday in Cleveland, on the southern shore of Lake Erie, but there is no record of any great festivities. After performances in Toledo and Detroit, he and Ward then made a gruelling overnight journey to Chicago, where they arrived on the morning of 16 January and stayed in the luxury Sherman Hotel. At his reading of ‘The Dream Woman’ in the brand-new Music Hall, only half the 1,700 seats were filled.
At this stage, as he told Fred Lehmann, he was still contemplating ‘going “out West” from this – and I may get as far as the Mormons’,474 a sect whose polygamous beliefs continued, for obvious personal reasons, to fascinate him. A few years earlier he had been a guest at a dinner party with the radical politician Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, who had just published a book called Greater Britain, about his travels in America. This was partly a manifesto for the unity of the English-speaking peoples, but also a creditable account of the places he had visited, including Salt Lake City, the Mormon headquarters in Utah, a topic he discussed with Wilkie. Dilke had travelled there with Wilkie’s friend William Hepworth Dixon, editor of the Athenaeum magazine (which Dilke owned). Wilkie and Dixon did not always see eye to eye, since the latter advocated the cult of athleticism, which Wilkie had pilloried in Man and Wife. But they generally got on well, and Dixon had called round at Gloucester Place as recently as late June. Dixon had written New America, a book about the journey he shared with Dilke, in which he focused more directly on the Mormons and their taste for polygamy. He had subsequently visited Oneida, a community in Connecticut, which practised pantagamy, where everyone was married to each other. Dixon had explored this topic further in his 1868 book Spiritual Wives, which examined the spiritual and sexual practices of the Somerset-based sect, the Abode of Love or the Agapemone.
If Wilkie had continued west, he might even have reached California, the home of his globe-trotting cousin Alexander Gray, whose mother Catherine (Wilkie’s aunt) still worked as an artist in London, though his father John Westcott Gray had long since decamped to Thun in Switzerland, where he was more interested in fundamentalist Christianity than painting.
But Wilkie felt exhausted by the hardships he had experienced in American trains rolling across landscapes ‘as flat, as monotonous,475 and as uninteresting to the traveller, as any that the earth can show’. As he wrote to Sebastian Schlesinger from Chicago on 17 January, ‘I feel the “sleeping car” in the “small of my back”, and in the drums of my ears at this moment.’476
He later recalled an incident on this trip when, ‘after two days and a night’s travelling, I was so utterly worn out that I asked the landlord of the hotel if he had any very dry champagne . . . I drank the whole of it, and informed him that although it was only noon, I was going at once to bed, and all visitors were to be told that I might possibly not get up for a week. I heard afterwards that after 24 hours some callers were allowed to come up and peep in the door, which I had not blocked; but all they saw was Mr Collins still fast asleep.’477
Aside from a touch of rheumatism while at Niagara Falls, Wilkie’s health held up well. He showed no signs of gout and, if he was taking opium, he kept quiet about it. But he was exhausted and needed to reassess his plans. If he was looking for an excuse to curtail his trip, he could point to the economic downturn, which had led to factory closures and was affecting his audiences. But at this point, a more personal matter arose: Martha’s landlord was preparing to vacate the house in Marylebone Road and was offering Wilkie an opportunity to buy the lease. He counselled his mistress to seek advice from Tindell, whom he took the trouble to remind, ‘N.B. You remember our name – Mr and Mrs “Dawson”.’478
He had had high expectations of Chicago, a city which had captured his imagination when it was razed to the ground in the great fire of 1871 (after which he had contributed spontaneously to its rebuilding appeal). But he now told Jane Bigelow, ‘Don’t tell anybody – but the truth is I am not sorry to leave Chicago. The dull sameness of the great blocks of iron and brick overwhelms me. The whole city seems to be saying, “See how rich I am after the fire, and what a tremendous business I do!”’479
Back in Boston at the end of January, he was happy to relax with Sebastian Schlesinger and his wife Berthe, who lived at 79 Marlborough Road, on
e-time home of Richard Dana Jr, who had corresponded with Wilkie back in the 1840s. Wearing his businessman’s hat, Schlesinger arranged two $5,000 (or £1,000) life insurance policies (both underwritten by American companies) for his guest. Though Wilkie was required to pay a premium of over £70 per annum on each of them, he could at least reassure himself that Caroline and Martha, the ultimate recipients of the policies, would be financially secure if anything should happen to him.
The following month he was overwhelmed when the cream of New England’s intelligentsia480 congregated at the St James Hotel in Boston for a dinner in his honour. Among those present were Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain). Wilkie no doubt enjoyed hearing the literary critic Edwin Whipple proclaim that there was now a region of the imagination called ‘Collins’s land’ and that ‘one would as soon doubt of the reality and veracity of Robinson Crusoe as some of the beings’ Wilkie had created. The evening concluded with a toast in verse by Wendell Holmes, which played on the artist and poet commemorated in Wilkie’s name:
And so his double name comes true,
They christened better than they knew,
And Art proclaims him twice her son,
Painter and poet, both in one!
Wilkie had made arrangements to return home on the Cunard steamship the Parthia out of Boston on 7 March. But first he travelled to New York to say his farewells (to Fechter among others) and to carry out a short journey that was important to him. Three days before his departure, he slipped away to visit a religious community at Wallingford in Connecticut.481 He had been hoping to follow Hepworth Dixon to Oneida, but that group had merged with the one at Wallingford. Known as Perfectionists, from their belief in the possibility of the perfect life on earth, the members of this communistic, polygamous, professedly Christian society continued to enjoy remarkable sexual freedom, with the elders encouraged to initiate young boys and girls into the pleasures of lovemaking. One member later wrote about Wilkie’s three-hour visit: ‘Mr Collins thought our system of communism the most perfect democracy in existence . . . He thought there is a great need of social reform in England, and said that underneath the surface of society there is a great deal of seething and fermentation which is sure to break out at last, in some form or other. He had no doubt that a Community such as ours would not be tolerated in England, and mentioned the Agapemone as a case in point.’482
Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation Page 33
