This not only confirms Wilkie’s familiarity with the Agapemone but shows that, as a persistent critic of formal matrimony, he was fascinated by the practice of polygamy. At least his visit to Wallingford made up for his missing the chance to observe the practices of the Mormons in Utah. He would draw on it to describe Amelius Goldenheart’s utopian community in his 1879 novel The Fallen Leaves.
Shortly after returning to London, Wilkie was walking in Hyde Park when he ran into Lucy Bethia Walford, a well-connected Scottish novelist who wrote the sort of frothy books that were popular with Mudie’s library customers but are forgotten today. She and a friend had been visiting Holman Hunt and they invited Wilkie to dinner. He proved surprisingly eager to accept, insisting that they should make it that same evening since he was just back from America, had seen no one, and had nowhere else to go. Over dinner, he talked inconsequentially about having been the centre of journalistic attention and how his health had benefited from the dry climate, before concluding with a typical piece of polite obfuscation, ‘A kinder, warmer-hearted set of people surely does not exist, only their ways are queer.’483
One reason Wilkie had not seen anyone was that his immediate priority was to sort out accommodation for Martha and their two children. Any idea of buying the lease on the house in Marylebone Road had been abandoned. Instead, they moved a few hundred yards to 10 Taunton Place, tucked away off the northernmost end of Gloucester Place. He would describe a similarly situated house in The Fallen Leaves later in the decade – a cottage ‘in a by-road, just outside’ Regent’s Park, where the do-gooding Amelius Goldenheart lived with Simple Sally, the teenage prostitute he found on the street.
Wilkie had earned £2,500 from his American trip,484 which was nothing like the £19,000 Dickens brought back from his venture across the Atlantic. It was, however, a tidy sum for six months’ work, and he comforted himself with the thought that he could have made much more if he had been prepared to speak every night, but it would have been at the expense of his health. As it was, it did not take long for his old afflictions to creep back. Before a month was out, he was complaining, ‘My native climate has already made me so “bilious” that I can hardly see. My eyes are yellow, and my head aches.’485
As he eased himself back into London life, taking in the Bancrofts’ production of a favourite play, Sheridan’s School for Scandal, at the Prince of Wales Theatre, his solution for his constitutional problems was a well-tried one – a redoubling of his work effort. Over the next few months he packaged for Bentley a selection of his readings from America, including a lengthy new adaptation of The Frozen Deep that he had tried out on his audiences towards the end of his tour. He also channelled his energies into a new novel, The Law and the Lady, which indicated how difficult it was for him to wrench himself from his roots, since it bore many hallmarks from his earlier sensation fiction as it relentlessly set about unravelling secrets and allowing the truth about marriages, identities, madness and alleged murder to emerge.
Wilkie marked out his ground by starting his story with the words from the marriage service: ‘For after this manner in the old time the holy women also who trusted in God adorned themselves, being in subjection unto their own husbands; even as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord; whose daughters ye are as long as ye do well, and are not afraid with any amazement.’ This immediately set the book up as another variation on his fascination with the institution of matrimony, but this time as a vehicle to subvert the patriarchal nature of traditional marriage.
The wedding in question is ostensibly between Eustace and Valeria Woodville, but little about it is right; nobody seems to be who he or she is supposed to be. While on honeymoon in Ramsgate, Valeria discovers that her husband’s surname is really Macallan. But she remains in the dark about the significance of this until, donning the mantle of a sleuth, she visits his old friend, the libidinous Major Fitz-David, who claims that he is honour-bound not to reveal anything, but allows her to search his rooms for further information. She finds a photograph of Eustace holding hands with another woman, inscribed to the Major from ‘his friends S. and E. M.’ She then alights on an account of a trial in which Eustace Macallan was accused of poisoning his first wife, Sara, with arsenic. He was set free, but only after the ambiguous Scottish verdict of ‘not proven’. The tenacious Valeria then determines to overturn this judgement and prove her husband’s innocence. She pursues various contradictory leads which take her inter alios to another of Eustace’s friends, the comic-grotesque figure of Miserrimus Dexter, ‘a mixture of a tiger and a monkey’, who, though crippled, half-mad and confined to a wheel-chair, helps her solve the mystery.
Describing herself as ‘capricious, idle, inquisitive’, Valeria is another self-motivated sensation heroine, who refuses to play the subservient wife and turns herself into a detective. Her husband is ineffectual by comparison as she works to restore his good name and, by legitimising her marriage, her name too. Though the narrative moves sequentially, she often seems to operate in a hall of mirrors, emphasised by the recurring image of the looking glass. The book’s dedication to Wilkie’s French actor friend Regnier underlines the theatrical dimension. But the rendering takes it to another level, as if he is sharing a fantastical joke. In an enigmatic preface he asks his readers to ‘bear in mind certain established truths’, the first being ‘that the actions of human beings are not invariably governed by the laws of pure reason’. In his world of illusions, an outsider, such as Ezra Jennings in The Moonstone, often possesses the psychic faculties to uncover the truth. Dexter is no Jennings, or rather his insights come from a different place in the spectrum of human experience (where eccentricity moves into madness), but Valeria admits that he ‘openly expresses . . . thoughts and feelings which most of us are ashamed of as weaknesses, and which we keep to ourselves accordingly’.
Wilkie again drew on the trial of Madeleine Smith, the middle-class Glaswegian whose guilt was ‘not proven’ in 1857 when she was accused of using arsenic to poison her former lover. Wilkie asked Tindell for details of Smith’s case, which he supplemented with information from his copy of John Hill Burton’s Narratives from Criminal Trials in Scotland. While he continued to be exercised by the quirks of the legal system, his main target was the state of matrimony and its attendant hypocrisies.
In the process, he peppered his text with autobiographical snippets – the honeymoon in the ‘favourite watering place’ of Ramsgate, the disapproving mother-in-law, Fitz-David’s address off Portman Square (around the corner from Wilkie’s house), and Eustace himself is something of a self-portrait, with his slight impediment, and beard streaked with grey. The womanising Fitz-David shows another side of Wilkie, torn between the two types of women represented in fine brass reproductions in his house – the Venus de Milo and the Venus Callipyge, or the cool beauty of Caroline and the more overtly physical attractions of Martha. One of Fitz-David’s girlfriends comes from the same background as Martha: ‘Would you believe it,’ he crows, ‘I met with her at the railway station. She was behind the counter in a refreshment-room, poor innocent, rinsing wine-glasses, and singing over her work.’
In June 1874, Wilkie arranged for this promising new story to be serialised in the Graphic, but he was uncertain where and how it should be published in volume form. He remained as keen as ever for his books to circulate widely among ‘the unknown public’, the mass readership he had identified in his 1858 article for Household Words. But the books market was still dominated by Mudie’s and the circulating libraries with their insatiable demand for expensive three-volume editions for their customers. Smith, Elder tried to steer him towards cheap two-shilling editions, at least after Mudie’s had had their way. But George Bentley, who had a significant financial interest in Mudie’s following its flotation in 1864, waged a subtle campaign to lure Wilkie from Smith’s clutches. Focusing initially on The Woman in White, he argued that Wilkie would profit more from a six-shilling edition than from anything Smith could put out at a cheaper pr
ice, and to gild the lily he pointed to the phenomenal sales Mrs Henry Wood had enjoyed at that price. By the end of the decade, her most successful title, East Lynne, would have sold 85,000 copies in Bentley’s six-shilling uniform edition. Wilkie was hugely impressed and not a little jealous to learn of the success of his female competitor, whom he often enlisted as an ally in his campaign on theatre copyright.
Matters took a new turn in August when he received an unsolicited offer for his new book from Andrew Chatto, who had recently taken the helm of a new publishing house, Chatto & Windus. Chatto proposed a sum of £1,000 for a seven-year licence on The Law and the Lady, with the copyright remaining with Wilkie. However, Chatto was not prepared to allow any edition under the price of two shillings and sixpence for the duration of that period. This was attractive since Smith aimed to price his cheap editions well below that figure. When the competitive Chatto returned with a further offer of £2,000 for a similar seven-year licence on all the back titles, plus a promise to bring them out in a uniform edition, Wilkie was hooked. George Bentley graciously ceded his corner. He and Wilkie remained on good terms, but Smith felt aggrieved and fought to keep control of No Name, After Dark and Armadale, as indeed was his right. Aside from the collection The Frozen Deep and Other Stories and A Rogue’s Life, which were committed to Bentley, all Wilkie’s titles, new and old, were published thereafter by Chatto & Windus. (The exception was the three titles retained by Smith, which went to Chatto in 1890 following Wilkie’s death.) In the end, Chatto did not publish the six-shilling editions Wilkie wanted. At the request of the circulating libraries, his books were still first presented in three-volume editions retailing at a guinea and a half, followed by a series of editions at around two shillings.
In between these negotiations, Wilkie took time off to support Ted (as he now called him) Pigott’s candidacy for the position of Examiner of Plays (effectively the official theatre censor under the Lord Chamberlain), following the retirement of William Bodham Donne. His friend had recently failed to land the job of Secretary of the Royal Academy, despite Wilkie lobbying Millais and others. So Pigott went to considerable lengths to produce a thirty-page booklet of testimonials,486 which he sent to interested parties. He included letters of support from influential friends such as Jean-Sylvain Van de Weyer, Belgium’s well-read Minister (or Ambassador) to Britain, who was respected at Buckingham Palace, as well as from writers such as Anthony Trollope, G.H. Lewes and, of course, Wilkie. This time Pigott proved successful and was appointed to the highly important post.
In early September, Wilkie took a short holiday in another of his old haunts, Boulogne, before returning for The Law and the Lady’s first outing in serial form in the Graphic on 26 September. He wrote another story, ‘A Fatal Fortune’,487 which appeared in All the Year Round in October, tilting at two of his favourite targets – the marriage laws and private asylums. This joined ‘The Dream Woman’ and the title story in the composite volume The Frozen Deep and Other Stories, which appeared from Bentley in November.
There was drama in early October when the Avenue Road house of the Clows, Caroline’s ex-parents-in-law, was badly damaged following a huge explosion on a barge488 passing through the Regent’s Canal en route to the nearby Albany Street Barracks. This marked the start of a new round of terrorist alarm when the Fenians were wrongly blamed for the outrage and troops were called in to ensure the safety of the animals in the zoo. According to one newspaper report, the walls, windows and doors were all destroyed, but Mr and Mrs Clow ‘scrambled, half dazed, but without injury, from the bed, and made their escape in the wind and rain in their night clothes to the stable’. Joseph Clow later sat on a committee looking into questions of liability relating to the accident.
Wilkie now had his own domestic drama to deal with. On Christmas Day 1874, Martha presented him with what he called ‘a Christmas Box, in the shape of a big boy’.489 William Charles Collins Dawson was the first of his children to be officially registered, as was now required by law. The date of his birth suggests that he was conceived almost immediately after Wilkie returned from America. William’s arrival raised a not unprecedented dilemma for Wilkie. Should he spend Christmas Day at the bedside of the mother of his first-born son? Or was his place with his maîtresse-en-titre in Gloucester Place? It is not known how he resolved this, but it seems extraordinary that he failed to mention this addition to his family when he wrote to his friend Jane Bigelow a few days later. Aside from the frost and the fog, he noted that ‘there is really no news here’.490
18
TWO HOUSES, TWO FAMILIES
AFTER YEARS OF rootlessness, Wilkie had, at the start of 1875, not one but two fixed points in his universe – Gloucester Place, where he lived with Caroline and Harriet, and, within easy walking distance, Taunton Place, the home of Martha and what he was starting to call his morganatic family. At the former, his maîtresse-en-titre, who was now in her mid-forties, presided over his domestic life with steely exactitude and maintained him in as good a state of health as possible. At her side was her daughter who, as Wilkie’s acknowledged amanuensis, assisted with writing his letters and copying his manuscripts. Together they provided the support system any industrious writer might want. At Taunton Place, his buxom lover, who was not yet thirty, gave him children, sex and a different form of relaxation. It was an unequal set of relationships, given particular emphasis by the word ‘morganatic’, which implied social disparity between the parties. But somehow it worked, and the two women involved learned, albeit sometimes reluctantly, to live with each other’s presence.
Wilkie also hoped for stability in his professional affairs, having recently alighted on Andrew Chatto, who would serve as his publisher for the rest of his life. As he had begun to experience, English literature was entering a difficult twenty-year hiatus between the passing of the great mid-Victorian masters, such as Dickens and Thackeray, and the emergence of a new generation of single-volume storytellers, including Stevenson and Kipling. The old, once thriving market for serials in magazines, such as the Cornhill, had melted away, and it would take a while before a new mass readership created by the Education Act of 1870 would take its place.
The 1870s were proving to be a period of global economic downturn that led to renewed workers’ agitation, followed by an inevitable conservative reaction. On cue, in April 1874, Gladstone’s reforming Liberal Government was thrown out of office and Disraeli returned to power, keen to divert attention from domestic problems by expanding the Empire abroad.
As so often, Wilkie could see the ramifications for his profession. As he told George Smith at the start of the decade, ‘My own impression is that a very few years more will see a revolution in the publishing trade for which most of the publishers are unprepared . . . I don’t believe in the gigantic monopolies, which cripple free trade, lasting much longer. The Mudie monopoly and the W.H. Smith monopoly are anomalies in a commercial country.’491
At the time, Wilkie had been reassuring George Smith that he wanted to retain him as his publisher. But now he felt differently. Unlike Smith and Bentley, both second-generation bookmen, Andrew Chatto was an entrepreneurial one-man operator, whose favourite pastime was yachting, which endeared him to Wilkie. After the death of his former employer John Camden Hotten, a small publisher in Piccadilly, he teamed up with William E. Windus, a rich poet willing to act as sleeping partner in their new firm, Chatto & Windus. Chatto had recently shown his commercial instincts by issuing Thackerayana, a book of notes and sketches by the late William Makepeace Thackeray, which George Smith, of Smith, Elder, then went to court to prove it infringed his copyright. Chatto had to withdraw the book, which did nothing to improve relations, already soured by Wilkie’s defection, between the two publishers.
Meanwhile, Wilkie could enjoy a bird’s eye view of the wider domestic political scene. The 1874 general election had seen Frederick Lehmann wanting to give something back to society and so he had stood as a Liberal candidate for Middlesex, where he was defeate
d. Undeterred, he returned to the hustings three years later in Waterford in Ireland, where The Times described him as on the ‘left wing’ of his party and eager ‘to assist as far as possible in getting everything done a Munster peasant can desire’. Wilkie told Sebastian Schlesinger, ‘He seems to have a good chance of getting into Parliament this time, so far as I can learn.’492 But Lehmann again failed to win election. He was eventually returned to Parliament as MP for Evesham in a by-election in 1880. But his majority of just two votes was challenged and overturned.While Wilkie did not follow his friend in all his policies, such as in promoting denominational schools in Ireland, he shared his basic liberal instincts.
Wilkie started 1875 on the wrong foot when he became involved in a spat with the Graphic, which was serialising The Law and the Lady. He was annoyed that the paper’s editor, Arthur Locker, had seen fit to bowdlerise a section of his story where Miserrimus Dexter forcibly tried to kiss Valeria. A sign of uncertain times in publishing, Locker declared that he and his directors regarded this incident as an attempted rape (his word was ‘violation’) and, as such, unfit to appear in a family paper. When he added that they were also concerned to discover that Valeria was pregnant, it became clear that this was Wilkie’s real offence – to have suggested such an ordeal for a woman with child. After Locker tried to justify his censorship in a later issue of the Graphic, Wilkie enlisted the help of his friend Edmund Yates, who was now editing the gossipy weekly The World, to run an editorial piece detailing what had happened and then allow Wilkie to vent his spleen in a letter to the editor,493 which poked fun at Locker and his fellow directors ‘all simmering together in a moral miasma of their own dirty raising’. This revealed that the Graphic had reneged on an agreement Wilkie had cannily inserted in his contract, giving him ultimate copy approval for anything that went into the paper under his name.
Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation Page 34
