FN
Charlotte Mary Yonge
MRT
The Heir of Redclyffe
Biog
ODNB (Elisabeth Jay)
52. Wilkie Collins 1824–1889
Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry, make ’em wait. The serialist’s motto, traditionally attributed to Collins
Born in London, he was the eldest son of William Collins, the landscape painter and Royal Academician, and named after his father’s friend and fellow artist, Sir David Wilkie. The Collins household was bohemian and as a boy Wilkie spent some years with his father in Italy (where he claimed to have lost his virginity at an alarmingly young age) and was educated privately. In 1841, he was articled to work in the establishment of a London tea merchant. The law, it was felt, offered a profession in which a man could write on the side, and in 1846 he entered Lincoln’s Inn, and was called to the Bar in 1851, but never practised. His handwriting, however, benefited from his pupillage – Collins’s manuscripts, most of which have survived, are among the most legible of the period; and stylistically the most carefully corrected. He had, in intervals from his scrivening, been writing a romance of ancient Rome, Antonina: or, The fall of Rome, which was published in 1850. Although it was successful, not least for its gothic descriptions of torture, Collins never wrote another historical novel. His fiction would be as up-to-the-minute as that week’s issue of the Police Gazette – which, indeed, supplied some of the details and plot matter of his later ‘sensation’ stories.
Collins’s career took off with ‘A Story of Modern Life’, the sexually superheated melodrama Basil (1852). In the Preface, Collins enunciated his doctrine that ‘the Novel and the Play are twin-sisters in the family of Fiction’. This was the essence of his high-impact style – drawn, it is plausibly assumed, from the popular newspapers of the day. To paraphrase Henry James, the imperative guiding his fiction was ‘melodramatise it! melodramatise it!’ In 1851, Collins became acquainted with Dickens. Both men had a passion for drama and for discreet adventuring in Paris. Their minds ran together happily and they collaborated on amateur theatricals. Among higher things, such as generating proceeds for good causes, the activity sanctioned unchaperoned access to young ladies and ‘dressing rooms’. One of the young ladies, Ellen Ternan, would become Dickens’s ‘invisible’ mistress. There may well have been some invisible skeletons of the same kind in Wilkie’s closet.
Collins soon began contributing short stories and non-fiction to Dickens’s weekly magazine, Household Words. His first contribution, the horror story, ‘A Terribly Strange Bed’ (1852) – the canopy of the strange bed descends, by silent screw mechanism, to smother the sleeper – is widely anthologised, even more widely imitated, and shows the clear influence of Poe. Collins went on to publish the full-length mystery novels Hide and Seek (1854) and The Dead Secret (1857). Both used physical handicap in their plots (deaf-and-dumbness in the first; blindness in the second).
In 1856, Collins had been struck at a court hearing, dealing with the Rugeley poisoner, William Palmer, by the narrative possibilities of witnesses’ testimony in the box. The reportage technique was brilliantly employed in the narrative of The Woman in White (1860). This novel made Collins’s name and largely inspired the 1860s vogue for so-called ‘sensation’ fiction. He followed up with No Name (1862), a work which attacked the British laws of inheritance. The Cornhill Magazine paid a whopping £5,000 for Collins’s next work, Armadale (1866). Only Dickens, he exulted to his mother, had been paid so much.
In 1868, he published The Moonstone, which is plausibly regarded as the first detective story proper in English. By this period, Collins’s health was poor and he was chronically self-overdosed with laudanum to relieve the pain of his rheumatic gout. His eyes, one acquaintance reported, were like ‘bags of blood’. He claimed to have written portions of The Moonstone in a condition of authorial somnambulism. Fame brought with it a new sense of public responsibility. Man and Wife (1870) heralds an overtly propagandistic phase of Collins’s career. Not all his readers welcomed it. ‘What brought Wilkie’s genius nigh perdition?’ asked the poet Swinburne, answering, rhymingly, ‘some demon whispered “Wilkie, have a mission”.’ A ‘fiction founded on facts’, Man and Wife protests against the British marriage laws. Poor Miss Finch (1872) has another plot drawing on the author’s obsessive interest in blindness. The heroine has her sight restored, but actually desires the loss of it again. An improbable sub-plot, involving her future husband’s turning blue, is latched onto this paradox.
Collins continued to propagandise in The New Magdalen (1873), whose heroine, Mercy Merrick, is a fallen woman who goes as a nurse to the Franco-Prussian War, where she is shot and left for dead. Mercy recovers and changes identities with another, supposedly dead woman, Grace Roseberry, leading to inevitable complications and final redemption at the hands of an idealistic clergyman. The novel was successfully dramatised, as were many of Collins’s later works. His reputation rose extraordinarily high in the 1870s, although the writing showed clear signs of fraying. One looks in vain for anything quite as thrilling as the opening scene of The Woman in White in which the woman herself (spectral or actual?) appears to an electrified Walter Hartright:
I had now arrived at that particular point of my walk where four roads met – the road to Hampstead, along which I had returned, the road to Finchley, the road to West End, and the road back to London. I had mechanically turned in this latter direction, and was strolling along the lonely high-road – idly wondering, I remember, what the Cumberland young ladies would look like – when, in one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me.
I turned on the instant, with my fingers tightening round the handle of my stick.
There, in the middle of the broad bright high-road – there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven – stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments, her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her.
Dickens, who serialised the story in his magazine, thought this one of the two best scenes in English fiction. He did not specify what the other was. In 1871 Collins’s appeal widened with a very successful stage version of The Woman in White, and in 1873, he made an applauded reading tour of America. In 1875, Chatto reissued his fiction in cheap half-crown form with great sales success.
Occultism fascinated Collins towards the end of his life and The Two Destinies (1876) deals with telepathy between childhood friends. The Fallen Leaves (1879), is the story of a reformed prostitute (an heiress, as it emerges) and a socialist, Amelius, who courageously marries her. It is generally regarded as Collins’s worst novel – although, like other of his ‘failures’, it demonstrates the remarkable restlessness of his genius. Among his later fiction, Heart and Science (1883) caused some stir with its full-blooded propaganda against vivisection, aided by some powerful descriptions of animal surgery.
Despite appalling health, Collins’s writing career of forty years is one of the longest and most productive in Victorian popular fiction. His sexual life was, by Victorian standards, irregular, verging on criminal. In the mid-1850s he took up with Caroline Graves (an original for Anne Catherick in The Woman in White). From 1868, he also lived with the lower born Martha Rudd, who bore him three children. His estate was divided between the two women. He decreed, however, that his corpse should lie alongside Caroline.
FN
William Wilkie Collins
MRT
The Woman in White
Biog
C. Peters, The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins (1991)
53. R. M. Ballantyne 1825–1894
If there is any boy or man who loves to be melancholy and morose, and who cannot enter with kindly sympathy into the regions of fun, let me seriously advise him to shut my book and put it away. It is not meant for him. Preface to The Cora
l Island
The eighth of nine children, Ballantyne was born in Kelso, near Edinburgh, where his family’s fortunes were in the process of being ruined in the fallout of Sir Walter Scott’s bankruptcy. His uncle, James, had been the great novelist’s printer and his father a lifelong comrade of the ‘Great Unknown’. Ballantyne had little education – but, since it was Edinburgh, and he came from a bookish family, that little rendered him as literate, probably, as a modern Ph.D. graduate. Importantly, he could write legibly and figure accurately and thereby earn a living. Aged sixteen, he shipped out as an apprentice clerk in the Hudson’s Bay Company, at £20 annual salary. The prospect, if not the salary, filled him with ‘ecstatic joy’. Letters home to his mother, printed in the papers as ‘Everyday Life in the Wilds of North America’, caught the attention of the senior Scottish publisher, William Nelson.
It would, however, be some time before young ‘Bob’ could devote himself to literature. His father died in 1847 and he returned to Scotland to support the teeming family – including that heaviest of Victorian burdens, five unmarried sisters, and he the only breadwinner. He clerked resourcefully in the newly founded railway companies and – a sharp young man – went on to a senior position in a paper factory. He could have been a captain of industry, but in 1856 Nelson invited him to write a boys’ book, based on his experiences in the frozen north. Before doing so, Ballantyne ‘asked guidance from God’. The Almighty gave him the go-ahead (his family were not at all keen) and there duly appeared The Young Fur-Traders. It was a hit. In 1858, still only thirty-two, he produced three of his finest works, Ungava, A Tale of Esquimeaux Land; The Coral Island; and Martin Rattler, or a Boy’s Adventures in the Forests of Brazil. Some sixty books streamed from his inexhaustible pen over the next decades. One reason for the quantity was that his publisher, the canny Nelson, paid a measly £60 for the entire copyright of each of Ballantyne’s novels – even the most popular. And the most popular of all was the adventures of Jack Martin, Ralph Rover and Peterkin Gay, the comic runt of the trio, on their coral island where they discover coconut lemonade (a geographical solecism), fish, make fire by rubbing sticks together, narrowly escape being eaten by sharks and cannibals, and have some close shaves with pirates whom, with the aid of the Royal Navy, they slaughter en masse. All very jolly.
Ballantyne had more creative ability than the formulaic nature of his narratives suggests. He could, for example, illustrate his boys’ books to professional standards. But why only boys’ books? His biographer discerns hypertrophy of the Presbyterian sensibility. Ballantyne ‘was acutely embarrassed by having to mention sex in any form.’ His heroes could, as in The Gorilla Hunters (1861), blast forty luckless beasts for the sheer fun of blasting – but were jelly in the face of a petticoat.
Ballantyne was a self-publiciser of genius. He specialised in lectures which he would open by stalking on stage in buckskin and shooting a stuffed eagle to get his audience warmed up. Or, if the subject were shipwreck, a rescue rocket would be fired to get things going. He particularly prided himself on his Esquimeaux ‘canoe songs’, which he would introduce, warblingly, as a musical interlude. ‘Research’ led him to disguise himself as an Arab in the native quarter of Algiers in order to write The Pirate City (1874). He submersed himself with nearly fatal results in a diving suit, Under the Waves (1876); and marooned himself in a lighthouse in preparation for other tales. He had as much fun, one suspects, writing his stories as generations of (mainly) schoolboys had reading the things.
He married in 1866. His wife Jane (‘Jeanie’) Dickson Grant was chosen carefully, with his mother’s help, from the respectable class of Edinburgh womanhood. Twenty years his junior, she bore her husband four children. Increasingly religious in later life, Ballantyne allied himself with the period’s good causes, notably the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, and laboured tirelessly to foster the cult of Victorian manliness in young men. He despised ‘muffs’ – the class, alas, from which most novelists are drawn. Like Gladstone, he was prone to cruise the midnight streets, with the pious aim of saving young ladies from sin. He had more success with lifeboats.
His last novel was The Walrus Hunters (1893) – one of the few species his fiction had hitherto spared. Kurtz’s ‘exterminate the brutes’ could have been taken as Ballantyne’s motto. Indirectly, he was responsible for William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, an inversion of The Coral Island for a later, less optimistic era, with a less hopeful view of children’s nature and a more reverent attitude to the animal kingdom. He died in Rome, where he had gone to mend his failing health, having suffered from Menière’s disease for some years (his biographer hints that syphilis may have been a contributory factor). Harrow School for boys, in whose vicinity he had lived, raised £600 from their pocket money for a monument to his memory.
FN
Robert Michael Ballantyne
MRT
The Coral Island
Biog
E. Quayle, Ballantyne the Brave: A Victorian writer and his family (1967)
54. Mary J. Holmes 1825–1907
Tempest, sunshine and bestsellers.
Mary Hawes was born in Brookfield, Massachusetts, and brought up in New England, but otherwise little is known of her early life. Under the tutelage of her mother, Fanny Hawes, Mary is recorded as intellectually precocious and was teaching at school at thirteen (the death of her father may have forced this child labour). Her first published short story followed two years later.
In 1844 she married Daniel Holmes, just out of Yale. The couple settled in Brockport, New York. They both taught for a while before he found work as a lawyer. There were no children to the marriage but, over the coming years, considerable wealth. Holmes received up to $6,000 for the serial rights of her stories, allowing her ample time to write and travel extensively. It is estimated that some two million copies of her fiction were sold during her lifetime. Her publisher, the Boston house of Appleton, treated her well, in the manner of employers in the so-called ‘gilded age’ of the American book trade.
Holmes’s career was launched spectacularly on the wave of the so-called ‘feminised fifties’, a decade in which women writers came into their own and dominated American fiction. Her first novel, Tempest and Sunshine (1854), is also her best known. It was never out of print during her lifetime, and for decades after. Subtitled a ‘Life in Kentucky’, the story opens with a young abolitionist New Yorker, Richard Wilmot, arriving in the South to take up work in a local school. He makes the acquaintance of a rich, good-hearted but rough-mannered plantation owner, Mr John Middleton, who has two daughters, both of whom are possessed of huge dowries ($100,000 apiece) to lure prospective fortune-hunting husbands. The older (seventeen), Julia, is dark and passionate; her nickname is ‘Tempest’. The younger (fifteen), Fanny, is golden-haired and sweet-natured; her nickname is ‘Sunshine’. Morally the sisters are opposites: ‘the angel of innocence spread his wing over the yellow locks of the one, while a serpent lay coiled in the dark tresses of the other.’
Unusually for a writer with a New England (home of abolition) background, Holmes offers an idyllic view of the South and a tolerant, anti-Harriet Beecher Stowe view of slavery. Most of the ‘Africans’ who appear in the narrative are comic buffoons – wholly happy with their lot. Wilmot proposes to the beautiful Julia, and is accepted. But later, after she has encountered a more dashing Yale-educated doctor, Lacey, she cruelly jilts Wilmot. As he lies dying, she refuses to visit his deathbed with the cruel remark: ‘Mr Wilmot is nothing to me.’ The plot becomes, if possible, even more melodramatic. Fanny, who secretly loved Wilmot, is virtuously appalled. Dr Lacey falls in love with the less dashing Fanny, who has turned down a millionaire, Frank Cameron, and proposes to her. Julia is furious and forges letters to break the engagement. Julia then entraps Lacey into marriage, but the ceremony is interrupted with evidence of her misdoings (echoes of Jane Eyre). ‘I am guilty,’ she publicly confesses and then disappears; her clothes are discovered by the river and she is presume
d drowned. Lacey returns to his faithful ‘Sunshine’. In a sensational climax (which Wilkie Collins evidently adapted for The Woman in White, five years later), Fanny meets a gaunt veiled woman at the grave of her sister Julia. It is Julia herself, ‘a living repentant woman’. The sisters are reconciled.
Tempest and Sunshine was followed by another bestseller with a racial theme, again set on a southern plantation, Lena Rivers (1856). A string of other novels followed, all popular, though none as popular as her first hit. The Civil War shrank the large constituency of women readers which she had established early in her career in the South. One can, incidentally, detect clear lines of influence in Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Holmes is recorded as having no hobbies – other than foreign travel (reflected in her later fiction). She was, through life, a devoted Sunday school teacher. She died at the age of eighty-two in Brockport.
FN
Mary Jane Holmes (née Hawes)
MRT
Tempest and Sunshine; or, Life in Kentucky
Biog
ANB (JoAnn E. Castagna)
55. Dinah Craik 1826–1887
Oftentimes, living is harder than dying. From The Ogilvies
Dinah Mulock was born at Stoke-on-Trent, the eldest child of a nonconformist Irish clergyman father. Precociously clever and literary, she was able to help her mother teach at school at the age of thirteen. An inheritance enabled the Mulocks to move to London in 1839. In 1844, she and her mother separated from Thomas Mulock, but a year later Mrs Mulock died. Thereafter, Dinah took on responsibility for the financial support of her family. This situation is projected on to the early career of her most famous character, John Halifax. She began her authorial career writing stories for children and contrived to scrape a genteel living for herself and her dependants, aided with another small inheritance from her mother’s family.
Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives Page 23
