Armadale

by Wilkie Collins

  If Lydia is the most interesting creation in the novel, Ozias Midwinter runs her close. He seems to have been initially conceived as a deliberate contradiction to elements in Thackeray’s novel Philip, which ran in the Cornhill Magazine a couple of years before (1861–2). Philip sets up a tendentious opposition between the manly, Anglo-Saxon, blue-eyed, hearty hero of the title and his odious rival, the mulatto, Captain Grenville Woolcomb. Woolcomb (who is West Indian by origin) is sexually lascivious, rich, degenerate and corrupt. He steals the hero’s intended wife and (black devil that he is) abuses her unspeakably. In the last chapters he stands for Parliament, under the slogan ‘Am I not a man and a brudder?’ The opposition between Philip and Woolcomb is virulently racist and politically weighted in the context of the civil war raging in America in the early 1860s. Thackeray’s position on black Americans (whom he had seen in his 1852 and 1858 trips) was unequivocal and obnoxious: ‘Sambo is not my man and brother’, he frankly declared. His allusion, of course, is to the abolitionists’ slogan, ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ In his political sympathies Thackeray was strongly and virulently pro-South and anti-abolitionist. His prejudices were prominently expressed in the Cornhill Magazine, which he edited until March 1862 and to which he was the star contributor until his death at Christmas 1863.13

  Ozias Midwinter has a Creole mother (whose first question, on learning that her husband loved someone before herself, is ‘Was she a fair woman – or dark, like me?’ (p. 31)). By setting the prelude in 1832 (the year before the emancipation of West Indian blacks), Collins ostentatiously stressed the point that Ozias is a child of slavery. On a number of occasions, the reader is reminded of Ozias’s ‘negro’ appearance – particularly when he is aroused and the blood rushes to his face. His ‘tawny’ complexion is also the mark of Cain – Ozias is the son of a murderer and if he has racially tainted blood on one side of his parentage he has criminally tainted blood on the other. There is a telling episode, shortly after Ozias’s first appearance in the novel, in which the Reverend Brock looks at him and is consumed with pathological disgust:

  His shaven head, tied up roughly in an old yellow silk handkerchief; his tawny, haggard cheeks; his bright brown eyes, preter-naturally large and wild; his tangled black beard; his long supple, sinewy fingers, wasted by suffering, till they looked like claws… If this man was honest, his eyes showed a singular perversity in looking away and denying it. Possibly they were affected in some degree by a nervous restlessness in his organization, which appeared to pervade every fibre in his lean, lithe body. The rector’s healthy Anglo-Saxon flesh crept responsively at every casual movement of the usher’s supple brown fingers, and every passing distortion of the usher’s haggard yellow face. (p. 64)

  Brock’s first inclination is to cast out this unclean, degenerate, mixed-breed thing. But eventually he comes to love, admire and trust Ozias. When the clergyman dies, it is to the mulatto’s care that he leaves Allan. On his part, the fair-haired, blue-eyed Allan comes to see Ozias as his brother. There is a telling moment when the Creole and the Anglo-Saxon clasp hands on board the ominous ship (La Grace de Dieu) where the primal murder of one father by another took place, eighteen years before. ‘The cruel time is coming,’ Ozias warns Allan, ‘when we shall rue the day we ever met. Shake hands, brother, on the edge of the precipice – shake hands while we are brothers still’ (p. 126).

  It is inconceivable that a novelist as aware as Collins would not know how this fraternal embrace of black and white as equals would be read in Civil War America – more particularly in the North (where Armadale was serialized in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine).14 In fact, the novel went down very well in the States – better than in Britain, where it was something of a sales flop. In dramatic versions of Armadale, Collins removed the negroid characteristics of Ozias, evidently feeling that the racial plot was not to English tastes.

  There are interesting things happening on the edges of Armadale. Not least, Collins’s own vexed private life was in turmoil as he assembled the novel’s intricate plot. As one of his latest biographers (William M. Clarke) assumes, it was in 1864 that Collins complicated his irregular sexual affairs to an extraordinary degree. For the better part of a decade he had been living with Caroline Graves (the original woman in white). In 1864 she was just under thirty-five years old, and a widow. Caroline was a woman of the world who may, as a common-law wife, have lived for some periods ‘bigamously’ with Collins (her marital status has never been entirely clear). They moved house in 1864 and, after his bohemian fashion, Wilkie played the part of paterfamilias (Caroline had a young daughter, Harriet, by her first husband). Caroline was a sophisticated, cultivated woman who could evidently discourse to Wilkie on his work and hold her own socially with his literary friends.

  Wilkie Collins was not, however, a man to be satisfied with one woman. In 1864 (as Clarke reckons) he met the simple Norfolk girl Martha Rudd (the meeting may be recalled in the Hurle Mere passage of Armadale, Book the Third, Chapters VIII–IX). Martha was just nineteen and very unworldly. Eventually (probably in 1867, a year after completing Armadale), Wilkie persuaded her to come to London. In a second household where he reigned as another paterfamilias, she bore him three children. He never made her an honest woman. As Clarke records, Collins contrived to live over the years with both women (apart from a brief and mysterious period during which Caroline was married to a third party). He was buried with Caroline – but Martha evidently had the greater claim to be his common-law wife.

  For all the ingenious investigations and speculations of recent biography, we know tantalizingly little about Collins’s private life. As Clarke observes: ‘How he kept in touch with Martha [after 1864] and why he eventually persuaded her to move to London – and when – is shrouded in mystery. But that she was in the background during Caroline’s continued efforts to persuade Wilkie to marry her is hardly in doubt. One can only marvel at his stamina in keeping his two women reasonably content’.15 Some of the strains on his stamina can be deduced from Armadale. Much of Lydia’s journal, in the central section of the narrative, is obsessed by her fury, as a 35-year-old woman of the world, against the little Norfolk chit, sixteen-year-old Neelie Milroy. Allan Armadale – the great male sexual prize in the novel – is attracted to both women, and at different times proposes marriage to both. Neelie, however, wins him. We have no records whatsoever of Collins’s domestic life, what recriminations were exchanged in the sexual triangle set up after 1864. But it is hard not to think that Lydia’s woman-of-the-world sarcasm at Neelie’s schoolgirlish sexual immaturity and provincial gaucheness do not echo what was said (or what Collins feared would be said) by an enraged Caroline in their parlour at Melcombe Place. ‘Am I handsome enough, to-day?’ Lydia asks her journal. ‘Well, yes’, she answers, ‘handsome enough to be a match for a little dowdy, awkward, freckled creature, who ought to be perched on a form at school, and strapped to a back-board to straighten her crooked shoulders’ (p. 428).

  For all the author’s high hopes, Armadale never achieved very great things. Perhaps Collins tried too hard. But the novel was also damaged by the delay in publishing it. During the interval (1863–4) a massive anti-sensation-novel campaign was whipped up. Leading the charge was the Quarterly Review, with a broadside denunciation (taking in no less than twenty-four novels) in April 1863, alleging that the country was being debauched by the avalanche of trashy sensation novels loosed on it.16 In exactly the same period, Dickens’s All the Year Round lost readers in droves with Charles Reade’s Hard Cash (3,000 as the author recorded) – a novel inevitably partnered in the public mind with Armadale. Dickens was impelled to publish a statement with Reade’s last number, dissociating his journal from Hard Cash.17 Circulation figures recorded by Smith show that, after a lift in November 1864, Armadale lost during its serial run about the same number of subscribers to the Cornhill Magazine as Hard Cash had lost Dickens.

  George Smith, who was not a courageous publisher (even if he had published Jane Eyre fi
fteen years before), capitulated by serializing alongside Armadale two ‘domestic’ novels – Trollope’s The Claverings and Mrs Gaskell’s idyll Wives and Daughters. In Latin, as Reade pointed out, domestic meant ‘tame’, and these were excessively innocuous works that studiously avoided what Reade (in Hard Cash) called ‘the dark places of England’. Collins himself was affected by the furore, and despite brave talk in his preface about ‘Clap trap morality’ took care to emphasize the ‘Christian morality’ of the book. In the body of the narrative, Collins ceded the moral centre to the excruciatingly preachy Decimus Brock. The novel ends with an invocation of the saintly Brock by Ozias as he addresses Allan in the happy-ever-after of his marriage to Neelie: – ‘God is all-merciful, God is all-Wise. In those words, your dear old friend once wrote to me. In that faith, I can look back without murmuring at the years that are past, and can look on without doubting to the years that are to come’ (p.677). This priggishness (out of character in both Ozias and Wilkie) was a sop to the moral critics yapping at Collins’s heels. They were not mollified: Armadale was mauled by the critics. Smith did not use Collins again (nor did he ever earn as much for any one novel again). In his next major piece of writing Collins avoided moral provocation and perfected the machinery of the detective novel, with his brilliant (and morally inoffensive) whodunnit, The Moonstone.

  The main flaw in Armadale for many readers is its obtrusive ‘theme’. George Eliot had made ‘determinism’ a fashionable topic for novelists in Adam Bede (1859), where in Chapter Sixteen Arthur Donnithorne and the Reverend Irwine debate whether a man has freedom of choice in his moral decisions, or whether he is nothing more than an automaton. This concern was, in part, a function of the growing sophistication of fiction as an explanatory tool for human behaviour. Novelists like Eliot and Collins could explain so much of motive and the influence of circumstance that their characters no longer seemed free agents – at least to the reader privileged with the narrator’s god-like insight.

  There are, however, deeper and less clear-cut aspects to the fatality theme in Armadale. The novel communicates a primitive sense of doom which one is tempted to connect with the sabbatarianism and religious austerity of Wilkie’s father – a dominant influence on his sons’ lives. William Collins exuded an atmosphere of imminent damnation for sinners. He was, for instance, ‘convinced that both the outbreak of cholera and the Reform Bill riots of 1831 were God’s judgement’.18 Kenneth Robinson plausibly suggests that Wilkie’s character (and lifelong bohemianism) was largely formed in opposition to his father’s religiosity. One suspects he may have been haunted by William Collins’s posthumous condemnation. Wilkie embarked on an elaborate depiction of Ozias’s Calvinist stepfather in the character of Alexander Neal which he subsequently deleted (see Book the First, Chapter II, note 5). It might have made the novel’s moral design clearer had he kept it in.

  When we encounter Ozias Midwinter for the first time he carries with him in his knapsack two volumes: the plays of Sophocles and Goethe’s Faust. They are emblems of the free will–determinism conundrum that obsesses him. At one pole is Oedipus Rex, the man who cannot escape his fate, run as he will. At the other pole is Faust, who damns himself by clear-headed choice. Both tragic heroes are doomed, but the machineries by which they meet their doom are opposite. The ‘Dream’ (which Collins altered significantly in the manuscript) overlays the narrative as prophecy, its fulfilment as inevitable as the Delphic oracle’s. But Ozias is not entirely convinced. His uncertainty as to whether his destiny is to be that of Oedipus or Faust, automaton or free agent, feeds into what is the most striking scene in the novel, when Major Milroy’s elaborate clock goes wrong. As the hour chimes and the little figures crash into each other (the Major is meanwhile buried in the entrails of his machine) Ozias is seized with uncontrollable hysteria at the ‘catastrophe of the puppets’:

  His paroxysms of laughter followed each other with such convulsive violence, that Miss Milroy started back from him in alarm, and even the patient major turned on him with a look which said plainly, Leave the room! Allan, wisely impulsive for once in his life, seized Midwinter by the arm, and dragged him out by main force into the garden, and thence into the park beyond.

  ‘Good heavens! What has come to you!’ he exclaimed, shrinking back from the tortured face before him, as he stopped and looked close at it for the first time.

  For the moment, Midwinter was incapable of answering. The hysterical paroxysm was passing from one extreme to the other. He leaned against a tree, sobbing and gasping for breath, and stretched out his hand in mute entreaty to Allan to give him time. (p. 225)

  It is a surreal episode, more so given Ozias’s heroic self-control later in the novel. The reason that he reacts as he does at the débâcle of the Major’s horological automaton can, however, be guessed at. It is a spontaneous and uncontrollable surge of relief that clockwork can actually go wrong. It is a hopeful catastrophe. Life’s outcome is not necessarily ordained.

  As T. S. Eliot (an unlikely admirer of the novel) said, Armadale has the great virtue of melodrama – that of ‘delaying longer than one could conceive it possible to delay, a conclusion which is inevitable and wholly foreordained’.19 In general this is true (we know that Allan must live happily with Neelie and that Lydia must come to an appropriately bad end). But Armadale none the less retains its ability to surprise us with regard to Ozias. To the very last page, Collins keeps us in suspense as to whether the narrative will climax with the deterministic vision of the dream (the fatal woman killing Ozias) or whether, like the Major’s clock, the machine will break down, allowing Ozias to live. The manuscript suggests that Collins himself – for all his talk of foreplanning – was not entirely certain in his mind as to what Ozias Midwinter’s end should be. It is one of the many features that make Armadale one of the most gripping of Victorian page-turners.

  Notes

  1. Kenneth Robinson, Wilkie Collins (London, 1951), p. 149. Following references are shortened to ‘Robinson’.

  2. Catherine Peters, The King of Inventors: Wilkie Collins (London, 1991), p. 227. Following references are shortened to ‘Peters’.

  3. Nuel Davis, The Life of Wilkie Collins (Illinois, 1956), p. 216. Following references are shortened to ‘Davis’.

  4. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: California, 1988), p. 146. Miller’s influential essay on Collins draws on a close reading of the texts and Foucauldian theory.

  5. See Richard Altick, The Presence of the Present (Columbus: Ohio, 1991), pp. 540–45, for a description of Madame Rachel’s notoriety in the 1860s. Following references are shortened to ‘Altick’. For Collins and the newspapers see Christopher Kent, ‘Probability, Reality, and Sensation’, Dickens Studies Annual, 20, 1991.

  6. It will be noted, however, that Collins set Armadale in 1851. His motives for this slight antedating were probably to protect himself against accusations of libel.

  7. The patriarchal role of Dickens in the school is argued in W. C. Phillips, Dickens, Reade, and Collins: Sensation Novelists (London, 1919).

  8. Peters, p. 236.

  9. Ibid., p. 275.

  10. Annual Register, 1862, p. 453.

  11. Mary S. Hartman, Victorian Murderesses (New York, 1977). Following references are shortened to ‘Hartman’.

  12. As Altick points out (pp. 525–6), Collins was evidently very influenced by the case of the poisoner Madeleine Smith. See also Hartman, Chapter Two.

  13. For Thackeray’s prejudices on race see Deborah Thomas, Thackeray and Slavery (Athens: Ohio, 1993).

  14. Susan Balée touches on this subject in ‘English Critics, American Crisis, and the Sensation Novel’, Nineteenth Century Contexts, Spring 1993.

  15. William M. Clarke, The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins (London, 1988), p. 112.

  16. The article in the Quarterly was by the Reverend H. C. Mansel, April 1863, 481–514. For other attacks of the period, see Norman Page, Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage (London, 1974). Collins responds
to these attacks in Armadale (see Book the Last, Chapter III, note 1).

  17. See John Sutherland, ‘Dickens, Reade, and Hard Cash,’ The Dickensian, Spring 1985.

  18. Robinson, p. 16.

  19. See T. S. Eliot’s long essay on Collins (1927), reprinted in Selected Essays 1917–1932 (London, 1933).

  FURTHER READING

  For many years the standard critical lives of Collins were Kenneth Robinson’s Wilkie Collins (London, 1951, reprinted 1974) and Nuel P. Davis’s The Life of Wilkie Collins (Urbana: Illinois, 1956). These have been supplanted by two meticulously researched recent biographies: William M. Clarke, The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins (London, 1988) and Catherine Peters, The King of Inventors: Wilkie Collins (London, 1991). Clarke (a descendant of Collins by marriage) has dug up more than anyone thought possible about Wilkie’s ‘secret lives’ (particularly his irregular sexual arrangements). Working independently, Peters has brought to light much new material on Collins’s early home life and family background. Her book is particularly relevant to Armadale in its illuminating discussion of Collins’s obsession with doubles, doppelgängers, stolen and recovered identity.

  The traditional (and still informative) critical study of sensation fiction is Walter C. Phillips, Dickens, Reade, and Collins: Sensation Novelists (New York, 1919). Good summaries of the accumulated scholarship on Collins will be found in W. H. Marshall, Wilkie Collins (Boston, 1970) and Ira B. Nadel and William E. Fredeman, eds., Victorian Novelists after 1885, Dictionary of Literary Biography 18 (Detroit, 1983). A good selection of contemporary and later-nineteenth-century commentary is given in Norman Page, Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage (London 1974).