Armadale

by Wilkie Collins

  This was dropped in proof, presumably.

  15. ‘Very oddly,’ said the rector to the lawyers. The manuscript reveals that Collins rewrote this section of the plot extensively. Most of his changes are irrecoverable, except for a deleted last paragraph:

  [Allan has just been speaking to the lawyers] in his own persistently original way.

  ‘One thing at a time, gentlemen,’ said the young philosopher to his legal advisers. ‘I’m satisfied for the present with knowing that I’ve got the estate. I’ll go and live there, if you please, when I know I can keep it. If it had been anywhere else I daresay I should have been in a violent hurry to go there at once. But they ill used my mother at Thorpe-Ambrose in her lifetime; and they are ill using her there now after her death. I’ll wait to be Squire of the Parish till I can set her memory right in the neighbourhood. When we have got our news from Madeira, let me know. While we are waiting for it, I shall go back to Somersetshire and finish my yacht.

  Their client being at that moment legally in possession of the estate, the lawyers left him free to act on his own singular resolutions – merely stipulating that if he went cruising at sea, he should keep within easy reach of the English shore, and should inform them from time to time at what coast-towns a letter would reach him. So the matter rested for the present, while the commissioners on both sides were on their way to Madeira.

  The dispute as to whether Allan’s mother had been legally married would have taken the narrative in significantly different directions.

  16. Isle of Man. In July–August 1863 Collins visited the island and found it ‘the one inaccessible place left in the world’. He crossed the Sound to the Calf of Man which he described as ‘wild and frightful, just what I wanted – everything made for my occult literary purposes’ (Robinson, p. 182).

  17. to inquire for letters. The manuscript continues: ‘On the fifth day, the Rector found a letter from Somersetshire waiting for him at the hotel…’ The striking detail of Allan ignoring the letter which will completely change his life was added in proof.

  Chapter II

  1. Chapter II. At this point in the manuscript there is a note: ‘3rd monthly Part – not complete yet. Another Chapter to follow. July 27th. WC.’ The third monthly part was published in January 1865.

  2. the Broomielaw. A street in Glasgow.

  3. the bridge at Bristol. Isambard Brunei’s famous suspension bridge over the Severn. Work on it was started in 1832 and it was finished in 1864 (which makes the reference slightly anachronistic here). Collins may intend the reader to remember (in view of Ozias being a Creole) that Bristol was a city enriched by the African slave trade.

  4. which brought me last night from my room to yours. Later editions have ‘which brought me from my room to yours’.

  5. If the conjecture… startling conclusion. This sentence was added in proof.

  Chapter III

  1. ‘a wet sheet… follows free.’ Slightly misquoted (‘sail’ should be ‘sea’) from the poem by Allan Cunningham (1784–1842). Catherine Peters points out that Cunningham was the biographer of Wilkie Collins’s godfather, Sir David Wilkie.

  2. Governor Smelt. More correctly the ‘sub-governor’. Leonard Smelt (1719–1800) was a military engineer and expert in fortifications in service with the Royal Family.

  3. College of King William. Boys’ school on the Isle of Man made famous by Dean Farrar (1831–1903), who set his improving novel Eric, or Little by Little (1858) there, masked under the pseudonym ‘Isle of Roslyn’.

  4. the wilds of Australia. Collins may be recalling the Australian expedition of R.O. Burke and William J. Wills, described in the Annual Register, 1862. They eventually died of thirst.

  Chapter IV

  1. while we are brothers still. The abolitionists’ slogan, ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’, would echo for many readers here, given the fact that Ozias is black and Allan white.

  2. Horrible, wasn’t it? As he records in his ‘Appendix’, Collins explored the Isle of Man for local colour for Armadale in summer 1863. According to Nuel Davis (working from Collins’s later testimony to the Manx novelist, Hall Caine), while cruising in a yacht off the island’s coast with Pigott,

  Collins saw a lunatic caper along the rocks pursued by a farmer and his wife. At Castletown, the capital, he learned that this sight was not so uncommon as one might think. Every Manx family was expected to take care of its own insane, with the result that many were kept chained in sheds. Wilkie, though he used the fact in Armadale, was not pleased to find material so perfectly suited to its mood. Sir James Gell, the Attorney General, later told Hall Caine about the results of Wilkie’s visit. After several letters written by Wilkie to The Times, said Sir James, the Home Office told the insular Legislature that if they did not quickly make provision for their indigent lunatics the imperial authorities would do so for them. (Davis, p. 242)

  This concern for lunatics was in line with Charles Reade’s current, high-profile campaign for the abolition of private lunatic asylums. As Altick notes (p. 545), in 1858 there had been three highly publicized accounts of wrongful incarceration. Reade launched a series of letters to the press on ‘“Our Dark Places” – the unregulated mad-houses’ (Altick, p. 546). A Commons Select Committee was appointed to look into the provision of care for lunatics and their property. Reade kept up the pressure with his novel Hard Cash, whose plot hinges on the (sane) hero’s incarceration in a private lunatic asylum. Collins returns to the topic in his depiction of Dr Downward’s ‘Sanatorium’ later in Armadale.

  3. hurts me. The manuscript continues:

  The straightforward simplicity of Allan’s appeal to that past time which his friend’s memory held sacred seemed to work an instant revolution in Midwinter’s mind. [The passage that follows in the text, down to ‘dread of wounding the sympathies of his friend’, was added in proof. The manuscript then continues:] ‘Why distress him?’ he whispered to himself. ‘Why resist him when the mischief’s done, and the caution comes too late? What is to be will be. What have I to do with the future? and what has he? This ship—’

  He rose and looked round him. Mr Brock’s words of caution before the Confession was burnt recurred to his memory. There was no shadow of doubt in his mind now, that the woman whom the rector had met in Somersetshire, and the woman whose attempted suicide had opened Allan’s way to Thorpe-Ambrose, were one and the same. ‘Are we at the end here?’ he asked himself. ‘No we are only at another stage of the journey. There is worse than this to come – There is the woman behind us in the dark. Will Allan see her first or shall I?’ He fell into deeper reflection – roused himself – and stepping hurriedly to the side of the vessel looked down at the channel of the Sound. ‘No swimming there!’ he thought. ‘Would it be for Allan’s good – would it be the saving of him in the future – if I jumped in?’

  He laughed bitterly. ‘As if that current would drown a man, as if those rocks would shatter him, before his time has come! No,’ he said as he lowered himself again to the deck. ‘Providence or Fate, I must see it out.’

  He went back to Allan…

  Collins deleted this powerful scene in proof, presumably. The suicidal tendency in Ozias suggests a gloomy end for him to which the author may not have wanted to commit himself so early.

  4. Address to the women of Norfolk posted in the park. The manuscript reads ‘notice posted in the park’.

  Chapter V

  1. The manuscript has a different version of the elements of the dream from 16 onwards:

  16. From this time the darkness opened no more. I was left alone in it again; and I waited again.

  17. Little by little, I felt something turning round and round me in the dense obscurity closer and closer at every turn.

  18. It stopped. In the moment when it stopped, a cold hand touched my forehead, and chilled me to the heart.

  19. For the first time in the dream my tongue was freed, and I spoke. I said or thought I said the words: ‘Is the hand that touched me t
he Hand of Death?’ Out of the darkness and the silence, there came softly an answering sigh. As I had known my father who appeared before me when the dream began – So I now knew the sigh that answered me when the dream ended. I had heard it, sitting by the bedside of the friend who was with me on board the wreck. Night after night, when sleep fell on him in a weary illness, he sunk into his rest with that sigh.

  20. So the dream left me; and I saw the morning sunshine once more.

  Here again, there seems a stronger premonition of Ozias’s death.

  2. my theory of dreams. Jenny Bourne Taylor’s In the Secret Theatre of Home, Chapter Five, records the Victorian psychologists from whom Collins derived (with some modifications) his theory of dreams: John Elliotson (the mesmerist, author of Human Physiology, 1840), Robert Macnish (The Philosophy of Sleep, 1830), John Abercrombie (Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers, 1830) and J. A. Symonds (Sleep and Dreams, 1851). Taylor’s research illumines this chapter of Armadale most usefully.

  3. Have you any reason to give. In the manuscript there follows a deleted passage:

  for going out of your way to reconcile such a mystical view as this with the unanswerably rational explanation of the dream which lies straight before you?’

  ‘It is hard to tell how I reconcile it,’ said Midwinter, ‘but I will try. All supernatural influences which work on mortal creatures, must necessarily work by means of mortal perceptions. Acknowledging as I do that you have clearly traced the events of the dream to my friend’s waking impressions, I go a step farther back when that point has been gained, and I ask next “If the waking impressions account for the dream, what accounts for the waking impressions?” I don’t believe, sir, that Chance took us on the road from Castletown to this place. I don’t believe that Chance caused our meeting with you. I see in that meeting, and in the events which grew out of it, a supernatural influence working its end with a mortal creature by mortal means, and producing those very waking impressions (about which we are all agreed) as the medium through which to convey the warning of the dream.’

  The doctor looked at his watch…

  BOOK THE THIRD

  Chapter I

  1. Doctors’ Commons. As the Oxford Companion to Law records, the College of Doctors of Civil Law dealt with ‘matrimonial, testamentary, and probate matters’. The College was dissolved in 1858.

  2. a good sixteen years older. A chronological mistake. In the next number (April, p. 157) Collins printed a footnote entitled ‘PRINTER’S ERROR’ alerting the reader. The figure should be ‘six years’.

  3. odious powders. As a number of commentators have noted, Collins is alluding here to ‘Madame’ Rachel Leverson, the ‘great lady renovator’ who opened her beauty parlour at 47a New Bond Street in 1863. At her premises ‘large sums of money were extracted from gullible women whose beauty she claimed to be able to preserve, or enhance, by means of various cosmetic preparations with romantic names’. Blackmail and procuring ‘did not come amiss’ (Altick, pp. 541–5). She was tried for fraud as early as December 1865 (see The Times, 13 December 1865). In 1867 she was sentenced to five years’ penal servitude.

  Chapter II

  1. wide-awake hat: according to the OED, ‘a soft felt hat with broad brim and low crown said to have been punningly named as not having a “nap”.’ It is a slight anachronism here as the fashion for this headgear did not catch on until the early 1860s.

  2. the dreadful justice of photography would have had no mercy on her. Collins chooses his tense carefully. It is 1851: exchanging photographs (which became a rage in the 1860s) was not yet a widespread custom (see Altick, pp. 336—7).

  3. the famous clock at Strasbourg. Catherine Peters quotes a letter of October 1853 from Wilkie Collins (touring Europe at the time) describing this famous cathedral clock and its elaborate puppetry to his mother. He was in Strasbourg also in June 1863 when he seems to have had his ‘Idea’ for Armadale(see Lonoff, p. 33). The major is an example of ‘monomania’, a variety of madness defined by the French psychologist Esquirol.

  4. Louis the Sixteenth. As the Encyclopaedia Britannica (eleventh edition) records, Louis XVI, while in prison awaiting execution, ‘amused himself in making locks and a little at masonry’.

  5. confined to her own room. The manuscript continues:

  Allan made no reply; he was a little startled by a marked change in the speaker’s manner. When Miss Milroy chanced to mention her mother in the course of their morning walk he had characteristically failed to notice that she spoke with a strange absence of any tenderness of feeling. But even he, careless as he was, observed the cloud that hovered over his host’s face when Major Milroy described his wife’s situation. Allan felt that he had inadvertently touched on something under the household surface which it was not desired that strangers should approach too closely. ‘I have made a mistake already,’ he thought to himself. ‘The less I say in the future about Mrs Milroy, the better.’

  The Major turned away towards the breakfast table. ‘Have we got everything we want on the table, my love?’ he said, speaking to his daughter while he looked about the table with something of a return to his customary absence of manner. ‘Will you come and make tea?’

  This was cut in proof, presumably; possibly for reasons of length.

  Chapter III

  1. Waoerley novels… Edgeworth… Hemans. The fiction of Walter Scott (1771–1832) was collected as the ‘Waverley Novels’ in 1829. Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849) was another popular novelist of the early nineteenth century. Felicia Hemans (1793–1835) was a highly respectable and admired poet.

  2. the Second Vision of the Dream. There follows crossed out in the manuscript:

  He waited, thinking and looking mechanically at the statue, while he thought. There was little disturbance in his face; it had become suddenly steady and composed with the resignation of a great despair. He took the written narrative of the Dream from his pocket book and compared the scene described there with the scene before him. ‘I said I would keep it till we got to Thorpe-Ambrose,’ he whispered to himself as he put the paper back again. ‘I was right.’ A mounting impulse of curiosity stirred in his mind. He stepped out and looked along the whole row of windows, to see if another window of the French sort was among them. There was no other. He returned to the far side of the house – passed along the front of it – and returned again but the other side. Still this one window and the only window?

  3. the other fellow. i.e. Abednego. In Daniel 3: 12–30, the three of them are cast into the burning furnace by Nebuchadnezzar, and are rescued from destruction by Jehovah.

  4. wants that little long. From Edward Young’s Night Thoughts,4.118, ‘man wants but little, nor that little long’.

  5. Darch is our friend the lawyer. The manuscript reads:

  ‘Darch is the lawyer,’ said Allan, supposing Midwinter had forgotten the name, – ‘the family lawyer who did all the Blanchards’ business. Don’t you remember the studious bachelor who offered for the cottage at the same time as the major?’

  Without making any reply…

  6. a chimney-pot hat. Sometimes called a stovepipe hat; a high, black, cylindrical item of headgear associated with Abraham Lincoln. It is probably slightly anachronistic for 1851.

  7. his personal influence next. The manuscript continues:

  ‘In the position you are now occupying, Allan, you must cultivate the good opinion of your neighbours,’ he said. ‘If this was only my idea, I wouldn’t press it on you – but I know that Mr Brock thinks about it as I do. I know he has always felt uneasy at your living so entirely out of society. I know he wishes you to take your proper position in this place. Come! come! All I ask is the sacrifice of an hour or two. Only make the personal concession of calling on them first; only tell them (what you can say with perfect truth) that you were not aware their preparations had advanced so far – and all this mischief will be set right.’ He stopped and took Allan affectionately by the hand…

  8. Joe Miller. Joe M
iller’s Jests, or the Wit’s Vade-mecum was a famous (and ever expanding) collection of jokes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  Chapter IV

  1. a vagabond like me. The manuscript reads ‘a tramp like me’.

  2. at your friend’s disposal. In place of the passage that follows in the text, the manuscript continues:

  ‘Who is he?’ inquired Midwinter. ‘One of the clerks?’

  ‘Of course! how else should he be in the office? Wait a minute’, said Allan, feeling in his pockets. ‘I knew how particular you were and how little I was to be depended on in these matters of business – so I asked Pedgift to give me a memorandum to jog my memory. Here it is,’ continued Allan, opening the memorandum and beginning to read from it. ‘The man’s name is Bashwood. He has been four years in Pedgift’s service; and before that he was steward to Sir John Mellowship in the county. Steward – do you hear? Just the man you require at just the time you want him.’

  ‘How came Mr Bashwood to drop from the position of steward on a gentleman’s estate, to the position of clerk in a lawyer’s, office?’ asked Midwinter.

  ‘Through troubles at home, poor wretch,’ said Allan, consulting his memorandum. ‘His wife was a drunkard. She died only lately at the county asylum here. Stop! that’s not the reason he lost his place – here it is. He had a son whom he got into a merchant’s office some years since, and who robbed his employers. Those employers came down on their clerk’s security. Patience, patience, here’s the point. Bashwood himself was the security. He was sold out of house and home to pay the money. Sir John was scandalized and Bashwood lost the steward’s place. He came to Pedgift (whom he had done business with in former years) a broken-down man. Pedgift gave him a trial in his office. There he has stopped ever since; and that is the whole of his story.’