Armadale

by Wilkie Collins

  ‘Another question,’ said Midwinter, ‘When does Bashwood come here? Tomorrow?’

  ‘No; he can’t be spared – he won’t come until two or three days before the rent-day dinner.’ [The manuscript then continues as in the printed text until ‘the new house’, then reads:] The two young men dined together quietly; the rebuffed butler, benevolently forgetful of his injuries, presiding with undiminished grace and affability at the side-board. A man is none the worse a Christian because he happens to be afflicted with a bulbous nose. Let it be recorded to the butler’s credit that he bore no malice, and that he let his master and his master’s friend have the best wine in the cellar after all.

  The one noticeable event…

  It seems likely that Collins originally intended to do more with his bulbous-nosed butler.

  3. since yesterday. The manuscript continues:

  A little dispirited, Allan sauntered about his gardens smoking and then returned to his house. There he discovered that his expedition to the cottage had not been entirely fruitless of satisfactory results. The resident gentry had all driven to Thorpe-Ambrose at the usual visiting hour to return Mr Armadale’s call; and had all left their cards and gone away again, on finding that Mr Armadale was out.

  The next two days…

  The manuscript reveals that Collins originally intended to make much more of Allan’s difficulties with his Norfolk neighbours.

  4. watch for somebody. The manuscript continues:

  ‘Am I in luck’s way at last?’ thought Allan. ‘Is it possible she’s waiting for me?’ She was waiting for him.

  She gave a little start when he appeared, and came forward without hesitation to meet him. Her complexion had suffered under confinement to her house. An expression of embarrassment clouded her pretty face; and the steady brightness of her smile, which had charmed Allan when she greeted him on the former occasion, was only a momentary lightness when she greeted him now.

  ‘I hardly know…

  5. mentioned between them. The manuscript continues:

  Depend on my acting for the best in his interests and in yours; and expect to hear from me again, as soon as I know how this strange discovery is to end. Very Truly Yours, Decimus Brock.

  The chapter and the sixth monthly number finished at this point in the manuscript. Collins worked it up to get a better curtain line.

  Chapter V

  1. venomous little quarrel. The manuscript reads ‘pretty little quarrel’.

  2. the mixed train. i.e. with first, second and third class passengers.

  Chapter VI

  1. Michael Angelo was to Sir Joshua Reynolds. Collins quotes at length Sir Joshua Reynolds’s eulogy on Michelangelo in his fifth lecture in ‘To think, or be thought for’ (1856), reprinted in Collins’s My Miscellanies (1863). It seems likely that he may have re-read Reynolds’s account of the Sistine ceilings in spring 1864, when he was in Rome and thinking out the plot of Armadale.

  Chapter VIII

  1. He rides the whirlwind. Quoted from Joseph Addison’s eulogy of Marlborough (‘who rides the whirlwind and directs the storm’) in his poem The Campaign (1705).

  2. ‘The Death of Marmion’, ‘The Battle of the Baltic’, ‘The Bay of Biscay’, ‘Nelson’. Marmion’s death is an extract from Scott’s poem on Bannockburn, 1808. The other recitations are appropriately nautical: the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell (1774–1844) wrote ‘The Battle of the Baltic’; the Irish dramatist Andrew Cherry (1762–1812) wrote ‘The Bay of Biscay’; the famous English tenor John Braham (1774–1856, see the ‘late Braham’ below) wrote ‘Nelson’. Altick (pp. 467–8) cites this scene on the Broads as an illuminating example of Victorian entertainment.

  3. ‘The Mistletoe Bough’. A ballad by Nathaniel Bayly (1797–1839). ‘Poor Mary Anne’ is a ballad by Braham, as Catherine Peters guesses. I am indebted to her for the identification of these songs.

  4. ‘Eveleen’s Bower’. From Irish Melodies (1801–34) by Thomas Moore (1779–1852). See Altick (p. 468) for the popularity of Moore in Victorian parlour entertainments.

  Chapter IX

  1. Hurle Mere. As Nuel Davis records:

  In the summer [1864] Collins cruised along the Norfolk coast in a yacht. [His brother] Charley joined him at Yarmouth in August and they explored one of the broads or marshes called Horsey Mere. Renaming it Hurle Mere, Wilkie introduced it into Armadale in one of the most dramatic and skilfully integrated bits of nature painting ever done in a novel.

  For Martha Rudd’s connection with Hurle Mere and nearby Winterton, see Clarke (pp. 110–11) and Peters (p. 267).

  Chapter X

  1. said the voice of young Pedgift. Crossed out in the manuscript there follows:

  ‘And it’s my opinion Miss Gwilt’s place won’t be a very easy one.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Allan in return.

  ‘Did you not notice how the Major and Miss Milroy looked?’

  ‘They looked surprised; and well they might at getting such a handsome woman as a governess.’

  ‘I don’t mean how they looked at first, Mr Armadale. How did they look when Miss Gwilt made her excuses…’

  2. by the first train. The manuscript continues much as the text:

  In any event – whether you succeed or whether you fail in confirming mysuspicions – write to me by return of post. If it is only to tell me you have received my letter, write! I am suffering under anxiety and suspense which, separated as I am from Allan, you alone can relieve.

  Having said this, I know you well enough to feel that I need say no more.

  This redundant information is dropped in subsequent editions.

  3. it was red! Richard Altick notes the Victorian prejudice against red hair (particularly ‘flaming red hair’) and its ‘association… with female villainy’. Collins, however (in alliance with the Pre-Raphaelites), cast a glamour over this hitherto dubious tint and, as Altick guesses, Armadale may even have inspired a fashion for false red hair (Altick, p. 323).

  4. to the Thorpe-Ambrose estate – . The manuscript continues:

  In her footsteps and in hers only could the March of Doom advance on the bearers of that fatal name.

  Looking, under the influence of that one unalterable conviction, at events as they had just happened, his mind saw and seized its new conclusion…

  This mood of inevitable fatalism was lightened systematically by Collins in revising his manuscript.

  Chapter XI

  1. Miss Gwilt Among the Quicksands. In the manuscript, this section is entitled ‘Four Letters’.

  2. I have been proved not to be myself. There was a spate of personation cases in the 1850s and 1860s, climaxing in the sensational Tichborne case, to whose early stirrings Collins may well refer in Armadale. In April 1854, Sir Roger Tichborne was lost at sea. His mother, the dowager Lady Tichborne, refused to believe he was dead, and advertised for information concerning her son. In late 1865, an Australian butcher from Wagga Wagga, Arthur Orton, claimed to be the Tichborne heir. The case dragged on with various trials until the 1870s when a totally discredited Orton was sent to prison.

  3. boa constrictor fed at the Zoological Gardens. As Fred Kaplan (Dickens, New York, 1988, p. 359) records, Collins’s friend Dickens had nightmares about the horrific sight of the boa constrictors being fed live rabbits at the Regent’s Park Zoological Gardens.

  Chapter XII

  1. her residence at Thorpe-Ambrose. Crossed out in the manuscript, there follows:

  Mr Brock’s letter of the third of July had reached Mr Brock’s correspondent that morning. He had read it, and had set it aside with the sense of relief from responsibility which the writer had desired to produce in him.

  The subject had since dropped out of his thoughts, and had left his mind free to occupy itself with other and nearer objects of interest. As he now sat waiting for Allan, he looked round the room, seeking the object of his suspicious distrust, and noted, as composedly as a stranger might have noted, certain changes which had
been made in it on that day…

  2. without knowing why. The manuscript continues: ‘“I suppose it’s the weather,” he said impatiently, as he took up his candle and went to bed.’ In the manuscript the ninth number was to end here, but Collins wrote a better curtain line.

  BOOK THE FOURTH

  Chapter II

  1. Saturday. The manuscript has ‘yesterday’.

  Chapter III

  1. Worth makes the Man… leather and prunella. Proverbial, from Pope’s Essay on Man, 4. 203.

  2. a ladies’ medical man. Collins’s portraiture of Dr Downward seems to owe something to Thackeray’s Dr Firmin, in The Adventures of Philip, which preceded Armadale in the Cornhill Magazine.

  3. absence of any other information, sir,’ he resumed. The manuscript continues:

  and in the face of what the cabman has just said to us, I see only one other alternative. We must take it for granted that my notion about these people at Pimlico is wrong, and that they really are deceiving us for some purpose of their own. What do you say…

  Chapter IV

  1. the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. The Crystal Palace which opened in 1851; the greatest public exhibition of its kind ever mounted in Britain. As Altick notes (p. 422), there are relatively few date markers of this kind in the narrative of Armadale.

  2. five shillingsworth of human labour and electric fluid. i.e. electrical current (‘fluid’ was a common synonym at this period). This detail seems to have been put in Collins’s mind by an article on the ‘Electrical Telegraph’ in Cornhill, July i860. Wire telegraphs (run by, and alongside, the railroad system) had been widely used since the 1840s.

  3. learnt his profession at the Old Bailey. A broad hint that Downward is an abortionist. Collins hints at Oldershaw’s parallel procuring activities in a number of places in Armadale (see Altick, p. 543).

  Chapter V

  1. a prison, in the present tender state of public feeling. Collins is reflecting bitterly here on the recent acquittal of the Scottish arsenical poisoner, Madeleine Smith. Smith had an affair with, and became secretly affianced to, a Glasgow shipping clerk, Emile L’angelier. A richer and older suitor came along. L’Angelier threatened to expose Smith, by means of her letters to him. In response Smith (as Collins, and many other observers firmly believed) poisoned him. The lovers’ letters were introduced into evidence in the trial (which may have given Collins some ideas for Armadale). In her defence, Smith claimed she had bought arsenic, shortly before L’Angelier’s death, for cosmetic purposes (which may have suggested to Collins the link between Lydia Gwilt and Maria Oldershaw). (See Mary S. Hartman, Victorian Murderesses, New York, 1977, Chapter Two and Altick, p. 525.)

  Chapter VII

  1. I believe in mesmerism. Mesmerism had been popularized by John Elliotson (1791–1868), a friend of Dickens and Collins’s physician for a short period before Armadale. As Catherine Peters points out, Collins wrote sympathetic articles on the subject of mesmerism for the Leader (at a period when Elliotson was under attack for his theories). As William Clarke records, while Collins was preparing Armadale, Caroline Graves was regularly mesmerizing him to help him withdraw from his opium addiction (Clarke, p. 103).

  2. and left them. The manuscript continues:

  ‘I’ll bet you another half-crown there’s something wrong in that quarter,’ said the first footman.

  ‘Thank you,’ said the second. ‘When I’ve got half-a-crown to throw away I’ll think of it.’

  This was the end of the twelfth monthly part and Collins was working up his curtain line.

  Chapter IX

  1. notes-of-hand. IOUs, legally stamped, which would have to be renewed or retired by a certain date.

  2. wings of a dove. From the 1662 Anglican Prayer Book, ‘Oh that I had wings like a dove; for then would I flee away and be at rest.’

  3. fancy free. A misquotation (on Oldershaw’s part, not Collins’s) from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, II. i. 156.

  4. and tried in vain. The manuscript continues:

  There are times when one’s wits seem to desert one – and it was this helpless time with me.

  Monday morning…

  5. laudanum. Collins was intermittently addicted to laudanum (a habit which he projects on to Lydia Gwilt). Laudanum – tincture of opium dissolved in alcohol – was an uncontrolled substance at this period.

  6. than you suppose. Crossed out in manuscript there follows a partially legible passage:

  [I was] considering whether I had better not stop. When I began my letter, I was really angry enough to be bent on terrifying you with the whole truth. But the time I have passed in writing has calmed me down. My head aches and my hand is getting [?]

  Chapter X

  1. The nursery… bread and butter. Byron, Beppo (1818), 39. It should be ‘leaps out’ rather than ‘lisps out’.

  2. It is for this, is it, Miss Milroy, that I resisted temptation. i.e. the temptation to poison her. The manuscript reads:

  Well, well, Miss Milroy. I’m glad now that I resisted temptation, morning after morning, when I knew you were out alone in the park. I’m glad I waited till you yourself put the opportunity in my hands. Though you did take shelter from the thunderstorm under the tree, and though you have made the best use of your time since you forced him to ask you into his house, you are not Mrs Armadale yet…

  3. actually jealous of Armadale, at his age! Both Collins and Dickens had recently fallen in love with much younger women: Martha Rudd (nineteen when Collins met her in 1864) and Ellen Ternan (twenty-seven when Dickens met her in 1857)

  4. domestic sentimentalists of the present day! Collins attacks the sensation novel’s critics, who valued instead the kind of domestic novel written by Anthony Trollope and Mrs Gaskell. Ironically, during its run in Cornhill, Armadale was accompanied by Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (August 1864–January 1866) and Trollope’s The Claverings (February 1866–May 1867).

  5. On this hint, as the man says in the play, I spoke. The reference is to Othello, I. iii. 166. There are many dramatic references in Armadale, presumably reflecting Collins’s and Dickens’s passionate interest in amateur theatricals in the late 1850s.

  6. a newspaper which is about to be started in London. There were a large number of new newspapers started in the middle and late 1850s, following the lifting of the most burdensome of the old taxes (‘taxes on knowledge’) in 1855. The most successful of the new id. newspapers of the period was the Daily Telegraph, and Collins may be thinking here of the success that his former colleague on Household Words, G. A. Sala, had as a foreign correspondent for that paper.

  7. I will or will not go abroad. Crossed out in the manuscript there follows:

  And suppose I put a kiss in the letter, and drew a line round it to show where it is? and suppose I write under it ‘Patience, patience; and I’ll send some more’? Who was the idiot who first said ‘Beauty was only skin deep’? You can’t see anything under the skin – why should you…

  8. Five o’clock. The manuscript continues:

  Another visitor! No less a person than Mrs Milroy’s nurse! Her excuse (for it was plainly nothing else) for coming to see me, is that it is heavy on her conscience to tell me the truth. She is aware that I believe Miss Neelie to be responsible for sending Mr Armadale to my reference in London; and she wishes to apprise me, from her own personal knowledge, that Miss Neelie really knew nothing about it [the manuscript then continues as in text from ‘and it all originated’ to ‘medical care’]. Having favoured me with these particulars, the nurse finished with a little cough and looked as if she expected to be made the depository of some confidence on my side.

  A little friendly talk between us soon satisfied me of two things. One, that she is so far as ignorant as the major of Miss Milroy’s meetings with Armadale. The other, that she had some communication with the servants at the great house, and that she suspects me of stopping here with designs on Armadale, which might make a confidential person like herself a purchasea
ble bargain to me, in the character of go-between. I thought it wise not to undeceive her. She knows Miss Milroy’s habits as well as I do; and her suspicions, if confided with me, might turn Miss Milroy [my way?] Without therefore saying anything positive one way or the other, I thanked her for coming, gave her some silver (which I can ill spare) and took down an address in London at which I can write to her if I pleased. I was not sorry to see the door close on her. She is a dangerous woman, and if she waits till I write, she will wait long enough.

  As to what she told me about Mrs Milroy, even if it is true, which I persist in doubting – it is of no importance now. I know that Miss Milroy and nobody but Miss Milroy – has utterly ruined my prospect of becoming Mrs Armadale of Thorpe-Ambrose – and I care to know nothing more. If her mother was really alone in the attempt to expose my false reference, the mother seems to me to be suffering for it any rate. And so, good bye to Mrs Milroy.

  At an earlier stage, Collins apparently saw a part for the odious nurse in the subsequent narrative.

  9. I see it! The manuscript continues:

  My door is locked. I am afraid of the people of the house. If any of them came in, they might see it in my face. I believe I look as I looked in the bygone time, when the people in authority came to me with their studied politeness, and their deadly calm, and said, ‘This way, if you please. The judge has taken his seat and the court is waiting for you!’