Chapter VII.
The Story Continued by Isidor, Ottavio Baldassare Fosco The Story Continued by Walter Hartright
Chapter I.
Chapter II.
Chapter III.
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About the Author.
Wilkie Collins was born in Marylebone in London on 8 January 1824. His father was the landscape painter William Collins. After school he worked for a tea merchant before studying to become a lawyer. In 1848 he published a biography of his father and his first novel, Antonina, followed in 1850. In 1851 he met Charles Dickens who would later edit and publish some of his work. Collins's novels were extremely popular in his own time as well as today. The Woman in White (1860), No Name (1862), Armadale (1866) and The Moonstone (1868) are his best-known works. Collins was linked with two women (one of whom bore him three children) but he never married. He died on 23 September 1889.
OTHER NOVELS BY WILKIE COLLINS.
Antonina Mr Wray's Cash-box Basil Hide and Seek The Dead Secret No Name Armadale The Moonstone Man and Wife Poor Miss Finch The New Magdalen Law and the Lady The Two Destinies A Rogue's Life The Fallen Leaves Jezebel's Daughter The Black Robe Heart and Science I Say No The Evil Genius The Guilty River The Legacy of Cain Blind Love Iolani Still unsurpassed as a masterpiece of narrative drive and excruciating suspense, THE WOMAN IN WHITE is also famous for introducing, in the figure of Count Fosco, the prototype of the suave, sophisticated evil genius. The first detective novel ever written, it has remained, since its publication in 1860, the most admired example of the genre.
INTRODUCTION.
The Woman in White was serialized in All the Year Round, the weekly periodical edited by Wilkie Collins' friend, occasional collaborator and competitor as a best-selling novelist, Charles Dickens, from November 1859 to August 1860. In August, it was published as a book in the standard Victorian format of three volumes, by Sampson Low in England and Harper Brothers in the United States. In England, The Woman in White heralded a decade of literary sensationalism, in which what by the early 1860s reviewers were already labelling the 'sensation novel', a term borrowing from the 'sensation drama' of the contemporary stage, dominated the market for fiction.
Wilkie Collins notoriously led his private life on advanced principles. That life has been fully explored for the first time in a recent biography, The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins, by William M. Clarke, who has had the advantage as a biographer of being married to the novelist's great-grand-daughter. Collins was Charles Dickens' prized 'vicious associate' in nights of 'amiable dissipation and unbounded license', functioning, as Clarke suggests, as a necessary emotional safety-valve for Dickens at the time of the beginning of his acquaintance with the eighteen-year-old actress, Ellen Ternan, and of his acute distress over his marriage. The two novelists (Dickens, born in 1812, was twelve years the senior) had met in 1851 when Wilkie Collins was summoned as a last-minute substitute to play the modest part of valet to Dickens' protagonist in one of the latter's lavish amateur theatrical productions. To Collins, unlike the young Dickens, it was a matter of principle not to marry. In the mid-1850s, however, his more strictly bachelor days ended when Caroline Graves entered his life in sensational circumstances which inspired the scene in The Woman in White of Walter Hartright's meeting Anne Catherick. Of the original incident, there is an often quoted account by John Millais in his biography of his father, Sir John Millais, the celebrated painter and Collins' friend and contemporary.
One night in the fifties Millais was returning home to Gower Street from one of the many parties held under Mrs Collins's hospitable roof in Hanover Terrace, and, in accordance with the usual practice of the two brothers, Wilkie and Charles, they accompanied him on his homeward walk through the dimly-lit, and in those days semi-rural, roads and lanes of North London. It was a beautiful moonlit night in the summer time, and as the three friends walked along chatting gaily together, they were suddenly arrested by a piercing scream coming from the garden of a villa close at hand. It was evidently the cry of a woman in distress; and while pausing to consider what they should do, the iron gate leading to the garden was dashed open, and from it came the figure of a young and very beautiful woman dressed in flowing white robes that shone in the moonlight. She seemed to float rather than to run in their direction, and, on coming up to the three young men, she paused for a moment in an attitude of supplication and terror. Then, seeming to recollect herself, she suddenly moved on and vanished in the shadows cast upon the road.
While Millais was reflecting on the beauty of the woman, Collins pursued her. Dickens' daughter, Kate Perugini, whose first husband had been Wilkie's brother, Charles, related in the 1930s how Wilkie Collins 'had a mistress called Caroline, a young woman of gentle birth, and the origin of the woman in white'. William Clarke, who exposes the gentle birth as a myth, suggests the relationship to have been companionable and equal, remarkably so for the time: without the option of being a pallid angel in the house, Caroline was witty, charming and competent. Collins was not to be moved on the question of marriage, however, and in 1868, with her bluff seemingly having been called in trying to shift him from his position, Caroline married someone else, Joseph Charles Clow, whose family was in the wine trade. Seldom lacking in sang froid, Wilkie Collins attended the wedding. The marriage was a brief one and Caroline was soon back with Wilkie Collins, though probably on altered terms, as Clarke thinks. Collins had by now installed in conveniently neighbouring lodgings Martha Rudd, a girl from a poor Norfolk family whom he had met probably in 1864, when she was nineteen, and by the time of Caroline's return she was expecting her second child by Wilkie.
Wilkie Collins' bohemianism extended to the consumption of drugs as well as to his romantic and sexual arrangements. Thus Collins is in the tradition of the nineteenth century's distinguished literary opium addicts, dosing himself with laudanum (opium distilled in alcohol) originally to relieve the pain of his gout, but progressing until anecdotes abounded in relation to his habit: a servant was alleged to have swallowed Wilkie's nightly dose of laudanum, apparently mistaking it for port, and to have dropped dead on the spot, and Collins had a recurrent hallucination of a woman with a green face and teeth like tusks, who waited on the stairs for him as he went to bed and bade him goodnight by biting his shoulder. Such traumas apart, one may agree with William Clarke's remark about the bohemian proclivities of Collins that 'he did these things not to make a point, not to be ahead of his time, but simply because he was always at ease with his own decisions'. As Clarke's biography reveals, Collins was a devoted and anxious parent albeit shunning marriage. The two significant women in his life, Caroline Graves and Martha Rudd, knew about each other, and the children of Martha Rudd and Collins shared holidays with the children of Caroline's daughter, Harriet, whom Collins treated as paternally as if he had indeed been her father. Collins did not prefer his principles to the well-being and comfort of the women, and was always respectably Mr Dawson when he visited Martha Rudd as Mrs Dawson.
The first published work of Wilkie Collins was the memoir of his recently deceased father, William Collins, RA, the popular and prosperous landscape painter, which appeared in 1848. In the memoir, the career of William Collins becomes an equivalent in the arts to the lives of the engineers which Samuel Smiles was to present as exemplary in his mid-nineteenth-century bestsellers, The Life of George Stephenson, Self-Help and Lives of the Engineers. The engineers of the Industrial Revolution who rose to eminence and riches from humble origins had suggested the scope available for others to do the same. In The Woman in White, the always somewhat complacent protagonist, the young drawing-master, Walter Hartright, remarks early on of his father that 'Thanks to his admirable prudence and self-denial my mother and sister were left, after his death, as independent of the world as they had been during his lifetime.' Prudence, self-denial, independence: these were pre-eminently the bourgeois virtues. The writing of the memoir was a devotedly filial labour, and such virtues were unlikely to be slighted as subscribed to and practised in his own time by William Collins. The fiction, however, recurrently parodies what Collins terms in the preface to Armadale 'the claptrap morality of the present day', and the sincerity is suspect of the filial biographer who competes with his subject in morality. Enthusiastic as is the son's homage to the father's genius, in the account of the painter's career the stress falls less on the genius than on the moral virtues which all might cultivate and to whose material efficacy the successful career was a tribute. The peroration to one moralistic digression refuses to be an apology.
These remarks may appear to delay unnecessarily the progress of this Memoir, but they are suggested by the great truth which the career of Mr Collins illustrates that the powers of the mind, however brilliant, are never too elevated to be aided by the moral virtues of the character; and that between the aims of the intellect and the discipline of the disposition, it is intended that there should exist an all-important connexion, which the pride of genius may easily sever, but which the necessities of genius are never enabled to spare.
The moralism informing the Memoirs is derided in The Woman in White. Though recent criticism has rightly been interested in images of women and issues of gender in the fiction, it is especially the undermining of the traditional bourgeois ethic of self-help, in crisis though much preached still in the 1860s, and far from dead as an ideological force, as the 1870s and even the 1980s might demonstrate, which alarmed reviewers of the sensation fiction of Collins and prompted some of their more dismissive and patronising judgements.
Compliments to William Collins are not only in exemplary early Victorian taste but also poles apart from what would be remarked of the bulk of his son's work, from Antonina, in 1850, onwards. 'In him, taste was essentially a happy and kindly gift; for it made him especially the painter for the young, the innocent and the gentle. Throughout the whole series of his works, they could look on none that would cause them a thrill of horror, or a thought of shame.' On 24 June 1854, the reviewer and novelist, Geraldine Jewsbury, writing in the Athenaeum, welcomed Hide and Seek, which followed Antonina and Collins' second novel, Basil, thus: In Antonina and Basil Mr Collins showed himself possessed of gifts of genius; but in those works his strength was like the strength of fever, and his knowledge of human nature resembled a demonstration in morbid anatomy. Over both those works there hung a close, stifling, unwholesome odour: if fascinating, they were not wholesome; if powerful, they were not pleasant. In his present work, Hide and Seek, he has ceased walking the moral hospital to which he has hitherto confined his excursions. Here we have health and strength together.
Even the novels preceding Hide and Seek show biases quite at odds with those of Collins' sensation phase, though the sensation fiction would attract opprobrium couched in curiously similar terms. Geraldine Jewsbury would have been provoked by two scenes in particular in Antonina and Basil. In Antonina, a licentious cat-worshipping Roman senator intrudes on the eponymous heroine in her bedchamber and revels in the sight of her state of undress. In Basil, the eponymous hero is an anguished but spellbound listener rather than a voyeur as, through the 'boards papered over' which divide two rooms in a shabby hotel, filter the sounds accompanying the act of adultery between his yet virginal bride of a year and her father's confidential clerk. 'I heard and I knew knew my degradation in all its infamy, knew my wrongs in all their nameless horror,' recalls Basil as narrator.
If Geraldine Jewsbury was shocked by what for the time was the unusual sexual candour of the scene in Basil, to suggest female sexual promiscuity as a potentiality was indelicate in a wider sense. Dr Johnson had long ago insisted that 'all the property of the world depends upon female chastity, and that 'confusion of progeny constitutes the essence of the crime' of adultery, so that while 'wise married women don't trouble themselves about infidelity in their husbands', wifely infidelity was unforgivable. Charges couched in similar terms of those of 'walking the moral hospital' were much elicited by the sensation fiction of the 1860s, and seem to have been as liable to be provoked by moral or social heterodoxy as by salaciousness. The early fiction, however, even though occasionally salacious, is relatively compliant to the prejudices of the middle-class reader. Antonina is a historical romance of the fifth century: historical romance was the fictional vogue of the 1830s and 1840s, and though when Collins began writing fiction, the market was in decline, historical romance remained an obvious choice for any aspiring and commercially astute young novelist. Caught between the Scylla of orgulous nobles and the Charybdis of slaves who steal his flocks and ravage his cornfields, a despairing Roman farmer is ready to welcome the Goths: he is, alas, no visionary.
. . . Could he have imagined how, in after years, the 'middle class', despised in his day, was to rise to privilege and power; to hold in its just hands the balance of the prosperity of nations; to crush oppression and regulate rule; to soar in its mighty flight above thrones and principalities, and ranks and riches, apparently obedient, but really commanding could he but have foreboded this, what a light must have burst upon his gloom, what a hope must have soothed him in his despair!
Admittedly, Basil, with a modern setting, is less ingratiating to the middle class than might have been anticipated from this gratuitous tribute from the fifth century. The implied alternatives which emerge to middle-class values, however, are those of the aristocracy or gentry. By contrast, what would seem to characterize at least the first two-thirds of the 1860s as the age of sensation is a sense of the possibility of social transformation in the fairly immediate future, so that hostility to the present can dispense with nostalgia. If the middle class is not treated kindly in The Woman in White, nor is the hypochondriacal Frederick Fairlie, representing the country gentry (but somewhat of a spent force, as he would acknowledge), presented as admirable.
Of the novels succeeding to Basil in the 1850s, Hide and Seek, published in 1854, and for which Geraldine Jewsbury gave much thanks, tends to be Dickens-and-water, as Dickens partially conceded to his less charitable (where Collins was concerned) sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth. The evangelically respectable Mr Thorpe is revealed as a seducer, but such a revelation is minimally subversive. The more radical option is to challenge respectable values, as do the sensation novels of the 1860s. While The Dead Secret, published in 1857, is more impressive, its radicalism may be contained in a moral which Leonard, the heroine's husband but a chilly snob, merely would be more agreeable for bearing in mind: that the highest honours are 'conferred by LOVE and TRUTH'.
The novelist and critic, Margaret Oliphant, commented in her review, 'Sensation Novels', in Blackwood's Magazine in May 1862, on the completeness with which the domestic saga, the vogue in middle-class popular fiction in the 1850s, had been superseded by the sensation novel. She complimented Wilkie Collins on being the first novelist since Sir Walter Scott to keep readers up all night over a novel: Domestic histories, however virtuous and charming, do not often attain the result nor, indeed, would an occurrence so irregular and destructive of all domestic proprieties be at all a fitting homage to the virtuous chronicles which have lately furnished the larger part of our light literature.
So marked a switch of taste in the readership from domestic saga two of the more prominent examples of which were Charlotte Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) and Dinah Mulock's John Halifax, Gentleman (1856) to sensation novel asks to be related to the historical currents of the period: events, but also thoughts and emotions about the events or apparently imminent events.
In The Age of Capital 18481875, the historian, E. J. Hobsbawm, remarks that the economic boom of the first seven years of the 1850s sent politics into 'hibernation'. 'In Britain Chartism died away . . . Parliamentary reform ceased to occupy British politicians for a while . . . Even the middle-class radicals, Cobden and Bright, having achieved the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846, were now an isolated fringe minority in politics.' The period of quietude ended with the depression of 1857.
Economically speaking, this was merely an interruption of the golden age of capitalist growth which resumed on an even larger scale in the 1860s and reached its peak in the boom of 18713. Politically it transformed the situation. Admittedly it disappointed the hopes of revolutionaries, who had expected it to produce another 1848 . . . Yet politics did revive. Within a short space of time all the old questions of liberal politics were once again on the agenda Italian and German national unification, constitutional reform, civil liberties and the rest. Whereas the economic expansion of 18517 had taken place in a political vacuum, prolonging the defeat and exhaustion of 18489, after 1859 it coincided with increasingly intense political activity.
A sense of crisis and upheaval is to be traced in the writings of contemporaries. George Augustus Sala knew Wilkie Collins from the days when both were on the staff of Household Words, the weekly periodical edited by Dickens which preceded All the Year Round. In his autobiography, The Life and Adventures of George Augustus Sala, Sala compared the International Exhibition of 1862 with the Great Exhibition of 1851, which was housed in Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace in Hyde Park.
The display presented two conspicuous departures from the lines laid down in 1851. In that year, no modern weapon of war was to be seen in the palace of glass and iron. In 1862 section after section showed cannon, gun, muskets, rifles, pistols, swords, daggers, and other munitions of warfare. The promoters of the First Exhibition had thought, good souls! that the thousand years of war were over, and that the thousand years of peace were to be inaugurated; but they had awakened from that dulcet dream in 1862. Solferino and Magenta had been fought, and the great American Civil War was impending.
Margaret Oliphant explained the vogue for the sensation novel in terms of the Zeitgeist: 'it is natural that art and literature should, in an age which has turned to be one of events, attempt a kindred depth of effect and shock of incident'. Like Sala, Oliphant was impressed by the contrast between the mood of the 1860s and the optimisim of 1851: 'we who once did, and made, and declared ourselves masters of all things, have relapsed into the natural size of humanity before the great events which have given a new character to the age'. Margaret Oliphant was thinking of wars abroad and particularly the American Civil War: That distant roar has come to form a thrilling accompaniment to the safe life we lead at home. On the other side of the Atlantic, a race blasee and lost in universal ennui has bethought itself of the grandest expedient for procuring a new sensation; and albeit we follow at a humble distance, we too begin to feel the need of a supply of new shocks and wonders.
Margaret Oliphant may be suspected of being disingenuous in contrasting thrilling America with safe England. The English fascination with events in America was because the war seemed provoked by something more urgent than ennui. As did the English monied classes generally, The Times supported the South because it was assumed to be rebelling against democracy. In the 1860s, with the emergence of an organized trades union movement and vigorous campaigns for an extension of the franchise, democracy was a prospect much contemplated in England. The Civil War was a terrible warning which English democrats would do well to heed: it certainly encouraged their opponents to think that the triumph of democracy was not inevitable. Reviewers stressed the contemporaneity of setting of sensation novels as a distinguishing feature, and H. L. Mansel, in a marathon review of sensation fiction, explained that it was necessary to be near a mine to be blown up by the explosion. Unlike most of his emulators, however, whose opening chapters are indeed set three or four years back to allow the plot to culminate in the present, Collins was exploring the pre-history of the mood of crisis in the 1860s. The sensational plots of both The Woman in White and Armadale, Collins' third sensation novel of the 1860s, culminate in what Lydia Gwilt, the red-haired and seductive murderess in Armadale, sacrilegiously refers to as 'the worn-out old year eighteen hundred and fifty-one'. Like some recent historians of the age, Collins was sceptical of even the briefest period of mid-Victorian 'calm'.
What may be termed the first 'sensation scene' of The Woman in White is that of Walter Hartright's meeting with Anne Cathcrick on Avenue Road. Hartright is walking back late on a summer night from his mother's cottage in Hampstead to his chambers in Lincoln's Inn. Henry Dickens remembered his father comparing the episode with Thomas Carlyle's account in The French Revolution of the march of the Parisian women to Versailles: these were the 'two scenes in literature which he regarded as being the most dramatic descriptions he could recall'. This is an intriguing comment so far as the scene in The Woman in White is concerned, since nothing happens that is obviously dramatic, following the actual entrance of Anne Catherick, the woman in white. As much as Carlyle, however, even if characteristically less strenuously, Collins captures an historical moment.
While praising the characterization of Marian Halcombe and Count Fosco, admirers of The Woman in White have often complained that Walter Hartright and Laura Fairlie are a disappointingly standard hero and heroine. The complaint is misconceived: the hero and heroine are conventional; their characterization is not. There is a neat irony to the naming of Collins' protagonist. Hartright sounds like a character in a morality play, and, in the mid-nineteenth century, society was conventionally perceived as morality play. Those with a right heart succeeded while others failed. Hartright has to adjust, to the more complex social actuality. By the late 1840s, it was becoming increasingly difficult to believe in the validity of the moral ethic which was derived from laissez-faire economics, though the ethic was preached all the more sternly in the face of doubt. Recommending self-help to the poor, remarks a modern historian of the period, J. F. C. Harrison, was like telling them to 'lift themselves up by their own bootstraps'. Collins shows a cynicism beginning to attach to the inculcation of respectable values. In The Woman in White, Mrs Catherick is praised for her 'independence of feeling' in consigning (at Sir Percival Glyde's expense) her daughter, Anne, to a private asylum. Enunciating the principle that 'a truly wise mouse is a truly good mouse', Fosco parodies the naivete of Laura without being himself more worldly wise than other contemporary moralists.
There is a real-life equivalent to Walter Hartright's progress towards enlightenment in The Woman in White. 'To Mr Collins,' wrote Henry James, 'belongs the credit of having introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors.' During the years in which The Woman in White is set, and in conducting the inquiries which eventually were to yield his magnum opus, London Labour and the London Poor, the pioneering investigative sociologist, Henry Mayhew, was introducing readers of the Morning Chronicle to mysteries at their own doors. Douglas Jerrold asked a correspondent, Mrs Cowden Clarke, in 1850: Do you devour those marvellous revelations of the inferno of misery, or wretchedness, that is smouldering under our feet? We live in a mockery of Christianity that, with the thought of its hypocrisy, makes us sick. We know nothing of this terrible life that is about us us, in our smug respectability.
Mayhew is initially an orthodox moralist, insistent that much of the misery of the poor derived from their own fecklessness and improvidence. Introducing an account of the London costermongers, he remarked ruefully that 'the hearth, which is so sacred a symbol to all civilized races as being the spot where the virtues of each succeeding generation are taught and encouraged, has no charms for them'. Mayhew's report on the costermongers, however, showed that they spurned the hearth with impunity: although they rarely married, social chaos did not result and community life continued. Mayhew came to appreciate that, so far from bad morals causing poverty, poverty caused the bad morals. Burlesquing the language of orthodoxy, he wrote of the casual dock-labourer's improvidence that it was: due, therefore, not to any particular malformation of his moral constitution, but to the precarious character of his calling. His vices are the vices of ordinary human nature . . . If the very winds could whistle away the food and firing of wife and children, I doubt much whether, after a week's or a month's privation, we should many of us be able to prevent ourselves from falling into the very same excesses.
In his novel set in the period in which Mayhew was conducting his researches, Collins, too, presented the moral invalids of conventional myth to his respectable audience ('we') as 'they' really were.
Samuel Smiles, in his Leeds lectures of the 1840s which were to form the basis of Self-Help, published in 1859, was 'citing examples of what other men had done, as illustrations of what each might, in a greater or less degree, do for himself. The corollary is that the distressed Anne Catherick is exclusively responsible for her own plight, and has been remiss in practising the bourgeois virtues. But Anne, as Hartright is gradually half-convinced, has 'done nothing wrong'. She is a victim of power, or circumstance, or a combination of the two, as were, one would assume, the mass of distressed in mid-Victorian society.
'This extraordinary apparition,' Walter Hartright calls Anne who is dressed in white from head to foot. Conventionally the signifier of female purity, white, in relation to Anne, has subversive connotations. Apparitions abounded in Gothic fiction, the preceding literary sensationalism, and Collins often alludes to Gothic props to imply the contrasting verisimilitude and preoccupation with the present of his own sensation fiction. To Hartright, however, the unfortunate innocent whose existence orthodoxy denies must necessarily seem ghostly. Hartright simultaneously denies and betrays his reflex suspicion of Anne. 'The one thing of which I felt certain was, that the grossest of mankind could not have misconstrued her motive in speaking, even at that suspiciously late hour and in that suspiciously lonely place.' Though one might assume that Hartright, in his capacity as narrator, is expanding on momentary misgivings, these have engrossed the time which they take to communicate, and the reader in sympathy with Hartright is made a party to keeping Anne in suspense. She has asked merely whether the road leads to London and wonders whether Hartright heard her question. Aware of his persisting mistrust, she protests her innocence. 'You don't suspect me of doing anything wrong, do you? I have done nothing wrong. I have met with an accident I am very unfortunate in being here alone so late. Why do you suspect me of doing wrong?' Alert to Hartright's compulsion to associate misfortune with guilt, Anne stresses the fortuity of her condition: she has 'met with an accident'; she is 'very unfortunate'.
Finally, Hartright's humanity would seem to override his conditioning. 'The natural impulse to assist her and to spare her got the better of the judgment, the caution, the worldly tact, which an older, wiser, and colder man might have summoned to help him in this strange emergency.' The natural impulse, however, takes Hartright only so far, and he continues to prevaricate, instead of showing Anne where to find a cab. 'What I did do, was to try and gain time by questioning her.' The aftermath of his eventual acquiescence is traumatic: It was like a dream. Was I Walter Hartright? Was this the well-known, uneventful road, where holiday people strolled on Sundays? Had I really left, little more than an hour since, the quiet, decent, conventionally domestic atmosphere of my mother's cottage?
The conventionally domestic version of society, stressing the sufficiency of prudence and self-help, turns out to be the dream. Hartright is worried by 'a vague sense of something like self-reproach', without being able further to define this premonition of the immorality of conventional morality. He finds Anne a cab, but remains perplexed. That benevolent impulse should conflict with the moral code in which he has been raised is still dreamlike: I hardly knew where I was going, or what I meant to do next; I was conscious of nothing but the confusion of my own thoughts, when I was abruptly recalled to myself awakened, I might almost say by the sound of rapidly approaching wheels close behind me.
Significantly, Hartright does not commit himself to the metaphor. He is awakened, 'almost', by the police, pursuing Anne at the instigation of Sir Percival Glyde. Hartright's confidence in the sweetness and light of the established social order of which the police are guardians has been undermined.
Hartright, however, is yet the standard hero when he next meets Anne in Cumberland. Scrubbing the tomb of her late benefactress, Mrs Fairlie, Anne finds that convincing Hartright that her reputation is spotless is similarly hard work: It ought to be kept white as snow, for her sake. I was tempted to begin cleaning it yesterday, and I can't help coming back to go on with it to-day. Is there anything wrong in that? I hope not. Surely nothing can be wrong that I do for Mrs Fairlie's sake?
Hartright's suspicions are as compulsive as Anne's scrubbing: Her 'misfortune'. In what sense was she using that word? In a sense which might explain her motive in writing the anonymous letter? In a sense which might show it to be the too common and too customary motive that has led many a woman to interpose anonymous hindrances to the marriage of the man who has ruined her?
Eventually, Hartright has no option but to extend in a manner which neither his own earlier self nor his father could have foreseen the principle of self-help. Instead of the orthodox version stemming from the model of a providentially ratified society in which poetic justice rains on the virtuous and vicious, Hartright resorts to a version of self-help which rejects social convention rather than being contained by it. Having attributed to paranoia Anne Catherick's mistrust of men of 'rank and title', Hartright himself now senses a conspiracy of rank and power in England. Bent on hiding from his enemies the location of the lodgings which he shares with Laura and Marian in the East End of London, he goes home by a lonely route to establish whether he is being followed. 'I had first learnt to use this stratagem against suspected treachery in the wilds of Central America and now I was practising it again, with the same purpose and with even greater caution, in the heart of civilized London!'
If civilized London and the wilds of Central America seem curiously associated, so might London and the Italy of the Risorgimento. Count Fosco combines his machinations against Laura with spying on behalf of the Austrians, who occupy his country, on his fellow Italians in England. Mocking the rhapsodic rhetoric of Mazzini, the Italian republican leader, Fosco ignores the organ-grinder and presents a tart to the monkey. 'In the sacred name of humanity, I offer you some lunch!' The sensational plot culminates in 1851, the year, as Hartright remarks, 'of the famous Crystal Palace Exhibition in Hyde Park'. There are many foreigners in London. Fosco is attacked by Hartright through an Italian friend, Pesca, who found Hartright his appointment as drawing-master in Cumberland and still inescapably belongs to an Italian revolutionary society, 'the Brotherhood', which Fosco has betrayed. Pesca now regrets committing himself to revolution, but is yet prepared to defend his youthful decision: It is not for you to say you Englishmen, who have conquered your freedom so long ago, that you have conveniently forgotten what blood you shed, and what extremities you proceeded to in the conquering it is not for you to say how far the worst of all exasperations may, or may not, carry the maddened men of an enslaved nation.
As well as in being diminutive, Pesca is 'still further distinguished among the rank and file of mankind by the harmless eccentricity of his character'. Recommending in his essay, On Liberty, published in 1859, eccentricity as a good in itself, John Stuart Mill remarked that 'precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric'. Pesca irritates Hartright's strait-laced sister by breaking a tea-cup. 'Very provoking: it spoils the Set.' Paradoxically, Pesca's eccentricity is manifested in emulating English respectability. Pesca adopts athleticism and is to be seen 'invariably carrying an umbrella, and invariably wearing gaiters and a white hat'. His Whiggish perspective on English history, which would imply that what the Italians were fighting for in the nineteenth century the English had won in the seventeenth, is not the last word in The Woman in White on the affinity between English and Italian history. If there were two nations in Italy, there might also be said to be, as Disraeli did say, two nations in England: rich and poor. Hartright follows the example of the Italian nationalists by taking the law into his own hands.
In Politics and Letters, published in 1979 and the record of discussions between the literary and cultural theorist, Raymond Williams, and representatives of New Left Review, Raymond Williams is invited to elaborate on the meaning of his concept, 'structure of feeling', initially defined here as 'the field of contradiction between a consciously held ideology and emergent experience'. It is notable how his further specifications correspond with presentations in the sensation novel: 'I have found that areas which I would call structures of feeling as often as not initially form as a certain kind of disturbance or unease, a particular type of tension, for which when you stand back or recall them you can sometimes find a referent.' The terms to which Raymond Williams resorts unease, or 'disturbance, tension, blockage, emotional trouble' are akin to those in which Collins renders the encountering by his protagonists of 'the field of contradiction between a consciously held ideology and emergent experience'. One need look no further than the first two sensation scenes of The Woman in White, with Hartright meeting Anne Catherick, and then the palpably resourceful, intelligent, and so (to Hartright) the alarmingly 'masculine' Marian Halcombe: To see such a face as this set on shoulders that a sculptor would have longed to model to be charmed by the modest graces of action through which the symmetrical limbs betrayed their beauty when they moved, and then to be almost repelled by the masculine form and masculine look of the features in which the perfectly shaped figure ended was to feel a sensation oddly akin to the helpless discomfort familiar to us all in sleep, when we recognise yet cannot reconcile the anomalies and contradictions of a dream.
Arriving at Limmeridge House in Cumberland as drawing-master to the half-sisters, Marian and Laura, Hartright first sees Marian Halcombe with her back towards him and is ready to be captivated on the strength of her figure. She spoils the effect by turning round. We would gather from Hartright that Marian contrasts absolutely with her half-sister, the pallidly angelic Laura Fairlie, in being ugly as well as in being spirited. We should not take the drawing-master's word for the former. It has to be a symptom of Collins, too, being to some degree trapped in prevailing sexual stereotypes, that Marian has down on her upper lip which to Hartright is 'almost a moustache'. But no less objectionable to Hartright because no less suggestive of an aura of manliness are the qualities revealed in her expression, qualities which Hartright would find admirable in a man. Hartright is incited to assert what has been affronted, his own and the conventional idea of femininity. 'Her expression bright, frank, and intelligent appeared, while she was silent, to be altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of gentleness and pliability, without which the beauty of the handsomest woman alive is beauty incomplete.'
Margaret Oliphant wrote in her review of May 1862: 'it cannot be denied that a most striking and original effort, sufficiently individual to be capable of originating a new school in fiction, has been made, and that the universal verdict has crowned it with success'. It is worth considering in what sense, if any, there was actually a 'school' of sensation fiction. In her review, Margaret Oliphant seems to abandon the distinction which she has implied between the new and preceding fiction by stating that 'Mr Wilkie Collins is not the first man who has produced a sensation novel', and citing Hawthorne, Bulwer Lytton and Dickens as forerunners, so that the beginning of the 1860s would not mark a literary turning-point. Collins cannot count as the first sensation novelist, since 'by fierce expedients of crime and violence, by diablerie of divers kinds . . . the thing has been done before now'. This, however, suggest the difference upon which she will insist. 'The result is no doubt a class of books abounding in sensation; but the effect is invariably attained by violent and illegitimate means, as fantastic in themselves as they are contradictory to actual life.' Wilkie Collins, on the other hand, is to be commended since 'the more we perceive the perfectly legitimate nature of the means used to produce the sensation, the more striking does that sensation become'. The force here is that of Henry James' congratulation of Collins for unveiling to middle-class readers 'the mysteries which are at our own doors'.
Margaret Oliphant complimented Collins on wasting 'neither wickedness nor passion' in The Woman in White. Wickedness, however, continued to be a prime motivator of many of the sensational plots of the 1860s. Mrs Henry Wood's East Lynne provides a once famous example. The adulterous wife is so disfigured in a railway accident that by donning a veil and blue spectacles she is able to return incognito as governess to her former home, East Lynne, and watch her son die lingeringly of consumption. In such fiction, what is sensational is not, as in the fiction of Collins, the suggestions of gaps and contradictions in the moral code, but the purported consequences of straying from it, by committing adultery or murder, or helping strange women on Avenue Road. Mrs Henry Wood's son, Charles Wood, who declared of her in his biography that 'in politics she took no part, beyond being a strong Conservative', quoted the tribute to her that 'she successfully used sensational elements for moral ends, and so at the most fitting moment met a great need and corrected a vicious tendency, hardly otherwise corrigible'. If such a mission inspired East Lynne, Dickens' The Mystery of Edwin Drood, his last and unfinished novel, with its running and hostile allusion to Collins' The Moonstone, would seem to have been similarly inspired. There was, then, in the 1860s, a 'war of ideas' between what may be distinguished as radical and conservative sensation novels, as there was in the 1790s between the Jacobin and anti-Jacobin fiction with which Marilyn Butler is preoccupied in her book, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas.
This helps to make a very broad church of what Margaret Oliphant terms 'a new school in fiction'. A strict 'school of Collins' might be an exclusive one, the master, Collins, and the self-acknowledged pupil, Mary Elizabeth Braddon. 'I aways say that I owe "Lady Audley's Secret" to "The Woman in White". Wilkie Collins is assuredly my literary father,' Braddon avowed, though somewhat belatedly, when the heat of competition and some twenty years had passed. Like that of Collins, Braddon's fiction would deconstruct the moralism of Mrs Henry Wood. Apart from Lady Audley's Secret, perhaps Braddon's most interesting sensation novel was Henry Dunbar: The Story of an Outcast, published two years later, in 1864. Henry Dunbar is a millionaire banker who dies violently. His murderer is an escaped convict called Joseph Wilmot, who assumes the banker's identity. Changing clothes with the corpse, he has his beard shaven off, his moustache trimmed and his hair cut: He was no longer a vagabond. He was a respectable, handsome-looking gentleman, advanced in middle age. Not altogether unaristocratic-looking.
The very expression of his face was altered. The defiant sneer was changed into a haughty smile; the sullen scowl was now a thoughtful frown.
The process is more complex than that of assuming a disguise, as Braddon shows the personality adapting to the unaccustomed dress and toilet. Quoting the passage, the critic in the North British Review, W. Fraser Rae, indignantly took the point: if Braddon were to be trusted, 'then many disreputable-looking characters have it in their power to become gentlemen at a very small cost'.
Probably the dominant image of the sensation novel was that it was distinguished by railing against abuses. The anonymous novel, The Old Roman Well, published in 1861, lived up to the image more promiscuously than most in protesting against crowded dwelling-houses, subversive plays, seductive wiles and adulterated beer. The 'innocent consumer of London draught' is treated to a history of his glass of ale. The beer having been watered by two parts to one: Coculus indicus, henbane, opium, and the Bohemian rosemary replaced the deluged malt.
With coculus indicus poachers 'hocuss' trout; with henbane Socrates was murdered; with opium Chinamen commit a tedious suicide; and one sprig of the Bohemian rosemary will produce a raving madness.
All this is simply to lend apparent strength to the beer: other subtle ingredients supply flavour and froth. The shrill tone of such novels notwithstanding, they may perhaps be read as socially complacent rather than not, since the shrillness proceeds from viewing an abuse, or even a cluster of abuses apparently chosen almost, at random, as exceptional. More anxiety is betokened by the unbending deference to the precepts of orthodoxy urged on readers of East Lynne.
Wilkie Collins produced four novels in the 1860s: The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale and The Moonstone. The first and last have always been in print, while No Name, and Armadale, wittily subversive in the manner of The Woman in White, are now also readily available. In the 1870s and 1880s, Collins, until shortly before he died in 1889, continued as a novelist, and a popular novelist, though less so than in the 1860s when he could write proudly of the 5,000, which he had received from the publisher, George Smith, for Armadale, that 'No living novelist (except Dickens) has had such an offer as this for one book.' Though the later fiction is often of interest and like Maurice Richardson, who introduced the previous Everyman edition of The Woman in White, I would particularly recommend Poor Miss Finch, published in 1872 much of it is characterized by an obsession with 'abuses' in the manner of The Old Roman Well. Collins' contemporary, the poet, Algernon Swinburne, produced a witty couplet: What brought good Wilkie's genius nigh perdition?
Some demon whispered 'Wilkie! have a mission'.
Though the verdict has recently been challenged, I would broadly agree with it. The 'missions' informing novels from Man and Wife in 1870 onwards with equal fervour, Collins inveighs against foot-racing, vivisection, Jesuits and the treatment of prostitutes, among other targets paradoxically suggest an accommodation to the new placidity of the late 1860s and the 1870s, when modest and mere reforms are thought to be all that is achievable. The demise of the sensation novel coincides with a renewed assent to orthodoxies which had been under challenge. If it was the economic slump of the mid-1860s which transformed John Bright's somewhat forlorn promotion of the cause of parliamentary reform into what was felt by many contemporaries to be a potentially revolutionary situation, that slump was followed by a spectacular boom which lasted until 1873. The historian, Gareth Stedman Jones, remarks that 'in the late 1860s and early 1870s, the liberal utopia had never seemed nearer. The bulk of the middle and upper classes had never felt more secure or confident in the future.' The 1870s were the 'golden years' of the Charity Organization Society. In My Apprenticeship, Beatrice Webb associates with the name of the Secretary to the Society, Charles Stewart Loch, such precepts as 'that independence is among the most valuable of the goods and chattels that a man possesses; that to wound independence is to do grievous harm; to foster independence is true charity; that character is nine-tenths of life'.
Norman Page, editor of Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage, quotes in his preface from the obituary of Collins in the Spectator, which suggested that the position of Mr Wilkie Collins in literature was a very unusual one. He was an extremely popular writer deservedly popular, as we think who was not very highly esteemed . . . That is an odd position, and we do not know that it has been quite satisfactorily explained.
Norman Page proffers his own explanation: 'what it demonstrates is that his novels posed certain distinctive critical problems which made the placing of them a delicate and controversial operation a task for which Victorian reviewers were not always adequately equipped'. This is true in part. The Woman in White, like Collins' other fiction of the 1860s, is formally innovative and complex. The story is narrated by various characters, a death certificate and a tombstone, with the effect of foregrounding the partiality of these and by implication any narrators. Thus we may be prompted to resist adopting the perspective of the moralizing commentary of Hartright, even though his name punningly suggests that he writes from the heart and that what he writes is 'right'. There were then such presumably innocent objections from reviewers of The Woman in White as that 'had the story been wrought out in the old-fashioned way it could have been told far more effectively and in less space'.
There are also, however, intriguing cases of contradictions within a review which suggest that reviewers were handicapped by more than a mere deficiency in critical sophistication. Margaret Oliphant, in her generally laudatory review of The Woman in White, has a convoluted complaint about Fosco, the villain who subverts conventional distinctions between right and wrong, as when he is inspired to read his white mice a moral lesson. 'A truly wise mouse is a truly good mouse. Mention that, if you please, to your companions, and never gnaw at the bars of your cage again as long as you live.' Against the evidence of the text, Margaret Oliphant must insist that Fosco is intended as the melodramatic stereotype of the villain, and then proceed to protest because actually she is unable to read Fosco in this way: He is intended to be an impersonation of evil, a representative of every diabolical wile: but Fosco is not detestable; on the contrary, he is more interesting, and seizes on our sympathies more warmly than any other character in the book.
In a review of 1863, the Spasmodic poet, Alexander Smith, while remarking of Collins' fiction that 'the reader is continually as if treading on bomb-shells, which may explode at any moment,' went beyond Margaret Oliphant in finally denying the power which he implied of the fiction to disturb: you feel you have been existing in a world of impossible incidents, and holding converse with monstrosities . . . If Mr Collins described a dead man walking out of his grave, the reader would peruse the startling sentences without a thrill just as if such a proceeding was the most ordinary thing in the world.
This is to turn a blind eye to precisely what other reviewers had identified as new about Collins' literary sensationalism: that it dispensed with haunted castles in favour of, in the words of Henry James, 'the mysteries which are at our own doors'.
Taking a tip from Wilkie Collins, annoyed by reviewers who dissipated for readers the suspense of his plots in advance, I have tried to avoid giving away too many secrets in the case of The Woman in White. My emphasis is on the frequent complexity and profundity of the suspense, belying the pejorative tag of melodrama which has often docketed the fiction in the past. It may encourage modern admirers of Wilkie Collins that contemporaries found the fiction challenging and disturbing, often more so than they were willing or able to acknowledge. Sensation fiction belongs to the context of the 186os. On the other hand, we are living in times when 'Victorian values' have recently been much trumpeted. The Woman in White wittily unmasks 'Victorian values' as ideology, effacing with a moral gloss what Douglas Jerrold called 'the inferno of misery, of wretchedness, that is smouldering under our feet'. It is a tribute to the radicalism by Victorian standards of The Woman in White, or to the regressive nature of political tendencies in our own time, or perhaps to both, that Wilkie Collins' novel is liable to seem curiously up to the minute to the modern reader.
Nicholas Rance SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY.
ASHLEY, ROBERT, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Barker, 1952. Biography and criticism.
BOURNE TAYLOR, JENNY, In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology, Routledge, 1988. Theoretically sophisticated and vertiginously intelligent.
CLARKE, WILLIAM M., The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins, Allison & Busby, 1988. At least while we await forthcoming editions of the letters, this will seem the definitive biography of Collins, though Clarke modestly eschews literary criticism.
DAVIS, NUEL PHARR, The Life of Wilkie Collins, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1956. As a biography, this is not satisfactory, since Davis too readily credits Collins with adventures befalling his characters. Nevertheless, often useful and stimulating.
HUGHES, WINIFRED, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1980. A pioneering and acute discussion of Wilkie Collins and the sensation novel, though relatively indifferent to the 1860s as historical context.
LONOFF, SUE, Wilkie Collins and his Victorian Readers: a Study in the Rhetoric of Authorship, AMS Press, New York, 1982. Subtle and informative, though less interested in the contemporary impact of Collins' novels than the title might seem to promise. Lonoff's thesis is that Collins' fiction was most commercially successful when least potentially disturbing. Though this might be what one would expect, I argue in the introduction for the radicalism of The Woman in White and the succeeding fiction of the 1860s, the period of Collins' greatest popularity, and the relative conservatism of the later fiction.
MILLER, D. A., The Novel and the Police, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1988. Includes ambitious essays on The Woman in White ('Cage aux folles: Sensation and Gender in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White') and The Moonstone.
O'NEILL, PHILIP, Wilkie Collins: Women, Property and Propriety, Macmillan, 1988. As well as being preoccupied with the themes announced in the subtitle, O'Neill denies that Collins 'declines' as a novelist from 1870 onwards.
PAGE, NORMAN, ed., Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974. A useful and revealing selection of early reviews and criticism.