From The Woman in White directed by Trevor Nunn, Palace Theatre, London, 2004
Book Details
Andrew Lycett
WILKIE COLLINS
A life of sensation
525pp. Hutchinson. £20.
978 0 09 193709 6
A workmanlike biography of the very Victorian creator of sensation fiction
JOHN STOKES
Since so many Victorian novels include the presence of a double it is tempting to assume that the figure reflects the historical circumstances of authors who are torn between maintaining a public face and protecting a private – or "secret" – life. Revelations about Charles Dickens's longtime mistress, Ellen Ternan, present a particularly inviting instance. In the case of Wilkie Collins the possibility seems equally attractive because his relationships with women were unorthodox and, to an extent that is still unclear, had to be kept under wraps.
From 1859 onward Collins lived with a young widow, Caroline Graves. In 1868 Graves married another man, but the relationship didn't last and Collins continued to be closely involved with her until his own death in 1889. Graves was subject to what Collins himself described as "nervous-hysterical" attacks which, again not surprisingly, has led some to see her as a model for his more troubled fictional heroines, especially Marian Halcombe in The Woman in White (1859–60). In the mid-1860s, however, Collins had begun another liaison, this time with Martha Rudd, the daughter of an agricultural labourer, with whom he was to have three children. For quite considerable periods he ran two separate London households with two different women – and was married to neither.
Andrew Lycett's new biography takes Victorian doubleness for granted, finding a predictable irony in the relation between Collins's "compromised" domestic situation and novels that were "based on exposing the double standards and hypocrisy beneath the surface of Victorian society". This is hard to deny, unless the facts of Collins's sexual life, so far as they are known, prompt one – as they well might – to reconsider received ideas of Victorian "hypocrisy" altogether. In any case, double standards are only half the story. A literary double is neither a falsehood nor a copy; it's a reversed reflection, a replication that is also an alternative. In a classic work of generic criticism, entitled Doubles (1985), Karl Miller, without mentioning Collins, explained modern duality as a mode of imaginative escape to be associated with the liberating uncertainties built into the act of writing itself. Collins's protagonists are sometimes naive, or blind to their situation, in a way that their authorial creator could not have been. As more recent academic critics such as Jenny Bourne Taylor have shown, Collins's sense of human psychology had a great deal in common with contemporary scientific enquiry into the workings of the mind. The interest was far from secret and the phenomenon of double consciousness was widely demonstrated and discussed.
This may account for the fact that Collins regularly invented characters who encounter their own emotional or psychological opposites in terms of sexual or moral temperament. These pairings can be female (Clara and Margaret in Basil, Rosanna and Rachel in The Moonstone, Carmina and Miss Minerva in Heart and Science, the sisters Norah and Magdalen in No Name, Mercy Merrick and Grace Roseberry in The New Magdalen), or male (Basil and Mannion in Basil, even – in the novel of that name – two men both called "Armadale"), or across gender (Marian Halcombe and Count Fosco in The Woman in White). In addition, Collins, routinely credited with mixing the sensation novel with the detective story, constructs frames within frames, deploys multiple narrators, composes implausibly detailed letters and devises plots involving mesmerism. Cumulatively all these techniques seem designed to reflect a world in which it is virtually impossible to know anything or anyone for sure.
Sometimes literary biographers put the doubling process into reverse, employing imaginative fictions as a means of tracking back to actual occurrence. This is not primarily Lycett's way. In a substantial book he is not particularly generous with quotation and readers may feel the need to fill in the imaginative evidence for themselves. So, for instance, we learn in some detail about the sequence of north London addresses, from Marylebone to Avenue Road, north of Regent's Park, in which Collins lived for most of his life, but to appreciate the strangely provisional quality of Collins's home ground one has to turn to passages like this one from Basil (1852): " . . . a suburb of new houses, intermingled with wretched patches of waste land, half built over. Unfinished streets, unfinished crescents, unfinished squares, unfinished shops, unfinished gardens, surrounded us".
The London the author knew best was in the throes of being created – a margin between the town, invariably described as hot, dirty, and crowded – and a frequently desolate countryside, a developing suburbia that could look permanently incomplete. Collins's cityscapes are both hallucinatory and topographically exact. The Woman in White provides a famously creepy instance. The narrator has arrived at the point "where four roads met – the road to Hampstead, along which I had returned, the road to Finchley, the road to West End, and the road back to London". Looking towards the city, he is accosted by what seems to be an apparition:
There, in the middle of the broad, bright high-road – there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven – stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments, her face bent in grave enquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her.
Brought together in this way the vision of the woman and the vista of the city are both subject to curious meteorological conditions governing the contrast of light. It's an extreme example of a repeated effect. Basil again: "The fair summer evening was tending towards twilight; the sun stood fiery and low in the cloudless horizon; the last loveliness of the last quietest daylight hour was fading on the violet sky, as I entered the square".
At such transitional moments the possibilities are palpable, but as yet unknown. Collins's unusual sensitivity to light is, perhaps, to be connected with the near-psychedelic experiences that opium, to which he became profoundly addicted as a result of medical prescriptions, might have offered him. Lycett believes that, as time went on, opiate addiction lessened rather than deepened Collins's ability to convey perceptual disorientation, but something other than pure imagination seems to be powerfully at work in The Moonstone. The bewitching jewel gives off a glow like that of "a harvest moon":
When you looked down into the stone, you looked into yellow deep that drew your eyes into it so that they saw nothing else. It seemed unfathomable; this jewel, that you could hold between your finger and thumb, seemed unfathomable as the heavens themselves. We set it in the sun, and then shut the light out of the room, and it shone awfully out of the depths of its own brightness, with a moony gleam, in the dark.
Moments like these can be as erotic as they are elusive. They bear comparison with the "unfathomable" depths glimpsed within the highly intelligent yet oppressed heroines of the novels and they encourage speculation about the appeal of the actual women in the author's life – not that, even in Lycett's biography, we ever really come to know them. Collins described his relationship with Martha Rudd as "morganatic". It's a tell-tale choice of word that implies a lasting awareness of class difference between partners, and unresolved chafing against hierarchies is common in novels such as Man and Wife (1870). Yet the way in which Collins treated his two mistresses remains a largely hidden part of a life in which, according to external testimony, physical illness played a more dominant, and certainly a more discussed role, than moral disquiet – gout more significant than guilt.
The man who once described the English winter as "the season of Cant and Christmas" did, it is true, have an ear for the hypocrisy of others, including religious fudge. In The Moonstone the servant Betteridge, for the most part a deferential old buffer, overhears the smooth and sanctimonious ladies' man Godfrey Ablewhite express his ideas about morality to the woman he has his eye on:
Religion . . . meant love. And love meant religion. And earth was heaven a little the worse for wear. And heaven was earth, done up again to look like new. Earth had some very objectionable people in it; but to make amends for that, all the women in heaven would be members of a prodigious committee that never quarrelled, with all the men in attendance on them as ministering angels. Beautiful! Beautiful!
But why, wonders Betteridge, half-perceptively, does Mr Godfrey "keep it all to the lady and himself?" Religion for Collins, especially when organized, is usually a mode of manipulation. In the later novels his subversive attitudes to public life are even more on the surface: The New Magdalen (1873) takes on the divorce laws; Heart and Science (1883) treats the horrors of vivisection. Yet although pernicious practices are exposed, they tend to remain in place. There's a bitterly ironic instance at the very end of Heart and Science, when the funeral of the misguided vivisectionist Dr Nathan Benjulia is attended in large numbers by "his brethren of the torture-table", who honour him as a martyr to their sinister cause.
Some 3,000 of Collins's letters have survived, and they are largely available in good modern collected editions. It may seem fitting that this master of the epistolary form should have left so much correspondence, but it's more revealing about business matters than about the affairs of a divided heart. Lycett is strong on this important aspect of Collins's career, tracing his relationship with a series of publishers and his impatience with Charles Mudie, the puritanical owner of the country's largest lending library. Having flourished in the era of the three-decker, Collins remained tied to the form even when it was under threat. He knew very well that commercial arrangements between author and publisher were continually changing, but despite becoming the first well-known client of A. P. Watt, the literary agent, professionally he remained a mid-Victorian, endlessly worried about copyright and wrangling over editions.
Since the groundbreaking biographies of Collins by William M. Clarke in 1988 and Catherine Peters in 1991, academic studies, spurred by a feminist interest in the Gothic and the melodramatic, have proliferated. By contrast with this critical engagement, Andrew Lycett has given the creator of sensation fiction a workmanlike but distanced treatment. His approach has the virtue of providing what documentary evidence exists, yet the biography of a writer like Collins doesn't have to be confined to prosaic detail. In 2012, Peter Ackroyd published his own shorter Life of Collins, a work that was particularly appreciative, as one might have anticipated from this author, of the layered mysteries of London buildings but, more unexpectedly, managed to exploit afresh the long-established criticism that Collins is better on plot than on character. Ackroyd turns the complaint around by explicating the literary achievement while detailing Collins's career, showing how structural mechanisms and stylistic devices create unique moments of suspense out of a series of incidents. Ackroyd features the fictive; Lycett fixes on the factual. Given the perennial choice that faces the literary biographer – whether to foreground the life or the work – you might even say that the one doubles the other.
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