BOOKS

A master with two mistresses

Bevis Hillier

THE LE I I FRS OF WILKIE In an after-dinner speech, Winston Churchill amused the company by recount- ing how he had been shipwrecked: While I was swimming about, a door from the ship providentially floated towards me — and, do you know, it was inscribed with my initials.

Both the writer and one of the editors of the letters under review are WCs (a step up, perhaps, from what the second Lord Redesdale called the Mitford sisters' suit- ors — 'sewers') and, by what might be termed a chain of coincidences, I have links with both of them, Wilkie Collins and William Clarke.

In the 1960s I was for a time deputy to the letters editor of the Times. Our job was to sift through the day's mail. Important letters from eminenti went straight to the editor, Sir William Haley. Other letters were sent through to the people who had written the articles that had provoked them, or to the newspaper's expert on a given letter's subject. Quite a few letters began something like this:

Sir, May I crave the indulgence of your columns to draw attention to a factor which seems to me to lie at the very root of the eco- nomic malaise at present afflicting our coun- try?

Such a letter would be sent through to Mr William Clarke, the paper's then financial editor. And back it would swiftly come with a brusque 'No' scrawled on the slip of paper attached to it. Clarke was a genial cove and often called into the letters department for a chat.

He married the great-granddaughter of Wilkie Collins. As a result he gained privi- leged access to papers which the family had always been careful to keep hushed up; and in 1988 he wrote The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins, a racy presentation of very scholar- ly research. The book laid bare the compli- cated private life of the author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White, who is regarded as 'the father of the detective story'. Collins kept two mistresses at the same time and had children by one of them, but never married.

Clarke also did his best to disentangle from Collins's fiction the parts that might be based on fact — for example, was there a real-life original of the Woman in White? In 1991 Catherine Peters built on Clarke's foundation with a critical biography. Clarke had expressly confined himself to the Life. But now Clarke, with William Baker, Professor of English at Northern Illinois University, has edited Collins's correspon- dence, some of it long hidden. Until these two volumes appeared, Collins was one of the last great Victorian writers whose let- ters remained largely unpublished.

I have unorthodox reasons for taking a special interest in Wilkie Collins. A train of circumstances, suggestive of one of his own plots, led me to him. In the early 1960s I bought a bound volume of the Strand Mag- azine for 1912. It contained an article recalling the St John's Wood Clique, a 'Good night, dear! God willing, we'll resume our dreary existence tomorrow.' group of artists who had lived in that part of north London in the mid-19th century. They included W. F. Yeames, who painted 'And When Did You Last See Your Father?', and Henry Stacy Marks, who designed part of the frieze round the Royal Albert Hall. They were sort of second- division Pre-Raphaelites, specialising in such historical tableaux as 'The Queen Groweth Mopish and Melancholy'. No one had written a book on the Clique or, since 1912, so much as an article.

I decided to do some research and offer an essay to Apollo magazine. (It appeared in 1964.) My first step was to write to any- one in the NW8 area of north London — St John's Wood — with a surname the same as any member of the Clique. I struck gold almost immediately. One of the Clique was George Adolphus Storey, a capable history painter who wrote his memoirs. To my amazement I found still living in NW8 his elderly daughter, Miss Gladys Storey, OBE. She had got the OBE for supplying Bovril to the troops in the first world war and she repeated the per- formance in the second world war, receiv- ing a fulsome letter of gratitude from Lord Montgomery, referred to by Godfrey Smith (`Good old Monty!') in one of his Sunday Times columns when the letter was sold after her death. G. A. Storey had married late; so, incredibly, it was possible for this woman to talk to me about artists she had known who flourished in the 1850s.

Miss Storey lived in Wellington Road, St John's Wood. You went through a wicket gate in a high hedge and found yourself facing a building exactly like a country cot- tage. She gave me tea. I was lent a splendid group photograph of the Clique and a bound volume of their manuscript letters, each headed by their printed emblem of a gridiron (signifying that they all felt free to 'roast' their confreres' works when they thought them substandard). My sole inter- est was to pump Gladys Storey for as much information about the Clique as I could get. So when she mentioned that she had been a friend of Charles Dickens's daugh- ter, Kate Perugini, I registered the fact — because Dickens, as a writer, is an idol of mine — in an 'I danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales' kind of way but moved quickly on to my next question about the Clique. I now realise what a chance I missed. When I read Claire Tomalin's 1990 book on Dickens's girlfriend Nelly Ternan, I found that Gladys Storey was the source of a rumour that Dickens had had a child by Ternan. And when I read Bill Clarke's biography of Collins, I learned that Storey was again the source of a legend that a woman with whom Collins had a dramatic encounter — in the Regents Park area bor- dering on St John's Wood — was his mis- tress Caroline Graves, in her view the original Woman in White.

Dickens and Collins were great friends. Collins took Dickens on brothel crawls in Paris, virtually acting as his pimp. Further, Collins's artist brother Charles married Dickens's daughter Kate, later Mrs Perugi- ni. It was not a happy marriage: Clarke thinks that when Dickens wrote to a friend's daughter, 'There are no "Great Expectations" of prospective CoRinses,' he was hinting that Charles Collins was impo- tent, and other evidence makes that plausi- ble. The failure of the Collins-Dickens marriage led to a cooling of relations between the two novelists; in his manipula- tive way, Dickens made Wilkie Collins choose between Charles and himself and naturally Collins chose his own brother. But at its height the friendship was close enough to make Dickens's strait- laced friend John Forster jealous — Forster wrote spiky things about Collins and all but Tippexed him out of his biogra- phy of Dickens. It is a tragedy that Dickens burned Collins's letters to him (with many from other people) on a bonfire at his Kent home, Gadshill, though it would have been a greater disaster if Collins had burnt Dick- ens's letters to him.

At the same time that I was writing my article on the Clique, I was beginning to do research for a book on posters which Weidenfeld published in 1969, and, most conveniently, the best gallery selling old posters in London was Philip Granville's Lords Gallery, just two doors away from Gladys Storey's cottage in Wellington Road. I soon discovered that all who had ever written on the history of posters were agreed that the first great pictorial poster — years before Lautrec and Beardsley burst on the scene — was that designed by Fred Walker in 1871 for a stage adaptation of The Woman in White. For a time, Lords Gallery had one of these rare posters for sale. The design shows the eponymous Woman giving a scared backward glance as she goes through a door. I have a theory that it was derived from the frontispiece to William Blake's 'Jerusalem'. The poster appears behind Collins in the caricature of the novelist which Baker and Clarke repro- duce. But there is no mention of Walker in either the caption to that cartoon or in the rest of the two volumes of letters.

Walker is known to have written to Collins but his letter does not appear here. A more regrettable omission is a letter of 9 June 1873 from Collins to Anthony Trol- lope, printed in full in N. John Hall's edi- tion of The Letters of Anthony Trollope published by Stanford University Press in 1983. Baker and Clarke are aware of this letter. They list it in an appendix of 'Unpublished letters', presumably regard- ing it as too insignificant for inclusion. It is a short letter, but in it Collins does rather more than accept an invitation. In a postscript, he tells Trollope: I have been perpetually occupied with my play at the Olympic [The New Magdalen, which ran for 19 weeks] — or I should have called and asked you for that cigar which I missed last time (when I met those nice Americans at your table).

Baker and Collins have deliberately (and very reasonably) omitted many letters which merely accept or decline invitations. But I think they ought to have made an exception for this one because they print no other letter to Trollope, and this exam- ple shows that the two great Victorian nov- elists were on cordial terms, even though each could be caustic about the other's writings. (Trollope said he could 'never lose the taste of the construction' in Collins's novels; while Collins, after read- ing Trollope's Autobiography in 1883, told the literary agent A. P. Watt, who had sent it to him:

The early part of it is very interesting — but when he comes to his own opinions on his own books let that dash express my sentiments.

Apart from the minor reservations about Fred Walker and Trollope, one must recognise the two volumes edited by Baker and Clarke as a feat of meticulous scholar- ship. They have cast their nets widely. The linking passages and footnotes are to the point, though there are a few lapses to remedy in the paperback edition that will no doubt follow. For instance, when in 1842 Collins writes to his friend Charles Caricature of Wilkie Collins by F.W. Waddy, 1872 Ward: Oh the `Dook', the 'Doold How they will write about him! How they have written about him already! What sort of funeral will it be I wonder? Military I suppose...

surely we need a note to say that the Duke of Wellington had died. The editors also score a duck for a note on 'Joseph Mallard William Turner'.

Of course Collins is not in the Dickens league as a letter-writer; who, apart from Byron perhaps, is? No doubt in the letters burnt by Dickens we would have seen Collins on his best epistolary behaviour, out to entertain and impress. He could, especially when young, write a la Dickens, with his 'guzzling' style, jokiness and super- abundant energy. In 1845 he wrote to his mother from the Hotel des Tuileries, Paris. Recalling the family's visit almost ten years before, he described the crowds still cram- ming the Palais Royal:

The children who assemble there are worth the journey from England, alone. An evening or two since, a creature (whether 'masculine, feminine or neuter', I know not) bowled his hoop against the toe of my boot and made me an apology (he seemed just able to walk and talk) so elaborately civil that I was per- fectly astounded and took off my hat to him. . .The men stick to their beards, their arguments, and their sugar and water, as usual; and the women eat as many bonbons, wear as many 'bustles' & make as many speeches, as ever. The gutters hold their rights unimpinged, the churches rejoice in their accustomed emptiness, the organ plumes still glitter in gorgeous indelicacy of design.

It is amusing to note that in printing this letter in his 1988 biography of Collins Clarke rendered as 'sugar plums' the two words which have become 'organ plumes' in this recension. Collins was 21 when he wrote the Paris letter. Later on, his writing was more spare. In long passages of, say, The Moonstone, you might feel you were reading 20th-century prose — something that could not be said of anything by Dick- ens.

The early letters include two to Collins's father, the Royal Academician William Collins, a seascape artist who was also a religious bigot, a man of 'unattractive goodness'. One person who could not stand him was John Constable, his neighbour in Hampstead for a time, who wrote: I have made up my mind to rid myself of this unpleasant fellow — at least, if I see him again, it shall not be of my seeking. He IS now at war with some members of the Acade- my — and hated by all.

Collins is generally respectful to his father, but some hint of the tensions between them appears in a cheek)' postscript to a letter of 1845, again from Paris, to Collins's mother:

P.S. Give my love to the Governor and tell him that I will eat 'plain food' (when I come back to England) and read Dimcan's Logic and Butler's Analogy (when I have no chance of getting anything else to peruse).

An advantage of having a quite eminent father was that, as a child, Collins met his famous friends — Coleridge, Wordsworth, Samuel Palmer. When Coleridge was weepily bemoaning his dependence on opium, Collins's mother said, 'If the opium really does you any good, and you must have it, why do you not go and get it?' Collins had good reason to remember this advice when he became a martyr to some- thing called 'rheumatic gout' which turned his eyes into 'great bags of blood'. He dosed himself with beakers of laudanum — enough to kill another man.

In the same Paris letter of 1845 in which he was cheeky to his father, Collins referred to his first novel, Ioldni; or, Tahiti as it was, the story of a diabolical high priest, Iolani, and the heroic young woman who bears his child. It was turned down by Chapman and Hall, and one can see why. Longman were prepared to publish it if Collins's father would pay the entire cost. He would not. The manuscript was lost for almost a century, then turned up in New York in 1991 and has now been edited by Ira B. Nadel, Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. If I were being charitable about this book, I would say that it is always interesting to see the incunabula of great writers. If I were not being charitable, I might add that the price you have to pay for that insight is reading sentences like this:

Such (briefly analysed) was infanticide in the Pacific Islands, and such was the crime to which the Priest had tempted the wretched woman who had entrusted to him her pre- cious though simple dowry of affection and truth.

Trollope was not the only critic to find Collins's novels over-constructed. In the letters, that failing (if it is a failing) is removed; we see the writer in casual dress. Collins's letters to his mother are some of the most relaxed and confiding. He writes to her almost as if she were a friend of his own age, even hinting at the dissipation in Paris. She was a very bright, sympathetic figure, whose London house became some- thing of a meeting-place for the Pre- Raphaelites, friends of Wilkie's brother Charles. (Holman Hunt was best man at Charles's wedding.) As the son of one artist and the brother of another, Wilkie Collins took much interest in painters. His com- ments on art are always worth reading. When an American correspondent asks his Opinion of Ruskin's art criticism in 1849, Collins comments severely on the 'violent Paradoxes' of Ruskin's first volume, but writes that his second volume has 'raised him immensely in the estimation of culti- vated and thinking readers'. We get a pleasant impression of Collins from the letters. He is generous about fel- low writers, especially Dickens — more generous than they sometimes were about him. He is 'laid back', only rarely moved to anger, usually over piracy of his works. (His wit and guileful lateral thinking are displayed in a letter of 1873 to John Hollingshead, manager of the Gaiety Theatre, in which he suggests that if Dis- raeli's books were dramatic enough to be adapted for the stage, an immediate adap- tation would be made — then copyright law might be strengthened.) When total strangers write asking how he composes his novels, he is prepared to go into fascinating detail — though, as Professor John Suther- land has indicated, these expositions are not always reliable.

Collins is a man who works out his own responses to the world, on love, marriage, religion, war and everything else. He is never a sucker for received opinion. His singular originality is shown in this prophetic passage, written during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870: I begin to believe in only one civilising influ- ence — the discovery, one of these days, of a destructive agent so terrible that War shall mean annihilation, and men's fears shall force them to keep the peace.

So, sucks to CND, whose slogan 'Ban the bomb' enshrined the naive idea that the lid could be put back on Pandora's box once it was opened.

Some may feel that Collins's relations with his two mistresses are hard to defend. With a nice symmetry, when living in Ramsgate he kept one of them in Welling- ton Crescent, the other in Nelson Crescent. One was buried with him and the grave was tended by the other. His will, dividing his property between them, ensured that he was not given a memorial in Westminster Abbey. As Clarke has written, Collins was 'decidedly heterosexual'. He told Dickens he had had his first sexual experience with a woman in Paris at 13. And in 1887, two years before his death, he wrote to the Frontispiece to William Blake's Jerusalem photographer Napoleon Sarony (who took the best-known photographs of Oscar Wilde) to tell him how he revelled in his pictures of nude women:

Wonderful, and I add, sympathetic man! For I too think the back view of a finely formed woman the loveliest view — and her hips the most precious parts of that view. The line of beauty in those quarters enchants me, when it is not overladen by fat.

It was typical of Collins's disregard for Vic- torian convention that he kept one of these photographs, framed, on top of his desk.

The Baker-Clarke collection contains one series of letters that has never appeared before in book form, from Collins to an 11-year-old girl, `Nannie' Wynne (Anne Elizabeth le Poer Wynne). The letters first came to light after Clarke's biography of Collins was published. He received a letter from Sir John Lawrence, 'Islamic's' son, asking if Clarke knew where his mother's replies to Collins were. Lawrence owned over 40 of Collins's letters to her. He had first learned of her friend- ship with Collins when she found him read- ing The Woman in White. 'Did you know Wilkie Collins was very fond of me?' she asked. Collins had come to know the Wynne family through his physician, Dr Frank Beard, who was also theirs. Lawrence made available Collins's letters to `Nannie'.

They are written in very much the face- tious tone adopted by Lewis Carroll in his letters to young girls. Collins pretends `Nannie' is his wife — 'Here I am, darling — and here I shall be delighted to receive that conjugal embrace at 3 o'clock tomor- row. . .' And again: 'Dearest dear, do you ever swear? (you know you may confess anything to your husband). If you wish to enchant me, please swear at the Irish.' Was Frederick Walker's poster for the stage adaptation of The Woman in White, 1871 this an innocent friendship? Sir John Lawrence was told by his mother that her mother, 'though startled by the way things were going. . . quickly came to the conclu- sion that there was no harm in it'. Clarke thinks she was right, because Collins was quite open about the correspondence and was careful to include 'Nannie's' mother Cm mother-in-law') in most of his invita- tions. Perhaps, Clarke suggests, Collins — as somebody who had always mocked and shied away from the state of marriage — was getting the best of all worlds.