ARMADALE
WILKIE COLLINS was born in London in 1824, the eldest son of the landscape painter William Collins. In 1846, having spent five years in the tea business, he was entered to read for the bar at Lincoln’s Inn, where he gained the legal knowledge that was to give him much material for his writing. From the early 1850s, he was a friend of Charles Dickens, acting with him, contributing to Household Words, travelling with him on the Continent. Dickens produced and acted in two melodramas written by Collins, The Lighthouse (1855) and The Frozen Deep (1857). Of his novels, Collins is best remembered for The Woman in White (1860), No Name (1862), Armadale (1866) and The Moonstone (1868), which T. S. Eliot called ‘the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels’. Wilkie Collins, who braved Victorian morals by living with one mistress and maintaining another in a separate establishment, died in 1889.
JOHN SUTHERLAND, who has edited Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds, Phineas Finn and Rachel Ray, and William Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond, all for Penguin Classics, is currently Northcliffe Professor of English Literature at University College London. His other publications include Fiction and the Fiction Industry, Best Sellers: Popular Fiction of the 1970s, The Longman Companion to English Literature, Mrs Humphry Ward and Is Heathcliffa Murderer?, a collection of essays.
ARMADALE
___________
WILKIE COLLINS
EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES
BY JOHN SUTHERLAND
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published 1864–6
Published in Penguin Classics 1995
8
Introduction and Notes copyright © John Sutherland, 1995
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The moral right of the editor has been asserted
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EISBN: 978–0–141–90477–1
CONTENTS
Introduction by John Sutherland
Further Reading
A Note on the Text
A Note on the Manuscript
ARMADALE
Notes
Appendix: Dramatic Versions of Armadale
INTRODUCTION
‘Like most of Collins’ novels, Armadale has the immense – and nowadays more and more rare – merit of never being dull’ – T. S. Eliot
‘Nothing Boring about the Sensation Novel’ – D. A. Miller
‘Action! action! action!’ – Quarterly Review, April 1863
Few novelists have made a reputation as suddenly and as spectacularly as did Wilkie Collins with The Woman in White in 1859–60. With its high-impact reportage style and new-fangled detective plot the novel took the Victorian reading public by the throat. Thackeray sat up all night reading it. Edward Fitzgerald (of Omar Khayyám fame) devoured it three times, and named a herring-lugger he owned Marian Halcombe ‘after the brave girl in the story.’1 The Prince Consort sent a copy to Baron Stockmar. Readers took bets among themselves as to what could be Sir Percival Glyde’s dreadful secret (illegitimacy, as it turned out). Manufacturers took the opportunity to bring out The Woman in White perfume, cloaks and bonnets. Music-shops displayed The Woman in White waltzes and quadrilles and (most improbably) a ‘Fosco Galop’.2 According to Nuel Davis, ‘The Woman in White was probably the most popular novel written in England during the nineteenth century.’3
Popular in itself, The Woman in White popularized a new form of novel – variously called the newspaper novel, ‘matter-of-fact romance’, the bigamy novel and, most enduringly, the sensation novel. The term was double-edged: it denoted ‘sensation’ as in cause célèbre but also in the narrower psychological application of ‘violent stimulation of the senses’. Sensation fiction was felt as much as read – ‘electrifying the nerves of the reader’ as one (indignant) commentator of the period put it. Its practitioners exploited the same shock-horror stories as the penny press of the day. Sensationalists specialized in a jagged style of narration that impacted on the reader’s sensibility like bullets. In the manuscript of Armadale, Collins paid minute attention to details of interruptive typography: the italics, white and black lines (i.e. line spaces and rules) and dynamic paragraphing which break up the narrative flow are all of Collins’s own devising. At times the narrative whispers, at others it shouts; volume, tempo and intensity are all controlled by narrative device and typographic effect. As a genre, sensation fiction works against the idea of the organic ‘book’ – preferring to fragment its narrative into segments (sometimes, as in Armadale, perversely called ‘books’). The manuscript of Armadale also shows Collins revising his text to sharpen ‘curtain lines’ – instalment endings designed to keep the reader in suspense for a month. D. A. Miller (who has done much to bring sensation fiction back into critical fashion) claims plausibly that ‘the genre offers us one of the first instances of modern literature to address itself primarily to the sympathetic nervous system, where it grounds its characteristic adrenalin effects: accelerated heart rate and respiration, increased blood pressure, the pallor resulting from vasoconstriction, and so on.’4
It is a feature of the sensation novel that it wholeheartedly embraced the century’s new-fangled communications, its transport systems and its technological inventions (displayed to a wondering world at the Great Exhibition of 1851 – an event on the edge of Armadale’s narrative). The telegraph figures centrally in sensation fiction, and the terseness of the still-expensive medium (it costs five shillings to use the ‘electrical fluids’, a character notes in Armadale) conditions the writers’ prose. So does the ‘agony column’ advertisement in the daily newspaper (another form of communication that cost by the word) – a precursor of today’s computer bulletin board. In several sections of Armadale, characters exchange letters by the incredibly quick penny post, which from 1839 allowed same-day reply at near-fax speed. They routinely exploit the new transport and communications systems in ingenious ways. Take, for instance, the following passage from Lydia Gwilt’s journal (7 o’clock, 8 August 1851):
I have just come back from a long round in a cab. First, to the cloak-room of the Great Western, to get the luggage which I sent there from All Saints’ Terrace. Next, to the cloak-room of the South Eastern, to leave my luggage (labelled in Midwinter’s name), to wait for me till the starting of the tidal train on Monday. Next, to the General Post Office, to post a letter to Midwinter at the rectory, which he will receive to-morrow morning. Lastly, back again to this house – from which I shall move no more till Monday comes. (p. 508)
Lydia Gwilt uses the machinery of the modern metropolis with the expertise of a Victorian James Bond (she also anticipates the secret agent’s ?
??dead drop’ routine). On another occasion, as she goes off to be fitted for her wedding dress (part of a diabolic personation scheme) Lydia senses that something is wrong. Someone is tailing her:
I drove straight to the milliner’s shop – which I had observed, when I was there yesterday, had a back entrance into a mews, for the apprentices to go in and out by. I went in at once, leaving the cab waiting for me at the door. ‘A man is following me,’ I said; ‘and I want to get rid of him. Here is my cab-fare; wait ten minutes before you give it to the driver, and let me out at once by the back way!’ In a moment I was out in the mews – in another, I was in the next street – in a third, I hailed a passing omnibus, and was a free woman again. (p. 502)
If Collins had taken out a patent on this ‘throwing the tail’ gimmick, his heirs would be millionaires. It has become a cliché with thriller writers. Also interesting is the emancipatory ‘I… was a free woman again’. Lydia is liberated from the traditional constraints on nineteenth-century women by the technologies of modern civilization which allow her to melt invisibly into the London crowd. (It is significant that in the country – where no escape into anonymity is possible – she feels caged and can find release only in suicidally excessive draughts of laudanum.)
Lydia loves new mid-century technology for its own complicated sake. When, at the grisly climax of the story, she plots to kill Allan Armadale, she spurns arsenic (the poison of choice for lesser women) as too primitive. With her ominous purple flask of carbonic acid (a chemical whose toxic applications were first explored in 1858) she generates a subtle poison gas which she elaborately wafts into her victim’s room via a ‘fumigation system’ (i.e. air-conditioning vents). It is high-tech homicide, 1860-style, and far more complex than strictly required for the purposes of extermination. But Lydia wants a modish murder to crown her career – poisoning with style.
It is one of the characterizing features of the ‘sensationalists’ that they came as close as libel permitted to headline stories of the day. No moderately wide-awake reader of Armadale during its serial run, for instance, would have failed to make the connection between Lydia Gwilt’s foster-mother, Maria Oldershaw (‘Mother Jezebel’), and ‘Madame Rachel’ – i.e. Rachel Leverson. This lady, proprietor of a New Bond Street beauty salon (which opened in 1863, as Collins was laying the groundwork for Armadale), was accused of fraud in December 1865 and was, while Collins wrote, one of the most notorious and criminally glamorous figures in the country.5 Shortly after the novel’s publication she was to be sent to prison. Collins anticipates the jury’s verdict and comes as near as he (or his publisher George Smith) dares to contempt of court. Behind her beautician’s front Mother Jezebel is a blackmailer, a procuress and an abortionist. So was Madame Rachel Leverson. Collins broadly hinted as much to his readers, before they had juridical confirmation in the newspapers of 1867. Another headline item which hovers over the narrative of Armadale is the ‘sensational’ Yelverton bigamy case (Lydia Gwilt is – among her other criminalities – a skilled bigamist; see Book the Fourth, Chapter X, note 11). There is also multiple allusion in Armadale to the spectacular domestic poisoning trials of the 1850s which had all the country agog (Lydia poisons one husband and tries to poison the two other men in her life; there are hints that she may have had other victims over the years). The other chic crime of the day, ‘personation’, also figures centrally in the novel (Collins, I suspect, had caught wind of the Tichborne affair as it was brewing up; see Book the Third, Chapter XI, note 2). Armadale, in short, is a novel which reverberates to the headlines of the popular press in the 1850s and early 1860s.6
Sensationalists were sometimes called ‘the school of Dickens’ (in the 1850s and 1860s many of them worked on Household Words or All the Year Round, the 2d. weekly newspapers both edited by Dickens).7 Collins was the Inimitable’s favourite protégé. Although Dickens did not entirely approve of the over-engineered quality of Wilkie’s plots (and took the maestro’s privilege of telling him so) he had fostered his young friend’s career. The Woman in White had been first serialized to huge effect in Dickens’s new weekly paper, All the Year Round. But Dickens, for all his literary grandeur, did not have the financial resources of the mid-Victorian publishing giants. In the wake of The Woman in White’s success, Collins was approached in July 1861 by George Smith, founder of the Cornhill Magazine (edited by Dickens’s great rival, Thackeray). Smith – legendary for the lavishness of his bids to writers – offered Collins £5,000 for a new serial (subject unspecified) to run in his monthly magazine. Collins accepted, with the proviso that he clear an outstanding commitment to Dickens (No Name, as it was to be).
Collins fairly crowed about the size of Smith’s offer in a letter to his mother: ‘Five thousand pounds for nine months or at most a year’s work – nobody but Dickens has made as much.’8 It was not quite true. At around the same time, Smith offered no less than £10,000 to George Eliot for Romola (serialized in the Cornhill Magazine, 1862–3). But George Eliot was no journalist happy to toss a novel off in a few months. Her tale of fifteenth-century Florence would be a Herculean labour of historical research – one which, as she later recorded, she would embark on as a young woman and emerge from as an old woman.
Armadale did, in the event, need much more than nine months to come to birth. For one thing, Collins resolved to make it something supremely good; his masterpiece. He wanted, in a word, to out-Dickens Dickens. This involved lengthy fore-planning. He undertook a wealth of primary research in exotic locations for what was to be – by comparison with The Woman in White – an extraordinarily far-flung narrative (the action starts in the Black Forest, jumps parenthetically to the Caribbean, returns to the English West Country, makes a gloomy excursion to the Isle of Man, plays out the main romantic plot among the flat waters of the Norfolk Broads, and climaxes bloodily in Naples and London’s newest suburb, Hampstead). Collins also authenticated the medical, nautical and legal subplots in which the narrative abounds. While not as fetishistic about such research as his fellow sensationalist Charles Reade, Collins was very careful about eyewitness confirmation and getting technical details right.
Research was not, however, the main retardant to Armadale’s completion. Collins suffered a collapse of health before and during composition. His doctors (particularly his and Dickens’s close friend, Frank Beard) had prescribed in early 1863 a total sabbatical from writing which put back the eventual publication of Armadale almost two years. George Smith, always the best-natured of employers, was patient. No one knows exactly what ailed Collins, and if he himself knew he was deliberately vague on the subject. He was not an old man (he turned forty during the composition of Armadale). His sexual athleticism might have been envied by men half his age. The term used to describe his chronic complaint – rheumatic gout – disguises more than it reveals. Like other gout sufferers Wilkie had excruciating pain in his joints (specifically he had a bad ankle and foot, which he alludes to in the characterization of Mr Neal in the first chapter). But when feeling well, he could go sailing with his journalist friend Edward Pigott. It was a sport which he loved, and which he projects on to the yacht-mad Allan Armadale the younger. Wilkie’s most disabling symptoms seem to have been nervous. Light and sound were intolerably painful to him during his bad times. He was also prone to crippling bouts of depression. Writing exacerbated his symptoms (something he projects on to Ozias in the Naples episode of Armadale). He had what seems to be a major nervous collapse just before the publication of the novel’s first number. During the subsequent composition of Armadale, he persuaded his physician Beard to refer him to a nerve and brain specialist. As is well known, Wilkie was intermittently (and while writing Armadale) addicted to opium – in the form of laudanum. In the short term, the narcotic soothed him; but in the long term he suffered the extra burdens of toxic overdose and withdrawal.
Wilkie’s father had died prematurely (aged fifty-eight) of an unspecified disease. His brother Charley (who had married Dickens’s daughter Kate) was slo
wly dying of cancer in the 1860s (he had also proved impotent after marriage – something that concerned his super-potent father-in-law). Armadale is a novel obsessed with fate, congenital doom and inherited blight. The sins of the novel’s fathers (Ozias’s mark of Cain and his ‘negro blood’, for instance) are relentlessly visited on their sons. It is significant, as Catherine Peters points out, that in the first episode the patriarchal Allan Armadale is clearly dying of tertiary syphilis. Put all this together and the hypothesis that Collins feared that he had inherited some venereal affliction (euphemistically called ‘rheumatic gout’) suggests itself irresistibly.
Whatever the reasons, Armadale is a novel obsessed with illness. It begins at a German Kurort, with the mayor of the place welcoming ‘the first sick people of the season’ (p. 10). There are many sick people to come in Armadale. The action ends in a sanatorium where Dr Downward (alias Le Doux) specializes in making well women unwell by his sinister regime of ‘rest’. The plot opens with two invalids – one of them making his dying confession which the other less terminally sick man records. The bedridden and twisted Mrs Milroy is one of the finest side-studies in the book. Nor are principal characters immune. Ozias Midwinter is given Collins’s nervous symptoms. Lydia Gwilt is given Collins’s drug addiction (at one point in the action she blesses the sainted man who invented laudanum). The Reverend Brock dies of the English cholera (that was indeed rampant in England in 1851). The eerie Jacobean figure of Mrs Oldershaw (‘Mother Jezebel’) enamels over the marks of sickness in the general population with her cosmetics. (In the case in which Madame Rachel was indicted in December 1865 she had undertaken to remove the ravages of smallpox from the face of an American woman, in return for all that woman’s jewellery.) There is disease everywhere in the world of Armadale.