2015 Travels with Wilkie Collins by Susan Hanes

Travels with Wilkie Collins

Cover: Botallack Copper Mine, Cornwall Wilkie twin: David A. Michelson, PhD Department of History University of Alabama

In Search of Wilkie Collins: A Journey Through England September—October 1998 Susan Hanes with Houston Hanes Wilkie Collins was one of the most popular and prolific authors of the

rebellious spirit that was to remain with him throughout his life. As a young

nineteenth century. He was the father of the detective novel, the prime

man, he did not share his father’s dream that he become a lawyer. He wanted

exponent of sensation fiction, and a close friend and associate of Charles

to write. Although he was warm and charming company (one woman wrote of

Dickens. He wrote more than thirty novels, as well as numerous short stories,

him, “To sit next to Wilkie at dinner is to have a brilliant time of it”) he

essays, and plays. His best-known novels, The Moonstone and The Woman in

avoided society’s demands and preferred an unconventional Bohemian

White, have never been out of print. He excelled in plot and character

lifestyle. He never married, although he spent his adult life in long-term

development, but above all, he was a consummate storyteller. Many well-

relationships with two women. The story of his mysterious meeting with

respected writers have been fans of Wilkie Collins, including Dorothy Sayers,

Caroline Graves on a moonlit night reads like a parody of his own books. She

Arthur Conan Doyle, and P.D. James. He has been described as “the most

lived with him and posed as his “housekeeper,” entertaining his guests and

readable of all major English writers,” and T.S. Eliot said of him, he had “the

accompanying him on his writing expeditions. Some years later, Martha

immense merit…of never being dull.”

Rudd, a much younger woman, drifted into his life and eventually became the mother of his three children. For the rest of his life, Wilkie supported two

William Wilkie Collins was born on January 8, 1824, the eldest son of

households, taking full responsibility for both. The life of this enigmatic man,

celebrated English landscape painter William Collins and Harriet Geddes

who lived on the outside of convention, is as intriguing as any tale that came

Collins, herself a member of a noted family of artists. His godfather was the

from his own pen. That he was born into a fine and loving family, yet never

Scottish painter, Sir David Wilkie, for whom he was named. Although he lived

chose to marry the women he supported and cared for; that he remained a

his entire life in the Marylebone area of London, Wilkie always enjoyed the

faithful friend and charming companion in spite of acute suffering and

seaside and sought inspiration for his writing and relief from chronic physical

addiction to laudanum; that he wrote some of the best-loved fiction of his

ills in the sea air. Within the strict upbringing of his evangelical father and the

time, yet his books today are too often overlooked: all contribute to my

rigid constraints of Victorian society, Wilkie developed a particularly

fascination with Wilkie Collins. 1

In mid-September 1998, my husband Houston and I flew from Chicago to

again with Caroline after he had completed The Woman in White in 1860.

Frankfurt to begin our Wilkie Collins pilgrimage. I hoped to gain a sense of

Dickens wrote to a friend that he and Wilkie had been looking for “a good

the England that Wilkie Collins knew by seeing where he had lived and

apartment, where we can have our breakfast.” We thought it appropriate that

visiting the places from which he drew inspiration for his writing. It had been

we have breakfast there as well. One look at the dining room and we were

over a century since he had frequented the places we planned to see, and I

convinced of Wilkie’s impeccable – and expensive – taste. Heavily mirrored

hoped that time had not brought too many changes. We actually started our

walls reflected the golden magnificence of the columns, the rich draperies, and

Wilkie tour in Paris, arriving by overnight train from Stuttgart in time for

the huge crystal chandeliers. Our opulent champagne breakfast was, as Wilkie

breakfast. Across from the Tuileries Gardens, we found the Meurice, a

described his own, “first-class all the way.” Although Wilkie rented a room

magnificent hotel from the time of its opening in 1816. With his parents,

with sitting room at the Meurice, we were content to enjoy the most expensive

Wilkie stayed there as a child; he returned later with Dickens in 1855, and

breakfast we had ever eaten.

We drove to Ramsgate, where Wilkie and his family first visited in 1829. His

Ramsgate, leasing lodgings on Albion Hill. Wilkie’s father, however, found them

father was not impressed, reporting. “There is nothing worth a straw in

to be unacceptable, and he moved his family to Number 4, Plains of Waterloo,

Ramsgate, except the sea.” However, Wilkie continued to return to the area

pushing their belongings up the hill in a wheelbarrow. The street numbers have

throughout his life, since his doctor was convinced that the sea air was good for

changed over the years, so that the house they occupied can only be narrowed

his health. In fact, Wilkie’s last visit was in 1889, only a few months before his

to two possibilities. Both are similar, on opposite sides of the street. Whichever

death. Armed with a nineteenth century map of the area, Jeremy Hewett,

house it was, the family was happy, and the holiday successful, with Wilkie’s

executive editor of Ramsgate Remembered, helped us to locate the places where

mother proclaiming, “Willy behaves nobly in the sea” (probably with the aid of

Wilkie stayed during his many visits. In 1833, the Collins family returned to

a Victorian bathing machine.) 3

Wilkie continued to come to the Kent coast as a young man and stayed in the

In 1862, Wilkie returned to Broadstairs, leasing Fort House (Dickens’s Bleak

nearby town of Broadstairs with friends, using the town as a base for sailing

House.) He came to work on No Name, and to enjoy the company of Dickens

trips to Dunkirk. In 1859, he returned with Caroline Graves, and stayed at a

and other friends.

remote cottage where he worked on The Woman in White. During a time of particular frustration at not being able to find a title for his work, Wilkie went for a long walk along the cliffs outside of Broadstairs, coming at last to the North Foreland Lighthouse.

But after Dickens died in 1870, Wilkie felt that Broadstairs held too many ghosts of past friends and past times. Prompted by happy childhood memories, he decided to return to Ramsgate. He joined the local yacht club with his friend Edward Pigott, and made use of the excellent harbor where he could get a boat whenever he wished.

Exhausted, he threw himself on the grass, admonishing the lighthouse, “You are ugly and stiff and awkward; you know you are: as stiff and as weird as my white woman. White woman!—woman in white! The title, by Jove!” (The World, 26 Dec. 1877) 4

From that time on, he returned each year, staying with Caroline Graves at No. 14 Nelson Crescent on the West Cliff. In the guise of “Mr. Dawson,” he would stay with the other woman in his life, Martha Rudd (“Mrs. Dawson”), and eventually their three children, across the way on the East Cliff at No. 27 Wellington Crescent.

Wilkie used Ramsgate and Broadstairs often in his narratives. In The Law and the Lady, Valeria Macallan, perhaps the first lady detective in literature, visits Ramsgate and is walking towards Broadstairs:

The scene that autumn morning was nothing less than enchanting. The brisk breeze, the brilliant sky, the flashing blue sea, the sun-bright cliffs and the tawny sands at their feet… it was all so exhilarating…that I could have danced for joy like a child. (p. 26)

While researching material for his novel No Name, Wilkie visited this Suffolk seaside town with Caroline in 1861. They stayed at the White Lion Hotel,

The day we spent on the Kent coast was just such an autumn day, as we

overlooking, as he describes it, “the defencelessness of the land against the

continued our drive to Aldeburgh.

encroachments of the sea.”

Indeed, today, the beach still gives the illusion that the water is higher than the land, and is ever hungry for more. In the Fourth Scene of the novel, he describes the town as we saw it, even to the church up on the hill: In one direction, the tiny Gothic town-hall of old Aldborough – once the centre of the vanished port and borough – now stands fronting the modern villas close on the margin of the sea… Behind the row of buildings thus curiously intermingled, runs the one straggling street of the town. Towards the northern end, this street is bounded by the one eminence visible over all the marshy flat – a low wooded hill on which the church is built. (Scene 4, p. 266)

Looking out across the water, it was easy to envision the ghost ships passing

We eventually continued up the coast. The shadows were beginning to

by, as I thought of Magdalen, driven by despair, deciding to tempt her fate.

lengthen as we reached the Norfolk Broads. Sensuous and mysterious, the

Painter John Millais captured the scene in his frontispiece for No Name.

area of Horsey Mere (or as Wilkie calls it, Hurle Mere) offered the perfect backdrop to the dramatic appearance of Lydia Gwilt in the novel Armadale.

She seated herself close at the side of the window, with her back towards the quarter from which the vessels were drifting down on her – with the poison placed on the window-sill, and the watch on her lap. For one half hour to come, she determined to wait there, and count the vessels as they went by. If, in that time, an even number passed her – the sign given, should be a sign to live. If the uneven number prevailed—the end should be Death. (Scene 4, p. 408)

The reeds opened back on the right hand and the left, and the boat glided suddenly into the wide circle of a pool. Round the nearer half of the circle, the eternal reeds still fringed the margin of the water. Round the farther half, the land appeared again – here, rolling back from the pool in desolate sand-hills; there, rising above it in a sweep of grassy shore…The sun was sinking in the clear heaven, and the water, where the sun’s reflection failed to tinge it, was beginning to look black and cold…And on the near margin of the pool, where all had been solitude before, there now stood, fronting the sunset, the figure of a woman. (Chapter 9, p. 314-20)

After spending the night in the city of Boston, we continued north to

proprietor hired a brass band to play “regularly four hours a day for the

Whitby, a north Yorkshire coastal town where Wilkie visited with

benefit of his visitors.” Understandably, they cut their visit short. Almost

Caroline in August 1861. At first, they were delighted with the place.

one hundred and forty years later, we had the same reaction. From a

From a distance, the little port with its magnificent harbor, quaint

distance, the town looked much as it must have in Wilkie’s time: the

cottages and the eerie ruins of Whitby Abbey towering above looked

harbor, the cottages, the ghostly abbey… but as we got closer, we found

charming and romantic. They had splendid rooms at the Royal Hotel,

the Coney Island of the Yorkshire Coast, with fish and chips stands and

overlooking the bay. But soon, their opinion changed. The hotel was

Dracula shops, and masses of people milling about. The hotel, however,

teeming with small children: “Among the British matrons,” Wilkie

still looked as it might have in Wilkie’s day, and the lobby retains its

complained, “is a Rabbit with fourteen young ones.” In addition, the

Victorian character.

We continued north along the coast towards Runswick Bay, looking for Mulgrave Castle, hidden in woods just beyond Whitby. The castle was likely the location of the Verinder house in The Moonstone, which Wilkie described as “high up on the Yorkshire coast and close to the sea.” As we looked out over the coastline, it was easy to imagine Sergeant Cuff far below: …the raging sea, and the rollers tumbling in on the sand-bank, and the driven rain sweeping over the waters like a flying garment, and the yellow wilderness of the beach, with one solitary black figure standing in it – the figure of Sergeant Cuff. (Chapter 19, p. 196)

The castle was not easy to find, and as the fog rolled in, I felt as if I were retracing the steps of Rosanna Spearman through the “melancholy plantation” of trees as she made her “horrid walk” towards the Shivering Sand. Suddenly the house appeared, bathed in an eerie mist. It was a scene worthy of Wilkie’s imagination. 10

We drove east toward Cumberland. Not only did Wilkie travel there with

Carrock Fell. The next day, Dickens insisted on climbing the mountain,

Dickens, but he also featured Cumberland in several of his works. It was the

despite the bad weather. The trip was disastrous, as their guide (the

location of Limmeridge House in The Woman in White, in which he wrote that

innkeeper) knew nothing of the topography, Dickens’s compass broke, and

the house had a view of “the distant coast of Scotland [which] fringed the

they became lost in the fog. On the descent, Wilkie sprained an ankle. We

horizon with its lines of melting blue.” Noel and Magdalen Vanstone

were able to find the little village of Hesket Newmarket, and upon inquiring

honeymooned there in No Name, and in The Evil Genius, Catherine Linley takes

of a local innkeeper, found the Queen’s Head, now aptly named Dickens

Kitty to Cumberland. Perhaps the most extensive description that Wilkie

House. The village probably looked much as it did when the Idle Apprentices

gives of Cumberland is in his collaborative story with Dickens, The Lazy Tour

found it. With an ordnance survey of the area, we were able to locate

of Two Idle Apprentices, in which they recount the ill-fated walking tour of the

Carrock Fell. The weather was not much better than that described by

“laboriously idle” Francis Goodchild (Dickens) and the “born-and-bred idler”

Wilkie, but unlike him, we were not goaded into climbing the mountain. We

Thomas Idle (Wilkie). The two left London in September 1857 and traveled

did take a walk around its base, visiting with a few wayward sheep and

to the village of Hesket Newmarket, staying at the Queen’s Head, close to

pausing to sit by a rocky stream.

Carrock Fell

After a doctor in Wigdon treated Wilkie’s ankle, he and Dickens continued to

Marysport to Allonby. It was incredible to think that Dickens would leave

the coastal town of Allonby on the Solway Firth. They stayed at The Ship

Wilkie ruminating on his bed, while he walked all the way to Marysport

Hotel for two nights while Wilkie recuperated. Dickens described the inn as “a

looking for diversions in the city. We found The Ship, and after asking the

capital little homely inn looking out upon a sea…a clean nice place in a rough

proprietors if we could come in, Peter Yates showed us the room where Wilkie

wild country.” We drove on to the coast, finding that the country was still

had stayed with his foot propped up, reflecting that physical activity had been

rough, with scrubby grass and horses running free, as we headed north from

the cause of the disasters of his life.

We drove on into London. Wilkie lived, died and spent most of his life within

Broadcasting behemoth nearby. In 1848, the young Wilkie was instrumental

one square mile of the city, in Marylebone. We decided to stay in that area,

in helping an artist friend to sneak away and marry his underage girlfriend at

choosing the Langham, the largest and most fashionable hotel of Wilkieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s

the church. Wilkie lived in many different houses, first with his family, then

day. Newly refurbished, it once again exudes the opulence and glamour that

with his mother and brother Charles, and later in the two households that he

attracted the Victorian elite. Wilkie is said to have visited Oscar Wilde there,

established. Unfortunately, only a few are still standing. In some cases, it is

and would have seen many of the writers and artists of his day there as well.

difficult to determine their exact location, as street names and numbers have

Just across from the Langham stands All Soulâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Church, its circular portico

changed over the years. In any event, all were located within a small radius,

and fluted spire looking queerly out of style against the art deco British

and we determined to find as many as we could.

The house where Wilkie was born on January 8, 1824 was located at 11 New

whom Wilkie was named.) Painter John Linnell was a neighbor and his

Cavendish Street. The house no longer exists, but the street itself seems to have

children were playmates with Wilkie and his brother Charley. Wilkie started at

retained much of the look it must have had then. Later, the family moved to

Maida Hill Academy in 1835, winning first prize at the end of the year. This

Hampstead, where they lived at two addresses. When Wilkie was six, the family

was likely his first experience of the dangers of good behavior, for as he later

moved to 30 Porchester Terrace, Bayswater, so that Mr. Collins might be

wrote of Thomas Idle, â&#x20AC;&#x153;The idle boys deserted him as a traitor, the workers

nearer to the center of London and to his friend, painter David Wilkie (for

regarded him as a rival, and the previous winner gave him a thrashing.â&#x20AC;?

30 Porchester Terrace, Bayswater 17

The Collins family took a lengthy trip to Europe from1836 to 1838, which proved to be a life-defining period for Wilkie. Upon their return, he was enrolled at a boarding school at 39 Highbury Place. It was at this school that he first started to develop his talent for story telling, in order to appease a bully who threatened him. In 1841, he left school and found employment at a tea merchant on the Strand, a job he found boring, but which allowed him time to nurture his budding creativity. In 1846, Wilkie’s father persuaded him to study law. He was admitted as a student of Lincoln’s Inn where he attended for five years. He confessed to “engaging in little or no serious study” but in November 1851, went through “the affecting national ceremony” of being called to the Bar. Although he never practiced, he used his knowledge of law and the nature of lawyers in many of his novels. He jests in The Law and the Lady, “But then I am a lawyer, and my business is to make a fuss about trifles.” While he was at Lincoln’s Inn, he discovered a fascinating collection of

Wilkie’s Boarding School

artifacts amassed by Sir John Soane, which the old nurse in Heart and Science describes as “a nice little easy museum in a private house, and all sorts of pretty things to see.” In the 1830’s, Soane, an eclectic and eccentric architect, obtained an Act of Parliament to turn his house into a museum, and it has remained unchanged to this day.

Lincoln’s Inn 18

Sir John Soane’s Museum

William Collins died in 1847, leaving his widow Harriet and her sons comfortably provided for. In 1850, they moved to 17 Hanover Terrace, a luxurious home on the Outer Circle overlooking Regentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Park. Charles Collins painted a picture of their view of the park in spring, which now hangs in the Tate Gallery. Wilkie lived there for nearly six years, writing prolifically and enjoying the company of members of artistic and literary circles who were frequent guests. It was also during this time that John Millais painted his portrait, now at the National Portrait Gallery.

On an evening in 1852, Wilkie and his brother Charles were accompanying John Millais as they walked from a party at Hanover Terrace back to his home at 83 Gower Street. Millais’ son wrote of an encounter in his biography of his father: It was a beautiful moonlight light 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, suddenly seeming to recollect herself, she moved on and vanished in the shadows cast upon the road. Wilkie dashed after her and reported the next day that she had related her sad story of being kept a prisoner through mesmeric influence and threats of violence in a villa in Regent’s Park. The passage concludes, “Her subsequent history, interesting as it is, is not for these pages.” Traditionally, this account is taken to be the moment when Wilkie first meets Caroline Graves, and is also a source for the dramatic meeting between Walter Hartwright and Anne Catherick in The Woman in White. That either is true is food for speculation. 20

In 1859, Charles Dickens founded the weekly periodical All the Year Round at 26 Wellington Street, incorporating his previously successful Household Words after a disagreement with his former partners. Wilkie was a member of the staff, and it was in this periodical that The Woman in White first appeared in serial form, causing crowds of impatient readers to gather at the offices on publishing days. No Name and The Moonstone were also serialized in All the Year Round.

The year 1859 also marked the time when Wilkie began to live openly with Caroline, but their home on Albany Street and the rooms he next rented from a local doctor on Cavendish Street are gone. In early 1860, they moved to 12 Harley Street, known then, as now, as the place where the most exclusive private doctors work. Although there exists now a number 12, it is not the actual house that they occupied, but with its blanket of Victorian soot, offers a close approximation. It is the house on Harley Street where most of The Woman in White was written, giving Wilkie status as one of the most popular writers of his time. Of his lodgings there, Dickens wrote: He has made his rooms in Harley Street very handsome and comfortable. We never speak of the (female) skeleton in that house and I therefore have not the least idea of the state of his mind on that subject. I hope it does not run in any matrimonial groove. I cannot imagine any good coming of such an end in this instance. In the Census of 1861, Wilkie falsely filled in the form at this address putting himself down as a married lodger, a barrister at law, and an author, with Caroline as his wife. He started work on Armadale there as well, having laid out the framework for the novel during a four-month trip to Italy with Caroline and her daughter Carrie. Upon Wilkieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s return to Harley Street, he was bothered by the noise of â&#x20AC;&#x153;pianos at the back and bagpipes and bands at the front,â&#x20AC;? and was finally forced to move to lodgings at 9 Melcombe Place, Dorset Square, which is no longer extant. 22

Drama was always one of Wilkieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s passions, which he shared with Dickens. He participated in amateur productions from the 1840s, and regarded fiction and drama as inextricably linked. As he explains in his introduction to Basil: Believing that the Novel and the Play are twin-sisters in the family of Fiction; that the one is a drama narrated, as the other is a drama acted; and that all the strong and deep emotions which the Play-writer is privileged to excite, the Novel-writer is privileged to excite also, I have not thought it either politic or necessary, while adhering to realities, to adhere to common-place, everyday realities. Several of his works were written as both novels and plays, and often his descriptions could pass for stage directions. Despite his enthusiasm, Wilkie was never wholly successful as a dramatist, although numerous works were played on the stages of London, including the Olympic (now the Aldwych), and the Lyceum.

In 1867, Wilkie moved to 90 Gloucester Place – now renumbered 65 – where he lived for almost twenty years. A substantial terraced house, five stories high, it was a place suitable for a man who had achieved success, having plenty of space for family, visitors and servants. Unfortunately, when the lease ran out, he was faced with an exorbitant sum to renew it, and was forced to confront “the horror of moving in [his] old age.” The house that Wilkie lived in for the last eighteen months of his life was at 82 Wimpole Street. As he wrote to a friend: The deed is done, in the matter of my future living place…and having solemnly vowed never to take another house—I have taken refuge in the upper floors of 82 Wimpole Street, having the whole place to myself excepting only the dining rooms.

90 Gloucester Place 24

82 Wimpole Street

In January 1889 Wilkie survived a carriage accident on his way home from a dinner party, when he was thrown from the cab. The following June he suffered a stroke. Although he seemed to be recovering, he arranged for his friend and fellow-novelist Walter Besant to finish Blind Love for him. By September, it was clear that he was failing. He died at his home on Wimpole Street on September 23, 1889. Wilkie had specifically asked for a simple funeral, that only twentyfive pounds be spent, and that no one was to wear â&#x20AC;&#x153;scarves, hatbands or feathers.â&#x20AC;? But there was no controlling the spontaneous outburst of floral tributes, or the throngs of followers who crowded the street and later, Kensal Green cemetery. He was buried there in a simple grave marked with the brief inscription that he chose:

Wilkie Collins, Author of The Woman in White and Other Works of Fiction He wanted nothing added to it-- no sentimental effusions, or mention of heaven or family. When Caroline died in 1895, the grave was opened for the addition of her coffin, but no word was added to the stone. From that time on, until her own death, Martha Rudd tended the grave. It was not easy to find Wilkieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s resting-place, for Kensal Green is neglected and overgrown, but with the help of the cemetery staff, we located it. Standing there in the quiet, I paid my respects. After seeing where he had lived and visiting the places he had loved and found inspiration, I felt I had come to know Wilkie Collins.

One final visit would bring together all we had seen. That evening, we went by train to Greenwich and enjoyed an evening with Wilkieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s greatgranddaughter, Faith Clarke and her husband, Bill. Faithâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s charm and warmth and quiet wit gave me a sense of how the past carries on to the present. It was a fitting finale to our Wilkie Pilgrimage.

At the end of her biography, The King of Inventors, author Catherine Peters defined the legacy of Wilkie Collins: A hundred years later [his] novels have an added value: they give us access to the oddity and passion that lay beneath the surface of Victorian life. These glimpses into the secret places of his time, revealed by a man whose own refusal to conform was open and unashamed, are as strange and fascinating as anything the age produced. There are greater Victorian writers; but none who is quite like Wilkie Collins. 26

Rambles with Wilkie in Cornwall September 2000 Susan Hanes with Chris Hanes In 1850, Wilkie Collins, in the company of his artist friend, Henry Brandling,

was published, he determined that his original title stand as representative of

made a walking trip through Cornwall. He published the story of their

the Cornwall that they had experienced. In late summer 150 years later, my

journey a year later, incorporating twelve lithographs provided by Brandling,

son Chris and I retraced those travelers’ steps by embarking on our own

as Rambles Beyond Railways. At a time when the railroad ended at Plymouth,

Rambles through Cornwall. Having only a week to make our journey rather

the two travelers made the 234 miles by foot, hiking along the south coast to

than the two months of the original Rambles, we succumbed to the use of a

the Lizard and Penzance and returning through northern Cornwall to

rental car to take us from place to place, and then hiked as much as time

Tintagel before completing their journey back to Plymouth. The resulting

would allow. Our goal was to find as many of the places described in the

book is a charming mixture of travelogue, description, illustration and social

book as we could, and to take photographs as close to Brandling’s illustrations

observation, and although—much to Wilkie’s consternation—the “all-

as possible. We were eager to experience the rugged Cornwall coast for

conquering Railroad invaded Cornwall” immediately after the first edition

ourselves, just as those earlier tourists before us.

We began our journey as Wilkie Collins had, taking the train to Plymouth from London. We picked up our car and found our way to St. Germans, hoping to save the time that Wilkie took in approaching it by water. However, we could have made good use of Mr. William Dawle, the boatman who rowed them directly to the village, for our own route was unintentionally circuitous. Eventually we did manage to find St. Germans, almost driving through the village before we realized we were there. Wilkie quoted Mr. Dawle’s description of St. Germans as “a strap of a place,” and we agreed. The only “local curiosity” they found was the old church, which Wilkie left Henry Brandling to describe with his brush. A photograph from the artist’s vantage point was impossible, as an iron fence prevented us from moving far enough away, but the massive arched doorway and contrasting towers were just as the painting depicted. We were pleased that we had made our first discovery. Our Rambles were on, as in Wilkie’s own words, “joyously and in good earnest.”

St. Germans Church 30

We next drove to Looe, “one of the prettiest and most primitive places in England,” according to Wilkie. We parked and walked to the old bridge, which he described as “a most picturesque and singular structure…[that] dates back as far as the beginning of the fifteenth century.” We noted that although the bridge looked much the same, the grace of the boats pictured had diminished with the years. According to the second edition appendix of Rambles, the travelers stayed at The Ship Hotel in Looe, and we went to a nearby pub to inquire if this establishment was still there. Upon entering, we found the proprietor at the till, his mum ensconced comfortably on a cushion nearby, and a Scotsman hunched over a pint at the bar. We inquired of the three as to the whereabouts of “the old, old inn” we were seeking. “A man we are tracing stayed there 150 years ago,” I added with dramatic emphasis. “Ay,” scoffed the Scotsman, “Lassie, that’s not old,” pointing out to us our provincial New World point of view. “This place was built in 1512,” added the proprietor. With that, we thought we’d settle for a pint ourselves before following their directions to the other side of the bridge. We later agreed with Wilkie’s observation that the people of Looe were “as good-humored and unsophisticated a set of people as you will meet with anywhere.”

Looe 31

We found the Ship on the high street of East Looe, its red flower baskets and hand-lettered menus showing promise of the â&#x20AC;&#x153;comfortable precinctsâ&#x20AC;? which Wilkie wrote of finding within.

We continued northward. The way was still as Wilkie observed: The lanes were sunk down between high banks, like dry ditches; all varieties of ferns grew in exquisite beauty and luxuriance on either side of us; the trees were small in size, and thickly clothed with leaves.

Eventually, just as our Victorian guides before us, we were brought with startling abruptness to the “magnificent prospect of a Cornish moor.” We hiked to the Hurler rocks and the mighty Cheese-Wring, happy to be walking together, the breeze in our hair, on this week of discovery. The Hurlers, according to Wilkie, have two explanations. One is that they are the remains of a Druid temple. The other, which Wiklie preferred, claimed “a common susceptibility to the charms of romance,” and determined that long ago, These rocks were Cornish men who profanely went out…to enjoy the national sport of hurling the ball on one fine Sabbath morning and were suddenly turned into pillars of stone, as a judgement on their own wickedness, and a warning to all their companions as well. We observed, as he had done, that the rocks indeed resembled a motley collection of hurling team members demonstrating various positions.

When we came to the Cheese-Wring, we shared Wilkieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s enthusiastic response to the sight: All the granite we had seen before, was nothing compared with the granite we now looked upon. The masses were at one place heaped up in great irregular cairnsâ&#x20AC;Śand above the whole, rose the weird fantastic form of [this], the wildest and most wondrous of all the wild and wondrous structures in the rock architecture of the scene. 34

As the â&#x20AC;&#x153;long shadows of rocks lay over the moor,â&#x20AC;? we followed our hikers towards the southwest, driving to Lostwithiel where we would stay for the night. While we had rooms at a bed and breakfast dating from the 17th century, Wilkie and Henry stayed at the Talbot, which we found maintaining its stately presence in the village, just as it had when they were there.

Lostwithiel 35

Although the shadows were beginning to lengthen, we set out across the fields to find Lanhydrock House, a model for Porthgenna in Wilkie’s novel The Dead Secret, published in 1857. We walked through a dense forest, approaching the grounds from above. In Wilkie’s words: There, below them, was the dark, lonesome, spacious structure of Porthgenna, with the sunlight already stealing round towards the windows of the west front. There was the path winding away to it gracefully over the moor…

Fowey

The next day, Wilkie and Henry hiked eight miles to the village of Fowey, where they spent the night at another Ship hotel. Although the town did not produce an impression upon him strong enough to merit more than a mention in his book, we found this beautiful little seaside village, nestled into the green banks surrounding the harbor, to be one of the most charming sites of our journey. 37

Kynance Cove

We drove to the area near Lizard, where we hiked and marveled at the dramatic scenery described by Wilkie. As he wrote: The sunlight had brightened gloriously since we had last beheld it—the rain was over—the mist was gone. But a short distance before us, rose the cliffs at the Lizard head—the southernmost land in England—and to this point we now hastened, as the fittest spot from which to start on our rambles along the coast. The coastal path took a turn upwards and we found ourselves climbing higher and higher until we overlooked the most dramatic scenery yet. Again in Wilkie’s words: The place at which the coast scenery arrives at its climax of grandeur [is] Kynance Cove. Here, such gigantic specimens are to be seen of the most beautiful of all varieties of rock, the “serpentine.” What a scene was now presented to us! It was a perfect palace of rocks! 38

As we gazed upon the grandeur before us, we could imagine another, darker day when the boiling sea thundered against these same rocks in the final dramatic scene of Wilkieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s early novel Basil, when Mannion meets his fate: The wet sea-weed slipped through his fingers. He struggled frantically to throw himself towards the side of the declivity; slipping further and further down it at every effort. A tremendous jet of spray hissed out upon him at the same moment. I heard a scream so shrill, so horribly unlike any human cry, that it seemed to silence the very thundering of the water. The spray fell. For one instant, I saw two livid and bloody hands tossed up against the black walls of the hole, as he dropped into it. Then the waves roared again fiercely in their hidden depths; the spray flew out once more; and when it cleared off, nothing was to be seen at the yawning mouth of the chasm.

St. Michael’s Mount Wilkie and Henry hiked on to St. Michael’s Mount, near Penzance. In his Rambles, Wilkie takes his readers through the history of the Mount with a series of dissolving views in which he illustrates its growth from a place of conflict among ancient tribes, to an eleventh century Benedictine abbey, to a seventeenth century fortress, to a place of “prosperous labor and innocent recreation” as it had become in his time. As we walked along the uneven cobbled causeway during low tide, we joined “companies of excursionists,” just as he did 150 years ago.

In Penzance, Wilkie and Henry stayed at the Union Hotel, which today is still bustling in the center of town. We had reservations at the Abbey, just down the

The Elusive Logan Rock

street, its low ceilings and miniature doors suggesting to Chris that he had somehow fallen through the looking glass with Alice. In the morning, we continued to Treen to look for Logan Rock, which Wilkie called “one of Cornwall’s greatest curiosities.” We followed their route, reaching Treen in a windy drizzle. Nonetheless, we valiantly clambered across the slippery rocks, trying to find the amazing balancing stone that had so intrigued our ramblers. To our disappointment, Logan Rock was just not to be found. We convinced ourselves that someone must have finally tipped it over into the sea.

We drove on to Land’s End, the westernmost point of England. As we neared the area, huge concrete letters proclaimed that we had found it. A hotel and games arcade lay ahead of us, a mammoth parking lot was to our left, and tour buses were everywhere. It was only our commitment to see all that Wilkie had seen that kept us from turning around and making our escape. However, we found that once we started hiking along the ridge overlooking the dramatic granite formations, the crowds fell away and we were once again left free to savor the vista before us. To once again quote Wilkie: There Nature appears in her most triumphant glory and beauty… There, every mile, as you proceed, offers some new prospect, or awakens some fresh impression…It is granite, and granite alone that you see everywhere…presenting an appearance of adamantine solidity and strength, a mighty breadth of outline…nobly and impressively adapted to the purpose of protecting the shores of Cornwall.

Landâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s End

Wilkie and Henry stayed nearby at the First and Last. We were pleased to find that yet another of their inns remains; this one in the village of Sennen still welcomes Landâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s End visitors as it has since 1620.

We continued north along the coast

“hauled taught” the braces (as the sailors

for about five miles, coming to the

say) until my waistband was under my

ruins of Botallack Copper Mine.

armpits; and then he pronounced that I and

Perched on the edge of a rocky

my trousers fitted each other in great

outcrop, the mine’s old engine houses

perfection. The cuffs of the jacket were next

overlook the wild magnificence of the

turned up to my elbows—the white nightcap

waves below. Wilkie called this sight

was dragged over my ears—the round hat

as “striking and extraordinary as the

was jammed down over my eyes. When I

first view of the Cheese-Wring itself.”

add to all this, that I am so near-sighted as

One of the most amusing anecdotes

to be obliged to wear spectacles, and that I

in Wilkie’s Rambles is his description

finished my toilet by putting my spectacles

of going down into the mine. He and

on, nobody, I think, will be astonished to

Henry donned miner’s gear and

hear that my companion seized his sketch-

descended below the level of the

book and caricatured me on the spot.

pounding waves. As he describes himself in this exercise: The same mysterious dispensation of fate, which always awards tall wives to short men, decreed that a suit of the big miner’s should be reserved for me. He stood six feet two inches—I stand five feet six inches. I put on his flannel shirt—it fell down to my toes, like a bed gown; his drawers—they flowed in Turkish luxuriance over my feet. At his trousers I helplessly stopped short, lost in the voluminous recesses of each leg. The big miner, like a good Samaritan as he was, came to my assistance. He put the pocket button through the waist buttonhole, to keep the trousers up in the first instance; then, he 46

Botallack Copper Mine

After listening for a few moments, a distant, unearthly noise becomes faintly audible – a long, low, mysterious moaning, which never changes, which is felt on the ear as well as heard by it – a sound that might proceed from some incalculable distance, from some invisible height – a sound so unlike anything that is heard on the upper ground, in the free air of heaven; so sublimely mournful and still; and so ghostly and impressive when listened to in the subterranean recesses of the earth, that we continue instinctively to hold our peace, as if enchanted by it, and think not of communicating to each other the awe and astonishment which it has inspired in us from the very first. At last, the miner speaks again, and tells us that what we hear is the sound of the surf lashing the rocks a hundred and twenty feet above us, and of the waves that are breaking on the beach beyond… when storms are at their height, when the ocean hurls mountain after mountain of water on the cliffs, then the noise is terrific; the roaring heard down here in the mine is so expressively fierce and awful, that the boldest men at work are afraid to continue their labour. All ascend to the surface, to breathe the upper air and stand on the firm earth… —Wilkie’s impressions below the surface of the waves, in Rambles

The travelers went from the mines of Botallack to the docks of St. Ives, and

He described it as “a few hundred yards of ground enclosed by some of the

from there through Redruth to Perranporth. Wilkie and Henry spent the

most luxuriant wood foliage in Cornwall,” and continued:

night there at the Tywarnhayle Arms, which today is still thriving. The trees bound each side of the stream, tinging it in deep places, where it eddies smoothly, with hues of lustrous green, and dipping their lower branches into it, where it ripples on white pebbles or glides fast over gray sand. [The trees] cluster thickly about the old churchyard, as if to keep the place secret, throwing deep shadows over the graves. The small cottage garden and the spacious manner house are sheltered by [these trees] alike…There is an unbroken, unworldly tranquility about this secluded place, which communicates itself mysteriously to the stranger’s thoughts; making him unconsciously slacken in his walk, and look and listen in silence.

The Vale of Mawgan, near the market town of St. Colomb, was the next destination of our ramblers. Wilkie was impressed by this lush little village nestled in a green valley, and devoted a chapter of the book to it.

He wrote of being moved by a â&#x20AC;&#x153;strange memorialâ&#x20AC;? in the churchyard: the white-painted stern of a boat, upon which were inscribed the names of ten fishermen who met a terrible death at sea in 1846. We found the memorial still there; only a trace of the white paint remains, yet otherwise it is just as he saw it.

What most intrigued Wilkie and Henry at Mawgan was a convent of Carmelite nuns. Wilkie described it as: A sanctuary not thrown open to dazzle and awe the beholder, but veiled in gloom, guarded in secrecy, preserved in deep mystery behind gates that only open, like the fatal gates of the grave, to receive, but never to dismiss again to the world without. So captivated was Wilkie by the Lanhearne Convent that he used it to describe the atmosphere of Porthgenna in The Dead Secret. It was intriguing to find the house much as it appeared in Henryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s drawing, still exuding that atmosphere of secrecy as it protects the privacy of the nuns who continue to live there.

The travelers stayed at the Red Lion Inn in St. Colomb; again, we found that it was still there, on a narrow street in town. We, however, stayed with old friends further up the coast at their B & B, an old vicarage overlooking the rugged north Cornish coast.

In the final chapter of Rambles Beyond Railways, Wilkie and Henry followed the trail of three legends of the northern coast, and we intended to do the same. The first took us to Tintagel Castle. Again in Wilkie’s words, it was: An ancient ruin magnificently situated on a precipice overhanging the sea, and romantically, if not historically, reputed as the birthplace of the hero of many a magic tale—King Arthur. Our view of the castle ruins looked much the same as Henry’s painting, but we were pleased that the path up to it, though steep, had been much improved. In his description, Wilkie wrote of the “perilous path” where “a single false step would be certain destruction.” 52

Tintagel Castle

The second legend took us in search of St. Nectan’s Kieve and it’s mystic

waterfall, though they could hear it all around them. Wilkie described the

waterfall that has been a shrine since the 6th century. Wilkie and Henry

tangled branches and thorny bushes that pressed them from all directions, and

wandered before us:

bemoaned that they “heard the monotonous, eternal splashing of the water… and vainly tried to obtain even a glimpse of the fall.” Although our Victorian

…to the entrance of a valley, bounded on either side by high, gently sloping hills, with a

travelers were not successful in seeing the waterfall, we were able to make up

small stream running through its center, fed by the waterfall of which we are in search.

for our failure to find the Logan Rock. Though muddy and slick, the way was passable, and we were rewarded with a magical sight indeed. The sun

A century and a half ago, the way was so overgrown with “weeds, ferns,

followed the water down into a dark cove and through a tunnel in the rocks

brambles, bushes and young trees” that they simply could not find the

below. We could only imagine what Wilkie would have had to say about it.

St. Nectanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Kieve 55

However, Wilkie and Henry determined that they found the scene of the second legend: that of two silent women who lived in a cottage in the valley of St. Nectan's Kieve. Wilkie described the ruins of the cottage, with its “stained roofless walls, the damp clotted herbage, and the reptiles crawling about” and related the story of two women who died there “in mystery and in solitude,” never having uttered a word to anyone. We found a building reputed to be the site of Saint Nectan's cell at the top of the waterfall. Legends are rampant and conflicting, and Wilkie had undoubetedly contirbuted to them. Information provided by the current owners of the cottage suggests that the ruins of the chapel provided the lower part of the walls of a cottage erected in the 1860s. Today, they invite visitors to light a candle in the small chapel.

The third legend concerned Forrabury Church in nearby Boscastle. According to the story that Wilkie related, the people of the village were troubled that their church had no bells, while rival Tintagel boasted a great peal. At last, they collected enough money and the bells were ordered. The voyage that was to bring the bells was fine, with fair winds and calm seas. However, the captain and the pilot began to argue as they neared the shore. While the pilot thanked God for the crossing, the captain disputed him, saying the safe journey was due only to his own skills. Heaven intervened, sending a freak gale. An immense sea overwhelmed the boat, sinking it and killing all but the pilot. The bells were never recovered, and never replaced. We found the church up on a hill “where neither cottages nor cultivation appear,” and like Wilkie, we saw “the ancient walls and gloomy tower,” with its belfry boarded up. As we gazed on this desolate place, we could almost hear the bells tolling their “muffled deathpeal” from the depths below the waves. 56

Finally, like our Victorian tour guides, we were at the end of our own Rambles Beyond Railways, and headed back to London. We could rightly echo the words with which Wilkie ended his narrative: Let us once again “jog on the footpath way” as contentedly, if not quite as merrily, as ever; and remembering how much we have seen and learnt that must surely better us both, let us, as we now lose sight of the dark, gray waters, gratefully, though sadly, speak the parting word—FAREWELL TO CORNWALL! 57

My Persistent Phantom Susan Hanes

I have a confession to make. I have a relationship with a certain gentleman that has endured for more than forty years and yet continues to captivate me even today. Does it lessen the intrigue that the target of my obsession would now be 191 years old? That he was short, bespectacled, and had a long, shaggy beard and unusually small hands and feet? I have been fascinated by Wilkie Collins ever since the summer before my sophomore year in high school, when I picked up his novel The Moonstone as part of a summer reading assignment. I am not sure whether it was the title of the book or the authorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s name that first enticed me to choose it from my English teacherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s suggested list, but I remember that once I started reading, I couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t put it down. The story of the disappearance of the Moonstone, a fabulous diamond, was full of excitement and mystery, with a little love, revenge, and drug use sprinkled in, but it was the way the plot unfolded that was uniquely absorbing. The characters themselves told the story in a series of narratives, enabling the reader to become intimately engaged with them.

Wilkie and I didn’t meet again until several years later, when I was having breakfast with a friend who happened to mention that she was thinking of reading The Woman in White. I remembered that book as the other famous novel that Wilkie wrote, and I made a mental note of it. As it turned out, my friend never got around to reading the book, but I did, finding an old copy with an intriguing cover at a used bookstore a few days later. Again, I was hooked, starting with its beguiling opening line: “This is the story of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can achieve.” Again, I couldn’t put it down. As each chapter pulled me into the next, I was caught in a mesmerizing web of rambling, dark houses with long, shadowy hallways; of swishing skirts and burning candles, of secret journals and hidden identities. And there was more: Wilkie’s rapier wit, his idiosyncratic, complex characters, and his intuitive pronouncements about humanity and its foibles. As I read the last lines and closed the book, I wondered about Wilkie Collins, this man with the unusual name who had, so many years later, captivated me once again. So I looked him up. I learned that Wilkie Collins had been one of the most popular and prolific authors of the nineteenth century. I learned that he was the father of the detective novel and the prime exponent of sensation fiction, that mid-Victorian British literary genre focused on shocking subject matter like adultery and murder and set in familiar, domestic surroundings.

Wilkie was an associate of Charles Dickens, whom he first met when they performed in a the comedy, Not so Bad as we Seem, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1851. Although their earliest af?iliation was through such amateur theatrical productions, Dickens and Collins became close friends. They collaborated on Dickens’s two literary periodicals, Household Words and All the Year Round. They traveled together, hiking in the Lake District of England and exploring the pleasures and excesses of Paris. They visited each other at home, particularly at Dickens’s Gad’s Hill Place, where they shared family holidays and critiqued each other’s work. In fact, Wilkie’s younger brother, Charles Collins, married Dickens’ beloved daughter, Katey. Wilkie wrote more than thirty novels, as well as numerous short stories, essays, and plays. His best-known novels, The Moonstone and The Woman in White, have never been out of print. He excelled in plot and character development, but above all, he was a consummate storyteller. Many well-respected writers have been fans of Wilkie Collins, including Dorothy Sayers, Arthur Conan Doyle, and P. D. James. He has been described as “the most readable of all major English writers,” and T. S. Eliot said of him, he had “the immense merit…of never being dull.”

Dorothy Sayers

P. D. James

Arthur Conan Doyle

T. S. Eliot 61

William Wilkie Collins was born on January 8, 1824, the eldest son of celebrated English landscape painter William Collins and Harriet Geddes Collins, herself a member of a noted family of artists. His godfather was the Scottish painter, Sir David Wilkie, for whom he was named. Although he lived his entire life in the Marylebone area of London, Wilkie always enjoyed the seaside and sought inspiration for his writing and relief from chronic physical ills in the sea air. Within the strict upbringing of his evangelical father and the rigid constraints of Victorian society, Wilkie developed a particularly rebellious spirit that was to remain with him throughout his life. As a young man, he did not share his father’s dream that he become a lawyer. He wanted to write. Although he was warm and charming company, (one woman wrote of him, “To sit next to Wilkie at dinner is to have a brilliant time of it”) he avoided society’s demands and preferred an unconventional Bohemian lifestyle.

William Collins 62

Harriet Collins

David Wilkie

He related an example of this inclination in Dickens’s weekly literary magazine, All the Year Round, to which he was a regular contributor. He told of one hot summer night, when he rebelled against dressing for an evening party, instead putting on comfortable clothes and joining an admiring group of the working class peering in at the party through the windows. In Wilkie’s words: There they all were, all oozing away into silence and insensibility together, smothered in their heavy black coats and

Martha Rudd

strangled in their stiff white cravats! There is a fourth place vacant, my place … I see my own ghost sitting there: the appearance of that perspiring specter is too dreadful to be described. I shudder as I survey my own full-dressed apparition at the dinner table … I turn away my face in terror, and look for comfort at my street companions, my worthy fellow-outcasts. Wilkie never married, although he spent his adult life in long-term relationships with two women. The story of his mysterious meeting with Caroline Graves on a

Caroline Graves

moonlit night reads like a parody of his own novels. She lived with him and posed as his “housekeeper,” entertaining his guests and accompanying him on his writing expeditions. Some years later, Martha Rudd, a much younger woman, came into his life and eventually bore him three children. For the rest of his life, Wilkie supported two households, taking full responsibility for both.

His American friend, drama critic William Winter, wrote a wonderfully warm description of Wilkie. In his memoir, Winter recalls: Wilkie was a great writer: as a storyteller, specifically, he stands aloneâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;transcendent and incomparable: but his personality was even more interesting than his authorship. To be in his society was to be charmed, delighted, stimulated and refreshed. â&#x20AC;ŚThe hours that I passed in the company of Collins are remembered as among the happiest of my life. â&#x20AC;Ś His humor was playful. His perception of character was intuitive and unerring. He manifested, at all times, a delicate consideration for other persons, and his sense of kindness was instantaneous and acute. I found the life of this enigmatic man, who lived on the outside of convention, as intriguing as any tale that came from his own pen. That he was born into a fine and loving family, yet never chose to marry the women he supported and cared for; that he remained a faithful friend and charming companion in spite of acute suffering and addiction to laudanum; that he wrote some of the best-loved fiction of his time, yet his books today are too often overlooked: all contributed to my fascination with Wilkie Collins.

William Winter

In the fall of 1998, after months of planning, I made a pilgrimage with my husband Houston, following Wilkieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s footsteps within the London that he knew and around the England that he loved. It was a magical journey for me. As we explored the ghostly abbey near Whitby, where Wilkie hoped for a quiet place to write (and found instead a brass band that played under his hotel window every afternoon); or hunted along the foggy Yorkshire Coast for Mulgrave Castle, the setting for The Moonstone; or climbed among the fells in the Lake District, where he hiked with Dickens (and sprained an ankle), I sensed Wilkieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s presence.

The climax of that trip was an evening with Wilkieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s great-granddaughter Faith, to whom I had been introduced by letter through a professor friend of mine. The moment I met her, I felt as if time had been reordered, and that I was somehow meeting her great-grandfather as well. Faith invited me to sit at Wilkieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s desk. As I felt the soft writing leather and handled his well-used books, it was as if I were reaching across the years toward my old friend. Three months later, the tragedy of my life occurred, when I lost my husband in a senseless accident. In my sorrow, I wrote to Faith. Although we had only met once, that meeting was so full of meaning that I wanted to share my loss with her. She invited me to return to London. And so I did, again and again.

In the fall of 2000, I planned another Wilkie Collins journey, hiking through Cornwall with my son Chris. We retraced the tour that Wilkie made 150 years earlier with his artist friend, Henry Brandling, and recorded in his book, Rambles Beyond Railways.

We climbed to the Cheese Wring, which Wilkie described as the “wildest and most wondrous of all the wild and wondrous structures in the rock architecture of the scene.”

We were delighted to find mysterious St. Nectan’s Kieve, which Wilkie bemoaned not being able to locate, although they heard the sound of the waterfall hidden in impenetrable forest growth. 68

We hiked along the coastal path near Lizard to Kynance Cove, setting for the final dramatic scene of Wilkie’s early novel Basil, which Wilkie described as “the place at which the coast scenery arrives at its climax of grandeur.”

Back in London, I introduced Chris to Faith, and he immediately sensed

hear Wilkie Collins Society Grand Patron, Baroness James of Holland

her connection to the past, as I had. My visits to London continued, each

Park, a.k.a. P.D. James, speak about Wilkieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s influence on detective fiction.

spring and again in the fall, and Faith, with her distinguished husband Bill,

The evening was all we had hoped it would be.

became an important part of my life. We arrived together to find the library filled with round dining tables and a After I remarried, I continued to return to London, often with my

long head table in the center. I was seated there, between Faith and Bill

husband, George. We always arranged to see Faith and Bill. Each time, I

and across from Lady James. The portly and perspiring president of the

had the same feeling that I was somehow connecting with friends on both

Thackeray Society smacked the table with a wooden mallet for silence and

sides of the Looking Glass.

asked the blessing in a slow, ponderous Latin. Dinner was elegant and beautifully presented. After dessert and coffee and chocolates, Lady James

In May 2004, we joined members of the Wilkie Collins and Thackeray

got up to speak. Afterward, she inscribed a copy of her current book, The

Societies for a formal dinner at Londonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s venerable Reform Club. Faith

Murder Room, for me and I gave her a bound paper I had written about

and I had been looking forward to the evening for months, when we would

Wilkie and another detective writer, Dorothy Sayers.

Faith and Bill Clarke

George and I returned to London in September of the same year, when we joined Faith and Bill for the opening night of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical version of Wilkie’s The Woman in White at the Palace Theatre. As the final curtain came down, Faith turned to me and said, “You know, the old man would have really loved all this.” I thought so, too. 71

Through the years, I read all of Wilkie’s writings and most of what had been written about him. There was, however, one part of his life about which little was known. From September 1873 to March 1874, he toured the United States and Canada, hoping to replicate the success of Dickens, Thackeray, and others by reading his way across the continent. Dickens, who died in June 1870, had made two immensely profitable tours of North America in 1842 and 1867-8. In light of the extraordinary success of own his novels and plays in America, Wilkie believed that he, too, could make a good sum of money and enhance his reputation across the ocean; by this time he was acknowledged by many as the most popular living author writing in English. I decided to try and recreate his itinerary and to discover how he felt about Americans, and their response to him. My intention was to determine a sense of the America that Wilkie encountered, and, in so doing, contribute to an understanding of the challenges and successes of celebrities who came to America in the second half of the nineteenth century. Little did I realize, however, that what started as a summer project would become a four-year passion, involving thousands of miles and thousands of hours and eventually culminating in a book, Wilkie Collins’s American Tour, published in 2008 in London. My plan was to create a biographical narrative of Collins’s tour by identifying possible “stops” on his trip and collecting contemporary periodical reviews that recorded his reception and the public response to his performances.

I soon realized that learning about the Dickens and Thackeray tours was

At that point, a little detective work was called for. Using contemporary

significantly facilitated because both were accompanied by assistants who

railroad maps, I constructed possible routes that Wilkie might have taken. I

meticulously recorded their activities. Dickens traveled with George Dolby

determined where he could logically have traveled next, taking into

who carefully documented Dickens’s time in America in Dickens As I Knew

consideration the train schedules for the period, the availability of suitable

Him, while Thackeray brought along Eyre Crowe who, as an artist and

speaking venues, and the itinerary of Wilkie’s friend and mentor, Charles

personal assistant, detailed their trip in his book, With Thackeray in America.

Dickens. George and I packed up the car and headed east to follow my

Although Wilkie hired his godson Frank Ward to assist him for part of his

assumptions concerning Wilkie’s travels. The sources I was seeking were not

own tour, no records from Ward have been found. Published works about

available online, nor for the most part, were they indexed. During a period of

Wilkie’s tour were confined to short articles or chapters based on known

four years, we visited more than 85 institutions in over 45 cities. Our method

letters, in spite of the fact that he gained impressions from his visit that would

was to drive to a possible location and visit the local historical society and the

influence his writing for the remainder of his life.

special collections of academic and public libraries. We combed through boxes of letters and piles of journals, and scoured the small print of late 19th century newspapers. Cranking away on scratchy microfilm readers, we looked for any mention of our man during the logical period that he could have been in a particular location.

I began my project with an article entitled, “Collins in America,” written by Dr. Clyde Hyder of the University of Kansas in 1940. Only two pages in length, it nonetheless contained the most comprehensive research on the topic I could find. I also had the advantage of two recently published collections of his letters. Using the dates and places provided by these sources, I made my first rough itinerary of Wilkie’s American tour. The earlier article cited reviews from newspapers in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago, so I knew that Collins had traveled to those places. The collections of letters also included letters written from Buffalo, Cleveland, and Sandusky, Ohio. 73

We discovered that it was easiest to look first for the announcement of a

alternately described him as:

reading, for those were usually in larger print. The appearance of an

… a short, thick-necked man

announcement, however, did not necessarily mean that Wilkie had actually

… small in stature

spoken at the time publicized. The proof could only be found by locating

… medium in height

reviews appearing a day or so after the advertised readings.

… a rather tall man. The papers variously stated that as a reader: … he read in a very clear and distinct manner … [he had] a monotonous cockney accent … he was distinctly audible … his voice was too low for our great halls … [he] succeeded better than was expected … [he was] unquestionably a failure There were wonderful moments of serendipitous discovery that kept me going. For instance, at Brown University, I found an exchange of letters between New York raconteur William Seaver and American statesman John Hay. Seaver writes, “My dear Hay, Come to me on the 22nd at the Union Club, at 12 and help thrust a swell breakfast down the throat of Wilkie Collins, That’s a good child.” Hay asks in reply, “Shall I bring a sausage stuffer or will you provide them?” After learning that Wilkie had given a reading in Providence, Rhode Island, I found a letter in the archives at Swarthmore College, written by a young

As we connected the dots from one speaking engagement to another, I

man named Chalkey Collins (no relation), who had attended the event with

began to get a picture of his American experience. Once I had a date and

a small group from the local Quaker School. Chalkey writes later to his

place affixed in his calendar, I expanded my search to try and find letters,

brother:

diary entries, or published articles that would shed more light on his appearance in a particular place: his reception, those he met, and his other

Some of the teachers and the seniors went down to hear Wilkie Collins lecture. He read

related activities. There were many “needle-in-a-haystack” searches and lots

from one of his novels … which I suppose was very interesting to some but I did not think

of dead ends. The newspaper reports themselves were a jumble of

much of it: he read so low that I could not understand some of it. I don’t think he did

contradictions. For example, a cross section of the newspapers I examined

much honor to the name of Collins. 75

On another occasion, Wilkie was entertained at a grand affair at the venerable Century Club of New York. The guest list included some 60 or 70 writers, journalists, and artists including Thomas Nast, John Hay, and Bret Harte. The New York World reported that the festive good cheer and lively talk continued late into the evening. A sense of the merry atmosphere was evident by an examination of a menu, now at the Morgan Library, that had been circulated for the purpose of collecting the autographs of this august group. Wilkie started the menu around by signing his name, followed by the other guests. Eventually the menu came back to him and he signed it again, followed by several others who signed it again too.

I was eventually able to confirm 25 readings in 22 locations during the 154 days that Wilkie spent in North America. During his American tour, he used New York and Boston as bases from which he traveled to his readings. From these points of departure, he completed four major circuits, heading northwest to upstate New York, north to Canada, west to Chicago, and south to Washington, D.C. On Thursday, September 25, 1873, Wilkie Collins stood on the deck of the Algeria as it steamed into New York harbor, thus beginning his American tour. He checked into the Westminster Hotel at Irving Place and was shown to his rooms, the same suite, with a private door and staircase, occupied by Charles Dickens six years earlier. According to reports, Wilkie was moved to tears to see his mentorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s desk.

Two days after his arrival in New York, Wilkie was honored at a Saturday evening reception and dinner at the Lotos Club. In attendance were many of the Cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most prominent men, including politicians, business leaders, writers, artists, and theatrical celebrities. The president of the Lotos introduced Collins, saying, We have met tonight to greet a visitor from the other side, of whom nothing is unknown to us but his face. May he give us long and frequent opportunity for better acquaintance with that. Wilkie came forward and was greeted with great enthusiasm. He spoke of his experiences with American hospitality and the kindness that he had received from the American people. 77

British actor Wybert Reeve, one of Wilkie’s close friends, remembered the extent to which the author was hounded by reporters and interviewers during those early weeks in America. He related an incident that greatly amused Wilkie shortly after he arrived in New York. Reeve writes: Before leaving England, Collins found himself in want of a rough traveling suit of clothes, and driving though London he bought a cheap shoddy suit. The New York Herald, in a later description of Collins, gave an elaborate account of his person. He was wearing at the time the slop suit, and the description in the papers wound up with a statement that Mr. Collins was evidently a connoisseur of dress, having on one of those stylish West End tailor’s suits of a fashionable cut by which an Englishman of taste is known.

Wybert Reeve

Wilkie’s first American reading was in Albany, New York on an October evening in 1873. According to the papers, he “tripped across the stage” to “hearty applause.” Before he began his reading, Wilkie remarked that the story, "The Dream Woman," had been revised and amplified for the purpose of his readings. He added, “In the hour and a half in which I shall have the honor of appearing before you this evening, you can judge for yourselves whether or not I have succeeded in making it entertaining.” He then opened his manuscript and began his story. A newspaper review enthusiastically described the effect that the reading had on the audience, in spite of a “threatening fire” that broke out at a nearby machine shop. The article continued: It would be impossible to bring together a better representation of the lovers of fine literature and more cultivated minds than greeted Mr. Collins. The mental quality of the audience and the power of the reader in holding the attention of his listeners was well shown by the perfect composure with which an alarm by the fire bells was taken—it seemed really to be considered only a minor impertinence and was not heeded.—Albany Argus, October 8, 1873. 78

The following day, the Argus concluded, “If Mr. Collins meets with such

No matter where I go, my reception in America is always the same. The prominent people

appreciative listeners throughout the country as he has found in Albany, it

in each place visit me, drive me out, dine me, and do all that they can to make me feel

will be no less a gratification to him than to us that he has come to

myself among friends. The enthusiasm and the kindness are really and truly beyond

America.”

description. I should be the most ungrateful man living if I had any other than the highest opinion of the American people. I find them to be the most enthusiastic, the most cordial,

But, that was not to be the case. A review of his presentation the following

and the most sincere people I have ever met with in my life.

night in Troy concluded that as a reader, Collins was “no actor, and only the thrilling nature of the story redeemed his reading from dullness,” because he was “far from being an elocutionist.” There were similar reviews of his readings in Utica and Syracuse. The enthusiastic reports that had preceded his earlier performances were replaced by more honest

From Buffalo, Wilkie continued west along the southern shore of Lake Erie to Cleveland (where he celebrated his 50th birthday), Sandusky, Toledo, Detroit, and finally, Chicago, arriving on the morning of January 16, 1874 after another grueling train journey.

assessments. Although his skills as a novelist were never contested, on the stage, he was no Dickens. The reception of his readings was not Wilkie’s only problem. Years later, he still recalled the discomforts of American rail travel and its effect on his constitution. He wrote: I remember once, after two days’ and a nights’ traveling, I was so utterly worn out that I asked the landlord of the hotel if he had any very dry champagne. He replied that he had. ‘Then’ I said, ‘send a bottle up to my bedroom.’ I drank the whole of it, and informed him that though it was only noon, I was going at once to bed, and that all visitors were to be told that I might possibly not get up for a week. I heard afterwards that after twenty-four hours some callers were allowed to come up and peep in at the door, which I had not locked; but all they saw was ‘Mr. Collins still fast asleep.’ In December, he headed north to Canada where he read in Toronto and Montreal before appearing in Buffalo, New York. While in that city, he had the opportunity to write to an old friend about his views of the American people.

Wilkie Collins at 50 in America 79

He settled into the newly opened Sherman Hotel, located on the southwest corner of Randolph and Clark Streets. Designed by prominent Chicago architect William Boyington, it was considered one of the finest hotels in the city, catering to public figures in the stock and agricultural trade. Wilkie had little time to recuperate from the trip, as his reading was scheduled for the evening of his arrival at the grand new Music Hall, located opposite the Sherman House on Clark Street. One might think that the people of Chicago would be out in great numbers to see the man who was “widely known in the world of literature as a novelist of wonderful imagination.” In fact, two of his plays, Man and Wife and The New Magdalen had recent runs in the city. But for Wilkie’s presentation of “The Dream Woman,” The Chicago Tribune estimated that the hall’s 1700 seats were only about half filled, albeit with “an unusual number of local celebrities, the church being particularly well represented.” Among these was Robert Collyer, popular pastor of Unity Church and the first President of the Chicago Literary Club.

The Tribune mentioned that the hall was uncomfortably cold in spite of its new steam heating system, reporting “the calorific apparatus of the hall stupendously defective.” The Chicago Evening Journal suggested, “Perhaps the frigidity of the atmosphere had something to do with the rigidity of the audience.” The reviews were not complimentary. The Journal’s response, although unique in observation, was not unlike the others in tone: But not withstanding the reader’s monotonous cockney accent … and inability to change from his own tone to the imaginary ones of his characters, the reading was worth all it cost to

Robert Collyer 80

anybody simply because it was done by one of the great masters of English fiction.

Apparently, the arduous journey to Chicago had caused Wilkie to reevaluate his travel plans. In Buffalo, early in January, he was still considering his western adventure, writing, “I am going ‘Out West’… and I may get as far as the Mormons.” At one point he had even considered continuing as far as the Pacific coast. He had cousins who lived in San Francisco, whom he had hoped to see. But after arriving in Chicago, Wilkie’s attitude seemed to change. He wrote to his American publisher, Joseph Harper, “My plans are a little uncertain.” In a letter to Jane Bigelow, wife of American statesman John Bigelow, Wilkie complained, “I am not going further west, because I cannot endure the railway traveling. A night in a “sleeping car” destroys me for days afterwards.” Wilkie visited the Bigelows at their estate in Highland Falls, New York, having

Don’t tell anybody—but the truth is I am not sorry to leave Chicago. The dull sameness of

met the couple back in 1867 at a dinner party in London. In Jane, Wilkie

the great blocks of iron and brick overwhelms me. The whole city seems to be saying “See how

sensed a sympathetic ear, and he shared with her his impressions of the brash

rich I am after the fire, and what a tremendous business I do!” and everybody I meet uses the

new city that had not only emerged from a frontier settlement in less than fifty

same form of greeting. “Two years ago, Mr. Collins, this place was a heap of ruins—are you

years, but from the ashes of the Great Fire two years earlier. Calling Chicago

not astonished when you see it now?” I am not a bit astonished. It is a mere question of

“this city of magnificent warehouses,” he continued:

raising money—the re-building follows as a matter of course. This letter reflects a significant reversal of attitude. Shortly after the Great Fire of 1871, Wilkie sent a check, valued at around $700 today, to the Committee of the American Chicago Relief Fund, along with the following heartfelt message: I beg to enclose a cheque, offered to your fund, as a trifling expression of my sympathy with the sufferers by the Fire of Chicago, and of my sincere admiration of the heroic spirit with which your countrymen have met the disaster that has befallen them. Wilkie’s disaffection with Chicago was probably exacerbated by his travel and social schedule, as well as homesickness from his extended absence from

Jane Bigelow

London. (This conjecture might be supported by the fact that is third child, Charley, was born almost nine months to the day after his return.)

Back in Boston, Wilkie was honored by “a select group of his most intimate friends” at a banquet at the St. James Hotel. Organized by Boston publisher William Gill, the remarkable assembly included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, as well as Mark Twain and the Vice-President of the United States, Henry Wilson. Oliver Wendell Holmes read a poem that he had written especially for the occasion.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

John Greenleaf Whittier

Mark Twain

Oliver Wendell Holmes

At the close of the evening, each guest was presented with a leather-covered bon-bon box, in the shape and size of the cabinet edition of Collins’s works, and containing his photograph, his autograph, and the number of his important works exactly corresponding with the number present at the reception. Wilkie must have still been feeling euphoric the next morning when he wrote to a friend, “Such a banquet yesterday!” adding that the only detail the papers failed to mention was “a dove with a pen in her mouth—hanging from the chandelier.”

Was Wilkie’s American reading tour a success? Unfortunately, that question cannot be answered with an unqualified “yes.” Whether it met his expectations can never fully be known. His own descriptions of his public reception often contradicted the newspaper reviews. His written account that he “riveted” his Albany audience contrasted with a review questioning his success as a speaker. A reviewer in New Bedford, Massachusetts observed that Collins’s powerless voice was lost to “the ill-mannered crowd” while later reporting that Wilkie was “delighted with his audience.” It is clear that his appearances drew crowds that came principally to see the great novelist rather than to listen to his readings. He was swarmed by countless admirers and met some of the most influential leaders in the United States. He was extravagantly entertained and gloriously fêted. He learned about the American character and earned the admiration and respect of everyone he met. He had the opportunity to witness the effect that his books had on a population that lionized him as the greatest living English novelist. Perhaps Wilkie Collins best summarized his feelings for America in a letter written from the steamer Parthia as he sailed for home: I leave you with a grateful heart—with recollections of American kindness and hospitality, which will be, as long as I live, among the happiest recollections to which I can look back. My years following Wilkie Collins through his family, his writings, and his travels in England and America have given me a closer understanding of him as a man and as a literary figure. I have traveled with him on both sides of the ocean, and sensed his presence through the veil of time. As I have gotten to know him, I have discovered that our enchanted relationship has enriched my life by giving me a sense of my own place in history; by knowing Wilkie, I see my world in perspective, and it is a richer, warmer place because of him. 83

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