Where There’s a Will

I studied Dickens at A-level and even now I cannot quite rid myself of the suspicion that the Inimitable is wordy and self-important. I agree that he can’t be beaten for the vibrancy of his character sketches, but for mastery of plot and sheer page-turning entertainment, give me his old friend Wilkie Collins. For various reasons, Collins has never really emerged from the shadow of Dickens, so even today he struggles to find a place on any school syllabus. Denied access to him in my student years, I came to him somewhat later through an interest in thriller writers.

T. S. Eliot described Collins’s masterpiece The Moonstone (1868) as ‘the first and greatest English detective novel’. Sure enough, that book establishes many of the ground rules of detective fiction as it evolved over the next century – the country-house setting, the Scotland Yard sleuth dispatched from London, the locked room, and so on. It does this with an understated humour, exhibited, for example, in the self-serving machinations of Drusilla Clack, the pious niece of Lady Verinder, in whose house the eponymous gem is apparently stolen. Collins has considerable fun at the expense of Miss Clack, who latches on to her elderly aunt, making great play of distributing religious tracts, while all the time professing the obvious lie that she has ‘not the slightest pecuniary interest in Lady Verinder’s Will’. But what grabbed me was the novel’s modernity. This is not simply because of its fresh, uncomplicated style of writing. It has more to do with the frame of reference that permeates its pages. I had expected it would promote the empirical rationality of the times in which it was published, but there is no sense of scientific triumphalism; the central crime isn’t solved by the obvious candidate, the pleasant, plodding and essentially logical professional Sergeant Cuff, but by Ezra Jennings, the medical assistant with the ‘dreamy eyes’ and ‘gypsy complexion’, who arrives at the truth with the help of opium. It was as though, having established the conventions of the genre, Collins anticipated and then decided to ignore a range of later detective novels where the detective needs to be an all-knowing sleuth, and went for an alternative, if entirely credible, solution. The Moonstone appeared towards the end of Collins’s great outpouring, which started in 1859 with The Woman in White, a spinetingling story of the evil machinations which lead an innocent woman to be confined to an asylum, and of the detective-like efforts to uncover them. Both books were considered sensation novels. But if that simply meant they set readers’ pulses racing, the works of Dickens, Charlotte Brontë and others would have been similarly categorized. Collins and his fellow sensation novelists, such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Ellen Wood, came from a younger generation which was trying to take the fevered pulse of mid-Victorian Britain at a time of unprecedented change. Along with railways, urbanization and scientific advance came new excitements, new neuroses and new distractions. Authors had to work harder than ever to keep their busy readers turning their pages. So, like a Hollywood movie director, they ratcheted up the tension and churned out ever more exciting scenarios. Collins astutely realized that one consequence of rapid social adjustment was a sense of mounting domestic unease. So he helped pioneer a literary trend in which, as Henry James would later observe, the scene of the action shifted from exotic gothic castles to regular houses and ‘that most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries that are at our own doors’. Under Collins’s lead, sensation novels probed deep-rooted family secrets which had hitherto been considered off limits – bigamy, insanity and, a speciality of his, skulduggery in the execution of wills. Adopting various innovative narrative techniques, he ranged over a host of related subjects, including disputed inheritances, bloody revenge and another favourite – the iniquities imposed on women by the law, particularly in matters relating to marriage and property. Both The Woman in White and The Moonstone are clever and absorbing. But where should one go in Collins’s work after them? Armadale is fascinating but dauntingly complex, with its two cousins of the same name. For an easier point of entry, and a gripping read, I always recommend No Name (1862). As its title playfully implies, it’s about loss of identity – another favourite topic, in this case arising in typical Collins manner from a botched will. The story starts with one of the best descriptions in literature of tranquil English country-house life. The setting is Combe-Raven, the bucolic ‘Somerset-shire’ home of the two contrasting Vanstone sisters. Norah is quiet and conventional, while Magdalen is exuberant and flighty: she enjoys amateur theatricals and wants to marry an unsuitable neighbour. Their world is turned upside down when their parents both die in quick succession. Unbeknownst to the girls, their father had had a wife in North America and had recently been informed of her death. As a result he had travelled to London for a secret and belated wedding with their mother. However, he had subsequently failed to make a new will, as required by law. So the girls find themselves disinherited and supposedly illegitimate, without money, estate or even good name. Everything that should have gone to them passes instead through a malevolent uncle to an ailing cousin. Norah meekly accepts her fate and becomes a governess, while mettlesome Magdalen determines to regain her rightful inheritance by whatever means she can. Having trodden the boards at Combe-Raven, she initially tries to improve her finances by working as an actress in the provinces. She is helped by a distant relation, Captain Wragge, who inveigles his way into her life as her manager. Pockmarked and with eyes of different colours, he rivals Count Fosco in The Woman in White as the scoundrel who is an essential figure in any sensation novel. He gaily describes himself as a moral agriculturalist, or swindler, who preys on people’s weakness. Under his crafty tutelage, Magdalen shimmies through a series of tense encounters which see her forging letters, swapping identities and even marrying her feckless cousin, whom she loathes, under an assumed name. At one stage, at a particularly low ebb, she contemplates suicide with a draught of laudanum, as she looks out to sea in Aldborough (modern Aldeburgh). Her personal salvation comes through another marriage, this time to a good man. This is unexpected because Collins had a personal aversion to matrimony. However, as a professional writer, he knew that even his most sensationhungry readers wanted a happy ending. Magdalen is one of several tough-minded women in Collins’s novels. Her willingness to take on a new identity recalls Collins’s reallife mistress, Caroline Graves. Having been born out of wedlock, Caroline tried to present herself as respectable – referring to her father, a jobbing carpenter, as a well-born army officer, for example. In the mid-1850s Collins plucked her from the depths of poverty in Marylebone where she was running a marine store, the lowest of mercantile activities (the equivalent of a junk shop) and, according to some commentators, working as a prostitute. She has been identified as the ‘woman in white’ who escaped from an asylum in Collins’s earlier novel. This is unconvincing, but she nevertheless served as a model in several of his books for a generic but always plucky fallen woman who becomes the victim of legal injustice. Occasionally Collins’s storylines can seem over-elaborate. One needs to bear with that, if only to experience the giddying highs and lows of his tale, and the cliff-hanging chapter endings demanded by both his readers and his editors. As a result he is sometimes accused of skimping on character at the expense of plot. But that is not true of No Name, which abounds in well-conceived portraits, such as the engagingly duplicitous Wragge. Beneath its cleverness, it is also humane – a quality particularly evident in a scene in which Magdalen, down on her luck and attempting to infiltrate a strange house, swaps identities with her maid, Louisa. She realizes that her own predicament is little different from that of Louisa, who has been forced to give up her illegitimate child in order to get a job. Magdalen recognizes that in their different ways both she and the maid are victims of marriage laws which discriminate against women. Once again Collins’s relationship with Caroline Graves is significant, for he presents Magdalen’s compromised marital status as legitimized prostitution, while Louisa, ostensibly the ‘fallen woman’ with her baby born out of wedlock, is in fact the purer of the two. Thus he suggests that social and even moral differences can be mutable. Presented in suitably ironic terms, this social critique has a subversive quality at odds with accepted Victorian propriety. This helps account for a recent surge in Collins’s popularity. You get a strong sense of him in neo-Victorian writers such as Sarah Waters and in Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries. He’s also gaining respect in universities for his willingness to play with forms and tackle themes of identity and gender. But such tricks would be nothing if he didn’t know the rules of good narrative. If you want something engrossing to read, I can guarantee that you will skip through the 700-odd pages of No Name.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 48 © Andrew Lycett 2015