Talking of books
Victorian rake and rebel
Benny Green
In Hesketh Pearson's urbane and friendly life of Dickens, there comes a startling moment when he is obliged to face up to the daunting challenge of Wilkie Collins. Making no bones about his problem, Pearson writes in extenuation of his own sins of omission: Miss Dorothy Sayers informed me that it was the extreme obscurity which surrounds the whole of Collins' private life which discouraged her from getting on with the biography she had contemplated.
No doubt the sardonic ghost of Collins would have regarded the failure to nail him by Miss Sayers as a merciful release from that lady's odious talents as bowdleriser and snobbist. But what is much more to the point is that so famous and popular a writer, moreover a man who spent much of his life in the denuding glare of publicity which surrounded Dickens from the day that Pickwick took the town, should have remained so utterly obscure in defiance of all the sinister engines of twentieth-century literary snooping.
The Collins deficiency was finally met in 1951 when the then MP, Kenneth Robinson, published the first full-length biography. The fact that for many years after, Robinson's book was allowed to go out of print is surprising, for no other comparable life of Collins has appeared since, nor seems likely to. It is therefore something of a commensensical gesture on the part of the publishers that Collins should be restored at last to the lists*, where his presence Will, if there is any justice in these affairs, which there isn't, make him one of the most fascinating subjects of the year.
For Collins must surely be one of the strangest odd-balls to turn up in all the annals of English literature, a man so clearly born out of his time that it is nothing short of miraculous that he made himself so comfortable inside the horsehaired hothouse of Victorian society. He would have suited the dissipations of the Regency well enough, and the literary manners of the Gothic novelists would have been food and drink to him; as for the twentieth century, he would have found that steady loosening of the corsets which is the story of English social life since he died highly amusing as well as highly congenial. That such a man, cheerfully amoral, unconcernedly heretical, genially blasphemous, should have turned up at the very apogee of high Victorian cant and pietism, and then, having found himself contemporaneous with, say, Martin Tupper, proceed to have a good time and be professionally riotously successful, is one of the most remarkable literary freaks of the age.
But Collins was sagacious as well as salacious, and it was this curious blend of disregard for the proprieties and a shrewd businesslike brain which so captivated Dickens. (Collins needed no literary agents, and negotiated his own contracts with a duodecimo sharpness only matched later by Bernard Shaw.) It would be interesting to know, for instance, what the Dictionary of National Biography meant when it wrote of him: Intimacies formed as a young man led to his being harassed, after he became famous, in a manner which proved very prejudicial to his peace of mind.
Not only was he partial to lifting petticoats himself, but he strongly approved of his friends lifting them too, which was one of his great attractions for Dickens. Robinson tells how Collins stage-managed the elopement of a friend with a sixteen-year-old girl, acted as best man and turned up for the christening of the first child of the union, so drunk that he was heard to mutter, `The baby sheems to be moving in a very odd way and is making funny faces. Why, 'pon my soul, the baby's drunk, the baby's drunk!" If one adds to the Collins story the elements of drug-taking (laudanum to ease his rheumatic ordeal) and his living openly in sin with his lady-loves, we begin to see why Dickens came to love him so well, for nobody ever needed release from pettifogging Victorian notions of sexual morality than Dickens, who chose Collins as his guide on trips to the continent pleasure bent — or even perhaps bent pleasure. (Some of Collins's heroines are ominously dominating, and one of them, Marian Halcombe in The Woman in White was "almost swarthy, and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a moustache".) It is typical of Dickens that where other manic creators often struggle with the schizophrenia inside themselves, he should have found the living projections of his contradictory lusts for the domestic hearth and the fleshpots, and natural that while John Forster, the receptacle of the respectable Dickens, should have despised the dissolute Collins, Collins should have regarded Forster with the same cheerful warmth which he lavished on everyone else. But it is a pity that Collins should have ended up as one of Dickens's two shadows, for he was a formidable artist in his right. There is no question that his astonishing mastery of plot construction, a gift well exercised by his need to resort to it in his chaotic private life, influenced Dickens profoundly in the last few novels, until with Edwin Drood, we find the great man actually writing a kind of super-Collins Novel. Shaw once said that Collins corrupted Dickens with plots, but had the grace to say also, "As I was brought up on Dickens's Inspector Bucket, Collins's *Wilkie Collins Icenneth—Robinson (DavisPoynter £6.00)
Sergeant Cuff and Poe's Dupin, I thought nothing of Sherlock Holmes."
Robinson, who says in his foreword that the illegitimate descendants of Collins whom he traced "appear to have no wish publicly to acknowledge their distinguished if unconventional forebear", approaches his task in a mild-mannered sort of way, which is perhaps the best way. A lurid approach to the life of the man who lived so comically flamboyant an existence, who contorted the English novel into the amazing shapes of The Woman in White and The Moonstone, would have been altogether too much. Incidentally, Collins found the love of his life in an incident which readers of The Woman in White will recognise, but how typical of the man that having found his love, he should set up house with her, smile upon her marriage to another man, and continue to love her for the rest of his life. But did she really marry someone else? Or was it merely Collins playing his plot-games again and taking the vows under an assumed name?
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