Armadale (3 page)

After the bloody consequence of her forgery, Lydia is bundled off to France. She is pensioned on condition that she never return to England. ‘Unpleasantness' follows wherever she goes. A respectably married music teacher attempts suicide and goes mad. The still under-age Lydia has, apparently, seduced and ruined him. To protect the male sex, the young she-devil is confined to a religious establishment. Extreme in all things, she decides to take the veil. Better for the male sex had Lydia Gwilt been mewed up, as in earlier days. The nineteenth-century convent cannot reform or hold her, and Lydia Gwilt – now a dangerous woman – is loosed on the world to do her mischief. Already she has had an eventful enough life to fill several novels (some of them unpublishable in nineteenth-century England).

Lydia has only her red hair, her beauty, her musical talent and her
unscrupulosity with which to make her way. Ever resourceful, she becomes a pianist in a ‘low concert room in Brussels' where she is taken up by a Baroness who needs a beautiful young woman as bait for her card-sharping business. Five years pass. In Naples, Lydia entraps one of the Baroness's dupes, a rich young Englishman, into marriage. She returns to his home on the Yorkshire moors as a respectable lady, Mrs Waldron. But, corrupt to the core, she takes a Cuban lover – the magnificently disreputable Captain Manuel. Her cuckolded husband beats her with a horse whip; in return she poisons him. At this stage still inexpert in the murderer's skills she is apprehended, convicted, and – after furious (and sentimentally wrong-headed) protest from the papers – pardoned by the Home Secretary (for Collins's allusions to current events here, see Book the Fourth, Chapter XV, note 6). Spared the rope, Lydia is none the less obliged to serve two years in prison for theft. On her release, she makes an irregular ‘Scotch marriage' with Manuel. But since he is already married, as she later discovers, the union is void. She blackmails her old employer, Mrs Armadale
née
Blanchard, and is in turn robbed and abandoned by the faithless Manuel. At this low point in her life she attempts a very public suicide, and in so doing sets off the series of deaths (but not her own) that lead to blue-eyed Allan Armadale inheriting Thorpe-Ambrose. The stage is set for the events of May to December 1851 which make up the body of the narrative.

However carefully we read
Armadale
, there remain tantalizing gaps in Lydia's history. Who
were
her parents? Did Collins keep this in reserve, and never get round to filling in the missing information? When – veiled, and with her distinctive red Paisley shawl flying – she threw herself from the first-class deck of the Thames steamer did she know that Arthur Blanchard, heir to Thorpe-Ambrose, was on board the vessel? Was it an attempt to lure him into a marriage trap, as she had other men? Or was she genuinely bent on self-destruction? At many points in the novel Lydia is baffling to the reader. She is also baffling to herself. Why, she wonders (as the reader might well wonder), does she keep a journal – something that may send her to the gallows:

Why do I keep a diary at all? Why did the clever thief the other day (in the English newspapers) keep the very thing to convict him, in the shape of a record of every thing he stole? Why are we not perfectly reasonable in all that we do? Why am I not always on my guard and never inconsistent with myself, like a wicked character in a novel? Why? why? why? (p. 559)

Lydia is similarly perplexed by her uncontrollable love for her victim,
Midwinter. At other points in the narrative, she actually fears herself and wishes that – to spare the human race – she might be locked up. Why, she wonders, does she so hate Allan? Or does she hate him? Is it love gone wrong that makes her so vindictive? Do women love the men they poison? The ‘Why? why? why?' is never satisfactorily answered.

Lydia's inability to fathom her own motives, her irrationalism and her fatal inability to control her temper (the typical weakness of redheads) leads her to commit a string of blunders – leaving her employment at Thorpe-Ambrose in a tantrum of rage against Neelie, for instance. Banished from the household, she has no hope of entrapping Allan in marriage. Steeping herself in laudanum is another inexplicable stupidity in one so calculating. Her strange refusal to shed her name for the purpose of disguise, which leads her into the absurdity of pretending to be ‘the other Miss Gwilt', is bizarre. One of the most interesting and experimental sections of the novel is that in which Collins offers us a double perspective on the same crucial days in late July 1851: in the form of Lydia's confidential (but actually very guarded) letters to Mother Jezebel, and in the form of her more candid journal entries for the same days. But even with this binocular insight, Lydia remains invincibly mysterious.

The reviewers of
Armadale
hated Lydia Gwilt, and she was probably one of the reasons for the novel selling badly when it came out in volume form in May 1866. Mrs Oliphant (an inveterate foe to sensation fiction) had complained that in Gollins's previous novel,
No Name
, the criminal heroine had been allowed to live. Collins would not make that mistake in
Armadale
(and his epigraph on the title page made it clear that Miss Gwilt was not to profit from her wrongdoing). None the less, his critics were unmollified. The
Spectator
foamed with rage at a novel which ‘gives us for its heroine a woman fouler than the refuse of the streets'. Collins had overstepped the limits of decency and ‘revolted every human sentiment'. This reviewer and others were particularly indignant that Lydia remained beautiful to the end – despite her evil ways. She would have been acceptable if, like Isabel Vane in
East Lynne
, she had been providentially disfigured (perhaps a rotted nose, or loss of teeth, or premature whitening of her red hair would have sufficed). In the
Athenaeum
, Collins's erstwhile friend Henry Chorley was, if anything, even more apoplectic in his denunciation of Lydia: ‘one of the most hardened female villains whose devices and desires have ever blackened literature'. Wilkie, one suspects, was unrepentant (although he would doubtless have liked good sales). And most modern
readers will have a more generous and thoughtful reaction to the fascinating Miss Gwilt than the affronted moral guardians of 1866.

If Lydia is the most interesting creation in the novel, Ozias Midwinter runs her close. He seems to have been initially conceived as a deliberate contradiction to elements in Thackeray's novel
Philip
, which ran in the
Cornhill Magazine
a couple of years before (1861–2).
Philip
sets up a tendentious opposition between the manly, Anglo-Saxon, blue-eyed, hearty hero of the title and his odious rival, the mulatto, Captain Grenville Woolcomb. Woolcomb (who is West Indian by origin) is sexually lascivious, rich, degenerate and corrupt. He steals the hero's intended wife and (black devil that he is) abuses her unspeakably. In the last chapters he stands for Parliament, under the slogan ‘Am I not a man and a brudder?' The opposition between Philip and Woolcomb is virulently racist and politically weighted in the context of the civil war raging in America in the early 1860s. Thackeray's position on black Americans (whom he had seen in his 1852 and 1858 trips) was unequivocal and obnoxious: ‘Sambo is not my man and brother', he frankly declared. His allusion, of course, is to the abolitionists' slogan, ‘Am I not a man and a brother?' In his political sympathies Thackeray was strongly and virulently pro-South and anti-abolitionist. His prejudices were prominently expressed in the
Cornhill Magazine
, which he edited until March 1862 and to which he was the star contributor until his death at Christmas 1863.
¹³

Ozias Midwinter has a Creole mother (whose first question, on learning that her husband loved someone before herself, is ‘Was she a fair woman – or dark, like me?' (p. 31)). By setting the prelude in 1832 (the year before the emancipation of West Indian blacks), Collins ostentatiously stressed the point that Ozias is a child of slavery. On a number of occasions, the reader is reminded of Ozias's ‘negro' appearance – particularly when he is aroused and the blood rushes to his face. His ‘tawny' complexion is also the mark of Cain – Ozias is the son of a murderer and if he has racially tainted blood on one side of his parentage he has criminally tainted blood on the other. There is a telling episode, shortly after Ozias's first appearance in the novel, in which the Reverend Brock looks at him and is consumed with pathological disgust:

His shaven head, tied up roughly in an old yellow silk handkerchief; his tawny, haggard cheeks; his bright brown eyes, preter-naturally large and wild; his tangled black beard; his long supple, sinewy fingers, wasted by suffering, till they looked like claws…
If this man was honest, his eyes showed a singular perversity in looking away and denying it. Possibly they were affected in some degree by a nervous restlessness in his organization, which appeared to pervade every fibre in his lean, lithe body. The rector's healthy Anglo-Saxon flesh crept responsively at every casual movement of the usher's supple brown fingers, and every passing distortion of the usher's haggard yellow face. (p. 64)

Brock's first inclination is to cast out this unclean, degenerate, mixed-breed thing. But eventually he comes to love, admire and trust Ozias. When the clergyman dies, it is to the mulatto's care that he leaves Allan. On his part, the fair-haired, blue-eyed Allan comes to see Ozias as his brother. There is a telling moment when the Creole and the Anglo-Saxon clasp hands on board the ominous ship
(La Grace de Dieu)
where the primal murder of one father by another took place, eighteen years before. ‘The cruel time is coming,' Ozias warns Allan, ‘when we shall rue the day we ever met. Shake hands, brother, on the edge of the precipice – shake hands while we are brothers still' (p. 126).

It is inconceivable that a novelist as aware as Collins would not know how this fraternal embrace of black and white as equals would be read in Civil War America – more particularly in the North (where
Armadale
was serialized in
Harper's New Monthly Magazine
).
¹⁴
In fact, the novel went down very well in the States – better than in Britain, where it was something of a sales flop. In dramatic versions of
Armadale
, Collins removed the negroid characteristics of Ozias, evidently feeling that the racial plot was not to English tastes.

There are interesting things happening on the edges
of Armadale
. Not least, Collins's own vexed private life was in turmoil as he assembled the novel's intricate plot. As one of his latest biographers (William M. Clarke) assumes, it was in 1864 that Collins complicated his irregular sexual affairs to an extraordinary degree. For the better part of a decade he had been living with Caroline Graves (the original woman in white). In 1864 she was just under thirty-five years old, and a widow. Caroline was a woman of the world who may, as a common-law wife, have lived for some periods ‘bigamously' with Collins (her marital status has never been entirely clear). They moved house in 1864 and, after his bohemian fashion, Wilkie played the part of paterfamilias (Caroline had a young daughter, Harriet, by her first husband). Caroline was a sophisticated, cultivated woman who could evidently discourse to Wilkie on his work and hold her own socially with his literary friends.

Wilkie Collins was not, however, a man to be satisfied with one woman. In 1864 (as Clarke reckons) he met the simple Norfolk girl Martha Rudd (the meeting may be recalled in the Hurle Mere passage
of Armadale
, Book the Third, Chapters
VIII
–IX). Martha was just nineteen and very unworldly. Eventually (probably in 1867, a year after completing
Armadale)
, Wilkie persuaded her to come to London. In a second household where he reigned as another paterfamilias, she bore him three children. He never made her an honest woman. As Clarke records, Collins contrived to live over the years with both women (apart from a brief and mysterious period during which Caroline was married to a third party). He was buried with Caroline – but Martha evidently had the greater claim to be his common-law wife.

For all the ingenious investigations and speculations of recent biography, we know tantalizingly little about Collins's private life. As Clarke observes: ‘How he kept in touch with Martha [after 1864] and why he eventually persuaded her to move to London – and when – is shrouded in mystery. But that she was in the background during Caroline's continued efforts to persuade Wilkie to marry her is hardly in doubt. One can only marvel at his stamina in keeping his two women reasonably content'.
¹⁵
Some of the strains on his stamina can be deduced from
Armadale
. Much of Lydia's journal, in the central section of the narrative, is obsessed by her fury, as a 35-year-old woman of the world, against the little Norfolk chit, sixteen-year-old Neelie Milroy. Allan Armadale – the great male sexual prize in the novel – is attracted to both women, and at different times proposes marriage to both. Neelie, however, wins him. We have no records whatsoever of Collins's domestic life, what recriminations were exchanged in the sexual triangle set up after 1864. But it is hard not to think that Lydia's woman-of-the-world sarcasm at Neelie's schoolgirlish sexual immaturity and provincial gaucheness do not echo what was said (or what Collins feared would be said) by an enraged Caroline in their parlour at Melcombe Place. ‘Am I handsome enough, to-day?' Lydia asks her journal. ‘Well, yes', she answers, ‘handsome enough to be a match for a little dowdy, awkward, freckled creature, who ought to be perched on a form at school, and strapped to a back-board to straighten her crooked shoulders' (p. 428).

For all the author's high hopes,
Armadale
never achieved very great things. Perhaps Collins tried too hard. But the novel was also damaged by the delay in publishing it. During the interval (1863–4) a massive anti-sensation-novel campaign was whipped up. Leading the charge was the
Quarterly Review
, with a broadside denunciation (taking in no less than twenty-four novels) in April 1863, alleging that the country
was being debauched by the avalanche of trashy sensation novels loosed on it.
¹⁶
In exactly the same period, Dickens's
All the Year Round
lost readers in droves with Charles Reade's
Hard Cash
(3,000 as the author recorded) – a novel inevitably partnered in the public mind with
Armadale
. Dickens was impelled to publish a statement with Reade's last number, dissociating his journal from
Hard Cash
.
¹⁷
Circulation figures recorded by Smith show that, after a lift in November 1864,
Armadale
lost during its serial run about the same number of subscribers to the
Cornhill Magazine
as
Hard Cash
had lost Dickens.