Armadale (4 page)

George Smith, who was not a courageous publisher (even if he had published
Jane Eyre
fifteen years before), capitulated by serializing alongside
Armadale
two ‘domestic' novels – Trollope's
The Claverings
and Mrs Gaskell's idyll
Wives and Daughters
. In Latin, as Reade pointed out, domestic meant ‘tame', and these were excessively innocuous works that studiously avoided what Reade (in
Hard Cash)
called ‘the dark places of England'. Collins himself was affected by the furore, and despite brave talk in his preface about ‘Clap trap morality' took care to emphasize the ‘Christian morality' of the book. In the body of the narrative, Collins ceded the moral centre to the excruciatingly preachy Decimus Brock. The novel ends with an invocation of the saintly Brock by Ozias as he addresses Allan in the happy-ever-after of his marriage to Neelie: – ‘God is all-merciful, God is all-Wise. In those words, your dear old friend once wrote to me. In that faith, I can look back without murmuring at the years that are past, and can look on without doubting to the years that are to come' (p.677). This priggishness (out of character in both Ozias and Wilkie) was a sop to the moral critics yapping at Collins's heels. They were not mollified:
Armadale
was mauled by the critics. Smith did not use Collins again (nor did he ever earn as much for any one novel again). In his next major piece of writing Collins avoided moral provocation and perfected the machinery of the detective novel, with his brilliant (and morally inoffensive) whodunnit,
The Moonstone
.

The main flaw in
Armadale
for many readers is its obtrusive ‘theme'. George Eliot had made ‘determinism' a fashionable topic for novelists in
Adam Bede
(1859), where in Chapter Sixteen Arthur Donnithorne and the Reverend Irwine debate whether a man has freedom of choice in his moral decisions, or whether he is nothing more than an automaton. This concern was, in part, a function of the growing sophistication of fiction as an explanatory tool for human behaviour. Novelists like Eliot and Collins could explain so much of motive and the influence of circumstance that their characters no longer seemed free agents – at least to the reader privileged with the narrator's god-like insight.

There are, however, deeper and less clear-cut aspects to the fatality theme in
Armadale
. The novel communicates a primitive sense of doom which one is tempted to connect with the sabbatarianism and religious austerity of Wilkie's father – a dominant influence on his sons' lives. William Collins exuded an atmosphere of imminent damnation for sinners. He was, for instance, ‘convinced that both the outbreak of cholera and the Reform Bill riots of 1831 were God's judgement'.
¹⁸
Kenneth Robinson plausibly suggests that Wilkie's character (and lifelong bohemianism) was largely formed in opposition to his father's religiosity. One suspects he may have been haunted by William Collins's posthumous condemnation. Wilkie embarked on an elaborate depiction of Ozias's Calvinist stepfather in the character of Alexander Neal which he subsequently deleted (see Book the First, Chapter
II
, note
5
). It might have made the novel's moral design clearer had he kept it in.

When we encounter Ozias Midwinter for the first time he carries with him in his knapsack two volumes: the plays of Sophocles and Goethe's
Faust
. They are emblems of the free will–determinism conundrum that obsesses him. At one pole is Oedipus Rex, the man who cannot escape his fate, run as he will. At the other pole is Faust, who damns himself by clear-headed choice. Both tragic heroes are doomed, but the machineries by which they meet their doom are opposite. The ‘Dream' (which Collins altered significantly in the manuscript) overlays the narrative as prophecy, its fulfilment as inevitable as the Delphic oracle's. But Ozias is not entirely convinced. His uncertainty as to whether his destiny is to be that of Oedipus or Faust, automaton or free agent, feeds into what is the most striking scene in the novel, when Major Milroy's elaborate clock goes wrong. As the hour chimes and the little figures crash into each other (the Major is meanwhile buried in the entrails of his machine) Ozias is seized with uncontrollable hysteria at the ‘catastrophe of the puppets':

His paroxysms of laughter followed each other with such convulsive violence, that Miss Milroy started back from him in alarm, and even the patient major turned on him with a look which said plainly, Leave the room! Allan, wisely impulsive for once in his life, seized Midwinter by the arm, and dragged him out by main force into the garden, and thence into the park beyond.

‘Good heavens! What has come to you!' he exclaimed, shrinking back from the tortured face before him, as he stopped and looked close at it for the first time.

For the moment, Midwinter was incapable of answering. The
hysterical paroxysm was passing from one extreme to the other. He leaned against a tree, sobbing and gasping for breath, and stretched out his hand in mute entreaty to Allan to give him time. (p.
225
)

It is a surreal episode, more so given Ozias's heroic self-control later in the novel. The reason that he reacts as he does at the débâcle of the Major's horological automaton can, however, be guessed at. It is a spontaneous and uncontrollable surge of relief that clockwork can actually go wrong. It is a hopeful catastrophe. Life's outcome is not necessarily ordained.

As T. S. Eliot (an unlikely admirer of the novel) said,
Armadale
has the great virtue of melodrama – that of ‘delaying longer than one could conceive it possible to delay, a conclusion which is inevitable and wholly foreordained'.
¹⁹
In general this is true (we know that Allan must live happily with Neelie and that Lydia must come to an appropriately bad end). But
Armadale
none the less retains its ability to surprise us with regard to Ozias. To the very last page, Collins keeps us in suspense as to whether the narrative will climax with the deterministic vision of the dream (the fatal woman killing Ozias) or whether, like the Major's clock, the machine will break down, allowing Ozias to live. The manuscript suggests that Collins himself – for all his talk of foreplanning – was not entirely certain in his mind as to what Ozias Midwinter's end should be. It is one of the many features that make
Armadale
one of the most gripping of Victorian page-turners.

1
. Kenneth Robinson,
Wilkie Collins
(London, 1951), p.
149
. Following references are shortened to ‘Robinson'.

2
. Catherine Peters,
The King of Inventors: Wilkie Collins
(London, 1991), p.
227
. Following references are shortened to ‘Peters'.

3
. Nuel Davis,
The Life of Wilkie Collins
(Illinois, 1956), p.
216
. Following references are shortened to ‘Davis'.

4
. D. A. Miller,
The Novel and the Police
(Berkeley: California, 1988), p.
146
. Miller's influential essay on Collins draws on a close reading of the texts and Foucauldian theory.

5
. See Richard Altick,
The Presence of the Present
(Columbus: Ohio, 1991), pp.
540
–45, for a description of Madame Rachel's notoriety in the 1860s. Following references are shortened to ‘Altick'. For Collins and the newspapers see
Christopher Kent, ‘Probability, Reality, and Sensation',
Dickens Studies Annual
, 20, 1991.

6
. It will be noted, however, that Collins set
Armadale
in 1851. His motives for this slight antedating were probably to protect himself against accusations of libel.

7
. The patriarchal role of Dickens in the school is argued in W. C. Phillips,
Dickens, Reade, and Collins: Sensation Novelists
(London, 1919).

8
. Peters, p.
236
.

9
. Ibid., p.
275
.

10
.
Annual Register
, 1862, p.
453
.

11
. Mary S. Hartman,
Victorian Murderesses
(New York, 1977). Following references are shortened to ‘Hartman'.

12
. As Altick points out (pp.
525
–6), Collins was evidently very influenced by the case of the poisoner Madeleine Smith. See also Hartman, Chapter Two.

13
. For Thackeray's prejudices on race see Deborah Thomas,
Thackeray and Slavery
(Athens: Ohio, 1993).

14
. Susan Balée touches on this subject in ‘English Critics, American Crisis, and the Sensation Novel',
Nineteenth Century Contexts
, Spring 1993.

15
. William M. Clarke,
The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins
(London, 1988), p.
112
.

16
. The article in the
Quarterly
was by the Reverend H. C. Mansel, April 1863, 481–514. For other attacks of the period, see Norman Page,
Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage
(London, 1974). Collins responds to these attacks in
Armadale
(see Book the Last, Chapter
III
, note
1
).

17
. See John Sutherland, ‘Dickens, Reade, and
Hard Cash,' The Dickensian
, Spring 1985.

18
. Robinson, p.
16
.

19
. See T. S. Eliot's long essay on Collins (1927), reprinted in
Selected Essays 1917–1932
(London, 1933).

For many years the standard critical lives of Collins were Kenneth Robinson's
Wilkie Collins
(London, 1951, reprinted 1974) and Nuel P. Davis's
The Life of Wilkie Collins
(Urbana: Illinois, 1956). These have been supplanted by two meticulously researched recent biographies: William M. Clarke,
The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins
(London, 1988) and Catherine Peters,
The King of Inventors: Wilkie Collins
(London, 1991). Clarke (a descendant of Collins by marriage) has dug up more than anyone thought possible about Wilkie's ‘secret lives' (particularly his irregular sexual arrangements). Working independently, Peters has brought to light much new material on Collins's early home life and family background. Her book is particularly relevant to
Armadale
in its illuminating discussion of Collins's obsession with doubles,
doppelgängers
, stolen and recovered identity.

The traditional (and still informative) critical study of sensation fiction is Walter C. Phillips,
Dickens, Reade, and Collins: Sensation Novelists
(New York, 1919). Good summaries of the accumulated scholarship on Collins will be found in W. H. Marshall,
Wilkie Collins
(Boston, 1970) and Ira B. Nadel and William E. Fredeman, eds.,
Victorian Novelists after 1885, Dictionary of Literary Biography
18 (Detroit, 1983). A good selection of contemporary and later-nineteenth-century commentary is given in Norman Page,
Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage
(London 1974).

Coming closer to the present, the 1980s and 1990s have seen an explosion of interest in this school of fiction. Most useful to the editor of Collins are works which fill in the socio-historical-literary background. R. D. Altick's three books –
The Presence of the Present
(Columbus: Ohio, 1991);
Deadly Encounters
(Philadelphia, 1986); and
Victorian Studies in Scarlet
(New York, 1970) – supply an invaluable context to
Armadale
. So too does Mary S. Hartman's
Victorian Murderesses
(New York, 1976). The complex medical background to
Armadale
is illuminatingly dealt with by Jenny Bourne Taylor,
In the Secret Theatre of Home
(London, 1988). Nicholas Ranee,
Wilkie Collins and Other Sensation Novelists
(London, 1991), is instructive on the political subtexts to the novel as is Philip O'Neill's
Wilkie Collins: Women, Property, Propriety
(London, 1988). As its title suggests, Winfred Hughes's
The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation
Novels of the 1860s
(Princeton, 1980) directs its attention at the literary context; so does Sue Lonoff's informative
Wilkie Collins and his Victorian Readers
(New York, 1982).

Interviewers at the MLA conventions in the early 1990s noted a large number of Ph.D. theses in progress or just completed on Wilkie Collins. The inspiration for this fashionability is largely attributable to D. A. Miller's influential, Foucauldian
The Novel and the Police
(Berkeley: California, 1988) and Peter Brooks's
Reading for the Plot
(New York, 1985), both of which reappraise Collins in the light of ‘theory'. A good example of the new wave of Collins criticism is Jonathan Loesberg, ‘The Ideology of Narrative Form in Sensation Fiction',
Representations
, 13, Winter 1986. Feminist critics have also begun to examine the genre thoughtfully. See, for example, Elaine Showalter, ‘Desperate Remedies: Sensation Novels of the 1860s',
Victorian Newsletter
, 49, September 1976. This line has been followed up by Tamar Heller,
Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic
(New Haven: Connecticut, 1992).

On another front, it is noticeable that many of Collins's novels have been returned to print in the 1980s. There are two other editions of
Armadale
currently available: Catherine Peters's ‘World's Classics' edition (Oxford, 1989) which has extremely valuable annotation and reproduces the 1869, one-volume text; and the ‘Dover' edition (New York, 1977) which reproduces the
Cornhill
text – it has no annotation but offers the full range of George Thomas's illustrations.

The standard bibliographies of Collins's works are: M. C. Parrish and Elizabeth V. Miller,
Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade: First Editions described with Notes
(New York, 1940, reprinted 1968) and Kirk H. Beetz,
Wilkie Collins: An Annotated Bibliography
(Methuen: New Jersey, 1978).