Armadale (5 page)

The publisher George Smith offered Collins the large sum of £5,000 for the rights to a new novel
(Armadale
as it was to be) in July 1861. The letter in which he communicated the news to his mother records Wilkie's glee: ‘Nobody but Dickens has made as much… if I live and keep my brains in good working order, I shall have got to the top of the tree, after all, before forty'.
¹
As was common with writers at the top of the tree, no subject was specified at this stage. Wilkie Collins's name was sufficient. Smith's bid was evidently for the serial and first volume rights (the contract has not, apparently, survived). The proposed work was to be serialized in twenty monthly numbers of Smith's
Cornhill Magazine
, which had been launched in January 1860 with great fanfare. Smith was legendarily open-handed in his payments, and had recruited Thackeray as editor (he retired in March 1862) and all the great novelists of the day as contributors (less Dickens, who had started his own magazine,
All the Year Round
, in 1859). Collins's payment was more than the £3,500 Trollope received for
The Small House at Allington
, the novel which immediately preceded
Armadale
, but considerably less than the £10,000 George Eliot was offered for
Romola
(which none the less proved to be a failure as a serial for
Cornhill
, (January 1862–August 1863).

In July 1861 the expectation was that Collins would provide his new story for Smith to begin serialization in January 1863 or soon after. He had first to provide a new full-length work for Dickens (
No Name
). This, in fact, took somewhat longer than expected, running in
All the Year Round
from March 1862 to January 1863.
Armadale
was put back – initially a few weeks (Collins was quite capable of composing his story just ahead of the printer, although he liked to have time in hand at the beginning of the serial run). But Collins's health deteriorated badly in early 1863 and he was advised by his physicians to give up writing altogether until he recovered. On 19 March 1863 he recorded that the
Cornhill
novel was ‘put off again… [Smith, Elder] have behaved most kindly and considerately about it'.
²
On 18 June 1863 he wrote with more precise dates: ‘I have had a most kind and friendly letter from Mr Smith… allowing me until the 1st. of December next [1863] to send in
the 1st. number of the new story for Cornhill.'
³
He was in Strasbourg at the time and mysteriously declared ‘I have
Got an Ideal'
(Major Milroy's clock may have been a small part of the idea.) He seems to have clarified this idea in Wildbad, where he went to take the curative waters in summer 1863. In July – August he visited the Isle of Man and in November he recorded: ‘I am getting ideas as thick as blackberries'. By December he was convinced he had invented (but not yet started to write) ‘an extraordinary story – something entirely different from anything I have done yet'. By January 1864 he was ‘constructing my story' and again insisting that it was something ‘entirely new'.
⁴

Collins's delay must have been vexatious for Smith. Dickens began serializing Charles Reade's
Hard Cash
in
All the Year Round
in March 1863. Reade's novel would conclude in December 1863. Reade – who was another leading sensationalist – would thus overshadow Collins. It was a further vexation that Reade's novel (which features abominations perpetrated on patients in private lunatic asylums) went down very badly with the reading public, and lost Dickens 3,000 subscribers (as Reade calculated). Its failure cast a blight over Collins's forthcoming work (which also climaxes in a private lunatic asylum). While he was waiting for
Armadale
, Smith filled the gap in
Cornhill Magazine's
, pages with a hastily devised serial by his new editor, Frederick Greenwood,
Margaret Denzil's History
(November 1863–October 1864).

During the early part of 1864 Collins travelled on the Continent to recuperate his health. He thought out the plot for his new story in Rome, in February 1864. By March, when he returned to England, ‘most of the important preliminary work was done'. After eighteen months' ‘literary abstinence' he now felt well enough to write. On 20 April 1864 he told his mother: ‘After much pondering over the construction of the story I positively sat down with a clean sheet before me, and began to write it on Monday last. So far my progress is slow and hesitating enough – not for want of knowing what I have to do, but for want of practice.' He instructed Smith that the new (and still unnamed) novel could be announced to start its serial run ‘almost two years after the date first proposed'.
⁵
The first sections were delivered to the printers (who approved of the story) in June 1864. Smith was very pleased. Dickens was sent an early set of proofs of the first number, and gave his approval.
⁶
On 24 September 1864, however, just one week before publication of the opening number, Collins wrote in near panic to his friend Edward Pigott to report that ‘The gout has affected my brain. My mind is perfectly clear – but the nervous misery I suffer is indescribable. Beard [his doctor] cannot yet decide when I can work again, or
what is to be done about the Gornhill. With Smith away, and the first number made up on the first of the month, the disaster is complete'.
⁷
Evidently Collins somehow rode out this disaster. Keeping a month or so ahead of deadlines, and despite recurrent poor health, he finished writing on 12 April 1866, some six weeks before the last instalment was published. ‘Miss Gwilt's death quite upset me', he recorded.
⁸

The serial divisions of the novel in
Cornhill
are as follows: 1 (November 1864) Book the First, Chapter One; 2 (December 1864) Book the Second, Chapter One; 3 (January 1865) Book the Second, Chapter Two; 4 (February 1865) Book the Second, Chapter Four; 5 (March 1865) Book the Third, Chapter One; 6 (April 1865) Book the Third, Chapter Three; 7 (May 1865) Book the Third, Chapter Five; 8 (June 1865) Book the Third, Chapter Eight; 9 (July 1865) Book the Third, Chapter Ten; 10 (August 1865) Book the Third, Chapter Thirteen; 11 (September 1865) Book the Fourth, Chapter Three; 12 (October 1865) Book the Fourth, Chapter Five (up to this point in the run,
Armadale
was the first item in the magazine; after this point it was relegated to an inferior position); 13 (November 1865) Book the Fourth, Chapter Eight; 14 (December 1865) Book the Fourth, Chapter Ten; 15 (January 1866) Book the Fourth, Chapter Eleven; 16 (February 1866) Book the Fourth, Chapter Fourteen; 17 (March 1866) Book the Fourth, Chapter Fifteen; 18 (April 1866) Book the Fifth, Chapter One; 19 (May 1866) Book the Fifth, Chapter Three continued; 20 (June 1866) Book the Last, Chapter Three.

Collins had originally wanted
Armadale
to be illustrated by his close friend John Millais. But the artist was too busy (or perhaps too expensive), and Smith recruited the inferior George Thomas, who supplied one full-page and one vignette woodcut (to accompany the first paragraph) for each of the twenty numbers. It seems that Thomas had early proofs to work from, although some mismatches occurred between text and illustration (see Book the Second, Chapter I, note 7).

The
Cornhill
had been on a circulation slide ever since its launch (when it sold just under 110,000 copies). As
Armadale
started its run, monthly sales stood at around 41,000. Collins added a couple of thousand new subscribers, but by the end of
Armadale's
serialization the magazine's sales had sunk to a new low of 36,000–38,000.
⁹

Armadale
was serialized a month later in America in
Harper's New Monthly Magazine
, from December 1864 to July 1866. It is likely that the American publisher was sent early proof sheets and Thomas's woodblocks, to forestall piracy. (Since not all
Harper's
instalments are illustrated, the timetable may occasionally have proved too tight.) The
novel proved popular in America, and apparently revived the magazine's circulation, which had been badly hit by the Civil War. According to Nuel Davis,
Harper's
paid Collins between £500 and £750 for the serial and volume rights.

Smith, Elder released a ‘Library Edition' of
Armadale
in two volumes in the second half of May 1866 (the break came between the ninth and tenth numbers). Essentially, it comprised the text and Thomas's twenty illustrations as they had appeared in
Comhill Magazine
, with the addition of a title page designed by Collins. It contained a moralistic epigraph: ‘“Even my wickedness has one merit – it has not prospered. I have never been a happy woman.” Miss Gwilt.' The two-volume edition also had a dedication to John Forster, an apologetic foreword by Collins and the ‘Appendix' on the mysteriously prophetic events on the ship
Armadale
. There was some superficial reordering of materials: ‘Book the First' became ‘Prologue', with the following ‘books' appropriately renumbered. Otherwise, the text was substantially as serialized, with a few errors and rough edges tidied up. The two-volume
Armadale
cost 26 shillings. Early reviews of the novel were extraordinarily and almost universally savage, and the edition did not, apparently, sell well (although evidently the librarian Mudie was obliged to order more than he initially intended).
¹⁰
The bibliophile Michael Sadleir notes that very few copies of the two-volume edition survive.
¹¹
The surviving records of Smith, Elder record a print run of 1,286, of which 1,118 sold. Mudie took 500 at 15s.
6d
. a copy. The relationship between Collins and George Smith did not prosper (Smith did not commission the novelist again, and may have regretted his expensive purchase of
Armadale). A
one-volume edition of the novel, priced six shillings, was brought out by Smith in November 1866, and by October 1869 this was being sold at the reduced cost of five shillings. It was, presumably, overprinted. In September 1871, Smith, Elder brought out a budget-priced two-shilling edition of
Armadale
. In the long run, George Smith (who evidently owned the copyright outright) probably got his money back. In America,
Harper's
brought out a one-volume edition in late 1866 at $1.60, with thirty-six illustrations by Thomas. Tauchnitz brought out a three-volume edition for the English-speaking European market in the same period.

This edition follows the first published version of
Armadale
, as published in the
Cornhill Magazine
, with the addition of the dedication, Collins's foreword, and the ‘Appendix'.

1
. Peters, p.
236
.

2
. Robinson, p.
179
.

3
. Sue Lonoff,
Wilkie Collins and his Victorian Readers
(New York, 1982), p.
33
. Subsequent references are shortened to ‘Lonoff'.

4
. Lonoff, pp.
33
–4.

5
. Robinson, p.
187
.

6
. Lonoff, p.
34
.

7
. Peters, p.
268
.

8
. Robinson, p.
190
.

9
. See John Sutherland,
‘ComhilFs
Sales and Payments',
Victorian Periodicals Review
, 19, 3 (Fall 1986), p.
107
.

10
. Lonoff, p.
37
.

11
. Michael Sadleir in
XIX Century Fiction
(Cambridge, 1951), I, 376–7.

The holograph manuscript of
Armadale
, comprising 577 leaves, is held at Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
¹
I am indebted to the library for permission to examine and quote from the manuscript. Like his mentor Dickens, Collins composed hyperactively and his pages are black with overscorings, marginal additions and interlineations. Typically he wrote in short spells with much cutting and pasting. Many of Collins's changes cannot be recovered from his obliterations. Those that can fall into four main categories. Most were simple improvements of the words on the page – sometimes changed as he went along, sometimes edited as he looked back over what he had written. Although Collins had the main lines of the plot clear in his mind from the first, he allowed himself considerable freedom with subplots, minor characters and incidental scenes: some of these changes of conception are recoverable and I annotate them in the explanatory notes. Like other sensation novelists, Collins was most attentive to suspense and effect, and the ends of instalments often show him sharpening up his ‘curtain' lines on the ‘Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, make 'em wait' principle. Throughout his manuscript (which is also the copy text and contains the marks of Smith, Elder's printers) Collins is meticulous in instructions to the compositor on such things as white lines, black lines, new paragraphs, italics, small caps., etc.

Armadale
was the first narrative Collins had written in monthly instalments, and he encountered a few problems with length, particularly towards the end of his composition. In the seventeenth and eighteenth numbers he miscalculated and was obliged to revise to fit the
Cornhill Magazine's
length requirement. In a number of places he seems to have had to cut small amounts of material away in proof. The proofs themselves do not seem to have survived, but it is clear that Collins revised them carefully, improving local details with great skill and economy. Years of work for newspapers had trained him as a fluent and highly professional writer. The
Armadale
manuscript is an informative and still relatively unexplored document, and it is to be hoped that some enterprising doctoral student will undertake a thorough study of it.

Writing to a correspondent in October 1865, Collins declared: ‘In the story I am now writing
(Armadale)
, the last number is to be published several months hence [June 1866] – and the whole close of the story is still unwritten. But I know at this moment who is to live and who is to die – and I see the main events which are to lead to the end as plainly as I see the pen now in my hand… the characters themselves were all marshalled in their places, before a line
of Armadale
was written. And I knew the end two years ago in Rome [February 1864], when I was recovering from a long illness, and was putting the story together'.
²
In his ‘Appendix' to the novel, Collins refers more directly to a ‘notebook' – presumably used in Rome – in which he forecast the plot (including the sanatorium murder) before embarking on the actual writing of the novel. This notebook seems not to have survived and it is possible that Collins slightly exaggerates the degree of preconception it contained. (There is, for instance, some reason for suspecting that the ‘carbonic gas' episode was suggested at a later date by the prophetic suffocations on board the ship
Armadale
in November 1865.)

The Huntington Library also holds the manuscript version of Collins's first (1866) stage adaptation of
Armadale
,
³
and the unpublished – but printed and authorially corrected – second (1875–7) stage version,
Miss Guiilt
. Catherine Peters notes that the Parrish Collection at Princeton holds part of the French stage play which Collins devised with his collaborator François Regniér.