SOURCE: “Wilkie Collins in the 1860s: The Sensation Novel and Self-Help,” in Nineteenth-Century Suspense: From Poe to Conan Doyle, edited by Clive Bloom, Brian Docherty, Jane Gibb, and Keith Shand, Macmillan Press, 1988, pp. 46-63.

Recent manifestations of critical interest in Collins have not tended to impugn his traditional status as a minor novelist, to be mentioned in the same breath as Reade. Feminist criticism has played off a male and reactionary Collins against enlightened female sensation novelists. Elaine Showalter pronounces the novels of Collins in the 1860s to be ‘relatively conventional in terms of their social and sexual attitudes.’¹ A misreading is first adduced in evidence. ‘The first sentence of The Woman in White announced Collins' endorsement of Victorian sex roles: “This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve.”² The first sentence, however, is Walter Hartright's as editor of the various narratives, including his own, and announces Hartright's endorsement of Victorian sex roles, but not that of Collins. That Collins was conventional in his sexual attitudes might seem a curious charge to lay against the creator of Marian Halcombe and Lydia Gwilt. Admittedly, the spirited Marian in The Woman in White has on her upper lip down which to Hartright is ‘almost a moustache.’ (p. 58) But no less objectionable to Hartright because no less suggestive of an aura of manliness are the qualities revealed in her expression, qualities which Hartright would find admirable in a man. Hartright is incited to assert what has been affronted, his own and the conventional ideal of femininity:

Her expression—bright, frank and intelligent—appeared, while she was silent, to be altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of gentleness and pliability, without which the beauty of the handsomest woman alive is beauty incomplete.

(pp. 58-9)³

The Italian, Count Fosco, conceives a passion for precisely the attributes which repulse the English drawing-master. Sue Lonoff in her recent book is not intent on exalting female sensation novelists at the expense of Collins, but can still state that ‘Collins had no greater ambition than to be a popular novelist—popular in the double sense of selling widely and of appealing to middle-brow, middle-class readers.’⁴ The undoubted appeal of the novels to middle-brow, middle-class readers, though not exclusively to such readers, did not stop Collins from being master of a suspense in which what for the reader was suspended was faith in the validity of successive aspects of mid-Victorian orthodoxy. I shall be concerned here not with sexual attitudes in the fiction, which have been the focus of much of the new critical interest in Collins, but rather with the fictional project of undermining the traditional bourgeois ethic of self-help.

Serialized from November 1859 to August 1860 in All the Year Round, The Woman in White inaugurated a decade of literary sensationalism. In the 1860s, Collins is a historical novelist preoccupied by the very recent past. All four of the novels published in the 1860s, The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale and The Moonstone, are set in England in the late 1840s and, except for No Name, the early 1850s. At the beginning of his autobiography, The Life and Adventures of George Augustus Sala (1895), Sala, who knew Collins from Household Words days, wrote of the International Exhibition of 1862 that

the display presented two conspicuous departures from the lines laid down in 1851. In that year, no modern weapon of war was to be seen in the palace of glass and iron. In 1862 section after section showed cannon, gun, muskets, rifles, pistols, swords, daggers, and other munitions of warfare. The promoters of the First Exhibition had thought, good souls! that the thousand years of war were over, and that the thousand years of peace were to be inaugurated; but they had awakened from that dulcet dream in 1862. Solferino and Magenta had been fought, and the great American Civil War was impending.

Margaret Oliphant, whose essay ‘Sensation Novels’ appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in May 1862, explained the new literary school in terms of the Zeitgeist: ‘it is natural that art and literature should, in an age which has turned out to be one of events, attempt a kindred depth of effect and shock of incident.’ Like Sala, Oliphant was impressed by the contrast between the mood of the 1860s and the optimism of 1851: ‘We who once did, and made, and declared ourselves masters of all things, have relapsed into the natural size of humanity before the great events which have given a new character to the age.’ Margaret Oliphant was thinking of wars abroad and particularly the American Civil War:

That distant roar has come to form a thrilling accompaniment to the safe life we lead at home. On the other side of the Atlantic, a race blasé and lost in universal ennui has bethought itself of the grandest expedient for procuring a new sensation; and albeit we follow at a humble distance, we too begin to feel the need of a supply of new shocks and wonders.

Oliphant may be suspected of being disingenuous in contrasting thrilling America with safe England. The English fascination with events in America was because the war seemed provoked by something more urgent than ennui. As did the English monied classes generally, The Times supported the South, because it was assumed to be rebelling against democracy. In the 1860s, with the emergence of an organized union movement and vigorous campaigns for reform of the franchise, democracy was a prospect much contemplated in England. The Civil War was a terrible warning which English democrats would do well to heed: it certainly encouraged their opponents to think that the triumph of democracy was not inevitable. Reviewers stressed the contemporaneity of setting of sensation novels as a distinctive feature of the school, and H. L. Mansel, in a marathon review of sensation literature, explained that it was necessary to be near a mine to be blown up by the explosion (Quarterly Review, April 1963). Unlike most of his emulators, however, whose opening chapters are indeed set three or four years back to allow the plot to culminate in the present, Collins was exploring the prehistory of the mood of crisis in the 1860s. The sensational plots of The Woman in White and Armadale culminate in what Lydia Gwilt in Armadale sacrilegiously refers to as ‘the worn-out old year eighteen hundred and fifty one’ (p. 496). Like some recent historians of his age, Collins was denying even the briefest period of mid-Victorian ‘calm.’

Margaret Oliphant commented in her review on the completeness with which the domestic saga had been superseded in public favour by the sensation novel. She complimented Collins on being the first novelist since Scott to keep readers up all night over a novel:

Domestic histories, however virtuous and charming, do not often attain the result—nor, indeed, would an occurrence so irregular and destructive of all domestic proprieties be at all a fitting homage to the virtuous chronicles which have lately furnished the larger part of our light literature.

Oliphant not only shared a London house with Dinah Mulock, author of the bestseller John Halifax, Gentleman, than which no domestic saga is more virtuous, but also during the vogue for the saga herself produced five domestic novels between 1854 and 1860. The Athelings was published in 1857. The heroine, Marian, ‘had heard of bad men and women,’ but nevertheless, ‘safe as in a citadel, dwelt in her father's house, untempted, untroubled, in the most complete and thorough security.’ Meredith wryly reflected on what constituted the appeal to the public of The Athelings. ‘The secret is that the novel is addressed to the British Home, and it seems that we may prose everlastingly to the republic of the fireside. …’ The first domestic saga, Bulwer's The Caxtons, was serialized in 1848 and 1849, and the vogue ran through the 1850s. This was also the period of the acme of popularity of Martin Tupper's versified edification. Originally published in 1838, Proverbial Philosophy in the tenth edition appeared in 1850, and in the thirty-eighth in 1860. There was no thirty-ninth edition until 1865. According to Gladstone, Tupper was ‘slain’ by an article in the National Review in July 1858, calling him ‘a kind of poetical Pecksniff’ with the ‘motto, “my friends, let us be moral”’. The placidity which Oliphant suggests as characterizing domestic sagas would imply them to be the literature of an age of equipoise. Superficial placidity, however, is at odds with the underlying neuroticism of the sagas. E. J. Hobsbawm has remarked how ‘the structure of the bourgeois family flatly contradicted that of bourgeois society. Within it freedom, opportunity, the cash nexus and the pursuit of individual profit did not rule.’⁵ Domestic moralism has its counterpart in the public sphere in Smilesian moralism, and the virtuous practices inculcated in the home are alleged to be a recipe for social success, but the felt inadequacy of the home as a social model keeps breaking through in the sagas. However idyllic the British Home, to emerge from the portals is dangerous, even if only for children to marry and launch another domestic idyll. The principle is grudgingly conceded in John Halifax, Gentleman: ‘it was but right that Nature's holy law should be fulfilled—that children, in their turn, should love, and marry, and be happy, like their parents.’ But the plots of the domestic sagas show that the concession is indeed grudging. There is a prevalence of marrying cousins and thereby not disrupting the original family circle, of daughters who stay at home and never marry, and of children who escape the horns of the dilemma by dying young, like Muriel in John Halifax, Gentleman. Ethel May, in Charlotte Yonge's The Daisy Chain, excels in virtue by cheerfully relinquishing a romance with a cousin, Norman May, who has, however, a ‘brilliant public career,’ which is suspect in itself.

The agoraphobia of John Halifax, Gentleman is the more extraordinary since Halifax is supposed to be exemplary Smilesian man. Having arrived in Norton Bury a penniless urchin, Halifax is employed in Mr Fletcher's tanner's yard. Eventually, he is refusing nominations as a parliamentary candidate and living in Beechwood Hall, though the moral is obscured by his persistently hinting at his gentle birth. This subverts the propaganda mission of the novel, since it is not clear whether his virtues are those which any working man may emulate or whether they derive from the birth which gives the title ‘gentleman,’ traditional rather than Smilesian connotations. Other working men in the novel are presented as a confused mob. When debating Halifax's status, however—‘No, he be a real gentleman’—‘No, he comed here as poor as us’—the mob is precisely as confused as the novel. Mulock's ideological tangle extends to the Fletchers, Phineas's father anticipated Halifax by arriving in Norton Bury ‘without a shilling in his pocket’ and rising to become a large employer. Fletcher, however, is invariably conscious that he ‘originally came of a good stock’: he names his son ‘after one of our forefathers, not unknown—Phineas Fletcher, who wrote the “Purple Island.”’

Mulock palpably lacks confidence in the Smilesian ethic which her novel was famous for celebrating. Like nearly all Smiles's encouraging examples in Self-Help, John Halifax, Gentleman is backdated to the ‘heroic age’ of self-help, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Rather than being imperialistic, however, on behalf of domestic moralism, the novel is neurotically defensive; desiderata are quietness, passivity and staying at home—even dying at home, which is a permanent staying. Whereas Smiles himself included ‘energy’ in his list of cardinal virtues, merely to be adult in John Halifax, Gentleman is to be in crisis. The devotion between John and his wife proceeds from childhood and remains childlike. Their sons, Edwin and Guy, are less fortunate. They simultaneously fall in love with the governess, who has suppressed her French paternity and more specifically that her father was ‘D'Argent the Jacobin—D'Argent the Bonnet Rouge.’ The Jacobinical aura of the governess reflects her status as ardent young woman in the house. She is not romantically culpable and respectably marries Edwin. Guy, however, whom she has not encouraged, moves ‘away into the wide, dangerous world.’

In 1867, reviewing fiction by the second generation of female sensation novelists, Margaret Oliphant remarked that ‘the last wave but one of female novelists was very feminine. Their stories were all family stories, their troubles domestic, their women womanly to the last degree, and their men not much less so.’ The male characters in Bulwer's domestic sagas, it may be remarked, are no less ‘womanish’ than those of Mulock or Yonge. Female sensation novelists, Oliphant complained, had so far erred in the other direction as to mould their ‘women on the model of men, just as the former school moulded its men on the model of women.’ Halifax's youthful yearning for Ursula reduces him to the sickbed, though his suit is so far from unpromising that Ursula promptly consents to marry the invalid. The highest compliment Phineas can pay to the blind Muriel Halifax, who dies as a child, is that ‘she was better than Joy—she was an embodied Peace.’ The eulogy continues, ‘everywhere and always, Muriel was the same. … The soft dark calm in which she lived seemed never broken by the troubles of this our troublous world.’ Muriel's death then prompts Halifax's temporary failure to fulfil his early promise: ‘all the active energies and noble ambitions which especially belong to the prime of manhood, in him had been, not dead perhaps, but sleeping.’ Halifax himself dies at the early age of fifty-four.

As a sensation novelist, Collins was both conscious of and scathing about the preceding fashion in popular fiction. Lydia Gwilt in Armadale abuses ‘nauseous domestic sentimentalists.’ Having engaged to impart her full story to Midwinter before their wedding, she readily invents her ‘little domestic romance.’ ‘There was nothing new in what I told him,’ she admits in her diary: ‘it was the commonplace rubbish of the circulating libraries.’ Charlotte Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe, the cult of which in domestic circles was rivalled only by that of John Halifax, Gentleman, provoked a virulent though belated review by Collins. ‘The characters by whose aid the story is worked out, are simply impossible. They have no types in nature, they never did have types in nature, and they never will have types in nature. …’ Setting his sensation novels in the period in which the domestic sagas flourished, Collins foregrounds the sense of unease which disrupts the pose of complacency of the sagas. The moral of the sagas generally, as it is pronounced by Pisistratus Caxton to be that of Bulwer's My Novel, might be that ‘Conduct is Fate’. The sagas are evidently less than confident about this, since they turn away from the world to which domestic morality is supposed to hold the key. There is a telling compliment to the poetical Leonard Fairfield's wife in My Novel that, ‘if the man's genius made the home a temple, the woman's wisdom gave to the temple the security of a fortress.’ At least in so far as ‘conduct’ has the intended moral connotations, the sensation novels of Collins obdurately dispute the premise that ‘Conduct is Fate.’

What one might call with Margaret Oliphant the first ‘sensation scene’ of The Woman in White (Oliphant borrows the term from the contemporary theatre's ‘sensation drama,’ after which ‘sensation novels’ were named) is that of Hartright's meeting with Anne Catherick on the Finchley Road. Henry Dickens remembered his father's referring to the episode as one of the ‘two scenes in literature which he regarded as being the most dramatic descriptions he could recall,’ the other being Carlyle's account in The French Revolution of the march of the women to Versailles. Remarking about some of the later scenes in The Woman in White that ‘the excitement of the situation has a certain reality which makes the author's task easier,’ Margaret Oliphant shrewdly praised this scene and that of Hartright's dawning consciousness of a resemblance between Anne and Laura Fairlie as having a dramatic interest that was inward and psychological. As much as Carlyle, Collins captures a historical moment. Hartright has praised his late father's social orthodoxy. ‘Thanks to his admirable prudence and self-denial my mother and sister were left, after his death, as independent of the world as they had been during his lifetime.’ Prudence, self-denial, independence: these were the characteristic bourgeois virtues. While praising the characterization of Marian and Count Fosco, admirers of The Woman in White have often complained that Walter Hartright and Laura Fairlie are a standard hero and heroine. The complaint is misconceived: the hero and heroine are conventional; their characterization is not. There is a neat irony to the naming of Collins's hero. Hartright sounds like a character in a morality play, and as such in mid-nineteenth-century society was conventionally perceived. Those with a right heart succeeded, while others failed. Hartright has to adjust to the more complex social reality. By the late 1840s it was becoming increasingly difficult to believe in the validity of the moral ethic which was derived from laissez-faire economics, though the ethic was preached all the more sternly in the face of doubt. Laissez-faire capitalism recommended itself as tending towards social equality: apart from inevitable cases of hardship which were the province of charity and the Poor Laws, poverty was consequent upon the vices of individuals, who were intemperate, imprudent or idle. Further, it was assumed that such poverty and inequality as existed were more than adequately compensated by the chances of rising in an open society. In the mid nineteenth century, inequality was greater than ever before, within as well as between classes, while the chances of rising socially were slight and dwindling. Recommending self-help to the poor, remarks a modern historian of the period, J. F. C. Harrison, was like telling them to ‘lift themselves up by their own bootstraps.’⁶ Collins shows a cynicism beginning to attach to the inculcation of respectable values. In The Woman in White, Mrs. Catherick is praised for her ‘independence of feeling’ (p. 154) in consigning at Sir Percival Glyde's expense her daughter, Anne, to a private asylum. Enunciating the principle that ‘a truly wise Mouse is a truly good Mouse’ (p. 254), Fosco parodies the naïveté of Laura without being himself more worldly wise than other contemporary moralists.

There is a real-life equivalent to the progress towards enlightenment of Hartright in The Woman in White. ‘To Mr Collins,’ wrote Henry James, ‘belongs the credit of having introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors.’ During the years in which The Woman in White is set, Henry Mayhew was introducing readers of the Morning Chronicle to mysteries at their own doors. Douglas Jerrold asked a correspondent, Mrs Cowden Clarke, in 1850,

Do you devour those marvellous revelations of the inferno of misery, of wretchedness, that is smouldering under our feet? We live in a mockery of Christianity that, with the thought of its hypocrisy, makes us sick. We know nothing of this terrible life that is about us—us, in our smug respectability.

Writing contemporaneously with the first flowering of the domestic sagas, Mayhew shares in the creed of the literature. Introducing an account of the London costermongers, he remarked ruefully that ‘the hearth, which is so sacred a symbol to all civilized races as being the spot where the virtues of each succeeding generation are taught and encouraged, has no charms to them.’ Mayhew's report on the costermongers, however, showed that they spurned the hearth with impunity: although they rarely married, social chaos did not result and family and community life continued.⁷ Mayhew came to appreciate that, so far from bad morals causing poverty, poverty caused the bad morals. Burlesquing the language of orthodoxy, he wrote of the casual dock-labourer's improvidence that it was

due, therefore, not to any particular malformation of his moral constitution, but to the precarious character of his calling. His vices are the vices of ordinary human nature. … If the very winds could whistle away the food and firing of wife and children, I doubt much whether, after a week's or a month's privation, we should many of us be able to prevent ourselves from falling into the very same excesses.

In his novel set in the period of which Mayhew was conducting his researches, Collins, too, presented the moral invalids of conventional myth to his respectable audience (‘we’) as ‘they’ really were.

‘This extraordinary apparition’ (p. 47), Hartright calls Anne: she is dressed in white from head to foot. The conventional signification of female purity has in her case subversive implications. Apparitions abounded in Gothic fiction, the preceding literary sensationalism, and Collins often alludes to Gothic props to imply the contrasting realism and preoccupation with the present of his own sensation fiction. To Hartright, however, the unfortunate innocent whose existence orthodoxy denies must necessarily seem ghostly. Hartright simultaneously denies and conveys his reflex suspicion of Anne:

The one thing of which I felt certain was, that the grossest of mankind could not have misconstrued her motive in speaking, even at that suspiciously late hour and in that suspiciously lonely place.

(p. 48)

Though one might assume that Hartright, in his capacity as narrator, is expanding on momentary misgivings, these have engrossed the time that they take to communicate, and the reader in sympathy with Hartright is made a party to keeping Anne in suspense. She has asked merely whether the road leads to London and wonders whether Hartright heard her question. Aware of his persisting mistrust, she protests her innocence:

You don't suspect me of doing anything wrong, do you? I have done nothing wrong. I have met with an accident—I am very unfortunate in being here alone so late. Why do you suspect me of doing wrong?

(pp. 48-9)

Alert to Hartright's compulsion to associate misfortune with guilt, Anne stresses the fortuity of her condition: she has ‘met with an accident;’ she is ‘very unfortunate.’

Anne poses the crucial question: ‘You don't think the worse of me because I have met with an accident?’ At this point, Hartright's humanity would appear to have overridden his conditioning:

The natural impulse to assist her and to spare her got the better of his judgement, the caution, the worldly tact, which an older, wiser and colder man might have summoned to help him in this strange emergency.

(p. 49)

The natural impulse takes Hartright only so far, and he continues to prevaricate, instead of showing Anne where to find a cab. ‘What I did do, was to try and gain time by questioning her’ (p. 50). The aftermath of his eventual acquiescence is traumatic:

It was like a dream. Was I Walter Hartright? Was this the well-known, uneventful road, where holiday people strolled on Sundays? Had I really left, little more than an hour since, the quiet, decent, conventionally-domestic atmosphere of my mother's cottage?

(p. 50)

The conventionally domestic version of society, stressing the sufficiency of prudence and self-help, turns out to be the dream. Hartright is worried by ‘a vague sense of something like self-reproach’ (p. 51), without being able further to define this premonition of the immorality of conventional morality. He finds Anne a cab, but remains perplexed. The open conflict between benevolent impulse and the moral code in which he has been raised is still dreamlike:

I hardly knew where I was going, or what I meant to do next; I was conscious of nothing but the confusion of my own thoughts, when I was abruptly recalled to myself—awakened, I might almost say—by the sound of rapidly approaching wheels close behind me.

(p. 54)

Significantly, Hartright does not commit himself to the metaphor. He is ‘awakened,’ almost, by the police, pursuing Anne at the instigation of Sir Percival Glyde. Hartright's confidence in the sweetness and light of the established form of society of which the police are guardians has been undermined.

Hartright, however, is yet the standard hero when he next meets Anne in Cumberland. Scrubbing the tomb of her late benefactress, Mrs Fairlie, Anne finds that convincing Hartright that her reputation is spotless is similarly hard work:

It ought to be kept as white as snow, for her sake. I was tempted to begin cleaning it yesterday, and I can't help coming back to go on with it today. Is there anything wrong in that? I hope not. Surely nothing can be wrong that I do for Mrs Fairlie's sake?

(p. 121)

Hartright's suspicions are as compulsive as Anne's scrubbing:

Her ‘misfortune’. In what sense was she using that word? In a sense which might explain her motive in writing the anonymous letter? In a sense which might show it to be the too common and too customary motive that has led many a woman to interpose anonymous hindrances to the marriage of the man who has ruined her?

(p. 124)

Eventually in the novel, Hartright has no option but to extend in a manner which neither his own earlier self nor his father could have foreseen the principle of self-help. Having attributed to paranoia Anne Catherick's mistrust of ‘men of rank and title’ (p. 51), Hartright himself now senses a conspiracy of rank and power in England. Bent on hiding from his enemies the location of the lodgings which he shares with Laura and Marian in the East End of London, Hartright goes home by a lonely route to establish whether he is being followed:

I had first learnt to use this stratagem against suspected treachery in the wilds of Central America—and now I was practising it again, with the same purpose and with even greater caution, in the heart of civilized London!

(p. 474)

If the wilds of Central America and civilized London seem curiously associated, so might civilized London and the Italy of the Risorgimento. Two Italian characters are prominent in the novel. Count Fosco combines his machinations against Laura with spying, on behalf of the Austrains who occupy his country, on fellow Italians in England. Walking from his house in St John's Wood, he stops by an Italian organ-grinder with his monkey. Mocking Mazzini's rhapsodic rhetoric, Fosco ignores the organ-grinder and presents a tart to the monkey. ‘In the sacred name of humanity, I offer you some lunch!’ (p. 587). The sensational plot culminates in 1851, the year, as Hartright remarks, ‘of the famous Crystal Palace Exhibition’ (p. 584). There are many foreigners in London. Fosco is attacked by Hartright through an Italian friend, Pesca, who found Hartright his appointment as drawing-master in Cumberland and still inescapably belongs to an Italian revolutionary society, ‘the Brotherhood,’ which Fosco has betrayed. Pesca now regrets committing himself to revolution, but is yet prepared to defend his youthful decision:

It is not for you to say—you Englishmen, who have conquered your freedom so long ago, that you have conveniently forgotten what blood you shed, and what extremities you proceeded to in the conquering—it is not for you to say how far the worst of all exasperations may, or may not, carry the maddened men of an enslaved nation.

(p. 595)

Besides being diminutive, Pesca is ‘still further distinguished among the rank and file of mankind by the harmless eccentricity of his character’ (p. 35). Recommending in On Liberty eccentricity of a good in itself, John Stuart Mill remarked that, ‘precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric.’ Pesca irritates Hartright's straitlaced sister by breaking a teacup. ‘Very provoking: it spoils the Set’ (p. 38). Paradoxically, Pesca's eccentricity is manifested in his emulating English respectability. He adopts athleticism and is to be seen ‘invariably carrying an umbrella, and invariably wearing gaiters and a white hat’ (p. 35). His Whiggish perspective on English history, which would imply that what the Italians were fighting for in the nineteenth century the English had won in the seventeenth, is not the last word in The Woman in White on the affinity between English and Italian history. If there were two nations in Italy, there might also be said to be, as Disraeli did say, two nations in England. Hartright follows the example of the Italian nationalists by taking the law into his own hands.

The action of No Name, Collins's next sensational novel, is dated with characteristic precision. The novel is set between the years 1846 and 1848. 1846 was the year of the significant middle-class triumph over aristocratic vested interests, the repeal of the Corn Laws. There is in Vauxhall Walk, where Noel Vanstone lives in Lambeth, a memorial of an aristocratic order which has vanished:

And here—most striking object of all—on the site where thousands of lights once sparkled; where sweet sounds of music made night tuneful till morning dawned; where the beauty and fashion of London feasted and danced through the summer seasons of a century—spreads, at this day, an awful wilderness of mud and rubbish—the deserted dead body of Vauxhall Gardens mouldering in the open air.

(p. 219)

If the revolutions of 1848 generally established the sway of the middle classes in the various countries, the ‘June Days’ in Paris, like Chartism in England, were a portent that the class which had triumphed might itself be eclipsed. The proletarian rising which began on 22 June 1848 in Paris was described by Marx as ‘a gigantic insurrection, in which the first great battle was fought between the two great classes which divide modern society’. Those sceptical whether Collins's dating will bear the significance being attributed to it may be reminded that the eighteenth birthday of Rachel Verinder in The Moonstone falls on 21 June 1848, and the moonstone is removed in the early hours of the 22nd, a day which ‘wore on to its end drearily and miserably enough, I can tell you’ (p. 218), remarks Betteredge. In No Name, Collins described ‘the hideous London vagabond’, lounging at the street-corners of Lambeth,

the public disgrace of his country, the unheeded warning of social troubles that are yet to come. … Here, while the national prosperity feasts, like another Belshazzar, on the spectacle of its own magnificence, is the Writing on the Wall, which warns the monarch, Money, that his glory is weighed in the balance, and his power found wanting.

(p. 218)

In No Name, from within as well as without the dominant class, its ideology is derided: Noel Vanstone, in the interview with his disguised cousin, Magdalen, is bored by bourgeois moralism: ‘Lecount, there, takes a high moral point of view—don't you, Lecount? I do nothing of the sort. I have lived too long in the continental atmosphere to trouble myself about moral points of view’. He states his position, minus the moral dressing. ‘I have got the money, and I should be born idiot if I parted with it’ (p. 242). Noel's father, Michael Vanstone, has invoked providence in defence of the same line of conduct. ‘Let them understand that I consider those circumstances to be a Providential interposition, which has restored to me the inheritance that ought always to have been mine’ (p. 134). Michael Vanstone is a man of 1846, ‘the famous year’ (p. 134), as Collins calls it, whose Zeitgeist is manifested in Andrew Vanstone's being killed in a railway accident. Michael is a speculator, who does well out of the railway boom of 1846 without being caught in the subsequent crash: it is his willingness to speculate on which Magdalen's plot to milk him of his fortune is founded. It is a blow to Magdalen when her uncle dies, since his son, Noel, a valetudinarian in his thirties, is bent merely on maintaining intact his inherited capital. As a speculator, who has been initially funded by his mother and a canny marriage, Michael is no Smilesian hero, but, having made his fortune, he can conceive of the rewards of his enterprise as a blessing. His son has no incentive to take ‘a high moral point of view’ about money. Like Mr Fairlie in The Woman in White, he is a character who signifies, in the face of the moralists, the decreasing opportunities in mid-Victorian society of linking material well-being with any conceivable merit.

If Collins had been killed off by gout or laudanum in 1870, he might be more in repute today. Sensation novels, Margaret Oliphant suggested, were the characteristic literature of ‘an age of events’, the 1860s. The literary decline of Collins seems to be related at least as much the changed social climate in which he was writing in the 1870s as to gout, laudanum or the baneful influence of Reade. This is not to deny that personal factors were involved, but what should be stressed is the inadequacy of invoking gout to explain the peculiar social vision of the late fiction. One distressing feature of the later novels is the absence of irony. The basis of Collins's irony had been to play off the orthodoxy concerning social conventions, roles and institutions—that they were eternally and providentially ordained—against his own perception that they were historically relative and therefore transient. In Man and Wife, however, the present is represented, as Carlyle accused historians of representing the Reign of Terror, in hysterics. This particularly applies to the treatment of what from Man and Wife one might suppose, leaving aside the threat of unwary English tourists posed by the marriage laws in Scotland, to be the great social evil of the day, undergraduate athleticism. The athlete Geoffrey Delamayn has ideas ‘of the devil's own’. ‘A hideous cunning leered at his mouth and peeped out of his eyes’ (p. 78). Collins claims that those who cultivate the body at the expense of the mind will be morally corrupted: Geoffrey Delamayn accordingly attempts to murder his wife. Collins also insists that physical cultivation is physically ruinous. Geoffrey fails to murder his wife because his athleticism induces a stroke. This is luridly described:

Even as he raised the arm, a frightful distortion seized on his face. As if with an invisible hand, it dragged down the brow and the eyelid, on the right; it dragged down the mouth, on the same side. His arm fell helpless; his whole body, on the side under the arm, gave way. He dropped to the floor like a man shot dead.

(p. 237)

Dr Benjulia, the heartless vivisectionist in Heart and Science, will commit suicide in his laboratory. Geoffrey has ignored urgent medical advice to stop running foot-races and his own death is a kind of suicide. Collins fictionally fulfils his own wishes, but actually he is paying tribute to what he senses is the durability of the present generation. ‘The Rough with the clean skin and the good coat on his back’, he remarks in the Preface to Man and Wife, ‘is easily traced through the various grades of English society, in the middle and upper classes’. In the 1860s, these classes had seemed threatened from below. In the more placid atmosphere of the 1870s, Collins resorts to spontaneous combustion as the nemesis of the middle and upper classes.

Swinburne blamed the novelist's perdition on having missions. Paradoxically, the missionary impulse was linked to a newly pessimistic social perception. With the seemingly eternal middle-class back in apparent control of the wider world of facts, the words of George Eliot's Felix Holt seem oddly appropriate, for ‘where great things can't happen I care [he tells us] for very small things’.

Royden Harrison has argued against the assimilation of the 1860s by historians of the Victorian period into an era of Victorian ‘calm’:

In the 1860s the British working class exhibited certain ‘contradictory’ characteristics. If it was increasingly ‘respectable’, it was increasingly well organised. If it had abandoned its revolutionary ambitions, it had not wholly lost its revolutionary potentialities. It left no doubt that these potentialities might be speedily developed if it was too long thwarted in its desire to secure political equality. In short, it had attained precisely that level of development at which it was safe to concede its enfranchisement and dangerous to withhold it. It was this circumstance, rather than the death of Palmerston, which determined the timing of reform.⁸

The safety of the concession was not universally appreciated. The middle class imbued with the ‘alarmed conservative feeling’ detected by Matthew Arnold in 1866 was haunted no less by the spectre of what might amount to a legislative resolution than by that of violent revolution. Collins was a politically radical novelist, and George Eliot a very conservative one, but the shift in political attitude between the late 1860s and the early 1870s that is registered in her novels bears on the decline of Collins. In Felix Holt the Radical, published in 1866, Eliot is transparently nervous of the consequences of an extension of the franchise. Through her hero, she preaches the irrelevance of politics. To Felix Holt, as to Herbert Spencer, while men remain morally corrupt, corrupt statues will be corruptly administered. If men were not corrupt, there would be no need for legislation. The hysterical treatment of the Treby election riot, however, which is made to exemplify popular politics in action, implies that Eliot's deepest dread is not of politically motivated workers wasting their time. In 1868, after the Reform Act but before a reformed election, Eliot is still fraught. Felix Holt steps out of the novel into Blackwood's Magazine to address the workers, warning them, or pleading with them, neither to emulate the Fenians in Ireland nor to destroy the culture of which the rich are custodians. In Middlemarch, however, which appeared in four parts between 1871 and 1872, there is a placidity in Eliot's demonstration of the futility of Reform Acts. The brief appearances made in the novel by workers show them as less morally evolved but not exactly brutish.

Others, Engels included, were disappointed by the tranquil aftermath to the 1868 Reform Act. He wrote to Marx of the election that year that is was

a disastrous certificate of poverty for the English proletariat. … The parson has shown unexpected power, and so has the cringing to respectability. Not a single working-class candidate had a ghost of a chance, but my Lord Tumnoddy or any parvenu snob could have the workers' votes with pleasure.

The political headiness and surmise of the preceding years had been conducive to a minor renaissance of the historical novel, with Elizabeth Gaskell and Meredith treating the past both on its own terms and with a sense of the continuity between past and present which was reminiscent of Scott. By the end of the decade, historical novels had been superseded by historical romances such as Lorna Doone, which were announced as having no designs on the reader but to help him pass an idle hour. The major fiction of Collins must itself be seen as historical, notwithstanding that the history is recent. A sense of expanding options and possibilities in the future inspired the investigation into the past. By the early 1870s, that sense had vanished. The analogue in the fiction of Collins to the placidity of tone of Middlemarch is having missions. Both Eliot and Collins believe that ‘great things can't happen’.

Notes

1. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own (London: Virago, 1982) p. 162.

2. Ibid.

3. There is no standard edition of the work of Wilkie Collins. Editions cited are as follows: The Woman in White (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974); The Moonstone (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983); Armadale (London: Chatto and Windus, 1975); No Name (New York: Dover, 1983); Man and Wife (New York: Dover, 1983). Page references are given in brackets.

4. Sue Lonoff, Wilkie Collins and his Victorian Readers (New York: AMS Press, 1982) p. 1.

5. E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital (London: Sphere, 1977) p. 280.

6. J. F. C. Harrison, The Early Victorians, 1832-51 (London: Fontana, 1973) p. 172. See also Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780-1880 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969) esp. ch. 10: ‘Entrepreneurial Society: Ideal and Reality’.

7. Eileen Yeo makes this point in her essay, to which I am generally grateful, ‘Mayhew as a Social Investigator’, in E. P. Thompson and Eileen Yeo (eds), The Unknown Mayhew (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971).

8. Royden Harrison, Before the Socialists (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965) p. 133.