A Very British Murder (20 page)

Interestingly, although T. S. Eliot and others have argued that
The Moonstone
is ‘the first’ English detective novel, it actually breaks two of the cardinal rules that would develop in the coming ‘Golden Age’ of early twentieth-century detective fiction: that the narrator himself must not have done the deed, and that the solution should not be a powerful drug that compels people to act out of character. In a magnificently unexpected twist, Franklin Blake, one of the narrators, discovers that he’d been dosed with opium without his knowledge and that under its influence
he himself
had stolen the jewel.

THE COMMITTING OF
a crime in a drug-induced dream may provide the thrillingly unpredictable ending of
The Moonstone
, but it was also yet another example of the ubiquitous, unsensational presence of narcotics in Victorian daily life. What seems jarring, and indeed criminal today – the spiking of someone’s drink with a heavy-duty drug – is presented by Collins as little more than a foolish (albeit dangerous) prank. It’s not surprising to learn, then, that Wilkie Collins was himself writing
The Moonstone
under the influence of opium.

By 1869, he was describing serious attempts to give it up: ‘I am stabbed every night at ten with a sharp-pointed syringe which injects morphia under my skin – and gets me a night’s rest without any of the drawbacks of taking opium internally’, he wrote. ‘If I only persevere with this, I am told I shall be able, before long, gradually to diminish the quantity.’

But this was a wish made in vain. Collins’s obituary recorded that he still depended daily upon ‘more laudanum than would have sufficed to kill a ship’s crew or company of soldiers’. No wonder opiates appear in so many of his books.

Collins’s addiction wasn’t the only unconventional feature of his life. He was the son of an artist, a hedonist, and a life-long indulger in food and drink. He worked in his youth for a tea merchant in the Strand, and found it boring, though the job gave him plenty of time for writing stories and essays. He was called to the bar, but never practised; his family money meant that he didn’t have to.

Collins became great friends with Charles Dickens, 12 years older, who gave him excellent editorial advice but sometimes despaired of his protégé’s unconventional habits. Everyone addressed him very informally as ‘Wilkie’ (his middle name, rather than his first name, William), he wore flamboyant clothes and – infamously – maintained two separate establishments with two women, neither of whom he married. Dickens worried that his gifted young friend was ‘unnecessarily offensive to the middle class’.

Collins was adamant that he didn’t draw his plots from true crime, but literary critics have certainly discovered enough clues to prove that he was being disingenuous in his claims of complete novelty. It was a round-up of celebrated French crimes that
provided the inspiration for
The Woman in White
. The plot hinges on a dastardly deed: a young woman committed to a madhouse so that her fortune could be stolen. This is to be brought off on the basis of her physical similarity to her illegitimate half-sister who has already been imprisoned.

The crime is solved by a young drawing master working in tandem with the splendid Marian Halcombe, another half-sister of the heroine. Marian identifies the two villains, eavesdrops upon them, is captured, falls ill of fever, recovers, bribes the attendant to let her half-sister out of the asylum and discovers that the villain himself was born out of wedlock and is therefore not entitled to his fortune or position in society. She does all this with vigour, charm and good humour despite – O tragedy! – being ‘ugly’. She has a ‘large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw’, down on her upper lip that was ‘almost a moustache’ and a waist ‘undeformed by stays’. Despite all these supposed defects, her expression is ‘bright, frank, and intelligent’. The critic John Sutherland calls her ‘one of the finest creations in all Victorian fiction’.

‘Sensation’ novelists were particularly good at showing women stepping outside the normal conventions of behaviour, and, among them, Wilkie Collins was best at it. Just as he used current events to shape his work, he also used his own experience of women. This is perhaps best seen in
Armadale
, with its evil but impressive heroine, Miss Lydia Gwilt. To make it absolutely clear of her wickedness, not only is her surname a mere letter away from ‘Guilt’, she also has wickedly red hair.

The plot of
Armadale
is really quite ludicrous. But this story, too, was related to contemporary events, however much Collins
may have claimed otherwise. In it, two men both named Allan Armadale, one rich, one poor, become friends. (They are related, but don’t know it.) Lydia Gwilt’s plan is to marry the poor one, thereby legally becoming ‘Mrs Armadale’. Then, having bumped them both off, she would pose as the widow of the rich one in order to claim his estate.

This sort of thing was in fact no stranger than the real-life affair of the Tichborne Claimant. In 1854 Roger Tichborne, heir to a baronetcy and fortune, was lost at sea and presumed dead. His devoted mother, however, believing that he might have survived, advertised widely in Australia, his supposed destination, and heard back from a butcher from Wagga Wagga. The butcher came to see her in England, and despite his uncouth ways, was accepted as the missing man by Lady Tichborne, and by many of his friends. (The family doctor claimed that both the missing man and the butcher shared an unusual deformation of the genitals.) But the rest of the family scented fraud and refused to accept him. Eventually the Tichborne Claimant was accused of perjury, and died destitute.

This idea of using a false identity to claim an inheritance is central to
Armadale
. But one of the most enjoyable aspects of the novel is found in the relationship between the two central female characters. The plot depends upon a passionate, though quite frankly unbelievable, friendship between Allan Armadale and the other Allan Armadale (of mixed race), who goes by the assumed name of Ozias Midwinter. Far more engaging is the rivalry for the rich Allan’s affections between Neelie Milroy, the teenage daughter of one of his neighbours, and the thirty-something Lydia Gwilt, who contrives to be engaged as Miss Milroy’s
governess specifically for the purpose of meeting and snagging him as a husband.

The character of Lydia Gwilt shocked and horrified readers upon her first appearance, but from today’s vantage point she is much more sympathetic, coping rather valiantly with the setbacks of life (albeit, like Collins himself, with the help of her bottle of laudanum). Born illegitimate, she spent the first eight years of her life in the care of a ‘baby farmer’, or paid foster mother, Mother Oldershaw. When the money from Lydia’s family mysteriously stopped, Mother Oldershaw put Lydia out to work, sending her, at twelve, to become a servant in a large Norfolk household. Here, her employer gets her to forge a letter on his behalf, because of her ‘wicked dexterity’ with the pen. John Sutherland points out that, of course, this wasn’t the real reason: Lydia’s wicked master knew that forgery was a capital offence, and wanted the actual crime off his hands. Also, the sub-text is that he seduced his maid as well. The family get rid of this inconvenient girl by sending Lydia to France, where she is next accused of seducing her music teacher and thereby sending him mad. Lydia goes into a convent for a while, before becoming a pianist in Brussels then being recruited by a female criminal baroness as bait for a gambling scam. After five years of this, Lydia marries a rich young Englishman, but her by now heinously corrupt nature causes her to take a lover. Her husband horsewhips her for this; she poisons him. She is caught and convicted, but is pardoned on the basis that people feel sorry for her. All this takes place before the story of
Armadale
even starts.

At its opening, Lydia’s plan is to support herself by marrying Allan Armadale. After having exhausted so many other options, it’s hard to see how else she might be able to earn a living. But the plan is eventually foiled when Lydia falls in love with her victim. It is her only weakness. In every other respect, she is a female Victorian Jason Bourne, employing the latest technology to achieve her ends. She aims to poison her victim by wafting carbonic acid into a bedroom through the air-conditioning in a new and purpose-built mental asylum. She also uses the facilities offered by London’s smart new railway stations, carrying out a complex skein of manoeuvres to get her possessions, her correspondence and her travel arrangements lined up without being detected:

to the cloakroom of the Great Western, to get the luggage which I sent there … next to the cloak-room of the South Eastern (to leave my luggage) … to wait for the starting of the tidal train on Monday. Next to the General Post Office, to post a letter to Midwinter at the Rectory, which he will receive to-morrow morning.

The most enjoyable passage of the book concerns the battle for Armadale’s affections between Lydia, with all her splendid mature beauty (maintained by artifice), sophistication and wily ways, and, on the other, the peachy and unstudied attractions of her young rival, Neelie. The pull between these two different types of woman was something that Wilkie Collins had experienced at first hand. Among his many unconventional views was the belief that
marriage was unfair to women, and he campaigned vigorously against what he saw as the injustices of the law regarding it. He avoided marriage all his life, but certainly did not live alone and celibate in consequence.

When he began
Armadale
, Collins was cohabiting with Caroline Graves, a woman in her mid-thirties, and her daughter, Harriet, whom Caroline had had with another man. (Wilkie loved Harriet and acted as her father.) Although they were not married, Caroline was the wise and worldly woman to whom he introduced his friends and with whom he discussed his work. In 1864, though, after ten years with Caroline, Wilkie Collins met the 19-year-old Martha Rudd, from Norfolk, the daughter of a shepherdess. He encountered her in Great Yarmouth as he was researching the East Anglian location of the action in
Armadale
, and persuaded her to come to London. He set her up in a house in Bolsover Street (only a ten-minute walk away from his and Caroline’s home in Gloucester Place) and she bore him three children.

The competing charms of Wilkie’s two mistresses are paralleled, in
Armadale
, by Lydia and Neelie’s rivalry. ‘Am I handsome enough, today?’ Lydia asks her diary. ‘Well, yes. Handsome enough to be a match for a little dowdy, awkward, freckled creature, who ought to be perched on a form at school.’

And yet, Allan Armadale would chose dim, dumpy little Neelie, malleable and easy-going, instead of the splendid Lydia.

In real life, Caroline’s response to the arrival of Martha upon the scene was almost worthy of Lydia herself. She didn’t poison anyone, but she finally decided that she’d had enough, left Collins and
married someone else. And yet, despite this, Wilkie and Martha never married, and he never introduced her to his friends as his ‘official’ consort. Something went wrong with Caroline’s new relationship and, within a couple of years, she was back in residence with Collins, even though he now had three children in the other home he shared with Martha. It was Caroline who nursed him in his final sickness, and Caroline was the ‘wife’ with whom Wilkie Collins was buried – in life, if not in literature, the older woman beat the younger.

Victorian readers, however, didn’t take to Lydia at all, finding her immorality revolting – ‘a woman fouler than the refuse of the streets’ – and
Armadale
was something of a disappointment in sales terms. Another of Lydia’s defects was the attention she paid to maintaining her striking good looks, a type of duplicitous vanity considered to be rather wicked.

This disapproval carried over to minor characters like Mother Oldershaw, whom contemporaries would have recognized instantly as the fictional equivalent of the beautician, con woman and procurer of abortions known as ‘Madame Rachel’. Born in the East End as Sarah Rachel Levison, Madame Rachel of Bond Street promised those who visited her salon that she would make them – in the words of her advertising slogan – ‘Beautiful for Ever’. Her cosmetic secrets included a process called ‘enamelling’, which involved plastering the face with a white paste designed to tighten, brighten and smoothen the skin. Today, we would presumably think it looked rather like the make-up of a clown, but to rich ladies – including the Princess of Wales herself – it was highly desirable.

Distinctly unnatural, though, an ‘enamelled’ or made-up face became easy to spot, and was the target of the sort of moral
disapproval aimed at Botox today. ‘We feel alarmed,’ wrote a journalist in the
Glasgow Herald
,

when a beauty looks as if she were going to be betrayed into a smile lest her cheek should suddenly become fractured. We shall watch with tremendous apprehension when some beauty applies her pocket handkerchief to her nose, lest four or five guineas worth of its exquisite proportions should come away with it.