Drood (29 page)

My mother was a sensible woman, but my father was a great artist and a great man. I was given my Christian middle name—Wilkie— due to his relationship with the honourable Sir David Wilkie, an old friend of my father’s from their school days, who lifted me up shortly after my birth, looked into my eyes, and pronounced, “He sees.” (This seemed to have laid the mantle of succession, in artistic terms, from my father’s shoulders to mine, but—as we shall see—that was not to be. My younger brother, Charley, was to inherit the stronger artistic ability and to be chosen for that role.)

My father was a great man with great men as friends. When I was growing up—a wide-eyed, rather gentle, bulbous-foreheaded child—I took it for granted that the Wordsworths, Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Sir Walter Scott would be familiar acquaintances of our family and visitors to our home. My father had not only received commissions from, but had spent much time with, such estimables as Sir Francis Chantrey, the Duke of Newcastle, Sir Robert Peel, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Sir Thomas Heathcote, Sir Thomas Baring, Sir George Beaumont, and Lord Liverpool.

Of course, it is true that the vast majority of my father’s time spent with greatness was spent out of the sight of our mother. I am sure that my father was not
ashamed
of my mother, nor certainly of Charles or me, but he did prefer to spend his time amongst great men far from our hearth. But he wrote home faithfully and, often after listing the exciting events and personal encounters of his days and weeks away, might add such a codicil as this I found when arranging my mother’s papers recently—

I cannot help longing for home, although I am so pleasantly spending my time, as pleasantly as the kindest friends, sprightly young ladies, and all the gaieties of this life can make me. I flatter myself that the idle life I am leading will please you, and perhaps make me stronger and therefore, I am determined to make the most of it.

He did make the most of it, I believe, although, despite the many commissions by such famous men, his income was rarely solid or consistent. But my mother lived frugally and made sure that Charley and I did as well, so money was set aside.

My father was an extremely religious man. He had long since vowed to banish inclinations to indolence or impiety from his own life and would brook none in the lives of his wife or children. Some called him censorious, even priggish, but this was unfair. In another letter to my mother, sent from some Scottish castle when Charley and I were in short pants, my father wrote—

Tell the dear children that the only way they can serve their parents is to obey them in all things; let Charley find out the passages in the Scripture where this duty is most strongly insisted on, and write them down for me.

And in a separate letter to my brother and me, one still in my possession and reread frequently, William Collins showed the true spirit of his religious intensity—

Your mother’s account, in her last letter about you both, pleased me very much. Go on praying to God, through Jesus Christ, to enable you, by his Holy Spirit, to be blessings to your parents; and then you must be happy.

True to his beliefs, my father became known for his denunciations. His tolerance for tolerance was very low. Once when our close neighbour, the artist John Linnell (who had painted several of our portraits), was seen working on Sunday—nailing his peach and nectarine trees to his northern wall—my father not only upbraided Linnell but denounced him to a visiting Congregational preacher. Father also believed and spread the rumour that Linnell had cheated one of his gardeners out of his wages, and when Linnell challenged him on the fact, Father cried, “Of what consequence is it, whether you cheated a man out of his wages or not, when you are constantly doing things ten times worse?”

The things-ten-times-worse included working on Sunday and becoming a Dissenter.

I was with my father when we met the poet William Blake in the Strand, and when Blake—an acquaintance—hailed my father and offered his hand, my father deliberately ignored him, turning his back on the poet and leading me away before I could speak. Blake, you see, was carrying a pot of porter in the hand he was not offering in friendship.

Later, when I was in my early twenties and writing my father’s memoirs after his death, I realised how jealous of him many of the so-called great artists of the period were. John Constable, for instance, an acquaintance of many years, was receiving only a few hundred pounds for his cloudy, obscure paintings during years that my father earned over £1,000 a year on commissions for what Constable sneered at as “pretty landscapes” and “flat, soulless, fashionable portraits.” When Constable could find no patrons at all (due, largely, to his persisting in painting such unpopular works as his
Corn-Field
at the same time that my father had his finger on the pulse of patrons’ and the Academy’s desires for more decorative works), the frustrated landscape painter wrote the following in a letter that was made public, much to my father’s fury—
“Turner exhibits a large picture of Dieppe… Calcotte nothing I hear… Collins, a coast scene with fish as usual and a landscape with a large cow turd at least as far as colour and shape is concerned.”

I mentioned earlier that my father decided when we were still quite young that Charley, not I, would be the real inheritor of his artistic talents and career, despite the crib-side assurances of Sir David Wilkie, my namesake. Father enrolled Charley in a private art school, spent much extra time with my brother during our long trips to Europe—analysing paintings in cathedrals and museums (although my father loathed entering Papist churches)—and helped Charley gain acceptance into the prestigious Royal Academy.

Father never really spoke to me about my future or how I would fill it, other than one suggestion, when I was thirteen, that I might consider going to Oxford with a view to entering the Church.

It was when I was thirteen, in Rome during one of our long family stays in Europe, that I experienced my first full love adventure. I remember telling the details to Charles Dickens precisely seventeen years later, during my next visit to Rome and my first trip there with the famous author, and Dickens was so pleased with the amatory precociousness of the affair that he later told me he had informed his sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth, sparing her, he said, only the details of “how the affair had proceeded to the utmost extremities.” He chuckled when he described how Georgina had blushed when Dickens had summarised my first complete physical encounter by saying, “Our young Willy came out quite a pagan Jupiter in the business.”

At any rate, even at age thirteen I had no intention of entering Oxford with an eye on going into the Church.

Artists are notoriously sensitive—at least to their own feelings—and young Charley was more sensitive than most. It is not an exaggeration to say that he was a doleful child, constantly brooding about this or that, and both of my parents—but especially my mother—took this incessant unhappiness (bordering on sullenness) as a sign of his artistic genius. He also disliked women and girls.

I interrupt here, Dear Reader, to beg your indulgence on this point. Were this not a memoir consigned to the distant future, I would not mention it at all, but—as perhaps you have already detected in this memoir—there was a deep and constant tension between Charles Dickens and his son-in-law, Charles Collins, and I fear that this small matter of Charley’s aversion to women (if not outright misogyny) may have played a part in Dickens’s prejudice. You see, however such things have played out in your distant time, it was not uncommon in our era for young men to go through long periods where they much preferred the company of boys and men to that of women. Given the limitations to education of women in our time, much less the obvious difficulties of the fairer sex in acquiring and mastering more difficult aspects of learning throughout history, it was logical that thoughtful, sensitive men should focus their energies and intercourse on other men.

I remember once when Charley was about fifteen and I came across some of his sketch diaries, left lying about in his room in an uncharacteristic manner (he was always secretive and neat), and I joked with him about the fact that all of the figure studies in his drawing book were of nude men.

Charley had blushed crimson but said with real emotion, “I hate drawing women, Willy. Don’t you? I mean, they are all heavy and pendulous and baggy and bulbous where the human body should
not
be. How much more delight I take in firm, flat buttocks and muscular thighs and flat bellies and masculine chests, rather than those appalling feminine absences and fleshy protuberances and miserable saggings.”

I was searching for some humourous comment worthy of a sophisticated nineteen-year-old gentleman such as myself when Charley went on, “I mean, Willy,
Michelangelo’s
female nudes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—even Eve—are actually all paintings of naked men. Even the great Michelangelo disdained nude women! What do you say to that, Brother?”

I was tempted to say that I had been there in Rome that hot, muggy day years before when our father taught
both
of us that salient fact. But I resisted the temptation. All I said that afternoon in my brother’s room as he tidied up the sketch diaries and set them away in a locked drawer was—“Those are very good drawings, Charley. Very good indeed.” I did not comment at all upon the fact that not only had my brother violated the unwritten rule that an artist was not to show male genitalia in one’s figure drawings—leaving an absence of graphite if nothing else, drawing a modest loincloth the preferred method—but Charley had drawn some of the male organs in an obvious state of excitement.

It was not too many months after this encounter that some revelation of the sort—perhaps a similar indiscretion in Charles’s drawings, or in his comments—became apparent to my father. I remember Charley being called in to my father’s studio one morning and the door being closed and then repeated screams from my brother as my father whipped the sensitive lad with either a branch, cane, or T square.

After my father died, I believe that Charley and I both would have enjoyed living with my mother in her wonderful home at Hanover Terrace for the rest of our lives. My liaison with Caroline G—— took me away from that safe haven. And yet, for months and even years after I moved in with Caroline and her daughter, Harriet—how I loved the coincidence of that name!—I would return to my mother’s home to write and address letters to our mutual friends (my mother’s and mine) from there even as I wrote to other friends from my new home. Mother did not know of Caroline’s existence, of course; or if she did know, she never let on that she did. It was true that I regaled her with many tales of my bachelor life apart from her, never mentioning any woman, much less the widowed Caroline, but it was also true that my mother never once suggested that she visit my various homes during all the years I shared them with Mrs G—— and Harriet.

I was still living with Mother when I met Dickens in 1851. As a reporter later wrote of Dickens and me during that early period—“Both were lively men, passionate about the theatre, keen on drinks and company and excursions, on being intensely gay, relaxing strenuously, responding vehemently.” And after our excursions and strenuous relaxations and vehement responses, Dickens would return home to his increasingly bovine wife and I would return home to my mother.

Charley would have lived with our mother until her death and perhaps remained in her home until his own death, I am quite sure, if it had not been for his marriage to Kate Dickens.

None of us shall ever know all the reasons for Charley’s sudden proposal to Kate in the late spring of 1860. In truth, from what I can gather, it was
Kate
who proposed marriage to
Charley
that spring. It was certainly Kate who hurried their wedding along to mid-summer—despite her father’s outspoken and vehement opposition, not only to the date of the wedding but to the fact of it.

Charley had not had a long history of courtship and wooing. In fact, up to his thirty-second year (which was to be the year of his marriage), he had continued to avoid women. Whispers abounded that spring and summer that Katey Dickens had fallen in love with and had been pursuing Edmund Yates, a younger friend of the Inimitable who had helped promote the falling-out between Dickens and Thackeray by writing a profoundly unflattering profile of the old writer. A contemporary had described Yates as “. . . very fascinating too. Superficially, mind you.”

Superficially fascinating or not, Kate Dickens had fallen in love with him and when Yates refused to notice the infatuation, despite the young man’s frequent visits to Tavistock House and then to Gad’s Hill Place and despite Katey’s obvious flirtations—obvious to everyone, including Charles Dickens and me—the headstrong young woman (she had just turned twenty) proposed to my Charley.

A few months before the wedding, after a visit to Gad’s Hill, where Katey’s redirected matrimonial attentions were again obvious to everyone, I wrote to my mother,
“. . . Charley is still trying hard to talk himself into believing he ought to be married.”

Years later, after my younger brother’s death from the constant stomach ulcers that had proved cancerous, I did ask Kate why she had pulled him into marriage. “I had to get away from that house,” she replied. “I had to get away from my father.”

Dickens did not hide his disapproval of the match. Despite that, Katey was his favourite child and he could not deny her anything, even this folly of a marriage.

On 17 July, 1860, St Mary’s Church in Higham—the church’s steeple would be visible from the writing room in Dickens’s chalet when the latter structure was assembled five years later—was almost buried in white flowers. The lower-class neighbours had created floral arches that showed the way to the church. The night before, the villagers had fired off guns in honour of the nuptials, but a cranky and concerned Charles Dickens had come out onto the lawn of Gad’s Hill in his nightshirt, shotgun in his hands, and said only, “What the devil is all that about?”