THE LETTERS OF WILKIE COLLINS

Wilkie Collins photographed for Men of Mark (© Andrew Gasson, source APG)

The Letters of Wilkie Collins

Volume 2 1866-1889

Edited by

William Baker

and

William M. Clarke

First published in Great Britain 1999 by

MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Volume 1: 1838-1865

First published in the United States of America 1999 by

ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010

Volume 1: 1838-1865 Volume 2: 1866-1889

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Collins, Wilkie, 1824-1889. [Correspondence. Selections] The letters of Wilkie Collins I edited by William Baker and William M. Clarke. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: v. 1. 1838-1865- v. 2. 1866-1889.

1. Collins, Wilkie, 1824-1889-Correspondence. 2. Novelists, English-19th century-Correspondence. I. Baker, William, 1944-

II. Clarke, William M. (William Malpas) III. Title. PR4496.A4 1999 823'.8-dc21 99-19642

CIP

Selection and editorial matter© William Baker and William M. Clarke 1999

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1999 978-0-333-73246-5

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P OLP.

Any person who does any unauthmised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01

2 I 00 99

ISBN 978-0-333-67466-6ISBN 978-1-349-40705-7 ISBN 978-0-230-37235-1 (eBook)DOI 10.1057/9780230372351ISBN 978-0-333-73247-2 two-volume set

ISBN 978-0-312-22343-4 ISBN 978-0-312-22344-1

ISBN 978-0-312-22343-4 (v. 1). ISBN 978-0-312-22344-1 (v. 2)CIP

For our wives

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List of Illustrations

Preface

Contents

PartY The Moonstone to the Death of his Mother, 1866-1868

Vlll

ix

269

Part VI Martha and the American Triumph, 1869-February 1874 315

Part VII Domesticity, March 1874-1879 377

Part VIII Illness, Work and Family, 1880-1885 425

Part IX

Part X

Index

Letters to 'Nannie', 1885-1888

Declining Years, 1886-1889

vii

491

515

597

List of Illustrations

Volume 1

Plates 1 and 2 William and Harriet Collins, Wilkie's parents, by John Linnell. (Faith Clarke)

Plate 3 Charles and Wilkie as children by Alexander Geddes. (Horace Pym Collection)

Plate 4 Wilkie as a baby by William Collins. (Faith Clarke)

Plate 5 Charles Collins, Wilkie's brother and son-in-law to Charles Dickens.

Plate 6 Charles Collins with Dickens and other members of the family at Gad's Hill.

Plate 7 Wilkie Collins by Herbert Watkins in 1864.

Plate 8 Caroline Graves in the 1870s. (From The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins by William Clarke)

Volume 2

Plate 9 Martha Rudd.

Plate 10 Wilkie Collins with Martha Rudd. (Faith Clarke)

Plate 11 The cover of The Bookman, June 1912.

Plate 12 A Christmas card featuring titles by Wilkie Collins, actual size.

Plate 13 F.W. Waddy's caricature of Collins, 1872.

Plate 14 "I am dying old friend." Plate 15 "I am too muddled to write. They are driving me mad by forbidding the [Hypodermic] Come for God's sake." The last letters Wilkie Collins wrote to his doctor. (Princeton University Library)

viii

Preface

As was indicated in Volume 1, this two-volume edition of the letters of Wilkie Collins will shed light on the life and activities of one of the few remaining major Victorian creative personalities whose letters and papers remain uncollected and unpublished. Although Collins has been the subject of recent biographies, these works only quote brief extracts from the limited correspondence already available to biographers.

Now that permission has been given to examine and publish the whole correspondence - one of the editors, William Clarke, is the husband of Collins' great-granddaughter and author of a revealing biography of Collins The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins (1988, 1996)- this two-volume edition will illuminate an extraordinarily rich and varied Victorian life. It will shed light on Victorian literature and publishing, music, art and many other areas of intellectual, cultural and artistic endeavour.

As explained in Volume 1, there are two main sources for Collins letters: those which survive in institutional holdings or in private hands; and those which have disappeared but survive in printed form. In Letters of Charles Dickens to Wilkie Collins, published by Harper Brothers in New York in 1892, Laurence Hutton collected the letters Dickens sent to his close friend Collins. In his preface to Wilkie Collins (1952) Robert Ashley wrote of "the huge bonfire at Gad's Hill to which, irritated at the invasion of his privacy by the press, Dickens consigned the whole of his correspondence". Consequently, he concluded, "although we have many of the letters Dickens wrote to Collins, we have none of those which Collins wrote to Dickens". Ashley also noted that "another loss was occasioned when Collins himself burnt the greater part of his correspondence before moving from Gloucester Place to Wimpole Street in the closing years of his life".

Two recent biographies have drawn upon some of the many extant letters throughout the world in university libraries and private collections. William Clarke's intention in his biography is to unravel the secrets of Collins' complicated private life. Clarke's pioneering research revealed the identity of Collins' copyright holder and identified 18 institutions whose libraries held Collins' letters and the names of some private holders. Catherine Peters in her The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins (1991), building upon Clarke's foundation, interweaves Collins' complicated life with her subject's literary achievements. Clarke's biography prompted Sir John

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X Preface

Lawrence to reveal the existence of letters sent by the ageing Collins in the last years of his life to an eleven-year-old girl and her mother.

The largest institutional collections of Collins' letters are to be found at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, at the Parrish Collection at Princeton and at the University of Texas. The Pierpont Morgan has over 300 Collins letters. These include 117 revealing letters to his mother, 86 to his close friend Charles Ward, and letters to publishers such as Harper and Brothers and William Henry Wills (1810-1880,) the general manager and proprietor of Household Words and All the Year Round. There are also many letters, not included here, by other members of Collins' family- his mother, his father and his brother Charles. The Parrish Collection has upwards of 250 letters including those to Collins' close friends the Lehmanns, to his physician Dr Frank Beard, to his various publishers and a host of other cor­respondents. The University of Texas has been adding to its Collins holdings edited by Coleman in the 1970s and now has just under 300 letters.

These three repositories alone yield upwards of 850 letters. There are also significant Collins holdings at the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, including letters to the publishers George Bentley (94) and George Smith (21), at Harvard, the Huntington Library, the University of Illinois at Urbana, the Beinecke Library, Yale University, and elsewhere including

Kansas and Stanford. Interestingly, there are fewer Collins letters in institutional holdings in the

British Isles. The largest of these, over 140 letters to Collins' solicitor W.F. Tindell is at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow. There are smaller collections at the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the National Art Library (the "V and A"), the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, the Manx National Heritage Museum and elsewhere. These holdings numerically do not compare with those in the United States. The most extensive collections of Collins' letters (more than 300) in the United Kingdom are in private hands owned by his descendants or by private collectors who inherited them or purchased the letters at auction. Thanks to the generosity of these collectors, some of whom wish to remain anonymous, we have been able to utilize their holdings.

Collins' letters are emerging almost daily at auction and in dealers' catalogues. A world-wide search reveals Collins letters on three continents including Australia. There are also Collins letters scattered in printed sources too, many of which belong to the last years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century. Various memoirs by actresses such as Kate Field and Mary Anderson, actors such as Frank Archer and Squire Bancroft, literary figures such as William Winter, publishers such as Bernhard Tauchnitz, included lengthy and interesting Collins letters. Collins' letters are scattered throughout the world and found in diverse locations and sources.

Preface xi

Our researches have uncovered upwards of 2000 letters written by Collins in institutional and private holdings. Some of these letters are social notes- Collins was invariably polite- for instance declining invitations to dine. Others are brief notes to his publishers or business letters. Some repeat what has been previously written, for instance to his agent A.P. Watt. Some letters are polite responses to people he doesn't know who for one reason or another have made contact with him. Others are of importance and contain details of his personal or artistic life, political, religious, or other opinions. Some are found only in summarized form.

We have decided to publish full transcriptions of what we consider to be the most important Collins letters, with annotations and linking commentary. Pressures of space have forced us to partly summarize others in a manner which retains the flavour of the originals while omitting redundant matter. Each volume, in addition, contains an Appendix setting out the date, recipient, present source and a one-line summary of all the remaining letters in date order. In this way, the letters in these two volumes should provide researchers with a comprehensive guide to contents and show the diverse nature of Collins' letters. While Volume 1 contains letters dated from 1847 to 1865, Volume 2 contains letters dating from 1866 to the year of his death, 1889.

With two exceptions, Collins' letters appear in the order of their composition. A letter that can be dated only approximately is placed at the earliest date on which the editors believe it could have been written. Letters with the same date are printed in alphabetical order of the addresses, unless the contents dictate an alternative order. Letters to which it has not been possible to assign a day or month are placed at the end of the year. We have made an exception to our chronological order in the case of Collins' corre­spondence with Nannie Wynne, which extended from 1885 to 1888, because it forms such a unique exception to all his other letters. We have therefore put these particular letters in a separate section of their own in Volume 2.

As well as being arranged in a general chronological order, the letters have also been divided into ten groups that reflect major stages in Collins' life. Each of these sections is introduced by a brief summary overview which also gives background sketches of crucial events for the benefit of those who wish to read the letters sequentially. Readers interested in particular corres­pondents or subjects treated in the letters can find access through the various indexes. Each letter is preceded by a brief head-note that identifies the addressee, the date, the manuscript location or other source for the text that follows, and other pertinent information. Collins' letters have been transcribed literally for the sake of fidelity to the originals and in the interest of keeping their special flavour as cultural and historical documents. Nevertheless, some minor regularizations have been made. This is a

xii Preface

diplomatic transcription: for instance, Collins' punctuation is very incon­

sistent and has been regularized. We indicate below exactly which editorial

procedures have been followed in preparing this edition.

1. Ampersands, cancellations, abbreviations, and Collins' often idio­

syncratic spelling, are retained. Uncertain readings, textual cruxes, and

material cancelled by Collins but still legible, and other editorial

insertions, appear in square brackets. Collins' word spacing and line

division are not reproduced, but to conserve space, line divisions in

addresses, headings, and complimentary closes are indicated by a

vertical rule ( I ). 2. Paragraphs are sometimes not clearly indicated in the letters. Collins at

times marked a change of subject by leaving a somewhat larger space

than usual between sentences; sometimes Collins started a fresh line. In

both of these cases, a new paragraph is started in the transcription.

3. Collins' signature is conveyed in its various forms. It has not been

practical, however, to reproduce his inconsistent underlinings of his

name. Sometimes Collins signed his letters with his initials "WC", and

the "C" of his final name is often much longer than his "W": it has not

been possible to reproduce such flourishes. Collins extensively

underlined words or parts of words, including his name, sometimes

using a single line, or double or treble underlining. Double and treble

underlining is noted in the explanatory notes, as is marginal lining

when conceivably useful to the reader. 4. Collins often uses both single and double quotation marks inconsistently

within the same letter. Here, double quotation marks are used

throughout, and punctuation at the conclusion of quotations follows

current conventions. 5. Return addresses at the top of each letter are taken from the letter itself.

If Collins did not write an address, then wherever possible it has been

supplied in square brackets. Complimentary closes are brought to the

right-hand margin; names of recipients, when Collins wrote them in,

appear after his signature. WC used a variety of printed stationery. In

order not to confuse the reader a standard address style has been used.

6. Less familiar foreign words and phrases are translated, in square

brackets, within the text of the letters. Explanatory notes, which for

convenience follow the text of each letter, briefly identify references,

whether these be personal, historical or contextual. We have tried to

identify every person or title mentioned, usually at the first occurrence.

The sources of quotations and literary allusions have similarly been

given when possible. Many names, titles, and allusions have, however,

eluded us, and we shall be grateful to readers for suggestions and

Preface xiii

corrections. In reference to printed books, when no place of publication is given, London is understood as the place of publication.

7. Postmarks and watermarks have been recorded when conceivably useful in any way; for example when they are evidence for the date or address of the letter.