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lascivious, rich, degenerate and corrupt. He steals the hero’s intended wife and (black devil that he is) abuses her unspeakably. In the last chapters he stands for Parliament, under the slogan ‘Am I not a man and a brudder?’ The opposition between Philip and Woolcomb is virulently racist and politically weighted in the context of the civil war raging in America in the early 1860s. Thackeray’s position on black Americans (whom he had seen in his 1852 and 1858 trips) was unequivocal and obnoxious: ‘Sambo is not my man and brother’, he frankly declared. His allusion, of course, is to the abolitionists’ slogan, ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ In his political sympathies Thackeray was strongly and virulently pro-South and anti-abolitionist. His prejudices were prominently expressed in the
Cornhill Magazine
, which he edited until March 1862 and to which he was the star contributor until his death at Christmas 1863. 13
    Ozias Midwinter has a Creole mother (whose first question, on learning that her husband loved someone before herself, is ‘Was she a fair woman – or dark, like me?’ (p. 31)). By setting the prelude in 1832 (the year before the emancipation of West Indian blacks), Collins ostentatiously stressed the point that Ozias is a child of slavery. On a number of occasions, the reader is reminded of Ozias’s ‘negro’ appearance – particularly when he is aroused and the blood rushes to his face. His ‘tawny’ complexion is also the mark of Cain – Ozias is the son of a murderer and if he has racially tainted blood on one side of his parentage he has criminally tainted blood on the other. There is a telling episode, shortly after Ozias’s first appearance in the novel, in which the Reverend Brock looks at him and is consumed with pathological disgust:
    His shaven head, tied up roughly in an old yellow silk handkerchief; his tawny, haggard cheeks; his bright brown eyes, preter-naturally large and wild; his tangled black beard; his long supple, sinewy fingers, wasted by suffering, till they looked like claws…If this man was honest, his eyes showed a singular perversity in looking away and denying it. Possibly they were affected in some degree by a nervous restlessness in his organization, which appeared to pervade every fibre in his lean, lithe body. The rector’s healthy Anglo-Saxon flesh crept responsively at every casual movement of the usher’s supple brown fingers, and every passing distortion of the usher’s haggard yellow face. (p. 64)
    Brock’s first inclination is to cast out this unclean, degenerate, mixed-breed thing. But eventually he comes to love, admire and trust Ozias. When the clergyman dies, it is to the mulatto’s care that he leaves Allan. On his part, the fair-haired, blue-eyed Allan comes to see Ozias as his brother. There is a telling moment when the Creole and the Anglo-Saxon clasp hands on board the ominous ship
(La Grace de Dieu)
where the primal murder of one father by another took place, eighteen years before. ‘The cruel time is coming,’ Ozias warns Allan, ‘when we shall rue the day we ever met. Shake hands, brother, on the edge of the precipice – shake hands while we are brothers still’ (p. 126).
    It is inconceivable that a novelist as aware as Collins would not know how this fraternal embrace of black and white as equals would be read in Civil War America – more particularly in the North (where
Armadale
was serialized in
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
). 14 In fact, the novel went down very well in the States – better than in Britain, where it was something of a sales flop. In dramatic versions of
Armadale
, Collins removed the negroid characteristics of Ozias, evidently feeling that the racial plot was not to English tastes.
    There are interesting things happening on the edges
of Armadale
. Not least, Collins’s own vexed private life was in