Armadale Read Online Free PDF

turmoil as he assembled the novel’s intricate plot. As one of his latest biographers (William M. Clarke) assumes, it was in 1864 that Collins complicated his irregular sexual affairs to an extraordinary degree. For the better part of a decade he had been living with Caroline Graves (the original woman in white). In 1864 she was just under thirty-five years old, and a widow. Caroline was a woman of the world who may, as a common-law wife, have lived for some periods ‘bigamously’ with Collins (her marital status has never been entirely clear). They moved house in 1864 and, after his bohemian fashion, Wilkie played the part of paterfamilias (Caroline had a young daughter, Harriet, by her first husband). Caroline was a sophisticated, cultivated woman who could evidently discourse to Wilkie on his work and hold her own socially with his literary friends.
    Wilkie Collins was not, however, a man to be satisfied with one woman. In 1864 (as Clarke reckons) he met the simple Norfolk girl Martha Rudd (the meeting may be recalled in the Hurle Mere passage
of Armadale
, Book the Third, Chapters VIII –IX). Martha was just nineteen and very unworldly. Eventually (probably in 1867, a year after completing
Armadale)
, Wilkie persuaded her to come to London. In a second household where he reigned as another paterfamilias, she bore him three children. He never made her an honest woman. As Clarke records, Collins contrived to live over the years with both women (apart from a brief and mysterious period during which Caroline was married to a third party). He was buried with Caroline – but Martha evidently had the greater claim to be his common-law wife.
    For all the ingenious investigations and speculations of recent biography, we know tantalizingly little about Collins’s private life. As Clarke observes: ‘How he kept in touch with Martha [after 1864] and why he eventually persuaded her to move to London – and when – is shrouded in mystery. But that she was in the background during Caroline’s continued efforts to persuade Wilkie to marry her is hardly in doubt. One can only marvel at his stamina in keeping his two women reasonably content’. 15 Some of the strains on his stamina can be deduced from
Armadale
. Much of Lydia’s journal, in the central section of the narrative, is obsessed by her fury, as a 35-year-old woman of the world, against the little Norfolk chit, sixteen-year-old Neelie Milroy. Allan Armadale – the great male sexual prize in the novel – is attracted to both women, and at different times proposes marriage to both. Neelie, however, wins him. We have no records whatsoever of Collins’s domestic life, what recriminations were exchanged in the sexual triangle set up after 1864. But it is hard not to think that Lydia’s woman-of-the-world sarcasm at Neelie’s schoolgirlish sexual immaturity and provincial gaucheness do not echo what was said (or what Collins feared would be said) by an enraged Caroline in their parlour at Melcombe Place. ‘Am I handsome enough, to-day?’ Lydia asks her journal. ‘Well, yes’, she answers, ‘handsome enough to be a match for a little dowdy, awkward, freckled creature, who ought to be perched on a form at school, and strapped to a back-board to straighten her crooked shoulders’ (p. 428).
    For all the author’s high hopes,
Armadale
never achieved very great things. Perhaps Collins tried too hard. But the novel was also damaged by the delay in publishing it. During the interval (1863–4) a massive anti-sensation-novel campaign was whipped up. Leading the charge was the
Quarterly Review
, with a broadside denunciation (taking in no less than twenty-four novels) in April 1863, alleging that the countrywas being debauched by the avalanche of trashy sensation novels loosed on it. 16 In exactly the same period, Dickens’s
All the Year Round
lost readers in droves with Charles