Armadale Read Online Free PDF Page B

Reade’s
Hard Cash
(3,000 as the author recorded) – a novel inevitably partnered in the public mind with
Armadale
. Dickens was impelled to publish a statement with Reade’s last number, dissociating his journal from
Hard Cash
. 17 Circulation figures recorded by Smith show that, after a lift in November 1864,
Armadale
lost during its serial run about the same number of subscribers to the
Cornhill Magazine
as
Hard Cash
had lost Dickens.
    George Smith, who was not a courageous publisher (even if he had published
Jane Eyre
fifteen years before), capitulated by serializing alongside
Armadale
two ‘domestic’ novels – Trollope’s
The Claverings
and Mrs Gaskell’s idyll
Wives and Daughters
. In Latin, as Reade pointed out, domestic meant ‘tame’, and these were excessively innocuous works that studiously avoided what Reade (in
Hard Cash)
called ‘the dark places of England’. Collins himself was affected by the furore, and despite brave talk in his preface about ‘Clap trap morality’ took care to emphasize the ‘Christian morality’ of the book. In the body of the narrative, Collins ceded the moral centre to the excruciatingly preachy Decimus Brock. The novel ends with an invocation of the saintly Brock by Ozias as he addresses Allan in the happy-ever-after of his marriage to Neelie: – ‘God is all-merciful, God is all-Wise. In those words, your dear old friend once wrote to me. In that faith, I can look back without murmuring at the years that are past, and can look on without doubting to the years that are to come’ (p.677). This priggishness (out of character in both Ozias and Wilkie) was a sop to the moral critics yapping at Collins’s heels. They were not mollified:
Armadale
was mauled by the critics. Smith did not use Collins again (nor did he ever earn as much for any one novel again). In his next major piece of writing Collins avoided moral provocation and perfected the machinery of the detective novel, with his brilliant (and morally inoffensive) whodunnit,
The Moonstone
.
    The main flaw in
Armadale
for many readers is its obtrusive ‘theme’. George Eliot had made ‘determinism’ a fashionable topic for novelists in
Adam Bede
(1859), where in Chapter Sixteen Arthur Donnithorne and the Reverend Irwine debate whether a man has freedom of choice in his moral decisions, or whether he is nothing more than an automaton. This concern was, in part, a function of the growing sophistication of fiction as an explanatory tool for human behaviour. Novelists like Eliot and Collins could explain so much of motive and the influence of circumstance that their characters no longer seemed free agents – at least to the reader privileged with the narrator’s god-like insight.
    There are, however, deeper and less clear-cut aspects to the fatality theme in
Armadale
. The novel communicates a primitive sense of doom which one is tempted to connect with the sabbatarianism and religious austerity of Wilkie’s father – a dominant influence on his sons’ lives. William Collins exuded an atmosphere of imminent damnation for sinners. He was, for instance, ‘convinced that both the outbreak of cholera and the Reform Bill riots of 1831 were God’s judgement’. 18 Kenneth Robinson plausibly suggests that Wilkie’s character (and lifelong bohemianism) was largely formed in opposition to his father’s religiosity. One suspects he may have been haunted by William Collins’s posthumous condemnation. Wilkie embarked on an elaborate depiction of Ozias’s Calvinist stepfather in the character of Alexander Neal which he subsequently deleted (see Book the First, Chapter II , note 5 ). It might have made the novel’s moral design clearer had he kept it in.
    When we encounter Ozias Midwinter for the first time he carries with him in his knapsack two volumes: the plays of Sophocles and Goethe’s
Faust
. They