Book Review: The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins by William Clarke

This biography, written by someone married to a descendant of Collins, attempts to decode the author's tangled personal life and get as close to the truth as possible. It's a book of remarkable accuracy, piecing together what we definitely do know about Collins's life with what can be assumed about his two 'families'. In a very readable book, Clarke examines the evidence, makes assumptions where necessary and comes up with a plausible trajectory for Collins's life.

Clarke chooses to start the book with Collins's will and then back-pedal to his parents to 'start' the story as it were. This allows for a certain amount of intrigue over the familial situation and the problems with the bequests to creep in before he turns to examine Collins's father. The chapters covering William Collins and Wilkie's childhood are more interesting than I expected them to be and I very much enjoyed the chapter covering the family's visit to Italy. I suppose one of my criticisms, though, is that it took a while to get to the 'good bits' - the relationships with Caroline Graves and Martha Rudd that shaped his life. However, Collins's early life shaped his reactions to events later on. The book is crafted to give a whole view of the man and it fulfils its objectives.

For Dickens fans, there's a chapter devoted to his relationship with Collins, covering the reason for them drifting apart as well. Then the investigative work begins as Collins's relationships with Caroline Graves and Martha Rudd are pieced together from what evidence there is. It hardly builds up a complete picture of his life - he was far too secretive for that - but it's a compelling picture nonetheless.

Perhaps my favourite chapters are the ones which cover his trip to America in 1873 and, just before that, the details of his stage successes, which I knew very little about. While this book only briefly mentions the plots of the novels, it takes an interest in the stage shows which, of course, involved Collins the man and not just Collins the author.

This book is a must for anybody wanting to unravel the mysteries of Collins's personal life. I also appreciated the look at the lives of both 'families' after he had died, including the inheritance problems. Would recommend for anyone interested in one of the most secretive and yet open authors of the nineteenth century.

Book Review: Sensation Stories by Wilkie Collins

This collection contains ten stories that were originally printed in various periodical publications including Household Words and Bentley's Miscellany. Most of them have been out of print for a century and many of them are very enjoyable. The introduction offers something of a crash course in Wilkie Collins for the uninitiated but I jumped straight into the stories.

A couple are notable for their reliance on supernatural elements. 'The Last Stage Coachman' is an eerie tale of a way of life lost while 'The Clergyman's Confession' builds to a supernatural climax that doesn't feel out of place in the collection. The most well-known story of the book is probably, I would guess, 'A Terribly Strange Bed'. I've certainly come across references to it within my studies and it really is a startling tale about a gambler who stays in a rather unique bed. 'The Diary of Anne Rodway' is an excellent depiction of a woman mourning the loss of her best friend. She refuses to accept a verdict of accidental death and tracks down the man responsible. Dickens apparently loved this story which is recommendation enough.

'Nine O'Clock' is an odd French Revolution piece which combines clairvoyance with more traditional themes. 'The Fourth Poor Traveller' is a nice little detective story which didn't make too much of an impression on me whereas 'The Dream Woman' stuck in my mind for some time after reading it. It involves a dream prophecy of a woman with a knife and shouldn't be read last thing at night! 'A Marriage Tragedy' is probably one of the most developed and intricate pieces, following a widow through the eyes of her servant as she remarries. 'Who Is The Thief?' is another detective story but a humorous one while 'Love's Random Shot' is an odd story about a married man who falls in love with a woman of dubious character. This last story in the collection is the least accomplished of the lot and seems a bizarre choice to conclude the collection on.

However, anyone interested in Wilkie Collins and his fiction could do worse than giving this a go. Some of the stories are gems and all have his distinct trademark style, occasionally tongue-in-cheek but always detailed.

A Little About Edmund Yates

I've been mentioning him in passing for months now. Yates is one of the authors I'm looking at for my thesis, although you can be forgiven for not knowing his fiction. Posterity - if it has remembered him at all - has placed him (justifiably) in the category of journalist. He is better known as a friend of Dickens and enemy of Thackeray than as a writer. Yet he wrote around nineteen novels between 1864 and 1875, serialising them in prominent journals of the day, such as Temple Bar, All the Year Round and Tinsley's Magazine. His first novel, Broken to Harness (1864), was described by Mary Elizabeth Braddon as a domestic novel but from Black Sheep (1867) onwards he was firmly a sensation writer.

His literary connections with people like Dickens were formed partly because of his parents. He was the son of Frederick and Elizabeth Yates, successful and very popular actors. They were on tour in Scotland when he was born. However, his parents were eager that he should not follow them into the theatre life and tried to prevent him getting too involved in that life. Consequently, he started work at the Post Office before his sixteenth birthday. This work would bring him into contact with Trollope, who became a bitter enemy later in life. Yates was also admitted to the Garrick Club aged only seventeen as a mark of respect for his parents. This ended badly when he offended (probably deliberately) Thackeray in a journal and was excluded from the prestigious club. It was likely that the publication of this unflattering article was deliberately timed to coincide with Dickens's announcement of his divorce - as a great friend of Dickens, Yates was probably trying to dilute the public gossip on that day. Thackeray, like Trollope, became a lifelong enemy, all the more upsetting for Yates because he had particularly admired Thackeray in his youth. Yates may have cultivated friendships with many literary powerhouses of the period but he was also prone to arguments with them. This led to a rumour after his death, perpetuated by Trollope and William Tinsley, that Yates was not responsible for writing some of his best novels. Yates's bibliographer, P.D. Edwards, has investigated this to the best of his ability, concluding that, while nothing can be confirmed, it is unlikely that the allegations are true.

The list of journals Yates contributed to - and, in some cases, edited - is almost never-ending. To name a few: Court Journal, Leader, Daily News, Illustrated Times, Morning Star, Comic Times (editor), Temple Bar (editor) and Tinsley's Magazine. He was a prolific journalist but it's also interesting to note that he continued working at the Post Office for twenty-five years. Where he found the time to write his articles and novels is difficult to comprehend. His first completed novel, Broken to Harness, was written out of desperation to fill a hole within Temple Bar after another contributor let him down. It would be followed by popular novels such as Black Sheep, Land at Last (1866) and Wrecked in Port (1869). As was usual with the period, anything remotely sensational was panned by the critics and gobbled up by the public.

To date I've read six of Yates's novel: Broken to Harness, Black Sheep, The Rock Ahead (1868), A Righted Wrong (1870), The Impending Sword (1874) and The Silent Witness (1875). His plots are sometimes flimsy and rely on coincidence and suspension of disbelief. But, then again, so did Wilkie Collins's sensation novels and they have been defined as classics. Yates utilises his journalistic tendency of observation in character sketches and humorous asides and, generally, I find him to be an enjoyable read. What has struck me most in his works is the treatment of so-called 'villains' in a way that inverts the expected conventions. Although allowing the reader to 'live dangerously' by enjoying the exploits of villains was a staple of sensation fiction, Yates took it further by making these villains sympathetic. One character who has stayed with me is that of Harriet Routh from Black Sheep. Her devotion to her husband is the heart of the plot and Yates effectively portrays her as a 'good' woman because of this devotion.

I'd recommend Yates's novels to anyone interested in sensation fiction. Unlike some writers I've come across, I was rarely bored reading his novels. Some are rushed, of course, and some were written in response to publisher demands. But, on the whole, he was very enjoyable to read and his journalistic endeavours are as interesting as his novels. There are plenty of little anecdotes out there about him for anyone willing to look. I'll leave you with a quote from a review of A Righted Wrong, written in the Saturday Review in 1870. Criticisms like this usually mean the novel lacks taste and literary merit but is a decent read nonetheless:

"We cannot honestly congratulate Mr. Yates on the appropriateness of his title, for novels like this are wrongs which there is no righting. The reader slips down in blank boredom between a couple of stools. There is nothing to interest, and there is just as little to amuse... It is simply colourless, and totally devoid of all marked characteristics. It reminds us of nothing so much as an excursion train of badly-coupled carriages, jolting among, without any apparent object, by badly-made loop-lines. The train has a destination certainly, known, we may presume, to the persons who despatch it; and you turn up somehow at the journey's end. But in the meantime the slowness of the pace, the frequent stoppages, and the general uncertainty make the travel martyrdom. Readers of course get tired of it, and get out as they please; but the conscientious critic must yawn and resign himself."

Well... I liked it!

Musings on Sensation

A few weeks ago there was an article on the Jeremy Vine Radio 2 programme asking whether relatives of the gunman Raoul Moat should be allowed to place flowers at the place he died. For those who don't recall, Moat is the man who sparked a manhunt in Northumbria last year after seriously wounding his ex-girlfriend, killing her new partner and blinding a police officer. He committed suicide after a stand-off with police in the village of Rothbury. A terrible case indeed. However, what was striking about the item Jeremy Vine covered was the fact that it came out that people go to the scene of Moat's suicide to recreate his death. Some visitors even use children as young as five to rest on the ground as Moat reportedly did.

I'd imagine most of us feel a sense of disbelief at that. After all, Moat committed some vile acts. It's one thing to allow his family to grieve for him if they so wish; it's quite another to glorify him in death. It strikes me as very nineteenth-century in nature. As much as we criticise the spectacle the Victorians made of crime and murder, we follow the exact same path as they did. Sensation means newspaper sales, webpage hits. More importantly, sensation means attention. For the media outlet, for the reporter, for the little old blogger having their say. I do, by the way, realise the idiocy of me writing a blog post to protest about blog posts.

I'm currently working my way through The Invention of Murder by Judith Flanders. So far it's a book I'd heartily recommend; I only wish I could devote more time to reading it at the moment. One particular case she mentions is the 1823 murder of William Weare. Flanders draws attention to the 'murder tourists' who plucked the hedges where the murdered man may have been dragged almost clean of their leaves. Everybody wanted a sovenir: even Walter Scott recorded going on such a sightseeing excursion.

Nothing's really changed, has it? The murdered dead still hold a fascination for us, as do the names of their killers. I can name many people, criminal and victim, who will be forever linked in the public consciousness. I won't go into them here; I think the sickening cases of the last decade speak for themselves. We will remember them though and perhaps some of us will indulge in these macabre activities to pay homage to them. The moral outrage that's erupted in recent weeks over the phone-hacking scandal is one significant burst of humanity against a tide of ugliness. But, as has been mentioned, if there wasn't an appetite for this ugliness then the News of the World wouldn't have been selling 2.8 million copies a week, would it?

Personally, I feel revulsion towards the Murdoch empire and everyone potentially involved in the hacking. I also cannot understand the motivations of those adults using their children as Raoul Moat substitutes in Rothbury. It seems like we're teaching the next generation to glorify death. I don't want to imagine where that one might lead.

Last year I blogged about the shootings in Cumbria and the ruthlessness of the journalists hounding the public - on the behest of the rest of the public. Somehow we need a balance. What is it within the 'public interest' to know? And what simply provides titilation for the masses? Can we make stuff up to fill that latter criteria so that innocent people aren't caught in the crossfire? Or did I miss a trick - do we just do that already?