Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (2340 page)

A storm was at this time sweeping round the coast, and while at Dover he had written of it to his sister-in-law (7th of November): “The bad weather has not in the least touched us, and the storm was most magnificent at Dover. All the great side of the Lord Warden next the sea had to be emptied, the break of the waves was so prodigious, and the noise so utterly confounding. The sea came in like a great sky of immense clouds, for ever breaking suddenly into furious rain; all kinds of wreck were washed in; among other things, a very pretty brass-bound chest being thrown about like a feather. . . . The unhappy Ostend packet, unable to get in or go back, beat about the Channel all Tuesday night, and until noon yesterday; when I saw her come in, with five men at the wheel, a picture of misery inconceivable. . . . The effect of the readings at Hastings and Dover really seems to have outdone the best usual impression; and at Dover they wouldn’t go, but sat applauding like mad. The most delicate audience I have seen in any provincial place, is Canterbury” (“an intelligent and delightful response in them,” he wrote to his daughter, “like the touch of a beautiful instrument”); “but the audience with the greatest sense of humour certainly is Dover. The people in the stalls set the example of laughing, in the most curiously unreserved way; and they laughed with such really cordial enjoyment, when Squeers read the boys’ letters, that the contagion extended to me. For, one couldn’t hear them without laughing too. . . . So, I am thankful to say, all goes well, and the recompense for the trouble is in every way Great.”

From the opposite quarter of Berwick-on-Tweed he wrote again in the midst of storm. But first his mention of Newcastle, which he had also taken on his way to Edinburgh, reading two nights there, should be given. “At Newcastle, against the very heavy expenses, I made more than a hundred guineas profit. A finer audience there is not in England, and I suppose them to be a specially earnest people; for, while they can laugh till they shake the roof, they have a very unusual sympathy with what is pathetic or passionate. An extraordinary thing occurred on the second night. The room was tremendously crowded and my gas-apparatus fell down. There was a terrible wave among the people for an instant, and God knows what destruction of life a rush to the stairs would have caused. Fortunately a lady in the front of the stalls ran out towards me, exactly in a place where I knew that the whole hall could see her. So I addressed her, laughing, and half-asked and half-ordered her to sit down again; and, in a moment, it was all over. But the men in attendance had such a fearful sense of what might have happened (besides the real danger of Fire) that they positively shook the boards I stood on, with their trembling, when they came up to put things right. I am proud to record that the gas-man’s sentiment, as delivered afterwards, was, ‘The more you want of the master, the more you’ll find in him.’ With which complimentary homage, and with the wind blowing so that I can hardly hear myself write, I conclude.”

It was still blowing, in shape of a gale from the sea, when, an hour before the reading, he wrote from the King’s Arms at Berwick-on-Tweed. “As odd and out of the way a place to be at, it appears to me, as ever was seen! And such a ridiculous room designed for me to read in! An immense Corn Exchange, made of glass and iron, round, dome-topp’d, lofty, utterly absurd for any such purpose, and full of thundering echoes; with a little lofty crow’s nest of a stone gallery, breast high, deep in the wall, into which it was designed to put —
 
—
me!
I instantly struck, of course; and said I would either read in a room attached to this house (a very snug one, capable of holding 500 people), or not at all. Terrified local agents glowered, but fell prostrate, and my men took the primitive accommodation in hand. Ever since, I am alarmed to add, the people (who besought the honour of the visit) have been coming in numbers quite irreconcileable with the appearance of the place, and what is to be the end I do not know. It was poor Arthur Smith’s principle that a town on the way paid the expenses of a long through-journey, and therefore I came.” The Reading paid more than those expenses.

Enthusiastic greeting awaited him in Edinburgh. “We had in the hall exactly double what we had on the first night last time. The success of
Copperfield
was perfectly unexampled. Four great rounds of applause with a burst of cheering at the end, and every point taken in the finest manner.” But this was nothing to what befell on the second night, when, by some mistake of the local agents, the tickets issued were out of proportion to the space available. Writing from Glasgow next day (3rd of December) he described the scene. “Such a pouring of hundreds into a place already full to the throat, such indescribable confusion, such a rending and tearing of dresses, and yet such a scene of good humour on the whole, I never saw the faintest approach to. While I addressed the crowd in the room, G addressed the crowd in the street. Fifty frantic men got up in all parts of the hall and addressed me all at once. Other frantic men made speeches to the walls. The whole B family were borne in on the top of a wave, and landed with their faces against the front of the platform. I read with the platform crammed with people. I got them to lie down upon it, and it was like some impossible tableau or gigantic pic-nic — one pretty girl in full dress, lying on her side all night, holding on to one of the legs of my table! It was the most extraordinary sight. And yet, from the moment I began to the moment of my leaving off, they never missed a point, and they ended with a burst of cheers. . . . The expenditure of lungs and spirits was (as you may suppose) rather great; and to sleep well was out of the question. I am therefore rather fagged to-day; and as the hall in which I read to-night is a large one, I must make my letter a short one. . . . My people were torn to ribbons last night. They have not a hat among them — and scarcely a coat.” He came home for his Christmas rest by way of Manchester, and thus spoke of the reading there on the 14th of December. “
Copperfield
in the Free Trade Hall last Saturday was really a grand scene.”

He was in southern latitudes after Christmas, and on the 8th of January wrote from Torquay: “We are now in the region of small rooms, and therefore this trip will not be as profitable as the long one. I imagine the room here to be very small. Exeter I know, and that is small too. I am very much used up on the whole, for I cannot bear this moist warm climate. It would kill me very soon. And I have now got to the point of taking so much out of myself with
Copperfield
that I might as well do Richard Wardour. . . . This is a very pretty place — a compound of Hastings, Tunbridge Wells, and little bits of the hills about Naples; but I met four respirators as I came up from the station, and three pale curates without them who seemed in a bad way.” They had been not bad omens, however. The success was good, at both Torquay and Exeter; and he closed the month, and this series of the country readings, at the great towns of Liverpool and Chester. “The beautiful St. George’s Hall crowded to excess last night” (28th of January 1862) “and numbers turned away. Brilliant to see when lighted up, and for a reading simply perfect. You remember that a Liverpool audience is usually dull; but they put me on my mettle last night, for I never saw such an audience — no, not even in Edinburgh! The agents (alone, and of course without any reference to ready money at the doors) had taken for the two readings two hundred pounds.” But as the end approached the fatigues had told severely on him. He described himself sleeping horribly, and with head dazed and worn by gas and heat. Rest, before he could resume at the St. James’s Hall in March, was become an absolute necessity.

Two brief extracts from letters of the dates respectively of the 8th of April
and the 28th of June will sufficiently describe the London readings. “The money returns have been quite astounding. Think of £190 a night! The effect of
Copperfield
exceeds all the expectations which its success in the country led me to form. It seems to take people entirely by surprise. If this is not new to you, I have not a word of news. The rain that raineth every day seems to have washed news away or got it under water.” That was in April. In June he wrote: “I finished my readings on Friday night to an enormous hall — nearly £200. The success has been throughout complete. It seems almost suicidal to leave off with the town so full, but I don’t like to depart from my public pledge. A man from Australia is in London ready to pay £10,000 for eight months there. If —
 
— ” It was an If that troubled him for some time, and led to agitating discussion. The civil war having closed America, an increase made upon the just-named offer tempted him to Australia. He tried to familiarize himself with the fancy that he should thus also get new material for observation, and he went so far as to plan an Uncommercial Traveller Upside Down.
It is however very doubtful if such a scheme would have been entertained for a moment, but for the unwonted difficulties of invention that were now found to beset a twenty-number story. Such a story had lately been in his mind, and he had just chosen the title for it (
Our Mutual Friend
); but still he halted and hesitated sorely. “If it was not,” (he wrote on the 5th of October 1862) “for the hope of a gain that would make me more independent of the worst, I could not look the travel and absence and exertion in the face. I know perfectly well beforehand how unspeakably wretched I should be. But these renewed and larger offers tempt me. I can force myself to go aboard a ship, and I can force myself to do at that reading-desk what I have done a hundred times; but whether, with all this unsettled fluctuating distress in my mind, I could force an original book out of it, is another question.” On the 22nd, still striving hard to find reasons to cope with the all but irresistible arguments against any such adventure, which indeed, with everything that then surrounded him, would have been little short of madness, he thus stated his experience of his two circuits of public reading. “Remember that at home here the thing has never missed fire, but invariably does more the second time than it did the first; and also that I have got so used to it, and have worked so hard at it, as to get out of it more than I ever thought was in it for that purpose. I think all the probabilities for such a country as Australia are immense.” The terrible difficulty was that the home argument struck both ways. “If I were to go it would be a penance and a misery, and I dread the thought more than I can possibly express. The domestic life of the Readings is all but intolerable to me when I am away for a few weeks at a time merely, and what would it be —
 
— .” On the other hand it was also a thought of home, far beyond the mere personal loss or gain of it, that made him willing still to risk even so much misery and penance; and he had a fancy that it might be possible to take his eldest daughter with him. “It is useless and needless for me to say what the conflict in my own mind is. How painfully unwilling I am to go, and yet how painfully sensible that perhaps I ought to go — with all the hands upon my skirts that I cannot fail to feel and see there, whenever I look round. It is a struggle of no common sort, as you will suppose, you who know the circumstances of the struggler.” It closed at once when he clearly saw that to take any of his family with him, and make satisfactory arrangement for the rest during such an absence, would be impossible. By this time also he began to find his way to the new story, and better hopes and spirits had returned.

In January 1863 he had taken his daughter and his sister-in-law to Paris, and he read twice at the Embassy in behalf of the British Charitable Fund, the success being such that he consented to read twice again.
He passed his birthday of that year (the 7th of the following month) at Arras. “You will remember me to-day, I know. Thanks for it. An odd birthday, but I am as little out of heart as you would have me be — floored now and then, but coming up again at the call of Time. I wanted to see this town, birthplace of our amiable Sea Green” (Robespierre); “and I find a Grande Place so very remarkable and picturesque that it is astonishing how people miss it.
Here too I found, in a bye-country place just near, a Fair going on, with a Religious Richardson’s in it — Théatre Religieux — ’donnant six fois par jour, l’histoire de la Croix en tableaux vivants, depuis la naissance de notre Seigneur jusqu’à son sepulture.
Aussi l’immolation d’Isaac, par son père Abraham.’ It was just before nightfall when I came upon it; and one of the three wise men was up to his eyes in lamp oil, hanging the moderators. A woman in blue and fleshings (whether an angel or Joseph’s wife I don’t know) was addressing the crowd through an enormous speaking-trumpet; and a very small boy with a property lamb (I leave you to judge who
he
was) was standing on his head on a barrel-organ.” Returning to England by Boulogne in the same year, as he stepped into the Folkestone boat he encountered a friend, Mr. Charles Manby (for, in recording a trait of character so pleasing and honourable, it is not necessary that I should suppress the name), also passing over to England. “Taking leave of Manby was a shabby man of whom I had some remembrance, but whom I could not get into his place in my mind. Noticing when we stood out of the harbour that he was on the brink of the pier, waving his hat in a desolate manner, I said to Manby, ‘Surely I know that man.’ — ’I should think you did,’ said he: ‘Hudson!’ He is living — just living — at Paris, and Manby had brought him on. He said to Manby at parting, ‘I shall not have a good dinner again, till you come back.’ I asked Manby why he stuck to him? He said, Because he (Hudson) had so many people in his power, and had held his peace; and because he (Manby) saw so many Notabilities grand with him now, who were always grovelling for ‘shares’ in the days of his grandeur.”