Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (30 page)

Cobb returned to the US to take up work again with his father. He married his school sweetheart in 1845 and the following year founded a weekly temperance magazine, the
Rechabite
, with his brother Samuel. In its virtuously dry pages appeared his first published story, ‘The Deserter’. At this point Cobb was living in Boston. Much jobbing magazine work followed until, in 1856 – now a well-known tale-spinner – Cobb formed an exclusive arrangement to write fiction for Robert
Bonner’s phenomenally successful
New York Ledger
. His first serial for Bonner was
The Gunmaker of Moscow; or, Vladimir the Monk
. The work was typical of what followed and, thanks to multiple reprintings, the best known of Cobb’s stories. Set in Russia in the sixteenth century, it features a heroic gunmaker, Ruric Nevel, who loves Rosalind Valdai, a ward of the Duke of Tula. The path to happiness is mysteriously helped by a well-disposed black monk of St Michael. The plot is nonsense, but rattles through its ten instalments in the required way, ending with young Ruric winning Rosalind’s hand and a knighthood from a grateful Tsar, whom he has saved.

Over the remaining thirty-one years of his life, Cobb wrote an estimated 130 novels, 834 short stories and 2,304 sketches for Bonner’s paper. His stories were overwhelmingly romances. Ruric is the first of hosts of innumerable buccaneers, swashbucklers, Gothic villains, all doing their best and worst against exotic settings where, typically, wild things lurk. On the strength of his connection with Bonner, and his indefatigable pen, Cobb could move up in the world and was able to indulge his love of tourism. In 1857 he moved to a luxurious house in Norway, Maine, where he was a prominent local citizen, an active freemason – his ‘religion’ in later life – and, as war loomed, a captain in Maine’s volunteer militia. He did not, however, serve in the Civil War – other than as an encourager of others to fight. He continued to write furiously, and doubtless many soldiers on both sides went to their death with a ‘Cobb’ in their knapsack (although, one is told, Victor Hugo’s
Les Misérables
was the most popular novel in both sides’ armies).

At the end of the 1860s, now seriously wealthy, Cobb and his family (how many children he had is unrecorded) moved to a mansion he had built for himself at Hyde Park, Massachusetts. Here it was he died, enriched and beloved by generations of his country’s juvenile readers.

She made goodness attractive.

The Victorians had less leisure time than we do, and the day of rest they did have – the Sabbath – was no friend to popular fiction, hence the dominance of the evangelical novel. Yonge, a Tractarian by doctrine, (i.e. halfway to Rome, but with
both feet planted firmly in Oxford), is by far the best of the genre and a formidable woman of letters in her own right, with over 150 titles to her lifetime credit. She was born, and died, in Otterbourne, near Winchester, a few miles, it is pleasant to recall, from Jane Austen’s grave. Her family were old Devon gentry; her father was a firm-minded churchman and a local magistrate. There were two children, the other being a brother seven years younger than Charlotte. Precocious and virtuous, she became a Sunday school teacher at the age of seven and stuck to the task until she was seventy-eight. She was largely educated by her father ‘who believed in higher education for women but deprecated any liberty for them’.

The formative event in Yonge’s girlhood was the arrival of John Keble, thirty years her senior, as vicar of the neighbouring parish. Keble, a disciple of Newman’s, had left Oriel College (the burning bush of Tractarianism) to make himself practically useful, and help regenerate, England’s Christian ministry. Charlotte was confirmed in 1838 and it seems that receiving the sacrament was one of the momentous experiences of her life – she commemorates it in
The Castle Builders; or, The Deferred Communion
(1854). Keble urged Charlotte to use her literary talent for the propagation of Christian – more specifically Tractarian – instruction. But he warned her against the overt preaching which marred the efforts of other religious novelists. He edited her early work himself, rigorously. Before she committed to print, a conclave of the Yonge family resolved it would be wrong for her to make any profit from fiction, unless that money were turned over to some good cause.

Yonge’s first great success came with
The Heir of Redclyffe
, in 1853. It tells the story of Sir Guy Morville. Byronic and an orphan, he is distracted by wild passions which he gradually learns to subdue to Christian duty. After daring acts of heroism at sea (such scenes are not, it must be said, Yonge’s forte as a narrator), he marries Amy, the woman who has purified him. The novel does not, however, end there. On honeymoon, Guy catches fever and, in a deathbed chapter which became famous in the annals of Victorian fiction, is comforted in his last moments by an Anglican priest, who hears his confession in appropriately High Church style. The story was found universally moving, even by the intelligentsia. William Morris was impressed by it; Rossetti admired it; thousands of soldiers in the Crimea were consoled by it. True to her family decision, Yonge donated the profits to Bishop George Selwyn to buy a schooner for the Melanesian mission to take the Word to the Pacific savage.

Now ‘the Author of
The Heir of Redclyffe
’, Yonge went on to produce a constant stream of novels for adults and juveniles. The best regarded were the multi-volume saga of the May family, beginning with
The Daisy Chain, or, Aspirations
(1856). In 1851 Yonge had become editor of the magazine, the
Monthly Packet
, a post she was to hold for thirty-nine years. As her Preface puts it: ‘it has been said that everyone
forms their own character between the ages of fifteen and five-and-twenty, and this Magazine is meant to be in some degree a help to those who are thus forming it’.

Yonge’s life was passed within strictly parochial boundaries and she never married. But her strong maternal instincts found an outlet in the series of stories she wrote for young children in her ‘Aunt Charlotte’ persona. At the same time she wrote one of the more intelligent novels about the problems of Victorian female adolescence,
The Clever Woman of the Family
(1865). Nor did she shrink from the horrors of old-maidhood in such works as
Hopes and Fears; or, Scenes from the Life of a Spinster
(1860). ‘She made goodness attractive,’ one critic observed. Yonge herself was in no doubt about the use she made of her talent: ‘I have always viewed myself as a sort of instrument for popularising Church views.’ She never made the mistake of ruining that popularity by churchiness, although the Anglican Church was the most important thing in her life.

Her father died in 1854 and she lived with her mother until she died in 1868. Her only brother died in 1892, and her last years were somewhat lonely – although she kept up a lively correspondence with literary acquaintances. She only twice in her life left England: for a short trip to Normandy in 1869 and another to Ireland. She left almost £13,000 on her death – to Christian charities, needless to say.

Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry, make ’em wait.
The serialist’s motto, traditionally attributed to Collins

Born in London, he was the eldest son of William Collins, the landscape painter and Royal Academician, and named after his father’s friend and fellow artist, Sir David Wilkie. The Collins household was bohemian and as a boy Wilkie spent some years with his father in Italy (where he claimed to have lost his virginity at an alarmingly young age) and was educated privately. In 1841, he was articled to work in the establishment of a London tea merchant. The law, it was felt, offered a profession in which a man could write on the side, and in 1846 he entered Lincoln’s Inn, and was called to the Bar in 1851, but never practised. His handwriting, however, benefited from his pupillage – Collins’s manuscripts, most of which have survived, are
among the most legible of the period; and stylistically the most carefully corrected. He had, in intervals from his scrivening, been writing a romance of ancient Rome,
Antonina: or, The fall of Rome
, which was published in 1850. Although it was successful, not least for its gothic descriptions of torture, Collins never wrote another historical novel. His fiction would be as up-to-the-minute as that week’s issue of the
Police Gazette
– which, indeed, supplied some of the details and plot matter of his later ‘sensation’ stories.

Collins’s career took off with ‘A Story of Modern Life’, the sexually superheated melodrama
Basil
(1852). In the Preface, Collins enunciated his doctrine that ‘the Novel and the Play are twin-sisters in the family of Fiction’. This was the essence of his high-impact style – drawn, it is plausibly assumed, from the popular newspapers of the day. To paraphrase Henry James, the imperative guiding his fiction was ‘melodramatise it! melodramatise it!’ In 1851, Collins became acquainted with Dickens. Both men had a passion for drama and for discreet adventuring in Paris. Their minds ran together happily and they collaborated on amateur theatricals. Among higher things, such as generating proceeds for good causes, the activity sanctioned unchaperoned access to young ladies and ‘dressing rooms’. One of the young ladies, Ellen Ternan, would become Dickens’s ‘invisible’ mistress. There may well have been some invisible skeletons of the same kind in Wilkie’s closet.

Collins soon began contributing short stories and non-fiction to Dickens’s weekly magazine,
Household Words
. His first contribution, the horror story, ‘A Terribly Strange Bed’ (1852) – the canopy of the strange bed descends, by silent screw mechanism, to smother the sleeper – is widely anthologised, even more widely imitated, and shows the clear influence of Poe. Collins went on to publish the full-length mystery novels
Hide and Seek
(1854) and
The Dead Secret
(1857). Both used physical handicap in their plots (deaf-and-dumbness in the first; blindness in the second).

In 1856, Collins had been struck at a court hearing, dealing with the Rugeley poisoner, William Palmer, by the narrative possibilities of witnesses’ testimony in the box. The
reportage
technique was brilliantly employed in the narrative of
The Woman in White
(1860). This novel made Collins’s name and largely inspired the 1860s vogue for so-called ‘sensation’ fiction. He followed up with
No Name
(1862), a work which attacked the British laws of inheritance. The
Cornhill Magazine
paid a whopping £5,000 for Collins’s next work,
Armadale
(1866). Only Dickens, he exulted to his mother, had been paid so much.

In 1868, he published
The Moonstone
, which is plausibly regarded as the first detective story proper in English. By this period, Collins’s health was poor and he was chronically self-overdosed with laudanum to relieve the pain of his rheumatic gout. His eyes, one acquaintance reported, were like ‘bags of blood’. He claimed to have
written portions of
The Moonstone
in a condition of authorial somnambulism. Fame brought with it a new sense of public responsibility.
Man and Wife
(1870) heralds an overtly propagandistic phase of Collins’s career. Not all his readers welcomed it. ‘What brought Wilkie’s genius nigh perdition?’ asked the poet Swinburne, answering, rhymingly, ‘some demon whispered “Wilkie, have a mission”.’ A ‘fiction founded on facts’,
Man and Wife
protests against the British marriage laws.
Poor Miss Finch
(1872) has another plot drawing on the author’s obsessive interest in blindness. The heroine has her sight restored, but actually desires the loss of it again. An improbable sub-plot, involving her future husband’s turning blue, is latched onto this paradox.

Collins continued to propagandise in
The New Magdalen
(1873), whose heroine, Mercy Merrick, is a fallen woman who goes as a nurse to the Franco-Prussian War, where she is shot and left for dead. Mercy recovers and changes identities with another, supposedly dead woman, Grace Roseberry, leading to inevitable complications and final redemption at the hands of an idealistic clergyman. The novel was successfully dramatised, as were many of Collins’s later works. His reputation rose extraordinarily high in the 1870s, although the writing showed clear signs of fraying. One looks in vain for anything quite as thrilling as the opening scene of
The Woman in White
in which the woman herself (spectral or actual?) appears to an electrified Walter Hartright:

I had now arrived at that particular point of my walk where four roads met – the road to Hampstead, along which I had returned, the road to Finchley, the road to West End, and the road back to London. I had mechanically turned in this latter direction, and was strolling along the lonely high-road – idly wondering, I remember, what the Cumberland young ladies would look like – when, in one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me.

I turned on the instant, with my fingers tightening round the handle of my stick.