This electronic material is under copyright protection and is provided to a single recipient for review purposes only. Review Copy THE EVIL GENIUS Review Copy This page intentionally left blank Review Copy THE EVIL GENIUS Wilkie Collins Edited by Graham Law broadview literary texts Review Copy ©1994 Broadview Press Ltd. Reprinted 1995, 1998 All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher — or in the case of photocopying, a licence from CANCOPY (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency) 6 Adelaide Street East, Suite 900, Toronto, Ontario M5C IH6 — is an infringement of the copyright law. Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Collins, Wilkie, 1824-1889 The evil genius (Broadview literary texts) ISBN 1-55111-017-2 I. Law, Graham. II. Title. III. Series. PR4494.E85 1994 823'.88 094-930533-7 Broadview Press Ltd., is an independent, international publishing house, incorporated in 1985. North America: Post Office Box 1243, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada K9J 7115 3576 California Road, Orchard Park, NY 14127 TEL: (705) 743-8990; FAX: (705) 743-8353; E-MAIL: [email protected] United Kingdom: Turpin Distribution Services Ltd., Blackhorse Rd., Letchworth, Hertfordshire sc6 IHN TEL: (1462) 672555; FAX: (1462) 480947; E-MAIL: [email protected] Australia: St. Clair Press, P.O. Box 287, Rozelle, NSW 2039 TEL: (02) 818-1942; FAX: (02) 418-1923 www.broadviewpress.com Broadview Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council, and the Ministry of Canadian Heritage. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. PRINTED IN CANADA Review Copy Contents Introduction 7 Footnotes 26 A Note on the Text 31 Select Bibliography 33 William Wilkie Collins: A Brief Chronology 36 THE EVIL GENIUS 43 Appendix: Contemporary Documents 353 Explanatory Notes 369 Review Copy This page intentionally left blank Review Copy Introduction TO BORROW A PHRASE FROM ROBERT BROWNING'S BISHOP Blougram, Wilkie Collins consistently occupied "the danger- ous edge of things" in Victorian life and letters.1 His family life straddled the bourgeois and the bohemian: he was born into a pious Tory household, but refused to marry; he fre- quented prostitutes in his youth, kept two mistresses concur- rently in his maturity, and left three illegitimate children at his death; yet he seems to have successfully concealed these facts from his mother, many of his acquaintances, and most of his readers. His socio-political ideas were a curious combi- nation of the radical and the conservative: frequently plead- ing the cause of "fallen" women, he was less sympathetic to bourgeois women's demands for the right to vote and to en- ter the professions; his spirited campaigns against contempo- rary abuses sometimes shifted towards a reactionary railing against the spirit of the time. A contemporary of both Char- les Dickens and Henry James, his writing career bears witness to the opening up of the divide between "serious" and "popu- lar" culture: the genre he was most drawn to, the sensational romance, was often disparaged as "female"; he was torn be- tween the roles of artist and journalist, between the demands of the bourgeois literary establishment and those of the mass reading public. On his death, when proposals were made for the writer to be commemorated in Westminster Abbey, ob- jections were raised on both moral and literary grounds, and instead a "Wilkie Collins Memorial Library of Fiction" was es- tablished at the People's Palace in East London.2 For much of the twentieth century, Collins's rather mar- ginal literary reputation rested on the claims of The Woman in White to be among the best Victorian mystery novels, and of The Moonstone to be the first detective novel, while his re- maining twenty or so novels, dozen or so plays, half a dozen collections of stories, and several works of non-fiction were virtually ignored. In the last decade or so, however, his writ- INTRODUGTION 7 Review Copy ing career as a whole has started to come back into focus, in- itially because of the renewed interest in the sensation novels of the 1860s from within Women's Studies,3 and latterly in as- sociation with the centenary of his death in 1989, an occasion which helped to generate two new biographies,4 four book- length critical works,5 and at least half-a-dozen new editions of novels that had long been difficult to obtain. Perhaps the same dangerous, slippery qualities of life and work which re- pelled many of his contemporaries are what now make him attractive. For a long time the development of Collins's fiction after The Moonstone tended to be seen as a steady degeneration to be explained in personal terms: the gradual loss of imagina- tive power due to the effects of illness and drugs, and/or an increasing didacticism following the death of Dickens and his replacement as Collins's literary mentor by Charles Reade. While recent reappraisals of Collins's work have not ques- tioned the pre-eminence of the novels of the 1860s, they have shown convincingly that any subsequent decline is remark- ably uneven, and requires explanation in socio-cultural as well as personal terms. In fact the three novels of the mid- 1880s, Heart and Science, I Say No, and The Evil Genius, in terms of both variety of form (sensation, mystery, and comic realism, respectively) and narrative energy, represent some- thing of a high-point among the later fiction. The Evil Genius centers on a seemingly ideal bourgeois marriage which breaks down when the husband becomes in- fatuated with the vulnerable young woman he recruits as a governess for his daughter. After their separation, the wife petitions for a divorce to secure custody of the daughter. The affair between the husband and the governess does not last; the prospective second marriage of the woman to a philan- thropist comes to nothing; and the novel ends with the daughter contriving the reconciliation and remarriage of the divorced couple. The title refers specifically not to the gov- erness but to the wife's mother, as repetitions of the phrase in the text make clear (pp.159, 169, 253, 308, & 349). But the usage is consistently comic or ironic, and the mother-in-law is not quite the heavy villain of stage melodrama; instead the narrative conducts a sustained but inconclusive debate as to 8 INTRODUCTION Review Copy what extent the vicissitudes of the marriage can be assigned to private acts or public policy, providence or pure chance. The principle interest of the novel, in the context of Col- lins's literary career as a whole, is that it deals with a theme similar to that of The Woman in White, a woman's struggle to resist legal and ideological subjection, but in a strikingly dis- similar form: mystery and melodrama are rejected in favour of comedy and realism; multiple plotting and multiple narra- tion are largely replaced by the narrative economies of the stage play; psychological depth is introduced not through symbolism but through dialogue. While it would be naive to argue that no loss of complexity was involved in this transfor- mation, it seems equally unwise to dismiss the narrative and social interest of the later novel entirely on this count. The rest of this introduction will be given over to a description of the combination of preoccupations and constraints, both pri- vate and public, which help to shape the themes and forms of The Evil Genius, under three headings: Law; Women and Fam- ily, and Writing, Voice and Print. LAW Collins occupied an ambiguous position in relation to the law, neither fully insider nor outsider. He entered Lincoln's Inn in 1846 and was called to the bar in 1851; but in the in- terim he wrote his first three books, and seems to have done little to prepare himself for the legal profession beyond con- suming the requisite number of dinners. In later life he was only to call himself a barrister in the part of an alias used to conceal an irregular liaison.6 And yet his narratives consis- tently hinge on the provisions and applications of the law, and reveal a precise knowledge of legal detail and an affinity with legal method and argument. At the beginning of The Woman in White he compares his preferred mode of multiple narration, in both form and function, to the operation of a court of law: ... the story here presented will be told by more than one pen, as the story of an offence against the laws is told in Court by more than one witness — with the INTRODUCTION 9