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What Maisie Knew

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What Maisie Knew (1897) comes from the late period of Henry James’ long and prolific career as a novelist, and yet it is written in a relatively straightforward manner compared with The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). The narrative is split into mercifully short chapters, and since the protagonist is a young girl, the first part of the book at least is psychologically uncomplicated – by James’ standards. It’s also (rather unusually) quite funny.

Henry James portrait

Henry James – by John Singer Sargeant

As a subject, or as James would call it a donnée, the story is quite ahead of its time. It deals with what we would now call a ‘dysfunctional family’. Two adults behave appallingly both to each other and to their only child. Maisie is only six years old when the story begins, and she has to endure neglect of both a physical and emotional kind. She never receives any schooling – though that would not be altogether unusual for a girl at the end of the nineteenth century (even Virginia Woolf didn’t go to school) – and she is protected only by the presence of paid governesses.

The triumph of the novel is to persuade us that as she becomes older, Masie begins to understand what is happening around her and develops ‘a moral sense’. She is an entirely passive heroine – rather like Fanny Price in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. She can only sit tight and watch as adults manoeuvre around her, manipulating her vulnerability for their own ends. But eventually, as she becomes older (her age is always left vague) she is confronted with a situation in which she is able to make a moral choice which reveals her inner maturity.

What Maisie Knew – critical commentary

Social conventions

There are a number of forces at work in this novel that stem from conventions in the upper echelons of society in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. These might be difficult to understand for contemporary readers.

A married couple were free to do more or less what they wished – so long as the appearance of respectability was maintained. Married men could absent themselves from home on the pretext that they were visiting friends or staying at their club. A married woman could entertain single men in her home – but only if there were others present – either other single men, or in the case of What Masie Knew if a child was present, acting as a sort of under-age chaperone.

Most of these conventions were designed to preserve power structures and concentrations of wealth in the form of both capital and income. People marrying outside (that is beneath) their social class were endangering the accumulation of capital via inheritance. To marry into a higher class was desirable but rare.

Many of James’s novels are concerned with this connection between money and social prestige. This is often presented in the form of newly rich Americans seeking to establish social prestige with Europeans who have social caché but no money (The Golden Bowl). In Masie figures such as Mr Perriam and the ‘Countess’ perform this role. Mr Perriam is viewed with suspicion because he is newly rich – and might even be Jewish. The American ‘Countess’ (who is of course not a countess) is very rich but is black and is therefore unacceptable.

But this social phenomenon is complicated by the fact that there is also a great deal of prestige attached to the source of the capital. To marry into an old family with centuries of inherited wealth as the acme of success. But to accumulate capital via commerce or trade was simply not acceptable – unless of course the capital accumulation was so enormous as to either pay off the debts or buy a way into the upper class.

Many of James’s novels have these conventions as a basis of their morality, but they are unstated, as are many ideological constructs in society. They are taken for granted, as if part of the ‘natural’ order of things. The characters of his novels must know these conventions to survive socially, and part of the interest in Masie’s case is that being very young, she is only in the very early stages of developing this understanding.

Marriage

The novel sheds a very negative light on the state of marriage. It begins with the divorce of Beale Farange and Ida, who go on to despise each other. They then re-marry – both of them to younger people than themselves. These second marriages are no more successful than the first. Beale Farange marries Miss Overmore, but eventually spends most of his time away from the family house – in clubs (the Chrysanthemum) at Cowes yachting week, and eventually as the paid lover of the black American ‘Countess’. Ida has a succession of lovers (a City broker who goes bust, the Captain, and Lord Eric) and when last seen she is threatening to go abroad. Even Sir Claude’s relationship with Miss Overmore/Mrs Beale eventually turns sour.

It is also interesting to note the subtle relationship between geography and morals. In the late nineteenth century it was quite common for people (usually males) to travel outside Britain to indulge in what is today called sexual tourism. Once the physical border of the Channel had been crossed, the social and psychological landscape changed. Unconventional social and sexual relations were tolerated – partly because of less puritanical mores, and partly because any deviant behaviour was being conducted beyond the sharp-eyed scrutiny of British society.

Ida Farange, possibly the most raffish of the characters, goes to Florence and ‘picks up’ a gentleman en route; and when Sir Claude takes Maisie away to try and persuade her to live with him and Mrs Beale, they go to Boulogne. He proposes that they live together in the south of France, and even when Maisie is trying to persuade Sir Claude to accept her alone on her own terms, it is to Paris that she wants him to take her. They almost do make that journey, narrowly missing the train by just a few moments.

Point of view

James very cleverly gives the impression that he is telling the story from Maisie’s point of view. There are no scenes in which she is not present for instance, and the separate chapters invariably begin with an account of events as Maisie perceives them. But in fact the controlling point of view is that of James himself. From time to time he shows his hand as first person narrator – “We have already learned … on a certain occasion hereafter to be described … in the manner I have mentioned”.

She met at present no demand whatever of her obligation, she simply plunged, to avoid it, deeper into the company of Sir Claude. She saw nothing that she had seen hitherto – no touch in the foreign picture that had at first been always before her. The only touch was that of Sir Claude’s hand, and to feel her own in it was her mute resistance to time. She went about as sightlessly as if he had been leading her blindfold. If they were afraid of themselves it was themselves they would find at the inn.

The young girl is foregrounded, the detail of the hand is one she might realistically notice – but the controlling vision here is that of an outsider – James himself commenting on her position and that of her stepfather.

Motifs

Careful readers will have no difficulty recognising the repeated motifs that occur in the novel. Whenever Beale Farange makes an appearance in the narrative he is described in terms of his teeth. In Ida’s case it is her over-use of jewellery and cosmetics – her “huge painted eyes … like Japanese lanterns”. In Sir Claude’s case it is his addiction to cigarettes. After repeatedly blowing smoke into Masie’s face throughout the novel, there is one scene where James describes them as smoking together – in the plural. “After dinner she smoked with her friend – for that was exactly what she felt she did … they stood smoking together under the stars”.

What Masie Knew – study resources

What Maisie Knew What Maisie Knew – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

What Maisie Knew What Maisie Knew – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

What Maisie Knew What Maisie Knew – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

What Maisie Knew What Maisie Knew – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

What Maisie Knew What Maisie Knew – Dover Thrift – Amazon UK

What Maisie Knew What Maisie Knew – Dover Thrift – Amazon US

What Maisie Knew What Maisie Knew – Kindle eBook (includes 60 James books for £2.23)

What Maisie Knew What Maisie Knew – eBook version at Project Gutenberg

What Maisie Knew What Maisie Knew – Audio book edition at LibriVox

What Maisie Knew What Maisie Knew – 2012 film version – Amazon UK

What Maisie Knew What Maisie Knew – 2012 film version – Amazon US

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

What Maisie Knew Henry James – biographical notes

What Maisie Knew Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Pointer Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

What Masie Knew

What Maisie Knew – plot summary

Maisie is the young daughter of louche and divorced parents Beale and Ida Farange. She is looked after by two governesses – the attractive Miss Overmore at her father’s house and the unattractive Mrs Wix at her mother’s house in six monthly intervals. Both parents use Masie as a bargaining counter and neglect her emotionally whilst in pursuit of their own self-indulgent ends and their psychological war games against each other.

What Masie KnewBoth parents subsequently re-marry, to people much younger than themselves. Ida’s marriage to Sir Claude quickly deteriorates, and Ida takes up with other men, leaving Sir Claude to look after the interests of Masie and Mrs Wix.

Beale Farange meanwhile marries Miss Overmore (who becomes Mrs Beale) but spends most of his time living away from home. Sir Claude establishes a romantic liaison with Mrs Beale which enables him to place Maisie back in her (absent) father’s household.

Maisie is used (and abused) by most of these adults as a screen of respectability for conducting liaisons with other people. Sir Claude alone tries to maintain a degree of social respectability that will leave Maisie protected, but it becomes apparent that he is in thrall to Mrs Beale.

When both her natural parents abandon her completely, Sir Claude takes Maisie to France, and Mrs Wix follows. They are then joined by Mrs Beale. Maisie is confronted with the choice of living with Sir Claude and Mrs Beale (who are not married to each other) in the south of France, or staying with Mrs Wix in an indefinite future. Maisie is deeply enamoured with Sir Claude, but she chooses Mrs Wix, and the two of them return to England.

Principal characters
Beale Farange tall, handsome, lounge lizard – Maisie’s father
Ida Farange tall, attractive, billiard player – Maisie’s mother
Maisie Farange six years old at the start of the novel, a teenager at the end
Moddle Masie’s nurse at the original Farange household
Miss Overmore Maisie’s attractive first governess, later to become Mrs Beale Farange
Mrs Wix cross-eyed and unfashionable – Maisie’s governess at Ida’s
Clara Matilda Mrs Wix’s (possibly imaginary) dead daughter
Lisette Maisie’s french doll at Ida’s
Susan Ash an under-housemaid at Beale Farange’s
Sir Claude handsome, young, Ida’s second husband
Mr Perriam rich City businessman, a suitor of Ida’s who goes bust
Lord Eric a suitor of Ida’s who is mentioned but never appears in the novel
The Captain sun-tanned and short-lived suitor of Ida’s
The ‘Countess’ rich but ugly black woman who pays Beale Farange to be her lover

Henry James's Study

Henry James’s study

Literary criticism

Martha Banta, ‘The Quality of Experience in What Maisie ‘Knew, New England Quarterly, 42 (Dec 1969) 483-510.

Jean Frantz Blackall, ‘Moral Geography in What Maisie Knew‘, University of Toronto Quarterly, 48 (1978) 130-148.

Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood, London: Penguin, 1967.

Randall Craig, ‘”Reading the Unspoken into the Spoken”: Interpreting What Maisie Knew‘ Henry James Review, 2/3 (1981), 204-212.

Lloyd Davis, Sexuality and Textuality: Reading Through the Virginal, New York, 1988.

Barbara Eckstein, ‘Unsquaring the Squared Route of What Maisie Knew‘, Henry James Review, 5/3 (1984), 207-215

James W. Gargano, ‘What Maisie Knew: The Evolution of a Moral Sense’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 16 (June 1961), 33-46.

F.R.Leavis, ‘What Maisie Knew: A Disagreement’, in Anna Karenina and Other Essays, London, 1967.

Juliet Mitchell, ‘What Masie Knew: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl’, in John Goode (ed), The Air of Reality: New Essays on Henry James, London, 1973.

Muriel Shine, The Fictional Children of Henry James< Chapel Hill, NC, 1969.

Harris W. Wilson, ‘What Did Maisie Know?’ College English, 17 (February 1956), 279-282.

Ward S. Worden, ‘A Cut Version of What Maisie ‘Knew, American Literature, 24/4 (September 1953), 493-504.

Further reading

Biographical

Red button Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James at Work, University of Michigan Press, 2007.

Red button F.W. Dupee, Henry James: Autobiography, Princeton University Press, 1983.

Red button Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life, HarperCollins, 1985.

Red button Philip Horne (ed), Henry James: A Life in Letters, Viking/Allen Lane, 1999.

Red button Henry James, The Letters of Henry James, Adamant Media Corporation, 2001.

Red button Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999

Red button F.O. Matthieson (ed), The Notebooks of Henry James, Oxford University Press, 1988.

Critical commentary

Red button Elizabeth Allen, A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James London: Macmillan Press, 1983.

Red button Ian F.A. Bell, Henry James and the Past, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993.

Red button Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1993.

Red button Harold Bloom (ed), Modern Critical Views: Henry James, Chelsea House Publishers, 1991.

Red button Kirstin Boudreau, Henry James’s Narrative Technique, Macmillan, 2010.

Red button J. Donald Crowley and Richard A. Hocks (eds), The Wings of the Dove, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978.

Red button Victoria Coulson, Henry James, Women and Realism, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Red button Daniel Mark Fogel, A Companion to Henry James Studies, Greenwood Press, 1993.

Red button Virginia C. Fowler, Henry James’s American Girl: The Embroidery on the Canvas, Madison (Wis): University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

Red button Jonathan Freedman, The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Red button Judith Fryer, The Faces of Eve: Women in the Nineteenth Century American Novel, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976

Red button Roger Gard (ed), Henry James: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1968.

Red button Tessa Hadley, Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Red button Barbara Hardy, Henry James: The Later Writing (Writers & Their Work), Northcote House Publishers, 1996.

Red button Richard A. Hocks, Henry James: A study of the short fiction, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1990.

Red button Donatella Izzo, Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James, University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Red button Colin Meissner, Henry James and the Language of Experience, Cambridge University Press, 2009

Red button John Pearson (ed), The Prefaces of Henry James, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

Red button Richard Poirer, The Comic Sense of Henry James, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Red button Hugh Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Red button Merle A. Williams, Henry James and the Philosophical Novel, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Red button Judith Woolf, Henry James: The Major Novels, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Red button Ruth Yeazell (ed), Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, Longmans, 1994.

Other works by Henry James

Henry James The Aspern PapersThe Aspern Papers (1888) is a psychological drama set in Venice which centres on the tussle for control of a great writer’s correspondence. An elderly lady, ex-lover of the writer, seeks a husband for her daughter. But the potential purchaser of the papers is a dedicated bachelor. Money is also at stake – but of course not discussed overtly. There is a refined battle of wills between them. Who will win in the end? As usual, James keeps the reader guessing. The novella is a masterpiece of subtle narration, with an ironic twist in its outcome. This collection of stories also includes three of his accomplished long short stories – The Private Life, The Middle Years, and The Death of the Lion.
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book at Amazon UK
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book at Amazon US

 

Henry James The Spoils of PoyntonThe Spoils of Poynton (1896) is a short novel which centres on the contents of a country house, and the question of who is the most desirable person to inherit it via marriage. The owner Mrs Gereth is being forced to leave her home to make way for her son and his greedy and uncultured fiancee. Mrs Gereth develops a subtle plan to take as many of the house’s priceless furnishings with her as possible. But things do not go quite according to plan. There are some very witty social ironies, and a contest of wills which matches nouveau-riche greed against high principles. There’s also a spectacular finale in which nobody wins out.
Henry James The Spoils of Poynton Buy the book at Amazon UK
Henry James The Spoils of Poynton Buy the book at Amazon US

 

Henry James Daisy MillerDaisy Miller (1879) is a key story from James’s early phase in which a spirited young American woman travels to Europe with her wealthy but commonplace mother. Daisy’s innocence and her audacity challenge social conventions, and she seems to be compromising her reputation. But when she later dies in Rome the reader is invited to see the outcome as a powerful sense of a great lost potential. This novella is a great study in understatement and symbolic power.
Henry James Daisy Miller Buy the book at Amazon UK
Henry James Daisy Miller Buy the book at Amazon US

Henry James – web links

Henry James web links Henry James at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides, tutorials on the Complete Tales, book reviews. bibliographies, and web links.

Henry James web links The Complete Works
Sixty books in one 13.5 MB Kindle eBook download for £1.92 at Amazon.co.uk. The complete novels, stories, travel writing, and prefaces. Also includes his autobiographies, plays, and literary criticism – with illustrations.

Henry James web links The Ladder – a Henry James website
A collection of eTexts of the tales, novels, plays, and prefaces – with links to available free eTexts at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

Red button A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
Japanese-based online research tool that locates the use of any word or phrase in context. Find that illusive quotable phrase.

Henry James web links The Henry James Resource Center
A web site with biography, bibliographies, adaptations, archival resources, suggested reading, and recent scholarship.

Henry James web links Online Books Page
A collection of online texts, including novels, stories, travel writing, literary criticism, and letters.

Henry James web links Henry James at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of eTexts, available in a variety of eBook formats.

Henry James web links The Complete Letters
Archive of the complete correspondence (1855-1878) work in progress – published by the University of Nebraska Press.

Henry James web links The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.

Henry James web links Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

Henry James web links Henry James on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of James’s novels and stories for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production features, film reviews, box office, and even quizzes.

© Roy Johnson 2010

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Wilkie Collins biography

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biography, study resources, and web links

Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) was one of the best-selling authors of the nineteenth century. He was a friend of Charles Dickens, and like his more famous contemporary he maximised his commercial success by publishing in all available formats. His work appeared as newspaper journalism, short stories, magazine serials, novels in three volume format, and adaptations for the stage. Even in his private life he was similarly prolific. He supported two separate families who lived round the corner from each other.

Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins was born in London in 1824. His father William was a reasonably successful painter – a member of the Royal Academy – but ‘constitutionally insecure and self-critical’. His mother Harriet was a governess and proved to be the principal agent in Wilkie’s early education.

The family lived in Cavendish Street and took their summer holidays in what was then the outlying rural area of Hampstead. This was a location favoured by artists, and family friends included the painter Constable and the poet and ‘philosopher’ Coleridge.

Wilkie was educated largely by his mother, but in 1836 when he was an impressionable twelve year old the whole family went on a two year tour of Italy. This included visits to museums, mixing with English expatriate artists in Rome, and Collins’ first erotic adventure when he became enraptured by a married woman. The tour also took in Naples, Sorrento, Bologna, and Venice – all the time pursued by the threat of cholera.

Collins was fourteen before he entered formal education – a boarding school in Highbury where he was bullied and regarded by staff as a model bad student. He was glad to leave at seventeen, when his father found him a virtually unpaid job as a clerk.

By the time he was twenty he had begun placing short stories and sketches in various magazines – almost all anonymously. He also made the first of many visits to Paris, where he indulged his taste for wine, good food, and the habits of a flaneur.

He switched from working as a clerk to studying law at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and began Antonina, a historical novel. However, when his father died in 1847, he dropped everything for six months and wrote a paternal biography – which was dedicated to family friend Sir Robert Peel. The book was well reviewed and even a modest commercial success.

Collins developed an interest in the theatre, and through his work in amateur productions he eventually came into contact with Charles Dickens. The two got on very well together. Dickens appreciated Wilkie’s hard work and professional attitude to writing: Wilkie enjoyed the older man’s appetite for adventurism – fuelled by the disappointment of his marriage. They went on late night sorties into the underworld of Soho and the East End.

He became active as a journalist, writing for the radical newspaper The Leader founded by George Henry Lewes (Mr George Eliot). In religious terms he was a sceptic and critic of the Church, but not an atheist. He took an interest in hypnotism and clairvoyance which were both fashionable at that time. In 1852 he was called to the Bar – not having worked for or passed any exams, which was quite common in the Law at that period.

He contributed to Household Words and Bentley’s Miscellany, but in 1852 published his first serious novel, Basil, for which he wrote a long preface explaining his artistic intentions. The novel was well received and has the distinction of being perhaps the first ‘sensation novel’.

Despite his commercial success and social connections with the Coutts banking family, the odd thing is he didn’t have his own bank account. He placed all his earnings in his mother’s account and drew off cash when he needed it.

He grew closer and closer to Dickens, acting as a sort of bachelor support at a time that Dickens’ marriage was floundering. There were long expeditions together with painter Augustus Egg to France, Switzerland, and Italy. However, Wilkie’s revelries were slowed down somewhat by a venereal infection he picked up around this time.

He continued to produce enormous amounts of magazine sketches and journalism, and made his first efforts to break into the theatre with plays such as The Lighthouse and The Frozen Deep. These were not initially successful, whereas he was able to turn any number of his holiday jaunts and seagoing cruises into profitable non-fiction.

Rather surprisingly (since his best work was yet to come) he started to develop a Europe-wide reputation. A critical study of his early work appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes and his next novel, After Dark (1856), was published by Tauschnitz for circulation on the Continent.

Although he was still quite young at thirty-two, he began to suffer from the various pains and ‘rheumatic gout’ which would affect him for the rest of his life. However, this did not affect his prodigious output, and around this time he added to the pressures under which he worked by embarking on serial publication. He worked out the plots of his novels in advance, but had to maintain a crushing level of production to stay a fortnight ahead of the printers – on both sides of the Atlantic.

As his international reputation took flight and his income rose as a consequence, he developed more interest in the establishment of copyright agreements. Like his friend Dickens, he took exception to unscupulous publishers issuing pirated editions of his work for which they had paid nothing. It was not until much later in the century that this practice was prohibited.

United as they were by many of their literary works, Dickens and Wilkie also shared central roles in two sexual scandals that developed around the same time. Dickens, the now world-famous author and family man, left his wife and nine children and took up secretly with the eighteen year old actress Ellen Ternan. Wilkie Collins did almost the opposite, but with the same effect. He started living openly with Caoline Graves, an older widow with a young daughter. They never married but stayed together (with one interruption) for the rest of his life. Caroline occupied the role of common-law wife, rather than that of mistress.

In 1859 he produced what was to become one of the most successful and best-selling novels of the nineteenth century. The Woman in White is a mystery story, a sensation novel, and a subtle critique of conventional values that piles up one thrilling incident after another. It became the talk of London, and when published in volume form sold out immediately in England and France.

Wilkie Collins

It was around this time that Wilkie, still suffering from the pains of his ‘rheumatic gout’, began the regular use of opium as an analgesic. Laudanum (opium disolved in alcohol) was available at any pharmacy for three pence an ounce around that time. Half an ounce was enough to kill a horse.

He started work on his next novel, spurred on by an advance from publishers Smith and Elder of £5,000 – the equivalent of half a million pounds today. After that he took Caroline and her daughter Carrie on an extended stay in Italy, where all three of them seemed to improve their health.

His next major work was Armadale which had been two years in the planning. It was successful both in England and America.even though the States were in the middle of a civil war. In order to protect his theatrical rights he immediately wrote a stage adaptation. He still hankered after success in the theatre, despite the fact tha a production of The Frozen Deep had been a flop.

In 1868 he had just started the serialisation of what was to be his second major success, The Moonstone when he suffered a double blow. First his mother died, then he suffered a savage attack of ‘gout’ which affected his eyes – though it is now thought that this affliction was actually a strain of venereal disease. He was forced to dictate some passages of the novel.

Wilkie Collins

Wilkie had always used his mother’s snobbish objection to the lower-class Caroline as a reason for not marrying. But even with maternal opposition now removed he still didn’t make the relationship decent and legal. Caroline’s reaction was understandable: she married someone else under an assumed name. Wilkie’s was less so – he actually went to the wedding.

But by then he also had another working class servant girl in his life. Martha Rudd was about have the first of his three children. He installed her in lodgings a short walk from his large house in Marylebone and gave her an annual allowance and the name ‘Mrs Dawson’. Caroline’s daughter stayed on with Wilkie as his occasional amanuensis.

If this arrangement was not complex enough, it became so two years later when Caroline (now Mrs Crow) returned ‘home’ when her marriage failed. Yet like the plot of a Henry James novel, the respectability of her young daughter Carrie (seen socially as Wilkie’s adopted child) conferred social acceptability back onto her mother, even though she was married to one man and living with another.

Throughout all this personal upheaval Wilkie was working on The Moonstone which when it was published made him a lot of money. It also profited Dickens, even though he was critical of the novel’s over-elaborate construction. Not long after this, even though the two friends had so much in common, the relationship between them deteriorated. Shortly afterwards Dickens died.

Wilkie’s next book was Man and Wife (1870) which was based on an idea he had originally conceived as a play. At a personal level he was now a man with two wives and two families. The next year he had his first taste of theatrical success when The Woman in White was staged at the Olympic Theatre. The original novel was completely changed by Wilkie himself, and whole scenes either omitted or added. The performance lasted four hours, but the play was a popular and critical success.

It is possible that this very success was detrimental to his later works, because the novels he went on to produce were always written with potential dramatisation in mind. They are full of long conversations between leading characters, set in a limited range of indoor locations. It proved to be the case that what was dramatic in a prose narrative was not necessarily so before the footlights – and vice versa.

In 1873 Wilkie embarked on a reading tour of America. He was well received as a famous author and a friend of Charles Dickens, but the trip was not profitable financially, largely because of poor management.

His next book, The Law and the Lady (1875) was not successful, but he was compensated by continued triumphs on the stage, even though his adaptation of Armadale altered and watered down the story until it was almost unrecognisable.

He was forever thinking of new ways to present old material – so much so that at times he sailed very close to self-plagiarism. But he was very keen to exploit all the avenues of publication open to him. He had an idea that there was an enormous audience or readership for literary entertainment ‘out there’ which had not yet been reached. He was right – and he also had not one but two families to keep.

He found assistance in this quest by hiring A.P. Watt – the first person to set himself up as what we now call a literary agent. The relationship was a good one – but Watt found difficulty in placing material that was considered too highbrow for provincial newspapers. The masses were not to be reached quite so easily.

As he got older his physical ailments multiplied and he became virtually a self-made invalid, living on cold soup and champagne. This did not prevent his conducting, at over sixty years of age, a flirtacious relationship with a twelve year old girl he befriended locally.

He continued to push himself right up to the end, sometimes working twelve hours a day to produce more stories and journalism. But he was sinking fast, and his last novel had to be passed over to Walter Besant for completion. Wilkie died in his recently acquired Wimpole Street apartment in September 1889.

His popular reputation continued to decline in the years after his death, even though the influence of sensation novels was still present in the work of younger writers such as Thomas Hardy. But there has been a revival of interest in his work starting in the late twentieth century, and now there is no reason why he should not be considred as a talented and major literary figure of his era, along with the equally neglected (and prolific) Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

© Roy Johnson 2016

Wilkie Collins Buy the book from Amazon UK

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Catherine Peters, The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins, London: Secker and Warburg, 1992, pp.498, ISBN: 0436367122

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William Wilson

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

William Wilson was first published in the October 1839 issue of Burton Gentleman’s Magazine. Later in 1844 it was translated into French and published in the Paris newspaper La Quotidienne. This marked the first introduction of Poe’s work into France, where it has been highly regarded ever since.

The story has surprisingly autobiographical elements. During his youth Poe spent some time at Manor House School in Stoke Newington in north London, on which the ‘academy’ in the story is based. However, he did not go on to either Eton or Oxford University – which he describes in the tale as ‘the most dissolute university in Europe’.

Edgar Allan Poe

William Wilson – critical summary

The double

This is an early and now-famous example of the double in literature – sometimes known by its German term the ‘Doppelganger’. The elements of a double in the story should be quite clear from the start. William Wilson is confronted by another schoolboy at the academy who has the same name as himself. They have the same birthday; they are the same height; they wear the same clothes; and they both join the academy and leave it on exactly the same day.

Wilson is exasperated by the appearances of what he perceives as a ‘rival’, and yet the double gives him ‘advice’ which Wilson, writing in retrospect, now wishes he had heeded. It is also significant that nobody else in the story seems to be aware of the double; he ‘appears’ only to Wilson himself.

“Yet this superiority — even this equality — was in truth acknowledged by no one but myself; our associates, by some unaccountable blindness, seemed not even to suspect it.”

It is one of the common features of the double in literature that it appears only to the protagonist of the story or the novel. The double figure acts as ‘another self’ to the protagonist which acts as the embodiment of good, evil, or ‘otherness’. It is for this reason that stories featuring a double are often seen as studies in psychological aberration or what is often called ‘the divided self’.

It should be fairly clear that William Wilson’s double is a manifestation of his conscience. The double appears at crucial moments when Wilson is about to commit a morally dubious act. Because the story is narrated from Wilson’s point of view, there is a strong tendency for the reader to be sympathetic to the account of events he gives us. He sees the double as a source of irritation and interference. But the double, the conscience, is merely giving him advice, and warnings – always in a low tone of voice.

The epitaph to this story provides an unmistakable clue to Poe’s intended meaning.

What say of it? what say Conscience grim,
That spectre in my path?

The essential conflict is between Wilson who wishes to do wrong, and his conscience which is warning him against himself. The two finally clash at the Roman ball, where Wilson finally kills off his double, only to discover that he is killing himself. The double tells him – no longer in a whisper – “In me didst thou exist—and in my death, see … how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.”

The Double An extended tutorial on The Double

Structure

William Wilson follows all of Poe’s own rules for the constituents of a successful short story. It strikes its distinctive tone from the opening sentence – ‘Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson’. And the story deals with that one topic alone – the inner identity (and conflict) of the protagonist.

Poe also claimed that a story should have a ‘unity of effect’. That is, all the elements of the story should be directed towards the point it is trying to make. This means in its turn that there should not be any digressions or the inclusion of unrelated material. William Wilson certainly does follow this rule. The story begins with Wilson’s anguish over his personal identity, and the focus of attention remains on that topic until the story’s dramatic finale.

Oscar Wilde

The striking image of ‘self’ destruction at the conclusion of the story was echoed famously by Oscar Wilde in the conclusion to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Wilde’s is another story of moral decline, in which the protagonist becomes progressively degenerate yet remains amazingly youthful in appearance. He finally confronts a portrait painting of himself which has aged in an attic to reveal his corruption. In a rage he stabs the painting with a knife and is found dead with the knife in his own heart – and the portrait has become young once again.

The idea of a portrait hidden in an attic which reveals the unpleasant truth about someone’s behaviour and age has become a commonplace image and figure of speech – often humorously applied. It is rightly attributed to Wilde, but it has its origins in Edgar Allan Poe.

William Wilson – study resources

William Wilson Poe: The Ultimate Collection – Amazon UK

William Wilson Poe: The Ultimate Collection – Amazon US

William Wilson Poe: Collected Tales – Penguin – Amazon UK

William Wilson Poe: Collected Tales – Penguin – Amazon US

William Wilson Tales of Mystery and Imagination – Kindle illustrated – UK

William Wilson Tales of Mystery and Imagination – Kindle illustrated – US

William Wilson William Wilson at Wikipedia

William Wilson – plot summary

William Wilson’s reputation has been ruined, and as death approaches him he wishes to make a record of his descent into wickedness.

Believing that he has inherited a ‘remarkable’ nature, he recalls his youth as a schoolboy in England. His academy school is like a Gothic prison, and its ethos is disciplinarian. Another boy with the same name becomes a competitor and a rival.

Wilson is worried by the other boy’s easy superiority, but it is not noticed by anybody else. The two boys have the same birthday, they are the same height, and they join the school on the same day.

They become inseparable companions. The rival can only speak in a very low voice, but he dresses in the same clothes as Wilson. He also takes pleasure in his superiority – though this is noticed only by Wilson himself.

The rival patronises Wilson and gives him advice, which Wilson now wishes he had heeded. Wilson visits the rival’s bedroom at night whilst he is asleep – but he does not look the same.

Wilson leaves the academy and goes to Eton where he plunges himself into a life of folly and vice. One drunken night he is visited by the rival who raises a warning finger then disappears.

Wilson moves on to Oxford University where he uses his wealth to gamble and take advantage of others. On the occasion of completely ruining a young nobleman he is visited again by the rival, who reveals to the company that Wilson has been cheating at cards. Next morning he leaves the university in disgrace and flees to the Continent.

The double figure pursues him throughout Europe, thwarting his plans for ‘bitter mischief’. Finally at a masked ball in Rome, the figure appears when Wilson is about to seduce a young married woman. Wilson draws a rapier to kill the figure, but finds himself confronting his own image in a full length mirror, spattered with blood, and saying ‘thou hast murdered thyself’.

© Roy Johnson 2017

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