Dawson; their relationship would eventually produce three children, who were given this alternative surname. Graves, perhaps understandably upset at her lover’s additional arrangement, married another man, and Collins even served as a legal witness to the marriage. Yet Graves and Collins were living together once again by 1871 and would continue to cohabit until his death in 1889. All but Collins’s closest friends thought that Graves was his housekeeper; decorum did not permit his “kept woman” to accompany him to either public events or private parties, and Collins largely seems to have accepted this restriction on his unorthodox relationships—a curious Victorian compromise, when a vocal rule flouter of Collins’s caliber should allow a smaller social prohibition to mask a much greater social sin.
Collins endured poor health for much of his life, and the stresses associated with literary composition seem to have only exacerbated—and exaggerated—his illnesses. While Collins was writing The Woman in White, this connection became more apparent. His letters from the period convey a definite openness about his ailments, perhaps the openness of the indulged hypochondriac; to his bank manager, for example, he explained the details of one particularly personal medical problem he encountered while writing this novel: “I have been suffering torments with a boil between my legs and write these lines with the agreeable prospect of a doctor coming to lance it. I seem destined, God help me, never to be well.” Under such conditions was The Woman in White born. Collins also suffered from painful gout, which affected his eyesight and, he claimed, his brain, leaving his mind clear for thought yet subjecting him to fits of severe nervous misery and agitation. His throes of creativity could produce throes of agony that often left him nearly blind and incapable of writing on his own; on such occasions, as during work on The Moonstone, he hired a private secretary to transcribe the narratives he dictated, but not all of them could withstand his intermittent disquieting screams. His chronic pain led him to take increasingly larger doses of laudanum, or liquid opium, throughout the latter years of his life, until by the time of his death, as legend has it, he was imbibing enough in a single dose to kill a dinner party’s worth of people not used to the drug.
The widespread public frenzy over The Woman in White at the time of its serial publication produced immediate effects, almost post-modern in their marketing synergy: the strong sales of Woman in White tie-ins, such as perfume, cloaks and bonnets; the composition of waltzes and other dances inspired by the novel; and the sudden popularity of the name Walter for newborn sons and of Fosco for pets (particularly cats). Readers cast wagers on the outcome of various plot twists and what Sir Percival’s terrible secret could be. Immediately following the end of its serial run, the novel was published in a three-volume edition in Britain and the United States. Its numerous positive reviews praised the novel as being “extremely clever,” “the greatest success in sensation writing,” and “a most striking and original effort.” Collins’s huge audience agreed with these assessments.
Yet many of his contemporary critics faulted Collins for numerous things, including an overabundance of unnecessary details and what they saw as his lack of characterization: “Remove all that there is of rather improbable incident in The Woman in White, and you might burn what remains without depriving the world of any imaginative creation, any delineation of character, or portrait of human nature worth preserving,” complained the Saturday Review (August 25, 1860). Even the very premise of his self-proclaimed new form of storytelling was challenged. Collins boasted in his preface that he had invented the strategy of employing multiple narrators, although the practice of telling a story through various characters’ pens had been established more than a century earlier in the epistolary tradition of novels built upon a series of letters from different protagonists. Some reviewers objected to Collins’s analogy of his fictional figures’ giving their evidence as though they were witnesses at a trial. The Saturday Review commentator wrote, “They are staring listlessly and vacantly, like witnesses who are waiting to be called before the court, and have nothing to do until their turn arrives.” This somewhat rigid structural method was also found to be “unnatural” and “an affectation.” As some of the more careful critics have remarked over the years, Collins’s technique can sometimes produce an ironic counterpoint to his characters’ defining qualities. The selfish, supersensitive hypochondriac Frederick Fairlie, for example (whose effete sensibilities mark him as a useless member of the aristocracy—clearly not a man of resolution), cannot be roused to make the least bit of physical or mental effort to save his niece, yet we are to believe that he would write a lengthy narrative of his involvement at Walter’s urging?
Other early negative criticism of The Woman in White focused on Collins not as a great novelist but as a mere “constructor,” if a very talented one, of intricate plots; as such he is a good storyteller, but, as the Saturday Review noted: “Mechanical talent is what every great artist ought to possess. Mechanical talent, however, is not enough to entitle a man to rank as a great artist.” And, “Our curiosity once satisfied, the charm is gone.... We should prefer hiring [his books] out as we do a Chinese conjurer—for the night. As soon as we have found out the secret of his tricks, and admired the clever way in which he does them, we send him home again.” Undoubtedly, some of the critical vitriol aimed at Collins stemmed from his request that reviewers not discuss the plot. When pressured not to remark upon the novel’s main point of satisfaction, the critics understandably balked. From The Times (October 30, 1860): “Has he so little faith in his own powers as to imagine that if the secret is once out his novel will lose its fascination, and have nothing else to recommend it to the reader? ... If we are not to touch the story, what else is there to touch?” Collins did not want his critics to let the cat out of the bag, yet in his labyrinthine construction they found themselves with “about a hundred cats contained in a hundred bags, all screaming and mewing to be let out.”
A new one-volume edition of The Woman in White appeared in 1861; this slightly revised version addresses criticisms of the plot’s faulty timeline (which Collins alludes to mysteriously in the preface as “certain technical errors”) that had originally appeared in the Times review. The anonymous author proves that Collins is off by two weeks in his chronology, incorrectly fixing the date upon which the novel’s main question hinges, that at which Laura leaves Blackwater Park, her husband’s estate. The problems with the date, crowed The Times, “render the last volume a mockery, a delusion, and a snare; and all the incidents in it are not merely improbable—they are also absolutely impossible.” Also, in order to create tension surrounding the accuracy of this date, critics noted, Collins had to “invent ignorance which could not exist,” in the Blackwater Park housekeeper, Mrs. Michelson, who inexplicably cannot remember the date in question even though it coincided with the termination of her own employment. “The novel will not bear a very close inspection. It is rather to be devoured whole, as a boa constrictor bolts a rabbit, than to be criticized in detail,” The Times jeered. As the Saturday Review critic noted of some crucial legal misjudgments the characters make, “If Mr.
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