Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (31 page)

There, in the middle of the broad bright high-road – there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven – stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments, her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her.

Dickens, who serialised the story in his magazine, thought this one of the two best scenes in English fiction. He did not specify what the other was. In 1871 Collins’s appeal widened with a very successful stage version of
The Woman in White
, and in 1873, he made an applauded reading tour of America. In 1875, Chatto reissued his fiction in cheap half-crown form with great sales success.

Occultism fascinated Collins towards the end of his life and
The Two Destinies
(1876) deals with telepathy between childhood friends.
The Fallen Leaves
(1879), is the story of a reformed prostitute (an heiress, as it emerges) and a socialist, Amelius, who courageously marries her. It is generally regarded as Collins’s worst novel – although, like other of his ‘failures’, it demonstrates the remarkable restlessness of his genius. Among his later fiction,
Heart and Science
(1883) caused some stir with its full-blooded propaganda against vivisection, aided by some powerful descriptions of animal surgery.

Despite appalling health, Collins’s writing career of forty years is one of the longest and most productive in Victorian popular fiction. His sexual life was, by Victorian standards, irregular, verging on criminal. In the mid-1850s he took up with Caroline Graves (an original for Anne Catherick in
The Woman in White
). From 1868, he also lived with the lower born Martha Rudd, who bore him three children. His estate was divided between the two women. He decreed, however, that his corpse should lie alongside Caroline.

If there is any boy or man who loves to be melancholy and morose, and who cannot enter with kindly sympathy into the regions of fun, let me seriously advise him to shut my book and put it away. It is not meant for him.
Preface to
The Coral Island

The eighth of nine children, Ballantyne was born in Kelso, near Edinburgh, where his family’s fortunes were in the process of being ruined in the fallout of Sir Walter Scott’s bankruptcy. His uncle, James, had been the great novelist’s printer and his father a lifelong comrade of the ‘Great Unknown’. Ballantyne had little education – but, since it was Edinburgh, and he came from a bookish family, that little rendered him as literate, probably, as a modern Ph.D. graduate. Importantly, he could write legibly and figure accurately and thereby earn a living. Aged sixteen, he shipped out as an apprentice clerk in the Hudson’s Bay Company, at £20 annual salary. The prospect, if not the salary, filled him with ‘ecstatic joy’. Letters home to his mother, printed in the papers as ‘Everyday Life in the Wilds of North America’, caught the attention of the senior Scottish publisher, William Nelson.

It would, however, be some time before young ‘Bob’ could devote himself to literature. His father died in 1847 and he returned to Scotland to support the teeming family – including that heaviest of Victorian burdens, five unmarried sisters, and he the only breadwinner. He clerked resourcefully in the newly founded railway companies and – a sharp young man – went on to a senior position in a paper factory. He could have been a captain of industry, but in 1856 Nelson invited him to write a boys’ book, based on his experiences in the frozen north. Before doing so, Ballantyne ‘asked guidance from God’. The Almighty gave him the go-ahead (his family were not at all keen) and there duly appeared
The Young Fur-Traders
. It was a hit. In 1858, still only thirty-two, he produced three of his finest works,
Ungava, A Tale of Esquimeaux Land; The Coral Island;
and
Martin Rattler, or a Boy’s Adventures in the Forests of Brazil
. Some sixty books streamed from his inexhaustible pen over the next decades. One reason for the quantity was that his publisher, the canny Nelson, paid a measly £60 for the entire copyright of each of Ballantyne’s novels – even the most popular. And the most popular of all was the adventures of Jack Martin, Ralph Rover and Peterkin Gay, the comic runt of the trio, on their coral island where they discover coconut lemonade (a geographical solecism), fish, make fire by rubbing sticks together, narrowly escape being eaten by sharks and cannibals, and have some close shaves with pirates whom, with the aid of the Royal Navy, they slaughter en masse. All very jolly.

Ballantyne had more creative ability than the formulaic nature of his narratives suggests. He could, for example, illustrate his boys’ books to professional standards. But why only boys’ books? His biographer discerns hypertrophy of the Presbyterian sensibility. Ballantyne ‘was acutely embarrassed by having to mention sex in any form.’ His heroes could, as in
The Gorilla Hunters
(1861), blast forty luckless beasts for the sheer fun of blasting – but were jelly in the face of a petticoat.

Ballantyne was a self-publiciser of genius. He specialised in lectures which he would open by stalking on stage in buckskin and shooting a stuffed eagle to get his audience warmed up. Or, if the subject were shipwreck, a rescue rocket would be fired to get things going. He particularly prided himself on his Esquimeaux ‘canoe songs’, which he would introduce, warblingly, as a musical interlude. ‘Research’ led him to disguise himself as an Arab in the native quarter of Algiers in order to write
The Pirate City
(1874). He submersed himself with nearly fatal results in a diving suit,
Under the Waves
(1876); and marooned himself in a lighthouse in preparation for other tales. He had as much fun, one suspects, writing his stories as generations of (mainly) schoolboys had reading the things.

He married in 1866. His wife Jane (‘Jeanie’) Dickson Grant was chosen carefully, with his mother’s help, from the respectable class of Edinburgh womanhood. Twenty years his junior, she bore her husband four children. Increasingly religious
in later life, Ballantyne allied himself with the period’s good causes, notably the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, and laboured tirelessly to foster the cult of Victorian manliness in young men. He despised ‘muffs’ – the class, alas, from which most novelists are drawn. Like Gladstone, he was prone to cruise the midnight streets, with the pious aim of saving young ladies from sin. He had more success with lifeboats.

His last novel was
The Walrus Hunters
(1893) – one of the few species his fiction had hitherto spared. Kurtz’s ‘exterminate the brutes’ could have been taken as Ballantyne’s motto. Indirectly, he was responsible for William Golding’s
Lord of the Flies
, an inversion of
The Coral Island
for a later, less optimistic era, with a less hopeful view of children’s nature and a more reverent attitude to the animal kingdom. He died in Rome, where he had gone to mend his failing health, having suffered from Menière’s disease for some years (his biographer hints that syphilis may have been a contributory factor). Harrow School for boys, in whose vicinity he had lived, raised £600 from their pocket money for a monument to his memory.

Tempest, sunshine and bestsellers.

Mary Hawes was born in Brookfield, Massachusetts, and brought up in New England, but otherwise little is known of her early life. Under the tutelage of her mother, Fanny Hawes, Mary is recorded as intellectually precocious and was teaching at school at thirteen (the death of her father may have forced this child labour). Her first published short story followed two years later.

In 1844 she married Daniel Holmes, just out of Yale. The couple settled in Brockport, New York. They both taught for a while before he found work as a lawyer. There were no children to the marriage but, over the coming years, considerable wealth. Holmes received up to $6,000 for the serial rights of her stories, allowing her ample time to write and travel extensively. It is estimated that some two million copies of her fiction were sold during her lifetime. Her publisher, the Boston house of Appleton, treated her well, in the manner of employers in the so-called ‘gilded age’ of the American book trade.

Holmes’s career was launched spectacularly on the wave of the so-called ‘feminised fifties’, a decade in which women writers came into their own and dominated American fiction. Her first novel,
Tempest and Sunshine
(1854), is also her best known. It was never out of print during her lifetime, and for decades after. Subtitled a ‘Life in Kentucky’, the story opens with a young abolitionist New Yorker, Richard Wilmot, arriving in the South to take up work in a local school. He makes the acquaintance of a rich, good-hearted but rough-mannered plantation owner, Mr John Middleton, who has two daughters, both of whom are possessed of huge dowries ($100,000 apiece) to lure prospective fortune-hunting husbands. The older (seventeen), Julia, is dark and passionate; her nickname is ‘Tempest’. The younger (fifteen), Fanny, is golden-haired and sweet-natured; her nickname is ‘Sunshine’. Morally the sisters are opposites: ‘the angel of innocence spread his wing over the yellow locks of the one, while a serpent lay coiled in the dark tresses of the other.’

Unusually for a writer with a New England (home of abolition) background, Holmes offers an idyllic view of the South and a tolerant, anti-Harriet Beecher Stowe view of slavery. Most of the ‘Africans’ who appear in the narrative are comic buffoons – wholly happy with their lot. Wilmot proposes to the beautiful Julia, and is accepted. But later, after she has encountered a more dashing Yale-educated doctor, Lacey, she cruelly jilts Wilmot. As he lies dying, she refuses to visit his deathbed with the cruel remark: ‘Mr Wilmot is nothing to me.’ The plot becomes, if possible, even more melodramatic. Fanny, who secretly loved Wilmot, is virtuously appalled. Dr Lacey falls in love with the less dashing Fanny, who has turned down a millionaire, Frank Cameron, and proposes to her. Julia is furious and forges letters to break the engagement. Julia then entraps Lacey into marriage, but the ceremony is interrupted with evidence of her misdoings (echoes of
Jane Eyre
). ‘I am guilty,’ she publicly confesses and then disappears; her clothes are discovered by the river and she is presumed drowned. Lacey returns to his faithful ‘Sunshine’. In a sensational climax (which Wilkie Collins evidently adapted for
The Woman in White
, five years later), Fanny meets a gaunt veiled woman at the grave of her sister Julia. It is Julia herself, ‘a living repentant woman’. The sisters are reconciled.

Tempest and Sunshine
was followed by another bestseller with a racial theme, again set on a southern plantation,
Lena Rivers
(1856). A string of other novels followed, all popular, though none as popular as her first hit. The Civil War shrank the large constituency of women readers which she had established early in her career in the South. One can, incidentally, detect clear lines of influence in Mitchell’s
Gone with the Wind
. Holmes is recorded as having no hobbies – other than foreign travel (reflected in her later fiction). She was, through life, a devoted Sunday school teacher. She died at the age of eighty-two in Brockport.

Oftentimes, living is harder than dying.
From
The Ogilvies

Dinah Mulock was born at Stoke-on-Trent, the eldest child of a nonconformist Irish clergyman father. Precociously clever and literary, she was able to help her mother teach at school at the age of thirteen. An inheritance enabled the Mulocks to move to London in 1839. In 1844, she and her mother separated from Thomas Mulock, but a year later Mrs Mulock died. Thereafter, Dinah took on responsibility for the financial support of her family. This situation is projected on to the early career of her most famous character, John Halifax. She began her authorial career writing stories for children and contrived to scrape a genteel living for herself and her dependants, aided with another small inheritance from her mother’s family.

Mulock’s fortunes improved with the success of her first novel,
The Ogilvies
, which came out in 1849. The narrative follows the route to marriage and eventual happiness of three girl cousins. It was much to the taste of library readers – a constituency which Mulock identified as hers and which she assiduously cultivated over the years.
Olive
(1850) treads more interesting ground with a physically deformed, less than beautiful heroine who contrives, by sheer goodness, to convert an agnostic lover to Christianity.
The Head of the Family
(1852) is a family chronicle, in the currently fashionable ‘domestic’ style of Bulwer-Lytton’s
The Caxtons
. No novelist was more domestic than Miss Mulock.