Wilkie Collins wrote thirty novels in his life time although his reputation as a master of the Victorian sensationalist novel really rests on just four books: The Woman in White, The Moonstone, No Name and Armadale. I’ve not read No Name so can’t judge whether its fame is deserved but I’m struggling to see how Armadale is in the same league as the other “great” Collins novels.
Published in serial form between 1864 and 1868, Armadale is Collins’s longest novel — my Penguin Classics edition runs to just shy of 670 pages. Just like The Woman in White and The Moonstone, the plot is a complex story containing elements of mixed identity, murder, detection and the supernatural.
It gets off to a cracking start with the arrival of the Armadale family at a hotel in a German spa resort. Allan Armadale is so frail he has to be stretchered into the hotel and clearly has only a short time to live. As he lies dying, he insists on dictating a confession of his role in the murder his clerk, Fergus Ingleby, because he had stolen Armadale’s name and also the woman he loved.
Years later we discover that both men had sons. One is the real Allan Armadale, the rightful heir to a large fortune and estate in Norfolk. The other adopts the name of Ozias Midwinter and becomes a poor vagabond. Surprise, surprise; they end up meeting each other and becoming companions. Only one of them knows the true identity of the other man.
Inevitably there is a woman adding to the intrigue, a temptress by the name of Lydia Gwilt. She’s a fortune hunter who sets her cap at marrying the rich Allan Armadale but then transfers her affections to Ozias Midwinter who she thinks is a more promising option. It’s her intrigues that keep most of the plot moving along, with plenty of revelations about her past life.
Confusing? Yes, absolutely. I really struggled to keep track of all the twists and turns of this intricate plot and the very many minor characters.
Collins deploys several different narrative techniques, blending letters and extracts from Lydia’s journal into chapters of third person narration told from the perspectives of different characters. We also get dream sequences (never a favourite device with me) cropping up at numerous points in the novel.
With shipwrecks, stolen identities, confessions and the deaths of at least three people in mysterious circumstances, Armadale should have been an entertaining read. But it suffered from Collins’s tendency to delve into too much detail about just about everything. Apparently he was a stickler for accuracy and did extensive research on medical, nautical and legal aspects of his plot which is all well and good, but can get in the way of the story.
After the dramatic opening couple of chapters, he also got bogged down in describing the childhood of one of his Allan Amadales and how he encounters his namesake and took a long while before he let the pace pick up again. My interest waned until Lydia Gwilt comes onto the scene.
She’s a superb construction, really the star of the show. This red-haired woman is the antithesis of the idealised Victorian woman. Instead of the compliant, sweet and considerate female, we get a laudanum addict who has poisoned one husband. She’s an arch manipulator who seems entirely without moral scruples until the end when she discovers she loves her current husband and rescues him from a gas-filled room.
In John Sutherland’s introduction to my Penguin edition he remarks that reviewers and readers alike hated Lydia’s character. The Spectator reviewer apparently “foamed with rage” over a novel which “gives us for its heroine a woman fouler than the refuse of the streets.”
Readers were indignant that Lydia retained her beauty right to the end — they somehow thought that she should have been punished for her evil ways by some form of physical disfigurement. Which tells you a lot about the sensibilities of those first readers.
Sales of Armadale were very poor when it was issued in volume form, maybe because there was such a strong dislike of Lydia’s character though Sutherland also suggests that Collins fell foul of mounting criticism and opposition to the sensationalist novel. Campaigners claimed that the moral tone of the country was seriously damaged by all those trashy novels.
I wonder if Collins were writing today, would he be cancelled or banned??
We're all friends here. Come and join the conversation