in his joints (specifically he had a bad ankle and foot, which he alludes to in the characterization of Mr Neal in the first chapter). But when feeling well, he could go sailing with his journalist friend Edward Pigott. It was a sport which he loved, and which he projects on to the yacht-mad Allan Armadale the younger. Wilkieâs most disabling symptoms seem to have been nervous. Light and sound were intolerably painful to him during his bad times. He was also prone to crippling bouts of depression. Writing exacerbated his symptoms (something he projects on to Ozias in the Naples episode
of Armadale)
. He had what seems to be a major nervous collapse just before the publication of the novelâs first number. During the subsequent composition of
Armadale,
he persuaded hisphysician Beard to refer him to a nerve and brain specialist. As is well known, Wilkie was intermittently (and while writing
Armadale)
addicted to opium â in the form of laudanum. In the short term, the narcotic soothed him; but in the long term he suffered the extra burdens of toxic overdose and withdrawal.
Wilkieâs father had died prematurely (aged fifty-eight) of an unspecified disease. His brother Charley (who had married Dickensâs daughter Kate) was slowly dying of cancer in the 1860s (he had also proved impotent after marriage â something that concerned his super-potent father-in-law).
Armadale
is a novel obsessed with fate, congenital doom and inherited blight. The sins of the novelâs fathers (Oziasâs mark of Cain and his ânegro bloodâ, for instance) are relentlessly visited on their sons. It is significant, as Catherine Peters points out, that in the first episode the patriarchal Allan Armadale is clearly dying of tertiary syphilis. Put all this together and the hypothesis that Collins feared that he had inherited some venereal affliction (euphemistically called ârheumatic goutâ) suggests itself irresistibly.
Whatever the reasons,
Armadale
is a novel obsessed with illness. It begins at a German
Kurort
, with the mayor of the place welcoming âthe first sick people of the seasonâ (p. 10). There are many sick people to come in
Armadale
. The action ends in a sanatorium where Dr Downward (alias Le Doux) specializes in making well women unwell by his sinister regime of ârestâ. The plot opens with two invalids â one of them making his dying confession which the other less terminally sick man records. The bedridden and twisted Mrs Milroy is one of the finest side-studies in the book. Nor are principal characters immune. Ozias Midwinter is given Collinsâs nervous symptoms. Lydia Gwilt is given Collinsâs drug addiction (at one point in the action she blesses the sainted man who invented laudanum). The Reverend Brock dies of the English cholera (that was indeed rampant in England in 1851). The eerie Jacobean figure of Mrs Oldershaw (âMother Jezebelâ) enamels over the marks of sickness in the general population with her cosmetics. (In the case in which Madame Rachel was indicted in December 1865 she had undertaken to remove the ravages of smallpox from the face of an American woman, in return for all that womanâs jewellery.) There is disease everywhere in the world of
Armadale
.
Collins has his primary fame in literary history as the âinventorâ of detective fiction, particularly on the strength of his next work,
The Moonstone
(1868) â the first fully formed
roman-policier
in English. Fictionâs love-affair with detection can be traced back to Oedipus and his fatally rigorous investigations into who murdered Laius. But as a genre with itswell-defined rules and conventions, the detective novel pioneered by Wilkie Collins was formed by three main influences: the memoirs of the French detective E. F. Vidocq (and the imitations produced by bandwagon-following Scotland Yard detectives); the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act which legitimized divorce
of Armadale)
. He had what seems to be a major nervous collapse just before the publication of the novelâs first number. During the subsequent composition of
Armadale,
he persuaded hisphysician Beard to refer him to a nerve and brain specialist. As is well known, Wilkie was intermittently (and while writing
Armadale)
addicted to opium â in the form of laudanum. In the short term, the narcotic soothed him; but in the long term he suffered the extra burdens of toxic overdose and withdrawal.
Wilkieâs father had died prematurely (aged fifty-eight) of an unspecified disease. His brother Charley (who had married Dickensâs daughter Kate) was slowly dying of cancer in the 1860s (he had also proved impotent after marriage â something that concerned his super-potent father-in-law).
Armadale
is a novel obsessed with fate, congenital doom and inherited blight. The sins of the novelâs fathers (Oziasâs mark of Cain and his ânegro bloodâ, for instance) are relentlessly visited on their sons. It is significant, as Catherine Peters points out, that in the first episode the patriarchal Allan Armadale is clearly dying of tertiary syphilis. Put all this together and the hypothesis that Collins feared that he had inherited some venereal affliction (euphemistically called ârheumatic goutâ) suggests itself irresistibly.
Whatever the reasons,
Armadale
is a novel obsessed with illness. It begins at a German
Kurort
, with the mayor of the place welcoming âthe first sick people of the seasonâ (p. 10). There are many sick people to come in
Armadale
. The action ends in a sanatorium where Dr Downward (alias Le Doux) specializes in making well women unwell by his sinister regime of ârestâ. The plot opens with two invalids â one of them making his dying confession which the other less terminally sick man records. The bedridden and twisted Mrs Milroy is one of the finest side-studies in the book. Nor are principal characters immune. Ozias Midwinter is given Collinsâs nervous symptoms. Lydia Gwilt is given Collinsâs drug addiction (at one point in the action she blesses the sainted man who invented laudanum). The Reverend Brock dies of the English cholera (that was indeed rampant in England in 1851). The eerie Jacobean figure of Mrs Oldershaw (âMother Jezebelâ) enamels over the marks of sickness in the general population with her cosmetics. (In the case in which Madame Rachel was indicted in December 1865 she had undertaken to remove the ravages of smallpox from the face of an American woman, in return for all that womanâs jewellery.) There is disease everywhere in the world of
Armadale
.
Collins has his primary fame in literary history as the âinventorâ of detective fiction, particularly on the strength of his next work,
The Moonstone
(1868) â the first fully formed
roman-policier
in English. Fictionâs love-affair with detection can be traced back to Oedipus and his fatally rigorous investigations into who murdered Laius. But as a genre with itswell-defined rules and conventions, the detective novel pioneered by Wilkie Collins was formed by three main influences: the memoirs of the French detective E. F. Vidocq (and the imitations produced by bandwagon-following Scotland Yard detectives); the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act which legitimized divorce