Armadale Read Free Page B

was an area of his life that he was determined to keep out of the public gaze.
    Armadale
depicts a world saturated in espionage. During the central section of the narrative Allan has set a man to spy on Lydia, who on her part is eavesdropping on Allan’s love conversations with Miss Milroy in Thorpe-Ambrose Park. Meanwhile, bedridden Mrs Milroy has bribed her nurse to steam open her governess’s letters. Lydia, on another front, has persuaded the love-besotted Felix Bashwood to spy on his employer, Allan, and report back to her. Bashwood has his son, James, investigate Miss Gwilt and report back to him (he feebly hopes to blackmail her into marriage). Bashwood has stationed men and women all round the capital. Pedgift is elsewhere investigating the mysterious Maria Older-shaw and her London aliases. Even Brock (the most easily deluded of these spies) is following suspicious women round the streets of London. It is, as Catherine Peters puts it, ‘a nightmare world, in which even thoughts cease to be private, a picture of English society as a claustrophobic prison’. 9
    It is sometimes claimed that Collins is at his best with minor characters.
Armadale
certainly has a full cast of memorable
ficelles
and vignettes: the eccentric clockmaker Major Milroy (a variation on Dickens’s maniac hobbyist Monsieur Manette); the ‘no fool like an old fool’, Felix Bashwood, parading like some seedy peacock in his finery to catch the eye of the deadly woman he loves (it is hard not to think that aspects of the Dickens–Ternan affair did not cross Collins’s mind in this subplot); the garrulous gardener Abel Sage, who briefly and hilariously lightens the gloomy world of Thorpe-Ambrose, as does the ineffably wet Reverend Pentecost, who proves himself capable of getting seasick on a Norfolk Broad. The Pedgifts, father and son, are among Collins’s finest lawyer creations – men so thoroughly conditioned by their profession that one suspects they have ink not blood in their veins.
    For all this wealth of incidental characterization (it is a very populous novel),
Armadale
is dominated by its three Napoleons of crime: Dr Downward – the ladies’ doctor who specializes in sinister anti-hysteria treatments; the painter of women, Maria Oldershaw (Collins has a misogynistic hatred of cosmetic art, associating it with moral corruption); and the Luciferian Lydia Gwilt. Each is a powerful creation, but as he tinkered with the plot in later life for stage adaptations, Wilkie distilled his creation down to a single portrait – ‘Miss Gwilt’. The apotheosis of Lydia was logical. She is an extraordinarily complex creation. As allusions suggest, Lady Macbeth was in Collins’s mind. Lydia’s closer literary pedigree is easily traced. The good and bad governess had been stock types in the English novel for a quarter of a century. The dualism was set up by
Vanity Fair’s
Becky Sharp (gold-digger seductress, adulteress, adventuress, whore, poisoner) and – on the other side – plucky little Jane Eyre and her virtuous Brontean colleagues, Agnes Grey and Lucy Snowe.
    The governess type changed melodramatically in the 1860s with three highly successful novels that twisted the characterization in start-lingly new ways, blending good and bad inextricably. In Mrs Henry Wood’s
East Lynne
(1861) the guilty wife, Isabel Vane (vain by nature as well as name), pays the price of her adulteries by losing her beauty in a catastrophic train crash. She returns – a shattered but chastened woman – to become the unrecognized governess (‘Madame Vine’) to the children she earlier abandoned. (One dies without knowing who she is, provoking the immortal ‘dead! dead! and never called me mother!’) In Mary Braddon’s
Lady Audley’s Secret
(1862) the governess Lucy Graham – a stunning Pre-Raphaelite beauty – catches the eye of rich old Sir Michael Audley