The Evil Genius

380 Pages·1994·17.11 MB·English

by  Wilkie Collins

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THE EVIL GENIUS
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THE EVIL GENIUS
Wilkie Collins
Edited by Graham Law
broadview literary texts
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©1994 Broadview Press Ltd.
Reprinted 1995, 1998
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in
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IH6 — is an infringement of the copyright law.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Collins, Wilkie, 1824-1889
The evil genius
(Broadview literary texts)
ISBN 1-55111-017-2
I. Law, Graham. II. Title. III. Series.
PR4494.E85 1994 823'.88 094-930533-7
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Contents
Introduction 7
Footnotes 26
A Note on the Text 31
Select Bibliography 33
William Wilkie Collins: A Brief Chronology 36
THE EVIL GENIUS 43
Appendix: Contemporary Documents 353
Explanatory Notes 369
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Introduction
TO BORROW A PHRASE FROM ROBERT BROWNING'S BISHOP
Blougram, Wilkie Collins consistently occupied "the danger-
ous edge of things" in Victorian life and letters.1 His family
life straddled the bourgeois and the bohemian: he was born
into a pious Tory household, but refused to marry; he fre-
quented prostitutes in his youth, kept two mistresses concur-
rently in his maturity, and left three illegitimate children at
his death; yet he seems to have successfully concealed these
facts from his mother, many of his acquaintances, and most
of his readers. His socio-political ideas were a curious combi-
nation of the radical and the conservative: frequently plead-
ing the cause of "fallen" women, he was less sympathetic to
bourgeois women's demands for the right to vote and to en-
ter the professions; his spirited campaigns against contempo-
rary abuses sometimes shifted towards a reactionary railing
against the spirit of the time. A contemporary of both Char-
les Dickens and Henry James, his writing career bears witness
to the opening up of the divide between "serious" and "popu-
lar" culture: the genre he was most drawn to, the sensational
romance, was often disparaged as "female"; he was torn be-
tween the roles of artist and journalist, between the demands
of the bourgeois literary establishment and those of the mass
reading public. On his death, when proposals were made for
the writer to be commemorated in Westminster Abbey, ob-
jections were raised on both moral and literary grounds, and
instead a "Wilkie Collins Memorial Library of Fiction" was es-
tablished at the People's Palace in East London.2
For much of the twentieth century, Collins's rather mar-
ginal literary reputation rested on the claims of The Woman
in White to be among the best Victorian mystery novels, and
of The Moonstone to be the first detective novel, while his re-
maining twenty or so novels, dozen or so plays, half a dozen
collections of stories, and several works of non-fiction were
virtually ignored. In the last decade or so, however, his writ-
INTRODUGTION 7
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ing career as a whole has started to come back into focus, in-
itially because of the renewed interest in the sensation novels
of the 1860s from within Women's Studies,3 and latterly in as-
sociation with the centenary of his death in 1989, an occasion
which helped to generate two new biographies,4 four book-
length critical works,5 and at least half-a-dozen new editions
of novels that had long been difficult to obtain. Perhaps the
same dangerous, slippery qualities of life and work which re-
pelled many of his contemporaries are what now make him
attractive.
For a long time the development of Collins's fiction after
The Moonstone tended to be seen as a steady degeneration to
be explained in personal terms: the gradual loss of imagina-
tive power due to the effects of illness and drugs, and/or an
increasing didacticism following the death of Dickens and his
replacement as Collins's literary mentor by Charles Reade.
While recent reappraisals of Collins's work have not ques-
tioned the pre-eminence of the novels of the 1860s, they have
shown convincingly that any subsequent decline is remark-
ably uneven, and requires explanation in socio-cultural as
well as personal terms. In fact the three novels of the mid-
1880s, Heart and Science, I Say No, and The Evil Genius, in
terms of both variety of form (sensation, mystery, and comic
realism, respectively) and narrative energy, represent some-
thing of a high-point among the later fiction.
The Evil Genius centers on a seemingly ideal bourgeois
marriage which breaks down when the husband becomes in-
fatuated with the vulnerable young woman he recruits as a
governess for his daughter. After their separation, the wife
petitions for a divorce to secure custody of the daughter. The
affair between the husband and the governess does not last;
the prospective second marriage of the woman to a philan-
thropist comes to nothing; and the novel ends with the
daughter contriving the reconciliation and remarriage of the
divorced couple. The title refers specifically not to the gov-
erness but to the wife's mother, as repetitions of the phrase
in the text make clear (pp.159, 169, 253, 308, & 349). But the
usage is consistently comic or ironic, and the mother-in-law is
not quite the heavy villain of stage melodrama; instead the
narrative conducts a sustained but inconclusive debate as to
8 INTRODUCTION
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what extent the vicissitudes of the marriage can be assigned
to private acts or public policy, providence or pure chance.
The principle interest of the novel, in the context of Col-
lins's literary career as a whole, is that it deals with a theme
similar to that of The Woman in White, a woman's struggle to
resist legal and ideological subjection, but in a strikingly dis-
similar form: mystery and melodrama are rejected in favour
of comedy and realism; multiple plotting and multiple narra-
tion are largely replaced by the narrative economies of the
stage play; psychological depth is introduced not through
symbolism but through dialogue. While it would be naive to
argue that no loss of complexity was involved in this transfor-
mation, it seems equally unwise to dismiss the narrative and
social interest of the later novel entirely on this count. The
rest of this introduction will be given over to a description of
the combination of preoccupations and constraints, both pri-
vate and public, which help to shape the themes and forms of
The Evil Genius, under three headings: Law; Women and Fam-
ily, and Writing, Voice and Print.
LAW
Collins occupied an ambiguous position in relation to the
law, neither fully insider nor outsider. He entered Lincoln's
Inn in 1846 and was called to the bar in 1851; but in the in-
terim he wrote his first three books, and seems to have done
little to prepare himself for the legal profession beyond con-
suming the requisite number of dinners. In later life he was
only to call himself a barrister in the part of an alias used to
conceal an irregular liaison.6 And yet his narratives consis-
tently hinge on the provisions and applications of the law,
and reveal a precise knowledge of legal detail and an affinity
with legal method and argument. At the beginning of The
Woman in White he compares his preferred mode of multiple
narration, in both form and function, to the operation of a
court of law:
... the story here presented will be told by more than
one pen, as the story of an offence against the laws is
told in Court by more than one witness — with the
INTRODUCTION 9