Armadale, by Wilkie Collins

(John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, Thoughts of the Past, oil on canvas, first exhibited 1859; Tate Britain; found here)

Hello again! I’m sorry, I haven’t felt like writing here for weeks – for no particular reason, we are all fine, the cats are fine, the hens are fine though on strike (and when they do bother to lay an egg, as often as not they just let it fall out wherever they happen to be and then stand on it). After a rush of children’s books and detective novels about which I felt I had nothing interesting to write, I have been wallowing in the Victorian delights of Armadale and I have Thoughts.

First serialised in 1864–66, Armadale is a wonderful chunk of nineteenth-century fiction which is usually classed, alongside Lady Audley’s Secret et al., as sensationalist, but in my opinion is more of a gothic novel. It contains everything you would wish to find in such a book: intrigue, murder, deception, fraud, a secret diary and a wicked lady whom you rather hope will triumph in her criminal ways though you fear she won’t. What makes it to my mind more gothic is its bold splash of the supernatural: its reliance on dreams, coincidences and fate to suggest another way of reading the world, its exploration of identity and its central use of the motif of the double, an old favourite of gothic writers including E.T.A. Hoffmann, Mary Shelley and James Hogg.

(Portrait of Wilkie Collins by Napoleon Sarony, 1870; found here)

There are five Allan Armadales. Yes five! Fortunately, this is not as confusing as it might be. Allan Armadale (I) has a son, also named Allan Armadale (II), who is a reprobate. AA(I) disinherits AA(II) and decides to leave his fortune to Allan Wrentmore, his nephew, if AW will change his name to Allan Armadale (III). Surprise! He does. AA(II) then journeys out from England to ‘Barbadoes’, where AA(III) lives, befriends him and pays him a bad turn. AA(III) has his revenge on AA(II). AA(II) has a son, born in England, guess what his name is, yes it’s Allan Armadale (IV), while AA(III) also has a son and he is Allan Armadale (V). AA(V), who knows the secret of his father’s revenge, changes his name to Ozias Midwinter and adheres to his father’s deathbed admonition to avoid AA(IV) and anyone connected with him.

But of course, Midwinter fails and becomes fast friends with AA(IV). One night they are stranded on a ship with an ominous connection to AA(III)’s revenge on AA(II), and AA(IV) dreams a dream which Midwinter interprets as a prophecy. Can Midwinter avert the doom which awaits AA(IV)? Especially since AA(IV) refuses to entertain the idea that there is either a prophecy or a doom?

The friendship of AA(IV), kind-hearted but impulsive and not terribly bright – on his way to becoming a Bluff Squire in middle age – and Midwinter, clever, passionate and sensitive, is unusually intense. One character distinguishes between them as the light Armadale (AA(IV)) and the dark Armadale (Midwinter – who is mixed race). They form a sort of split self, the one associated more with the surface world, the other with what is hidden.

They fall in love with the same woman. Their closeness provokes jealousy in the women who love them and who understand they will only ever have second place in these men’s affections. (Miss Milroy loses her hold over AA(IV) when he admits to her that when she believed he was thinking lovingly of her, he was in fact thinking of Midwinter;  Miss Milroy Flounces.) Even when Allan and Midwinter quarrel, they cannot give each other up for long. Apart, they fret and do badly. Midwinter is tormented between his desire to remain with Allan and guide him (because he is a bit of a fool), and his fear that by doing so he will fulfil the prophecy in the dream. He knows that they have a secret bond, created by their fathers, but it’s a bond he can never reveal to Allan.

(George Housman Thomas, illustration from Armadale, 1866; found here)

Into their world of gentlemanly honour comes Lydia Gwilt. Obviously she is an Adventuress. Clever and beautiful, she has a dark past, a laudanum habit and a disreputable friend by name of Mrs Oldershaw; she also has a proper reliance on Revealing All in her diary and a very snarky tone on occasion. Collins bills her past as being worse than prostitution, but when eventually it is revealed it is actually very sad and if you cannot root for Miss Gwilt to succeed in her wicked schemes you are dead to me.

Dreams, water, darkness, dawn and evening all play their part to suggest a liminal, unstable world behind the sunshine and the large country house. The split self of the two Allan Armadales is reflected in this dual world. Midwinter is associated more closely with the liminal elements; AA(IV) with the trappings of the solid, daylight world. The significant moment when AA(IV), Midwinter and Miss Gwilt encounter each other for the first time, fulfilling the initial image in the prophetic dream, occurs on the twilit Norfolk Broads, a strange landscape where water and land are mixed, and where at that moment water and night are balanced against land and day. Both AA(IV) and Midwinter love sailing, though AA(IV) seems more enthusiastic than competent, and they are happiest together on the water. But of course, this carries a risk, especially in this novel. Drowning is a repeated motif.

And coincidences abound! Needlessly far-fetched, it might seem. For instance, AA(IV) unexpectedly comes into a fortune when three adult male relatives of his die unexpectedly. One dies in connexion with a character who will later become significant; the other two are killed in an avalanche while rushing back for the first character’s funeral. It is all rather unconvincing and presented in a way that makes it even more unconvincing, but it is also completelly unnecessary. Collins had no need to have so many heirs between AA(IV) and the inheritance and no need (in terms of plot) to link the first death with the character who later becomes significant. Instead, he chose to push at the bounds of what readers will accept in order to suggest to us that perhaps this is not a preposterous coincidence, perhaps this is fate insisting on a certain outcome and even using certain people to that end.

Is the dream really prophetic? Can what it foretells be prevented or are the characters fated to live it out? Midwinter is the only character to take it seriously, yet he chooses to rationalise himself out of what he believes to be the only way to thwart it. Ultimately, it is the lawyers and the doctors and the vicars who ferret out most of the mystery, and all of the strange and dramatic happenings have a plausible explanation in rational terms. Still, this novel seems to tell us, there may be another pattern beneath the surface which we would perhaps do best not to ignore if we wish to keep our selves united.

Have you read Armadale or any other of Wilkie Collins’s novels? I’ve ordered a copy of No Name and await it impatiently...

(T.F. Goodall, Sunset on the Broads, oil, 1931; found here)