This is by Wilkie Collins (1824-89). It was first published as a book in 1866, having appeared in serial form from November 1864 to June 1866. Yes, that's a lot of months -- because it's his longest novel, and took two years to write.

In the list of departed books that I compiled before one of our big moves, I note three other works by Wilkie Collins that I once owned: The Woman in White (my copy marked 1978); The Moonstone (my copy also dated 1978, marked Muenster, and priced DM 6.90); and No Name (my copy dated 1996). The annotation says: "Great reads, one and all." And they corporately get three stars (the list's highest accolade).

More recently, I read The Haunted Hotel. Not Collins at the top of his game, that one, but still a rollicking good read. I was definitely up for more. And I think -- I'm no longer sure -- Armadale arrived on my reading list because I'd read somewhere that part of it was set on the Isle of Man.


Wilkie Collins

It's a great story. A really dark and twisty tale...

The action opens in 1832, with a deathbed confession to murder. Can't get much more dramatic than that...

Monica Young-Zook contextualizes the confusions of this opening section very neatly: "The novel features five Allan Armadales. The first is the grandfather who disowns his son (named Allan) for Matthew Wrentmore, who takes the name Allan Armadale as a condition of his inheritance. The first son, who renames himself Fergus Ingleby, vengefully steals Ms. Blanchard, the bride of the second, with the help of a young forger who will return later in the novel as Lydia Gwilt. In reaction to the loss of both woman and property, the second Allan drowns the first and moves to Barbados, where he marries a girl of mixed African and British descent and has a son whom he names -- Allan Armadale. The stolen bride, Mrs. Armadale née Blanchard, ensconces herself in a small British seaside town where she bears a son whom she names yet again Allan Armadale! So there are five eponymous characters: Armadale the grand-père, two Armadale fathers, and their two sons. This entire history is revealed to the murderer’s son via a letter his father dictates on his deathbed to the attorney Alexander Neal and which is given to the boy upon his eighteenth birthday."

This young man, in the meantime, has renamed himself Ozias Midwinter (which is a good thing, because without the pseudonym there would be no story...)

Complicated? Terribly. But the action begins in earnest in 1851, when Midwinter and young Allan accidentally cross paths. They couldn't be more different. Midwinter has had an extraordinarily rough life; Allan has been markedly sheltered. Midwinter is cautious, secretive, and moody; Allan is open-hearted, impulsive, and jolly to an almost ridiculous degree (sometimes the reader, tired of his foolery, longs to give him a good shake). But they become friends.

Midwinter, however, having reached the age when he is allowed to view his father's deathbed missive, is spooked by the dire parental warning it contains. He is told, in no uncertain terms, to have nothing to do with anyone called Armadale, or anyone associated with that family. Adding to the boding nature of the letter is its introduction of a theme that will play a major role in the book: "The only hope I have left for you hangs on a great doubt -- the doubt whether we are, or are not, the masters of our own destinies."

Midwinter confides in the Reverend Decimus Brock (a friend of Allan's recently deceased mother), who admires his honesty, and reassures him that he is indeed a fit companion for his friend on the sea voyage they are planning. But a series of chance happenings undermine Midwinter's confidence, and make him feel he is indeed the plaything of a malevolent fate. The very boat on which his father killed Allan's father turns up wrecked off the Isle of Man (where Allan's sailing boat has put in for repairs). A bit of carelessness puts the two young men aboard that boat with no way of escape, and -- as they wait for rescue -- Allan has a series of ominous dreams that he recounts to Midwinter the following morning. The dreamer lightly tosses off the dreams; Midwinter -- knowing what he knows, and fearing they foreshadow evil -- is oppressed by them.


The little island at the southern tip of the Isle of Man is the site of a key bit of action

When Midwinter accompanies his friend to the property that the latter has inherited at Thorpe Ambrose, he finds more reminders of these apparently prophetic dreams. He continues to be superstitious, and instinctively distrustful of everything and everyone. He has a "sensitive self-tormenting nature", and struggles against a "fatalist resignation". Forlorn, he admits: "What MUST be, WILL be... What have I to do with the future, and what has he?"

Meanwhile, Lydia Gwilt has turned up in Thorpe Ambrose as a governess. Midwinter knows that a young woman helped his father's rival to steal the woman he loved, but does not know that this person is Lydia. Allan, of course, has no idea about any of it.

Both young men fall in love with her. But Allan is spooked when he uncovers the dodgy references she has used to gain her governess position, thereby leaving the field open for Midwinter, who refuses to believe anything bad of her, and eventually goes so far as to tell her his secret. She agrees to marry him, on condition that the marriage paperwork shows his real name.

And why that stipulation? Well, knowing the terms of the various wills, she is working in the direction of becoming the rich widow of Allan Armadale. So what she needs to do is to become the wife of the one Allan Armadale, while arranging the demise of the other Allan Armadale...

Lydia is a wonderful character. Red-haired, strikingly beautiful, invincibly composed, she is seemingly capable of casting a spell over any man: "Her magnificent hair flashed crimson in the candlelight... Perfectly modest in her manner, possessed to pefection of the graceful restraints and refinements of a lady, she had all the allurements that feast the eye, all the siren invitations that seduce the sense -- a subtle suggestiveness in her silence, and a sexual sorcery in her smile."

Like Midwinter, she has had a rough and loveless life, but unlike Midwinter, she has become ruthless and heartless. Yet she is saved from caricature by her genuine love for the man who becomes her husband, and by the appearance of a genuine fork in the way, when she almost chooses a different life. At one point, she really does resolve to abandon her evil schemes, and to simply enjoy being married to someone who loves her: "Why not live out all the days that are left to me, happy and harmless in a love like this!"

But that resolution doesn't last... She's initially happy with Midwinter. But then, just a couple of months into the marriage, he turns cold towards her, and she feels she is losing his love. This is one of a handful of places where a character's motivation is not entirely grounded. Lydia surmises: "Is there an unutterable Something left by the horror of my past life, which clings invisibly to me still? And is HE feeling the influence of it, sensibly, and yet incomprehensibly to himself?" All we really know is that he's busy with his new writing career, and less enthralled by his wife. We need a little more.



Allan turns up, irritating Lydia so much with his besotted chatter about Eleanor, his intended (and Lydia's erstwhile pupil), that she absolutely makes up her mind that now is the time to get rid of him... Her first scheme is unsuccessful, but -- even though he thinks it is no more than an accident -- Midwinter is panicked by the whole episode. The crucial point is that the details again bring to life those mysterious dreams of Allan's: "I told you...," Midwinter tells his wife, "that two out of the three visions had already come true. I tell you now that the third vision has been fulfilled in this house tonight... For THIS, the miserable day dawned when you and I first met. For THIS, your influence drew me to you, when my better angel warned me to fly the sight of your face. There is a curse on our lives! there is a fatality in our footsteps!"

Her visions of a quiet and happy married life now evaporated, Lydia resumes her attempts to get rid of Allan. Another two schemes fail, however. Ultimately, it is Midwinter who saves Allan's life, and Lydia who ends up dead. Her parting note to Midwinter shows she has continued to love him; indeed, it is she who ultimately saves HIS life: "The one atonement I can make for all the wrong I have done you is the atonement of my death. It is not hard for me to die, now I know you will live. Even my wickedness has one merit -- it has not prospered. I have never been a happy woman."

Even though the Wicked Woman is duly punished, Collins still came in for some critical flak. A reviewer in The Spectator, for example, complains: "The fact that there are characters such as he has drawn, and actions such as he has described, does not warrant his overstepping the limits of decency, and revolting every human sentiment. This is what Armadale does. It gives us for its heroine a woman fouler than the refuse of the streets, who has lived to the ripe age of thirty-five, and through the horrors of forgery, murder, theft, bigamy, gaol, and attempted suicide, without any trace being left of her beauty." Ah, that's the problem, clearly. Lydia's beauty is under threat... According to The London Quarterly Review (quoted here), the representation of Miss Gwilt is "a portrait drawn with masterly art, but one from which every rightly constituted mind turns with loathing".

Modern readers, however, might find themselves agreeing with a different assessment: "Emotionally warped, spiritually bankrupt, psychologically ruined she is perhaps the most used and abused woman character Wilkie Collins ever created. But is she truly evil? By the novel's end most readers may find themselves shockingly feeling sympathy for Lydia's wrecked life."

Certainly, Collins shows flickers of understanding with regard to the limitations imposed on the women of his day: "In the miserable monotony of the lives led by a large section of the middle classes of England, anything is welcome to the women which offers them any sort of harmless refuge from the established tyranny of the principle that all human happiness begins and ends at home." In social circumstances such as these, a woman without home or happiness is forced to fend for herself...



***

The above is a very truncated account of the plot (there's more detail here). In fact, I have omitted most of the elements that keep us reading. The humorous moments, for example (Collins is very good at comedy). The suspenseful moments, as various characters uncover, bit by bit, Lydia's chilling back-story. The spooky moments, when you really do wonder whether our characters are the puppets of a harsh and Hardyesque higher power. The memorable characters (the pathetic Felix Bashwood, whose advanced years don't stop him making a fool of himself over Lydia; the canny father-and-son lawyer team, the Pedgifts, who -- for all their man-of-the-world pose -- nevertheless feel obliged to preserve their integrity; the crabbed and embittered Mrs Milroy, mother of Eleanor; the terminally wily old Maria Oldershaw; and the unutterably creepy Dr Downward, aka Dr Le Doux). The whole package, despite its flaws, is immensely enjoyable.

The Saturday Review of 1866 is ambivalent: "Armadale, from first to last, is a lurid labyrinth of improbabilities. It produces upon the reader the effect of a literary nightmare... If it were the object of art to make one's audience feel uncomfortable without letting them know why, Mr Wilkie Collins would be beyond doubt a consummate artist... As a whole the effect is clever, powerful, and striking, though grotesque, monotonous, and to use a French word, bizarre."

T.S. Eliot, on the other hand, reportedly called the construction of Armadale "almost perfect", opining: "It has no merit beyond melodrama, and it has every merit that melodrama can have."

***

Two final areas to cover. Firstly, the Isle of Man. Collins is very rude about my favourite Island (where he spent only a week). Castletown comes in for particular criticism: "It is doubtful if there is a place on the habitable globe which, regarded as a sight-seeing investment offering itself to the spare attention of strangers, yields so small a percentage of interest in return as Castletown... The silence of the grave overflowed the churchyard, and filled this miserable town..."

But he has also picked up a key reality: "They made various interesting discoveries in connection with the laws and constitution of the Isle of Man, and the manners and customs of the natives. To Allan's delight, the Manxmen spoke of England as of a well-known adjacent island, situated at a certain distance from the central empire of the Isle of Man."


The much maligned Castletown

He appreciates as much as I do the dramatic landscapes at the southern tip of the Island: "The finest coast scenery in the island was said to be to the westward and the southward, and there was a fishing town in those regions called Port St Mary, with a hotel at which travelers could sleep... Arrived in Port St Mary, the two friends found themselves in a second Castletown on a smaller scale. But the country round, wild, open, and hilly, deserved its reputation... Little by little the cliffs rose in height, and the rocks, massed wild and jagged, showed rifted black chasms yawning deep in their seaward sides... [They saw] the black precipices of the islet called the Calf, separated from the mainland by the dark and dangerous channel of the sound."

Reports that Collins played a part in expediting the construction of the Island's first "lunatic asylum" are apparently false. But Armadale is a sobering reminder of the plight of the mentally ill of the period (and Doctor Le Doux a terrifying exemplar of the grasping hands they can fall into).



***

Another interesting theme (which sounds very contemporary to our ears) is that of public opinion, which never quite knows what it wants. Lydia's history reveals the following: "She was [tried for murder] and sentenced to death in such a scene as had never been previously witnessed in an English court of justice... On the evening of the trial, two or three of the young buccaneers of literature went down to two or three newspaper offices, and wrote two or three heart-rending leading articles on the subject of the proceedings in court. The next morning the public caught light like tinder; and the prison was tried over again, before an amateur court of justice, in the columns of the newspapers... The general public followed the lead of the barristers and the doctors, and the young buccaneers who had set the thing going. Here was the law that they all paid to protect them actually doing its duty in dreadful earnest! Shocking! shocking!... The prisoner's death warrant went into the wastepaper basket; the verdict of the law was reversed by general acclamation; and the verdict of the newspapers carried the day. But the best of it is to come. You know what happened when the people found themselves with the pet object of their sympathy suddenly cast loose on their hands? A general impression prevailed directly that she was not quite innocent enough, after all, to be let out of prison then and there! Punish her a little -- that was the state of the popular feeling -- punish her a little, Mr Home Secretary, on general moral grounds."

When public opinion in Thorpe Ambrose judges Allan Armadale guilty of maligning Miss Gwilt, it goes to similar extremes: "She is now considered to be quite a heroine. The Thorpe Ambrose Mercury has got a leading article about her, comparing her to Joan of Arc."

All that with no social media...



All in all, if you're willing to suspend a little bit of disbelief from time to time, this is a wonderfully atmospheric, tense, and shuddery novel. Well worth your time.