Armadale by Wilkie Collins Read Free Book Online

have time in hand at the beginning of the serial run). But Collins’s health deteriorated badly in early 1863 and he was advised by his physicians to give up writing altogether until he recovered. On 19 March 1863 he recorded that the
Cornhill
novel was ‘put off again… [Smith, Elder] have behaved most kindly and considerately about it’. 2 On 18 June 1863 he wrote with more precise dates: ‘I have had a most kind and friendly letter from Mr Smith… allowing me until the 1st. of December next [1863] to send inthe 1st. number of the new story for Cornhill.’ 3 He was in Strasbourg at the time and mysteriously declared ‘I have
Got an Ideal’
(Major Milroy’s clock may have been a small part of the idea.) He seems to have clarified this idea in Wildbad, where he went to take the curative waters in summer 1863. In July – August he visited the Isle of Man and in November he recorded: ‘I am getting ideas as thick as blackberries’. By December he was convinced he had invented (but not yet started to write) ‘an extraordinary story – something entirely different from anything I have done yet’. By January 1864 he was ‘constructing my story’ and again insisting that it was something ‘entirely new’. 4
    Collins’s delay must have been vexatious for Smith. Dickens began serializing Charles Reade’s
Hard Cash
in
All the Year Round
in March 1863. Reade’s novel would conclude in December 1863. Reade – who was another leading sensationalist – would thus overshadow Collins. It was a further vexation that Reade’s novel (which features abominations perpetrated on patients in private lunatic asylums) went down very badly with the reading public, and lost Dickens 3,000 subscribers (as Reade calculated). Its failure cast a blight over Collins’s forthcoming work (which also climaxes in a private lunatic asylum). While he was waiting for
Armadale
, Smith filled the gap in
Cornhill Magazine’s
, pages with a hastily devised serial by his new editor, Frederick Greenwood,
Margaret Denzil’s History
(November 1863–October 1864).
    During the early part of 1864 Collins travelled on the Continent to recuperate his health. He thought out the plot for his new story in Rome, in February 1864. By March, when he returned to England, ‘most of the important preliminary work was done’. After eighteen months’ ‘literary abstinence’ he now felt well enough to write. On 20 April 1864 he told his mother: ‘After much pondering over the construction of the story I positively sat down with a clean sheet before me, and began to write it on Monday last. So far my progress is slow and hesitating enough – not for want of knowing what I have to do, but for want of practice.’ He instructed Smith that the new (and still unnamed) novel could be announced to start its serial run ‘almost two years after the date first proposed’. 5 The first sections were delivered to the printers (who approved of the story) in June 1864. Smith was very pleased. Dickens was sent an early set of proofs of the first number, and gave his approval. 6 On 24 September 1864, however, just one week before publication of the opening number, Collins wrote in near panic to his friend Edward Pigott to report that ‘The gout has affected my brain. My mind is perfectly clear – but the nervous misery I suffer is indescribable. Beard [his doctor] cannot yet decide when I can work again, orwhat is to be done about the Gornhill. With Smith away, and the first number made up on the first of the month, the disaster is complete’. 7 Evidently Collins somehow rode out this disaster. Keeping a month or so ahead of deadlines, and despite recurrent poor health, he finished writing on 12 April 1866, some six weeks before the last instalment was published. ‘Miss Gwilt’s death quite upset me’, he recorded. 8
    The