Armadale by Wilkie Collins Read Free Book Online Page B

took 500 at 15s.
6d
. a copy. The relationship between Collins and George Smith did not prosper (Smith did not commission the novelist again, and may have regretted his expensive purchase of
Armadale). A
one-volume edition of the novel, priced six shillings, was brought out by Smith in November 1866, and by October 1869 this was being sold at the reduced cost of five shillings. It was, presumably, overprinted. In September 1871, Smith, Elder brought out a budget-priced two-shilling edition of
Armadale
. In the long run, George Smith (who evidently owned the copyright outright) probably got his money back. In America,
Harper’s
brought out a one-volume edition in late 1866 at $1.60, with thirty-six illustrations by Thomas. Tauchnitz brought out a three-volume edition for the English-speaking European market in the same period.
    This edition follows the first published version of
Armadale
, as published in the
Cornhill Magazine
, with the addition of the dedication, Collins’s foreword, and the ‘Appendix’.
Notes
    1 . Peters, p. 236 .
    2 . Robinson, p. 179 .
    3 . Sue Lonoff,
Wilkie Collins and his Victorian Readers
(New York, 1982), p. 33 . Subsequent references are shortened to ‘Lonoff’.
    4 . Lonoff, pp. 33 –4.
    5 . Robinson, p. 187 .
    6 . Lonoff, p. 34 .
    7 . Peters, p. 268 .
    8 . Robinson, p. 190 .
    9 . See John Sutherland,
‘ComhilFs
Sales and Payments’,
Victorian Periodicals Review
, 19, 3 (Fall 1986), p. 107 .
    10 . Lonoff, p. 37 .
    11 . Michael Sadleir in
XIX Century Fiction
(Cambridge, 1951), I, 376–7.
    A NOTE ON THE MANUSCRIPT
    The holograph manuscript of
Armadale
, comprising 577 leaves, is held at Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 1 I am indebted to the library for permission to examine and quote from the manuscript. Like his mentor Dickens, Collins composed hyperactively and his pages are black with overscorings, marginal additions and interlineations. Typically he wrote in short spells with much cutting and pasting. Many of Collins’s changes cannot be recovered from his obliterations. Those that can fall into four main categories. Most were simple improvements of the words on the page – sometimes changed as he went along, sometimes edited as he looked back over what he had written. Although Collins had the main lines of the plot clear in his mind from the first, he allowed himself considerable freedom with subplots, minor characters and incidental scenes: some of these changes of conception are recoverable and I annotate them in the explanatory notes. Like other sensation novelists, Collins was most attentive to suspense and effect, and the ends of instalments often show him sharpening up his ‘curtain’ lines on the ‘Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry, make ’em wait’ principle. Throughout his manuscript (which is also the copy text and contains the marks of Smith, Elder’s printers) Collins is meticulous in instructions to the compositor on such things as white lines, black lines, new paragraphs, italics, small caps., etc.
    Armadale
was the first narrative Collins had written in monthly instalments, and he encountered a few problems with length, particularly towards the end of his composition. In the seventeenth and eighteenth numbers he miscalculated and was obliged to revise to fit the
Cornhill Magazine’s
length requirement. In a number of places he seems to have had to cut small amounts of material away in proof. The proofs themselves do not seem to have survived, but it is clear that Collins revised them carefully, improving local details with great skill and economy. Years of work for newspapers had trained him as a fluent and highly professional writer. The
Armadale
manuscript is an informative and still relatively unexplored document, and it is to be hoped that some enterprising doctoral student will undertake a thorough study of it.
    Writing to a correspondent in October 1865, Collins declared: