CHAPTER ONE

The Omni

The peculiar appearance of Mr. Wilkie Collins made him stand out in an “omni,” as the London bus was frequently called. At five feet and six inches he was relatively short even for the 1850s and 1860s. His head was too large for his body; his arms and his legs were a little too short, while his hands and feet were too small and considered to be “rather like a woman’s.” There was a large bump on his right temple as a result of a gynaecological accident; it was sometimes called “a swelling of the frontal bone.”

He was always aware of his oddity and declared that nature had in his case been “a bad artist”; he believed that his high shoulders, and his generally broad body, were “quite out of all proportion” to his large and intellectual head. He was extremely short-sighted, and always wore spectacles. In his thirties he grew a beard, thus lending much-needed symmetry to his face. In his published work he often draws attention to physical abnormalities that give a clue to distinctive character; he was very interested in what was then the science of physiognomy, but he also mentions among other ailments epilepsy, spinal defects, facial deformities, and paralysis of the limbs.

His friend, Holman-Hunt, gave an account of his demeanour. When welcoming a guest he would rock himself backwards and forwards while clasping his knees, and “ask with deep concern where you came from last.” Someone else described “a nervous movement of his knees, as if he were soothing invisible babies.” He could not stay still. When he sensed an attack of gout coming on, an ailment that afflicted him for much of his life, his response was “his fidgeting with one foot upon the floor.” When in repose, however, his face had a dreaming or reflective aspect; but in conversations his bright eyes behind his gold-rimmed spectacles fixed you like gimlets.

He wore colourful clothes, like many of his contemporaries, as if playing a certain part in the great general drama of life. His doctor, Frank Beard, explained that he would sometimes sit down to dinner “in a light camel hair or tweed suit, with a broad pink or blue striped shirt, and perhaps a red tie.” When photographed in New York, on a reading tour, he was dressed in a florid fur coat. He was recorded wearing “a linen shirt dashed with great, gory squares, cut low in the neck, and held together with a rakishly tied Belcher scarf” together with a bright blue jacket and waistcoat. He also owned a range of cravats, striped and spotted. Out for a walk in London one afternoon in his late fifties, wearing a smart paletot coat usually reserved for young men, he overheard a woman say to her companion, “To think of a man wearing such a coat as that—at his time of life!” Yet his preferred costume, when he was working quietly at home, was a dressing gown.

He was universally known for his amiability and general good humour; he was perhaps the sweetest-tempered of all the Victorian novelists. He did not have the hard and driven quality of Charles Dickens; he did not have the brooding and majestic air of George Eliot. He was “the least posé public man I ever met,” according to one companion; he was kind and ever approachable. He had no “side,” and seems to have been adored by the women of his acquaintance for his sly sense of fun and effortless charm. He set men at their ease with his cheerfulness and what was described as “the buoyancy of a youthful spirit.” He said of himself that dignity was not part of his nature. His description of one of his characters might be applied to him, that he was one of those men “whom everybody shakes hands with, and nobody bows to, on a first introduction.” He was always known simply as Wilkie, not as Collins or Mr. Collins.

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The bus was known as the “omni” because it catered for everyone, and thus can be seen as an indispensable preliminary to the Parliamentary Reform Acts of 1867 and 1870. He liked to ride on the omnibus because he wished to immerse himself in what he called “the Actual,” as opposed to “the Ideal.” Among the routes adjoining his neighbourhood he might have taken that from the Yorkshire Stingo at Paddington to the Bank of England, passing along the New Road (now known as the Marylebone Road), Somers Town and the City Road.

It was a relatively expensive mode of transport—a shilling for a full ticket—but newspapers and magazines were provided free of charge. The bus could accommodate twenty-two passengers and Collins once wrote that “an omnibus has always appeared to be a perambulatory exhibition room of the eccentricities of human nature”; he liked to scrutinise “merely the different methods of getting into the vehicle and taking their seats, adopted by different people.” He saw the fashionable young woman in intensely dyed crinoline; he saw the banker, dressed in clerical black, wearing a stovepipe hat. He observed the stout gentleman in a white neckcloth, and the “shabby-genteel” man with a green bag. He may have noticed how the stout gentleman gave a poke to the “cad,” or conductor, with his umbrella for some infringement of the rules. He saw all the anxious, nervous, exhausted and ailing people of the city. In one of his novels, Basil, a young man falls helplessly in love with a girl he has glimpsed on the “omni.”

One reviewer described his fiction as “stuffed full” with incidents “as an omnibus is with passengers on a rainy day.” Safely ensconced in his seat he would have heard all the phrases of the age. It struck me all of a heap. I am dead beat. He was in a blue funk. I hardly know whether I’m on my head or my heels. He’s spooney enough to like lemonade. He’s a rum’un. That shook him up a bit. Tuck in. Ta-ta, sergeant, ta-ta.

He knew the route of the Paddington omnibus by heart, since for most of his life he lived in the neighbourhood of the New Road. Like most Londoners of the period he remained in the area with which he was familiar. Londoners had some inner guide to the nature of their terrain; they knew where to find the dry soil or the damp soil; they knew of the windy quarters and the sultry quarters; they recognised which neighbourhoods were healthy, and which were diseased.

He lived, apart from some residences of his childhood years, in a small patch of territory bounded by Oxford Street in the south and Regent’s Park in the north; the western frontier lies on the Edgware Road and the eastern is formed by Great Portland Street. Scenes from this territory are to be found in much of his fiction, with the immediate neighbourhood of Regent’s Park as a particular attraction. Marylebone is in fact one of the most respectable, and also one of the most dreary, areas of London. Most of it is resolutely bourgeois, with solid stuccoed or red brick houses ranged along grimly patterned streets. Yet Collins, of all people, realised that strange crimes and furtive passions might lie concealed behind the brick and the plaster.

The most sensational crimes of the 1860s involved fraud, or blackmail, or poison, where a respectable façade was most important; these were also the issues that arrested Collins’s attention. Thomas Hardy characterised the most successful fiction of the period as containing “murder, blackmail, illegitimacy, impersonation, eavesdropping, multiple secrets, a suggestion of bigamy, amateur and professional detectives.” It is the best possible summary of the art of Wilkie Collins. He celebrated what he described, in The Woman in White, as “the idea of something hidden below the surface.” In the process he created a fragile world racked with nervous tension, where the conventions of ordinary life concealed the burden of secrets and of irregular relationships. This was a world of confused identities, both sexual and social, in which no one had a secure home. This was the world of London.