Armadale was first issued in twenty episodes in the Cornhill Magazine, from November 1864 to June 1866 (volumes x–xiii). Wilkie Collins was paid £250 for each instalment. Though sales of the magazine rose initially with the new serial, Armadale did not prove as popular as the publisher, George Smith, had hoped: by December 1865 sales had dropped back to between 36,000 and 38,000 per number.1 The serialization had one full-page and one initial illustration to each number. Collins had wanted his old friend Millais, who had drawn a frontispiece for the 1864 edition of No Name, to illustrate Armadale; as he was not available these were supplied by George Thomas, an experienced illustrator. Collins thought them very satisfactory. The volume edition, in two volumes octavo, was published by Smith, Elder in May 1866, with the twenty full-page illustrations.
The serial version was revised for the two-volume edition. The Dedication to John Forster, an Introduction, and Appendix were added. ‘Book the First’ was renamed ‘Prologue’, and the subsequent ‘Books’ renumbered. An error of dating in ‘Book the Third’, chapter 1 was corrected. Some cuts were made, in general to tighten up the narrative. Further ‘editions’ (which would now be called impressions) were printed in the same year, without any alterations. There were further editions during Wilkie Collins’s lifetime; copies of these are extremely rare. Smith, Elder published a one-volume reprint of the 1866 edition, which carries various dates. It became volume 9 of their ‘new edition’ of Wilkie Collins’s works in 1872. The catalogue to the Robert L. Wolff collection, now at Austin, Texas, lists a ‘yellowback’ Smith, Elder ‘new edition’ of 1884. The London Library catalogue lists an edition of 1866; but the copy has apparently disappeared from the library.
The novel also appeared in serial form in America in Harper’s Monthly Magazine, from December 1864 to July 1866. A one-volume edition, printed from the type set for the parts, in double columns, with American spelling, and with the original illustrations, was published by Harper in 1866. A three-volume edition, without illustrations, was also published by Tauchnitz for the European market in the same year. Harper reissued their one-volume edition in 1871; and a ‘Library Edition’ of Wilkie Collins’s novels, from 1873, including Armadale. After Wilkie Collins’s death, Armadale was included in the various Chatto and Windus collected editions, from 1891 onwards, and was also reissued by Harper, and by the firm of Collier, in various collected editions.
The Manuscript
The complete holograph manuscript, in 577 leaves, with title-page, Dedication, and Introduction for the volume edition, is at the Huntington Library, Pasadena, California. I should like to thank the custodians of the Library for kindly permitting me to examine it. The main body of the manuscript is marked up for the serial publication in the Cornhill Magazine. In spite of the author’s illness while he was writing it, he did not employ amanuenses. It is, as is usual for Wilkie Collins’s manuscripts, carefully annotated with instructions for the printer, and heavily revised and overscored. The title was not decided on until the third monthly part was delivered. Most of Collins’s first drafts are irrecoverable; but the revisions seem to have been stylistic rather than major alterations to the plot. Some over-expository, or repetitive sections were cut. The longest recoverable deletion comes in Book the First, chapter 5, where an attempt by Midwinter to reconcile the two explanations of Allan’s dream was removed. (See Explanatory Notes, p. 823.
Wilkie Collins immediately made an acting version of Armadale, to protect his dramatic rights in the story from piracy. The manuscript of this version is now at the Huntington Library. Twenty-five copies were printed for the author by Smith, Elder in 1866, but it was never performed. Though Collins felt this version was a failure, Dickens was enthusiastic and thought the dialogue excellent and dramatic. But, he warned Collins, in a letter of 10 July 1866:
Almost every situation in it is dangerous. I do not think any English audience would accept the scene in which Miss Gwilt in that widow’s dress renounces Midwinter . . . You would never get through the last act in the Sanatorium . . . you could only carry those situations by the help of interest in some innocent person whom they placed in peril, and that person a young woman. There is no one to be interested in here . . .2
A French translation and adaptation for the stage was made in 1867. Collins went to Paris to work on it in collaboration with his friend the French actor Regnier. At Regnier’s insistence he completely rewrote the second act and expanded the play from three to five acts. The new material was then translated and polished by Regnier. The manuscript of the third act of the French version is in the Parrish Collection at Princeton University. The play was never produced in France, but it became the basis for the play Miss Gwilt finally produced in England in 1875. As its title suggests, the emphasis was shifted, for dramatic purposes, from the intertwined histories of the two Armadales to the heroine/villainess, Lydia Gwilt. Collins managed the difficult feat of complying with Dickens’s demand for an innocent young woman to engage the audience’s sympathy by turning Lydia Gwilt into a ‘fallen’ woman attempting to redeem herself. The ‘dangerous’ elements are softened: it becomes entirely the doctor’s idea that she should pass herself off as Mrs Armadale, and she struggles to resist him. Her accomplice, the procuress Mrs Oldershaw, is cut from the play, as is Lydia’s elderly admirer Mr Bashwood. Finally, she is not implicated in the plots to sink Allan’s yacht and to murder him with poison gas. Lydia becomes, in fact, a stereotyped female victim, the tool of the male villains.
Miss Gwilt was put on first at the Alexandra Theatre, Liverpool, on 9 December 1875, and in April 1876 at the Globe Theatre, London. On both occasions Ada Cavendish, who had starred in Collins’s previous play about a fallen woman, The New Magdalen, took the title role, and the 21-year-old Arthur Pinero played the elderly solicitor, Mr Darch, making his West End début in the part. The play did well, though it did not achieve the same success as The New Magdalen. Wilkie Collins continued to tinker with it: alterations made in 1877, in response to the reactions of the actors and the audiences, added many stage directions, cut some long speeches, and altered the ending, making Midwinter remain in love with Lydia Gwilt to the final curtain.
The text of this edition
This text of this edition is that of the one-volume ‘illustrated’ edition issued by Smith, Elder in 1869. The text has been compared with the 1866 two-volume edition, with which it is identical, though some printer’s errors were corrected, and others introduced. These have been silently corrected. It has also been compared with the Cornhill serialization, the Tauchnitz edition, the Harper’s Monthly Magazine serialization, and the Harper one-volume edition, all of 1866.