On its publication in three-volume form in August 1860 (after its triumphant nine-month serialization in All the Year Round) The Woman in White enjoyed a huge success, sparking off what today we would call a sales mania and a franchise boom. As Wilkie Collins’s biographer Kenneth Robinson records:

While the novel was still selling in its thousands, manufacturers were producing The Woman in White perfume, The Woman in White cloaks and bonnets, and the music shops displayed The Woman in White waltzes and quadrilles … Dickens was not alone in his enthusiasm. Thackeray sat up all night reading it. Edward FitzGerald read it three times, and named a herring-lugger he owned Marian Halcombe, ‘after the brave girl in the story’. The Prince Consort admired it greatly and sent a copy to Baron Stockmar.1

Nuel Davis, in his life of Collins, goes so far as to claim that ‘The Woman in White was probably the most popular novel written in England during the nineteenth century’.2 This is demonstrably untrue (Robert Elsmere and Trilby outsold Collins’s novel by many times), but it is quite likely that it was the best-seller of the decade.

Among the chorus of applause there was one discordant voice. The Woman in White received a devastating review in The Times (then, as now, the country’s newspaper of record) on 30 October 1860. In the review E.S. Dallas proved – by close scrutiny of dates in the crucial Blackwater Park episodes – that the events described in the novel could never have happened. The Woman in White was, Dallas demonstrated, ‘impossible’. As Dallas pointed out the whole of Collins’s intricate denouement hinges on a single date – when was it that Laura took her fateful trip to London in late July 1850? If it can be proved that the date of Laura’s journey from Blackwater to Waterloo station post-dated her recorded ‘death’ (in fact, the death of her lookalike half-sister, Anne Catherick) at 5 Forest Road, St John’s Wood, then the criminals’ conspiracy falls to the ground. With this crucial fact in mind, Dallas dismantled the plot machinery of The Woman in White with the ruthless precision of a prosecuting counsel exploding a shaky alibi:

The details of Dallas’s criticism are less important than its general thrust. What he was doing, and doing brilliantly, was subjecting a work of fiction to the criterion of falsifiability, in terms of its internal logic and structure. This test was something distinctly new in literary criticism, and a corollary of the fetishistic standards of documentary accuracy which Collins had imported into English fiction as his hallmark. As he says in his ‘Preamble’, Collins wanted his novel to be read as so many pieces of evidence, ‘as the story of an offence against the laws is told in Court by more than one witness’. The reader, that is, should be as alert to clues and discrepancies in evidence as is a jury sitting in judgement. As Henry James astutely observed, Collins was playing a deep game with genre and literary discourse. Collins’s novels, James declared, were ‘not so much works of art as works of science. To read The Woman in White requires very much the same intellectual effort as to read Motley or Froude.’4 What James implied by comparing Collins to the leading historians of the age was that one could bring the same truth-tests to The Woman in White that a sceptical expert might bring to The Rise of the Dutch Republic (1855) or the History of England from the Death of Cardinal Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada (12 vols., 1856–70). By reading The Woman in White as if it were history or science (rather than just a made-up story) Dallas can ‘disprove’ it.

Collins took Dallas’s criticisms immensely seriously. He wrote to his publisher the next day, instructing that no more copies of The Woman in White must be put out, until he should have an opportunity to revise the text: ‘The critic in “The Times” is (between ourselves) right about the mistake in time … we will set it right at the first opportunity’, he confessed.5 The mistake was duly set right in the ‘New’ 1861 one-volume edition by antedating the crucial Blackwater Park episode a whole sixteen days, and by clipping a couple of days off the crucial death-of-Anne/arrival-of-Laura episode (i.e. making it 25/26 July, rather than 28/29 July). In the revised edition, Collins made other small corrections (changing the wedding date of Percival Glyde and Laura, for instance, so that it did not hit a Sunday in the 1849 calendar – a document which the novelist evidently went back to consult in the course of revision).

Although he took extraordinary pains to reconcile fine points of narrative chronology, Collins left one troubling mote to trouble the reader’s eye. In the revised 1861 text, a day or two after 20 June, when Marian falls into her fever, Count Fosco discovers Anne Catherick’s whereabouts and treats her heart condition. Having won her confidence, the fat villain passes on to Anne a forged message from Laura, telling her to go to London with her old friend and companion, Mrs Clements. Laura, Anne is reassured, will meet her there. Three days later, Anne having been strengthened sufficiently by Fosco’s medicines to undertake the journey, the two women leave for London, where they take lodgings. ‘A little more than a fortnight’ later (as Mrs Clements later testifies in her personal narrative) Anne is abducted. By Mrs Clements’s reckoning, this must be around 7 July – two to three weeks before Anne’s death. But, by Fosco’s account in his final written confession to Hartright, it was on 24 July that Anne Catherick was abducted and brought to the house in St John’s Wood as ‘Lady Laura Glyde’, we later learn. The unfortunate woman died of heart failure there the next day, 25 July, and it was not until the day after that, 26 July, that the true Laura was lured to London. On 27 July she was returned to the London lunatic asylum as ‘Anne Catherick’, the true Anne Catherick now being prepared for her funeral at Limmeridge on 2 August, as ‘Laura’.6

Who do we believe? Mrs Clements, by whose account Anne was in the sinister custody of the Foscos and the Rubelles for two weeks? Or Count Fosco, by whose account Anne was in their custody for two days? It does not require much inspection to see that Fosco’s confession, for all its superficial candour, is shot through with self-serving falsehoods. Mrs Clements, by contrast, is stolidly honest. In terms of character the reader/jury will find her by far the more credible witness. And if Anne was held for two weeks in St John’s Wood, what was she subjected to during that time? A clue is supplied in the famous anecdote of the novel’s inspiration, given by J.G. Millais (the painter’s son), ten years after Collins’s death:

One night in the ’50s [John Everett] Millais was returning home to 83, Gower Street from one of the many parties held under Mrs Collins’s hospitable roof in Hanover Terrace, and, in accordance with the usual practice of the two brothers, Wilkie and Charles [Collins], they accompanied him on his homeward walk through the dimly-lit, and those days semi-rural, roads and lanes of North London … It was a beautiful moonlight night in the summer time and as the three friends walked along chatting gaily together, they were suddenly arrested by a piercing scream coming from the garden of a villa close at hand. It was evidently the cry of a woman in distress; and while pausing to consider what they should do, the iron gate leading to the garden was dashed open, and from it came the figure of a young and very beautiful woman dressed in flowing white robes that shone in the moonlight. She seemed to float rather than run in their direction, and, on coming up to the three men, she paused for a moment in an attitude of supplication and terror. Then, suddenly seeming to recollect herself, she suddenly moved on and vanished in the shadows cast upon the road. ‘What a lovely woman!’ was all Millais could say. ‘I must see who she is, and what is the matter,’ said Wilkie Collins, as, without a word he dashed off after her. His two companions waited in vain for his return, and next day, when they met again, he seemed indisposed to talk of his adventure. They gathered from him, however, that he had come up with the lovely fugitive and had heard from her own lips the history of her life and the cause of her sudden flight. She was a young lady of good birth and position, who had accidentally fallen into the hands of a man living in a villa in Regent’s Park. There for many months he kept her prisoner under threats and mesmeric influence of so alarming a character that she dared not attempt to escape, until, in sheer desperation, she fled from the brute, who, with a poker in his hand, threatened to dash her brains out. Her subsequent history, interesting as it is, is not for these pages.7

Fosco, we remember, is a mesmerist: the Rubelles are thugs. What we can plausibly suppose is that, like the other luckless Woman in White, Anne was incarcerated for quite some time in a villa in the Regent’s Park district, where she was subjected to barbarous mistreatment, which may well have included sexual abuse. It was this mistreatment which provoked her death from heart failure on 25 July. Fosco, out of guilt, suppresses the fact that he was responsible for Anne’s death by torture, claiming instead that she died of ‘natural causes’, having been in his care only a few hours.

There is, of course, a simpler explanation – namely that Collins simply made another chronological miscalculation. But this seems unlikely. He revised the time-scheme of The Woman in White so conscientiously for the 1861 text, and he was so expert in such dovetailing, that it is much more attractive to assume that he left the anomaly for his more detectively inclined readers to turn up. This reading élite should have the privilege of knowing just how subtle and evil the Napoleon of Crime, Count Fosco, really was.

Notes

1. Kenneth Robinson, Wilkie Collins: A Biography (London, 1951), 149.

2. Nuel P. Davis, The Life of Wilkie Collins (Urbana: Illinois, 1956), 216.

3. The review is reprinted in Norman Page (ed.), Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage (London, 1974), 102–3.

4. Ibid. 124.

5. Ibid. 95.

6. This anomaly in the novel’s chronology is noted by W.M. Kendrick, ‘The Sensationalism of The Woman in White’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 32:1 (June 1977), 18–35 (see particularly 23) and by Andrew Gasson ‘The Woman in White: A Chronological Study’, Wilkie Collins Society Journal, 2 (1982), 12–13.

7. J.G. Millais, The Life and Letters of John Everett Millais (London, 1899), 278–9.