Why most sensational Victorian novel was set at the very edge of England
Full of sex, intrigue, hauntings and hints of insanity, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White was inspired by a trip to Cumbria by two famous authors desperately concealing shocking personal secrets
The setting for the sexually-charged BBC TV period drama The Woman in White is a real place.
Although author Wilkie Collins called the mansion where his hero Walter Hartright wooed vulnerable Laura Fairlie, "Limmeridge House," the location it is based on is actually Ewanrigg Hall near Maryport, Cumbria, a house that the author visited in 1857 on a walking tour with his friend Charles Dickens.
So why did Collins choose to set his most successful "sensation" novel - a kind of Gothic detective romance – in a location so remote from where the action of the story started in London’s Regent’s Park?
The answer is riven with real-life passion, deception and sexual intrigue, just as much as his fictional tale. Collins was a cunning craftsman who packed significance into every crevice of his work.
For example, the name he gave to Limmeridge House not only suggests a place at the limit of England and possibly the outer fringes of polite society, the meaning of the word “limmer”, which almost certainly passed the vast majority of his polite readership by, means a woman of loose morals, a hussy, prostitute or strumpet.
The book made the 35-year-old Collins a rich man, and its able to demand the equivalent of £500,000 for his next novel. Many of the characters, particularly the women so abused and manipulated by men, seem to be based on people intimately connected to Wilkie's life.
For example, the selfish valetudinarian Frederick Fairlie is modelled partly on Wilkie himself who was incapacitated during the walking trip by a sprained ankle.
The evil Sir Percival Glyde who sought to marry Laura purely for her then enormous £20,000 fortune is a portrait of Wilkie's friend the bombastic writer and MP Edward Bulwer Lytton.
The maritally unfaithful Lytton caused a media sensation by having his wife Rosina locked up in an insane asylum when she publicly complained of his miserly treatment of her to the voters in his Hertfordshire constituency.
Even more to the point it emerged only in 2019 from a newly discovered a trove of 98 previously unseen letters that Charles Dickens himself also tried to have his wife Catherine committed as he separated from her in order to enjoy his secret affair with an 18 year old actress Ellen Ternan.
At the time, Dickens wrote a letter to his agent suggesting it had been Catherine’s idea that she and Dickens live apart and the novelist accused her of having “a mental disorder under which she sometimes labors.”
Wilkie will have been one of a few few people who Dickens will have told about his attempt to have her put away. This may explain why the seductive, shape-shifting Count Fosco, who was destined to become the prototype of all smooth evil geniuses of future crime fiction, displays a touch of the Inimitable Boz.
The most extraordinary portrait is of Marian Halcombe, a woman who is undefined by her gender. Seen at a distance Hartright thinks her a "rare beauty" with a "perfect waist, undeformed by stays."
But close up this is belied "by her face and the head that crowned it," her "almost swarthy" complexion and the almost moustache on her upper lip which made her "ugly." But by the novel's end Marian had demonstrated another kind of beauty.
She is fiercely independent, intelligent, rejects her 19th century gender role and pressure from men to be pious, passive and submissive. She turns detective and saves her half sister’s life from the machinations of the duplicitous men. Marian was one of the first literary characters created by a man to strike a blow for the liberation of women. Symbolically, such a creature could only have emerged from the numinous northern void.
The imaginative spark for Collins’s dark, weird story - which he said he wrote to shock society into recognising the monster that lurks underneath the surface of civilised Victorian masculinity - came when he was thrust reluctantly out of his London literary comfort zone by Dickens.
The creator of Scrooge, Miss Havisham and Fagin was exhausted by the effort of editing his weekly magazine, Household Words, and racked by feelings of guilt and sexual frustration.
In 1857 the middle-aged Dickens had begun a clandestine adulterous affair with the teenage actress that would trigger the estrangement from his wife the following year. He wrote “in grim despair” to Wilkie asking if they could “go anywhere” together. “I want to escape from myself…my blankness is inconceivable - indescribable - my misery amazing.”
They hit on the idea of a walking tour starting in Cumberland, conveniently ending in Doncaster where Nelly had an acting engagement. They left London by train for Carlisle on 7 September, travelling another fourteen miles to the village of Hesket Newmarket. Here they stayed at the Queen’s Head Hotel close to Carrock Fell.
Dickens wrote to his housekeeper and sister-in-law “Georgy” Hogarth that he’d insisted on them climbing the Fell, “a huge black hill fifteen hundred feet high” despite Wilkie’s protests. “It rained in torrents,” the compass broke and they became hopelessly lost in the thick mist.
The two inappropriately dressed and poorly-shod writers followed the stream downwards doing “amazing gymnastics.” Wilkie fell into a stream “with his ankle sprained and great ligament of the foot and leg swollen I don’t know how big,” Dickens wrote.
So on the 9th they travelled to nearby Wigton where Wilkie saw a doctor. Dickens noted the town had “the wonderful peculiarity that it had no population, no business and no streets to speak of.” They arrived in Allonby in time for lunch. They stopped for two nights at The Ship - described by Dickens as “a capital little homely inn looking out upon the sea...a clean nice place in a rough wild country.”
The landlord was Benjamin Partridge and his immensely fat wife was “very obliging and comfortable.” By the time of their departure, Wilkie was in a bad way. He “can wear neither shoe nor stocking, and has his foot wrapped up in a flannel waistcoat, and has a breakfast saucer of liniment, and a horrible dabbling of lotion incessantly in progress. We laughed at it all, but I very much doubt whether he can go on to Doncaster,” wrote Dickens.
It was as they travelled in a carriage south from Allonby on the 12th towards Lancaster the pair came upon the spectacular Ewanrigg Hall on the outskirts of Maryport.
It was constructed in 1753, enjoying astounding views of the Solway Firth and the Scottish mountains beyond. In the novel, the young artist (and by the way Wilkie’s father was William Collins, the celebrated landscape artist) Walter Hartright writes: “My travelling instructions directed me to go to Carlisle, and then to diverge by a branch railway which ran in the direction of the coast…When I rose next morning and drew up my blind, the sea opened before me joyously under the broad August sunlight, and the distant coast of Scotland fringed the horizon with its lines of melting blue.”
With its large drawing room, breakfast room, library, eight good-sized bedrooms and a tower with walls reputed to be over five feet thick, Ewanrigg Hall is the spitting image of Limmeridge as described in the novel. In real life Ewanrigg was the home of the Christian family of Mutiny on the Bounty fame.
The house was demolished in 1903. Its owner Henry Taubmen Christian died in 1859 and his grief-stricken wife ended her years in a lunatic asylum. Dickens and Collins appear to have learned from staff at the house that Ewanrigg was supposed to be haunted by a ghostly “White Lady” and that the house was also famed for featuring in one of Cumbria’s “Golden Coffin” stories – which alleges that the hall houses a coffin containing the body of either a chieftain or a Roman woman in a white dress.
The year that the two novelists visited the house marked the high point of the Victorian malicious lunacy incarceration phenonmenon. In 1858, no fewer than four instances of deliberate attempts to certify and thereby dispose of sane people (two women and two men) made national newspaper headlines.
The most infamous was Lytton’s who had his spouse locked up because obtaining a divorce was legally impossible. Collins also had form in manipulating women. He acquired two “wives” at the same time but declined to marry either of them.
Instead, he split his time between Caroline Graves and Martha Rudd, who was a teenager when they met and with whom he had three children. The sudden meeting of his hero, Hartright, with the mysterious woman in white was supposed to have been inspired by a real life meeting between Collins and a woman while strolling home one evening in 1858 accompanied by his brother and the painter John Everett Millais. Millais is famous for his picture of that other literary victim of masculine abuse, Ophelia.
The three men were allegedly approached by “a woman dressed in flowing white robes escaping from a villa in Regent’s Park where she had been kept a prisoner under mesmeric influence.” In reality, this story was almost certainly fabricated or greatly exaggerated to shield Collins from moral disapproval.
The real-life woman in white was Caroline, a very beautiful 26-year-old carpenter’s daughter whom the 30-year-old Wilkie probably met in the spring of 1856 while he was walking alone.
Fairly soon after the pair were living together in lodgings on London’s Tottenham Court Road, a liaison that was only revealed years later in a biography of Millais by his son. Wilkie lived clandestinely with Caroline (whom he described as his housekeeper) for thirty years until he died. They are buried in the same grave.
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