Dickens had only just celebrated his 24^th birthday when the publisher Willian Hall paid a call on him at his lodgings in Furnival’s Inn to offer him a writing contract. It was early February, 1836, and Dickens’ collected Sketches by ‘Boz’ had literally just been published in book form by John Macrone. These sketches ‘Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People’ had been published individually in several popular newspapers over the previous four years, but Macrone’s book represented a professional breakthrough. Dickens had been socially adopted by some heavy hitters in literary London, like the author of the bestselling Rookwood, William Harrison Ainsworth, his partner in crime the illustrator George Cruikshank, and the Examiner’s literary editor, John Forster. These contacts had brought Dickens to Macrone and thus to the collected Sketches, but for all that, he was still just an unknown with a bit of potential when Hall came calling. Hall was half of the relatively new firm of Chapman and Hall, a publisher and bookseller he had co-founded with his friend Edward Chapman in 1830. Chapman was a voracious reader with a good eye for talent while Hall had the business brain. The Pickwick Papers

One of Robert Seymour’s illustrations for ‘The Pickwick Papers’

Chapman and Hall had had some success working with the illustrator and caricaturist Robert Seymour, an artist then rivalled only by Cruikshank. The Squib Annual of Poetry, Politics, and Personalities was a collection of comic verses written around twelve cartoons by Seymour. The artist was also independently publishing Sketches by Seymour, a series of humorous lithographs depicting inept sportsmen and comedic Cockneys huntin’, shootin’, and fishin’. Seymour had pitched the idea of a shilling monthly magazine to Chapman and Hall depicting the misadventures of a group of Cockney sportsmen known as the ‘Nimrod Club’. Cheap paper and advances in printing had created a new market for shilling magazines aimed at the growing urban middle and working classes. Gentlemen’s sporting clubs were a popular subject, and had been since the Regency publishing sensation Life in London, with illustrations by George and Robert Cruikshank and ‘letterpress’ by the sporting journalist Pierce Egan. As a well-known artist, Seymour’s illustrations would lead the project, to which an ’editor’ would append a few thousand words of text. Hall was offering the job to Dickens. Dickens knew nothing about sport, but as he was planning to marry, the money was too good to turn down at nine guineas per sheet (sixteen pages of printed text), one-and-a-half sheets per month – about 12,000 words. He wrote to his fiancée Catherine Hogarth, ‘the work will be no joke, but the emolument is too tempting to resist.’

Though fourteen years Seymour’s junior and hardly the ‘name’ in the project, Dickens quickly reversed the roles, arguing (as he later wrote in his preface to the cheap edition of 1847) that ‘it would be infinitely better for the plates to arise naturally out of the text; and that I should like to take my own way, with a freer range of English scenes and people, and was afraid I should ultimately do so in any case, whatever course I might prescribe for myself at starting.’ Dickens also told Hall that ‘the idea was not novel, and had already been much used.’ The sporting club was therefore dropped as the premise, although the character of Nathaniel Winkle was created as a concession to Seymour’s original plan, being a young man who fancies himself a sporting gentleman yet has no aptitude whatsoever and is downright dangerous when it comes to horses and guns. This must have been humiliating for Seymour, but he begrudgingly concurred. Thus did Dickens become the ‘editor’ of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. ‘Pickwick is at length begun in all his might and glory,’ he wrote to his publishers.

Dickens hit the ground running, and playing to his strengths as a journalist – ‘Boz’ the observer of London life and also the court reporter and parliamentary correspondent who had travelled around the south of England covering local elections. He even threw in favourite places from his childhood. The Pickwick Papers was to be the Sketches on a much grander scale, the mission statement plain in the first couple of pages of the opening chapter:

‘That the Corresponding Society of the Pickwick Club is therefore hereby constituted; and that Samuel Pickwick, Esq., G.C.M.P.C., Tracy Tupman, Esq., M.P.C., Augustus Snodgrass, Esq., M.P.C., and Nathaniel Winkle, Esq., M.P.C., are hereby nominated and appointed members of the same; and that they be requested to forward, from time to time, authenticated accounts of their journeys and investigations, of their observations of character and manners, and of the whole of their adventures, together with all tales and papers to which local scenery or associations may give rise, to the Pickwick Club, stationed in London.’

Samuel Pickwick, founder of the club which bears his name, is a warm-hearted if naïve retired businessman who fancies himself a philosopher though his insights are unremarkable: ‘There sat the man who had traced to their source the mighty ponds of Hampstead, and agitated the scientific world with his Theory of Tittlebats.’ Tracy Tupman is a middle-aged lothario who never makes a conquest; Augustus Snodgrass describes himself as a ‘poet’ but never writes anything; and Nathaniel Winkle is a sportsman of staggering inability. By the end of the first instalment, they are on the road and already in trouble.

Despite his reputation, Seymour, meanwhile, was struggling financially. In 1827, his publishers Knight and Lacey had gone bankrupt owing him a lot of money. He had married that year and overwork and money worries led to a nervous breakdown in 1830. More recently, he had been illustrating comic text for Gilbert Abbott à Beckett, the editor of Figaro in London, a forerunner of Punch. Later one of the ‘Dickens Circle’, à Beckett was younger than Seymour and the two men eventually quarrelled. He resigned, and à Beckett refused to pay him, ridiculing him in the magazine. The humiliation of the public smear had triggered severe depression, but Seymour returned to Figaro when Henry Mayhew took over as editor. Although at the height of his popularity when The Pickwick Papers commenced, Seymour was on the ragged edge and losing control of his project. The cover of the first issue says it is ‘Edited by “Boz” With Illustrations’, but Seymour’s name does not even appear. He was also struggling to meet Dickens’ requirements, which went far beyond the humorous sporting illustrations originally envisioned and which were his stock in trade. After an argument between the two men at Dickens’ home over the illustration for ‘The Stroller’s Tale’ in the second number, Seymour returned home, worked late into the evening on the new plate and then killed himself with a ‘fowling piece’ (a sportsman’s shotgun).

‘Mr Pickwick leaving Goswell Street’ by Frank Reynolds (1910)

As his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography delicately puts it, ‘Seymour could not brook the mere toleration of his designs, and when to this was added something in the nature of dictation from his collaborator (though couched in the kindest terms), his overtaxed nerves magnified the matter until it grew unbearable.’ Issue 2 went out with Seymour’s three completed illustrations, and Dickens changed the format from the third part, reducing illustrations from four to two per issue in order to increase his text to 32 pages. Seymour was initially replaced by Robert William Buss (later known for his painting Dickens’ Dream), but Dickens was not satisfied with his work and he was dropped after one issue. Buss was replaced by ‘Phiz’ (Hablot Knight Browne), who would go on to illustrate much of Dickens’ later work. Jane Seymour, the artist’s widow and mother of his two children, always blamed Dickens for her husband’s suicide, likening him to Milton’s Satan, although it was his dispute with Figaro that was cited as a cause in the coroner’s verdict of suicide. Seymour was a delicate, sensitive man in an increasingly Darwinian industry. His mental health had been declining for almost a decade, and to lay his death at Dickens’ door would be unfair. His announcement of Seymour’s death in the second number of Pickwick is sombre and respectful:

Some time must elapse, before the void which the deceased gentleman has left in his profession can be filled up: – the blank his death has occasioned in the Society, which his amiable nature won, and his talents adorned, we can hardly hope to see supplied.

After Pickwick became a success, which was far from certain when Seymour died, rumours persisted – largely circulated by Jane and family friends and amplified in some obituaries – that Seymour was the real brains behind the serial. In his preface to the 1867 edition, Dickens decided to set the record straight, stating that ‘Mr. Seymour never originated or suggested an incident, a phrase, or a word to be found in this book. Mr. Seymour died when only twenty-four pages of this book were published, and when assuredly not forty-eight were written.’ In a final, rather ghoulish twist, Seymour’s headstone (removed from St Mary Magdalene Church, Islington, during building work and for many years thought lost) is now on permanent display at the Charles Dickens Museum in Camden.

The tragic Seymour was as much a victim of changing times as anything, and Dickens was changing them. As he’d seen immediately, the sporting club formula was already hackneyed and cliché. But that’s what the industry seemed to want, the deliberately familiar. Advances in printing technology had flooded the market with new weeklies and monthlies, but the content was surprisingly bland compared with that of Regency magazines like Blackwood’s, The London Magazine, and the Edinburgh Review. Miscellanies were popular, mixing nonfiction articles with literary fiction, but the fiction was rarely new. Instead, these magazines republished the literature of the past, Augustan and Romantic, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, along with Classical translations and religious writing such as Bunyon’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Articles were long, learned, and dull. The tone was nostalgic, the humour much like Seymour’s – gently satirising the mores of the middle and upper classes. Contemporary literature, meanwhile, had no obvious champion after the death of Sir Walter Scott and the end of the Romantic period. Dickens was young, enthusiastic, brilliant, and hungry. And he worked fast.

As you read The Pickwick Papers you can feel Dickens growing as an author, transitioning from journalist to novelist. There’s the journalist’s eye for detail, his instinctual ear for natural dialogue, accents, and mannerisms, his nose for a story, and his hard-won knowledge of London life across the social divides. At the start, he is still the sketch writer, observing in his original preface:

The author’s object in this work, was to place before the reader a constant succession of characters and incidents; to paint them in as vivid colours as he could command; and to render them, at the same time, life-like and amusing.

This echoes his preface to the first edition of the Sketches, in which he wrote:

His object has been to present little pictures of life and manners as they really are; and should they be approved of, he hopes to repeat his experiment with increased confidence, and on a more extensive scale.

Sam Weller by ‘Kyd’ (Joseph Clayton Clark (1857-1937)

Pickwick provided the opportunity for the ‘more extensive scale’. The prose is restless – reckless even – eager to move on to the next gag, the next quirky character. Fast and funny, the writing sizzles with edgy, infectious energy. It can be quite disorientating at times, but the overall effect is one of exhilaration. As the innocent Samuel Pickwick and his companions go about their travels, the author and, indeed, the English novel, embark upon a similar journey to return, like Mr. Pickwick himself, changed by the experience.

Dickens opens with a transcript of a Club meeting in which he sends up learned and debating societies (and by implication parliament) something rotten, revelling in pompous and empty rhetoric, obscure personal disputes, and arcane proceedings:

‘MR. BLOTTON (of Aldgate) rose to order. Did the honourable Pickwickian allude to him? (Cries of “Order,” “Chair,” “Yes,” “No,” “Go on,” “Leave off,” etc.)

‘MR. PICKWICK would not put up to be put down by clamour. He had alluded to the honourable gentleman. (Great excitement.)

‘MR. BLOTTON would only say then, that he repelled the hon. gent.’s false and scurrilous accusation, with profound contempt. (Great cheering.) The hon. gent. was a humbug. (Immense confusion, and loud cries of “Chair,” and “Order.”)

‘Mr. A. SNODGRASS rose to order. He threw himself upon the chair. (Hear.) He wished to know whether this disgraceful contest between two members of that club should be allowed to continue. (Hear, hear.)

‘The CHAIRMAN was quite sure the hon. Pickwickian would withdraw the expression he had just made use of.

‘MR. BLOTTON, with all possible respect for the chair, was quite sure he would not…’

There’s already something quite surreal about all this, while Dickens’ artfully contrasts the colloquial with the ridiculously formal as the dispute becomes more colourful. This transcript forms something of a preface in which the mission is stated. We are then swept quickly to Chapter 2 and ‘The First Day’s Journey’, which immediately descends into farce as Mr. Pickwick attempts to interview the cabbie: ‘Mr. Pickwick entered every word of this statement in his note-book, with the view of communicating it to the club, as a singular instance of the tenacity of life in horses under trying circumstances.’ This does not go down well:

‘Here’s your fare,’ said Mr. Pickwick, holding out the shilling to the driver.

What was the learned man’s astonishment, when that unaccountable person flung the money on the pavement, and requested in figurative terms to be allowed the pleasure of fighting him (Mr. Pickwick) for the amount!

‘You are mad,’ said Mr. Snodgrass.

‘Or drunk,’ said Mr. Winkle.

‘Or both,’ said Mr. Tupman.

‘Come on!’ said the cab-driver, sparring away like clockwork. ‘Come on—all four on you.’

The George and Vulture in the City of London

Dickens is clearly writing freely and prolifically, the scene unfolding like a stage comedy with a reliance on quick, snappy dialogue. If you’re coming to Pickwick after reading his later work, the lightness of the prose comes as quite a surprise. (If you know the Sketches you’ll recognise the style immediately.) The man was funny.

The day is saved by the arrival of ‘a rather tall, thin, young man, in a green coat, emerging suddenly from the coach-yard.’ This is Mr. Alfred Jingle, a man of as yet unknown origins, who quickly bundles the travellers away while talking the gathered crowd down:

‘Here, No. 924, take your fare, and take yourself off—respectable gentleman—know him well—none of your nonsense—this way, sir—where’s your friends?—all a mistake, I see—never mind—accidents will happen—best regulated families—never say die—down upon your luck—Pull him up—Put that in his pipe—like the flavour—damned rascals.’

And he continues to talk like this, various triggers eliciting these mini-monologues:

‘Heads, heads—take care of your heads!’ cried the loquacious stranger, as they came out under the low archway, which in those days formed the entrance to the coach-yard. ‘Terrible place—dangerous work—other day—five children—mother—tall lady, eating sandwiches—forgot the arch—crash—knock—children look round—mother’s head off—sandwich in her hand—no mouth to put it in—head of a family off—shocking, shocking! Looking at Whitehall, sir?—fine place—little window—somebody else’s head off there, eh, sir?—he didn’t keep a sharp look-out enough either—eh, Sir, eh?’

Jingle, whose clothes are shabby and who travels light, is adopted as a kind of Cockney Pathfinder, and the group travel together to Rochester by coach, Jingle regaling them all the way about the adventures and the women that he has had, adding bawdy working-class humour to the more middle-class pomposity of the Club. It was the synergy between these two social positions – as was so often the case in Dickens’ later writings – that struck the sparks. Had Dickens come from a more conventional middle-class background himself, like the rest of his literary contemporaries, he simply could not have written like this. He really was streetwise. By the end of the journey, Mr. Tupman is quite beside himself and the two later attend a ball, Jingle having borrowed a suit from Mr. Winkle, who was drunk and asleep at the time. Tupman and Jingle dance with a very merry widow (widows feature heavily in the story), ‘bouncing bodily here and there’ much to the ire of her escort, the volcanic Doctor Slammer of the 97^th. Jingle insults him and leaves, and when Slammer’s second appears at the coaching inn the following morning in search of a man with a distinctive bright blue dress-coat, he finds the hungover Winkle, who assumes he must have done something when he was drunk. A meeting is arranged at sunset on the field of honour:

‘The consequences may be dreadful,’ said Mr. Winkle.

‘I hope not,’ said Mr. Snodgrass.

‘The doctor, I believe, is a very good shot,’ said Mr. Winkle.

‘Most of these military men are,’ observed Mr. Snodgrass calmly … The evening grew more dull every moment, and a melancholy wind sounded through the deserted fields, like a distant giant whistling for his house-dog. The sadness of the scene imparted a sombre tinge to the feelings of Mr. Winkle. He started as they passed the angle of the trench—it looked like a colossal grave.

Fortunately, Doctor Slammer arrives and declares ‘That’s not the man!’ There follows a nice running gag in which his second tries to find reasons to continue the duel:

‘Then, that,’ said the man with the camp-stool, ‘is an affront to Doctor Slammer, and a sufficient reason for proceeding immediately…’

‘Or possibly,’ said the man with the camp-stool, ‘the gentleman’s second may feel himself affronted with some observations which fell from me at an early period of this meeting; if so, I shall be happy to give him satisfaction immediately.’

Things seem to be resolved but Winkle is now getting on so well with Doctor Slammer that he invites him back to the Bull Inn for drinks, where they bump into Mr. Pickwick and Jingle…

At the same time, the madness is offset throughout by the inclusion of various short stories, traveller’s tales told told from the chimney corner by incidental characters. The picaresque tradition that Dickens was loosely following provided a precedent for this device in the works of Cervantes, Tobas Smollett, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne. These tales provide a change in tone that breaks up the episodic humour in a counterpoint that is decidedly gothic. You’ll probably recognise some of them from anthologies of Victorian ghost stories, for example ‘A Madman’s Manuscript’, which seems to anticipate Poe; the fairytale-like ‘Bagman’s Story’; and ‘The Story of the Bagman’s Uncle’, a quintessentially 19^th century English ghost story about haunted mail coaches. Most interesting of all is ‘The Story of the Goblins who stole a Sexton’. In this story, a misanthropic and curmudgeonly gravedigger is visited (or dreams he is visited) by the Goblin King and his hosts on Christmas Eve, who terrify him into changing his ways, a plot you might recognise from one of Dickens’ later projects.

But don’t think Dickens’ fame and fortune were assured. Though Jingle managed to steal every scene he was in, the class satire Dickens had set up between this character and the Pickwickians soon started to wear thin. By the third issue (June 1836), the project was in danger of stalling and sales were low, falling from about 1,000 per issue for the first two numbers to barely 400 for Part III. This would all change in the next issue, with the introduction of a certain Cockney boot black, destined to supersede Jingle as the working-class voice of the text, and transform Dickens from a journeyman writer to a literary celebrity and a household name.

Sam Weller is introduced polishing eleven and a half pairs of shoes in the yard of the White Hart Inn, to which Mr. Pickwick and his friend from Dingley Dell, Mr. Wardle, have journeyed in pursuit of Jingle, who has eloped with Wardle’s sister, Rachael, for her money:

‘Look at these here boots—eleven pair o’ boots; and one shoe as belongs to number six, with the wooden leg. The eleven boots is to be called at half-past eight and the shoe at nine. Who’s number twenty-two, that’s to put all the others out? No, no; reg’lar rotation, as Jack Ketch said, ven he tied the men up. Sorry to keep you a-waitin’, Sir, but I’ll attend to you directly.’

Modern merchandise: Royal Doulton’s Pickwick and Weller.

As G. K. Chesterton later wrote, ‘Sam Weller introduces the English people.’ Here was a character to which much of the audience could relate. There’s the same ‘Jack the lad’ working class sensibility, along with a similarly distinctive voice, but while Jingle is an idler and a grifter, Sam is an honest grafter, the face of ordinary humanity. The change was simple but radical. Jingle becomes a fully fledged antagonist, while Sam becomes Pickwick’s true guide to the urban jungle. He’s streetwise and cheeky, but also honest and loyal. And funny. Very, very funny. Sam’s dialogue is resplendent with what became known as ‘Wellerisms’, idiosyncratic proverbs drawing upon surreal analogies, all rendered in phonetic Cockney, with w’s and v’s interchanged, for example:

‘Then the next question is, what the devil do you want with me, as the man said, wen he see the ghost?’

‘There; now we look compact and comfortable, as the father said ven he cut his little boy’s head off, to cure him o’ squintin’.’

‘That’s what I call a self-evident proposition, as the dog’s-meat man said, when the housemaid told him he warn’t a gentleman.’

‘Vich I call addin’ insult to injury, as the parrot said ven they not only took him from his native land, but made him talk the English langwidge arterwards.’

You get the general idea. ‘You’re a wag, ain’t you?’ says Wardle’s lawyer, to which Sam replies: ‘My eldest brother was troubled with that complaint, it may be catching—I used to sleep with him.’ Dickens wrote with cautious optimism to John Macrone that this ‘specimen of London life’ would both stimulate his writing and garner new readers. This was born out pretty much immediately when the Literary Gazette reprinted Sam’s first episode. Although Dickens was not acknowledged as the author, the Gazette’s editor, William Jerdan, wrote to him privately advising him to make Sam a primary character. Sam’s wit and wisdom immediately gripped the public imagination, and in the following number, Dickens had Pickwick hire Sam as a valet and travelling companion, effectively becoming Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote.

You can feel The Pickwick Papers change gear at this point. Sam is obviously the key. He’s a beautifully drawn comic protagonist for a start, worthy of the epithet ‘Dickensian’. And beneath the funny dialogue, there is a big heart and the sharp mind of a natural problem solver. Sam is a survivor, and an honest one at that. In this sense, he is equally an ‘everyman’ hero that working and lower middle-class readers could see themselves in. Whereas Jingle is profligate with other people’s money, Sam earns his and knows how to cut his coat according to his cloth. As he tells the lawyer, ‘we shan’t be bankrupts, and we shan’t make our fort’ns. We eats our biled mutton without capers, and don’t care for horse-radish ven ve can get beef.’

Sam Weller represents the start of a long line of heroes from the golden age of British comedy. We laugh at the world through his eyes, familiar institutions made fresh through his colourful language and outlook (while he’s never too subversive), and he’ll always save the day with a dose of good old British common sense. He’s there, for example, in the characters of Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, Sid James and Tony Hancock, Terry Thomas, Eric Sykes, Kenneth Williams, Ronnie Barker, Bernard Cribbins, George Cole, Frankie Howerd, and Harry H. Corbett. And through Sam’s support, Mr Pickwick acquires agency. He is no longer passively at the mercy of a world he doesn’t understand, becoming instead a true philanthropist by turning empty talk into action. At the same time, the previously anarchic, sketch-based narrative gains form, evolving into a serial novel with the plot of ‘Bardell v. Pickwick’, one of the most famous legal cases in English literature. The serial’s climax in the Fleet debtor’s prison is far from funny and offers a glimpse (as did some of the Sketches) of the subjects that were to inform Dickens’ mature output as a novelist: poverty and social injustice. Already, the light was being balanced by the dark.

The ‘bounce’ had begun. Unlicensed merchandise soon followed; there were Sam Weller corduroys, puzzles, boot polish, joke books, and even cabs claiming to be driven by his garrulous father, Tony (introduced by Dickens to exploit the brand), as well as Pickwick cigars, playing cards, sweets, toby jugs, and china figurines. Sales jumped from 400 to 4,000 a month, and by the time The Pickwick Papers concluded in October 1837, the number was closer to 40,000. By then, Dickens had become a literary celebrity, and was already editing Bentley’s Miscellany and working on Oliver Twist. From then on, a new form of literary magazine began to dominate the market, based around the brand of a well-known author and driven by a flagship serial, each instalment ending on a cliffhanger. British publishing was never going to be the same, while popular entertainment had entered a new era, one to which we still belong. And it all begins with The Pickwick Papers, nowadays viewed by most literary historians as a minor work, and probably the weakest of Dickens’ novels.

The Pickwick Papers is chaotic, episodic, and melodramatic, but above all, it is extremely funny. It is also a masterpiece. Chaos and genius are not, after all, mutually exclusive. It also remains tremendous fun to read precisely because of all these qualities. If you don’t know Dickens’ early work, then prepare to be surprised and delighted by an irreverent sense of humour that’s as fresh today as it was almost 200 years ago. If you do know it, then why not visit some old friends? Even after all these years, The Pickwick Papers can still make me laugh out loud. As Sam Weller would have it, ‘Avay vith melincholly, as the little boy said ven his schoolmissus died.’ The Pickwick Papers

Main image: ‘Mr Pickwick slides’. Illustration by ‘Phiz’ (H. K. Browne)  Credit: Classic Image / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 1 above: ‘Mr Pickwick addresses the Club’. Illustration by Robert Seymour. Credit: Lordprice Collection / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 2 above: Frontispiece showing ‘Mr Pickwick leaving Goswell Street’. Illustration by Frank Reynolds (1876-1953). Credit: AF Fotografie / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 3 above: Sam Weller by ‘Kyd’ (Joseph Clayton Clark (1857-1937) Credit: Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 4 above: The George and Vulture, which features frequently in the book. Dickens was a regular visitor in real life, and it is now the home of the City Pickwick Club and The Dickens Pickwick Club. Credit: David Colbran / Alamy Stock Photo.

Image 5 above: Royal Doulton Pickwick and Weller, the property of our director, Derek Wright, who bought it as a memento of a highly entertaining evening at The George and Vulture as the guest of the City Pickwick Club. Credit: Derek Wright

For more information on the life and works of Charles Dickens’ visit: The Dickens Fellowship

Our edition of The Pickwick Papers is here: Pickwick Papers – Wordsworth Editions

The Pickwick Papers

The Pickwick Papers

The Pickwick Papers

The post ‘Avay vith melincholly’: The Story Behind ‘The Pickwick Papers’ appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s shortest tragedies, over a thousand lines fewer than both King Lear and Othello, and about half the size of Hamlet. Some literary historians go as far as to argue, in fact, that we are not in possession of the complete text, and that the recorded play is no more than a prompt-book, citing the difference between Quarto and Folio editions of Shakespeare’s other plays, the Quarto versions being generally longer. Macbeth was printed in the First Folio, but there is no Quarto version. The play therefore unfolds at a crisp dramatic pace, with few digressions and a lot of action. It thus translates incredibly well to film, and at time of writing there have been 48 film versions of the play (the first shot in 1905), with dozens of other general adaptations, such as Joe Macbeth (1955) and Men of Respect (1990), both of which relocate the action to the American criminal underworld and use modern dialogue while keeping to the story. On screen, Macbeth has been notably portrayed by Orson Welles (1948), Sean Connery (1961), Jon Finch (1971), Ian McKellen (1979), Patrick Stewart (2010), Michael Fassbender (2015), and Denzel Washington (2021). In such a crowded field, it might surprise you to learn that one of the versions most highly regarded by film and literary critics contains not a line from Shakespeare, and resides firmly in the ‘adaptation’ camp rather than ‘performance’. That film is Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 Kumonosu-jō – ‘Castle of the Spider’s Web’ – known in the west as Throne of Blood. The Japanese Macbeth

Shakespeare did not come to Japan in any meaningful way until the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the era during which Japan shed 250 years of strict cultural isolation, the Edo Period (1603 to 1868) foreign policy of Sakoku (literally ‘locked away’). Shakespeare was then banned again during the Second World War as was all non-Japanese art. During the war, the Japanese director in training Akira Kurosawa was learning his trade, playing cat and mouse with wartime censors over the clearly Hollywood-inspired gangster film Sanshiro Sugata (1943), and making propaganda movies like The Most Beautiful (1944), which celebrates wartime women factory workers, and a much more patriotic sequel to Sanshiro Sugata, in which the hero defeats an American boxer much as Sylvester Stallone would later best a Russian fighter in Rocky IV. Kurosawa’s father had been very open to western culture, and had encouraged his children to explore European and American theatre and cinema. Akira had been absorbing Shakespeare and Hollywood movies since he was six. While Kurosawa made his wartime movies, the young photographer Toshiro Mifune served in the Imperial Japanese Airforce as an aerial photographer and dreamed of being a cameraman in the growing Japanese film industry, if he survived the war. Like Kurosawa, Mifune was no cultural isolationist; his parents were Methodist missionaries and he had a natural gift for foreign languages.

Vintage film poster for ‘Throne of Blood’ 1957

Kurosawa and Mifune first met a couple of years after the war, at a talent competition at Toho Studies, then and now the largest film production company in Japan. Mifune had been encouraged to get his foot in the door as an actor by a friend, though he still hoped to become a cameraman. In a screentest for Kurosawa’s mentor Kajirō Yamamoto, Mifune had channelled his wartime anguish when asked to mime ‘anger’, and landed a role in Yamamoto’s Shin Baka Jidai (‘These Foolish Times’) and Snow Trail (directed by Senkichi Taniguchi from a screenplay by Kurosawa) in 1947. Kurosawa was going to skip the Toho event, but the actress Hideko Takamine told him to go and look at Mifune. Kurosawa later described seeing ‘a young man reeling around the room in a violent frenzy’ and managing to alienate all the other judges. ‘It was as frightening as watching a wounded beast trying to break loose. I was transfixed.’ Exhausted, Mifune finished his scene, sat down and glared at the disconcerted judges with eyes of fire. He didn’t win the competition but Kurosawa and Yamamoto convinced Toho to sign him anyway. ‘I am a person rarely impressed by actors,’ Kurosawa later said, ‘but in the case of Mifune I was completely overwhelmed.’ The Japanese Macbeth

Mifune’s first film with Kurosawa was the noir thriller Drunken Angel (1948), in which, although not the lead, his defiant and tubercular yakuza ‘Matsunaga’ electrified domestic audiences in the same way that Marlon Brando would do in America in a couple of years later in The Men and A Streetcar Named Desire. The pair would make fifteen films together, bringing Japanese cinema to the international audience for the first time with Rashomon (1950), which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. This led to a vogue for Japanese movies among discerning Western cinemagoers now tiring of Italian neorealism. In Rashomon, various characters famously provide subjective, alternative and contradictory versions of the same event – the death of a samurai and the assault of his wife – a device that at once looks back to the ambiguity of the European gothic and forward to the ontological uncertainty of the postmodern text. International recognition for both Kurosawa and Mifune was cemented by films like The Seven Samurai (1954), a period drama inspired by John Ford westerns that was in turn remade as the Hollywood western The Magnificent Seven (1960); and Yojimbo (‘The Bodyguard’, 1961), which inaugurated the modern archetype of the itinerant warrior, ‘the man with no name’ – in this case a wandering and solitary Edo Period samurai. Yojimbo was also remade (without permission) by Sergio Leone as the ‘spaghetti western’ A Fist Full of Dollars (1964) starring Clint Eastwood. The Hidden Fortress (1958, again starring Mifune), was a key inspiration for Star Wars, and when George Lucas finally got the chance to make his epic, he hoped Mifune would play either Darth Vader or Obi Wan Kenobi. Kurosawa and Mifune’s productive partnership finally came to an end after a dispute over their last film, Red Beard (1965), and Kurosawa’s increasingly long production schedules. (Red Beard took two years to shoot, during which Mifune was unable to work on any other projects.) Mifune continued to work in both America and Japan, though he turned down the offer to play ‘Tiger Tanaka’ in You Only Live Twice, telling Cinema Magazine ‘Generally speaking, most East–West stories have been a series of clichés. I, for one, have no desire to retell Madame Butterfly.’ He once again caught the world’s attention in 1980 as Lord Toranaga in the American TV miniseries Shōgun, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by James Clavell (a new version of which has just started running on Disney+). In his memoir Something Like An Autobiography (1981), Kurosawa wrote of Mifune:

Mifune had a kind of talent I had never encountered before in the Japanese film world. It was, above all, the speed with which he expressed himself that was astounding. The ordinary Japanese actor might need ten feet of film to get across an impression; Mifune needed only three. The speed of his movements was such that he said in a single action what took ordinary actors three separate movements to express. He put forth everything directly and boldly, and his sense of timing was the keenest I had ever seen in a Japanese actor. And yet with all his quickness, he also had surprisingly fine sensibilities. The Japanese Macbeth

Mifune, one of the greatest actors of the twentieth century, was quite modest about his talent, once telling a journalist, ‘Since I came into the industry very inexperienced, I don’t have any theory of acting. I just had to play my roles my way.’ Of his collaborations with Kurosawa, he said, ‘I have never as an actor done anything that I am proud of other than with him.’ And even though he and Kurosawa were never friends again after Red Beard, the great director also admitted, ‘All the films that I made with Mifune, without him, they would not exist.’

Throne of Blood was the ninth collaboration between Kurosawa and Mifune, following their contemporary drama I Live in Fear (1955), about an aging industrialist who plans to save his extended family (including mistresses and illegitimate children) from the nuclear war he believes inevitable by moving them all to Brazil. Although nowadays viewed as a powerful psychological exploration of the emotional effects of living under a constantly deferred apocalypse, I Live in Fear received mixed reviews and a poor domestic box office, being the first film Kurosawa had ever made that lost money. Their next project, then, returned them to the tried and tested world of samurais and Jidaigeki – period drama – and to a play that Kurosawa loved.

Orson Welles as Macbeth

Kurosawa had originally planned to follow Rashomon with Macbeth, but put the project on hold in deference to Orson Welles’ film version of 1948. He revived it almost a decade later. Throne of Blood was to be the first of three samurai films for Toho, Kurosawa announced in the spring of 1956, to be followed by The Hidden Fortress – the story of two peasants who agree to escort a man and a woman across hostile territory for money, unaware that the man is a general and the woman a princess – and Revenge (later retitled Yojimbo), in which a sardonic rōnin (a masterless samurai) drifts into a small town run by two rival gangs and decides to play both sides off against the middle. Originally, Throne of Blood was to be directed by Ishirō Honda, the director of the original Godzilla (1954), but in the end all three movies were directed by Kurosawa at Toho’s insistence. Kurosawa also saw Throne of Blood as a historic cautionary tale which would balance nicely with his 1952 film Ikiru (‘To Live’, his only film in the 50s not to feature Mifune), in which a terminally ill postwar bureaucrat  played by Kurosawa regular Takashi Shimura (the leader of the Seven Samurai) attempts to find meaning in his life by cutting through miles of red tape to help a group of families build a children’s playground. (If this sounds familiar, the film was remade in the UK in 2022 as Living starring Bill Nighy with a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro.) Loosely based on Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), Ikiru explores the themes of death, family, authority, and complacency; the labyrinthine bureaucracy, like Chancery in Dickens’ Bleak House, intended to create meaningless activity without resolution. The film’s protagonist, Watanabe, breaks the rules in order to make things happen but is quickly forgotten after his death, while his colleagues’ resolve to live with the same level of authenticity that he finally achieved soon revert to type. In Macbeth, of course, such maverick behaviour leads only to murder, guilt, and destruction. Kurosawa also felt that medieval Scotland and Feudal Japan – the Sengoku (‘Warring States’) period – had much in common; politically unstable and routinely violent, with rival warlords and clannish powerbases vying for control of the country, while innocents were forever caught in the middle when swords and armour clashed. The two countries are also geographically similar, both lands of mountains, rugged coastlines, and prehistoric forests hammered by harsh and unforgiving weather.

Throne of Blood was written by Kurosawa and his frequent collaborators Shinobu Hashimoto (Rashomon, Ikiru, The Seven Samurai, I Live in Fear, The Hidden Fortress), Ryūzō Kikushima (Stray Dog, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, Sanjuro), and Hideo Oguni (Ikiru, The Seven Samurai, I Live in Fear, The Hidden Fortress, Sanjuro, Red Beard). Their screenplay eschews the original Shakespeare in favour of dialogue appropriate to samurai (knights) and daimyōs (feudal lords) in the first part of the Edo period, early seventeenth century Japan. Shakespeare’s central themes of loyalty, betrayal, tragedy, witchcraft and the supernatural, and the collapse of moral order however remain intact. The screenwriters also looked to Japanese theatre, using many of the devices of Noh, a traditional form of dance and drama dating back to the fourteenth century or Muromachi period. Noh is the oldest of the three forms of classical Japanese drama, the others being Kabuki, which evolved out of Noh during the Edo period and tends to be more energetic and colourful (western correlatives would be melodrama and music hall), and Bunraku, which uses puppets. Noh is a more formal mode of drama than Kabuki, which is light-hearted and contemporary. Noh traditionally explores spiritual themes like life, death, the afterlife, and the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence, that all existence is ‘transient, evanescent, inconstant.’ Performances are sombre and stylised, using elaborate masks, formalised movement, and subdued music and dance to tell the story. Kabuki is more upbeat, with colourful costumes and make-up, cheerier musical accompaniment, exaggerated movements, and a sense of humour. As Kurosawa, his writers and actors knew, The Tragedie of Macbeth translated perfectly to Noh drama. The Japanese Macbeth

The film’s musical score is also Noh-like, composer Masaru Satô (I Live In Fear, The Hidden Fortess, Yojimbo, Sanjuro) immediately creating an ominous, funerary atmosphere with bamboo drums and flutes, while like Orson Welles’ Macbeth, a wailing winter wind emphasises the bareness of the land around Spider’s Web Castle. Production designer Yoshirô Muraki (who had worked with Kurosawa on I Live in Fear), draws similarly from the Noh stage, his interiors graphic and spare, the paper walls acting like traditional Japanese woodblock and silkscreen prints against which the actors become part of the design. Spider’s Web Castle was also based on Edo period woodblock prints, or ukiyo-e, its wooden exteriors built full size on the slopes of Mount Fuji. As Kurosawa later said, ‘We decided that the main castle set had to be built on the slope of Mount Fuji, not because I wanted to show this mountain but because it has precisely the stunted landscape that I wanted. And it is usually foggy. I had decided that I wanted lots of fog for this film.’ (Fog is another mise-en-scènic device borrowed from Welles’ Macbeth.) Muraki painted the castle walls black to contrast with the bleak environment, and it looms out of the mist like some ancient and terrible monster. Special effects were by Eiji Tsuburaya, best known for his work on the original Godzilla films, and when the trees of Spider’s Web Forest (Kurosawa’s Dunsinane) come to the castle, he created an eerie, swaying mass of leaves and branches in fog, as if endlessly but not quite falling, and lumbering forward as hundreds of suddenly homeless birds invade the castle. It’s difficult not to remember Tsuburaya’s many kaiju movies looking at those ‘spider trees’ moving.

Throne of Blood follows Shakespeare’s Macbeth closely. Macbeth becomes General Taketoki Washizu (Mifune), Banquo is General Yoshiaki Miki (The Seven Samurai’s Minoru Chiaki), Duncan is the daimyō they serve, Lord Kuniharu Tsuzuki (Takamaru Sasaki); Lady Macbeth becomes Lady Asaji Washizu (Isuzu Yamada), and Macduff is General Noriyasu Odagura (Takashi Shimura). The film opens with Washizu and Miki returning to Spider’s Web Castle, Lord Tsuzuki’s seat of power, having successfully put down a rebellion. They become lost in the forest and encounter a ‘witch’ (also translated variously as a ‘monster’ or ‘evil spirit’) spinning an apparently endless silk thread while singing a dirge about the futility of existence. Chieko Naniwa’s witch immediately establishes the film’s Noh credentials. Although Kurosawa could not use Noh masks, his actors wore rigid and heavily made-up, mask-like expressions, and the witch’s powdery white face is locked in a rictus grin as she foretells that Washizu will first become Lord of the Northern Garrison then daimyō, the lord of Spider’s Web Castle, while Miki will become commander of the first fortress and, one day, his son Yoshiteru will be daimyō… The Japanese Macbeth

Toshiro Mifune and Isuzu Yamada

The Noh sensibility continues as Mifune holds his face in contorted snarls and conflicted leers as his wife draws him into the inevitable murder of the visiting daimyō, plotting in a haunted room in which the blood of the previous Lord (who committed suicide) can never be washed away, foreshadowing her later madness. Lady Asaji is the quintessential Noh character, her presence one of porcelain tranquillity, her face frozen and pale, her movements precisely choreographed as she glides through rooms like a ghost, the only sound the rustle of her silk kimono; the delicacy of her movement in stark contrast to the violence of her schemes. Her husband, meanwhile, is edgy and conflicted, yet ambitious and easily manipulated. His movements are therefore a mix of reflective inactivity and explosive eruptions of action. At times, the film feels as if it is being performed on stage in front of the camera. Miki’s ghost at the banquet, for example, eerily luminous, his figure entirely white, like the witch of the forest, is as silent and still as a statue. But these stylised, tableau-like interiors can explode into action and movement, as the theatrical segues beautifully into the cinematographic, validating Kurosawa’s belief that Noh drama could be as gripping and energetic as any movie. The world of the film becomes bigger in exterior scenes such as Washizu and Miki in the forest, firing off arrows on horseback at first believing the disembodied voice of the witch to be an enemy ambush; the riders in the fog, hopelessly lost in the terrible void; or Washizu hacking through the forest once more in search of the witch towards the end of the story, when he will misinterpret her fatal prediction that no harm will come to him until ‘the trees of the Spider’s Web Forest rise against the castle.’ Somehow, in Throne of Blood, the stasis that is key to the Noh performance counterpoints the kineticism of film in harmonious balance. The effect is hypnotic, even watching almost seventy years later, because of Kurosawa’s visual style and Mifune’s powerhouse performance, stylishly supported by Chiaki’s pragmatic Banquo and Yamada’s haunting Lady Macbeth.

Kurosawa parts company with Shakespeare slightly during the film’s climax, dispensing with the witch’s second prediction that ‘No man that’s born of woman / Shall e’er have power upon thee’, and focusing instead on the assault on the castle by the Macduff figure – General Odagura – and the son of Lord Tsuzuki, Kunimaru (Malcolm). Like Macbeth, Washizu believes himself to be invincible, but instead things quickly fall apart. His wife has become more ghostly in madness, obsessively washing imaginary blood from her hands, while a panicking lookout reports that ‘The trees have risen to attack us!’ after Odagura orders his troops to cut branches from the trees to camouflage their numbers. Washizu remains nonetheless defiant, even though he knows his fate is sealed, but unlike Macbeth, his death comes at the hands of his own men, desperate to avoid execution for treason. As Washizu paces the battlements, trying to rally his men with talk of victory, they begin to fire arrows at him. As scores of arrows embed in the walls around him, he frantically slashes them away with his sword, but more and more volleys come, barring his way, and sticking from his armour until the final, fatal shot. The scene is disconcertingly realistic, because it was actually real; only the coup de grâce was a special effect. Just as Kurosawa insisted the crew wait until real fog descended on Mount Fuji to shoot the scene in which Washizu and Miki are lost after seeing the witch, his commitment to realism included the use of real archers firing real arrows at Mifune during the film’s climax. Being essentially a method actor, and descended from samurai stock on his mother’s side, Mifune could hardly refuse. He therefore used the movement of his sword arm to indicate to the archers which way he was going while the scene and the arrows were shot, so as not to be hit by accident. Knowing this makes viewing the scene particularly edgy; the exaggerated horror on Mifune’s face was probably real as well.

Given the relative closeness of the two postwar movies, it’s quite productive to watch Throne of Blood alongside Orson Welles’ Macbeth. Both are stark, expressionistic movies, shot in black and white, making much use of shadows and fog. Both are the passion projects of brilliant auteur directors, with brooding, intense turns by the central cast, Mifune and Yamada, and Orson Welles and Jeanette Nolan as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Welles’ dreamlike and theatrical production feels like the herald of Throne of Blood, and there are certainly stylistic features in common, for instance the bold chiaroscuro contrasts between light and dark favoured by both directors, the spooky wind whistling through both soundtracks, the mist, the screeching birds, and the eerie movement of the trees of Dunsinane. Sadly, Welles’ low budget and 23 day schedule for Republic Pictures did not let him make the film he wanted (he had visualised ‘a perfect cross between Wuthering Heights and Bride of Frankenstein’) and though his haunting and idiosyncratic Macbeth is better than his contemporary critics and the film histories allow, it is oddly Kurosawa’s interpretation that is hailed as the better film version of the play, despite the lack of original dialogue. The critical consensus is that Kurosawa’s visual style and Mifune and Yamada’s performances justify the absence of Shakespeare’s words.

Akira Kurosawa

The Japanese Macbeth

Throne of Blood was a commercial success in Japan, becoming the second highest grossing film of 1957, losing out to Kunio Watanabe’s Meiji tennô to nichiro daisenso (‘Emperor Meiji and the Great Russo-Japanese War’), a film that no-one now remembers, though there were some grumbles that the Noh references were ‘old fashioned.’ In the UK, Throne of Blood was the first film to be screened at the 1st BFI London Film Festival in October, 1957. After the screening, Kurosawa attended a party at the house of the film critic and travel writer Dilys Powell where he met Laurence Olivier and his wife Vivien Leigh, who were at that point planning their own film version of Macbeth. Olivier was never able to raise the money for this project, and his Macbeth was never made although, tantalisingly, his original screenplay was discovered in the British Library ten years ago. Olivier praised Kurosawa’s climax scene and imagined his Macbeth as a ‘blood-bolted and murky production.’ Had he made it, we would have likely seen the influence of Throne of Blood.

Kurosawa would go on to make two more Shakespearian adaptations. In the noirish The Bad Sleep Well (1960), Mifune plays a young man who gets a job in a corrupt postwar company in order to expose the men responsible for the death of his father in a loose update of Hamlet. Kurosawa (but not Mifune) returned to the bard for his final masterpiece, Ran (1985), a samurai epic based on King Lear that is a joy to behold. He made three more films after Ran, dying on September 6, 1998, eight months after Mifune. Writing this piece now, as someone who lived in Japan for several years, I still find it hard to believe that the world continues to turn without these two men in it. But we do have their films, with Mifune’s ghost emoting as wildly as ever. He was the Japanese Macbeth, and completely irreplaceable. And if a Shakespeare film without any Shakespeare doesn’t appeal, try watching Throne of Blood in the original Japanese, without subtitles, and just let Shakespeare’s iconic words come to you:

Henceforth be earls, the first that ever Scotland

In such an honor named. What’s more to do,

Which would be planted newly with the time,

As calling home our exiled friends abroad

That fled the snares of watchful tyranny,

Producing forth the cruel ministers

Of this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen

(Who, as ’tis thought, by self and violent hands,

Took off her life)—this, and what needful else

That calls upon us, by the grace of grace,

We will perform in measure, time, and place.

So thanks to all at once and to each one,

Whom we invite to see us crowned at Scone.

That’s how I do it.

Main image: Akira Kubo, Chieko Naniwa as Old Ghost and Toshiro Mifune. Credit: Masheter Movie Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 1 above: Vintage Film Poster for  Throne of Blood (1957). Credit: Sam Kovak / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 2 above: Toshiro Mifune and Isuzu Yamada. Credit: Photo 12 / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 3 above: Orson Welles as Macbeth (1948) Credit: Moviestore Collection Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 4 above: Cartoon of Akira Kurosawa Credit: Helmut Kruse / Alamy Stock Photo

Our paperback edition of Macbeth can be found here: Macbeth

For more information on Kurosawa’s life and works, visit: The Akira Kurosawa Community

The Japanese Macbeth

The Japanese Macbeth

The Japanese Macbeth

The Japanese Macbeth

The Japanese Macbeth

The Japanese Macbeth

The Japanese Macbeth

The Japanese Macbeth

The post The Japanese Macbeth appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

In Graham’s Magazine, Poe also reviewed Master Humphery’s Clock, Dickens’ short-lived weekly periodical published from April 1840 to December 1841, in which his novels Barnaby Rudge and The Old Curiosity Shop were serialised, alongside the ‘Master Humphery’ stories. For Poe, one story stood out in particular:

The narrative of ‘The Bowyer,’ as well as of ‘John Podgers,’ is not altogether worthy of Mr. Dickens. They were probably sent to press to supply a demand for copy … But the ‘Confession Found in a Prison in the Time of Charles the Second’ is a paper of remarkable power, truly original in conception, and worked out with great ability.

This is interesting. Dickens’ ‘Confession Found in a Prison in the Time of Charles the Second’ is an eerie story related in the first person by a retired seventeenth-century soldier. The tone is immediately brooding and morbid:

This is the last night I have to live, and I will set down the naked truth without disguise. I was never a brave man, and had always been from my childhood of a secret, sullen, distrustful nature. I speak of myself as if I had passed from the world; for while I write this, my grave is digging, and my name is written in the black-book of death.

The soldier tells of how he and his wife adopted the young orphan son of his brother, and of how he felt himself becoming ‘haunted’ by the child’s gaze, which reminds him of the boy’s dead mother, with whom he had a troubled history:

I can scarcely fix the date when the feeling first came upon me; but I soon began to be uneasy when this child was by. I never roused myself from some moody train of thought but I marked him looking at me; not with mere childish wonder, but with something of the purpose and meaning that I had so often noted in his mother. It was no effort of my fancy, founded on close resemblance of feature and expression. I never could look the boy down. He feared me, but seemed by some instinct to despise me while he did so; and even when he drew back beneath my gaze — as he would when we were alone, to get nearer to the door — he would keep his bright eyes upon me still. When Poe met Dickens

The soldier becomes more obsessed with the boy’s gaze until he finally murders him and hides the body in a newly planted part of the family garden. Dickens does not dwell on the murder, instead the horror of the tale is the narrator’s descent into madness, first plotting the murder then his fixation with the hidden grave, which he watches compulsively for any signs that might give him away. On the fourth day, the soldier is visited by an old friend with whom he served and another officer he does not know. They sit in the garden, and the narrator places his chair over the grave. He then imagines the unknown guest is staring at the spot. To make matters worse, the garden is invaded by a pair of bloodhounds that have slipped their leads and are clearly aware something’s in the ground. Finally, ‘I fell upon my knees, and with chattering teeth confessed the truth, and prayed to be forgiven.’

The Tell-Tale Heart

The similarities between Dickens’ ‘Confession’ and Poe’s 1843 story ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ are unmistakable. Both stories are deep confessional dives into disintegrating minds, with each narrator madly obsessed by another person’s eye, who they ultimately murder. The protagonists then conceal the bodies but become fixated by the graves, and both end up sitting over the burial sites talking to third parties until their own delusions force them to confess. These stories both signal the shifting thematic of the gothic epiphany in the nineteenth century, the threat moving from something external – some sort of mad monk, ghostly nun, or villainous aristocrat – to something internal and uncanny, insanity itself. When Poe met Dickens

Given the endless pressure of producing copy to deadlines to make a living, it was not without precedent for Poe to rework an idea by another author. We tend to forgive him because he invariably improved on the original. We certainly know that he raided several Regency tales of terror, as his satirical piece ‘How to Write a Blackwood Article’ attests. There are echoes of John Galt’s ‘The Buried Alive’ in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, while William Maginn’s ‘The Man in the Bell’ and William Mudford’s ‘The Iron Shroud’ collectively form the basis for ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’. As William Faulkner is said to have observed (though this line has also been attributed to T.S. Eliot, Stravinsky, and Picasso): ‘immature artists copy, great artists steal.’

Poe also reviewed the first four chapters of Barnaby Rudge for Graham’s Magazine. He predicted the serial’s climax, and was gratified to discover he had been right when he later reviewed the complete novel. Set around the Gordon Riots of 1780, Barnaby Rudge is one of Dickens’ more neglected novels nowadays, an early work quickly eclipsed by A Christmas Carol, which followed it. Like Oliver Twist, it also sits in the ‘Newgate’ tradition, which was a label Dickens himself was keen to avoid. Although not the hero, the simple-minded and ‘innocent’ Barnaby Rudge of the title drifts in and out of the narrative accompanied by a pet raven called ‘Grip’. Barnaby talks to Grip, who in turn expressively croaks:

The raven gave a short, comfortable, confidential kind of croak;—a most expressive croak, which seemed to say, ‘You needn’t let these fellows into our secrets. We understand each other. It’s all right.’

Grip has also learnt a few human words and phrases, most notable ‘Never say die!’ and ‘Nobody!’ Poe loved Grip, and speculated on the possibility of expanding its role within the narrative:

The raven, too, intensely amusing as it is, might have been made more than we see it, a portion of the conception of the fantastic Barnaby. Its croaking might have been prophetically heard in the course of the drama. Its character might have performed, in regard to that of the idiot, much the same part as does, in music, the accompaniment in respect to the air. Each might have been distinct. Each might have differed remarkably from the other. Yet between them there might have been wrought an analogical resemblance, and although each might have existed apart, they might have formed together a whole which would have been imperfect in the absence of either. When Poe met Dickens

Hold that thought.

Barnaby Rudge and ‘Grip’

Barnaby’s ‘Grip’ was based on Dickens’ pet raven, which was also called ‘Grip’. The original Grip lived with the Dickens family in Devonshire Terrace, Marylebone, and was given the run of the house like a cat or a dog. She could speak several phrases – her favourite being ‘Halloa old girl!’ – liked to bury cheese, potatoes and coins in the garden, and had a tendency to bite the servants and the children. She also terrorised the family dog. Dickens adored the irascible creature, once writing to the artist Daniel Maclise, ‘I love nobody here but the Raven, and I only love him because he seems to have no feeling in common with anybody.’ It made sense, then, that she would become a part of one of his novels. As Dickens wrote to his friend George Cattermole, ‘Barnaby being an idiot, my notion is to have him always in company with a pet raven, who is immeasurably more knowing than himself. To this end I have been studying my bird, and think I could make a very queer character of him.’

After the bird bit one of the children, Dickens’ wife Kate insisted that she be removed from the main house. She therefore took up residence in the carriage house. When the stable was painted in 1840, Grip drank some paint left behind by the workmen and tragically died of lead poisoning. ‘The children seem rather glad of it,’ Dickens confessed to Maclise. Dickens had poor old Grip stuffed and mounted in a glass case which he hung above his desk, so the raven could look down on him as he wrote. This was not unusual for the novelist. He already had a letter-opener made from the paw of his late cat, Bob.

Dickens first visited the United States in 1842 with Kate, arriving in Boston on the RMS Britannia on January 22. This is the visit described in his travelogue American Notes for General Circulation. Dickens gave a series of lectures, during which he pointedly raised the question of international copyright laws and the pirating of his novels in the US. (In 1834, the US Supreme Court had ruled that an author did not have a common law right to control reproduction following the first publication of the work. The US market was therefore flooded with unlicensed but perfectly legal editions that made money only for their publishers.) In New York, he persuaded a group of writers, including Washington Irving, to sign a petition on the matter for him to present to Congress. The press were, however, unsympathetic, seeing what he called ‘piracy’ as honest American free enterprise. Dickens, they said, should be grateful for his warm welcome (he was mobbed by admirers wherever he went) and international fame.

When it was announced in the press in March that Dickens had arrived in Philadelphia to give a lecture and was staying at the United States Hotel, Poe, who was living there at the time, made contact. He sent Dickens his two-volume collection of short stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), and a letter requesting a meeting. Dickens promptly and enthusiastically replied:

My Dear Sir, — I shall be very glad to see you whenever you will do me the favor to call. I think I am more likely to be in the way between half-past eleven and twelve, than at any other time. I have glanced over the books you have been so kind as to send me, and more particularly at the papers to which you called my attention. I have the greater pleasure in expressing my desire to see you on this account. Apropos of the “construction” of “Caleb Williams,” do you know that Godwin wrote it backwards, — the last volume first, — and that when he had produced the hunting down of Caleb, and the catastrophe, he waited for months, casting about for a means of accounting for what he had done? When Poe met Dickens

A terrible name-dropper, Poe would later open his seminal essay The Philosophy of Composition (1846) by quoting Dickens’ comment to him on Godwin’s writing process and then developing it as his first point, suggesting that he and Dickens knew each other quite well, which was a bit of a reach. As well as being a genuine admirer of Dickens, Poe was certainly hoping to court him as a heavyweight literary contact in Britain, and although we only have one side of the written dialogue, it’s clear from Dickens’ remarks that Poe was trying to showcase his abilities as both an author and a critic.

Charles Dickens’ pet raven, ‘Grip’

The men met twice in Dickens’ suite at the hotel, Poe in his neat but worn black suit, a portrait of gentile poverty, Dickens draped in fine clothes and jewellery for the first meeting, and in his dressing gown for the second. The meetings appear to have been scholarly and impersonal, although Dickens was travelling with a portrait of his children and Grip, and it is likely that he showed this to Poe given the latter’s enthusiasm for the ‘Grip’ of Barnaby Rudge. They discussed contemporary English and American authors, literary history, and composition, as well as the need for workable international copyright legislation. Poe is not mentioned in American Notes, and the author who made the greatest impression on Dickens during the visit was Washington Irving, who Dickens described as ‘my dear friend.’ But then, Irving was a literary giant, whereas Poe was, by Dickens’ standards, a nobody.

It was probably on the second visit that Poe made his move, asking if Dickens could help him find an English publisher for Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. As a couple of surviving letters prove, Dickens promised that he would try. After returning to England, Dickens wrote to Poe in November:

Dear Sir, — by some strange accident (I presume it must have been through some mistake on the part of Mr. Putnam in the great quantity of business he had to arrange for me), I have never been able to find among my papers, since I came to England, the letter you wrote to me at New York. But I read it there, and think I am correct in believing that it charged me with no other mission than that which you had already entrusted to me by word of mouth. Believe me that it never, for a moment, escaped my recollection; and that I have done all in my power to bring it to a successful issue — I regret to say, in vain.

I should have forwarded you the accompanying letter from Mr. Moxon before now, but that I have delayed doing so in the hope that some other channel for the publication of our book on this side of the water would present itself to me. I am, however, unable to report any success. I have mentioned it to publishers with whom I have influence, but they have, one and all, declined the venture. And the only consolation I can give you is that I do not believe any collection of detached pieces by an unknown writer, even though he were an Englishman, would be at all likely to find a publisher in this metropolis just now.

Do not for a moment suppose that I have ever thought of you but with a pleasant recollection; and that I am not at all times prepared to forward your views in this country, if I can.

Four years later, Poe must have tried to work the contact one more time, again to no avail, because on March 19, 1846, Dickens wrote to him: When Poe met Dickens

Although I have not received your volume, I avail myself of a leisure moment to thank you for the gift of it.

In reference to your proposal as regards the Daily News, I beg to assure you that I am not in any way connected with the Editorship or current Management of that Paper. I have an interest in it, and write such papers for it as I attach my name to. This is the whole amount of my connection with the Journal.

Any such proposition as yours, therefore, must be addressed to the Editor. I do not know, for certain, how that gentleman might regard it; but I should say that he probably has as many correspondents in America and elsewhere, as the Paper can afford space to.

And that was that. Poe never received the patronage he desired, and he died in poverty and despair in 1849. When Dickens returned to the US in 1867, Poe’s posthumous reputation was growing. On visiting Baltimore, he learned that Poe’s mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, was still alive but in poor health and living in poverty. He made time to visit her and, on leaving, pressed a large amount of money into her hand. Back in England, he sent her a further $1000.

Statue of Edgar Allan Poe in Boston, MA

But the story does not end here. Barnaby Rudge and Grip had clearly lodged in the back of Poe’s mind. About three years after he met Dickens, Poe published his most famous poem, ‘The Raven’, in the New York Evening Mirror for a one-off fee of $9.00. The poem was an immediate popular and critical success, and remains one of the most iconic texts in gothic literature to this day. Though it is a matter of no more than informed conjecture, it seems likely that the model for Poe’s ‘Raven’ was dear old ‘Grip’. Poe’s contemporary, the ‘Fireside’ poet James Russell Lowell, saw the connection immediately, writing in his book-length satirical poem A Fable for Critics (1848):

There comes Poe with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,

Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.

One cannot deny that ‘Nevermore’ is not so far away from ‘Never say die!’ and ‘Nobody’, and there are other notional textual similarities, for example this exchange of dialogue regarding Grip in Barnaby Rudge:

‘Ah! He’s a knowing blade!’ said Varden, shaking his head. ‘I should be sorry to talk secrets before him. Oh! He’s a deep customer. I’ve no doubt he can read, and write, and cast accounts if he chooses. What was that? Him tapping at the door?’

‘No,’ returned the widow. ‘It was in the street, I think. Hark! Yes. There again! ‘Tis someone knocking softly at the shutter. Who can it be!’

There are certainly echoes of this in Poe’s opening stanza:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—

    While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—

            Only this and nothing more.” When Poe met Dickens

Equally, the lines from Poe’s seventh stanza, ‘In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore; / Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he; / But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door’ reflect a similar description of Grip’s movement and demeanour from Barnaby Rudge: ‘After a short survey of the ground, and a few sidelong looks at the ceiling and at everybody present in turn, he fluttered to the floor, and went to Barnaby—not in a hop, or walk, or run, but in a pace like that of a very particular gentleman with exceedingly tight boots on, trying to walk fast over loose pebbles.’ You may pay your money and take your choice, but as previously noted, Poe could be what academics euphemistically refer to as ‘a little too close to his sources’ when necessity dictated. And though in the end he got very little help from Dickens in his own lifetime, he did at least receive the inspiration for his greatest poem.

We shall never know for sure, but the two – or is it three? – birds are now forever conceptually linked. After Dickens died in 1870, the America collector of Poe memorabilia Colonel Richard Gimbel purchased the original Grip. She can be seen today, still in her case, gazing balefully down, in the rare-book section of the Free Library of Philadelphia.

Main image: Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Dickens. Credits: World of Triss / Alamy Stock Photo and Science History Images / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 1 above: ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’. Illustration by Arthur Rackham (1867 – 1939). Credit: Lebrecht Music & Arts / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 2 above: Barnaby Rudge and his raven Grip, part of a stone panel sculpted by Estcourt J Clack at the former home of Dickens on what is now Marylebone Road in London. Credit: Lebrecht Music & Arts / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 3 above: A 19th-century portrait of Dickens’ pet raven. Credit: Colin Waters / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 4 above: Edgar Allan Poe statue in Boston MA. Credit: Randy Duchaine / Alamy Stock Photo

More information on the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe can be found here: Poe Studies Association

Our editions of Dickens’ and Poe’s works can be found here: Wordsworth Dickens and here: Wordsworth Poe 

When Poe met Dickens

The post When Poe Met Dickens appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

Few stories ignite the British sense of national pride and identity quite as much as those when a small but valiant force hold their ground against a much bigger enemy. This is what the Battle of Britain was all about, the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, and probably most importantly of all, the Battle of Agincourt, where Henry V led 9,000-odd soldiers to victory against a much larger French force in 1415. Henry’s army was made up mostly of yeoman archers, and while estimated numbers vary, the French army was anything from 15,000 to 30,000 strong, comprising armoured cavalry and infantry, around 6,000 of which were killed against English losses of barely 600, a staggering ratio of ten to one. King Henry V

In national myth, Britain standing alone against a superior force is a powerful symbol. Churchill evoked it perfectly in his Shakespearean speeches during the Battle of Britain, and it was certainly a central feature of the Brexit campaign, whatever your views might be on that. Henry’s victory crippled France as a dominant European power – in some cases three generations of French nobility died on that battlefield – and ushered in a new era of English military and political prestige. In many ways, he sowed the seeds of the great power England was to become under Elizabeth I, which ultimately led to the British Empire and the country’s position as a global superpower in the nineteenth century. Ripples were still being felt in the twentieth century, when the ghosts of Henry’s bowmen were said to have intervened during the British retreat from Mons, and when Churchill invoked Henry’s spirit in his rousing Second World War speeches, when all seemed lost and, once more, Britain stood alone. In 1944, Lawrence Olivier’s film version of Henry V prepared the population for D-Day. Henry V reaches across the centuries, one of the great English monarchs, immortalised by Shakespeare as ‘Prince Hal’ in Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2 and as the victor of Agincourt in Henry V: ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more…’

Henry’s position in our nation’s history would seem to be unassailable. Yet he is one of those iconic figures who has actually been crafted not from the historical record but from literature, in common with, for instance, King Arthur – a minor Celtic warlord elevated to mythic status by Norman chroniclers keen to cut the brooding Saxon bloodlines and link their man, William, to a more ancient and noble line; Robin Hood, a folk hero with no basis in reality whatsoever; and Dick Turpin, gentleman highwayman, a nasty and unremarkable eighteenth century thief whose legendary reputation can be ascribed almost entirely to the early Victorian romance Rookwood. The ‘Angels of Mons’ were an invention as well, a little propaganda piece for the London Evening News written by Arthur Machen in 1915; Machen was known for his esoteric supernatural and horror fiction. As Lady Clarinda’s asserted in Crotchet Castle, ‘history is but a tiresome thing in itself; it becomes more agreeable the more romance is mixed up with it.’ King Henry V

And the legend of Henry V shows no signs of abating. When it was reported a few years back that a film version of Bernard Cornwell’s novel, Azincourt, was in the offing, the Express framed the article with: ‘A triumph of the humble English and Welsh longbowmen over the arrogant French knights, it remains a vivid demonstration of the bulldog spirit, ingenuity and bravery against the odds we like to see as some of the finest qualities of our nation.’ (The film’s still in development hell, by the way.) And this was pretty much where Cornwell’s novel ended up as well, still following the myth. The man, however… Well, that’s a different story, which has little to do with redoubtable British spunk, courage, determination, or longbows.

Laurence Olivier as Henry V

When most of us think of Henry V, I’d bet that the image that immediately comes to mind is of either Lawrence Olivier or Kenneth Branagh, depending on one’s age. To a lesser extent, the Netflix generation might also go to Tom Hiddleston or Timothée Chalamet. The story behind him will be that of Shakespeare, the wayward prince hanging around with Falstaff, Poins, Bardolph, and Peto until he comes into his own at the Battle of Shrewsbury, rejecting his old lowlife crew and becoming the warrior king of Harfleur and Agincourt. King Henry V

The real Henry’s life, though notionally on the same path as the stories, was very different. There was no riotous youth, and by the age of 14 he was already the High Sheriff of Cornwall and in command of a major part of the English armed forces. He gained valuable military experience during the Glyndŵr Rebellion in Wales, and in 1403, at the age of 16, he led his troops against the rebel army of Henry ‘Harry Hotspur’ Percy of Northumberland, fighting alongside his father, Henry IV. Percy was defeated and killed, but during the battle Prince Henry was shot in the face with an arrow, the three-inch iron bodkin point entering beneath his left eye and embedding itself in the back of his skull. Miraculously, the arrow missed the brainstem and the surrounding arteries and did not injure his eye. That said, this would still have been a death sentence for a common soldier, but Henry had the best medical care then available, in the form of the court surgeon John Bradmore. Also a brilliant metalworker, Bradmore designed a tool to extract the bodkin head after field surgeons broke the shaft of the arrow. He kept the prince anaesthetised with dwale, a mixture of henbane, hemlock, opium and wild lettuce seeds dissolved in alcohol and vinegar, using a glass squirtelle to blow wine through the wound to cleanse it, and honey as an antiseptic dressing. He sutured the wound with hair from a horse’s mane. Henry survived, but the scar was terrible, a florid trench running beneath his eye and down his cheek. He never permitted a full-face portrait, only his right profile, although later depictions in the sixteenth century and after omitted his disfigurement. Bradmore recorded an account of the operation in Latin in the Philomena, one of the earliest treatises on surgery. It is also mentioned in a Middle English surgical treatise attributed to Thomas Morstede, who led a company of surgeons during Henry’s French campaign of 1415.

Following his father’s death, Henry became king of England in 1413, reigniting the hot and cold Hundred Years’ War by asserting his right to the French throne as well. Henry’s great-grandfather Edward III had initiated this dispute after the death of his uncle, Charles IV of France, in 1328, leaving no direct male heir. Edward was the son of Charles IV’s sister, the formidable Isabella of France, and, as Charles had no sons or brothers, proclaimed that he was the next male relative in line. Since the tenth century, however, the French crown had always passed down through exclusively male lines – ‘agnatic succession’ – and Edward’s maternal ancestry was not deemed legitimate. This is the ‘Salic Law’ of the first Frankish King, Clovis, mentioned in the first act of Henry V.  The throne instead passed to Charles’ cousin Philip, Count of Valois, who became Philip VI. Edward begrudgingly conceded, but further political disputes with France in 1337 over Edward’s Duchy of Aquitaine (Gascony) and the county of Ponthieu (part of the Province of Picardy in northern France) led Edward to press his claim again in 1340, triggering the war. Edward gave himself the title ‘King of France’, and this was also assumed by Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V. The English kings were generally prepared to waive the claim, however, if the French would acknowledge their right to Aquitaine and other French lands according to the terms of the 1360 Treaty of Brétigny, with which Edward III and John II of France had ended the first phase of hostilities. King Henry V

Kenneth Branagh as in Henry V

During the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV, relations with France were largely peaceful, the war having moved into a semi-permanent armistice. By the accession of Henry V, however, France was not looking particularly stable. King Charles VI was prone to mental illness and at times was convinced he was made of glass. He even had special, rigid clothing made to protect him from shattering. His eldest son, Louis of Guyenne, Dauphin of Viennois, was politically weak while Charles’ uncles and brothers were fighting among themselves for control. The newly crowned Henry sought to exploit this weakness and proposed a war with France to his lords and advisers. Caution was counselled, his parliament urging him to moderate his claims and to negotiate with France. Henry ‘negotiated’ by offering to surrender his claim if the French paid him 1.6 million crowns (the equivalent of about £250,000,000 today) from the unpaid ransom of John II (captured at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356), and grant English ownership of Aquitaine, Normandy, Touraine, Anjou, Brittany and Flanders. He also asked for the hand of Charles VI’s daughter, Princess Catherine, along with a dowry of a further 600,000 crowns (another £95,000,000 by our standards). Unsurprisingly, negotiations ground to a halt, with the English claiming France had ridiculed their claims and insulted the King – shown by the gift of tennis balls in Henry V. In 1414, Henry persuaded his parliament to grant him a ‘double subsidy’ (the right to tax his realm at twice the traditional rate) to prepare for war, and in April the following year his Great Council sanctioned military action. King Henry V

Henry’s invasion force landed at Chef de Caux in Normandy on August 13, 1415, comprising around 2,300 English and Welsh men-at-arms (knights, noblemen, and members of their retinue), 9,000 bowmen, and about 20,000 horses. He proceeded to lay siege to Harfleur, then the principal seaport in north-western France. This was to be a bridgehead from which fresh supplies could be landed from England while Henry marched on Paris. Henry and his second-in-command, Sir John Cornewaille, anticipated victory in about eight days.

In Henry V, Shakespeare romps through the Siege of Harfleur quite quickly, memorably opening Act III with Henry’s famous speech at the walls of the town:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;

Or close the wall up with our English dead.

In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man

As modest stillness and humility:

But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

Then imitate the action of the tiger;

Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,

Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;

Then lend the eye a terrible aspect…

By scene 3, Harfleur has surrendered. In reality, the siege dragged on for five weeks, the English forced to camp in the foul marshland that surrounded the town. Their supplies ran low, the soldiers subsisting on horsemeat, and disease was soon rife. Dysentery, then known as the ‘Bloody Flux’, swept through the camp. Then an invariably fatal disease, dysentery killed considerably more English soldiers than the French, with contemporary chroniclers suggesting that Henry lost almost half of his army. Even Henry’s close friend and spiritual adviser, Richard Courtenay, Bishop of Norwich, succumbed to the disease. During the siege, it was also discovered that the English longbows – often cited as the machine guns of medieval weaponry – could not penetrate the French’s steel body armour, although their impact had been decisive when the armies of Edward III and Philip VI met at the Battle of Crécy in 1346.

In the first volume of his Chroniques, covering the reign of Charles VI and written sometime around 1422, the French chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet describes Henry entering Harfleur for the first time as a barefoot penitent, dressed in rough hessian, ash in his hair, to visit the ruins of St. Martin’s Church to ask for forgiveness for its destruction and to pledge its restoration. This episode does not appear in Shakespeare’s play, in which the real Henry’s morbid religious enthusiasm is replaced by more conventional English Christian values, although another episode related by de Monstrelet does. In Act III, scene 6, Henry sees his old drinking buddy Bardolph hanged for stealing a ‘pax of little price’ from a church (a pyx is the container in which the consecrated bread of the Eucharist is kept). In the play, this episode recalls the sober prince’s rejection of Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 1, Act II, scene 4: ‘henceforth ne’er look on me. Thou art violently carried away from grace.’ De Monstrelet reports that a pyx was stolen from the church at Chef de Caux by an English soldier. Fearing bad luck and divine retribution, Henry had the man suspended naked above a brazier and roasted alive. In the play, Henry says of Bardolph’s looting:

We would have all such offenders so cut off: and we

give express charge, that in our marches through the

country, there be nothing compelled from the

villages, nothing taken but paid for, none of the

French upbraided or abused in disdainful language;

for when lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the

gentler gamester is the soonest winner.

A noble sentiment, although in reality when Henry was later frustrated in his search for supplies and a bridge across the Somme River by the people of Pont-Rémy, he ordered the village razed to the ground. Shakespeare perhaps gets closer to the truth with Henry’s soft threat to the governor of Harfleur:

This is the latest parle we will admit;

Therefore to our best mercy give yourselves;

Or like to men proud of destruction

Defy us to our worst: for, as I am a soldier,

A name that in my thoughts becomes me best,

If I begin the battery once again,

I will not leave the half-achieved Harfleur

Till in her ashes she lie buried.

The gates of mercy shall be all shut up,

And the flesh’d soldier, rough and hard of heart,

In liberty of bloody hand shall range

With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass

Your fresh-fair virgins and your flowering infants. King Henry V

Henry darkly concludes, ‘Take pity of your town and of your people/Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command.’ In other words, ‘Surrender the port or I will not be responsible for the actions of my soldiers towards the civilian population.’

His forces severely depleted by the siege, Henry was forced to abandon his plans to march on Paris. Some of his lords counselled a return to England but he knew that he would be politically weakened in front of his domestic and European enemies if he slunk back to London with little to show for the expensive expedition. He desperately needed a win. Leaving a small force garrisoned in Harfleur, he left the port on October 8 to march what was left of his army to Calais, the English stronghold in northern France. This would send a clear signal to the King and his Dauphin, as well as the English parliament, that his right to rule in Normandy was not just an abstract historical claim. It was also a deliberate provocation, essentially telling Charles and Louis that he was marching an army through their backyard and there was nothing they could do about it. Having secured a decent propaganda victory, Henry would return to England from Calais.

The Battle of Agincourt

During the siege, the French had raised an army which had assembled around Rouen, although it had been too late to relieve Harfleur. Thus began a game of cat and mouse as Henry tried to get ahead of the superior French force led by Jean Boucicaut, Marshal of France. Thwarted in his attempts to cross the Somme, Henry was forced to take his army south, away from Calais and deeper into France, before finally fording the river near Péronne. Supplies were scarce, and dysentery still plagued his remaining forces. The Dauphin called a semonce des nobles, summoning knights to set aside their factional differences and join the French army. Anticipating a turkey shoot, French noblemen turned up in droves in hope of battle honours and expecting to capture and ransom English knights, whose families under chivalric law would have to pay five years’ income from the captives’ estates. Perhaps, some dreamed, they might even capture the King himself. Princes, dukes, barons, counts, viscounts, and their retinues caused Boucicaut’s army to swell grotesquely, undermining his command. Although he would have preferred to avoid a confrontation, Boucicaut finally trapped Henry between the forests of Tramecourt and Azincourt (known erroneously as ‘Agincourt’ in English). The French had chosen the ground. English were sick, hungry, and exhausted, and outnumbered at least five to one, probably more. On the morning of October 25, the battle was joined.

At this point, the myth takes over:

This story shall the good man teach his son;

And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remember’d;

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition:

And gentlemen in England now a-bed

Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

We all know the story. Henry’s tactical brilliance, the indomitable British fighting spirit, and the technological superiority of the longbow snatched an epic victory from the jaws of defeat. This noble battles echoes throughout history, still defining us as a nation over 600 years later. Henry’s call to arms in Shakespeare’s play makes every English heart swell with pride to this day. Before the Battle of the Nile, Nelson referred to his captains as his ‘band of brothers.’ When Churchill heard Lawrence Olivier deliver the ‘St. Crispin’s Day’ speech on radio he begged the actor to film the play to boost British morale. Generations of schoolchildren have memorised these lines; politicians still allude to them.

But what really happened? King Henry V

Henry’s limited forces were stuck in a bottleneck with a mile wide front shrinking to about 750 yards between two thick forests. Henry deployed defensively, with longbowmen on either flank, and men-at-arms and knights in the centre, led by Henry himself. The archers drove pointed wooden stakes into the ground at an angle to disrupt cavalry. A page of Boucicaut’s original battle plan survives and is held at the museum at Péronne. He had intended to first deploy archers and infantry with crossbows which may well have resulted in a very different outcome. Instead, lords and gentlemen demanded places in the front lines, drunk on thoughts of glory and profit and confident of an easy victory. The bulk of Boucicaut’s men-at-arms were therefore massed on the front lines, with no remaining space for the infantry, who had nowhere to go but the rear. When the undisciplined and disorganised French cavalry finally charged, it was a disaster.

Heavy rain the night before had turned the ground into a quagmire of sodden blue clay, the same mud that turned the Battle of the Somme into a slimy, sucking hellscape 501 years later. Heavy war horses struggled through the mud while their riders failed to flank the archers behind their stakes because of the trees. Horses bunched together, and while the English arrows were not very effective against the Italian and German armour the French knights wore, they tore into the horses, which panicked and tried to escape, running straight into the ranks behind them. Wounded and terrified horses galloped through the advancing infantry, scattering and trampling. It was chaos. The killing ground was also becoming lethally crowded. The French chronicler Michel Pintoin, the ‘Monk of St. Denis’, wrote of French soldiers ‘marching through the middle of the mud where they sank up to their knees. So they were already overcome with fatigue even before they advanced against the enemy.’ Worse, he continued, ‘Their vanguard, composed of about 5,000 men, found itself at first so tightly packed that those who were in the third rank could scarcely use their swords.’ Knights in heavy armour fell into the mud and suffocated or drowned as their comrades clambered over them. As the crush continued, the French second line pushed forward, further adding to the catastrophic press. It was not English pluck that defeated the French at Agincourt, but a tragic crowd disaster. The medieval Latin chronicle Gesta Henrici Quinti (‘Deeds of Henry the Fifth’) describes the nightmare scene: ‘For when some of them, killed when battle was first joined, fell at the front, so great was the undisciplined violence and pressure of the mass of men behind them that the living fell on top of the dead, and others falling on top of the living were killed as well.’ The English archers abandoned their longbows and attacked the stricken French with mallets, hatchets, and daggers, capturing and killing thousands.

The only French success was an attack on the lightly protected English baggage train, which Shakespeare turns into a war crime. As the Welsh Captain, Fluellen, says:

Kill the poys and the luggage! ’tis expressly

against the law of arms: ’tis as arrant a piece of

knavery, mark you now, as can be offer’t; in your

conscience, now, is it not?

Henry V (1387-1422)

In fact, the real war crime of the day tends to be overlooked. Having captured several thousand high ranking French prisoners, Henry began to fear that he didn’t have the numbers to hold off a counterattack either by or to free the prisoners, who outnumbered their captors. These men had all surrendered under the sanctuary of parole, a chivalric code which guaranteed their safety until ransomed. Henry gave the order to execute them. When some of his knights objected, he threatened to hang any man that refused. Several thousand more Frenchmen died, many of them locked in a barn which was then set on fire. Shakespeare makes only a passing reference to these killings, omitting the grim details:

But, hark! what new alarum is this same?

The French have reinforced their scatter’d men:

Then every soldier kill his prisoners:

Give the word through.

This scene is immediately followed by Fluellen discovering the dead boys at the baggage train, presumably to morally justify the killing of the French prisoners. Perhaps Henry’s cause was not so ‘just’ nor ‘his quarrel honourable.’ The play is, of course, more nuanced that popular interpretation allows. It might be that it celebrates a great military victory, but Shakespeare also shows the cost of war, while depicting Henry sometimes as the noble king, sometimes the ruthless psychopath who hangs his old friends, threatens the people of Harfleur with rape, and murders his prisoners. King Henry V

The disaster at Agincourt left France in disarray, many of her military and political leaders killed off at a stroke. Entire noble bloodlines were wiped out. The surviving aristocratic families soon began fighting among themselves. Henry, meanwhile, did not have the forces for a military follow-through. He nonetheless returned to England in triumph, the English claim to Normandy advanced, and apparently ordained by God. The legitimacy of the Lancastrian monarchy was now guaranteed. The political chaos in France allowed Henry the time to prepare for a new campaign, and by 1419 he had conquered much of Normandy and Northern France. In 1420, Henry and Charles VI signed the Treaty of Troyes, recognising Henry as regent and heir to the French throne. He also finally married Catherine of Valois. Shakespeare relates these events in the fifth and final act of the play.

Henry was set to rule the kingdoms of England and France after the death of Charles VI, but he didn’t live to achieve this, dying on August 31, 1422, at the Château de Vincennes, some said of the Bloody Flux. Charles outlived him by only a couple of months, dying on October 21. Henry’s infant son became Henry VI of England, a regency formed by his uncles, John, Duke of Bedford, and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester until he came of age. During Henry VI’s reign, most of the French territories captured by the English were lost to Charles VII of France, with only the outpost of Calais remaining. (Mary I finally lost it in 1558.) By 1453, the Hundred Years’ War was over, and England’s claim to the French throne with it. Henry VI’s heirs and descendants fell to quarrelling over the succession, leading to the War of the Roses. But that’s another story.

Tomb of Henry V, Westminster Abbey

Despite his early grave and the subsequent loss of the French territories, there can be no doubt that Henry V changed the course of British history, and he is rightly the stuff of national myth and legend. To all intents and purposes, even though Agincourt did not play out the way Shakespeare wrote it, we might even argue that it is still true, fact and fiction alchemically blending to form a new reality. Shakespeare’s Henry V, after all, wouldn’t be the first fictional character to change the world. That said, there is something satisfyingly random about the real Battle of Agincourt. It could all have been so different. I wonder if Henry ever acknowledged this to himself. It was not his military acumen, God’s will, or the heroism of his men that carried the day. It was blind luck.

Perhaps national identity, in the end, is rightly or wrongly based upon not looking too closely, especially at our heroes. We remain armour-plated against a reality that is often brutal and chaotic, protected by our stories, which endure after the facts are long forgotten. As Thomas Carlyle wrote in On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841): ‘Hardened round us, encasing wholly every notion we form, is a wrappage of traditions, hearsays, mere words.’

Stephen Carver

Dedicated to the late Paul Cotton, whose work taught me so much about the real Battle of Agincourt.

Main image: Statue of the character Prince Hal (Henry V) and William Shakespeare on the apex of the Gower Monument, Stratford Upon Avon, England. Credit: Martin Bache / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 1 above: Laurence Olivier in the 1944 Rank/Two Cities film of Henry V. Credit: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 2 above: Kenneth Branagh in the 1989 Samuel Goldwyn film. Credit: Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo

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Though a popular novelist in the 1860s, Collins had gone off the boil after The Moonstone, his later novels more political and polemical. As Algernon Swinburne quipped:

What brought good Wilkie’s genius nigh perdition?

Some demon whispered—‘Wilkie! have a mission.’

Collins had always brought social issues into his novels by stealth, but now the theme was the story, with sensation replaced by social commentary. This was nowhere near as much fun to read as The Woman in White or The Moonstone. He had also lost his best friend and mentor Charles Dickens, who had died ‘exhausted by fame’ in 1870; he was plagued by rheumatoid arthritis and gout, his eyesight was failing, and he was hopelessly addicted to laudanum. By the Modernist era, therefore, his novels had not stood the test of time, and were consigned to the same dustbin of literary history that contained the works of W.H. Ainsworth and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Ellen (‘Mrs. Henry’) Wood, ‘Ouida’ (Maria Louise Ramé), and R.D. Blackmore – all bestselling Victorian novelists whose work was now ignored by the academy as melodramatic rubbish and overlooked by a reading public that had been raised on an entirely new generation of popular writers. Collins was, for example, included in Professor Malcolm Elwin’s 1934 study of ‘forgotten’ 19^th century authors, aptly named Victorian Wallflowers. But a rehabilitation was in the offing, noted by Elwin, who quoted Eliot’s comment that ‘The Moonstone is the first and greatest of English detective novels.’

Eliot had given readers and publishers a ‘hook’, a tagline that put Collins’ last significant novel – written in 1868 – in a wider context, bringing it up to date within a popular and still relatively new genre. You will see this line quoted everywhere, in every introduction to a new edition of The Moonstone, in reviews of TV adaptations, and academic essays. Rarely, if ever, is Eliot quoted further on the subject. He did, however, have a lot more to say about Wilkie Collins and detective fiction in general which remains relevant today in any serious exploration of the novelist and the genre he helped to invent, before being superseded by Sherlock Holmes and forgotten for 50-odd years. To any contemporary Victorianist, the exclusion of Wilkie Collins from the literary canon would be unthinkable. For this, we have T.S. Eliot and his love of detective stories to thank.

Group photograph including Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins

Eliot’s famous line on The Moonstone is taken from his 1927 essay ‘Wilkie Collins and Dickens’, which formed the introduction to the 1928 Oxford World’s Classics edition of the novel. In this piece, he argued that ‘the work of the two men ought to be studied side by side’ as ‘their relationship and their influence upon one another is an important subject of study.’ Eliot’s thesis is that Dickens excelled in character while Collins was ‘a master of plot and situation,’ and that both learnt from each other in their greatest works. Eliot sees Collins’ influence on narrative structure and event in Bleak House, Little Dorrit and ‘parts of Martin Chuzzlewit’, and Dickens’ genius for the ‘kind of reality which is almost supernatural’ in character creation rubbing off on Count Fosco and Marian Halcombe in The Woman in White. That said, it is these characters only, suggests Eliot, that make The Woman in White ‘great’. They are dramatic in a sea of melodrama, whereas ‘The one of Collins’s books which is the most perfect piece of construction, and the best balanced between plot and character, is The Moonstone.’

Eliot goes as far as comparing The Moonstone to Bleak House as ‘The theft of a diamond has some of the same blighting effect on the lives about it as the suit in Chancery.’ Most importantly, it is the ‘first and greatest of English detective novels.’ In specifying ‘English’, Eliot is removing Collins from ‘the detective story, as created by Poe.’ Poe’s detective stories – ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’, and ‘The Purloined Letter’ – are, writes Eliot, ‘as specialized and as intellectual as a chess problem,’ whereas:

[T]he best English detective fiction has relied less on the beauty of the mathematical problem and much more on the intangible human element. In detective fiction England probably excels other countries; but in a genre invented by Collins and not by Poe. In The Moonstone the mystery is finally solved, not altogether by human ingenuity, but largely by accident. Since Collins, the best heroes of English detective fiction have been, like Sergeant Cuff, fallible; they play their part, but never the sole part, in the unravelling. Sherlock Holmes, not altogether a typical English sleuth, is a partial exception; but even Holmes exists, not solely because of his prowess, but largely because he is, in the Jonsonian sense, a humorous character, with his needle, his boxing, and his violin. But Sergeant Cuff, far more than Holmes, is the ancestor of the healthy generation of amiable, efficient, professional but fallible inspectors of fiction among whom we live today.

Eliot’s advice to modern writers is that ‘there is no contemporary novelist who could not learn something from Collins in the art of interesting and exciting the reader.’ This is because:

The contemporary ‘thriller’ is in danger of becoming stereotyped; the conventional murder is discovered in the first chapter by the conventional butler, and the murderer is discovered in the last chapter by the conventional inspector — after having been already discovered by the reader.

The Cluedo model, he seems to be saying, is already established to the point of cliché. However, he concludes, ‘The resources of Wilkie Collins are, in comparison, inexhaustible.’

In the same year – 1927, also, coincidently the year of the last Sherlock Holmes story, ‘The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place’ – Eliot developed this advice in The Criterion in ‘Homage to Wilkie Collins: An omnibus review of nine mystery novels’, in which the nine authors reviewed are schooled by The Moonstone. Eliot, in fact, lays down ‘some general rules of detective technique’ for authors, all of which he derives not from Conan Doyle but Collins, because:

[A]s detective fiction observes the rules of the game, so it tends to return and approximate to the practice of Wilkie Collins. For the great book which contains the whole of English detective fiction in embryo is The Moonstone; every detective story, so far as it is a good detective story, observes the detective laws to be drawn from this book.

Of the nine novels under review, all of them, says Eliot, violate at least one of these rules, though Collins never did. Eliot’s ‘rules’ (slightly shortened here) are as follows:

(1) The story must not rely upon elaborate and incredible disguises … Disguises must be only occasional and incidental: here Wilkie Collins is impeccable. Elaborate double lives, in disguise, are an exaggeration of this vice.

(2) The character and motives of the criminal should be normal. In the ideal detective story we should feel that we have a sporting chance to solve the mystery ourselves; if the criminal is highly abnormal an irrational element is introduced which offends us. If the crime is not to have a natural motive, or is without motive altogether, we feel again that we have been tricked.

(3) The story must not rely either upon occult phenomena, or, what comes to the same thing, upon mysterious and preposterous discoveries made by lonely scientists. This, again, is the introduction of an irrational element.

(4) Elaborate and bizarre machinery is an irrelevance. Detective writers of austere and classical tendencies will abhor it. Some of the Sherlock Holmes stories make far too much of stage properties. Writers who delight in treasures hid in strange places, cyphers and codes, runes and rituals, should not be encouraged … But in The Moonstone, the Indian business is perfectly within the bounds of reason. Collins’s Indians are intelligent and resourceful human beings with perfectly legitimate and comprehensible motives.

(5) The detective should be highly intelligent but not superhuman. We should be able to follow his inferences and almost, but not quite, make them with him. It is perhaps in the Detective that the contemporary story has made the greatest progress – progress, that is to say, back to Sergeant Cuff. I am impressed by the number of competent, but not infallible professionals in recent fiction: Scotland Yard, or as it is now called, the C.I.D., has been rehabilitated. The amateur detective no longer has everything his own way. Besides the C.I.D. Inspector, another type is successful: the medical scientist whose particular work brings him into touch with crime … One of the most brilliant touches in the whole of detective fiction is the way in which Sergeant Cuff, in The Moonstone, is introduced to the reader. He is unimpressive, and dreary … [But] It is not that Cuff has superhuman powers; he has a trained mind and trained senses.

Any genre savvy reader will have by now recognised many of the tropes, good and bad, in the vast output of detective fiction, film, and television that continues to enthral us. Were it not so popular, after all, there would be no profit in producing these stories. And, as Eliot argues, they all go back to ‘the celebrated Cuff’, Collins’ understated but brilliant detective with a penchant for roses.

*

Like The Woman in White, The Moonstone is narrated by several different point of view characters: Gabriel Betteredge (House-Steward – head servant – of Julia, Lady Verinder); the evangelical Drusilla Clack (the poor niece of Lady Verinder); Matthew Bruff (the Verinder family solicitor); Franklin Blake (cousin and suitor of Rachel Verinder, Julia’s daughter and owner of the ‘Moonstone’ diamond); Ezra Jennings (the terminally ill and opium addicted assistant of Dr Candy, the family doctor); Dr Candy; Sergeant Cuff; and Rosanna Spearman (housemaid; posthumously, by letter). There is also a prologue and epilogue, and a preface by the author. Franklin Blake, the notional hero – another ‘Walter Hartright’ figure – acts as editor, having asked the contributors to put their experiences on the record ‘in the interests of truth.’ The device is a legal one, that of witness testimony, though intended to obscure rather than reveal. This is a novel of secrets; its complex structure and unreliable narrators immerse the reader in a murky world of contradictory information, evidence that is difficult to interpret, and sketchy clues.

The prologue ‘Extracted from a family paper’ tells the story of the storming of Seringapatam on May 4, 1799, by British East India Company forces, a decisive military action in the conquest of South India. It is written in the form of a long letter by a cousin and brother officer of Colonel John Herncastle, Lady Verinder’s brother. He is writing to explain why he has disowned Herncastle, who has looted a huge yellow diamond – the ‘Moonstone – from the statue of an Indian deity, Chandra, Hindu god of the Moon, killing the three holy men guarding it, the last of whom dies uttering the curse: ‘The Moonstone will have its vengeance yet on you and yours!’ The disgraced Herncastle has been estranged from his family ever since, and when he dies, he leaves the diamond to his niece, Rachael Verinder, to be given to her on her eighteenth birthday in 1848. Whether this is a redemptive act or one of spite is not clear, although in gifting the diamond he passes on the relentless pursuit of the Brahmin pilgrims committed to the recovery of the sacred diamond.

The adventurer Franklin Blake is charged with bringing the diamond safely from London to the Verinder country house in Yorkshire. He, of course, quickly falls in love with Rachael, though he has a rival in the philanthropist and lay preacher Godfrey Ablewhite. Several guests are in attendance for Rachael’s birthday party at the house, and on the same night the Moonstone is apparently stolen from her room. Lady Verinder reluctantly calls in the local police, led by the ineffectual Superintendent Seegrave, who is ill-equipped in both intellect and experience to solve the mystery, which is looking increasingly like an inside job. He is soon replaced by the sharp but melancholy London detective Sergeant Cuff. Suspicion initially falls on three travelling Indian street performers who have been seen in the area, the housemaid Rosanna Spearman (a disabled Reformatory girl with a criminal past who is acting strangely), and Rachael herself, whose behaviour has inexplicably changed and who refuses to cooperate with the police investigation. Alongside Cuff, Franklin also acts as an investigator, both men aided by Betteredge, who has become caught up in ‘detective-fever’. If you are not already familiar with the story, I guarantee you will not see the resolution coming.

You will note here the (now) familiar devices of the English detective story:

• A crime in a country house
• An inside job
• Multiple suspects and misdirection
• Police procedure
• Incompetent local constabulary
• A celebrated if eccentric detective
• Clues, coded messages, and concealed evidence…

Though not apparent from my summary, there is also a reconstruction of the crime, a medical examiner and early psychological profiler (Ezra Jennings), the detective summing up the case, and a startling final twist. After several characters are apparently incriminated, the perpetrator is also the least likely suspect. As Eliot notes, Collins has given us the complete template for the modern detective story in The Moonstone. Like the ‘hero’s Journey’, it can be seen everywhere in mystery and crime narratives, from the Sherlock Holmes stories to Jonathan Creek and Scooby-Doo.

Like Peter Falk’s Lieutenant Columbo, Sergeant Cuff is not what people expect:

[O]ut got a grizzled, elderly man, so miserably lean that he looked as if he had not got an ounce of flesh on his bones in any part of him. He was dressed all in decent black, with a white cravat round his neck. His face was as sharp as a hatchet, and the skin of it was as yellow and dry and withered as an autumn leaf. His eyes, of a steely light grey, had a very disconcerting trick, when they encountered your eyes, of looking as if they expected something more from you than you were aware of yourself. His walk was soft; his voice was melancholy; his long lanky fingers were hooked like claws. He might have been a parson, or an undertaker—or anything else you like, except what he really was.

The only thing that truly seems to animate him is the subject of growing roses, about which he argues joyously with the Verinder family gardener every chance he gets. (This is one of the novel’s running gags, alongside Miss Clack’s propensity for distributing religious tracts.) And just like Columbo, this modest man, easy to underestimate, misses nothing and is relentless in his inquiries. He has ‘roundabout’ and ‘underground’ ways of investigating, luring suspects into giving away more than they should. But, as Eliot wrote, he is also human and fallible. Cuff is not Sherlock Holmes or Batman. He observes, he deduces, he makes plays; sometimes he’s right, and sometimes he isn’t, and if he cannot solve a case, he will accept no payment.

Sergeant Cuff discusses roses with Gabriel Betteridge.

Cuff was based on the real Victorian policeman Detective Inspector Jack Whicher (1814 – 1881), one of the original eight members of London’s newly formed Detective Branch, established at Scotland Yard in 1842. Whicher was well known in the popular press (Dickens wrote about him twice in Household Words), having solved several notorious crimes in Britain and Europe. Detached and methodical, Whicher had a reputation for cracking complex cases, but it was the one that defeated him that bears the most similarity to the plot of The Moonstone.

On the night of June 29,1860, in the small village of Road (then in Wiltshire; it’s now ‘Rode’ in Somerset), the 3-year-old Francis Savile Kent disappeared from the bedroom of his nursemaid, one Elizabeth Gough. His mutilated body was found the next morning, stuffed into an outhouse used by servants in the garden of his family home, Road Hill House. The Kents were a prosperous middle-class family. Savile’s father, Samuel Kent, was the Home Office Inspector of Factories for Southwest England. His mother was the second Mrs. Kent and had been the governess of Savile’s small army of older half-siblings before the first Mrs. Kent had gone mad and subsequently died. The horrific crime attracted national press attention because of the social status of the family, stoked when preliminary police investigations found no sign of a forced entry, suggesting that the murderer was a member of the household. The fact that Kent had married one of his own servants, with whom he was almost certainly having an affair before his first wife died, added further grist to the mill. A theory grew that Gough had been in bed with a lover when the boy had woken up and was killed to keep the secret. This would have at least protected the reputation of the family, transferring blame to an outside agent and a servant, but it didn’t hold water, even though Gough was arrested twice. Gough knew no one in the village. Further speculations followed, including this one from Dickens, who wrote to Collins at the time:

Mr Kent intriguing with the nursemaid, poor little child awakes in crib and sits up contemplating blissful proceedings. Nursemaid strangles him then and there. Mr Kent gashes body to mystify discoverers and disposes of same.

Dickens was not alone in this conjecture, and Kent’s private life was picked apart by gossipmongers because of his penchant for sleeping with his servants. A modern correlative to the ‘Road Hill House Murder’ would be the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Everyone was following the story; everyone had a theory.

It was clear from the start that the local police were hopelessly out of their depth, and after two weeks Inspector Whicher arrived from Scotland Yard to take charge of the investigation. By this time, the crime scene had been trampled by local coppers, journalists, and sightseers, and any useful clues had been destroyed. The killer had also had ample time to cover their tracks, and the family was refusing to cooperate with the investigation. Whicher seized on the only piece of evidence he did have, a missing nightgown belonging to Savile’s 16-year-old half-sister Constance that was logged in the washing book but never received by the washerwoman. Constance was a troubled teenager, who had possibly inherited her mother’s mental health problems; she blamed her stepmother for her mother’s death and had once run away from home with her older brother, William. Whicher promptly arrested her on suspicion of murder. Because of the class difference between accused and accuser, the Road community and much of the national press took Constance’s side and she was soon released by the local magistrate on the grounds of insufficient evidence. The case collapsed.

Publicly humiliated and still convinced of Constance’s guilt, Whicher returned to London, his reputation in tatters. The Kent family moved to Wrexham and sent Constance to a finishing school in France. She confessed to the murder five years later. Her death sentence was commuted to life in prison, and she was released after twenty years. (She changed her name and emigrated to Australia, dying in 1944 aged 100.) It later emerged that Wiltshire police had found a bloodstained nightgown hidden in a boiler. They had lost it in a failed attempt to catch the culprit returning to dispose of it properly and Whicher was never told. The officers charged with watching the boiler had accidently locked themselves in the kitchen.

Though considerably less gory than the true story, Collins took much from the Hill House murder, understanding that it was all about family secrets. Like the original case, the crime appears to originate in the household once an attempt to pin it on outsiders (the Indians) fails. The police then immediately move on to suspecting the servants. The middle-class family at the heart of the mystery close ranks and refuse to cooperate with the investigation. The local police are useless, and when the suspicions of the London detective, Cuff, fall on the daughter, Rachael, he is hampered by her silence and ultimately leaves the investigation, only to return briefly at the end of the story. (Franklin then takes over as an amateur detective, as Walter Hartright did in The Woman in White.) In common with the Hill House case, a missing nightgown becomes a vital piece of evidence. And like the Kents, the silence of the Verinder family seems to suggest that no one is innocent.

In The Moonstone, all the primary characters conceal things, either to protect themselves or somebody else. There are double lives, secret loves, and mysterious motivations, not unlike the sordid truth – adultery, betrayal, madness, and visceral hatred – hidden beneath the respectable veneer of the Kent family, like the ‘Shivering Sand’ of The Moonstone, a complex and gothic space that seems to represent the unconscious, femininity, and all that is hidden:

I looked where she pointed. The tide was on the turn, and the horrid sand began to shiver. The broad brown face of it heaved slowly, and then dimpled and quivered all over. ‘Do you know what it looks like to me?’ says Rosanna, catching me by the shoulder again. ‘It looks as if it had hundreds of suffocating people under it—all struggling to get to the surface, and all sinking lower and lower in the dreadful deeps! Throw a stone in, Mr. Betteredge! Throw a stone in, and let’s see the sand suck it down!’

There are also parallels between daughters Constance Kent and Rachael Verinder and housemaids Elizabeth Gough and Rosanna Spearman. Their collective unwillingness to talk to investigators placed them all under suspicion of one crime when their silence was intended to conceal another, one of illicit passion. It was still believed, for example, that Constance was trying to protect her father’s reputation, as was Elizabeth, by covering up the affair, even if it meant a murderer went unpunished. As Collins wrote in his preface to the novel:

In some of my former novels, the object proposed has been to trace the influence of circumstances upon character. In the present story I have reversed the process. The attempt made, here, is to trace the influence of character on circumstances. The conduct pursued, under a sudden emergency, by a young girl, supplies the foundation on which I have built this book.

Only the murder and the theft can be openly acknowledged; there are other things going on in these families that are not to be spoken of, especially by women, whether working- or middle-class. Neither crime represents an invasion of the family home from an outside force that can ultimately be repelled; they are endemic to the structure of the Victorian family. Again, this is a theme that remains present in much contemporary detective fiction and drama. As the detective digs, more and more that is kept hidden is revealed, often secrets and lies not connected to the original crime.

Godfrey Abelwhite is ambushed and searched for The Moonstone by the three Brahmins.

There is, of course, another crime that the Verinders fail to acknowledge, and that is the original theft of the Moonstone by Lady Julia’s brother. The jewel no more belonged to Rachael than it did Colonel Herncastle. It was never his to bequeath. It was a sacred object looted from India, just as the country had been stolen by the British East India Company. The Brahmins in Collins novel are not a sinister and corrupting force from the east, a common racial stereotype in colonial gothic writing that persisted until the end of the century and can frequently be seen in the stories of Kipling and Conan Doyle. Instead, they are honourable, noble men, who have sacrificed everything in their decades-long quest to reclaim the sacred relic. Written just over ten years after the 1857 Indian Mutiny, this is a remarkably progressive line to take. In 1858, Dickens had written in Household Words, for example:

I wish I were Commander in Chief in India. The first thing I would do to strike that Oriental race with amazement should be to proclaim to them in their language, that I considered my holding that appointment by the leave of God, to mean that I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested; and that I was there for that purpose and no other, and was now proceeding, with all convenient dispatch and merciful swiftness of execution, to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the earth.

Such were the shockwaves across the Empire, that the Indian Mutiny continued to preoccupy the and prejudice the British for the rest of the century, an institutionalised racism that general dismissed Indian culture as ‘savage’ and ‘heathen’. It might be argued that the events of The Moonstone represent the intrusion of imperialism on everyday English life, but this is not the threat of eastern otherness represented in the Imperial Gothic of Conan Doyle’s ‘The Speckled Band’ or Kipling’s ‘Mark of the Beast’. In The Moonstone, the only thing that can lift the curse is to return the diamond to its rightful owners, the Brahmins.

Collins is similarly rebellious when it comes to the outcasts of society, with prime roles going to a deformed servant girl whose done hard time for theft, Rosanna, her best friend ‘Limping’ Lucy Yolland, a disabled fisherman’s daughter, and Ezra Jennings, Dr Candy’s mysterious assistant. Weird looking and therefore shunned, an unspecified but terminal illness has left Jennings addicted to opium, the latter fact linking him autobiographically to his creator as well as representing a vital plot point. Class as well as gender is a factor, and politically the women are less inclined to remain silent than they are on the subject of the Moonstone. Lucy tells Betteredge, for instance, that ‘the day is not far off when the poor will rise against the rich.’ She has no time for men either, and imagines a life with Rosanna without them:

‘I had saved up a little money. I had settled things with father and mother. I meant to take her away from the mortification she was suffering here. We should have had a little lodging in London, and lived together like sisters. She had a good education, sir, as you know, and she wrote a good hand. She was quick at her needle. I have a good education, and I write a good hand. I am not as quick at my needle as she was—but I could have done. We might have got our living nicely.’

In her introduction to the 1962 Everyman edition of The Moonstone, Dorother L. Sayers argues that Collins was unique among his contemporaries for being ‘genuinely feminist’ in his treatment of women in his fiction. Rosanna, meanwhile, makes the powerful point that the only difference between her and Rachael as women is the trappings of wealth: ‘Suppose you put Miss Rachel into a servant’s dress, and took her ornaments off? … it does stir one up to hear Miss Rachel called pretty, when one knows all the time that it’s her dress does it, and her confidence in herself.’ And while Lucy has only one important part to play in the plot, Collins gives the narrative over to both Ezra and Rosanna, much as Henry Mayhew reproduced interviews verbatim with the subjects of his seminal work of social investigation, London Labour and the London Poor, and Chartist activist and Dickens’ hated rival G.W.M. Reynolds gave working class characters long monologues in his epic penny dreadful series The Mysteries of London. While Collins was bringing intrigue and drama to the middle-class home, he was also depicting the working classes in a way Dickens never would, shunning, as he did, political solutions as demonstrated by his criticism of trade unions in Hard Times. There’s some strong social satire in there as well, with Miss Clack’s evangelical proclivities sent up something rotten. Like the eccentric life of its author, there is something decidedly subversive about The Moonstone that makes us question our conception of the Victorian novel. In short, there is something very modern about it, which returns us to contemporary detective fiction. Knives Out and Glass Onion are not so different in construction, right down to the different and conflicting points of view and, of course, the eccentric detective themselves.

The Moonstone represents the high watermark as far Collins’ work is concerned. He earned £750 for the UK serial rights and as much again in America, the equivalent to about £209,000 today. Few authors aside from Dickens earned anywhere near as much or commanded such a huge readership. In his 1900 memoir Random Recollections of an Old Publisher, William Tinsley, who published The Moonstone in book form, recalled the impact of the original serial:

During the run of ‘The Moonstone’ as a serial there were scenes in Wellington Street that doubtless did the author’s and publisher’s hearts good. And especially when the serial was nearing its ending, on publishing days there would be quite a crowd of anxious readers waiting for the new number, and I know of several bets that were made as to where the moonstone would be found at last. Even the porters and boys were interested in the story, and read the new number in sly corners, and often with their packs on their backs…

Not since The Woman in White has there been such a clamour for the next instalment. But this is the moment when the wave broke and began to roll back. The composition had taken its toll. As Collins wrote in the preface to the novelised edition of 1871: ‘when not more than one third of it was completed, the bitterest affliction of my life and the severest illness from which I had ever suffered, fell on me together.’ His mother was on her deathbed, and he was stricken with ‘rheumatic gout’, an agonising condition. Nonetheless, ‘I held to the story’, he writes, because ‘I had my duty to the public.’ Relying on laudanum and an amanuensis, he took to his bed and dictated the serial, later claiming there were several parts that he had no recollection of composing. This horrible cycle of pain, opium, the side effects of opium – the epic nightmares so memorably described by Thomas De Quincey – and then more pain leaks out in Jennings’ narrative:

June 16th.—Rose late, after a dreadful night; the vengeance of yesterday’s opium, pursuing me through a series of frightful dreams. At one time I was whirling through empty space with the phantoms of the dead, friends and enemies together. At another, the one beloved face which I shall never see again, rose at my bedside, hideously phosphorescent in the black darkness, and glared and grinned at me. A slight return of the old pain, at the usual time in the early morning, was welcome as a change. It dispelled the visions—and it was bearable because it did that.

Collins continued to take opium for the rest of his life, viewing it as an essential medicine, knowing that he couldn’t stop even if he wanted. Ironically, his father had been a friend of Coleridge, whose creative powers were also ruined by the drug.

And so, Collins’ star paled. He kept writing, but never again achieved the creative success of the 1860s, the golden decade that began with The Woman in White and ended with The Moonstone, the two books now most closely associated with his name. Though aside from John Forster he was Dickens’ closest friend, Forster edits him out of his Life of Dickens almost completely, while his colourful private life (he lived with two women, neither of whom he married), meant that proposed memorials at Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s Cathedral after his death in 1889 never happened. This was the Victorian era after all.

Thus, it was left to T.S. Eliot to remind readers how good Collins had been, rather than just another second fiddle to Dickens. And his opinion was soon echoed by Dorothy L. Sayers, who described The Moonstone as ‘probably the very finest detective story ever written,’ and G.K. Chesterton, who called it ‘probably the best detective tale in the world.’ Purest may argue that The Notting Hill Mystery by ‘Charles Felix’ (Charles Warren Adams) got there first in 1863, and that Clara Vaughan by R.D. Blackmore (1864) features a protagonist in search of her father’s killer. Policemen as characters and mystery plots were not new in the Victorian novel, especially during the sensation fiction era, but if there was already a new British genre forming (for we must not forget Poe in the US), then what Collins achieved in The Moonstone was a masterful consolidation of these various ideas and narrative codes into the recognisably modern detective story, transcending what had gone before. This is what Eliot is telling us. We can argue over what or was not the original source of the genre, but what Collins did was define it. This is why there are elements of The Moonstone in Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) and The Sign of Four by Conan Doyle (1890), and why Agatha Christie pinches the punchline in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in 1926. Every mystery writer owes a debt to The Moonstone, and its influence is just as prevalent today as it was in Eliot’s lifetime. It’s there in the novels of Patricia Cornwell, Richard Montanari, Karin Slaughter, and the rest of that crowd, and in TV shows like Broadchurch, Mindhunter, Happy Valley, Luther… in far too many popular narratives, in fact, to enumerate.

So, whatever your poison, if you’re a fan of detective fiction, or, indeed, a writer of detective fiction, if you’ve not yet read The Moonstone you’re in for a treat. As soon as you start reading, Collins gives you an exotic location and a family schism, the history of the diamond, a ‘heap of the slain’, and John Herncastle with ‘a torch in one hand, and a dagger dripping with blood in the other.’ There is just enough light in this horrible scene to glint off the unnaturally large stone set in the weapon’s hilt ‘like a gleam of fire.’ And this is just the event that triggers the main story. Without looking it up, I challenge you to figure out who done it. Enjoy.

Stephen Carver

Main image: Moonstone pendant on sterling silver chain. Credit: Charline Xia / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 1 above: From left to right: Charles Dickens Jr (Charley), Kate Dickens, Charles Dickens, Georgina Hogarth, Mary Dickens, Wilkie Collins Credit: The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 2 above: Engraving depicting a scene from The Moonstone: Sergeant Cuff discusses roses with Gabriel Betteridgeon his way to see Lady Verrinder. Illustrated by Francis Arthur Fraser (1846-1924) an English painter and cartoonist. Credit: World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 3 above: Further engraving by Francis Arthur Fraser. Godfrey Abelwhite is ambushed and searched for The Moonstone by the three Brahmins. Credit: World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

For more information on the works of Wilkie Collins, visit: The Wilkie Collins Society

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Like James Bond and Doctor Who, everyone has their favourite version of Ebenezer Scrooge, the actor that defines the role for them, probably from whatever version of A Christmas Carol they first saw as a kid. I have seen many polls on social media inviting us to vote for the ‘Best Scrooge’ but they only ever offer three or four choices. This doesn’t even cover all the well-known adaptations of the novella, let alone any of the others. A Christmas Carol is by far the most adapted of Dickens’ works, and one of the most filmed literary texts in history, rivalled only by Romeo and Juliet and MacBeth. At time of writing, in terms of direct adaptations, there have been 23 live action movies and 11 animated versions, with an additional 32 TV productions (24 live action, 8 animated), and 18 parodies. (And that’s leaving aside other media, which includes 25 radio versions, 34 theatrical adaptations – not counting all the Victorian ones – 5 operas, 3 ballets, 2 video games, and 14 audio recordings. Then there’s the derivative works, which are well into three figures.) So, as everyone loves this story, because I love this story, and fresh from a Dickens Fellowship meeting on the original story, I recklessly thought it might be fun to explore some of the different film adaptations and Mr Scrooge’s evolution from page to stage. This is a journey that links Victorian thespian Edward Stirling and Dickens himself to the Muppets and the Captain of the Enterprise. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Dickens probably didn’t see any of this coming.

Dickens wrote a series of Christmas books throughout the 1840s, beginning with A Christmas Carol in 1843. He had been inspired by a visit to a ragged school in Saffron Hill in Holborn, the slum district in which he based Oliver Twist. This experience had polarised Dickens’ central social concerns about poverty, crime, industrialisation, and ignorance, already present in his early fiction but now sharply focused after trips to Manchester and the United States had driven home the true horror of rapid industrialisation. As he later put it in the Examiner: ‘Side by side with Crime, Disease, and Misery in England, Ignorance is always brooding, and is always certain to be found.’ Ignorance repeats the cycle of deprivation among the poor, and accounts also for the indifference of the better off in society. Dickens vowed he would strike ‘a sledgehammer blow’ for poor working-class children.

Reginald Owen and Ronald Sinclair in the 1938 MGM film

A Christmas Carol was the result, written quickly in the autumn of 1843 while he was finishing the serial run of Martin Chuzzlewit. There is therefore a certain amount of conceptual crossover, most notably the theme of selfishness in Martin Chuzzlewit, and the way that greed and money leads to a heartless, commercialised society. A Christmas Carol explores the same ground through seasonal fantasy. Sales of the monthly instalments of Martin Chuzzlewit were sluggish, and it was one of Dickens’ least popular novels. His publishers, Chapman & Hall, even threatened to reduce his monthly fee by £50 if sales did not improve. A Christmas Carol, on the other hand, was the bestseller he desperately needed. First published on December 19, 1843, the first edition had sold out completely by Christmas Eve. By the next Christmas, it had already gone through thirteen editions, and it has never gone out of print since its first publication.

Dickens wrote four other ‘Christmas Books’: The Chimes (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846), and The Haunted Man (1848). Although these all sold well on initial publication, they have not stood the test of time like A Christmas Carol, which was always the most popular of the series. That said, it was not the most popular when it came to contemporary theatrical adaptations, although Dickens actively supported Edward Stirling’s A Christmas Carol; or, Past, Present, and Future at the Adelphi. The stage versions of The Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth did much better, possibly because of the staging difficulties of A Christmas Carol. In the 1840s, special effects were simply not up to the task of producing convincing ghostly visitations. ‘Pepper’s Ghost’, an illusion created by English scientist John Henry Pepper, would not appear until the 1860s, heralding a fashion for paranormal-themed plays. By the end of the decade, Dickens had abandoned Christmas books, being preoccupied with the serialisation of David Copperfield. He did, however, continue to disseminate what he called his ‘Carol Philosophy’ through public readings of A Christmas Carol, which he began in 1853 and continued until his death in 1870. It was not until the advent of film that A Christmas Carol was able to be properly adapted in another medium. A Christmas Carol was, in fact, made for film.

The first film version was made in the UK and released in November 1901. Scrooge, or, Marley’s Ghost had a running time of six minutes, twenty seconds. It was directed by Walter R. Booth, a stage magician and pioneer of British film known for his ‘trick films’, silent single-reelers showcasing innovative special effects. Early cinema made much use of familiar popular narratives so the audiences could follow them easily. Though stagey and static, Booth wowed audiences by superimposing Jacob Marley’s face on a doorknocker, and projecting scenes from Scrooge’s youth onto a black curtain in his bedroom. To condense an 80-page book into six-and-a-half minutes, Booth used Marley’s ghost – an actor draped in a white sheet, not so impressive – to take Scrooge through the various visions, cutting the three Christmas ghosts. Remarkably, the British Film Institute has managed to preserve about half of the film, including the scene in which Scrooge is shown his own grave. And with this, Ebenezer Scrooge entered the 20^th century.

The first American film, made by Essanay Studios in Chicago in 1908, is now lost, although the ‘Stories of the Films’ section of The Moving Picture World magazine published just before the film’s release in December gave a scene-by-scene breakdown. A Christmas Carol was 15 minutes long and included the three spirits of Christmas as well as Marley’s ghost. The English-born stage and screen actor Tom Ricketts played Scrooge. Ricketts directed dozens of silent films and was one of Hollywood’s first heavyweight character actors. Other Essanay stars included Francis X. Bushman, Gloria Swanson, and Western star Broncho Billy Anderson.

Edison Studios of New York produced a version that has survived. Released on December 23, 1910, A Christmas Carol was 13 minutes long, into which director J. Searle Dawley managed to cram the visits of the charity committee and Scrooge’s nephew Fred, as well as Marley’s ghost and the three spirits. Australian actor Marc McDermott played Scrooge while Charles S. Ogle was Bob Cratchit. Ogle is best known for his portrayal of the monster in Edison’s Frankenstein, which was also directed by Dawley in 1910.

The next British version was Scrooge (known as Old Scrooge in the US), a more sophisticated 3-reel film with a running time of 40 minutes made in 1913. It even has a framing narrative in which Dickens paces his library in search of inspiration before sitting at his desk to write A Christmas Carol. The film fundamentally covers the events of the original novella. Directed by Leedham Bantock (incidentally the first actor to play Father Christmas on film), Scrooge is notable for starring Seymour Hicks as Scrooge, a role he had been playing on stage since the 19^th century. (He also reprised the role in a 1935 British film version. He was knighted the same year.) J.C. Buckstone, on whose play Scrooge, or, Marley’s Ghost had been based, and the son of the great Victorian actor and playwright John Baldwin Buckstone, was also in the cast. Buckstone senior had produced several unlicensed plays based on Dickens’ novels at the Adelphi and the Haymarket and Dickens did not much care for him.

Next, released on Christmas Day 1916, Universal’s The Right to Be Happy is regarded by historians as the first feature length adaptation of A Christmas Carol, though it is only ten minutes longer that Scrooge and is not loyal to the original text. It was directed by Rupert Julian, best known for directing Universal’s 1924 Phantom of the Opera starring Lon Chaney. He also played Scrooge. The rest of the cast were all Universal contract players, who can be spotted in dozens of early classics from the studio. Claire McDowell, for example, who played Mrs. Cratchit was also in The Mark of Zorro (1920) with Douglas Fairbanks and Ben Hur (1925). Emory Johnson, who played Fred, was also in around 20 Essanay Westerns. Universal wanted the film to be more of a morality play that could be shown throughout the year. The script therefore concentrated on Scrooge’s transformation from miser to philanthropist, adding new material about his earlier life, and bizarrely downplaying the Christmas connection. Concerned that Dickens’ original title would yoke the film to the holiday season, studio executives imposed the more generic title. Critics were not buying this, however, and all reviews emphasised the Christmas story. Unfortunately, no prints of The Right to Be Happy have survived.

George C. Scott 1984

Three short adaptations were produced in Britain in the 1920s, two unremarkable silent versions and the first sound production, the nine-minute-long Scrooge (1928), directed by Hugh Croise for British Sound Film Productions, now, unfortunately, lost. The next notable version was Scrooge (1935), starring Seymour Hicks and released by Twickenham Film Studios. This was the first feature-length sound version of the story, with a running time of 78 minutes. Unlike previous film versions, the ghosts rarely appear onscreen. Instead, the novelty of sound led to the creative choice to present them as creepy disembodied voices. Only the Ghost of Christmas Present is shown as a full figure; The Ghost of Christmas Past is a featureless shape, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is depicted only by an outstretched pointing hand, and Marley’s ghost is shown only briefly as the face on the doorknocker. The film has a murky, gothic atmosphere, and it’s a treat to see Hicks acting in sound, recreating his role from the late Victorian stage in the barnstorming style of Henry Irving or Tod Slaughter. It’s still around in the public domain, with a couple of versions on YouTube (look for the 78-minute cut). Because it is in the public domain, there are some very rough DVD copies available. For restored versions, look for the 2002 Image Entertainment DVD release or the 2007 VCI Entertainment version, which bundles a restored version of the 1935 film with the 1951 Renown Pictures adaptation starring Alastair Sim.

Hollywood soon followed with the saccharine A Christmas Carol from MGM (1938), produced by multiple Academy Award winner Joseph L. Mankiewicz, written by Hugo Butler, and directed by Edwin L. Marin. Butler takes several liberties with the source material to make the story less grim and more palatable for family audiences. In his script, Scrooge sacks Bob Cratchit after he accidently knocks his hat off with a snowball outside the office (also docking his last week’s wages to cover damages). The tormented spirits seen outside Scrooge’s window are cut, as is Scrooge’s fiancée Belle, the starving wraiths ‘Ignorance’ and ‘Want’, and Scrooge’s charwoman, laundress, and undertaker selling off his belongings after his death. A romantic subplot is also added involving Fred and Elizabeth (now Fred’s fiancée rather than his wife), the role of both characters greatly expanded. Portly Gene Lockhart, meanwhile, turns Bob Cratchit into a well-fed and jovial figure rather than the victim of food poverty, low wages, and exploitation that Dickens’ intended. (Lockhart later played the judge in the great Christmas movie Miracle on 34th Street.) Veteran British character actor Reginald Owen – who at various times played both Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes – was Scrooge. Owen appeared in several iconic movies, including Platinum Blonde, National Velvet, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Kim, and While the City Sleeps, ending his career in Mary Poppins and Bednobs and Broomsticks. Terry Kilburn, an English child actor known for Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Swiss Family Robinson, National Velvet, and Black Beauty was Tiny Tim, while Ann Rutherford – Carreen O’Hara in Gone with the Wind – was a young and pretty Ghost of Christmas Past, eschewing the look of the strange, androgenous creature with the flaming head from the original story. D’Arcy Corrigan, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, can also be seen in Robert Florey’s Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), and Marley’s ghost was Leo G. Carroll, later Napoleon Solo’s boss in The Man from UNCLE. MGM is still hawking this around as a ‘Christmas Classic’, the original black and white stock now digitally colourised.

But while historically significant, all these movies are just a prelude to the ones we all know and love. After a fallow period following the MGM version, the first of these premiered on November 22, 1951, at the Odeon, Marble Arch.

Scrooge (released as A Christmas Carol in the US) is a powerful adaptation in the tradition of David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948), with a similarly bleak Victorian mise-en-scène, gothic sensibility, and stunning black and white cinematography.  The film was directed by Brian Desmond Hurst, a Northern Irish filmmaker who had been mentored by John Ford, once collaborated with Michael Powell, and whose early work included The Tell-Tale Heart (1934). Aside from Scrooge, he is best known for Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1951) and Malta Story (1953). The screenplay was written by Noel Langley, who had written the original screen story for The Wizard of Oz and understood allegorical fantasy. The cast is also an impressive list of postwar British talent. The versatile Scottish actor and popular meme Alastair Sim – a man as comfortable in comedic roles as serious ones – was Scrooge; Ealing regular Mervyn Johns – who starred in the trailblazing British horror film Dead of Night (1945), was an edgy and timid Bob Cratchit; Cockney Sparrow Kathleen Harrison was the Charwoman, now called ‘Mrs. Dilber’ (in the novella, this character was unnamed while the laundress was called Mrs. Dilber); Shakespearean actor and national treasure Michael Hordern was Marley’s Ghost; Patrick Macnee – later ‘John Steed’ – was young Jacob Marley; and Sim’s protégé, George Cole, played the young Ebenezer. Jack Warner, he of Dixon of Dock Green, appeared as ‘Mr. Jorkin’, a role created for the film.

While adhering largely to Dickens’ original story, Langley added a few of his own flourishes that may offend purists, but which add more emotional depth to Scrooge’s character. In The Ghost of Christmas Past episode, the young Scrooge leaves Mr Fezziwig’s employment to work for the ruthless businessman Mr. Jorkin, meeting fellow clerk Jacob Marley. Jorkin ruins Fezziwig, and eventually embezzles so much from the company that his shareholders are on the verge of bankruptcy, and he is on the verge of prison. Scrooge and Marley use their own money to bail out the company in return for controlling shares. In this episode – or, in Dickens’ terms, ‘Stave’ – Scrooge also witnesses the death of his beloved sister Fan in childbirth, and realises he missed her last words asking him to take care of her son, Fred. It is also shown that Scrooge’s mother died giving birth to him, causing his father to resent him and send him away to school. In the original novella, Fan is much younger than Ebenezer, and her cause of death is not mentioned. In the movie, Ebenezer is younger than Fan. Her death causes him to resent his nephew as his father did him. This plotline subsequently turns up in other adaptations. Finally, ‘Belle’, Scrooge’s fiancée in the novella becomes ‘Alice’, and is given an extra scene in the Ghost of Christmas Present episode, when she is shown working at a homeless shelter, a device later used in Bill Murray’s Scrooged (1988). Unlike the original Belle, Alice is not depicted as being happily married.

Bill Murray ‘Scrooged’ 1988

Scrooge was a commercial success in the UK, Sim and Dickens both greatly loved, but a box office disappointment in America. Contemporary critical notices were also mixed at best, Variety, for example, dismissing the film as ‘a grim thing that will give tender-aged kiddies viewing it the screaming-meemies,’ while ‘adults will find it long, dull and greatly overdone.’ It was, however, a grower, finding its place in seasonal television re-runs for decades to come, Sim’s portrayal of Scrooge for many viewers – including yours truly – being judged as definitive. Richard L. Coe of The Washington Post summed it up: ‘This may not be A Christmas Carol of recent tradition, but I’ve an idea it’s the way Dickens would have wanted it. It’s the way he wrote it.’ Patrick Macnee agreed, often citing the film as his favourite version of the story, because ‘it really seems to capture the true essence of the Dickens novel.’ Because of the Victorian setting, the age of the film seems to convey authenticity. Like David Lean, Hurst understood the connection between Dickens’ London and the postwar city, still pock-marked with bomb craters, its population skint, and half-starved with rationing. Sim’s haunted Ebenezer Scrooge therefore endures, the world of Dickens made for the larger-than-life character actor and comic genius. After fifty years of A Christmas Carol on film, this is the first true benchmark.

Such was the power of the 1951 version that filmmakers did not touch A Christmas Carol for a generation. The trigger for a new version was the success of Carol Reed’s 1968 film version of Lionel Bart’s stage musical Oliver! This led to Scrooge (1970), an original film musical directed by distinguished British producer, director, cinematographer, and screenwriter, Ronald Neame, the producer of David Lean’s Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. The film starred Albert Finney as Scrooge, Alec Guinness as Jacob Marley, Edith Evans as the Ghost of Christmas Past, and Kenneth More as the Ghost of Christmas Present; Paddy Stone was the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, and David Collings was Bob Cratchit. (Stone was a stage musical veteran while Collings was a familiar face from television, appearing in shows such as Dangerman, Doctor Who, Blake’s 7, and Sapphire & Steel.) Songs and book were written by Leslie Bricusse, a British composer, songwriter, and playwright best known for Doctor Dolittle, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. (He also wrote the theme songs for Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice.) Scrooge is built around eleven musical arrangements, with songs such as ‘Father Christmas’, ‘See the Phantoms’, ‘I Like Life’, ‘I’ll Begin Again’, and my personal favourite, ‘I Hate People’.

The film was shot at Shepperton Studios using many of the sets from Oliver! and looks beautiful as a costume drama. The credits sequence is also impressive, featuring a series of illustrations by Ronald Searle mirroring Victorian illustrators like John Leech and George Cruikshank. Though the story keeps to Dickens’ main plot points, it does take a few liberties. The action is moved to 1860, ‘Fred’ becomes ‘Harry’, Scrooge’s lost love is now Fezziwig’s daughter, ‘Isobel’, The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come drops Scrooge into Hell to be the devil’s clerk, and in his rebirth scene he dresses as Father Christmas and distributes presents all over London. Finney is a good Scrooge and Guinness steals the film as Marley. If you like musicals, this is well worth checking out. The songs aren’t as memorable as those of Oliver! and you’ll probably forget them as soon as the film’s over but they’re catchy enough. Scrooge later did an Oliver! in reverse and was converted to a stage musical in 1992 starring Bricusse’s longtime creative partner Anthony Newley. It was revived in 2003, 2004, and 2013 with Tommy Steele as Scrooge, and last year an animated version was released by Netflix directed by Stephen Donnelly with Welsh actor and singer Luke Evans voicing Scrooge.

Nothing happens in the cinema after this until Bill Murray’s Scrooged in 1988, but before I get to that I’m going to cheat and mention a TV film which has entered the public consciousness as one of the classics. A Christmas Carol was a US/UK coproduction, made-for-television feature length movie broadcast on CBS in America and released theatrically over here in mid-December 1984. It was directed by the darling of the British New Wave, Clive Donner (The Caretaker, Nothing but the Best, What’s New Pussycat?, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush), who had been an editor on Hurst’s 1951 Scrooge. The script was by the American TV writer Roger O. Hirson. The cast is amazing: George C. Scott as Scrooge; Frank Finlay (Marley’s Ghost); Angela Pleasence (Spirit of Christmas Past); Edward Woodward (Spirit of Christmas Present); David Warner (Bob Cratchit); Susannah York (Mrs. Cratchit); Joanne Whalley (Fan); Liz Smith (Mrs. Dilber); and Michael Gough (Mr Poole, one of the charity workers). Nigel Davenport also appears as Scrooge’s father. The film was shot in the historic medieval county town of Shrewsbury, and the Victorian ‘look’ is impeccable, comparable to the kind of costume drama the BBC were making at this point.

Roger O. Hirson was a journeyman Television writer who once almost won a Tony, and he wisely kept as close to his source material as possible, making this one of the most loyal adaptations of the novella. Borrowing from the 1951 film, Scrooge’s mother died giving birth to him, causing his father to resent him, shipping him off first to boarding school then as an apprentice to Fezziwig. Academy Award winner George C. Scott was a superb Scrooge, playing him as a ruthless and cynical businessman with a dark sense of humour who at first defends his position to the spirits. Scott was also doing some great horror in this period. He had starred in The Changeling in 1980, an atmospheric old school ghost story that had done rather well, and the producers played up the connection with the tagline: ‘A new powerful presentation of the most loved ghost story of all time!’ He was also fresh from Stephen King’s Firestarter (1984) and would go on to star as C. Auguste Dupin in Jeannot Szwarc’s Murders in the Rue Morgue (1986) for CBS and William Peter Blatty’s underrated Exorcist III (1990). Scott was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor for his portrayal of Scrooge, and for many viewers he vies with Alastair Sim for the title of ‘Best Scrooge’.

Michael Caine and Kermit the Frog 1992

And so, to Scrooged (1988), the Saturday Night Live version of A Christmas Carol. 145 years after the original novella, somebody finally decided to do something different with the material. Scrooged is dark, anarchic, intelligent, and a savage satire of the entertainment industry and media culture that seems to get more relevant every year. Ebenezer Scrooge is updated to Frank Cross, a ruthless, narcissistic, and tyrannical television executive charged with winning the Christmas ratings war with a cheesy musical version of A Christmas Carol called Scrooge, a film within a film that is just as tacky as it sounds. Bob Cratchit becomes Frank’s long-suffering PA Grace (played with dignified pathos and dry wit by Alfre Woodard), and ‘Belle’, the one that got away, is hippy ex-girlfriend Claire (Karen Allen), who now works with the homeless. Tiny Tim is Grace’s son, Calvin (Nicholas Phillips), who has been mute since his dad was murdered, and Marley becomes Lew Hayward (John Forsythe), Frank’s hard drinking mentor who died of a heart attack playing golf seven years before. Veteran actor John Houseman also appears as himself narrating Scrooge, who Frank describes as, ‘America’s favourite old fart, in front of a fire, reading a book.’ The action is updated to contemporary New York, with some great turns by Carol Kane as the Ghost of Christmas Present, a kind of goth fairy with a penchant for violence, and David Johansen of the New York Dolls as the Ghost of Christmas Past. (The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is a scary animatronic.) The script was written by SNL stalwarts Mitch Glazer and Michael O’Donoghue, with Murray interfering and ad libbing as the film went along. The film’s climax, for example, when Frank is redeemed on live TV, was almost entirely improvised by Murray.

This was Murray’s first film since Ghostbusters, which producers namedropped shamelessly in the advertising. It was initially not a great success, being deemed ‘too dark’ by many critics, Roger Ebert, for example, calling it one of the most ‘disquieting, unsettling films to come along in quite some time,’ arguing that it was more about pain and anger than comedy. Others only liked the dark side and criticised the sentimentality of the Third Act. Nonetheless, Scrooged eventually broke $100 Million, and it has since become a cult favourite and a Christmas classic, joining the best of them on television every holiday season. In 2017, Collider.com named Scrooged the fifth-best adaptation of A Christmas Carol, using ‘a classic tale of redemption as the framework for a satire of modern culture’s desire to embrace the irredeemable.’ Scrooged was ahead of its time. Unfortunately, we are now catching up in reality. It might be a bit scary and adult for the kids, but Scrooged remains a great Christmas movie, particularly for people who don’t like Christmas movies.

The year before Scrooged, 1987, saw a one-man stage production of A Christmas Carol adapted by Patrick Stewart, performed once at the parish church of his hometown, Mirfield, West Yorkshire, in support of their church organ restoration. The play was three-and-a-half hours long; there were no costumes or props, and Stewart played over 30 characters. Later, during the second seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Stewart streamlined the play into a tight one-man show which he performed at Christmas for several years in the US and the UK in the late 80s and early 90s, winning the 1992 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding One-Person Show and the 1994 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Entertainment. More on Patrick Stewart later…

Scrooged clearly shook something loose, as the next adaptation was The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992), destined to become another cult favourite. The film was directed by Brian Henson (the son of Muppet creator Jim Henson, who had tragically died of pneumonia in 1990), and penned by The Muppet Show writer Jerry Juhl. The film is another musical, comprised of 14 songs by Paul Williams with a score by Miles Goodman. George Carlin, David Hemmings, Ron Moody, and David Warner were all considered for the part of Scrooge, which Henson eventually offered to Michael Caine, who told him: ‘I’m going to play this movie like I’m working with the Royal Shakespeare Company. I will never wink; I will never do anything Muppety. I am going to play Scrooge as if it is an utterly dramatic role and there are no puppets around me.’ And so, he did, which is the genius of his performance. Though he gives us a couple of songs, Caine plays it completely straight, making one wonder how great a serious version of the Carol would have been had he done that instead. Oddly, this implacable foil works perfectly with the Muppets, ably supported by British actor Steven Mackintosh as Fred. The humour comes from the rigidity of Caine’s performance; like Adam West in Batman, there is all this crazy, colourful stuff going on around him that he apparently either doesn’t see or accepts as completely normal.

Patrick Stewart 1999

The other major roles are all taken by Muppets. Kermit the Frog is Bob Cratchit, Miss Piggy is Mrs Cratchit, and Robin the Frog is Tiny Tim. Marley becomes ‘Marley and Marley’ (who get the best song), played by Statler and Waldorf, Fozzie Bear is ‘Fozziwig’ (what else?), Dr Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker are the charity collectors, Sam Eagl is Young Ebenezer’s schoolmaster, and The Great Gonzo is Charles Dickens. Well, he’s not exactly Charles Dickens, as his companion Rizzo the Rat keep gleefully pointing out, but he is the narrator, and he knows what’s going on, though this often involves breaking into places to witness story events. This gives us another one of those ‘story-within-a-story’ devices like the Scrooge holiday special in Scrooged and provides a lot of the humour while the original story unfolds, largely as it should.

This one is a real guilty pleasure. The songs are as catchy as hell, Caine is an excellent Scrooge, and Gonzo as Dickens is a subversive delight. Of all the Muppet movies, this one is undoubtedly the strongest. It is also a very good way to introduce children to Dickens, and I defy you not to tear up as ‘God bless us, everyone.’ At the end of the day, this is still A Christmas Carol. Just as I love the Alaister Sim version, The Muppet Christmas Carol is my dear wife’s favourite, and both movies are wheeled out and inflicted on the family every Christmas. This year, The Muppet Christmas Carol’s getting a limited release in cinemas, so we get to see it on the big screen on Christmas Eve. If you have young kids, you might want to consider taking them to see it too. I expect the experience is quite magical.

Following the Muppets, in 1999 Patrick Stewart returned as Scrooge in another popular contender for everyone’s favourite version of the story. I’m cheating again, as this one’s a TV movie, but it’s too significant to reject on a technicality. Patrick Stewart is always on the social media polls for the ‘Best Scrooge’, and quite rightly so. A Christmas Carol (1999) is a UK/US coproduction for Turner Network Television (TNT) and Hallmark Entertainment. Because of his one-man show, Stewart was an obvious choice for the starring role. (His literary skills were in full swing too, having played Ahab in the Hallmark/America Zoetrope TV adaptation of Moby Dick the previous year.) The screenplay was written by Peter Barnes, best known for his 1968 play The Ruling Class and an experienced literary adapter; the film was directed by David Hugh Jones, a British stage, television, and film director who started his career with the Royal Shakespeare Company. There is thus something quite theatrical about this version, almost like an open-air production, enhanced by the use of historical and derelict buildings as sets, with heavyweight British character actors like Stewart and Richard E. Grant as Bob Cratchit, Saskia Reeves (Mrs Cratchit), Dominic West (Fred), Celia Imrie (‘Mrs. Bennett’, one of Fred’s Christmas guests), and Liz Smith as Mrs. Dilber (again). There is also an effortlessly sinister turn by Joel Grey as the Ghost of Christmas Past; although the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come attempts to replicate John Leech’s original illustrations but ends up looking quite pantomimic. With glowing red eyes, let’s just say, it has not aged well. In addition to the original text, this adaptation takes as its inspiration the 1951 film version, in its gothic tone and use of bleak locations and set designs. Alongside the 1984 version, this is the strongest of the TV movies, although very different in style. It also represents the end of a rich and fascinating cycle of adaptations that begins in 1951. Most of the actors popularly identified with Ebenezer Scrooge inhabit this period.

There is, however, one more Scrooge we must mention. I’ve avoided the animated movies for the sake of space, but this one deserves to be in the Christmas Carol film pantheon. Robert Zemeckis’ A Christmas Carol (2009) is also a motion capture animation, a process of recording the actions of human actors and using that information to animate digital character models in 2D or 3D computer animation, so there is live action in there somewhere. (Other films using this technique include The Polar Express, Monster House, and Beowulf.) This is the third Disney version of A Christmas Carol, following Mickey’s Christmas Carol (1983) – which is exactly what it sounds like – and The Muppet Christmas Carol. The film was written and directed by Academy Award winner Zemeckis, who is probably best known for the Back to the Future trilogy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and Forrest Gump, for which he won the Oscar. He has described the original A Christmas Carol as one of his favourite stories about time travel. It stars Jim Carrey as Scrooge, who also plays the three Christmas spirits; Gary Oldman as Bob Cratchit, Jacob Marley, and, weirdly, Tiny Tim; Colin Firth as Fred; and Bob Hoskins as Mr Fezziwig and ‘Old Joe’, the fence who buys the dead Scrooge’s belongings. Robin Wright plays Fan and Belle.

Robert Zemeckis’ A Christmas Carol (2009)

Again, like the 1999 Patrick Stewart film, there is a definite feel of the 1951 version about this one, with the accent of Carrey’s Scrooge not a million miles from Alastair Sim’s resonant Edinburgh baritone. (He makes the Ghost of Christmas Past Irish and gives the Ghost of Christmas Present a Yorkshire accent.) Stylistically, the film feels like an updated version of John Leech’s original illustrations against a dark, hyper-real reimagining of early Victorian London. The set pieces are lavish, but look like a video game, but the interiors are claustrophobic and threatening. By design, the script stays close to the original novella, especially the dialogue, making this another one of the most loyal adaptations. If there is a downside, it is the ‘uncanny valley’ factor when relating to the characters. They look like the actors, but they don’t. They look like Dickensian illustrations come to life, but they’re not traditionally animated; they are, simply put, too real. Japanese Professor of Robotics Masahiro Mori first introduced the concept of the ‘uncanny valley’. He theorized in 1970 that as the appearance of a robot is made more human, our initial response will be positive and empathetic, but after a certain point this changes to a strong revulsion. I watched Zemeckis’ A Christmas Carol again recently and I still have mixed feelings. It is a wonderfully acted, visually stunning piece of work, but there’s still something eerie about it that the ‘rebirth’ ending, and all the laughter and merrymaking don’t quite disperse. As Mary Elizabeth Williams of Salon.com wrote, the film ‘is a triumph of something—but it’s certainly not the Christmas spirit.’ After a century of costume dramas, however, it is, at least, different, yet at the same time I would have loved to see a live action version starring actors of the calibre of Carrey and Oldman.

And this, I think, brings us almost up to date, though an honourable mention must go to BBC Films 2018 stage-to-film adaptation of a one-man performance by Simon Callow, based on his stage recreation of Dickens’ own performance adaptation, which brings us full circle.

I’m aware here that I’ve only scratched the surface. There are so many other versions of the Carol worth seeking out, which I don’t have time or space to cover, such as the 1969 ITV Carry on Christmas show with Sid James as Scrooge, or Bah, Humduck! A Looney Tunes Christmas (2006) with Daffy Duck as Scrooge; A Christmas Carol: The Musical (2004), starring Kelsey Grammer, in which Scrooge meets the ghosts before and after Christmas, rather like Dorothy’s companions in The Wizard of Oz; Steven Knight’s 2019 reimagining for the BBC; the sublime Blackadder’s Christmas Carol (1988), or the 1947 live DuMont television version starring horror icon John Carradine as Scrooge… the list really is almost endless. And they show no sign of stopping. Most recently, in addition to the 2022 Netflix remake of the 1970 musical, there is Spirited (also 2022), a musical comedy and modern retelling of A Christmas Carol directed by Sean Anders, starring Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds. This is apparently a satire of the other adaptations of A Christmas Carol, although I have yet to see it so can offer no opinion.

I like to cycle around the different versions of A Christmas Carol every Christmas, and this post is in many ways intended to inform those of you who do the same. This year, so far, I have watched the Patrick Stewart and Jim Carrey versions, and the family have our tickets for The Muppet Christmas Carol at the VUE on Christmas Eve, which I must confess I’m really looking forward to. That said, whenever I see an online poll, I always vote for Alastair Sim.

Happy Christmas, anyway, and in the immortal words of Tiny Tim, ‘God bless Us, Every One!’

For more information on the life and works of Charles Dickens, visit The Dickens Society

Main image: SCROOGE, (aka A CHRISTMAS CAROL), Alastair Sim and Michael Hordern in Scrooge (1951). Credit: Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 1 above: Publicity still from A Christmas Carol featuring Reginald Owen and Ronald Sinclair MGM 1938 Credit: PictureLux / The Hollywood Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 2 above: A Christmas Carol , George C. Scott, 1984, TM and Copyright © 20th Century Fox Film Corp. Credit: Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 3 above: Poster for Scrooged,  the 1988 Paramount film with Bill Murray. Credit: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 4 above: Michael Caine as Scrooge in The Muppet Christmas Carol  1998, directed by Brian Henson. Credit: Entertainment Pictures / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 5 above: Patrick Stewart in A Christmas Carol (1999). Credit: Copyright Hallmark Entertainment / Cinematic / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 6 above: A Christmas Carol (2009) directed by Robert Zemeckis. Credit: Moviestore Collection Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

The post Filming ‘A Christmas Carol’. appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

Much as letters were carefully preserved in the 19^th century, it was the custom of the children of eminent Victorians to dutifully produce a biography of their departed parent. This was usually but not exclusively their father – Sara Coleridge, for example, wrote a beautiful memoir of her mother – to be placed over the grave, so to speak, along with an overly elaborate monument. While often quite turgid panegyrics, these biographies are nonetheless a wonderful resource for historians willing to seek them out and trawl through them. Thus, in his Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais (1899), John Guille Millais relates the following anecdote from 1858. His father – the Pre-Raphaelite painter – had been walking home from a dinner party accompanied by the author Wilkie Collins and his younger brother Charles, through the dimly lit and in those days semi-rural roads and lanes of North London…

It was a beautiful moonlight night in the summertime, 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 to run in their direction, and, on coming up to the three young men, she paused for a moment in an attitude of supplication and terror. Then, 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.

Illustration for the poster of the 1871 stage version

‘I must see who she is and what’s the matter,’ said Wilkie Collins as, without another 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.

Millais Jr. concludes the episode: ‘Her subsequent history, interesting as it is, is not for these pages.’ As ever in these Victorian memoirs, propriety always stays the chronicler’s hand just as they are getting to the good bits. Millais’ tact here is because of the almost certainly apocryphal story that the woman in question was Caroline Graves, a lower-middle-class widow and mother with whom Collins lived but never married from 1858 to his death in 1889, barring a brief separation during which Caroline married a plumber before returning to Collins. Collins had further scandalised his peers in 1868 when he also took a mistress, Martha Rudd, a young working-class woman from Norfolk, with whom he had three children.

That Collins might have met the love of his life under such romantic circumstances is a nice story, even if not to be told officially at the time. In reality, Caroline kept a modest shop near the house Collins shared with his brother and mother in Hanover Terrace, and it is much more likely that he met her buying candles. Similarly, the identity of the original ‘Woman in White’ was probably known only to herself and, possibly, Collins, and the two may well have never met again. The story was nonetheless (allegedly) perpetuated by Dickens’ daughter Kate, who had been married to Collins’ younger brother. According to her friend Gladys Storey, Kate had told her that ‘this Woman in White so gallantly rescued by Wilkie Collins was the same lady who henceforth lived with him.’ This Storey duly recorded in her memoir of Kate, Dickens and Daughter (1939), written ten years after her friend had died.

Perhaps Caroline was the ‘Woman in White’, perhaps she wasn’t. As Lady Clarinda asserts in Crotchet Castle, ‘History is but a tiresome thing in itself; it becomes more agreeable the more romance is mixed up with it.’ The same goes for literary biography. And perhaps because of his temperament as much as his role in the development of the English novel – mentored by Dickens, herald of the likes of Thomas Hardy and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Wilkie Collins was a master of both romance and realism. In fact, he could blend the forms with such alchemical precision it was far from obvious where one ended and the other began. And regardless of the true identity and history of the ‘very beautiful woman dressed in flowing white robes’, she was to become immortalised in what many readers and literary scholars alike believe to be Collins’ finest work, The Woman in White. Whoever she was, she had certainly made an impression on Wilkie Collins.

Published in 1860, The Woman in White was Collins’ fifth novel. It followed Antonina, or the Fall of Rome (1850), a historical novel in the manner of Edward Bulwer Lytton; Basil (1852), a tale of social class and sexual obsession that was praised by Dickens; the Dickensian Hide and Seek (1854), which Dickens described as ‘the cleverest novel I have ever seen written by a new hand’; and the psychological mystery The Dead Secret (1856). Collins had been learning his trade. Leaving aside the anomalous Antonia, which harks back to the 1840s vogue for historical romance, Basil, Hide and Seek, and The Dead Secret can all be read as early examples of what came to be known as ‘Sensation Fiction’, although the term had yet to be coined. Basil, in fact, caused quite a stir in its day for its depiction of the secret marriage of the upper-class hero to the teenage daughter of a linen draper who is then seduced by his father’s clerk. But despite Dickens’ praise, Collins had yet to break through in the Darwinian world of mid-Victorian popular fiction.

Collins shared Dickens’ passion for amateur dramatics and the two writers were introduced by a mutual friend, the artist Augustus Egg, while Dickens was producing Lytton’s comedy Not So Bad as We Seem for the stage in the spring of 1851. Collins landed a small part, and a friendship began that would endure until Dickens’ death in 1870. Collins was soon a regular contributor to Household Words, becoming a staff writer in 1856. When Dickens fell out with his publisher Bradbury and Evans and Household Words folded to be replaced by All the Year Round, Collins went with him. The Woman in White was serialised in 20 parts in All the Year Round between November 1859 and April 1860, appearing concurrently in the US in Harper’s Magazine. When The Woman in White began, Collins was an established contributor to the magazine but still something of a journeyman author; by the end of the serial, he was one of the most popular novelists of the day. ‘There can be no doubt that it is a very great advance on all your former writing,’ Dickens wrote to him, ‘The story is very interesting and the writing of it admirable.’

All the Year Round had hit the ground running with Dickens’ flagship serial A Tale of Two Cities, but circulation rose when The Woman in White followed it and fell again when it ended. Queues formed outside the offices when the next edition was due out, and a cottage industry of unlicensed ‘Woman in White’ products sprang up to satisfy the public craze, including clothes, cosmetics, toiletries, and ceramics, while music shops supplied sheet music for themed waltzes and quadrilles. When The Woman in White was published as a ‘triple-decker’ (three volume) novel, it went through four editions in the first month, the first edition selling out on the day of publication. William Gladstone cancelled a social engagement so he could keep reading and Prince Albert gifted it to friends. ‘Walter’ – the name of the novel’s hero – became a fashionable name for babies, and painters filled galleries with portraits of women in white gowns. Collins was courted by publishers, Smith and Elder offering £5,000 for his next novel. ‘FIVE THOUSAND POUNDS!!!!!!’ he wrote to his mother, ‘Ha! ha! ha! Five thousand pounds, for nine months or, at most a year’s work – nobody but Dickens has made as much.’ The Woman in White was certainly a page-turner, and so it remains. It is not difficult to imagine the mesmeric effect the story had on Victorian readers and the publishers who watched and fed the public taste.

The design and implementation of the novel is precise and beautiful. As contemporary reviewer Alexander Smith observed, ‘every trifling incident is charged with an oppressive importance; if a tea-cup is broken, it has a meaning, it is a link in a chain; you are certain to hear of it afterwards.’ This meticulous plotting – which Dickens clearly learned from in his later novels – is matched by a genius for character creation and a wry sense of subversion beneath the veneer of Victorian respectability, a duality much like the novelist himself. Collins was raffish and bohemian, romantic and spontaneous, the opium-addicted son of an artist who spent much of his youth in France and Italy and cheerfully defied social convention. The novel therefore offers two sets of ‘heroes’. There is the notional protagonist, Walter Hartright, and his beautiful, innocent, and rather boring love interest, Laura Fairlie, whose fraught story arc moves towards a resolution that conforms to Victorian social norms and values. There is also the dashing and wicked Count Fosco, and the unconventional and brilliant – if rather manly – Marian Halcombe, representing respectively anarchy and feminism, and both given prominent voices in the narrative. Fosco, in fact, is allowed to put forward his own version of events in his own words, which are thoroughly unrepentant and seem to suggest that if one is daring and cunning enough, then crime really does pay.

After a couple of deceptively leisurely opening chapters in which the protagonist is introduced – Walter Hartright, a poor artist and drawing tutor – and his status quo disrupted by an intriguing job offer, triggering the novel, the first act concludes with a meeting very much like the one from the summer of 1858. As Walter wanders home from his mother’s house along the secluded Finchley Road on a sultry, moonlit summer’s night:

There, in the middle of the broad bright high-road—there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven—stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments, her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her.

The moment is gothic. The encounter takes place ‘where four roads met’, a site at which murderers and suicides were traditionally buried, the crossroads intended to confuse unquiet spirits, who would be unable to choose a path. The word Walter chooses to describe the woman is ‘apparition’, and she doesn’t know which way to go either. ‘Is that the road to London?’ she asks. But this is not a ghost story, despite the novel’s evocative title. Legends of spectral ‘white ladies’ have been a staple of supernatural fiction and folklore since the Middle Ages, their appearance traditionally linked to an impending death. Collins was well aware of this, and the ghostly figure certainly assumes this role symbolically in the story, appearing – and just as quickly disappearing – at moments of impending crisis.

Her social rank is ambivalent, and the informed reader might think of Caroline Graves in Walter’s initial description:

There was nothing wild, nothing immodest in her manner: it was quiet and self-controlled, a little melancholy and a little touched by suspicion; not exactly the manner of a lady, and, at the same time, not the manner of a woman in the humblest rank of life.

Walter is therefore confident that this strange encounter is not to be transactional: ‘The one thing of which I felt certain was, that the grossest of mankind could not have misconstrued her motive in speaking, even at that suspiciously late hour and in that suspiciously lonely place.’ Rather, she is a damsel in distress, and just as Collins had helped the mystery woman on that fateful summer evening in 1858, Walter comes to the aid of her fictional counterpart:

The loneliness and helplessness of the woman touched me. The natural impulse to assist her and to spare her got the better of the judgment, the caution, the worldly tact, which an older, wiser, and colder man might have summoned to help him in this strange emergency.

She claims to have met with an accident and is lost. She has a friend in London, she says, if she can only find her way. Walter is clearly drawn to the woman, though his motives are unclear, or at least mixed: he is intrigued by the mystery of her unlikely presence, alone, in the middle of nowhere at night; he wants to help; he is captivated by her vulnerable, ethereal beauty. We don’t know, and Walter doesn’t know, but the dice are rolling. Nonetheless, he does ‘try and gain time by questioning her’ and is destined to fall in love with someone who looks very much like her so the frisson of desire cannot be easily denied. In this, creation probably resembles creator. Collins certainly liked the ladies and seemed to be attracted to those of a lower social class to himself. As Millais’ anecdote implied, Collins’ interest in the mystery woman had not been entirely chivalrous.

A cryptic conversation follows, in which the woman has to be reassured that Walter is not ‘a man of rank and title’, a class she seems to fear, one unnamed baronet in particular, while making him promise that he will not ‘interfere’ with her, that is impede her journey in any way. Walter assures her he is not and will not, and, fearing she might later have need of his help in London, he explains that he’s lately been engaged to tutor two young ladies in Cumberland and is leaving imminently. To his amazement, the woman replies that she went to school briefly in the village he’s moving to and speaks with great affection of the family that has engaged him, the Fairlies of Limmeridge House, though those she knew are now long dead. By now, they have reached gaslights and houses. Walter engages a cab for the woman in white and bids her farewell. He continues to walk home, wondering if the encounter had really happened, when an open chaise pulls up alongside a policeman across the road and asks if he’s seen a woman in white who’s escaped from an asylum. Walter says nothing. In the morning, he begins his journey to Limmeridge House and the main body of the story.

The identity of the ‘Woman in White’ is not, however, the mystery. Rather, she is a catalyst for a much more elaborate plot, a series of secrets and conspiracies that cross generations and into which Walter is shoved by the hand of authorial fate. Walter’s employer, Frederick Fairlie, is an indifferent and indolent hypochondriac who is guardian to his niece, Laura Fairlie, the heir to a considerable fortune. Walter is to tutor Laura and her elder half-sister and companion, Marian Halcombe, bothering their guardian as little as possible. Marian, whom he meets first, quickly befriends him. She is a prototypical ‘New Woman’, a literary ancestor of Stoker’s Mina Harker: highly intelligent, witty to the point of irreverence, and political in her frustration at the legal, social, and physical constraints imposed on her by gender. Unlike Laura, she has no inheritance and lives at the mercy of the Fairlies’ goodwill, being the daughter of Laura’s late mother from a previous marriage. Walter first sees her standing at a window and is ‘struck by the rare beauty of her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude.’ As she turns and approaches him, the spell is broken, at least as far as the male gaze is concerned:

The lady’s complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a moustache. She had a large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw; prominent, piercing, resolute brown eyes; and thick, coal-black hair, growing unusually low down on her forehead. Her expression—bright, frank, and intelligent—appeared, while she was silent, to be altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of gentleness and pliability, without which the beauty of the handsomest woman alive is beauty incomplete. To see such a face as this set on shoulders that a sculptor would have longed to model … was to feel a sensation oddly akin to the helpless discomfort familiar to us all in sleep, when we recognise yet cannot reconcile the anomalies and contradictions of a dream.

Marian is not to be the love interest. Freed of this role, she later becomes Watson to Walter’s Sherlock Holmes, a fellow amateur investigator and confidante as the plot thickens. She loves a good mystery, and soon discovers the identity of the woman in white by going through her mother’s letters.

Laura is a much more conventional heroine of Victorian fiction:

Think of her as you thought of the first woman who quickened the pulses within you that the rest of her sex had no art to stir. Let the kind, candid blue eyes meet yours, as they met mine, with the one matchless look which we both remember so well. Let her voice speak the music that you once loved best, attuned as sweetly to your ear as to mine. Let her footstep, as she comes and goes, in these pages, be like that other footstep to whose airy fall your own heart once beat time. Take her as the visionary nursling of your own fancy; and she will grow upon you, all the more clearly, as the living woman who dwells in mine.

She is also the spitting image of the woman Walter met on the Finchley Road. Walter is quickly smitten, despite the obvious difference in social rank, and the grounds of Limmeridge House become Edenic as friendship and passion grow. But as is always the case, there is a serpent in the garden. Laura, Marian delicately reveals, is engaged to be married to Sir Percival Glyde, Baronet.

Drawing by Frederick Watty

Marian advises Walter to leave, but while he prepares to break his contract with Frederick Fairlie, local schoolchildren report seeing a ghostly woman haunting Limmeridge churchyard, ‘Arl in white – as a ghaist should be.’ At the same time, Laura receives a cryptic anonymous letter clearly warning her against marrying Glyde. In a moment of epiphany, Walter tells Marion that ‘the fancied ghost in the churchyard, and the writer of the anonymous letter, are one in the same person,’ the same woman he met on the road into London. Could it be Glyde that had the woman in white placed in the asylum, he wonders? But there is nothing he or Marian can do. Glyde will not release Laura from her promise, even when she confesses she loves another. Neither can her guardian be bothered with the family lawyer’s concerns over the financial terms of the marriage settlement, in which Glyde would receive her entire fortune if she died without leaving an heir. To get over his broken heart, Walter joins a scientific expedition to Central America, leaving those around Laura to pick up the narrative. And so, the first act closes, the pieces on the board developed. Walter’s knight has left the field, and only Marian stands between Laura and her new husband, and his sinister companion from Italy, Count Fosco, a ruthless and brilliant strategist that prefers animals to human beings. Fosco is captivated by Marian, however, who he views as his intellectual equal. And although Marian is granted lesser textual status than the more conventional and much less interesting Laura, we are left with the impression that she would be the hero were Fosco writing the account rather than Walter.

Then things get really complicated…

As the plot twists and turns, Collins uses the accounts of multiple point of view characters to tell the story over a more conventional unified narrative voice. He had trained (but never practiced) as a lawyer at his father’s insistence and, as he explained in a ‘Preamble’ to the novel:

The story here presented will be told by more than one pen, as the story of an offence against the laws is told in Court by more than one witness—with the same object, in both cases, to present the truth always in its most direct and most intelligible aspect; and to trace the course of one complete series of events, by making the persons who have been most closely connected with them, at each successive stage, relate their own experience, word for word.

Thus, ‘As the Judge might once have heard it, so the Reader shall hear it now.’ This, he explains, is to ensure that ‘No circumstance of importance, from the beginning to the end of the disclosure, shall be related on hearsay evidence.’ But this crafty claim to veracity also allows Collins to obscure and misdirect, while also showing key characters through the eyes of several people, all of whom offer very different portraits, leaving the reader to draw their own conclusions. Count Fosco, for example, is perceived by many to be a man of considerable charm and breeding. The novel is therefore subdivided into the following narrative fragments across three ‘epochs’ or parts, the common format of the Victorian serial, which was subsequently published as a novel in three volumes:

THE FIRST EPOCH

The Story Begun by Walter Hartright (of Clement’s Inn, Teacher of Drawing) [This is the part summarised above]

The Story Continued by Vincent Gilmore (of Chancery Lane, Solicitor).

The Story Continued by Marian Halcombe (in Extracts from her Diary).

THE SECOND EPOCH

The Story Continued by Marian Halcombe.

Postscript by a Sincere Friend. [Count Fosco writing in Marian’s diary]

The Story Continued by Frederick Fairlie, ESQ., of Limmeridge House.

The Story Continued by Eliza Michelson (Housekeeper at Blackwater Park).

THE STORY CONTINUED IN SEVERAL NARRATIVES

1. The Narrative of Hester Pinhorn, Cook in the Service of Count Fosco. Taken down from her own statement.
2. The Narrative of the Doctor.
3. The Narrative of Jane Gould.
4. The Narrative of the Tombstone.
5. The Narrative of Walter Hartright.

THE THIRD EPOCH

The Story Continued by Walter Hartright.

The Story Continued by Mrs Catherick.

The Story Continued by Walter Hartright.

The Story Continued by Isidor, Ottavio, Baldassare Fosco.

The Story Concluded by Walter Hartright.

As well as having a legal format, this device is also gothic. In gothic fiction, multiple points of view are used to undermine set interpretation and unsettle the reader. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example, is framed by Captain Walton’s letters to his sister, while the main body of the text is Victor Frankenstein’s confession, which is, in turn, annexed mid-point by the first-person narrative of his creature. Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde similarly offers a third person frame plus ‘Dr Lanyon’s Narrative’ and ‘Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case’. Stoker’s Dracula is the most complex of all, comprising letters, diaries, and journal entries from six point of view characters and a series of newspaper columns. This level of narrative fragmentation functions as a series of competing frames of explanation, creating a tension between natural and supernatural possibilities, like a series of witness testimonies in a complicated trial, just like Collins’ analogy. In The Woman in White, the effect is to build suspense to key-bending levels, with one narrative cutting across the other at a moment of extreme tension, until all the fragments finally come together only in climax and denouement. In a thriller, the effect is electric, even after all these years. Multiple points of view are also a feature of postmodern narratives, in which the mutable and fundamentally unstable nature of the ‘self’ (our individual conscious and unconscious identities) muddling along in a godless universe is reflected in the instability of the text. Obvious examples include the early novels of Thomas Pynchon – The Crying of Lot 49, V, and Gravity’s Rainbow – and Samuel Beckett’s ‘Trilogy’: Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. It is probably a reach to suggest Collins had something similarly existential in mind, but The Woman in White is nonetheless a novel much concerned with psychology, from the extremes of the Victorian asylum to the instability of individual identity and the way we perceive ourselves and each other. Mrs Catherick, for example, has endured years of judgement and social ostracism to proudly reach a point in matronly middle age at which the vicar must always raise his hat when he sees her in the street. And just as it should be in all good mysteries, nobody is quite what they seem.

As a serial writer, Collins was also a master of the cliffhanger ending, of evocative ‘last turns’ that close one chapter while setting up the next. In Walter’s opening narrative, for example, there are such page-turning closers as:

‘Done! She has escaped from my Asylum. Don’t forget; a woman in white. Drive on.’

My introduction to Miss Fairlie was now close at hand; and, if Miss Halcombe’s search through her mother’s letters had produced the result which she anticipated, the time had come for clearing up the mystery of the woman in white.

She paused for a moment, and then answered, rather coldly— ‘Baronet, of course.’

The place looked lonelier than ever as I chose my position, and waited and watched, with my eyes on the white cross that rose over Mrs. Fairlie’s grave.

One farewell look, and the door had closed upon her—the great gulf of separation had opened between us—the image of Laura Fairlie was a memory of the past already.

You can feel the man reaching across time and grabbing us, which is why The Woman in White remains a popular novel to this day, in a limited Victorian literary pantheon in which a handful of novels become transcendent and iconic, for example Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Collins’ other famous novel, The Moonstone. Even if you’ve never read these books, you’re aware of them as part of our common cultural heritage; you’ll have some idea of the story and have probably seen a movie or a serial. There are just some classic novels that are endlessly dramatised, and The Woman in White is one of them. The BBC has been making it regularly since the first six-part serial in 1966. The next BBC adaptation was in 1982, with a stunning performance from Diana Quick as Marian. Then there was the 1997 version, with Andrew Lincoln as Walter, and Simon Callow making Count Fosco his own forever. The BBC remade it again in 2018 with a nice turn by Dougray Scott as Sir Percival Glyde. (There were also two Radio Four serials.) The novel has also been adapted for television in Italy, Germany, and Russia. There have also been five silent film versions, and a 1948 Hollywood adaptation starring film noir stalwart Sydney Greenstreet as Count Fosco. Leaving aside the 1997 BBC version, which I consider definitive, my personal favourite is Crimes at the Dark House (1940) starring the great British melodramatic villain Tod Slaughter – Sweeney Todd himself – as Glyde.

The continuing popularity of The Woman in White can largely be ascribed to the dawning of ‘Sensation Fiction’ that it represents, a precursor of the modern mystery and thriller genres and a significant development in the form of the popular English novel. Collins was, said Vanity Fair in 1872, ‘The Novelist who invented Sensation.’ Not that ‘Sensation’ was a label authors sought at the time, it being a pejorative term used by critics who did not share the enthusiasm of Collins’ massive audience. As John Ruskin wrote in his essay ‘Fiction Fair and Foul’, ‘the reactions of moral disease upon itself, and the conditions of languidly monstrous character developed in an atmosphere of low vitality, have become the most valued material of modern fiction.’ ‘Sensation Fiction’ was first given a name in the November 1861 number of the Literary Budget, seeking to define the style of The Woman in White and East Lynne by Ellen ‘Mrs Henry’ Wood. By the following year, the publication of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret cemented the genre.

Wilkie Collins’ grave

The ‘Sensation’ novel blended the narrative codes of both realism and romance, literary forms that had previously been quite distinct. It borrowed from the Newgate novels of the 1830s (early crime fiction), melodrama, and gothic fiction, with the horrors of the traditional medieval settings of Radcliffe, Maturin, and Lewis relocated to Victorian England. As Henry James wrote, the sensation novel had ‘introduced those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors’. Therefore, ‘instead of the terrors of “Udolpho” we were treated to the terrors of the cheerful country-house and the busy London lodgings. And there is no doubt that these were infinitely the more terrible.’ Contemporary criminal cases were also a rich source of inspiration, hence Collins’ fragmented narrative, presented like a bundle of legal documents. (In The Moonstone, he would go on to base his great detective Sergeant Cuff on the famous Victorian policeman DI Jack Whicher.) ‘Sensation’ plots commonly featured madness, opium, murder, adultery, bigamy, kidnapping, dark family secrets, and the loss of identity. Because of the modern settings and boundary-pushing narrative edginess, these novels were also able to explore contemporary social issues and anxieties. The Woman in White, for example, is based around the unequal position of married women under English law before the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, all their property automatically passing to husbands who could also lock ‘difficult’ wives away in private asylums with impunity. The changing social dynamics of Victorian Britain are also apparent. Upper-class and aristocrat villains are pitted again middle-class heroes like Walter and Marian, as the industrial bourgeoisie transcend the landed gentry, business and finance creating a new ruling elite. There is also, of course, the fledgling signs of detective fiction in The Woman in White, although the honour of invention must go to Edgar Allan Poe and his C. Auguste Dupin stories in the 1840s. Though Walter and Marian are cast as investigators, with key clues such as the date on a train ticket becoming major plot points, The Woman in White is more ‘mystery’ than ‘detection’, the narrative based more on emotional affect than deductive reasoning. Collins’ masterpiece of detective fiction was to be his 1868 bestseller, The Moonstone.

Although a commercial success and publishing phenomenon, The Woman in White was not much liked by contemporary critics who, like Ruskin, similarly derided his bestselling ‘Sensational’ contemporaries Mary Elizabeth Braddon, J.S. Le Fanu, and Charles Reade. The Archbishop of York denounced the genre from the pulpit, the debate similar in tone to the ‘Newgate Controversy’ of the previous generation, in which ‘criminal romances’ – including Dickens’ Oliver Twist – were decried as socially dangerous. As with the Newgate novelists of the 1830s – W.H. Ainsworth and Edward Bulwer-Lytton – the critical consensus was that Collins had no right to use the kind of subversive and violent material he did without an eye on the moral improvement of his reader, the clause that always saved Dickens from the same charge. The Times review called the novel ‘a mockery, a delusion, and a snare.’ Collins was not happy, announcing ‘Either the public is right and the press is wrong, or the press is right and the public is wrong.’ Time would tell, he decided, concluding that ‘If the public turns out to be right, I shall never trust the press again.’ And so, he didn’t, choosing to measure success in sales over good notices as the reviews became harsher and more condescending.

The 1860s was therefore his decade, comprising his best and most significant work. The Woman in White was followed by No Name in 1862, in which two young women discover after the deaths of their parents that they are illegitimate and therefore penniless; and Armadale (serialised in the Cornhill Magazine between 1864 and 1866), a tale of inter-generational family secrets, murder, doubles, and a compelling flame-haired villainess called Lydia Gwilt, clearly Count Fosco’s female counterpart. In 1868, The Moonstone was published, alongside The Woman in White the novel for which Collins is best known today, and a landmark in British detective fiction. Nine novels were yet to be written, but it is upon this fascinating quartet that Collins’ literary reputation rests. And of all of these, it was The Woman in White of which he was most proud. Upon his death, an envelope left with his solicitor was unsealed, containing clear instructions regarding his epitaph. A plain stone in Kensal Green Cemetery therefore bears the following inscription:

William Wilkie Collins

8 January 1824 – 23 September 1889

Author of The Woman in White and other works of fiction.

For more information on the life and works of Wilkie Collins, visit: The Wilkie Collins Society

Main image: Crimes at the Dark House starring Tod Slaughter and Sylvia Marriott, 1940 Credit: Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 1 above: Illustration for a poster advertising the stage version that opened at the Olympic Theatre, London, on 9 October 1871. The illustration is by Collins’ friend, the English illustrator Frederick Walker (1840-1875). Credit: Photo 12 / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 2 above: Illustration featured in Cartoon Portraits and Biographical Sketches of Men of the Day (1873) with drawings by Frederick Watty and accompanied by biographical pieces on each of the subjects. Credit: Science History Images / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 3 above: Gravestone of Wilkie Collins in Kensal Green Cemetery London. Credit: Jeremy Hoare / Alamy Stock Photo

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Poster for the 1960 film, directed by Roger Corman

Much like Hammer’s Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula a couple of years before, The Fall of the House of Usher’s effect on the cinema-going public was electric. Unlike the novels of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and Robert Louis Stevenson, Poe’s work had not been adapted and popularised during the previous highpoint of gothic cinema in the 1930s and 40s and was more associated with American high school English classes, a connection Variety made at the time. Jaded audiences now re-evaluated, discovering, or perhaps remembering the master of the macabre in American literature, doubly fresh for having none of the baggage of numerous Dracula and Frankenstein movies. The film established Price as a leading man and a star (while at the same time typecasting him forever) and was a critical and commercial triumph for Corman and AIP. Thus began their lucrative and influential five-year ‘Poe Cycle’ of films, following House of Usher with The Pit and the Pendulum, The Premature Burial, Tales of Terror, The Raven, The Terror, The Haunted Palace, The Masque of the Red Death, and The Tomb of Ligeia. Stephen King later disclosed in On Writing that he learnt his trade as a schoolkid copying Matheson’s Poe screenplays.

Now, sixty-three years after Corman’s ground-breaking movie reinvented Poe and the American Gothic, writer and director Mike Flanagan has done it again with his remarkable reimagining of The Fall of the House of Usher for Netflix. And the critical and commercial response has been much the same as it was in 1960. You must have seen the headlines, the memes, and the clickbait. The Fall of the House of Usher has gone viral. It quickly captured the top spot for the week among all Netflix movies and TV shows, with 65.3 million viewing hours and 7.9 million views. The Daily Mail, meanwhile, has already denounced it as ‘Netflix’s most depraved show’, and the paper is not alone in colourful reviews around the world that (wrongly) suggest this is the most ‘terrifying’, ‘perverted’, and ‘violent’ TV show ever made. It isn’t, at least not to seasoned fans of contemporary horror, but you can’t buy publicity like that, and the series has transcended its genre to gain mainstream views and attention, making it a significant media event. As Poe once noted, ‘The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.’

Vincent Price as Roderick Usher, 1960

Flanagan hit the ground running as an innovative horror filmmaker with Absentia in 2011, which was initially funded through the crowdfunding website Kickstarter. This was followed by Oculus, Hush, Before I Wake and Ouija: Origin of Evil in 2016, and the adaptation of two novels by Stephen King, Gerald’s Game (2017) and Doctor Sleep (2019), the sequel to The Shining. He also made the miniseries Midnight Mass for Netflix (2021), a thoughtful and moving meditation on grief, guilt, and the possibility of redemption in which a priest suffering from dementia mistakes a vampire for an angel; and The Midnight Club (Netflix, 2022), based on the supernatural stories of the YA author Christopher Pike, which is so much more original than Disney’s reboot of Goosebumps.

In terms of elegant literary gothic revisionism, this is not Flanagan’s first rodeo either. As the creator, director, and lead writer of the ten-part serial The Haunting of Hill House for Netflix in 2018, Flanagan took his inspiration from the novel of the same name by Shirley Jackson (1959, previously filmed by Robert Wise in 1963 and Jan de Bont in 1999). Though not an adaptation of Jackson’s novel, Flanagan uses the original premise to explore the long-term effects of ‘the haunting’ on five siblings whose parents tried to renovate Hill House in the early 90s. It is a complex family saga with a non-linear narrative moving between different point-of-view characters in the present and their childhood memories, all stories leading to a key night in 1992 when the family finally fled the house. This is a structure that Flanagan seems to favour in his TV work – the longer running time of a series allowing for complex character arcs, subplots, and a much wider timeframe than a movie – and he returned to it in his next Netflix ‘Haunting’ series, The Haunting of Bly Manor in 2020. Credited as ‘inspired by the work of Henry James’, Bly Manor is a more ambitious literary project than Hill House in that rather than producing an almost entirely original story that took the essence of a single novel, Flanagan uses The Turn of the Screw (updated to the 1980s) as the foundational plot, the ‘through line’ of the series, but then also plunders eight more of James’ (mostly) supernatural short stories as episodes in the lives of his central characters and the history of Bly Manor. This approach to the American literary gothic is then developed further in the intertextual tour de force of The Fall of the House of Usher, in which numerous Poe poems and stories (and his biography) are referenced and quoted, creating an original contemporary drama that is seeped in his literary essence. Poe loved cyphers and so does Flanagan, packing the show with enough easter eggs to keep a Poe scholar up all night wondering if they caught all of them.

As with Hill House and Bly Manor, Flanagan’s House of Usher is not a straight adaptation of Poe. For that, you still need to go to the best of the Corman/Price movies. Again, Flanagan has gone with the gothic family saga, updating the Ushers to Biden’s America as a phenomenally wealthy and powerful dynasty with the 73-year-old Roderick Usher at its head (played by Flanagan regular Bruce Greenwood, his long face and grey widow’s peak recalling Price). Roderick rules in tandem with his brilliant and ruthless twin sister Madeline (Battlestar Galactica’s Mary McDonnell), while his six children (two legitimate, four not, and each uniquely dreadful), compete for his approval and their inheritance. The scenario is similar to Succession and Knives Out, while also inviting us to think of real-life corporate dynasties such as the Murdochs and the Trumps, vast business empires in which, like the Mafia, family is everything. ‘The company,’ Roderick tells his children, ‘is the family.’

The Usher fortune comes from Big Pharma, the foundation of which is the highly addictive painkiller ‘Ligadone’ (the name a nod to Poe’s ‘Ligeia’), a fictionalised version of OxyContin, referencing America’s current Opioid Crisis. In this context, Usher’s company Fortunato Pharmaceuticals (‘Fortunato’ being the victim of Poe’s 1846 revenge tragedy ‘The Cask of Amontillado’) alludes to Purdue Pharma and its billionaire former CEO Richard Sackler, himself the subject of two contemporary miniseries, Painkiller (Netflix) and Dopesick (Hulu). Purdue Pharma manufactured opium-based medications like hydromorphone, fentanyl, codeine, hydrocodone, and oxycodone (‘OxyContin’), using aggressive marketing and generous enticements to medical practitioners to prescribe OxyContin in particular, cornering the US market, generating staggering profits and resulting in half-a-million deaths by overdose in the US between 1999 and 2020. 1000+ lawsuits across multiple States finally pushed the company into bankruptcy pending a Department of Justice appeal to the US Supreme Court. The Sacklers have been described in the US media as the ‘worst drug dealers in history’ and the ‘most evil family in America’. In 2021, Purdue Pharma announced that it would be rebranding as Knoa Pharma, a cynical move worthy of Fortunato’s CEO and COO.

Poster for the 2023 Netflix adaptation.

At the start of the first episode (‘A Midnight Dreary’), which I think it is thus OK to reveal here, we learn two things that trigger the main story. Firstly, Roderick is on trial. Assistant United States Attorney C. Auguste Dupin (named, of course, for Poe’s famous French detective), is bringing 73 separate charges – one for each year of Roderick’s life – against the ‘Usher Crime Family’ pertaining to corruption and 50,000 unlawful deaths through Ligadone. Again, we are invited to think of Donald Trump as much as Sackler, who at time of writing has been criminally indicted four times and faces 91 felony counts across four criminal trials along with one civil suit. The earnest and meticulous Dupin (Carl Lumbly) is therefore a Jack Smith figure, pitted against Roderick’s legal fixer, Arthur Gordon Pym, Mark Hamill reminding us that there’s a lot more to him as an actor than Luke Skywalker. Pym is named for Poe’s 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and Flanagan’s version has a similar tale to tell from an ill-fated expedition in the early 80s. The character would not look out of place in The Godfather, a Consigliere devoted to though not of the family: part lawyer, part spy, part hitman… whatever it takes to protect the Usher’s reputation and interests. They call him ‘The Pym Reaper’.

The second thing we learn is that all of Roderick’s children are dead, and have, in fact, died in the last two weeks. The opening scene is a family triple funeral, in which the eulogy is taken from Poe’s poem ‘Spirits of the Dead’ (1827):

Be silent in that solitude,

   Which is not loneliness—for then

The spirits of the dead who stood

   In life before thee are again

In death around thee—and their will

Shall overshadow thee: be still.

The spirits of the dead are around Roderick too. Periodically, he can see them, his mutilated children staring silently back at him. Leaving the service, Roderick collapses on the sidewalk on the way to his Limo, cryptically muttering ‘It’s time’ to Madeline as a raven watches implacably from the church’s facade. Roderick, apparently recovered, invites his nemesis Dupin (with whom he has a long history) to meet him at the house where he grew up – the physical ‘House of Usher’ – a derelict Carpenter’s Gothic, semiotically the quintessential American ‘haunted house’. This establishes a framing narrative which runs through the series until its climax, as Roderick ‘confesses his crimes’ and reveals the true causes of each of his children’s deaths while Madeline bangs about (offscreen) in the basement. This structure reflects Poe’s original story, in which the unidentified narrator sits for days with the greatly altered Roderick Usher in the ‘melancholy House’ as his childhood friend goes slowly out of his mind: ‘I shall ever bear about me a memory of the many solemn hours I thus spent alone with the master of the House of Usher.’ (In the show, Roderick has no friends; the closest thing he has is his oldest enemy.) Dupin records the increasingly surreal confession as both men share a bottle of €4 million Henri IV Dudognon Heritage Cognac – ‘You know, a single pour,’ Roderik tells Dupin, ‘it probably costs twice your annual salary.’ As they talk, Roderick’s only grandchild, Lenore, keeps desperately texting but he ignores her. Roderick’s story has two parallel arcs, one set in his past, going back to childhood, but focusing on events at the end of 1979 in which Dupin also played a part, the other documenting the previous two weeks, and the deaths of his children. Dupin immediately spots the point of view paradox here. How can Roderick know what happened to his kids? Roderick replies that they have told him.

Each episode takes its title and theme from a Poe story, except for Parts 1 and 8, which both reference his famous poem ‘The Raven’. These episodes bookend the serial and are concerned largely with Roderick and Madeline and the original ‘House of Usher’ story. The other six episodes each show the fate of one of Roderick’s six children, the titles signalling the broad content of the story: ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, ‘Murder in the Rue Morgue’, ‘The Black Cat’, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, ‘Goldbug’ (an interesting and unusual choice, although the episode takes more from Poe’s doppelgänger story ‘William Wilson’), and ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’. Poe aficionadas will therefore have a rough idea of how each sibling will meet their demise, although the updates are clever and surprising, yet in retrospect inevitable, which is always the best way to end a story. ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, for example, is transmuted from the Castle of Prince Prospero to an exclusive ‘pop-up club’ rave and orgy at a condemned Usher chemical plant, while the ‘Rue Morgue’ becomes ‘Roderick Usher Experimental’ (R.U.E.), a facility known to employees as the ‘Rue Morgue’ because of the animal tests undertaken there, including on chimpanzees. (You can see where this is going.) Then there are Poe stories within Poe stories; for example, in what happens to Morella, wife of Roderick’s first-born son Frederick and mother of Lenore, the only Usher grandchild, which takes elements from ‘Berenice’ and ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ (and ‘Morella’ of course), while ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ features in Roderick’s rise to the top at Fortunato Pharmaceuticals. Frederick, meanwhile, is the name of a central character in Poe’s ‘Metzengerstein: A Tale in Imitation of the German’ (1832) and Morella comes from the story of the same name written by Poe in 1832. (You know who Lenore is.) Like Koch’s fractal snowflake, the intertext becomes almost infinite yet always constrained by the original circle: Poe, his life, his works.

The game continues with every character name, though as part of the fun is deciphering all these, I’ll just mention a few. Camille, Tamerlane, Prospero, and Annabel Lee are all obvious, but then there’s Victorine LaFourcade (‘The Premature Burial’), Alessandra (from the only play Poe ever wrote, the incomplete Politan, 1835), and crafty allusions to less well-known stories like ‘Never Bet the Devil Your Head’ (1841) and ‘Some Words with a Mummy’ (1845) which I’ll leave you to figure out. Then there’s the protean ‘Verna’, played with style and versatility by Carla Gugino, the enigmatic character that holds the whole plot together. More like Milton’s Satan – or ‘Rose the Hat’ from Doctor Sleep – than a creation of Poe, her name is an anagram of ‘Raven’.

There is also notable biographical naming. Roderick and Madeline are the illegitimate children of ‘William Longfellow’, for example. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, poet, author, and Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard University once turned down an offer from Poe to contribute to Graham’s Magazine. Irked by Longfellow’s literary and academic success, and desirous of stirring up publicity, Poe initiated a long literary war in reviews that were brutal even by nineteenth century standards. Similarly, the original CEO of Fortunata, who uses and abuses Roderick and Madeline, is called Rufus Wilmot Griswold. The original Rufus Wilmot Griswold had replaced Poe as editor of Graham’s in 1842 and professionally they did not get on. Both were also rivals for the affection of the popular poet Frances Sargent Osgood (though all three were married at the time), and when Poe submitted ‘The Raven’ to Graham’s, Griswold turned it down. When Poe died in 1849, Griswold claimed that Poe had made him his literary executor, though in truth he had tricked Poe’s mother-in-law into signing the papers. He edited Poe’s first collected works, which made him more money than Poe ever had from his writing, while allowing him to bask in reflected literary glory. Griswold also contributed a ‘Memoir of the Author’ which depicted Poe as a depraved, drunken, opium-fuelled lunatic, through a series of entirely fictitious anecdotes, and selectively quoted, altered, or forged correspondence. The book was widely reprinted, and quickly became the standard biographical source on Poe, which accounts for the tendency to this day among fans to associate the author with his own gothic characters. Look harder, and you’ll also spot references to Poe’s family in the series, as well as the last words he ever spoke, hidden on nametags and driving licenses, Mise-en-scènically embedded.

Poe at work in the company of his cat, Catalina, and his wife and proof-reader, Virginia Eliza Clemm.

But the most biographical portrait in the series is Roderick Usher himself. His mother was called Eliza, as was Poe’s, and like Poe he’s an orphan, and very close to his sister. His young wife Juno hints at Poe’s child bride, Virginia Clemm, who was 13 when they married (Poe was 27), and like Poe he has heart problems. Most significantly, Roderick is a poet, or at least he was until a choice he made in 1979 sent his life off in a different direction to that which was, the mysterious Verna explains, his true destiny. Before this, he was an ordinary, honest office worker in the lower echelons of Fortunato, struggling to support a young family. Roderick was married to Annabel Lee, a good and warm-hearted woman to whom he quotes poetry based on their love. (For the purposes of the story, Roderick wrote ‘Annabel Lee’, ‘The Raven’ and ‘Lenore’, all of which are quoted at length alongside ‘Spirits of the Dead’, not Poe.) Like Poe, who lived a life of gentile poverty despite his reputation as a talented author and critic, Young Roderick is poor. How he became the ruthless billionaire businessman forms the heart of his confession, so you’ll have to watch the show to find out. I won’t spoil it. Let’s just say that the moral choices we make, and their consequences are a central theme, just as Flanagan explored through a more spiritual and religious lens in Midnight Mass. As Verna tells Prospero ‘Perry’ Usher:

‘There are always consequences. Take you, for instance. Someone, a long time ago, made a little decision, then another, then a big one, then one of absolutely no importance. And then by and by, you were born. On that day, you were the consequence of a harmless choice made by someone in a moment where you didn’t even exist. And that choice defined your whole life. You are consequence, Perry. And tonight, you are consequential.’

As Roderick says in Poe’s original story, ‘I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results.’ So, Roderick the struggling poet and the two loving kids he has with Annabel Lee are overwritten by Roderick the feared, all-powerful oligarch (apparently immune to prosecution), a useless yes-man of a son, and a lifestyle influencer daughter who’s even more vapid than Gwyneth Paltrow, their goodness, Roderick tells Dupin, ‘killed by the money.’ (Only Lenore is like her virtuous grandmother; she wants to use the money to help people.) As Verna explains, this is all about, ‘Who you are, were, and could have been.’ And as he chose profit and power over love, Roderick’s first marriage collapsed leaving a trail of illegitimate children who are all messed up, narcissistic rich kids that it’s difficult to feel any sympathy for as they meet their grisly ends. As Ben Travers of IndieWire wrote in his review of House of Usher: ‘As the absurdly wealthy destroy our only planet, our innocent pleasures, and our very lives, even a blunt, overextended allegory can deliver visceral satisfactions. Arguing billionaires should not exist has rarely felt so Biblical.’ As the honest, hardworking Dupin walks away from the Usher graves at the end of the final episode, to return to his husband, kids, and grandkids, the moral of the story is plain. This kind of wealth and power corrupts utterly. This kind of money buys an easy life, but not happiness.

Perhaps not. Flanagan doesn’t let us off the hook quite so easily. In one of the philosophical monologues he is fond of giving his characters, Madeline argues that the fault lies not with her class but our own:

‘These people. They want an entire meal for $5 in five minutes then complain when it’s made of shit and plastic. McDonald’s would serve nothing but kale salad all day and all night long if that’s what people f—ing ate. It’s available, no one buys it … And what do we teach them to want? Houses they can’t afford. Cars that poison the air. Single-serve plastics, clothes made by starving children in third world countries, and they want it so bad that they’re begging for it, they’re screaming for it, they’re insisting upon it. And we’re the problem? These f—ing monsters, these f—ing consumers, these f—ing mouths. They point at you and me like we’re the problem. They f—ing invented us. They begged for us, they’re begging for us still. So I say, we stand tall and proud, brother.’

And in this self-justifying tirade, you have to admit that she has a point. As the Dead Kennedys sang, ‘Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death!’ This is the world we live in, and apparently the one we want. As Verna also argues:

‘So much money. One of my favourite things about human beings. Starvation, poverty, disease, you could fix all that, just with money. And you don’t. I mean, if you took just a little bit of time off the vanity voyages, pleasure cruising, billionaire space race, hell, you stopped making movies and TV for one year and you spent that money on what you really need, you could solve it all. With some to spare.’

While, as Ben Travers suggests, Flanagan has fun punishing the billionaires in a blatant modern political allegory, he is also asking us why we allow this destructive inequality to continue? Let’s face it, a lot of folks in democratic countries keep on voting for the billionaires and don’t seem much bothered when the billionaires give up on democracy altogether as Vladimir Putin did in Russia. Donald Trump, for example, has made no secret of his plans to turn the United States of America into a dictatorship and his support among working class voters remains massive. Flanagan even throws in a joke about him doing a deal with Verna: ‘Like I said to one of my clients, when I’m done, you can stand in the middle of 5^th Avenue and shoot somebody, and it won’t cost you a thing.’ (At a campaign rally in Iowa in 2016, Trump had boasted, ‘I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody. And I wouldn’t lose any voters.’) We pay tax so men like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos don’t have too, and we keep on consuming Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. As Madeline seems to suggest, following Joaquin Phoenix’s Trump era Joker, we ‘get what we f—ing deserve!’

For me, then, the most frightening scene in The Fall of the House of Usher has nothing to do with madness, premature burials, vengeful revenants, or homicidal test apes. Instead, it is the scene in which Roderick encapsulates in a single extended metaphor the world we now find ourselves living in. It is worth quoting in full. When Roderick begins a point, ‘When life hands you lemons…’ Dupin automatically replies, ‘You make lemonade.’ That’s the expression, right? ‘No,’ says Roderick, continuing:

‘First, you roll out a multimedia campaign to convince people lemons are incredibly scarce, which only works if you stockpile lemons, control the supply, then a media blitz. Lemon is the only way to say, “I love you,” the must-have accessory for engagements or anniversaries. Roses are out, lemons are in. Billboards that say she won’t have sex with you unless you got lemons. You cut De Beers in on it. Limited edition lemon bracelets, yellow diamonds called “lemon drops”. You get Apple to call their new operating system “OS-Lemón”. A little accent over the “o”. You charge 40 per cent more for organic lemons and 50 per cent more for conflict-free lemons. You pack the Capitol with lemon lobbyists; you get a Kardashian to suck a lemon wedge in a leaked sex tape. Timothée Chalamet wears lemon shoes at Cannes. Get a hashtag campaign. Something isn’t “cool”, “tight”, or “awesome”. No, it’s “lemon”. “Did you see that movie? Did you go to that concert? It was effing lemon.” Billie Eilish, “OMG, hashtag lemon.” You get Dr. Oz to recommend four lemons a day and a lemon suppository supplement to get rid of toxins ’cause there’s nothing scarier than toxins. Then, you patent the seeds. You write a line of genetic code that makes lemons look just a little more like tits and you get a gene patent for the tit-lemon DNA sequence, you get those seeds circulating in the wild, and then you sue the farmers for copyright infringement when that genetic code shows up on their land. Sit back, rake in the millions, and then, when you’re done, and you’ve sold your lempire for a few billion dollars, then, and only then, you make some f—ing lemonade.’

Poe never wrote anything quite as chilling as this, although I suspect the lemon monologue would have appealed to him as an accomplished satirist.

Bruce Greenwood as Roderick Usher in the 2023 production

In Poe’s original story, ‘the quaint and equivocal appellation of the “House of Usher”’ came to include ‘both the family and the family mansion’, while Roderick’s ‘disordered fancy’ ascribed ‘sentience’ to the building itself: ‘The result was discoverable, he added, in that silent, yet importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies of his family, and which made him what I now saw him—what he was.’ The house therefore collapses into its own reflection in the story’s famous concluding image:

…my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder—there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters—and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the ‘House of Usher.’

The ‘House of Usher’ is both the family line and the ‘living’ building itself, its unconscious presence signalled in Poe’s opening paragraph with ‘the vacant eye-like windows’. Its ‘sentience’ is that of ‘vegetable things’, ‘gray stones’, and ‘fungi’, rather than something as straightforward as malevolent consciousness. Like the ‘black and lurid tarn’ it sits by, what’s in there lies beneath the surface. As Roderick understands – though his reason ‘totters upon her throne’ so this could just all be delusion – his ancestors, his sister and himself are all tied to the house and it to them. And just as it sucks the life and colour out of the land around it, it sucks the life and colour out of them. It is ‘The Haunted Palace’. In his seminal essay ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ (1927), H.P. Lovecraft suggested that Roderick, Madeline, and the ancient house all shared ‘a single soul’, meeting ‘one common dissolution at the same moment.’ The House of Usher, then, can be a metaphor for the unconscious, for all those destructive desires and monsters from the id, and in that sense, it stands for all of us, not just Roderick and Madeline. It is not so difficult to take another step back from this position, and to see the world itself in those bleak walls with the ‘barely perceptible fissure’ zigzagging down from the roof (the head, the conscious mind) until ‘it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn’ (the unconscious) that would one day bring the entire house down.

‘A poem,’ says Verna, ‘is a safe place for a difficult truth.’ Morally, politically, and metaphysically, this seems to me the point of Flanagan’s House of Usher. It is, like ‘The Raven’, a stylised narrative poem, as is much of Flanagan’s remarkable screenwriting, and, arguably, everything Poe ever wrote. Flanagan is not Poe, but he clearly loves him and knows his work very well. And like Poe, there’s a ghoulish delight in the mad and macabre that characterises all the truly great gothic writers. Flanagan is also an admirer (and adapter) of Stephen King, and like King he is operating in a literary and cinematic tradition that in many ways starts with Poe in the US, but which also owes much to pulp writers like Lovecraft and Matheson, EC horror comics, The Twilight Zone, and the films of Roger Corman and George A. Romero, to name but a few. Adapting Poe in 2023 is unlikely to be to the tastes of the purists. That said, the original sensibility remains. If you love Poe, you may still love Flanagan’s interpretation, however notionally different to the original source material. If you don’t know Poe’s original stories, then Flanagan’s miniseries isn’t a bad introduction that should inspire you to seek out and read some of the most important and amazing gothic fiction ever written. Flanagan does not allow himself to be constrained by the original texts, but he pays his respects. And in updating Poe, he makes the ‘House of Usher’ into the world as it is today, and as did Poe in 1839, invites us to consider the choices we’ve made that have bought us to this point. Do we want a world built by billionaires or by poets?

Dr Stephen Carver

Main image: Carla Gugino in The Fall of the House of Usher, directed by Mike Flanagan. Credit: Intrepid Pictures / Album / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 2 above: Vincent Price in the 1960 film. Credit: Allstar Picture Library Limited. / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 3 above: Poster for the 2023 Netflix release. Credit: TCD/Prod.DB / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 4 above: An early printed image of Edgar Alan Poe working at his desk with his pet cat Catalina on his shoulder with Virginia Eliza Clemm, (his juvenile cousin, wife and proof reader) in the chair. Credit: Colin Waters / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 5 above: Bruce Greenwood as Roderick Usher 2023. Credit: Photo: Eike Schroter / ©Netflix / Courtesy Everett Collection / Alamy Stock Photo

For more information on Poe’s work, visit the website of The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore

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After all the hype, the interviews, and the extended trailer, I must confess I was expecting more from last night’s pilot episode of Steven Knight’s new adaptation of Great Expectations. This is, after all, ‘The Dickens tale as you’ve never seen it before’ according to Radio Times, the BBC warning us in advance that the show contained ‘Some strong language, some violent scenes, and some scenes viewers might find upsetting.’ I must be getting jaded in my old age, or maybe all those video games have inured me to violence, because so far what I’m seeing here is a pretty straight adaptation of the opening chapters of the original novel, albeit needfully streamlined for the sake of televisual pacing. (Dolge Orlick did not make the cut for example – Pip is Joe Gargery’s sole apprentice.) It is, in fact, exactly the Dickens tale as I’ve seen it, personally, ten times before, though the novel’s been adapted far more often than that. The only difference so far is that Magwitch and Young Pip swore a bit – and Knight had already bought the F-bomb to Dickens in his 2019 version of A Christmas Carol – ­­and that some welcome ethnic diversity has entered the cast. In this, Knight’s serial follows the line taken by Armando Iannucci in his glorious The Personal History of David Copperfield (also 2019), in which all constraints of history and biology were rightly thrown to the four winds, dismantling both Victorian and contemporary racism. Depressingly, I’ve already noticed some internet chatter decrying the casting of Chloe Lee and Shalom Brune-Franklin as Estella on the grounds that Dickens’ character was white, so apparently all other versions of her have to be as well, which misses the point entirely on several levels. Not that these indie reviewers are ‘racist’, they hasten to remind us, but…

I suspect, however, that all this is the calm before the storm, given the look of the official trailer and some US reviews I’ve read which cover more of the series. ‘That’s the reason I’ve decided not to blow your f— brains out right here in this alley’ and ‘I’ll teach you first to be a rat, then a snake, then a vulture, then with blood dripping from your beak I will teach you how to be a gentleman’ are not lines from the original novel, although this tone has yet to surface in Part One, leaving instead a relatively unremarkable first act, aside from the in medias res opening scene in which the adult Pip is shown attempting suicide seven years after the prelude. To quote Olivia Colman’s Miss Havisham, the show at present, like Young Pip, is ‘innocent moments before the great corruption.’

Johnny Harris as Magwitch

This opening episode devotes a lot of time to Magwitch (This Is England ’90’s Johnny Harris) and his nemesis Compeyson (Trystan Gravelle, most recently seen in The Rings of Power); more so than usually shown in previous adaptations, which tend to introduce them running into Pip. Here, the overcrowded, rat-infested interior of the prison hulk Retribution is depicted in dark detail as the well-spoken Compeyson torments the increasingly deranged Magwitch in the next cell before starting a fire and escaping, leaving his enemy to burn to death. Harris plays Magwitch in an animal frenzy, raving and swearing, until he tears his fetters from the deck and uses his body to batter down the cell door. Both men exude violence, and Compeyson later shown as a shadow in fog brandishing an axe recalls Jason Vorhees or Michael Myers. There’s a kind of stylised realism to it, though their final fight in the marsh mud is no different to the same scenes in the previous 2011 BBC adaptation of the story or Mike Newell’s film of 2012. Given that this version is co-produced by Hardy Baker & Son, I’m guessing the original plan was for Tom Hardy to play Magwitch, as he did Bill Sikes in the 2007 BBC Oliver Twist serial. That would have been an amazing piece of casting; so far Johnny Harris not so much, but it’s early days yet. Gravelle, on the other hand, is shaping up to be a strong Compeyson, a character not normally given too much airtime in previous adaptations. With his long hair, posh accent, obvious intellect, and sense of bleak irony, there’s already more emotional depth here than Magwitch, whose redemptive turn when captured feels as if he and Knight are just going through the motions because that’s what must happen in the story, and everyone knows it already so let’s just get on with it. Adding Magwitch’s interactions with Pip to the escape, fight, and capture, these scenes comprise about half the episode, including a bridging scene in which we see Magwitch and Compeyson once more in chains aboard the Retribution staring each other out in silence, still locked in their terminal vendetta.

Tom Sweet makes a good Young Pip, who in this incarnation is haunted by a desire to escape his class destiny from the start, whereas Dickens’ original is triggered by his attraction to Estella. Knight clearly relates, telling the Radio Times that:

Pip is the son of a blacksmith and so am I. He’s trying to escape his background – that rings a bell with me. There’s something personal about the scenes where he’s in the blacksmith’s shop collecting nails. I think things work best when you take a personal experience and find the bigger message.

Trystan Gravelle as Compeyson

Young Pip, who ‘uses words longer than he is’ according to his long-suffering sister, Sarah, is first shown quoting Shakespeare at the forge to ward off boredom, much to the bemusement of the pragmatic Joe Gargery. In common with the novel, Joe is still kind and Sarah is still waspish, though he fears her beatings will drive Pip away so no one will earn for them in his dotage, while there’s a hint of remorse in Sarah when she breaks the switch she’s been using on Pip on Christmas morning. There is a darkness beyond this though, in Joe’s talk of ‘Love’, which he tells Pip is being expressed in these beatings just as it is in the food Sarah serves up. To Joe there’s no difference in these actions, but they give us the image of Pip as an already abused child, just as Knight’s Young Scrooge was abused at boarding school in his version of A Christmas Carol, and as Pip and Estella are abused and manipulated by Magwitch and Miss Havisham.

Pip, meanwhile, reads adventure stories and gazes wistfully at a map of London before he goes to sleep. The nature of his dramatic need is never in doubt. When visiting his parents’ grave, he likens his home to hell and declares, ‘My heart wants freedom’ before Magwitch creeps up on him, wanting the same thing. The prison metaphor is clear. ‘I would remove my shackles and be gone,’ Pip later tells Biddy, before announcing to Joe he has no intention of taking over the forge: ‘Rather than be a blacksmith I’ll be something more resembling a gentleman.’ Miss Havisham’s invitation to ‘play’ with Estella is his way out. ‘It’s a small window,’ remarks Biddy (who clearly loves him), ‘but you’ll crawl through it.’ Biddy apparently later goes on to become a Chartist, the failed forerunners of the British Working-Class Movement, a political group Dickens despised.

And so, then, to Satis House and Miss Havisham, the character for whom we’ve all been waiting. ‘Olivia Colman is mesmerisingly sinister’ proclaims Lucy Mangan in the Guardian this morning, adding that ‘The Oscar winner is so good that the rest of this adaptation from the Peaky Blinders creator feels like filler.’ That seems a bit harsh. Great Expectations looks gorgeous for a start, just as we’ve come to expect from contemporary costume drama. Working class interiors are shadowy, meagre and authentic, while Satis House is both gothic and stark; exteriors turn the marsh into a deadly maze wreathed in ice and fog, snow falling like crematorium ash, and the costume design is superb. There are also some impressive performances. Sweet and Lea more than hold their own as the children; Young Pip undernourished but smart and determined, Young Estella ethereal and proud. Matt Berry was made for Dickens while Hayley Squires owns every scene in which she appears as the brittle and careworn Sarah. Bronte Carmichael has a presence as Young Biddy, and Owen McDonnell’s Joe is a strong anchor for the family. But as Mangan’s review indicates, it is national treasure and Oscar-winner Colman that is the big box office draw here, supposedly bringing a new dimension to this grotesque archetype.

Shalom Brune-Franklin as Estella

Whether she achieves this is thus far difficult to judge based on the five minutes or so we saw of her last night, though there was a hint of true depravity in the line ‘Sometimes I have sick fantasies about what I want…’ Knight is obviously enthusiastic, saying that:

Miss Havisham was written as quite a big role anyway … But when I knew it was Olivia obviously then you go back and start to enjoy yourself because you can start adding a bit more of what Olivia brings. She’s just so powerful on the screen. There’s a couple of things we changed once we knew she would be in the role – a couple of what you’d call saucy lines where you know she’s going to pull it off in a way that it’s going to be just right. And she does.

Other reviewers who have clearly seen more than I have also refer to her opium smoking and ‘BDSM’ (bondage, discipline, sadism, masochism) so I guess we’re in for a wild ride. In the pilot, however, she feels quite restrained, her look somewhere between a Hammer film and a Japanese ghost story, and not as yet so very different to all those other Miss Havishams that Colman has said she has never seen, aside from a vague childhood memory of the 1946 David Lean film, in which Miss Havisham was memorably played by Martita Hunt, arguably setting the standard by which all others must be judged. In a recent interview, Colman makes a good point about such iconic Dickensian characters having a similar presence to the Shakespearian, inasmuch as they can and will be played and reinterpreted endlessly:

And then I realised that in art world, loads of people have played Richard III. It’s okay. Actors do that. And then I saw Steven’s take on it, I read the scripts – in general I never say yes before I’ve read the script. And I loved it. Everything in Steven’s hands is just heightened and made better.

This was after her initial reaction to turn the part down because ‘a couple of my good mates had played it [presumably Gillian Anderson in 2011 and Helena Bonham Carter, 2012] and I thought “Oh no”.’ One must also respect an actor avoiding the influence of previous interpretations, but so far I can’t help feeling that by not watching old versions to remain unique, Colman’s Havisham has become a cliché by default. We’ll just have to wait and see how those ‘saucy lines’ play out as the serial develops, because I suspect that Part One is the only episode that’s going to follow the original novel so closely. And this, really, is what is required to freshen up the story anyway, given the very long list of previous screen adaptations. As he did with A Christmas Carol – love it or loathe it – the best thing Knight can do is to reimagine the whole novel, drawing out connections to modern life to make it new and keep it relevant. Otherwise, what’s the point? For Knight, this means an uncompromising critique of the English class system.

Based on Knight’s previous form as a screenwriter, by doing just this, as some reviewers have already remarked – James Hibbs of the RT for example, and John Mullan of the Guardian – the story runs the risk of becoming excessively grim and joyless. For Robert Lloyd, TV critic of the LA Times, meanwhile, the series is a ‘gloomy, violent slog.’ Some might say this is what happened with A Christmas Carol. As Mullan notes, even in his darkest social commentary, Dickens knew to keep his audience engaged by lightening the mood. This is what Mr. Wemmick’s ‘Aged P’ and Mr Wopsle’s acting ambitions are all about. There is none of this so far in Knight’s version. Like Satis House, as Estella tells Pip, ‘Ghosts would be afraid to come here.’

For now, though, we must see what happens. At present, I’d say that the direction of the narrative is as yet unclear, though fans of Knight’s other TV dramas – Peaky Blinders, obviously, also Taboo and SAS: Rogue Heroes – will have a pretty shrewd idea. Perhaps, as in this first episode, the story will continue to run on Dickensian rails, with actions ordained by the original novel rather than necessarily through character development, or perhaps familiar characters will be radically rewritten. Somewhere between these two poles lies, I suspect, the best way to adapt Dickens to the 21^st century. As Mark Kermode said of Iannucci’s David Copperfield, the art of the remake is to ‘both respect and reinvent the novel from which it takes its lead.’ If Knight and his team have achieved this, then we are in for a treat, though judging from Part One I cannot with hand on heart say for sure that I am yet committed or convinced. As Estella says in the original novel, ‘I must be taken as I have been made. The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me…’

Finally, though, like many other critics I find myself wondering how many film and TV versions of Great Expectations we need? How about doing a different Dickens novel instead? The last time the BBC serialised The Pickwick Papers, for instance, was 1985, two years after Dombey and Son. Aside from a relatively recent Radio 4 version, A Tale of Two Cities goes back even further, the last BBC serial broadcast in 1980. Barnaby Rudge, meanwhile, has not been serialised on TV since 1960. Surely Hard Times would make a powerful allegory of Brexit Britain, and the last BBC version of that was in 1994, the same year they had a go at Martin Chuzzlewit. Our Mutual Friend is wonderfully bleak and gloomy and has not been filmed by the BBC since 1998. The last BBC Nicholas Nickleby was in 2012, but that was modern dress. The excellent BBC adaptations of Bleak House, Oliver Twist, and Little Dorrit date back to the early-2000s now, as do the ITV versions of Nickleby and The Old Curiosity Shop. As for Dickens’ other Christmas stories, the ones that weren’t A Christmas Carol – the most filmed novel in history – they don’t get a look-in at all, apart from the odd radio play, animation, or community theatre production. Then there are all those other wonderful 19^th century British serial novelists, whose work never gets filmed at all, like Pierce Egan (Life in London), Edward Bulwer Lytton (Paul Clifford), G.W.M. Reynolds (The Mysteries of London), William Harrison Ainsworth (Jack Sheppard), J.S. Le Fanu (Uncle Silas), Louise De La Ramée (Under Two Flags), Ellen Wood (East Lynn), and Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Lady Audley’s Secret). At this point, even wheeling out something by Thackeray, the Brontës, Mrs. Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, or George Eliot would make a nice change.

The counter argument, of course, is that stories like Great Expectations are part of the national consciousness and, as Colman implies in her comment about Richard III, they can be remade and reinterpreted ad infinitum. This is a fair point, but granting some texts such monolithic status necessarily pushes out others that might have been almost if not equally worthy if only readers and viewers were granted easier access. For me, it’s rather like letting your Spotify algorithms suggests new music based on your current listening trends. Don’t you think that takes all the fun out of it – the thrill of the hunt, the unexpected treasure? As Stuart Heritage wrote in the Guardian in 2020 when Knight’s version of Great Expectations was originally announced, ‘If you don’t like this adaptation, then another one will be along in a couple of years.’

All images from (C)BBC/ FX/ Hulu new series: Great Expectations (2023) Supplied by LMKMEDIA. Landmark Media is not the copyright owner of these Film or TV stills but provides a service only for recognised Media outlets. pictures@lmkmedia.com Contributor: LANDMARK MEDIA / Alamy Stock Photo

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