"The Haunted Hotel" by Wilkie Collins

British author Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) is best known for his two mystery novels The Moonstone and The Woman in White. He’s also known as a friend of Charles Dickens; the two met in 1850, and Dickens not only published several of Collins’s stories in his magazines, he also collaborated with Collins on both fiction and drama projects. 

In 1878, Collins published a strange story (which may be redundant; most of his stories were strange) entitled The Haunted Hotel: A Tale of Modern Venice. The novel is set in England, Ireland, and Italy, and it certainly has the stamp of Collins, being a mystery with supernatural or ghostly overtones.

 

An English aristocrat, Lord Montbarry, has surprised his family and friends by breaking off his engagement with a cousin, Agnes Lockwood, to marry a foreign countess. The new Lady Montbarry is completely unacceptable to the family; she and her brother, a supposed baron, seem more like goldiggers. When they learn that the lord’s wealth is all tied to entailed holdings (which means they can’t own and sell anything; the property remains with whomever holds the title), they induce the lord to take out a life insurance policy.

 

While on their extended honeymoon, the newlyweds rent a palace in Venice. The bride’s brother joins them. And it is not long before the lord succumbs to what is diagnosed as bronchitis. An investigation is launched by the insurance company, but all seems aboveboard.

 

Wilkie Collins

Except, of course, it’s not. The widow is becoming haunted by what has happened; the story beings with her consulting a renowned physician in London, trying to determine f she’s going mad. She has become convinced that the jilted fiancée, who by all accounts is a young woman of sterling reputation, will be the instrument of the widow’s own death. 

 

Collins mixes mystery and a ghost story together. He adds the deceased lord’s missing manservant, and a mysterious payment made to the manservant’s wife, swirling the plot into an even more mysterious direction. We know what likely happened – Lord Montbarry was likely murdered. But we don’t know what happened, and how the perpetrators managed to pull it off.

 

The Haunted Hotel is a classic Wilkie Collins novel, with a mix of mystery, murder, and the supernatural. Originally published in 1878, it has the charmingly formal language of the Victorian age coupled with a tale of the supernatural. The ghosts of those who die before their time don’t rest easy. 

"Dominion" by Peter Ackroyd

You might want to call this “everything you wanted to know about British parliamentary history in the 19^thcentury, and then some.”

British author Peter Ackroyd is beginning to approach the end of his multi-volume history of England. Each of the first four volumes has a one-word title (followed by a long subtitle): Foundation, Tudors, Rebellion, and Revolution. The single words of the titles serve as both descriptions of the content and summary themes. 

The fifth and most recent is Dominion: The History of England from the Battle of Waterloo to Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. It covers most of 19^thcentury British history. If there is a primary focus to the volume, it is the push and pull and British politics and parliamentary changes that occurred during the century. 

We follow, in detail, the rise and fall and occasional resurrection of all of the prime ministers and the governments. We see the considerable amount of political activism that occurred during the period, like the Chartist movement that sought, among other things, universal male suffrage. We read about the political protests, often fueled by the industrial and technological changes, that sometimes ended in bloodshed. Dominionalso includes succinct accounts of the significant wars Britain experienced during the Victorian period – the Crimean War, the rebellion in India, and the Boer War.

Ackroyd writes with a comprehensive view and a rather sparkling (and witty) style. A history like this one and its cohorts is not an easy thing to write; in a sense, the author has to hold together all of the information being covered even as he’s writing about a specific event or month or year. 

But Dominion is different from its predecessors. The difference is both significant and surprising, and it lies in what is not included. The previous volumes have covered literary and cultural history, in addition to political, technological, and military events. Dominion has a few scattered quotes from Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackery, George Eliot, and a few other literary figures, but that’s all that’s included. To get two-and-a-half pages on a music hall performer and essentially ignore what Victorian England produced in literature is not a minor omission. The previous volumes included literary history.

Peter Ackroyd

So what you will not find in Dominion, except for the occasional quotation, is Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, the Brontes, and others. Dickens fares slightly better than the rest, but only slightly. Even popular culture is shorted, with a single reference to Gilbert and Sullivan and none at all to Arthur Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes stories.

The author is one of Britain’s most prolific popular historians. In addition to his history of England series, he’s also written biographies of Charles Dickens and the artist J.M.W. Turner, among several others; a history of London (and a history of London beneath the streets); and many other works. 

Dominion stands as an in-depth and lively summary of 19^thBritish political history. In that regard, it is comprehensive and well-written. But it is disappointing that Ackroyd didn’t turn his keen eye to the literature of the period as well.

Related:

My review of Revolution by Peter Ackroyd.

My review of Rebellion by Peter Ackroyd.

My review of Peter Ackroyd’s Foundation.

My review of Peter Ackroyd’s Tudors.

Reading Peter Ackroyd.

A Revolt over a Prayer Book.

Top illustration: Queen Victoria, who gave her name to the period.

“Bedford Park” by Bryan Appleyard

Bedford Park in west London was the world’s first garden suburb. A planned community, its residents included poet William Butler Yeats, the painter Camille Pissarro, and many other actors, writers and artists.

Bedford Park is also the title of a 2013 novel by Bryan Appleyard, set mostly in the garden suburb. It is largely the story of Calhoun Kitt, a wealthy Chicagoan who leaves America and settles in London. Kitt tells the story of Bedford Park and its residents, and the larger story of London. And that story involves a rather gruesome murder, artistic people who seem to float from salon to fete and back to salon, and Kitt’s own inability to create a life for himself, instead simply responding to what s most forceful at the moment.

The cast of characters include both fictitious and actual people. Kitt is an invention, his name taken from a story by G. K. Chesterton. But Yeats and his muse Maud Gonne, Ezra Pound, Oscar Wilde, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, and the notorious Frank Harris were all very real people.

Kitt, the narrator and central figure of the story, wears dove gray suits at a time when men of fashion wear black. The color is symbolic – neither black nor white – and it captures Kitt’s general indecisiveness in matters of work and career, love, and even his friends. When a local Bedford Park resident, Brian Binks, is murdered and his body left on the area’s Acton Green, Kitt looks into it, but not too strenuously. Life for these favored people continues as if uninterrupted. Kitt will learn the identity of the murderer years later.

The Bedford Park residents enjoy their get-togethers and their planned activities. They dapple in spiritualism, popular at the time. They live very sheltered, very privileged lives, and very little is allowed to interfere with that privilege.

Bedford Park is a story of the late Victorian and Edwardian period, and yet it could be the story of any privileged group living at any time. I had the odd sense throughout reading the novel that I could easily be reading about an artistically-inclined group in contemporary New York, Los Angeles, or even Washington, D.C.

Brian Appleyard

Author Bryan Appleyard was graduated from Cambridge University with a degree in English. From 1976 to 1984, he served as financial news editor and deputy arts editor at The Times of London. Since then, he’s been a freelance writer, author, and journalist, and been named Feature Writer of the Year three times and Interviewer of the Year at the British Press Awards.

He is currently a writer, commentator, reviewer, and columnist for The Sunday Times, and also writes for the New Statesman and Vanity Fair. He’s also written for many other publications, including The New York Times, The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph, and The Times Literary Review, among others. Appleyard is also the author of The Brain is Wider than the Sky: Why Simple Solutions Don’t Work in a Complex World (2012).

Bedford Park is well written, and an interesting take on well-known literary and artistic people. But what the reader is left with is the emptiness of the lives of people who enjoy their renown and privileges, fully believing they deserve them.

Top illustration: Bedford Park in London in the late 19^th century.

A Week of Dickens: “Dickens’s Victorian London”

No city is more associated with the word of Charles Dickens than London.

He lived there most of his life; he worked there; he used London as the setting or a main setting for most of his novels (including for A Tale of Two Cities). He referred to London as his “magic lantern,” a reference to a projector of images that became popular in the 19^th century.

In 2012, for the bicentenary of Dickens’s birth, the Museum of London published an extensively illustrated book, Dickens’s Victorian London 1839 – 1901, by Alex Werner and Tony Williams.  The book accompanied the museum’s exhibition of “Dickens and London” – and it was the largest exhibition the museum had undertaken up to that time.

The exhibition closed, of course, after its scheduled run. But the book has lasted.

Werner and Williams assembled hundreds of photographs, drawings, and other illustrations. They could draw upon a wealth of information – the Victorian Age, and the life of Dickens, coincided with the birth and widespread popularity of photography. In the late 1870s, recognizing that so much of old London was fast disappearing as the city continued to rebuild itself, a special effort was made to photograph as many vanishing landmarks as possible, and the authors draw upon that treasure trove as well.

A few coaching inns remained, and photographs of those are included. They provide a physically concrete idea of what Dickens utilized for books such The Pickwick Papers. Landmarks of old and new London include St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Temple Bar, Lincoln Inn Fields, old houses, Devil’s Acre (the slum that existed near Westminster Abbey), Parliament, the Royal Exchange, and other structures and areas associated the Dickens’s books.

Alex Werner

The book contains a section on slums – few authors wrote as extensively as Dickens did about London’s slums. Also included are markets and street life, including Covent Garden; the docks and the River Thames; industry, which show how closely workers lived to the industrial places they worked; the construction of the railways and the great stations (in one photograph, Paddington Station in the 19^th century looks almost exactly like the same scene in the 21^st century; home life and studio photograph portraits; and the suburbs.

Tony Williams

Werner is the head of History Collections at the Museum of London, and has curated several exhibitions, including “Dickens and London.” He’s also the author of Dockland Life (2000); Journeys through Victorian London (2001); Jack the Ripper and the East End (2008); and Sherlock Holmes: The Man Who Never Lived and Will Never Die (2014). Williams is the associate editor of the Dickensian and an Honorary Fellow at the University of Buckingham. He’s also involved in the Dickens Journals Online project.

To read the text and pore over the photographs and illustrations of Dickens’s Victorian London is to immerse oneself in the scenes and settings of so many novels and stories by Dickens. The book is a delight.

A Week of Dickens: I’ve devoted the posts this week, for no ostensible reason other than I admire his novels, to a discussion of the life, works, and resources for Charles Dickens. Tomorrow will conclude the series with a listing of some of the resources available on the subject of his life, writings, novels, and the London he knew.

Top illustration: London Bridge in Dickens’s time.