Armadale (Collins, 1866)

Collins, Wilkie. Armadale. Pub. 1866. Ed. John Sutherland. London: Penguin, 1995. Print.

• Serialized in Cornhill Magazine 11/1864-6/1866; pub in 2 vol form, presumably by Smith Elder, in May 1866
• Good for: 169, 200, 302 Sensation novel modifying realist/domestic elements (inc. domesticity and characterization) possibly due to publication location (expectations set by Framley Parsonage (Anthony Trollope, 1861)) AND Lydia interrogating it 432; documents as link between individual and state-interpretable identity in Armadales and Lydia Gwilt; 183 example of bourgeois library; 312 Victorian modernity; 350 narrative time is structured by post time (again Framley); the post is also the engine of theme of espionage, as trains are the engine of Lady Audley's Secret (ME Braddon, 1862); LG as self-conscious "novelist" with a lot to say about 1860s fiction (and periodicals with Midwinter as correspondent 438)

Reading Notes

• Allan's dream (vision?): Allan falls asleep and dreams of a drowning man, followed by three other visions: the shadow of a woman by a pool at sunset; the shadow of a man with a broken statue; and a man and woman passing him a glass, after which he faints.
• 155-169 "Lurking Mischief" chapter uses the technology of the penny post (from 1839 according to sutherland) to keep the plotting between Lydia and Mrs Oldershaw moving fast
• 169-70 description of Thorpe-Ambrose as specifically unromantic and not at all gothic (modern, in fact) - AA thinks it will calm Midwinter's nerves
• 169 he mentions midwinter writing to Brock - the narrative interplay between fragments (letters) and diegesis
• 178 Maj Milroy talks about the risks of advertising for a governess -- the other end of the problem of Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847) advertising
• 183 the respectable middle class library: Waverley (Scott, 1814), Maria Edgeworth, Felicia Hemans
• 190 the town's sniffiness about Armadale's arrival is at least in part one between time scheme's: Allen's busy penny post modernity vs the formal slowness of town life welcoming the squire as of old
• 200-1 Allen exposes a nice vein of country petit bourgeois snobbery
• 206-8 Letters between the Milroys indicating that Lydia is inbound as governess and from Brock spying on Gwilt and Oldershaw
• fill in
• 235 Bashwood's son is Oldershaw's private investigator
• 239 midwinter's pocketbook of papers a textual model of the narrative
• fill in
• 284-5 "I have been proved not to be myself"
  • then Lydia's caustic anti-bourgeois description of Allan and Eleanor, but also playing the role of dutiful daughter better than the latter
• 302-3 Midwinter's indecision about leaving a good example of collins' focus on characterization here -- we get much less interiority in Marian Halcombe
• 305 Allan thinks he's seeing the fulfillment of the second part of the vision as Midwinter departs
• 312 "the age we live in is an age which finds no human creature inexcusable" (abt Mrs milroy) -- unclear if this form of Victorian modernity is more or less sympathetic
• 318 an actual scene of an envelope being steamed open as Mrs milroy arms herself to take down Lydia
• 331 "I am a great sufferer" -- Mrs milroy quite a different type of invalid than Frederick Fairlie in Woman in White, more cunning, "unscrupulous ingenuity"
• 333 interesting form -- Allan talking to himself while writing a letter, the writing in parentheses
• 345 it would appear that the house where Lydia's reference was sent from is a brothel
• 348 Pedgift suggests going to the Great exhibition with Allan (and talks about dabbling in Latin "from a crib" book)
• 350 "the interval day passed": narrative time is structured by post time
  • interesting to think of the vision of the intervening period being filled by the fantasia of a letter traveling in Framley Parsonage (Anthony Trollope, 1861)
• 378 seeing Lydia through Bashwood's eyes, an irresistible "mixture of the voluptuous and the modest"
  • formal and informal espionage -- Pedgift's man watching Lydia, Bashwood watching Allan
• 383 Midwinter observing her "sexual sorcery" (!)
• 385 Lydia's bald manipulation of Midwinter, the contrast between talk and thought -- compare to Lady Audley's relative decency -- no wonder reviewed found it scandalous
• 398-9 the second vision comes true as Lydia comes between Allan and Midwinter
• 410 Oldershaw quotes Midsummer Night's dream incorrectly in a letter to Lydia
• Ch X - Lydia Gwilt's diary - seems to be the dark heart of the novel (424-53)
• 424 Midwinter has revealed his identity to Lydia, and here she processed it in her diary
• 430 Lydia believes Allan has permanently rejected her
• 432 LG has a nice little swipe at "the nauseous domestic sentimentalists of the day" like Trollope or Gaskell
• 435 LG quite acidly satirical of high toned old Christian women visiting her and talking about her relationship with Allan
• 438 Midwinter has prospect of being a correspondent for a new newspaper in London, one of the many founded in the 1850s after the Taxes on Knowledge were repealed -- cf Altick 1952
• 441 LG realizes she could marry Midwinter and still be Mrs Allan Armadale (she notices her writing goes strange when she does)
• 442 she wonders what Lady Macbeth would have done in her situation
• 445 her final plot falls into place: she will marry Midwinter and kill AA so she might be then the widow of Allan Armadale
• 453 interesting fragmentation within the fragmented letter/diary structure: to conclude the chapter (part?) she returns to the end of the letter that she was concluding on 423 in order to tell off Mrs Oldershaw
• 454-5 Neelie is nervous about eloping with allan based on the plot of a novel she read -- he returns to pore over Blackstone's Commentaries with her
  • nice little statement about fatality and narrative method then - "the widely discordant elements of the grotesque and the terrible were forced together by that subtle law of contrast which is one of the laws of mortal life" when AA and Neelie are looking over Blacstone even as Lydia's letter accepting marriage to a Midwinter reaches him
  • Neelie makes a pro-con table to help them understand Blacstone on marriage law
• 458 Sarah Waters' Fingersmith uses the same banns and residency in parish law as a part of its central secret marriage plot (tho this plot seems not to turn on that entirely)
• 462 Lydia congratulates herself that she wrote a letter to the Major warning him about Neelie planning to elope as "if I had been a professed novelist" writing in the register of a servant
• 482 Bashwood writes to his son the PI to help him investigate Lydia's past -- on 484 the son reveals Mrs Oldershaw's name to the Thorpe-Ambrose cluster of characters (I think) for the first time
• 489 again as on 462 Lydia is self-consciously a novelist: "I must rouse my invention, and make up my little domestic romance" (and still making fun of Trollope)
  • 491 "There was nothing new in what I told him [Midwinter, of her invented past]: it was the commonplace rubbish of the circulating libraries"
    • a nice little swat at moralizing critics, intentionally validating their suspicions about women reading novels, with the extra turn that Mudie's especially prided itself as an arbiter of good morality and taste -- here used to deceive someone into marrying under false pretenses
• 496 Lydia observes the "connection between virtue and vice" in the major setting the stage with Allan/Eleanor perfectly to her own purposes
• 512 Brock chides Midwinter about his "paralyzingly fatalism" in his last letter
  • 514 though here Brock's portent that Midwinter will finally save Armadale makes Lydia fatalistic
• 515 Bashwood's laughably bright clothes is reminiscent of Nalcolio in Twelfth night -- overall the tone is reminiscent of the tragicomedies and "problem" plays more than the lighter comedy or full on tragedy Collins cites
• 516 Collins' special bile for private detectives like James Bashwood, perhaps related to his colleagues' investigations into his own and Dickens's lives
• 520 James Bashwood starts detailing his investigation of Lydia's past
  • 521 orphaned Lydia's having an allowance for her care recalls Estella in Great Expectations (Dickens, 1861)
• 530 influence of "young Buccaneers of Literature" writing in newspapers in getting the Home Secretary to pardon Lydia (aka Mrs Waldron)
• 538-9 proof that Lydia has married Midwinter in his real name of Armadale
• 546 LG pitches the theme of fatalism/determinism in a different register when contemplating how the "plague spots of past wickedness on my heart" have (she perceives) cast a pall over her marriage to Midwinter
• 547 she contemplated how the wives of authors "have been for the most part unhappy women" -- the distance between them she describes is reminiscent of Casaubon and Dorothea in Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872)
• 548-9 equivocating about whether to carry out her plan against AA
  • "My diary is so nicely bound -- it would be positive barbarity to tear out a leaf"
• 578 once in London LG gets her landlord to get her back numbers of The Times to try to track news of AA's untimely death
  • ff newspaper clipping of the yacht sinking
• 582 the marriage record and the way this informational genre facilitates the blurring between individuals and LG's plan (except Midwinter's signature in the registry)
  • 591 the doctor says how easily marriage registries are forged -- she needn't have married an actual Allan Armadale at all
• 585 Dr Downward identity changes to sanitarium running Dr Le Doux in Hampstead (reminiscent of Woman in White (Collins, 1861))
  • "sober and drab covers" binding the doctor's books at the sanitarium (587)
• 588 and Sutherland's scary note about sanitarium practices and quack doctors, as well as Collins' debt to Reade's crusading Hard Cash
• 600 letter to Bashwood from a very much alive Armadale
• 608ff LG and Downward plot to imprison AA at the sanitarium by telling him and Millroy is there on his return to England
• 611 odd ending to her diary: "having nothing else to be fond of, I half suspect myself of having been unreasonably fond of you. What a fool I am!"
• 627 LG denies she's married to Midwinter when he confronts her
• 635 visiting hours at the Sanitarium -- Collins goes on a little tirade about how middle-class women's lives are so limited that this is a form of entertainment
• 636-7 nice little jab at domestic fiction, here the kind of books Downward stocks in the sanitarium for their soporific qualities: "occasionally to make us laugh; and invariably to make us comfortable"
• 661ff he cranks up pace in the final scene by making reference to time intervals in minutes (increasing rhythm of the more regular time intervals of Milroy's clock, then of the railroad timetable, now moments in perception)
• 675 Pedgift Sr paraphrases Midsummer in recounting Mother Oldershaw's conversion to a sermon speaker - "lord, what fools we [these] mortals be!"
• 677 in the end Midwinter spares Allan the revelation of his real name, invoking Brock and to keep his mother's memory sacred
• 678 Appendix interesting because of the serendipity of a newspaper acct of sailors dying of inhaling carbon monoxide on a ship called Armadale, and for a profession of Collins' research on technical matters (spurred by Reade?)

Hensley Article

Hensley, Nathan K. Armadale and the Logic of Liberalism. Victorian Studies 51:4 (Summer 2009), 607-632. Web.

• 608 ...Critics who have focused on Armadale's apparent preference for plot over character fail to notice that its plot is about character - how it can be falsified, how names do or don't match it, how one individual (in disguise) might inhabit several of them in sequence.
• importance of character to liberal political systems
• 619 ...where Mill believed that the historical stage of liberty would put an end to bloodshed, Armadale reveals that violence does not go away.
  • idea of "monetary modernity" arising [in Lyn Pykett's words] "from the traffic in paper currency, from the manipulation of documents in a bureaucratic culture, and the control, misrepresentation, and misuse of information."
• 620 ...Collins was fascinated with defending difference, valorizing the idiosyncratic or marginal over the "typical" in ways that self-consciously reverse what Alex Woloch has called the modern novel's "distribution of attention" away from minor characters. The formal conceit of Armadale's main action highlights this antagonism between major and minor, figure and ground, as two heroes share the same name and compete, in structural terms, for status as referent for the novel's title. But Collins's preference for marginal figures is clear in Armadale's treatment of these two potential heroes [Allan and Neelie's banality vs Midwinter, and Lydia's "unabstracted particularity"]
• 622 [discussing the description of the Isle of Man setting for the shipwreck scene] What these scenes show is that Armadale endows the peripheries of England's global network of exchange with a positively charged particularity, while the stock scenes of domestic fiction are represented as just that.
• 623-4 Gwilt's admission [on 489] frames this novel's distinction between interchangable literary cliches and vividly particular fiction. Via this oddly sympathetic anti-hero, Collins's autoreferential gesture suggests that unlike Milroy's clockwork plot or Gwilt's twice-told tale, a specific narrative will have an identity -- distinguishing marks that make it singular -- while "commonplace" fiction can be reduced to a list of stock plot devices. That Collins's own novel earned him an unprecedented sum, appeared serially in the respectable Cornhill, and circulated in those same circulating libraries [tho not v successfully] are among this passage's distinct ironies. Armadale's internally conflicted critique psoits a particularizing literary practice as the realm of the incommensurable.
• 625 nice point about slave trade money being laundered through "countryside manors like Thorpe-Ambrose"
• 627 In contrast to Mill's paean to the powers of trade, then, Collins's novel charts the persistence of violence from an apparently outdated era of slave accumulation into a newer one, in its novelistic present; it attends to the historical development of a "contractual" modernity in which violence changes forms but does not go away.
• Interesting Benjaminian methodological bit:

I have argued for the specificity of Collins’s efforts in this direction, but my own account has performed a series of abstracting moves. I’ve read Mill’s diverse works as a class; elaborated a functional homology between mill and marx; and linked one Collins novel (but not all) to that newly created set of texts I’ve treated as “reform-era logics of exchange.” If my own analytic gestures have taken the shape of a performative contradiction, I conclude with a suggestion of why and how, calling on another critic, Walter Benjamin, who along with Adorno may be the most searching diagnostician of how modern conditions of exchange impinge upon method. In the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” to his doctoral dissertation, translated as The Origin of German Tragic drama (1924–25), Benjamin imagines a method by which the singular instance of historical information—the fragment, the letter, the episode—can stand as an emblem or allegorical representation of a larger whole without becoming the “example” of its “type.” Properly constellated, such singular objects might evoke “abstract” historical narratives—and true ones—without becoming subsumed under the categories they are called upon to represent. The goal of such a non-abstracting historicism, Benjamin writes in the later Arcades Project, is “to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event” (461). refusing any Millite claim to seamless induction, highlighting the misfit between the singular instance and its cate- gory, Benjamin’s allegorical method argues against “successfully” performing the move from particular to general, even as it continually insists upon enacting that very oscillation. This allows for particulars to remain particulars, unconverted into higher-order, exchangeable intellectual objects. “Let me think,” Lydia Gwilt con des to her diary. “What haunts me, to begin with? The Names haunt me!” (424, emphasis original). She is talking about the profusion of Allan Armadales, but her comment has methodological resonance. To be haunted by names, to be obsessed with the lost or marginal singularities denoted by them while remaining attuned to larger categorical claims: this is the challenge Benjamin’s method proposes and that Armadale invites us to consider.