I had my own problems, which included the terrible rheumatical gout and its accompanying pain, fainting spells, aching joints, a growing obesity which left me disgusted with myself even as I failed to reduce the size of the meals I enjoyed, flatulence, cramps, an assortment of other digestive disorders, and terrible palpitations of the heart. No one seemed aware of Dickens’s physical disorders, but all the world seemed to know of mine. A Frenchman wrote me through my publisher to say that “he had betted ten bottles of champagne that I am alive, against everyone’s belief,” and if I were still breathing, he begged me to inform him of the fact.
I wrote to my mother that autumn—
Here is “forty” come upon me [I was, in truth, forty-one that previous January]—grey hairs shrinking fast… rheumatism and gout familiar enemies for some time past, my own horrid corpulence making me fat and unwieldy—all the worst signs of middle age sprouting out on me.
And yet, I confided to her, I didn’t feel old. I had no regular habits, no respectable prejudices.
Dear Reader, I have not yet told you anything about the most important woman in my life.
My mother, Harriet Geddes Collins, had met my father, the artist William Collins, when they were both in their mid-twenties. My mother was also descended from a long line of artists; she and both her sisters drew constantly and one of my mother’s sisters had entered the school of the Royal Academy in London. Harriet Geddes and my father had first crossed paths at a ball given by some artist acquaintances of my father’s for their girlfriends, subsequently seen each other several times in the London of their day, confirmed in 1821 that neither had cultivated other attachments, and were married in Edinburgh in 1822. I was born a little less than eighteen months later, on 8 January, 1824. My brother, Charles, was born in January of 1828.
One of my father’s friends was the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and I clearly remember the day when I was a young boy and the poet came to our home, found my father gone, and stayed to weep to my mother about his increasing dependence upon opium. It was the first time I had seen or heard a fully grown man weep—Coleridge was sobbing so hard he could not catch his breath—and I shall never forget my mother’s words to him that day: “Mr Coleridge, do not cry; if the opium really does you any good, and you must have it, why do you not go out and get it?”
Many has been the time in recent years, as I wept my own bitter tears because of my growing need for the drug, that I have called back my mother’s voice on the subject.
My father had come home just after this advice was given to Coleridge, and I remember the poet’s cracked voice as he said, “Collins, your wife is an exceedingly sensible woman!”
My mother was a sensible woman, but my father was a great artist and a great man. I was given my Christian middle name—Wilkie— due to his relationship with the honourable Sir David Wilkie, an old friend of my father’s from their school days, who lifted me up shortly after my birth, looked into my eyes, and pronounced, “He sees.” (This seemed to have laid the mantle of succession, in artistic terms, from my father’s shoulders to mine, but—as we shall see—that was not to be. My younger brother, Charley, was to inherit the stronger artistic ability and to be chosen for that role.)
My father was a great man with great men as friends. When I was growing up—a wide-eyed, rather gentle, bulbous-foreheaded child—I took it for granted that the Wordsworths, Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Sir Walter Scott would be familiar acquaintances of our family and visitors to our home. My father had not only received commissions from, but had spent much time with, such estimables as Sir Francis Chantrey, the Duke of Newcastle, Sir Robert Peel, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Sir Thomas Heathcote, Sir Thomas Baring, Sir George Beaumont, and Lord Liverpool.
Of course, it is true that the vast majority of my father’s time spent with greatness was spent out of the sight of our mother. I am sure that my father was not ashamed of my mother, nor certainly of Charles or me, but he did prefer to spend his time amongst great men far from our hearth. But he wrote home faithfully and, often after listing the exciting events and personal encounters of his days and weeks away, might add such a codicil as this I found when arranging my mother’s papers recently—
I cannot help longing for home, although I am so pleasantly spending my time, as pleasantly as the kindest friends, sprightly young ladies, and all the gaieties of this life can make me. I flatter myself that the idle life I am leading will please you, and perhaps make me stronger and therefore, I am determined to make the most of it.
He did make the most of it, I believe, although, despite the many commissions by such famous men, his income was rarely solid or consistent. But my mother lived frugally and made sure that Charley and I did as well, so money was set aside.
My father was an extremely religious man. He had long since vowed to banish inclinations to indolence or impiety from his own life and would brook none in the lives of his wife or children. Some called him censorious, even priggish, but this was unfair. In another letter to my mother, sent from some Scottish castle when Charley and I were in short pants, my father wrote—
Tell the dear children that the only way they can serve their parents is to obey them in all things; let Charley find out the passages in the Scripture where this duty is most strongly insisted on, and write them down for me.
And in a separate letter to my brother and me, one still in my possession and reread frequently, William Collins showed the true spirit of his religious intensity—
Your mother’s account, in her last letter about you both, pleased me very much. Go on praying to God, through Jesus Christ, to enable you, by his Holy Spirit, to be blessings to your parents; and then you must be happy.
True to his beliefs, my father became known for his denunciations. His tolerance for tolerance was very low. Once when our close neighbour, the artist John Linnell (who had painted several of our portraits), was seen working on Sunday—nailing his peach and nectarine trees to his northern wall—my father not only upbraided Linnell but denounced him to a visiting Congregational preacher. Father also believed and spread the rumour that Linnell had cheated one of his gardeners out of his wages, and when Linnell challenged him on the fact, Father cried, “Of what consequence is it, whether you cheated a man out of his wages or not, when you are constantly doing things ten times worse?”
The things-ten-times-worse included working on Sunday and becoming a Dissenter.
I was with my father when we met the poet William Blake in the Strand, and when Blake—an acquaintance—hailed my father and offered his hand, my father deliberately ignored him, turning his back on the poet and leading me away before I could speak. Blake, you see, was carrying a pot of porter in the hand he was not offering in friendship.
Later, when I was in my early twenties and writing my father’s memoirs after his death, I realised how jealous of him many of the so-called great artists of the period were. John Constable, for instance, an acquaintance of many years, was receiving only a few hundred pounds for his cloudy, obscure paintings during years that my father earned over £1,000 a year on commissions for what Constable sneered at as “pretty landscapes” and “flat, soulless, fashionable portraits.” When Constable could find no patrons at all (due, largely, to his persisting in painting such unpopular works as his Corn-Field at the same time that my father had his finger on the pulse of patrons’ and the Academy’s desires for more decorative works), the frustrated landscape painter wrote the following in a letter that was made public, much to my father’s fury—“Turner exhibits a large picture of Dieppe… Calcotte nothing I hear… Collins, a coast scene with fish as usual and a landscape with a large cow turd at least as far as colour and shape is concerned.”