The New Magdalen by Wilkie Collins

 

The New Magdalen by Wilkie Collins

published 1873

 

 

Wilkie Collins is always a refreshing read when it comes to Victorian fiction. I have enjoyed several of his books and there are a number of blogposts.

Blogfriend Christine Harding recommended this one when I was doing posts on impersonation last year – she said ‘What about The New Magdalen by Wilkie Collins, where a poor woman with a disreputable past takes on [another] persona.’

It has taken me a while to get round to reading it, but once I started it was pretty much unputdownable – Collins knew how to create a plot and tease and grip the reader. This one is also shorter than some of his others – it was not a long multi-episode serial, but actually created as a play. There are linking passages that read like stage directions and set description, and also every item is not spelled out and there are jumps in the action. Late on someone speaks about something that happened ‘on a day not long since’, and I had to check that it wasn’t mentioned in the earlier text (it was not).

There is a lot of deep feeling here, and some of it is quite extreme, but you can always rely on Collins for some lighter moments. There is a wonderful clergyman, Julian Gray, who is a beacon of nobility of character. He is a genuine hero - but his aunt, Lady Janet, gets impatient with his long-windedness. He says he is going to read out a letter:

"Will it be very long?" inquired Lady Janet, looking with some alarm at the closely written sheets of paper which her nephew spread open before him.

And then later, the same two in conversation:

[Julian says:] "Shall I tell you what he said when I saw him this morning?"

"Will it take long?"

"It will take about a minute."

"You agreeably surprise me. Go on."

And I liked her diatribe against doctors:

The medical profession thrives on two incurable diseases in these modern days—a He-disease and a She-disease. She-disease—nervous depression; He-disease—suppressed gout. Remedies, one guinea, if you go to the doctor; two guineas if the doctor goes to you. I might have bought a new bonnet," cried her ladyship, indignantly, "with the money I have given to that man!”

A Magdalen is a reformed prostitute, and the book looks at the chances of one succeeding in creating a new life, and concludes that they are slim. At the end of the book we get the full story of the heroine, Mercy Merrick – until then we only know that at one point she was on the streets but wants something better in life so has become a nurse.

The book opens very dramatically – Mercy is working for the Red Cross on an effective battlefield during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, tending to wounded soldiers. An attack is coming – the fit soldiers go, leaving her with the men who are badly-hurt, and with Grace, a random woman who is trying to get to England and has got caught up in events. The two women talk, and tell each other what they are up to. Then a shell lands and kills Grace. Mercy  knows that Grace was on her way to be companion to a woman who has never seen her, a family friend. She has letters of introduction, and background information. So Mercy takes the sudden chance and says she is Grace when help comes.

When we next meet her she is well-established in Lady Janet’s household, much loved by all and about to get engaged to a highly eligible young man.

 

SPOILER

 

But not much of a spoiler as it is what gives the book its edge – the real Grace was NOT dead, she fell into the hands of an expert German doctor who worked hard to save her. She is assumed to be Mercy Merrick, and her objections and complaints are seen as a sign that the medical trauma has sent her mad.

Still she manages to make her way to London and turn up at the house. Nobody believes her of course: one of the key factors of the book is that Mercy (I will use their original names) is a much nicer person than Grace. You have to remind yourself all the time that Grace has right on her side, and has been very much ill-used.

Mercy has to decide what to do. She has also met the magnetic clergyman Julian - whom she encountered earlier in her life, though not enough for him to recognize her or there would be no plot: 

this man who had shaken her to the soul when he was in the pulpit, and when she was listening to him (unseen) at the other end of the chapel

I love the author’s helpful insertion of (unseen) there.

Given the way the world worked in the 1870s, it is intriguing, and by no means certain, to wonder what will become of Mercy: a happy ending not guaranteed, and in many Victorian novels an ex-prostitute, however reformed, has to die (in peace, looking forward to the afterlife etc). Collins – who himself led an unrespectable life by the standards of the time, though of course he was a man so it was more acceptable - has a very interesting way of ending everyone’s stories, told in a rather random epilogue. Let’s just say, no fairytales, believable, and not too depressing.

The New Magdalen was part of the genre of the Sensation  Novel – Collins’ Woman in White was one of the earliest defining texts of this kind of book. To find out more about these books, read a very entertaining short piece on the British Library website, here  - it’s by Matthew Sweet, another blog favourite. ‘The sensation novel jangled the nerves, and inspired a kind of pleasure that readers felt as much in their bodies as their minds.’

The plot brought to mind various Victorian paintings – those ‘narrative’ or ‘problem’ pictures showing families and couples being torn asunder, the likes of The Awakening Conscience. But: I decided against (much as I love and enjoy those pics) because I wanted something better for Mercy. And I found the top picture – it is from 1900, so much later, and is by Hugh Goldwin Riviere and is called The Garden of Eden. It is owned by the City of London Corporation, used with their kind permission. The title is seen as ironic – a dull day in an enclosed park, but the couple transcend that, they are happy. So that’s what we need for Mercy….

There is a fair bit more Wilkie Collins on the blog, check out the tag, including No Name which features a character called Magdalen. I used the second picture, by Vasily Perov, which would probably do for this book too.