The novel that Wilkie Collins published between The Woman in White and Armadale might at first seem less compelling than either of those but it’s a powerful tale about the response to a legal injustice.
The second of Wilkie Collins’s four major novels of the 1860s, No Name (1862) comes between The Woman in White and Armadale. On the face of it, it seems less compelling than either of those. It’s in part an “issues” novel: it seeks to draw attention to a social injustice, one arising from an anomaly or fault in the law. Problems with the law were to become a recurring theme of Collins’s in later decades. In The Law and the Lady (1875) it would be the Scottish verdict of “Not Proven” which threatens to blight the life of Valeria Woodville’s new husband. In No Name, it’s the rule that children born “out of wedlock” — whose parents were not married to each other when the child was born — could not inherit from a parent who died intestate. A parent who wanted to provide for such children had to leave a will.
Andrew Vanstone had indeed made a will providing for his two daughters, Norah and Magdalen, some five years before his sudden death in a rail accident. Not long before his death, when Norah was 26 and Magdalen 18, their parents took a mysterious trip to London where they remained for four weeks. It was only after Andrew Vanstone’s death that his daughters learned that the main reason for the trip was so that their parents could get married quietly. (They had been living as, to all outward appearances, a respectable married couple since before Norah’s birth.) There was another reason too: so that Mrs Vanstone, now in her forties, could consult a medical expert about her very late pregnancy.
Andrew had failed to appreciate that his marriage had the effect of revoking his earlier will. Once alerted to this by his friend and neighbour, the eccentric Francis Clare, Andrew urgently summoned his solicitor so that he could make a new will in the same terms as the revoked one — and was killed before the solicitor got there.
His wife, grief-stricken and weakened by the late pregnancy, does not survive him for long. She in turn is survived for just a few hours by the baby. From the point of view of the plot, these events slot together smoothly. Andrew Vanstone has died intestate, notwithstanding his will from five years earlier. Therefore, his wife inherits one third of his estate, with the rest going to his next of kin. When she dies, also intestate, soon afterwards, her entire estate, which now includes the property she inherited on her husband’s intestacy, passes to her newborn child (who, unlike his two sisters, has been born to married parents). He promptly dies and all that property (which largely consists of personal property as distinct from land) goes to his next-of-kin. In the absence of a living parent or a “legitimate” sibling, that person is his uncle, Michael Vanstone, his father’s elder brother, who is also Andrew Vanstone’s next of kin. So, Michael Vanstone ends up with everything.
It’s all very neat, even if the late pregnancy seems implausibly contrived: it’s necessary to ensure that Mrs Vanstone’s share of the estate is inherited by the embittered Michael Vanstone, rather than by one or more of her relatives. Michael Vanstone had as a young man been disinherited by his father and he blamed Andrew (unjustly, it would seem) for having plotted against him. That he became the ultimate inheritor of his brother’s estate seemed to him no more than the minimum requirement of justice. He was the least likely person in existence to take pity on his two unfortunate nieces. He offered them £100 each, and refused to make any further provision for them out of the money his brother had intended them to have.
The particular sequence of circumstances that led to this outcome is reflected, with variations, later in the story. If Magdalen is first disinherited by her father’s inadvertant intestacy, she is later disinherited intentionally when her husband makes a second will, revoking the one made just weeks earlier, following their marriage, by which she was to be left £80,000 (the amount of her father’s estate). But whereas her father, in spite of the urgency, waited for his solicitor to come from London, her husband reluctantly follows the guidance of his formidable former housekeeper, copies out in his own handwriting the “model” she has provided, and executes a valid, if clumsily worded, will — not long before he, too, dies suddenly.
Noel Vanstone’s isn’t the last sudden death in the story. The residuary beneficiary named in Noel’s will, Admiral Bartram, dies unexpectedly but testate, leaving his estate to his son, George. The death of the admiral’s daughter and George’s sister, Mrs Girdlestone, means the failure of one of the objects of the “secret trust” by which the admiral considered himself bound.
Norah and Magdalen Vanstone respond in very different ways to Michael Vanstone’s refusal to respect his brother’s clear but legally ineffective wishes. Although their behaviour is at odds, they could both be said to show a remarkable degree of patience. Norah stoically accepts her situation, and goes to work as a governess. Magdalen resolves to recover the inheritance they should have had, by disreputable and underhand means, since legal and respectable avenues are closed to her.
She has a plan to trick her uncle, relying on his taste for risk and speculation, but he dies before she can put this into effect, leaving everything to his son, Noel. Noel lacks his father’s vitality and adventurous spirit, but is no more willing than the old man was to indulge the claims of his impoverished cousins. He is miserly, inactive and cautious, apparently dependent on the advice of his housekeeper, Mrs Lecount, to enable him to make the most straightforward decisions. There is no prospect of luring him into a speculative investment. Magdalen at last concludes that her only hope of getting money out of Noel Vanstone is to marry him.
Magdalen is fully aware that, in marrying Noel, she will be sentencing both of them to a period of marital disharmony and unhappiness. It is a sentence of indeterminate duration. Although Mrs Lecount, finding a bottle of laudanum prominently marked “POISON” in Magdalen’s room, is convinced that the young woman means to murder her husband, the novel’s authorial voice insists that this is not true.
Magdalen has been patient, first in working at her one-woman show to accumulate some working capital, then in waiting for Noel to propose marriage to her (while her accomplice, Captain Wragge, engages Mrs Lecount in a tortuous battle of wits), before settling down to a life of domestic misery which she has no reason to expect will come to an end as quickly as it does in the event. Then, her plans having failed so far, she spends some months learning to be a parlourmaid, before going to work for the admiral in the hope of being able to find the secret trust document, in the existence of which she cannot be completely confident.
None of this leaves her much better off, materially, than she had been to start with (and much worse off in terms of her health). Her own efforts, aided for part of the time by Captain Wragge, have got her nowhere. It’s only after the lawyers have given up their thorough, painstaking search that Norah finds the document hidden in the ashes of a charcoal brazier in the admiral’s cold, disused banqueting hall. The sleepwalking admiral, torn between the sense of obligation he felt to comply with Noel Vanstone’s wishes, and the burden of anxiety that those wishes imposed upon him, had symbolically “burned” the document — but in a place where no fire had recently been lit.
It could be said the sisters accidentally and minimally cooperate with each other, in their very different ways of coping with their predicament. That cooperation, though barely noticeable, is essential to the way the story unfolds. If Norah hadn’t visited St Crux, the trust document would probably never have been found. Magdalen would remain the only living person to have seen it: as far as her own lawyer and everybody else was concerned, it had probably never existed.
By the same token, if Norah hadn’t been searching for the missing Magdalen, and gone to Aldeburgh (Aldborough in the novel) to look for a trace of her, she would probably never have met George Bartram, whom she later married, and would never have had any reason to visit St Crux.
The difference between Norah’s patience and that shown by Magdalen is that Magdalen’s is directed towards a material end, the recovery of (what should have been) the sisters’ inheritance, whereas the object of Norah’s stoical resignation is, I suppose, her own peace of mind. The end of the novel can obviously be read as an endorsement of conventional morality, suggesting that Magdalen’s unscrupulous, immoral and at times even illegal behaviour has done her no good — and Collins would certainly have been aware that it could be taken that way. But the resolution of the plot is actually more nuanced than that suggests.
Magdalen tears up the trust document which Norah has just given her. She still intends to accept the money, but she will take it as a gift from her sister and brother-in-law, not as a matter of right in her capacity as Noel Vanstone’s widow. Her destruction of the document is, in effect, a repudiation of the marriage, and of (almost) all that led to and followed from it. But she can’t entirely expunge her own history. If she hadn’t married Noel Vanstone, he would have left his estate outright to George Bartram, there would have been no revocation of the later will in her favour and no trust document. As already noted, if Magdalen hadn’t been in Aldeburgh, preparing for Noel’s proposal, Norah might never have met George Bartram. In any case, George wouldn’t have had any reason to question the origins of the property he inherited from Noel Vanstone.
In other words, Magdalen’s actions are not entirely without effect in bringing about the resolution of the story.
As far as I can tell, Collins is accurate as to the details of the law (and of Equity and the jurisdiction of the Ecclesiastical courts, and the complicated interaction of the three). As I hinted already, the premise of the novel is a deficiency in the law, an injustice. The solicitor, Pendril, who is no revolutionary, tells Miss Garth:
“… I am far from defending the law of England, as it affects illegitimate offspring. On the contrary, I think it a disgrace to the nation. It visits the sins of the parents on the children; it encourages vice by depriving fathers and mothers of the strongest of all motives for making the atonement of marriage; and it claims to produce these two abominable results in the names of morality and religion. But it has no extraordinary repression to answer for, in the case of these unhappy girls. The more merciful and Christian law of other countries, which allows the marriage of the parents to make the children legitimate, has no mercy on these children …” (p. 110)
It would not be till 1926 that English law would provide for the legitimation of children by the marriage of their parents after the children were born. Even that law would not have helped the Vanstone sisters because it didn’t apply to anyone whose parent was married to somebody else at the time of their birth (as Andrew Vanstone was). The requirement that neither parent should have been married to someone else at the time of the children’s birth was not dropped until 1959.
Magdalen Vanstone marries Noel Vanstone using an assumed name. He would never knowingly have married his cousin, or had any contact with her: he is well aware that she has been plotting against and threatening both him and his father. Before the marriage, Captain Wragge tells her that he has looked into whether her deception will affect its validity. He’s unable to give her a definitive answer:
“… If Mr Noel Vanstone ever discovers that you have knowingly married him under a false name, he may apply to the Ecclesiastical Court to have his marriage declared null and void. The issue of the application would rest with the Judges. But if he could proved that he had been intentionally deceived, the legal opinion is that his case would be a strong one.” (p. 415)
After the death of either party, however, the marriage would no longer be open to challenge.
Noel Vanstone’s position may be compared with that of Valeria Woodville, the heroine of The Law and the Lady. She becomes aware that her husband has married her under an assumed name and is at first uncertain whether she’s validly married or not. Eventually, she is advised that the the marriage is certainly valid. There are two differences between Valeria Woodville’s case and Noel Vanstone’s. First, there’s no question of fraud in her case: her husband was attempting to hide the fact that he had been tried in Scotland for the murder of his first wife and that the verdict had been “Not Proven”, not an unequivocal acquittal.
The second difference is that, any application that Noel Vanstone might make would be to the Ecclesiastical Court, whereas Valeria Woodville’s would have to be to the courts of common law. When writing about The Law and the Lady last year, I said that marriage had been brought under the jurisdiction of the common law courts by the Marriage Act 1836. I got that wrong, I’m afraid. While the 1836 Act made marriage law a matter of statute for the first time, the Ecclesiastical Courts retained their jurisdiction over marriage until the Matrimonial Causes Act 1957. So, in the 1840s, when No Name is set, any question as to the validity of Noel Vanstone’s marriage would have been determined by the Ecclesiastical Court.
Mrs Lecount makes an impressive villain who actually doesn’t do anything very wrong. She protects the interest of her employer who, however miserable his behaviour, undoubtedly has the law on his side. At the same time, she pursues the inheritance that Michael Vanstone said he intended to leave her — before dying intestate. The difference between her and Magdalen is that the amount she claims is £5,000 — on which she is able to retire, though not opulently — while Magdalen demands a half share in £80,000. So, if Mrs Lecount is a “good” villain, should we conversely regard Magdalen as a “bad” protagonist?
It’s clear that, as she herself sees it, the worst thing she does is make a mercenary marriage. It’s the prospect of that action that drives her to buy the laudanum and contemplate suicide. The laudanum isn’t used, but remains in her possession to be misinterpreted by Mrs Lecount. So, Magdalen has something in common with Armadale’s Lydia Gwilt who also marries a man she doesn’t love with an eye to pecuniary gain. While Magdalen contemplates suicide but doesn’t act on her thoughts, Lydia attempts murder, but then kills herself instead. There is thus a resemblance between Magdalen Vanstone and Lydia Gwilt, though not a moral equivalence.
In Collins’s novels we often find themes that recur with variations. I expect to return to them before very long.
Edition: Penguin Classics, edited by Mark Ford, 1994, 2004.