Gasson, Andrew; Baker, William; (2016) Forgotten terrain: Wilkie Collins’s Jewish explorations. Jewish Historical Studies , 48 pp. 177-199. 10.14324/111.444.jhs.2016v48.031.

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Abstract

Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) is known today almost exclusively for The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868) although in fact he has some thirty-four major books to his name and wrote well over a hundred articles, short stories and essays, and a dozen or more plays. His father, William Collins (1788–1847), Royal Academician, was a celebrated portrait and landscape painter; his younger brother, Charles Allston Collins (1828–1873), was also a painter and on the fringes of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Wilkie Collins led an unconventional and unorthodox life, living with one woman, having three children by a second, and marrying neither. He dressed flamboyantly, ate exotic foods, and maintained a cynical view of the Victorian establishment of which he almost became a part. His fiction abounds in idiosyncratic characters. As Steve Farmer has noted in his “Introduction” to the Broadview edition of The Moonstone, Collins’s work displays cosmopolitan sympathies.For instance, his “A Sermon for Sepoys” (native Indian troops), published in his long-standing friend Charles Dickens’s Household Words in February 1858, treats “both the English and the Indian rebels” (the sepoys who rebelled early in 1857) “with a subdued and elegant equanimity.” Furthermore, “the understanding evident in this Household Words article foreshadows Collins’s sensitive and sympathetic depiction of the mysterious Indians and their culture in The Moonstone”, published a decade later. Collins’s “unusual empathy for things and people un-British” is also reflected in his 1869 drama Black and White, co-authored with the French actor and dramatist Charles Fechter. “Set in Trinidad in 1830, the play has an evident anti-slavery theme and ends with the hero, a mixed race slave. . . marrying the white heiress.” It is surprising that little attention, if any, has been given to Collins’s personal and creative engagement with a minority group much closer to home than the sepoys or mixed-race groups in the Caribbean. Collins’s contemporaries such as Dickens and George Eliot depict a minority group – British Jewish characters and Jewish history. Considerable ink has been spent on analysis of the manner in which they present them and on their personal acquaintance with the Anglo-Jewish community. Wilkie Collins is largely ignored in such studies possibly because his work does not conform to their largely binary patterns of philo- and antisemitism, and unlike, for instance, either Maria Edgeworth or Dickens, he did not feel the need to present positive Jewish characters in his work in response to written complaints. In his thoughtful “Free Lance” in the Times Literary Supplement of May 2016, Bryan Cheyette writes that “Most cultural histories before the 1990s characterized Jewish literary representation as ‘stereotypes’, ‘myths’ or ‘images’ that remained the same across the centuries. This meant that these early accounts of literary anti-Semitism were, by definition, outside of time and place, and beyond the contingencies of history”. The omission of such a discussion for a major Victorian writer such as Wilkie Collins is certainly interesting, considering that Collins met some of the most eminent figures in the Jewish community. This article will examine how and where Jews are represented in his works; how from an early age he was introduced to English Jewry; and his subsequent social interactions with the Anglo-Jewish community. Discussion of Collins’s creative representation of Jewish characters should briefly be prefaced by an examination of the prevailing atmosphere of the time in which he lived and the manner in which Jewish characters were represented in fiction at the time by other novelists. The most familiar example is Dickens’s Fagin in Oliver Twist (1838), introduced to his readers as “The Jew” followed by stereotypical descriptions of his physical attributes. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the much earlier tale by Maria Edgeworth, “The Good Aunt” (1801), features a criminal jeweller with the unimaginative name of Mr. Carat who is clearly of Jewish origins. Further antisemitic portraits occur in her Castle Rackrent (1800), Belinda (1801), and The Absentee (1812). Michael Scrivener observes that “the default position in the work of the liberal Anglo-Irish writer Maria Edgeworth was uniformly anti-Semitic, until she was provoked by the American Jew, Rachel Mordecai, into writing her remarkable novel of reversals Harrington (1817).” A much less prejudiced depiction of Jewish characters is also reflected in Sir Walter Scott’s Rebecca in Ivanhoe (1819). Another novelist who has recently been the subject of attention, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, writes in a deprecating manner regarding Jews in both John Marchmont’s Legacy and Birds of Prey (1867). The better-known Anthony Trollope presents his readers with a succession of stereotypical Jewish moneylenders. Mr. Benjamin in The Eustace Diamonds (1873) is a jeweller, moneylender, and receiver of stolen property; he is obviously Jewish and referred to throughout the novel as “the Jew” along with his equally Jewish partner in crime, Mr. Harter. Samuel Hart, “small, and oily, and blackhaired and beaky-nosed” appears in Mr. Scarborough’s Family (1883), and Mr. Levy in Can You Forgive Her (1864) is “a dark man, with sharp eyes, set very near to each other in his head, with a beaked nose.” John Sutherland, however, among others has indicated that Trollope’s presentation of his Jewish characters is highly complex and by no means in each instance negative. With notable exceptions, there existed an overwhelmingly hostile literary and social climate in which the Jews were generally referred to in a negative manner, illustrated by the accepted parlance for borrowing from moneylenders as “going to the Jews.” It comes almost as a surprise that Wilkie Collins’s pawnbroker in The Moonstone, Septimus Luker, takes on the colloquial name for “money”, “luker” (lucre), rather than an identifiably Jewish appellation.

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