Marion about to post a letter to her London solicitor. — staff artist John McLenan's uncaptioned headnote vignette for the fifteenth serial number of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White: A Novel, published on 3 March 1860 in Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization, Vol. IV, "The Second Epoch": "The Narrative of Marian Halcombe, Taken from Her Diary," p. 106 in the 1861 volume and p. 133 the serial number. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]

Passage: Getting Rapidly Delivered Legal Advice to Thwart Glyde

Just as I was about to put the address on the envelope an obstacle was discovered by Laura, which in the effort and preoccupation of writing had escaped my mind altogether.

“How are we to get the answer in time?” she asked. “Your letter will not be delivered in London before to-morrow morning, and the post will not bring the reply here till the morning after.”

The only way of overcoming this difficulty was to have the answer brought to us from the lawyer’s office by a special messenger. I wrote a postscript to that effect, begging that the messenger might be despatched with the reply by the eleven o’clock morning train, which would bring him to our station at twenty minutes past one, and so enable him to reach Blackwater Park by two o’clock at the latest. He was to be directed to ask for me, to answer no questions addressed to him by any one else, and to deliver his letter into no hands but mine.

“In case Sir Percival should come back to-morrow before two o’clock,” I said to Laura, “the wisest plan for you to adopt is to be out in the grounds all the morning with your book or your work, and not to appear at the house till the messenger has had time to arrive with the letter. I will wait here for him all the morning, to guard against any misadventures or mistakes. By following this arrangement I hope and believe we shall avoid being taken by surprise. Let us go down to the drawing-room now. We may excite suspicion if we remain shut up together too long.”

“Suspicion?” she repeated. “Whose suspicion can we excite, now that Sir Percival has left the house? Do you mean Count Fosco?”

“Perhaps I do, Laura.”

“You are beginning to dislike him as much as I do, Marian.”

“No, not to dislike him. Dislike is always more or less associated with contempt — I can see nothing in the Count to despise.”

“You are not afraid of him, are you?”

“Perhaps I am — a little.”

“Afraid of him, after his interference in our favour to-day!”

“Yes. I am more afraid of his interference than I am of Sir Percival’s violence. Remember what I said to you in the library. Whatever you do, Laura, don’t make an enemy of the Count!”

We went downstairs. Laura entered the drawing-room, while I proceeded across the hall, with my letter in my hand, to put it into the post-bag, which hung against the wall opposite to me. ["The Second Epoch. The Story continued by Marian Halcombe," Blackwater Park, Hampshire. July 3d," p. 133; p. 106 in the 1861 volume.]

Commentary

Letter writing and mailing letters were perfectly normal by the period of the novel as the Penny Post had been in highly effective operation since 1680. There is something, therefore, almost prosaic about McLenan's using the image of Marian about to post a letter in the front hall's mailbag in this vignette. However, her motivation is anything but prosaic, for she is determined to learn how the duplicitous Glyde might be able to access Laura's personal fortune to pay off his considerable debts, knowledge of which (as this is a Sensation Novel) she has acquired by overhearing snatches of conversation between Laura's devious husband and his lawyer. She requires the expert legal advice of Gilmour's partner, Kyrle, if she is to outmanoeuvre the cunning Glyde and the plausible Fosco. Thus, the headnote vignette signals a crucial part of this number's plot.

Related Material

• McLenan's full-size plate for the fifteenth number "Sign there!" for the 3 March 1860 number
• Fred Walker's poster: The Woman in White for the Olympic's October 1871 adaptation
• Letters from the Past

Bibliography

Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White: A Novel. New York: Harper & Bros., 1861 (first printing, 15 August 1860; reissued in single-column format in 1902, 548 pages).

Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White: A Novel. Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization. Illustrated by John McLenan. Vols. III-IV (16 November 1859 through 8 September 1860).

Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. Ed. Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox. Illustrated by Sir John Gilbert. London: Minerva, 2006.

Peters, Catherine. "Chapter Twelve: The Woman in White (1859-1860)." The King of the Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins. London: Minerva Press, 1992. Pp. 205-225.

Vann, J. Don. "The Woman in White in All the Year Round, 26 November 1859 — 25 August 1860." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: MLA, 1985. Pp. 44-46.

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Created 10 July 2024