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"The smoke and flame, confined as they were to the room, had been too much for him."
John McLenan
21 July 1860
11.2 cm high by 8.7 cm wide (4 ⅜ by 3 ⅜ inches), vignetted, p. 453; p. 219 in the 1861 volume.
Thirty-fifth regular illustration for Collins's The Woman in White: A Novel (1860).
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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"The smoke and flame, confined as they were to the room, had been too much for him." — staff artist John McLenan's thirty-fifth composite woodblock engraving for Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White: A Novel, Instalment 35, published on 21 July 1860 in Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization, Vol. IV, "The Second Epoch; "The Narrative of Walter Hartright, Resumed. X," p. 453; p. 219 in the 1861 volume. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
I cannot believe that it was any part of his intention to make the destruction of the register appear to be the result of accident, by purposely setting the vestry on fire. The bare chance that prompt assistance might arrive, and that the books might, by the remotest possibility, be saved, would have been enough, on a moment’s consideration, to dismiss any idea of this sort from his mind. Remembering the quantity of combustible objects in the vestry — the straw, the papers, the packing-cases, the dry wood, the old worm-eaten presses — all the probabilities, in my estimation, point to the fire as the result of an accident with his matches or his light.
His first impulse, under these circumstances, was doubtless to try to extinguish the flames, and failing in that, his second impulse (ignorant as he was of the state of the lock) had been to attempt to escape by the door which had given him entrance. When I had called to him, the flames must have reached across the door leading into the church, on either side of which the presses extended, and close to which the other combustible objects were placed. In all probability, the smoke and flame (confined as they were to the room) had been too much for him when he tried to escape by the inner door. He must have dropped in his death-swoon — he must have sunk in the place where he was found — just as I got on the roof to break the skylight window. Even if we had been able, afterwards, to get into the church, and to burst open the door from that side, the delay must have been fatal. He would have been past saving, long past saving, by that time. We should only have given the flames free ingress into the church — the church, which was now preserved, but which, in that event, would have shared the fate of the vestry. There is no doubt in my mind, there can be no doubt in the mind of any one, that he was a dead man before ever we got to the empty cottage, and worked with might and main to tear down the beam. [Part 35: "Hartright's Narrative, X," p. 453; pp. 218-219 in the 1861 volume.]
Knowing that Hartright has discovered his forgery in the parish registry at Old Welmingham, Glyde had felt that he had no choice but to erase the evidence of his crime. But in attempting to steal the offending page he had inadvertently started a fire in the vestry, after having used the keys he had stolen from the parish clerk's house nearby to enter from the outside. Then, he panicked when he failing to open the mangled lock, and the conflagration had prevented his escaping through the other door into the nave.
After the inquest, Hartright receives a lengthy account from Mrs. Catherick as to how she had assisted Sir Percival with gaining access to the register so he could insert the record of a marriage that never transpired, that of his father, Sir Felix Glyde, and his mother, who had run away from a brutal husband in Ireland, and was therefore not free to marry again. Sir Percival, returning from abroad and in debt after the deaths of his parents, had had to establish his claim to the Blackwater estate in order to raise a loan on it. He had his foreign birth certificate, but not his parents' marriage certificate. As the wife of the parish clerk, Mrs. Catherick (in exchange from some attractive jewelry and a watch) had assisted him in gaining access to the register.
Ironically, the key to proving that the man found dead in the charred vestry was Sir Percival is his engraved watch. His intention had probably not been to burn the register but simply to purloin the page containing the forged account of the wedding. Glyde had merely struck a match to see what he was doing. Thus, the element of coincidence may also be construed as the machinations of divine justice. "So, for the first and last time, I saw him," remarks Hartright. "So the Visitation of God ruled it that he and I should meet" (IX, 217).
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 (26 November 1859 through 8 September 1860).
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. Illustrated by F. A. Fraser and Sir John Gilbert. London: Sampson Low, 1860; rpt., Chatto & Windus, 1875.
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. Ed. Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox. Illustrated by Sir John Gilbert and F. A. Fraser. Toronto: Broadview, 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. 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. 44-46.
Created 30 July 2024