Man and Wife by Wilkie Collins (e book reader pc .txt) 📕
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Man and Wife is the ninth novel by Wilkie Collins, and was published in serial form in 1870. Like many of his other novels it has a complex plot and tackles social issues, in this case the then-lax state of the marriage laws, particularly in Scotland and Ireland. As always, Collins deals carefully but frankly with human personal behavior. To avoid offending Victorian morals too greatly, much is implied rather than stated outright. Nevertheless, even dealing with such matters at all led to his novels being derided as “sensation fiction” by his critics. By today’s standards, of course, they wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow.
In Man and Wife, the main character Anne Silvester has fallen pregnant to a muscular and handsome, but boorish man, Geoffrey Delamayn, to whom she is not married. She is working as a governess at a house in Scotland. Anne arranges to meet Delamayn secretly at a garden party and angrily demands that he fulfill his promise to marry her, that very day. He very reluctantly agrees to a secret, private marriage, knowing that a public marriage would badly affect his inheritance prospects. How is the marriage to be arranged quickly but kept quiet? Anne has a plan based on her understanding of the looseness of the marriage laws in Scotland. Naturally, of course, things go badly wrong with this plan and many complexities arise.
Collins is deeply critical of the state of contemporary marriage laws, both in how loosely they were framed, and in how little power over their own lives they gave to women once they were married, even if married to a brutal man. He also uses this novel to denounce the worship of sporting heroes and the obsession with physical prowess rather than mental superiority as a primary indication of male virtue.
Though not as popular as his novels The Woman in White and The Moonstone, Man and Wife received a good critical reception when it was released and was a commercial success.
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- Author: Wilkie Collins
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Arnold looked appealingly to Sir Patrick. Not a word had passed between them, as yet, on the serious subject of Anne Silvester’s letter. Sir Patrick undertook the responsibility of making the necessary excuses to Blanche.
“Forgive me,” he said, “if I ask leave to interfere with your monopoly of Arnold for a little while. I have something to say to him about his property in Scotland. Will you leave him with me, if I promise to release him as soon as possible?”
Blanche smiled graciously. “You shall have him as long as you like, uncle. There’s your hat,” she added, tossing it to her husband, gaily. “I brought it in for you when I got my own. You will find me on the lawn.”
She nodded, and went out.
“Let me hear the worst at once, Sir Patrick,” Arnold began. “Is it serious? Do you think I am to blame?”
“I will answer your last question first,” said Sir Patrick. “Do I think you are to blame? Yes—in this way. You committed an act of unpardonable rashness when you consented to go, as Geoffrey Delamayn’s messenger, to Miss Silvester at the inn. Having once placed yourself in that false position, you could hardly have acted, afterward, otherwise than you did. You could not be expected to know the Scotch law. And, as an honorable man, you were bound to keep a secret confided to you, in which the reputation of a woman was concerned. Your first and last error in this matter, was the fatal error of involving yourself in responsibilities which belonged exclusively to another man.”
“The man had saved my life.” pleaded Arnold—“and I believed I was giving service for service to my dearest friend.”
“As to your other question,” proceeded Sir Patrick. “Do I consider your position to be a serious one? Most assuredly, I do! So long as we are not absolutely certain that Blanche is your lawful wife, the position is more than serious: it is unendurable. I maintain the opinion, mind, out of which (thanks to your honorable silence) that scoundrel Delamayn contrived to cheat me. I told him, what I now tell you—that your sayings and doings at Craig Fernie, do not constitute a marriage, according to Scottish law. But,” pursued Sir Patrick, holding up a warning forefinger at Arnold, “you have read it in Miss Silvester’s letter, and you may now take it also as a result of my experience, that no individual opinion, in a matter of this kind, is to be relied on. Of two lawyers, consulted by Miss Silvester at Glasgow, one draws a directly opposite conclusion to mine, and decides that you and she are married. I believe him to be wrong, but in our situation, we have no other choice than to boldly encounter the view of the case which he represents. In plain English, we must begin by looking the worst in the face.”
Arnold twisted the traveling hat which Blanche had thrown to him, nervously, in both hands. “Supposing the worst comes to the worst,” he asked, “what will happen?”
Sir Patrick shook his head.
“It is not easy to tell you,” he said, “without entering into the legal aspect of the case. I shall only puzzle you if I do that. Suppose we look at the matter in its social bearings—I mean, as it may possibly affect you and Blanche, and your unborn children?”
Arnold gave the hat a tighter twist than ever. “I never thought of the children,” he said, with a look of consternation.
“The children may present themselves,” returned Sir Patrick, dryly, “for all that. Now listen. It may have occurred to your mind that the plain way out of our present dilemma is for you and Miss Silvester, respectively, to affirm what we know to be the truth—namely, that you never had the slightest intention of marrying each other. Beware of founding any hopes on any such remedy as that! If you reckon on it, you reckon without Geoffrey Delamayn. He is interested, remember, in proving you and Miss Silvester to be man and wife. Circumstances may arise—I won’t waste time in guessing at what they may be—which will enable a third person to produce the landlady and the waiter at Craig Fernie in evidence against you—and to assert that your declaration and Miss Silvester’s declaration are the result of collusion between you two. Don’t start! Such things have happened before now. Miss Silvester is poor; and Blanche is rich. You may be made to stand in the awkward position of a man who is denying his marriage with a poor woman, in order to establish his marriage with an heiress: Miss Silvester presumably aiding the fraud, with two strong interests of her own as inducements—the interest of asserting the claim to be the wife of a man of rank, and the interest of earning her reward in money for resigning you to Blanche. There is a case which a scoundrel might set up—and with some appearance of truth too—in a court of justice!”
“Surely, the law wouldn’t allow him to do that?”
“The law will argue anything, with anybody who will pay the law for the use of its brains and its time. Let that view of the matter alone now. Delamayn can set the case going, if he likes, without applying to
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