Horatio Wragge in No Name by Wilkie Collins
Captain Horatio Wragge appears on the scene early in Wilkie Collins’s 1862 novel No Name. Poor but tidy with one “bilious green” eye and the other “bilious brown,” Wragge accosts the severe Miss Garth, governess of Norah and Magdalen Vanstone, with a request to speak to the girls’ mother. Mrs. Vanstone, in London on a mysterious errand, is related to the impecunious Wragge, who is in the habit of touching his relative from time to time for a small loan. Miss Garth sternly promises to send Wragge’s card to her mistress and abruptly ends the interview. The attention and wit that Collins lavishes on this odd character tell us that Wragge will play no small part in this remarkable novel.
No Name is often overlooked in the shadow of Collins’s two better-known books, The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868). While those novels typified the Victorian detective genre with its gothic overtones, No Name focuses on an unconventional heroine working her way through an excessively complicated story line. The plot of No Name is indeed complex, but hardly more so than most of the novels by Collins’s lifelong friend and collaborator, Charles Dickens. (Collins’s worked on both Household Words and All the Year Round under Dickens’s editorship. The two writers were so close that Dickens suggested alternate titles for No Name and even offered to finish the book when Collins fell ill.) Collins’s heroine, Magdalen Vanstone, the “No Name” of the novel’s title is interesting, but more so is Captain Wragge, a vulgar and vivid adventurer known by many names, not the least of which is the one he gives himself: moral agriculturalist.
Collins’s introduction of Wragge is exceedingly droll and broadly picaresque. From the crumpled mourning band around his hat to his carefully preserved umbrella and neatly darned black cotton gloves, Wragge presents the appearance of a “clergyman in difficulties.” His poor costume is offset by his mellifluous voice and deferential manner, his flow of persuasive words and power of moral suasion: “shabby as he was, perennial flowers of courtesy bloomed all over him from head to foot.” He is a pitchman of much facility, eager to bestow a compliment—or to step into an opportunity.
The opportunity presents itself in a most unexpected way. Readers of Victorian literature will be all too familiar with the laws of disposition of property among the landed gentry. Novels abound with second sons forced to join the army or become clergymen because their older brothers have inherited the estate. Second wives and their families often find themselves in the sad situation of being homeless or reduced to penury because the estate is entailed away from them. Both such situations occur in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, for example.
Here, Collins offers a situation that is very irregular, one influenced undoubtedly by his own chaotic life. When their parents die in quick succession, the Vanstone daughters learn that their mother and father were not legally married. Magdalen’s engagement to the benignly useless Frank Clare is put off indefinitely while he is sent to China as a clerk-apprentice. The girls’ comfortable life disappears virtually overnight and they must go to London to learn how to earn a living. Norah goes out to be a governess. Magdalen, however, runs away determined to regain the lost inheritance.
When Magdalen and Wragge meet in London, both have fallen on hard times. Wragge has lost what little he had in the railway speculation crash of 1847, but he is undaunted, “From top to toe, every square inch of the captain’s clothing was altered for the worse; but the man himself remained unchanged—superior to all forms of moral mildew, impervious to the action of social rust.” Magdalen has developed a plan to turn her talent for drawing room theatricals into a stage career. As a gentleman’s daughter alone and unprotected in the city, she has placed herself in a very dangerous position; the contemplation of a career on the stage means the certain loss of every shred of reputation that a lady would possess.
Wragge presents her with a vaguely decorous proposition: Magdalen may hide from her family in his lodgings with his wife until she decides what to do. She agrees to go with Wragge even though she tells him that she had heard he is a “rogue.” Little does she know that Wragge, who is indeed a rogue, has picked up a handbill offering a £50 reward for information on her whereabouts.
Before long, Magdalen and Wragge have concocted a bold scheme that meets their needs. Using her dramatic skills, Magdalen performs a one-woman show around the countryside in a number of disguises (one of these disguises is based on the governess Miss Garth). Part Svengali, part agent, Wragge books and promotes the show and keeps more than his fair share of the receipts. Magdalen is able to hide from her family while he reaps the profits. Magdalen, however, grows increasingly unhappy and bitter.
The only redeeming element of Magdalen’s existence is her gentle treatment of Mrs. Wragge. This creature, surely one of the most comic figures in English literature, is a former waitress who loves fine dress. A modest sort of heiress (hence Wragge’s motivation for marrying her), Mrs. Wragge is a little slow, “constitutionally torpid” with a penchant for letting her shoes fall off her heels and for wearing her cap crookedly. Wragge keeps his unnaturally tall wife on task by shouting in order to “stimulate her mind,” but his sense of orderliness is constantly offended by her confusion and slovenly appearance.
The Victorian heroine who would choose her own livelihood and take on the laws of primogeniture is clearly not typical. It has to be said that Collins’s portrait of Magdalen seldom escapes the literary platitudes of the day. Rather, the author enlists our sympathies for Magdalen’s plight by showing her willing to set aside her sheltered, passive upbringing and use cunning, courage, and determination to elect her own destiny (granted, this is more of a modern viewpoint than one shared by most Victorian readers). She gradually sets aside her fastidiousness and comes to a grudging admiration for Wragge, even allowing for the self-serving motives of each party.
We readers have to admire Wragge not just for his discipline and inventiveness, but also because he is a man who has no illusions about how he makes a living. Like many an adventurer, Wragge rationalizes that he only takes what is freely given out of “Christian charity”—who, he asks, has the right to persecute him “for habitually exciting the noblest feelings of our common nature”? He lays claim boldly to enlightened ideas about his profession, one that he likens to the farmer plowing and seeding the soil in the hope of harvest. He may be called a swindler by some, but this empty word fails to acknowledge his superiority in a crowded profession: “Swindler. Definition: A moral agriculturalist; a man who cultivates the field of human sympathy.” To emphasize his dedication and professional acumen, Wragge shows Magdalen his account books, what he calls his “commercial library” in which years of sums (stolen or “lent”), false identities (those used and those in reserve for the future), and profitable districts have been catalogued in blot-free black and white. Indeed, Wragge’s “library” demonstrates not only his professional discipline and credentials, but also humanity’s bottomless willingness to be deceived.
It is Wragge’s orderliness that gives Magdalen a way to act on her plan. Her objective is to marry the son of the man who inherited her father’s property and money, an astronomical sum close to £80,000. Michael Vanstone, already wealthy, believed that his brother Andrew, Magdalen’s father, plotted against him and had a lifelong hatred of his brother. The elder Vanstone dies and the money goes to Michael’s son Noel, a vain, sickly skinflint managed with exquisite skill by his housekeeper, Mrs. Lecount.
Mrs. Lecount is the female counterpart of Captain Wragge, his equal in dastardly imagination, but his social opposite. Well-dressed and respectable, she is a femme d’un certain âge who has been with Noel and his father for years. She has ingratiated herself with Noel to such a degree that he can’t make a move without her approval. Wragge understands that the way to Noel is through Mrs. Lecount and he lays the groundwork with care.
Wragge, his wife, and Magdalen adopt the name of Bygrave and install themselves in a seaside cottage near where Noel and Mrs. Lecount have alsoo moved for health reasons. Recognizing the hold that Mrs. Lecount has over her master, Wragge turns his eye to that lady’s weaknesses. Vanity is first among them and Wragge uses his most unctuous and flattering tone to gain her attention. When he learns that she is the widow of a prominent scientist, Wragge picks up a copy of Joyce’s Scientific Dialogues from 1807 and commits whole passages to memory so he can bedazzle her with ready-made science. His seaside discourses on hydrostatic principles and the Theory of Floating Vessels are marvels of prolixity and ponderousness. When Mrs. Lecount reveals that she still has the professor’s aquarium tank and the “foreign Toad” that lives in it, Wragge seizes the chance to cement their acquaintance by viewing the toad in the “public’s interest”: “Never had Captain Wragge burnt his adulterated incense on the flimsy altar of human vanity to better purpose than he was burning it now.”
We have seen Mrs. Lecount’s toad before. Earlier in London, Magdalen had donned one of her performances disguises and invaded Noel Vanstone’s own house where she meets Mrs. Lecount (boldness that will have dire consequences for our heroine’s plans). There, Madelyn sees the tank and the toad and quails before them (keeping fish and reptiles was uncommon in England at the time). The slimy snails, slippery efts, and tiny fish swimming in green water under the cold gaze of a bright-eyed toad startle Magdalen and establish Mrs. Lecount as a woman with an unexpected, even shocking side. Collins also uses the fact that she is a foreigner (from Switzerland) and dresses above her station to emphasize her sinister character.
Back at the seaside, the project to encourage Noel Vanstone to admire Magdalen and propose marriage is delicately brought to fruition. It is surely Wragge’s finest work as a moral agriculturalist. He even contrives to have Mrs. Lecount leave the country when the wedding takes place—a particularly tricky bit of business involving a forged letter that draws the housekeeper back to Switzerland to the bedside of her supposedly-dying brother.
Magdalen marries Vanstone (making her Magdalen Vanstone Vanstone), but Noel dies and the money slips through her hands due to a technicality. Making one last attempt to recover her inheritance, Magdalen decides to impersonate a servant in the house of the man who inherited Vanstone’s money. At this point, Collins indulges in one of his characteristically gothic scenes, one which layers on sleepwalking, missing papers, moonlight and shadows, and a menacing old sailor all in a house called, atmospherically, St. Crux-in-the-Marsh.
Having failed, Magdalen is back in London living in cheap lodgings, alone, ill, and friendless….except, that is, for Captain Kirke (not that one) who has rescued her after having fallen in love with her from one chance glance at the seaside. The predictably maudlin ending is put off by one final appearance by Captain Wragge. He appears in glossy black with an impeccably white frilled shirt, clearly successful. The moral agriculturalist, he tells Magdalen, is now the medical agriculturalist. Wragge, it seems, has capitalized on the patent medicine craze with a successful wonder pill. The “founders of [his] fortune are three in number. Their names are Aloes, Scammony, and Gamboge” (709-710). Wragge has indeed put the scam in scammony. His hilarious recounting of how he became a “Grand Financial Fact” describes his assault on modern medicine (“Down with the Doctors!”), his catchy marketing slogans (“A Pill in Time Saves Nine”), and his subtle packaging featuring the face of Mrs. Wragge (“she is the celebrated woman whom I have cured of indescribable agonies from every complaint under the sun”).
Wragge’s parting gift to Magdalen is to clear up how she came to be rescued by Captain Kirke. The news causes the invalid to start and she grabs Wragge’s sleeve, “Gently! Gently! You mustn’t take hold of my superfine black coat-sleeve in that unceremonious manner.” He departs soon after, promising that Mrs. Wragge may come and live with Magdalen. Ever the businessman, he offers to supply Mrs. Wragge with a few thousand advertising handbills carrying her portrait. Since she will inevitably drop these fliers wherever she goes, her clumsiness will result in extra advertising for her husband’s Pill. “Don’t think me mercenary,” Wragge nods wisely, “I merely understand the age I live in.”
© 2012 Leann Davis Alspaugh. All rights reserved.
