Captain Wragge suddenly enters the room — the headnote vignette for the curtain of episode fourteen in the American serialisation of Wilkie Collins’s No Name in Harper’s Weekly [Vol. VI. — No. 285] — Number 14, “The Second Scene. Skeldergate, York.” Chapter III, page 383 (the 14 June 1862 instalment): 9.7 cm high by 5.6 cm wide, or 3 ⅞ inches high by 2 ¼ inches wide, vignetted, text on p. 381 (volume edition, p. 96); with the regular illustration, “Who the devil would have thought it? She can act, after all!” in the volume edition, p. 94. Wood-engraving 11.7 cm high by 11.7 cm wide, or 4 ½ inches square, framed. Note: Number 15 in serial (21 June 1862) has illustrations, and occupies less than two full folio pages: pp. 398-399.
Passage Illustrated in the Vignette: Captain Wragge Suddenly Intervenes
“Mrs. Wragge!” cried a terrible voice at the door.
For the first time in Magdalen’s experience, Mrs. Wragge was deaf to the customary stimulant. She actually ventured on a feeble remonstrance in the presence of her husband.
“Oh, do let her have her Things!” pleaded Mrs. Wragge. “Oh, poor soul, do let her have her Things!”
The captain’s inexorable forefinger pointed to a corner of the room — dropped slowly as his wife retired before it — and suddenly stopped at the region of her shoes. [“The Second Scene. Skeldergate, York.” Chapter III, page 383 in serial, page 96 in volume]
Passage Illustrated in the Main Illustration: Captain Wragge Coaches the Actress
She started up, wild and flushed, with a desperate self-command in her face, with an angry resolution in her manner.
“No!” she said. “I must harden myself — and I will! Sit down again and see me act.”
“Bravo!” cried the captain. “Dash at it, my beauty — and it’s done!”
She dashed at it, with a mad defiance of herself — with a raised voice, and a glow like fever in her cheeks. All the artless, girlish charm of the performance in happier and better days was gone. The native dramatic capacity that was in her came, hard and bold, to the surface, stripped of every softening allurement which had once adorned it. She would have saddened and disappointed a man with any delicacy of feeling. She absolutely electrified Captain Wragge. He forgot his politeness, he forgot his long words. The essential spirit of the man’s whole vagabond life burst out of him irresistibly in his first exclamation. “Who the devil would have thought it? She can act, after all!” The instant the words escaped his lips he recovered himself, and glided off into his ordinary colloquial channels. Magdalen stopped him in the middle of his first compliment. “No,” she said; “I have forced the truth out of you for once. I want no more.”
“Pardon me,” replied the incorrigible Wragge. “You want a little instruction; and I am the man to give it you.” [“The Second Scene. Skeldergate, York.” Chapter III, page 382 in serial, pp. 93-94 in volume]
Commentary: Magdalen Becomes an Expert at Disguising Herself and Projecting Emotion
The theatrical context of the main establishes that Wragge has coached Magdalen in role-playing, not merely on the touring company’s circuit, but in real life. Apparently in his lengthy career as a swindler Wragge has acquired considerable skills as an actor. As a fair judge of thespians generally and a veteran of a professional production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals (which premiered at the Covent Garden Theatre, London, in January, 1775), Wragge now requests that Magdalen demonstrate for him a sample of her mastery of the dramatic arts. His high standard is presumably that set by Miss Kemble, the younger sister of the celebrated eighteenth-century actress Mrs. Sarah Siddons in the 1795 staging of the play. She proves a natural, much to Wragge’s admiration: “She dashed at it with a mad defiance of herself, with a raised voice and a glow like fever in her cheeks,” convincing her auditor of her emotional range and “native dramatic capacity,” electrifying (Collins’s own metaphor) the critical Captain. He has promised her to help her leave York, take up a stage career, and (most significantly) initiate a close enquiry about the affairs of the relative who has legally but quite immorally acquired her fortune, Michael Vanstone. He confirms Huxtable’s opinion that she is “a born actress” (94 in volume).
Related Material
- Frontispiece to Wilkie Collins’s No Name (1864) by John Everett Millais
- Victorian Paratextuality: Pictorial Frontispieces and Pictorial Title-Pages
- Wilkie Collins's No Name (1862): Charles Dickens, Sheridan's The Rivals, and the Lost Franklin Expedition
- "The Law of Abduction": Marriage and Divorce in Victorian Sensation and Mission Novels
- Gordon Thomson's A Poser from Fun (5 April 1862)
- Kate Egan's Playthings to Men: Women, Power, and Money in Gaskell and Trollope
- Philip V. Allingham, The Victorian Sensation Novel, 1860-1880 — "preaching to the nerves instead of the judgment"
Image scans and text by Philip V. Allingham. [You may use the images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned them and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
Bibliography
Blain, Virginia. “Introduction” and “Explanatory Notes” to Wilkie Collins's No Name. Oxford World's Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
