The woman in white; Caroline Graves ( c. 1830-1895) Kensal Green Cemetery

 

As a young man Collins probably had his romantic experiences those "intimacies" to which the Dictionary of National Biography rather ambiguously refers. But when he was thirty-five and seemingly a confirmed bachelor, he formed an attachment with a married woman ten years his junior, which greatly influenced his life and about which he remained steadfastly and discreetly silent to all but his closest friends. It began with a queerly dramatic encounter. One summer evening in 1859 Wilkie and his brother Charles were accompanying Millais, the artist, back to his house in Gower Street after he had dined with them at Hanover Terrace, Regent's Park, when suddenly they were startled by a shriek from a near-by house and the appearance of in Millais's words "a young and very beautiful woman" dressed in white arid obviously terrified. She darted off and Wilkie, his curiosity and chivalrous instincts aroused, followed her into the darkness and his companions saw him no more that night. On his return next day he was rather quiet about the episode, but it seemed that he had caught up with the lady in distress and extracted from her a woeful tale of imprisonment and maltreatment by a villain in a Regent's Park villa, and of final desperate escape. While it was obvious that the fair fugitive and her plight had impressed Collins, his friends could not have guessed that he would fall head over heels in love with her. Yet this is what happened.

Britannia and Eve - Friday 01 February 1952

It was the son of the artist Millais who was responsible for perpetuating, in print at least, this heavily romanticised version of the first meeting between Wilkie Collins and Caroline Graves. No doubt the painter had been repeating the story in drawing rooms and salons for years, in front of audiences of sceptical listeners who took it with the pinch of salt it deserves. But by including the fantastic episode in his biography of his father, ‘The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais’, John Guille Millais lent it that spurious credibility which repetition in print can create for even the silliest rumours. Creating a mysterious backstory for the lower-class girl from Gloucestershire would have suited Caroline who was doing her best to do exactly the same. Caroline was not her real name (she had been christened Elizabeth), she lied about her age, she said her father was a man Courteney, and claimed her first husband, George Robert Graves, was a man of independent means. In reality she the daughter of a carpenter called John Compton, had married the penniless Graves when she was 18 and then moved to Bath and ten Clerkenwell with him and his mother. George Graves died when Caroline was just 18 and left her in straitened circumstances with a young baby to look after. How Caroline managed to scrape a living over the next four years we do not know but in 1856 the 26-year-old Caroline met Wilkie Collins in circumstances no doubt much less melodramatic than those claimed by Millais all those years later.

Although she is not mentioned on the headstone, Wilkie Collins is buried with his mistress Caroline Graves. Although the pair lived together for the best part of thirty years, Wilkie always refused to marry Caroline. Even worse after a decade of living ‘in sin’ with Caroline, Wilkie started another relationship with a younger woman called Martha Rudd with whom he went on to have three children.  This caused a rift in his relationship with Caroline and she left Wilkie to marry a plumber called Joseph Clow. The wedding took place on the 29th October 1868 at St Marylebone Church.  The witnesses were Caroline’s daughter Elizabeth and Francis Carr Beard, a doctor and close friend and medical advisor to both Wilkie and his best friend Charles Dickens (and also buried at Kensal Green). Wilkie was also present at the ceremony! The marriage did not last; within two years Caroline was back living with Wilkie who now had to maintain two separate households for the two women in his life. When he died in 1889 Wilkie left clear instructions about the disposal of his remains; a plot was to be bought at Kensal Green and a plain stone cross erected over the grave. No scarves, hatbands or feathers were to be worn and the cost of the funeral was not to exceed £25. He also wrote the inscription on the gravestone. The funeral was not well attended, Wilkies unusual domestic arrangements were simply too scandalous for most of his friends and acquaintances to contemplate attending. Caroline attended the funeral but Martha did not, she had to content herself with sending a wreath of white flowers. When Caroline died in 1895 she was buried with Wilkie;  Martha took over looking after the grave.

'Who hath no wife, he is no cuckold'; George Hill (1802-1864) Kensal Green Cemetery

 

Was George Hill as dull as his epitaph suggests? It is not unusual for memorial inscriptions to mention the grave occupant’s occupation but very few are as exclusively focused on career achievements as George’s. “For upwards of 30 years the deceased was an esteemed and valued member of the local civil service in the Bengal residency,” it says. This about as much as we would normally want to know about George’s life in the Colonial Civil Service but he wants us to also know that the Government of India, no less, “were pleased in several dispatches to the court of directors to bear testimony to his public worth.” Very good, lets move on. “He was, moreover, for many years secretary to the retiring fund established by the medical officers of the Bengal Army.” Very interesting George, how about your family? “And during his incumbency he so materially enhanced and consolidated the permanent interests of that institution…” - did you have a wife, George? Children? - “that his resignation was the subject of general regret…” I don’t think so George. I bet they couldn’t wait to see the back of you, you old bore. We get his dates; born 20th October 1802, died 24th August 1864 and, in the first snippet of any interest, his place of death; ‘the Palace Hotel, Buckingham Gate, SW.’ but otherwise George’s summation of his life is a tedious recital of his CV, as though he was applying for a middle management position in Paradise.

Although he doesn’t mention him George’s son is also buried here, George Hill Junior, his ‘second son’ according to his epitaph on a side panel of the memorial, who apparently followed his father into the Bengal Civil Service before becoming the Senior Lieutenant in the 1st [West] Norfolk Regiment of Militia before “seriously impaired sight compelled him very early in life to relinquish public employment.” Although he deliberately chose not to mention it, George Hill senior was in fact married twice, the first time tragically, the second time scandalously, and was the father of 9 children. Traumatised, particularly by his second wife, at the end of his life an embittered George apparently preferred to dwell on the meagre satisfactions of his career rather than recall a troubling and chaotic domestic life.

Despite my best efforts I have not been able to find out anything about George Hill’s origins. I have not been able to trace a birth record in either the UK or India. In 1828 he was initiated as a Freemason in the Aurora Lodge, Candour and Cordiality in Calcutta. His profession was listed as merchant. Two years later when the Aurora Lodge merged with the Lodge of True Friendship, George had embarked on his civil service career and gave his profession as General Treasury. He was already a married man at the time of his initiation into the Masons having married Evelina Virginia Howe at St John’s church (then a cathedral) on 10 May 1827; the groom was 25 at the time of the marriage, the bride 22. Evelina was already a third generation Anglo-Indian; her paternal grandfather had been born in Nottingham and moved to India to serve in the Bengal presidency army. In India he lived for 10 years with an Irish woman called Margaret Shaw and had three illegitimate children with her including Evelina’s father, before he married her in 1786. He had two more children with Margaret and then oddly, married her for a second time in 1806. Evelina’s own family was large and thoroughly Anglo-Indian family; both her her parents had been born in Calcutta and she had 8 brothers and sisters. Evelina and George wasted no time in starting their own family; they were married in May, Evelina became pregnant in June and their first child, Mary Letitia was born on Match 17th the following year. Tragically she only lived 4 months and 21 days, dying on the 8th August 1828. Initially Evelina produced babies almost at the rate of one a year, after Mary Letitia in 1828 came eldest son Stuart, born in 1829, and George junior in 1830 and daughter Theodosia in 1831. Theodosia died before she was three, in 1834. There were three more surviving children, John Alexander in 1835, Latitia in 1836 and Octavious William in 1838 though John Alexander died in 1839 when he was four. In November 1841 Evelina gave birth to a still born girl and on the 5th January 1844 her eleventh and final child, a boy, was also still born. Evelina died herself six days later of a post-partum infection, worn out by childbearing and heartache no doubt. Unlike George’s dry epitaph, the epitaph on Evelina’s headstone in South Park Street Cemetery in Kolkata is heartbreaking.

Evelina Hill's epitaph on her memorial in the South Park Street burial ground in Calcutta (from 'The Bengal Obituary; A  compilation of tablets and monumental inscriptions from various parts of the Bengal and Agra presidencies' W. Thacker & Co London 1851)   

According to Evelina’s epitaph her 6 surviving children were all in England whilst George, now 42 years old, remained alone in Calcutta. But not for long; he soon met another Anglo-Indian, a 21-year-old woman called Anna Maria Lyster, the daughter of “a distinguished officer in the Bengal Artillery” Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Hawtrey. Young as she was Anna Maria was already widow with a two-year-old daughter. The young widow was immensely attractive but penniless and in need of a protector.  George was older, his children were far away in England and he ‘held a lucrative appointment, as head assistant to the Military Board of the Accountant General's Office’. He was not the most exciting catch but he offered stability. The couple were married at St Johns on 16th January 1847, the groom 20 years older than the bride. According to an account of Anna Maria’s divorce petition in the London Evening Standard of Friday 22 July 1864 “the union, from an early period, was a very unhappy one.” Anna Maria had secrets, which she claimed to have divulged to George on the eve of their wedding; the groom “said he would take a day to consider before he decided but he then agreed to marry her notwithstanding what had occurred.” This the Evening Standard’s version of what Anna Maria told George;

It appeared that Colonel Hawtrey died several years ago, leaving a widow, a son, who was in the Indian army, and the petitioner and another daughter. After his decease the widow, who was left in limited circumstances, came to England with her daughters, and while staying at Margate formed the acquaintance of a Colonel Lyster, to whom the petitioner, then almost a child, was married in 1847, and by whom she had a daughter, which is still living. It was discovered that Colonel Lyster, who is dead, had a wife at the time he contracted this marriage.

According to her, Anna Maria’s marriage had been contracted ‘in a room’ in Wales and unsurprisingly no official record of it exists. She continued to live with Colonel Lyster until his death in 1846 when she returned to India.

South Park Street Cemetery, Kolkata from Kevin Standage's wonderful blog 

George “was of a jealous and suspicious character, and frequent altercations took place between him and” Anna Mara according to the Newspaper but despite this Anna Maria bore him two children, a boy named George after his father and a daughter Alice. The rift between the couple became open when George decided to return to England with his young family:

Sometime after the marriage they left India for England, but in consequence of differences on the voyage the petitioner refused to accompany her husband further than Mauritius, where she remained for some time, but ultimately returned to England and took up her residence with her friends. It was at the period of this rupture between the parties that the first adultery was alleged to have taken place with a Lieutenant Hickey. Sometime after her return to England she was induced by the respondent to resume cohabitation with him, and they continued to live together until 1857. In that year she accompanied him to Folkestone, on his way to Germany, when he told her that he had altered his mind about taking her with him abroad, and desired her to go with the children to Sandgate, and remain there until he returned in about a week or fortnight. While she was staying there he addressed a most offensive letter to a policeman in that neighbourhood, asking to be informed how she conducted herself since his departure. On her return to England he agreed to allow her £100. a year, but refused to live with her, but the allowance was sometimes not paid in full.

Anna Maria petitioned for a divorce on the grounds that George had deserted her and that he was not paying alimony as previously agreed. George contested the divorce and the case was heard, in front of a jury, at Westminster by Judge Sir James Wilde. George’s case was that he had not deserted Anna Maria but had separated from her because of her unreasonable behaviour. She had, he claimed, been unfaithful to him with two different men; she had committed adultery with Lieutenant Hickey on board the steam ship Argo on the voyage between Calcutta and Mauritius, and in England she had conducted a ‘clandestine intimacy’ with a Mr Edward Warwick, an unmarried man, at his chambers in Regent Street and ‘at diverse other places’. In George’s version of events after separating at Mauritius Anna Maria had followed him to London and begged him to take her back, saying that she was not guilty of infidelity as George thought. George took her back but then “not withstanding his kindness” Anna Maria was treated him with “insolence and neglect, exhibited towards him great violence of temper and on some occasions violently assaulted him, pulled his hair and threw divers missiles at him.” She also frequently absented herself from home and refused to say where she had been. The petition also includes a copy of an incriminating letter from Lieutenant Hickey addressed to ‘My own darling’. George claimed that when the Argo arrived in Mauritius Anna Maria went with Hickey to a hotel for the day and never returned to the ship leaving him to travel on alone with their daughter.  According to the Evening Standard after listening to all this “the learned judge said that there was no chance of these parties living together, and suggested that a private arrangement should be made between them which would render the scandal of further proceedings unnecessary. The counsel then retired, and after about an hour's absence an arrangement was made and the proceedings terminated.”

One can only imagine the toll these humiliating court proceedings took on George and Anna Maria. It must have been bad enough in court in front of the judge and jury but then to see lurid details printed in the newspapers in the following days. Anna Maria strikes one as being the more robust character. She lived until 1897, surviving not only her husband but her son and daughter. George on the other hand didn’t live more than another month, dying of a seizure in his hotel room at the Palace Hotel in Buckingham Gate. 

The Palace Hotel, Westminster where George died in 1864.