“ Allan called out, encouragingly, to Midwinter, still walking to and fro on the deck, strangely indifferent to all that was passing above and beyond him. “Look out for the answering, hail!” And with his face set toward the islet, Allan shouted for help. The shout was not answered, but mimicked with a shrill, shrieking derision, with wilder and wilder cries, rising out of the deep distant darkness, and mingling horribly the expression of a human voice with the sound of a brute’s. A sudden suspicion crossed Allan’s mind, which made his head swim and turned his hand cold as it held the rigging. ”
Wilkie Collins
Summary
Wilkie Collins’ Armadale (1866), the third of his renowned 1860s novels, tells a story of identity, destiny, and moral uncertainty through two men named Allan Armadale—sons of rival murderers—whose entangled lives reveal secrets of treachery and legacy. Set in rural England and marked by a dramatic shipwreck, the novel introduces the scheming Lydia Gwilt, whose plots to gain riches and exact revenge propel the narrative.
Serialized in Cornhill Magazine, it delves into themes of remorse, foreboding, and social pretense, reaching a climax where personal integrity challenges cold ambition. Collins’ complex storytelling, incorporating letters and diary entries, highlights the conflict between logic and destiny.
Quotes from Armadale (Wilkie Collins)
Wilkie Collins,
Armadale
(1864)
“ The re-beginning of one’s life, at the re-beginning of every day, has already been something weary and hopeless to me for years past. I dreamed, too, all through the night—not of Midwinter and of my married life, as I had hoped to dream—but of the wretched conspiracy to discover me, by which I have been driven from one place to another, like a hunted animal. Nothing in the shape of a new revelation enlightened me in my sleep. All I could guess dreaming was what I had guessed waking, that Mother Oldershaw is the enemy who is attacking me in the dark. ”
“ Early on the morning after his first night’s rest at Thorpe Ambrose, Allan rose and surveyed the prospect from his bedroom window, lost in the dense mental bewilderment of feeling himself to be a stranger in his own house. The bedroom looked out over the great front door, with its portico, its terrace and flight of steps beyond, and, further still, the broad sweep of the well-timbered park to close the view. The morning mist nestled lightly about the distant trees; and the cows were feeding sociably, close to the iron fence which railed off the park from the drive in front of the house. ”
