I was given this book for Christmas by a good friend of mine and this old edition was published in the early 20th century. I’m not the kind of girl who just likes to collect old books purely because they are old. It has to be something that I want to read – and anything by Collins will fall into this category. The pleasure I get from reading old books is wondering who else has read it before me. Who were they? When did they read it? Did they enjoy it? How did it come to be in my hands? I love thinking about all these questions almost as much as I enjoy actually reading the story..
No Name is another complex and intricate story from the marvellous imagination of Wilkie Collins. As with everything I read by Collins, I have to compare it to my favourite story The Woman in White, and again I have to say that I don’t think this one can surpass that either. Having said that, No Name is a very, very good story (it’s just that The Woman in White will always be great in my opinion!). Collins’s characters are, as always, well rounded, deep and believable.
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The story tells of the misfortunes of the Vanstone family, focusing primarily on the characters of Magdalen and Norah; two sisters. The Vanstone family live a well-off and comfortable existence in their family home of Combe-Raven in Somerset. One morning, on receiving a letter from New Orleans, Mr and Mrs Vanstone immediately make arrangements to travel to London offering no viable explanation for their visit except for reasons relating to Mrs Vanstone’s health as she is expecting a baby. After two weeks, they return and life at Combe-Raven returns to normal. Magdalen and her older sister Norah are as much complete opposite in character as they are able to be. Magdalen is the extrovert character; noisy, passionate, colourful and opinionated. Norah in comparison is quiet, reserved and accepts the course that life directs her in without question.
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A few weeks later Mr Vanstone is killed in a railway accident while returning on business, and Mrs Vanstone, reeling from the shock of her husband’s death and compounded by her ill-health and delicate pregnancy, dies a few days later. Her premature son also dies a few minutes later. Trust me, this son is significant! Distraught Norah and Magdalen, burdened enough by their triple death of their parents and brother, then find out that they have inadvertently and unintentionally disinherited by their fathers will. As it turns out, Mr and Mrs Vanstone were not married at the times when Magdalen and Norah were born because Mr Vanstone was married to someone else. The mysterious letter from New Orleans informed him that his wife has died and the equally mysterious errand to London was undertaken so that Mr and Mrs Vanstone could actually be married without anyone else’s knowledge. Thus they returned to Combe-Raven, legitimately husband and wife and no one was any the wiser. However, Mr Vanstone becoming married makes any provisions he made for his two daughters through a Will inconsequential until he makes a new one to reflect that he has married otherwise the law will automatically transfer his estate to his wife and any legitimate children he had. This is fails to do before his death and subsequently the estate passes from next-of-kin to next-of-kin until it ends up in the hands of his estranged brother. Although it was always Mr Vanstone’s intention to leave his estate to his two daughters, his brother does not honour this and casts Norah and Magdalen into the world with nothing but one hundred pounds each, and in the eyes of the law they are ‘nobody’s children’.
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The rest of the story follows Magdalen as she attempts to reclaim her father’s fortune in any way she can. She is essentially a good character, driven to extremes by the forces of her circumstances. She becomes unrelenting in her struggle to retrieve what has been lost to her and Norah, the resulting breakdown in her character is both heart-breaking and dreadful to witness. Fortunately there is a happy resolution for all (yay!), in a manner not anticipated by anyone, least of all Magdalen. The circumstances in which the Combe-Raven money is returned to Norah and Magdalen highlights the fight of good over evil. The suffering which Magdalen inflicts upon herself and others in the tunnel-vision of her plight is brought into sharp contrast at the end by the actions and nature of her elder sister.
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I think that one of reasons that I didn’t enjoy this as much as The Woman in White or The Moonstone is because I’m a bit of an old romantic and a sucker for a love story. But even three quarters of the way through this there was still no sign of a worthy suitor for Magdalen’s affections. In fact, it’s very hard plant your flag of support in completely in Magdalen’s corner anyway, such are the lengths of cunning and scheming her ideas go to. However, there is no doubt that her naturally fiery nature and the circumstances under which her fortune was stripped from her elicit sympathy to her cause. You can’t help but hope that she eventually gets what she had worked so hard and sacrificed so much for.
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I have read in the past that Collins, being taught in law himself, was not in agreement with the class system evidently apparent in Victorian times and the sympathy with which he treats his characters of all levels in his novels is communicative of this. The laws then which led innocent children to pay the price of their parents mistakes was obviously something he endeavoured to bring to the readers attention when he wrote No Name. The barbarousness (is that a word?!) of a law which cast out children who were evidently loved by their parents because it saw them as ‘illegitimate’ was clearly something which he had strong feelings on. No Name is a very good story in which the inadequacies of a time and a class society evident in the 19th Century are highlighted extremely well. A definite good read for anyone who loves an intricate plot full of twists and turns.
