Comments & Queries

Comments & Queries are welcome via e-mail. Our address is victstu@indiana.edu.

On the Cover is a detail from "A Shilling Well Laid Out: Tom and Jerry at the Exhibition of Pictures at the Royal Academy" by Isaac Robert Cruikshank and George Cruikshank, from Life in London by Pierce Egan (London: Sherwood, Neely and Jones, 1821), facing p. 341. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Announcement: I would like to report the discovery and republication of a short story by Wilkie Collins that predates all his previously known works. "Volpurno—or the Student," an 1800–word story credited to "W. Wilkie Collins," appeared in The Albion, or British, Colonial and Foreign Weekly Gazette (New York) on 8 July 1843, and was reprinted in at least three additional US periodicals that year. Although these periodicals indicate that the story was first published in Britain, the original source remains unidentified. A story of madness and mourning set in Venice, "Volpurno" is influenced most obviously by Frankenstein and anticipates aspects of later works by Collins, in particular The Woman in White; elements of the story are also echoed in Wuthering Heights. The story appears, with an introduction by me, in the Times Literary Supplement, 2 January 2009 (p. 14–15).