Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Victorian Authorship (review)

Lillian Nayder has a fascinating subject in the collaborative writings of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Collaboration in the Early Modern period has received much recent critical attention, but, as she argues, in the Victorian period the practice raised different issues. It was in conflict with the dominant construction of authorship as heroic individual creativity, and with the related legal campaigns for the protection of individual intellectual property. Later critics have mostly followed the Victorians in sidestepping or denigrating collaboration, and Nayder's study highlights the importance of a practice that was habitual in the theatre and in journalism, and central to the working lives of two great novelists. Between 1855 and 1868 Dickens and Collins collaborated on novellas and series for the journals Dickens edited, and on plays. Their partnership thus offers rich opportunities to examine how collaboration worked in the Victorian context. Moreover, more than with the later and partially comparable example of Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, there is a substantial body of collaborative writing through which to estimate the contribution to their individual works.

Nayder's grounding of the partnership in the material conditions of Victorian publishing is valuable. She concentrates on two periods, the works of 1856 to 1857, and the last collaboration, No Thoroughfare (1867), and traces in detail, in the context of struggles for professional status in the Victorian literary market, Dickens's editorial practices, and Collins's determined efforts to enhance his status as individual writer. It is a gripping story, and, in Nayder's interpretation, one of exploitation by Dickens, whose "editorial practices worked to the disadvantage of his subordinates" (14), and of increasing resentment by Collins. These tensions, she argues, were exacerbated by political differences. The collaborative writings were "largely designed to discredit expressions of labour unrest and resentment among English workers as well as attempts to gain legal rights and employment for women" (7). Meanwhile, in his sections, Dickens's reluctant partner struggled to express his radical sympathies by systematic subversion of Dickens's political strategies. The key text here is The Perils of Certain English Prisoners (1857), always the most discussed of the collaborations. There is no defending the violence of Dickens's reaction to the Indian rebellion, and Nayder discusses it with reference to contemporary press hysteria and racism. Collins's section is distinct and otherwise occupied. However, Perils is a misleading model. Nayder's discussion of other texts assumes that Dickens always had a directly propagandist design, from which Collins dissented in clearly attributed sections. Her arguments, for example, for the thematic centrality of disaffected labour to The Lazy Tour (1857), or of racism and fear of female dominance in No Thoroughfare, are ingenious and detailed, but extremely tenuous. It is difficult, moreover, to see how the partnership could have lasted so long on the basis of inveterate hostility. Nayder allows little possibility that Collins's radicalism may have attracted Dickens. She twice cites, as exemplary of his conservative distrust, his injunction to William Wills, his deputy editor on Household Words, to tone down Collins's article, "Highly Proper," if necessary. In fact, Dickens, in another letter of 6 September 1858, initiated the topic, outlined it, assigned it to his most radical staffer, and urged him to show contempt. This was typical of Dickens's use of Collins as resident kite-flyer in his journals.

Nayder's tough-minded recognition of the competitive struggle in the literary market includes a scepticism about the positive values of collaboration as great as you might expect from the most convinced believer in art as the product of solitary genius. In her account, the collaboration was a continual battle over property rights (which was certainly part of it), and between monolithically opposed ideas, with no area for exchange or cooperation. She is interested in the material conditions of copyright holders, but not...