Wilkie Collins: A Literary Life (review)

As part of Palgrave's biographical Literary Lives series, Wilkie Collins: A Literary Life offers an account of the personal, literary, and cultural influences which shaped the writing, and writing life, of Wilkie Collins. Coauthors Graham Law and Andrew Maunder make frequent use of well-respected biographical and bibliographical works on Collins in order to form their own reading of his literary life. These include William Baker's Wilkie Collins's Library: A Reconstruction, Catherine Peters's biography, The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins, and the most recent collection of Collins's letters, The Public Face of Wilkie Collins, which Law coedited with Baker, Andrew Gasson, and Paul Lewis. (Law is also editor of the Wilkie Collins Society Journal, which is often the first publisher of newly discovered Collins information and material.) This makes for an up-to-date and well-informed interpretation of Collins's literary practices, and also of the changing publishing world of which he was a part for many decades.

Law and Maunder have chosen to arrange the book thematically, but in such a way as to maintain a roughly chronological treatment of Collins's works. This proves more successful on some occasions than on others. Chapter 7 on "Collins and the Theatre," for example, gives an excellent summary of many of the plays (both original and adaptations from his novels) that Collins wrote from the 1850s to the 1870s. This includes descriptions of the composition, performance, and reception of little-known works such as Black and White (1869). Contrastingly, Chapter 5 on "Collins and London" makes some interesting observations about Collins's depictions of the metropolis, but the chapter is essentially an opportunity to discuss more general themes in Basil (1852), Hide and Seek (1854), and The Woman in White (1860). This chapter and the following one, "Collins and Women"—covering No Name (1862), Armadale (1866), and The Moonstone (1868)—provide an overview of Collins's most famous works and the related issues which have most engaged modern critics (such as representations of class and gender), but they are also the least original. Whilst these chapters will be useful to students approaching Collins for the first time, others are far more interesting and also more relevant to people with an interest in Victorian publishing circles and the periodical press.

The book begins with a summary of Collins's early years and education, showing how his reading practices and preferences influenced his fiction. Chapters 2 through 4 cover Collins's time as an aspiring author and journalist, including his time in the "young journalistic set forming around Dickens in the 1850s" (31). Although his relationship with Dickens is necessarily a major part of these early chapters, plenty of attention is also given to Collins's work for periodicals such as The Leader. These chapters give a clear sense of the 1850s literary marketplace, touching on aspects such as the circulating libraries and the great increase in periodical publications. Useful comparisons are drawn between Collins and other young writers of the time who became central figures of the Victorian journalistic world, such as G.A. Sala and Edmund Yates. These earlier chapters therefore provide a good survey of, and introduction to, Collins's role as a contributor to the Victorian periodical press, and suggest how his experiences with it influenced his fiction, both then and in later years.

The second half of this book is particularly strong, as it turns to Collins's later, less-studied works, such as The New Magdalen (1873) and The Evil Genius (1886). Throughout, Law and Maunder give attention to the publishing practices of Collins, other authors, publishing houses, and periodicals in both Britain and America. They explore the difficulties that Collins faced in a changing literary world and offer comparisons with other (often little-known) authors, such as Fred Fargus (Hugh Conway).

There are some unfortunate oversights in proofreading which could cause confusion. For example, on one occasion the publication date for...