Wilkie Collins: A Literary Life (review)

Graham Law and Andrew Maunder have pooled their considerable knowledge about—and enthusiasm for—Wilkie Collins, the sensation novel, and nineteenth-century print culture to produce a very useful addition to the Palgrave Macmillan Literary Lives series. Combining original scholarship on Collins’s negotiation of the Victorian literary marketplace with lively readings of his fiction that also give a clear sense of recent trends both in Collins criticism and work on nineteenth-century popular fiction, the book serves equally well as an introduction to or an update on Collins and his literary and cultural contexts.

The opening overview of Collins’s education, reading, and the circles in which he moved as a young literary aspirant compares his social circumstances with those of other popular authors of the day (a comparison that might have been done more elegantly than in bullet-pointed potted biographies) and suggests that his class position, sporadic formal education, and “choice of lifestyle in adulthood” were not uncommon among such writers (10)—although significantly different from the (usually) Oxbridge-educated reviewers of their novels. A rather less effective comparison of Collins’s library with that of G. H. Lewes and George Eliot is used to demonstrate Collins’s rather unsurprising preference (both relative to Lewes and Eliot and absolutely) for narrative and dramatic books and for contemporary popular works; perhaps more surprising, given Collins’s interest in unusual psychological and physical states that has preoccupied many recent writers on his fiction, is the observation that he owned very few books on these matters.

The contexts of Collins’s formation and development as a writer are explored further in two very informative chapters on the earlier Victorian literary marketplace and Collins’s work as a journalist, and in two later chapters on “Collins Overseas” (his travels abroad, use of foreign settings, fictional engagement with the European political situation, and the marketing of the author and his work in America), and on his changing fortunes in the later-Victorian literary marketplace. The chapter on Collins as a journalist is particularly useful in identifying some hitherto unattributed pieces and showing how his extensive work for periodicals from the early 1850s enabled him to develop “the innovative mix of story-telling techniques” (59), which he was to exploit in the novels that bought him success and fame in the 1860s. This chapter also addresses the issue of Collins’s supposed decline into didacticism in his later years, suggesting that it was only when he ceased to contribute so regularly to periodicals that his lifelong preoccupation with social questions needed to find its outlet in fiction with a mission.

Just under half of the book is devoted to a critical exploration of Collins’s novels and plays. Two thematic chapters, “Collins and London” and “Collins and Women” are used as vehicles for discussing the novels of the 1850s and 1860s. As well as examining the various ways in which Basil (1852), Hide and Seek (1854), and The Woman in White (1860) use their metropolitan setting, “Collins and London” explores how they tap into a mid-century cultural malaise and discusses them as examples of the bildungsroman, urban gothic, mystery novel, thriller, and also, in the case of Basil and The Woman in White, as sensation novels (this is particularly well handled). “Collins and Women” glances at his views on and relationships with women as a prelude to focusing on his fictional treatment of women, female subjectivity, and gender relations in discussions of No Name (1862), which is read in relation to Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861); the treatment of Lydia Gwilt in Armadale (1866), the only one of Collins’s novels to be published in an upmarket illustrated monthly magazine (the Cornhill) and a novel whose concern with adultery, illegitimacy, poisoning, blackmail, insanity, and homosexuality seemed “aimed at a rather different magazine” (90); and The Moonstone (1868), which seems to be smuggled in...