Biography
A pencil drawing of the author titled “Wilkie Collins by his father William Collins, R. A.” survives; it shows a pretty, if serious, round face. The features beneath the end of the boy’s nose are shaded, giving particular prominence to the upper face and forehead. The viewer is at once drawn to the boy’s eyes; they are large, probing, mysterious—hardly the eyes of a child. Perhaps the artist-father sought to impart to his elder son some of his own austere, pious nature. William Collins (1788-1847), whose life began on the verge of one great European revolution and ended on the verge of another, was no revolutionary himself, nor was he the bohemian others of his calling imagined themselves. Instead, he was a strict Sabbatarian, an individual who overcame by talent and perseverance the disadvantages of poverty. The novelist’s paternal grandfather was an art dealer, a restorer, and a storyteller who lovingly trained and cajoled his son in painting and drawing. William Collins did not begin to taste success until several years after the death of his father in 1812, but gradually commissions and patrons did come, including Sir Robert Peel. Befriended by noted artists such as Sir David Wilkie and Washington Allston, William Collins was at last elected to the Royal Academy in 1820. Two years later, he married Harriet Geddes. The names of both of their sons, born in 1824 and 1828, respectively, honored fellow artists: William Wilkie Collins and Charles Allston Collins.
Little is known of Wilkie Collins’s early years, save that they appear to have been relatively tranquil. By 1833, Collins was already enrolled at Maida Hill Academy. In 1836, William Collins elected to take his family to Italy, where they remained until the late summer of 1838. The return to London required taking new lodgings at Regent’s Park, and the fourteen-year-old Wilkie Collins was sent to boarding school at Highbury. By the close of 1840, he was presumably finished with school. His father’s health began to fail, and the senior Collins made known his wish that Wilkie take holy orders, though the son apparently had no such inclination. The choice became university or commerce. Wilkie Collins chose business, and he became an apprentice to the tea merchants Antrobus and Company in 1841. He performed well there and was able to take a leave in order to accompany his father to Scotland the following summer. While still an apprentice, Collins began to write occasional pieces, and in August, 1843, the Illuminated Magazine published his first signed story, “The Last Stage Coachman.” A novel about Polynesia was also written but discarded. In 1844, Collins traveled to Paris with his friend Charles Ward, and he made a second visit in 1845. While William Collins’s health began to deteriorate more rapidly, his son was released from his apprenticeship and decided on the study of law. In February, 1847, William Collins died.
Wilkie Collins emulated his father’s self-discipline, industry, and especially his love of art and beauty, yet if one judges by the series of self-serving religious zealots who populate Collins’s fiction, one must assume that, while he respected his father’s artistic sensibilities, he did not admire his pious ardor. Instead, Wilkie Collins seems in most things to have taken the example of his mother, a woman of loving good nature and humor with whom both he and his brother Charles remained close until her death. Nevertheless, William Collins near the end of his life had asked Wilkie to write his biography, providing the opportunity for the young man’s first published book, Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, R. A., published in 1848 in two volumes. While the narrator tends toward self-effacement and burdens his readers with minute detail, the work is nevertheless a formidable accomplishment. His research in preparing the book led Collins into correspondence with the American writer Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and with a circle of established and rising artists, including E. M. Ward (brother of his friend Charles), Augustus Egg, John Everett Millais, Holman Hunt, and the Rossettis. At this time, Collins completed his historical novel Antonina, which is filled with gothic violence and adventure, a work that attracted the serious attention of John Ruskin. It was published in 1850, the same year that saw the production of Collins’s first publicly staged dramatic work, A Court Duel, which he had adapted from the French. With the success of his play and the surprisingly positive reception of Antonina, Collins began to enjoy a rising reputation.
In January, 1851, Richard Bentley published Collins’s account of a Cornwall hiking trip taken during the summer of 1850 as Rambles Beyond Railways. Two months later, Egg introduced the twenty-seven-year-old Collins to Dickens, and the initial contact resulted in Collins’s taking part in Dickens’s theatrical Not So Bad as We Seem: Or, Many Sides to a Character (pb. 1851), written by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Until Dickens’s death in 1870, he and Collins remained staunch friends, though there is some indication that there was friction between the two authors following Collins’s success with The Moonstone and Dickens’s supposed attempt to outdo his junior with his novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), which remained unfinished at Dickens’s death.
In 1852, after having tried to sell the version of a story that would become “Mad Monkton” to Dickens, Collins published the story “A Terribly Strange Bed” (anthologized often since) in Household Words, a magazine edited by Dickens from 1850 to 1859. The following years saw considerable collaboration between the two authors, not the least of which were Collins’s stories for the Christmas annuals such as Mr. Wray’s Cash-Box: Or, The Mask and the Mystery (1852), the collaboration The Seven Poor Travellers (1854), The Wreck of the Golden Mary (1856), a work often attributed to Dickens until the late twentieth century, the novel The Dead Secret, and numerous other stories and articles. In 1853, Collins, Dickens, and Egg traveled together in Italy and Switzerland. Four years later, Dickens produced Collins’s play The Frozen Deep, later noting that the self-sacrifice of the central character, Richard Wardour (played by Dickens), provided the germ for A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Although never published as a play, The Frozen Deep was published in 1866 as part of a collection of short stories.
The impact each had on the writing of the other has long been a topic of controversy and speculation for critics and biographers; generally unchallenged is the influence of Collins’s meticulous plotting on the work of his senior. In turn, Dickens often corrected and refined by suggestion Collins’s fiction, although he never agreed with Collins’s practice of including prefaces that upbraided critics and the public alike. When Collins published Basil (having included for Bentley’s publication in book form the first of those vexing prefaces), he forwarded the volume to Dickens. After a two-week silence, there came a thoughtful, admiring reply: “I have made Basil’s acquaintance,” wrote Dickens at the end of 1852, “with great gratification, and entertain high respect for him. I hope that I shall become intimate with many worthy descendants of his, who are yet in the limbo of creatures waiting to be born.” Collins did not disappoint Dickens on that count over their years of friendship and collaboration; indeed, they became “family” when Charles Allston Collins married Dickens’s daughter Kate.
Household Words faded in 1859 along with Dickens’s association with the publishers Bradbury and Evans. Dickens’s new periodical, All the Year Round (1859-1870), began auspiciously with the publication of A Tale of Two Cities. After the run of that novel, he needed something to keep public interest in the new magazine from abating, and Collins provided it with The Woman in White. This work’s monumental success put Collins into that rarest literary circle: that of well-to-do authors. Its success also coincided with important personal events in Collins’s life.
Collins had lived the life of a bachelor, residing with his brother and mother at least into his early thirties. Their house was often open to guests. On one such evening, the author and his brother escorted home the artist John Everett Millais through then-rural North London. Suddenly, a woman appeared to them in the moonlight, attired in flowing robes, all in white. Though distraught, she regained her composure and vanished as quickly as she had appeared. The author was most astounded and insisted he would discover the identity of the lovely creature. J. G. Millais, the painter’s son, who later narrated this anecdote in a life of his father, did not reveal the lady’s ultimate identity, saying, “Her subsequent history, interesting as it is, is not for these pages.” The woman was Caroline Elizabeth Graves, born 1834, mother of a little girl, Harriet. Her husband, G. R. Graves, may or may not have been dead. Of him, only his name is known. Clearly, however, the liaison between Caroline Graves and Wilkie Collins was fully under way when he began to write The Woman in White.
From at least 1859, the couple lived together in a secret relationship known only to their closest friends, until the autumn of 1868, when for obscure reasons Caroline married the son of a distiller, John C. Clow. Collins, not one to waste time, started a new liaison with Martha Rudd. This union produced three children: Marian (1869), Harriet Constance (1871), and William Charles (1874). The children took the surname Dawson, but Collins freely admitted his paternity. By this time, too, Caroline and her daughter returned, and Harriet Graves for a time served as her mother’s lover’s amanuensis; Collins adopted her as his daughter. A lover of hearty food, fine champagne, and good cigars, Collins appears to have lived in private a life that would have shocked many of his readers. Still, Collins treated his “morganatic family” quite well: He provided handsomely for his natural and adopted children and for their mothers. When she died in 1895 at age sixty-one, Caroline Elizabeth Graves was interred beside the author of The Woman in White.
As Collins’s private life began taking on its unconventional proportions in the 1860’s, his public career grew more distinguished. His output for All the Year Round in shorter forms declined; he simply did not need the money. In March, 1861, his novel No Name, a didactic work about inheritance, began its run in the magazine; it was published in volume form in December, 1862. A year later, Collins resigned his editorial assignment for Dickens’s periodical and also published, with Sampson Low, Son, and Company, My Miscellanies, bringing together, in two volumes, work that had first appeared in the two Dickens periodicals. After about seven years of almost obsessive productivity, Collins relented, but only for a time; he began his novel Armadale in the spring of 1864, for serial publication in the Cornhill Magazine in Britain and Harper’s Monthly in the United States. This exploration of inherited and personal guilt remains one of Collins’s most adept and popular novels; it is also his longest. He wrote a dramatic version of the novel in 1866, but the play was not produced until it appeared in 1876 as Miss Gwilt.
In 1867, Collins and Dickens began their last collaboration, the play No Thoroughfare (pr., pb. 1867), an adventure set in the Alps and perhaps not unaffected by the two men’s shared Swiss journey many years before. By this time, too, Collins began to suffer tremendously from the good living he had long enjoyed—gout of the areas around the eyes caused him excruciating pain, requiring the application of bandages for weeks at a time. To allay the ache, Collins developed a habit for laudanum, that tincture of opium that fills the darker recesses of middle-Victorian culture. It was in this period of alternating pain and bliss that Collins penned The Moonstone, for All the Year Round, beginning in January, 1868. The novel was an uncontestable triumph; Collins himself thought it wonderfully wrought.
The Moonstone had hardly begun its run, however, when Collins’s mother died, and later that same year, Caroline married Clow. When the novel was finished, Collins again turned to the stage, writing Black and White with his friend Charles Fechter, an actor; the play successfully opened in March, 1869. At the end of the year, the serialization of Man and Wife began in Harper’s Weekly and in January, 1870, in Cassell’s Magazine. Posterity has judged Man and Wife more harshly than did its first readers. It was a different kind of novel from The Moonstone: It attacked society’s growing obsession with athleticism and castigated marital laws that Collins believed to be cruel, unfair, and unrealistic. According to Collins’s modern biographer Kenneth Robinson, Man and Wife was the turning point in Collins’s career, the start of the “downhill” phase of the writer’s life. The novel sold well after its serialization; Collins also wrote a four-act dramatic version that was not produced on the stage until 1873.
At the same time, Collins adapted No Name for the theater and, in 1871, The Woman in White. The stage version of The Woman in White opened at the Olympic Theatre in October and ran for five months before going on tour. The same year saw the beginning of a new novel in serial form, Poor Miss Finch, about a blind woman who falls in love with an epileptic whose cure turns him blue. When she is temporarily cured of her affliction, she finds herself in a dilemma about her blue lover, whose healthy twin also desires her love. A year later, the indefatigable Collins published The New Magdalen in a magazine called Temple Bar; the novel’s heroine, a virtuous prostitute, outraged contemporary critics, but the work’s dramatization in 1873 was greeted with enthusiasm.
As his work increasingly turned to exposing social hypocrisies, Collins sought, as a writer of established repute, to regulate the body of his published work. Since Basil, wholesale piracy of his writings had angered him and hurt his finances. By the early 1870’s, he had reached agreements with the German publisher Tauchnitz and with Harper & Brothers in the United States, and, by 1875, with Chatto & Windus in Britain. Chatto & Windus not only bought all extant copyrights to Collins’s work but also became his publisher for the rest of his life. This arrangement was finalized in the year after Collins, like his friend Dickens before him, had undertaken a reading tour of the United States and Canada.
The years 1875 and 1876 saw the publication of two popular but lesser novels, The Law and the Lady and The Two Destinies. The next year was marked, however, by the successful dramatization of The Moonstone and the beginning of Collins’s friendship with Charles Reade. In 1879, Collins wrote The Haunted Hotel for the Belgravia Magazine, a ghost story fresh in invention that extends one’s notions about the genre. Meanwhile, however, Collins’s health became less certain and his laudanum doses became more frequent and increasingly potent. The decade took away many close friends, beginning with Dickens and, later, his brother Charles, then Augustus Egg.
In the last decade of his life, Collins became more reclusive, although not much less productive. He adapted his 1858 play The Red Vial into the novel Jezebel’s Daughter. He also began, for serialization in the Canadian Monthly, the novel The Black Robe, the central figure of which is a priest plotting to encumber the wealth of a large estate. This work has been regarded as the most successful of his longer, late novels. It was followed by a more controversial novel, Heart and Science, a polemic against vivisection that appeared in 1883. The same year saw Collins’s last theatrical work, Rank and Riches, an unqualified disaster that brought the leading lady to tears before the first-act curtain and that led her leading man, G. W. Anson, to berate the audience. Collins thereafter gave up writing for the stage, save a one-performance version of The Evil Genius in 1885; the work was quickly recast as a novel that proved his single most lucrative publication.
Although 1884 saw the passing of Reade, his closest friend of the time, Collins continued to write steadily. The Guilty River made its appearance in the Arrowsmith Christmas Annual for 1886; in 1887, Chatto & Windus published Little Novels, collecting earlier stories. Two works also appeared that ended the battle Collins had long waged with critics. A young man, Harry Quilter, published an encomiastic article for the Contemporary Review, “A Living Story-Teller.” Collins himself wrote “How I Write My Books” for the newspaper The Globe, an account of his work on The Woman in White. As his health at last began to fail precipitously in 1888, Collins completed his final serial novel, The Legacy of Cain. It appeared in three volumes the following year, at a time when he was finishing the writing of Blind Love for the Illustrated London News. On the evening of June 30, 1889, Collins suffered a stroke. He requested that Walter Besant, then traveling in the north, return and complete the tale.
Collins had long before befriended Dickens’s physician and neighbor, Frank Beard, who did what little could be done to comfort Collins in his final days. Just past midmorning on September 23, 1889, Wilkie Collins died, Beard at his bedside. Four days following his death, Collins was buried at Kensal Green; his procession was headed by Caroline Graves, Harriet Graves, and his surviving literary, theatrical, and household friends. Despite infirmities, Collins had lived a life long and full, remaining productive, industrious, and successful throughout his career.
Analysis
At its best, Wilkie Collins’s fiction is characterized by a transparent style that occasionally pleases and surprises the reader with an apt turn of word or phrase, by a genius for intricate plots, by a talent for characterization that in at least one instance must earn the epithet “Miltonic,” and by an eye for detail that seems to make the story worth telling. These are the talents of an individual who learned early to look at things like a painter, to see the meaning, the emotion behind the gesture or pose—a habit of observation that constituted William Collins’s finest bequest to his elder son.
Narrative style and plotting
The transparency of Collins’s style rests on his adherence to theconventions of the popular fiction of his day. More so than contemporaries, he talks to readers, cajoles them, often protesting that the author will recede into the shadows in order that readers may judge the action for themselves. The “games”—as one critic has observed—that Collins plays with readers revolve about his mazelike plots, his “ingenuous” interruptions of thenarrative, and his iterative language, symbolic names, and metaphors. Thus, at the beginning of “Mrs. Zant and the Ghost,” published in Little Novels, the narrator begins by insisting that this tale of “supernatural influence” occurs in the daylight hours, adding, “The writer declines to follow modern examples by thrusting himself and his opinions on the public view. He returns to the shadow from which he has emerged, and leaves the opposing forces of incredulity and belief to fight the old battle over again, on the old ground.” The apt word is “shadow,” for certainly, this story depicts a shadow world. At its close, when the preternatural events have occurred, the reader is left to assume a happy resolution between the near victim Mrs. Zant and her earthly rescuer, Mr. Rayburn, through the mood of the man’s daughter:
Arrived at the end of the journey, Lucy held fast by Mrs. Zant’s hand. Tears were rising in the child’s eyes. “Are we to bid her good-bye?” she said sadly to her father.
He seemed to be unwilling to trust himself to speak; he only said, “My dear, ask her yourself.”
But the result justified him. Lucy was happy again.
Here, Collins’s narrator has receded like Mrs. Zant’s supernatural protector, leaving the reader to hope and to expect that Mrs. Zant can again find love in this world.
This kind of exchange—direct and inferred—between author and reader can go in other directions. For example, when, near the middle of The Woman in White, one realizes that Count Fosco has read—as it were—over one’s shoulder the diary of Miss Halcolmbe, the author surely intends that one should feel violated while at the same time forced into collusion with the already attractive, formidable villain.
Because Collins’s style as narrator is so frequently self-effacing, it sustains the ingenuity of his plots. These are surely most elaborate in The Woman in White and The Moonstone. In both cases, Collins elects to have one figure, party to the main actions, assemble the materials of different narratives into cohesive form. It is a method far less tedious than that of epistolary novels and provides for both mystery and suspense. Although not the ostensible theme in either work, matters of self-identity and control over one’s behavior operate in the contest between virtue and vice, good and evil. Thus, Laura Fairlie’s identity is obliterated in an attempt to wrest from her her large fortune; thus, Franklin Blake, heavily drugged, unconsciously removes a gem that makes him the center of elaborate investigation. In each novel, the discovery of the actual circumstances restores identity to the character. The capacity to plot allows Collins to surprise his readers profoundly: In The Woman in White, one is astounded to be confronted by Laura Fairlie standing in the churchyard, above her own grave. In The Moonstone, one is baffled when the detective, Sergeant Cuff, provides a plausible solution to the theft of the diamond that turns out to be completely incorrect.
Collins’s novels of the 1860’s find the author having firmly established his transparent detachment from the subjects at hand, in turn giving full scope to his meticulous sense of plot. No Name and Armadale are no less complex in their respective actions than their more widely read counterparts. It is interesting to note, however, that all of these novels explore matters of identity and motive for action; they attest to Collins’s ability to relate popular tales that encompass more serious issues.
Characterization
Because he had a painter’s eye for detail, Collins was a master of characterization, even when it appears that a character is flat. Consider, for example, this passage from “Miss Dulane and My Lord,” published in Little Novels:
Mrs. Newsham, tall and elegant, painted and dyed, acted on the opposite principle in dressing, which confesses nothing. On exhibition before the world, this lady’s disguise asserted she had reached her thirtieth year on her last birthday. Her husband was discreetly silent, and Father Time was discreetly silent; they both knew that her last birthday had happened thirty years since.
Here an incidental figure in a minor tale remains fixed, the picture of one comically out of synchronization with her own manner; before she has uttered a syllable, one dislikes her. Consider, on the other hand, the initial appearance of a woman one will grow to like and admire, Marian Halcolmbe, as she makes her way to meet Walter Hartright in The Woman in White:
She turned towards me immediately. The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window—and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps—and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer—and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly!
This passage reveals not only Collins’s superb sense of pace, his ability to set a trap of astonished laughter, but also some of Hartright’s incorrect assumptions about the position he has taken at Limmeridge House; for example, that the two young women he will instruct are pampered, spoiled, and not worth his serious consideration. Preeminently, it shows the grace of Marian Halcombe, a grace that overcomes her lack of physical beauty in conventional senses and points to her indefatigable intelligence and loyalty, so crucial to future events in the novel. Marian is, too, a foil for her half sister, Laura Fairlie, the victim of the main crimes in the book. While one might easily dismiss Laura Fairlie with her name—she is fair and petite and very vulnerable—she also displays a quiet resilience and determination in the face of overwhelming adversaries.
The most memorable of Collins’s characters is Count Fosco in the same novel, whose name immediately suggests a bludgeon. Collins gives the job of describing Fosco to Marian Halcombe: “He looks like a man who could tame anything.” In his characterization of Fosco, Collins spawned an entire race of fat villains and, occasionally, fat detectives, such as Nero Wolfe and Gideon Fell. One is not surprised that Sydney Greenstreet played both Fosco and his descendant, Caspar Gutman, in the 1948 film version of The Woman in White and the 1941 film version of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1930). In one of his best speeches, Fosco reveals the nature of his hubris, his evil genius:
Crimes cause their own detection, do they?…there are foolish criminals who are discovered, and wise criminals who escape. The hiding of a crime, or the detection of a crime, what is it? A trial of skill between the police on one side, and the individual on the other. When the criminal is a brutal, ignorant fool, the police in nine cases out of ten win. When the criminal is a resolute, educated, highly-intelligent man, the police in nine cases out of ten lose.
In pitting decent people against others who manipulate the law and social conventions to impose their wills, Collins frequently creates characters more interesting for their deficiencies than for their virtues. His novels pit, sensationally at times, the unsuspecting, the infirm, or the unprepossessing against darker figures who are usually operating under the scope of social acceptance. Beneath the veneer of his fiction, one finds in Collins a continuing struggle to legitimate the illegitimate, to neutralize hypocrisy, and to subvert the public certainties of his era.