WORKS'S COMENTARY

Although best known to modern readers as the author of The woman in white (1860) and The Moonstone (1868) –which T.S. Eliot and Dorothy Sayers have called the best English detective story- Wilkie Collins made contributions more substantial than his current reputation indicates to the development of mistery and suspense fiction. As early as 1865 Henry James noted that Collins had "introduced into fiction those most mysterious of misteries, the misteries which are at our own doors". Writing before the detective story had become established as a genre and before it had hardened into formula, Collins was consideresd by contemporary reviewers a sensation novelist, and James’s comment singles out an innovation crucial to the creation of modern suspense fiction. Sensation fiction established an atmosphere of mistery and terror in realistic settings and relied upon factually accurate detail and believable characterization to give verisimilitude to often lurid plots. Collins shared the Victorian belief that fiction should be true to nature; and in the "Letter of Dedication" to Basil (1852) he wrote that he founded the novel "on a fact within my own knowledge" and stressed his adherence to the "actual" and to "everyday realities". In simultaneously enphasizing his reliance upon experience and retaining his prerogative to exercise his imagination and to include "those extraordinary accidents and events which happen to few men" as "legitimate materials for fiction", Collins fused the romantic and the realistic and provided a model for subsequent suspense and mystery fiction. His plotting was intricate and closely meshed.

Collin’s own background, which combined the artistic with the practical, proved ideal for this future career as an author.

In his biography this fact was definitive: the dead of his father actually marks the beginning of Collins’s literary career. Freed by inheritance of the necessity to earn a living, he first carried out William Collins’s request that he write a memorial of his life. Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., R.A. was published by subscription in 1848 and attracted favorable attention for its young author. The reception of his book undoubtedly owed more to the reputation and popularity of its subject than the skill of the biographer, but Collins wrote in a pleasant, unpretentious style and made ample use of dieries and letters to reveal his father’s personality. Detailed dicussions of his father’s paintings offered good practice in descriptive writing, an ability for which he became justly known.

Once his filial obligations had been completed, Collins returned to the historical romance on which he had been working for years. Antonina, written under the influence of Sir Walter Scott and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, did not display his talents to advantage. Turgid, inflated prose and a plot which moves with soporific slowness combine to produce a novel Sayers appropriately calls "impossibly melodramatic and impossibly dull". In depicting the adventures of a pure-minded and beautiful adolescent girl during the Gothic invasion of Rome, the religious fanaticism of her father, the opposing fanaticism of a pagan high priest, and the consuming desire for vegeance of a Gothic woman whose husband and children were massacred during the sack of Aquileia, Collins produced a blloddrenched but implausible narrative. Surprisingly, the novel was favorably reviewed by critics who found its portrayal of Roman life accurate and moving. A warning note, however, was sounded by H. F. Chorley in the Athenaeum. Chorley, later one of Collins’s most virulent critics, warned him "against catering for a prurient taste by dwelling on such incidental portions of the subject as, being morbid, ought to be treated incidentaly". The commentary is significant as a harbinger of the attacks on the morality of Collins’s fiction which became commonplace with the publication of his next novel, Basil, and continued throuhghout his career.

Both professionally and personally, mid century proved an exciting and influential period for Collins. In 1849 he submitted a landscape to the Royal Academy; it was accepted, probably out of respect to his father’s memory, but hung near the ceiling, where it was practically invisible to viewers of the exhibition. According to Hunt, Collins later kept the painting in his study and narrated its history to guests with ironic selfmockery.

The reception of his painting convinced Collins that his future lay in literature, and a walking tour of Cornwall with his new frind, artist Henry C. Brandling, in the summer of 1850 led to the writng of Rambles Beyond Railways, published in 1851. An anecdotal travelogue of the sort popular with mid-Victorian audiences, Rambles is slight but charming and shows that Collins possessed a sense of humor and a talent for humorous characterization not indicated by Antonina.

Early in 1851 Collins’s passionate interest in amateur theatricals led to his first meeting with Charles Dickens. Learning of Collins’s ability as an amateur actor from their mutual frind Egg, Dickens wrote to ask him to take a small part in Bulwer-Lytton’s Not so Bad as We Seem. The first performance of the play was given in 1851 at Devonshire House in the presence of Queen Vistoria and Prince Albert.

The first evidence of Dickens’s influence appears in Mr. Wray’s Cash-Box (1852), a Christmas tale published in Household Words in December 1851. The story features Reuben Wray, a retired actor, and the theft of his most prized possession, a bust of Shakespeare; it concludes with a Christmas feast and is notable only for its use of Collins’s experience in amateur theatricals and in its contemporary setting. Collins’s forte, as he himself realized, was not the historical novel, and in his next book, Basil, his most significant novel of the 1850s, he turned to the present.

The rality in Basil was too strong for many contemporary critics who found in it the "aesthetics of the Old Bailey" and condemned it because it did not "elevate and purify".

Collins’s contempt for middle-class morality and the limitations it imposed on the artist, only thinly disguised here, was to culminate in later references to the "clap-trap morality of the present day". He refused to accept "young people as the ultimate court of appeal in English literature" or to succumb to "this wretched English claptrap" which forbade a writer to "touch on the sexual relations which literally swarm around him".

Collins’s appreciation of human sexuality is evident in Basil, where his depiction of sensuality is remarkably candid for the early 1850s. Its hero is a young man of aristocratic background, the second son of a father whose pride in his lineage is fanatical. In pursuit of realistic detail about human nature for a historical romance he is writing, he boards a London omnibus and becomes inmediately infatuated with one of the passengers. The young woman under whose sexual spell he falls is Margaret Sherwin, the daughter of a linen draper. Basil knows that she is an unsuitable wife but his desire for her is so great that he consents to a secret marriage and even acepts the stipulation of Margaret’s father that the marriage not be consummated for a year. He feels "guilty" and "humiliated" and comes to see "certain peculiarities in Margaret’s character and conduct". Margaret is vain, shallow, and materialistic; she feels no affection for Basil and is interested only in his wealth and social position. The uneasy and unnatural situation of Basil is further complicated by the appearance of Mr. Sherwin’s clerk, the mysterious Robert Mannion, a reticent and sinister figure whose relationship with Margaret creates a sense of foreboding. Basil’s humiliation becomes complete when he follows Margaret and Mannion to a seedy hotel and learns that they are lovers. Infuriated, he attacks Mannion and permanently disfigures him.

Despite a melodramatic conclusion in which Mannion tries to murder Basil and is himself killed, the novel is successful.

Secrecy and crime in a mundane suburban villa bring suspense and terror close to the reader’s own experiences and prove more frightening and more significant than similar crimes committed in the ruined castles so commonplace in the Gothic romance.

Morally, Basil is ambiguous: the hero’s older brother presents an implicit contrast to Basil, whose humiliating experiences are caused by "the honorable quality of his intentions...Had he not wished to marry Margaret but to seduce her, had he not sought to enter with Margaret the state which for the Victorian bourgeois was at the center of a social order". In simultaneously criticizing the aristocratic ethic in his portrayal of the arrant snobbery of Basil’s father, and affirming its value in his depiction of the competent and practical manner in which Ralph starightens out the mess Basil had made of his life, Collins neglects to provide the consistent moral focus so important to Victorian critics, but he has presented a realistic portrait of a young man caugh between two value systems, both of which have obvious flaws.

Although much less powerful than Basil, Collins’s next novel, Hide and seek (1854), was more favorably received by critics who found its morality unobjectionable and who praised its humor. In creating Valentine Blyth, a second-rate painter devoted to an invalid wife and an adopted daughter who is a deaf-mute, Collins put so good use his knowledge of the art world. The basic plot relies too heavily on a series of improbable coincidences, but the novel is noteworthy for containing Collins’s first piece of sustained detection and for the characterization of Matthew Grice, also known as Mat Marksman. An eccentric wanderer who has spent most of his life in the wilds of North America and had been scalped by Indians, Grice is derived from James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking. Dickens considered him "admirably done", as well he might, sice Collins had clearly profited from studying Dickens’s own touch with eccentricity. His search for his lost and ruined sister and his discovery of her death and subsequent identification of her seducer and her child, especially the detailed reconstruction of past events, indicate the approach Collins was to follow in later novels. Hide and Seek also displays his antipathy toward narrow religiosity and the association of morality with respectability, attitudes at variance with his own moral vision, which consistently emphasized charitableness and forgiveness.

Because of the outbreak of the Crimean War at the time of its publication, Hide and Seek failed to attract a large audience. He persevered in his work and was rewarded by the serialization of his next novel, The Dead Secret (1857), in Household Words. As the title indicates, Collins was moving closer to sensation fiction, a genre Kathleen Tillotson has aptly christened the "novel-with-a-secret". Once again the discovery of a young girl’s parentage is the focal point of the plot, but the secret itself is less important than the characterization of the cuatodian of the secret, Sarah Leeson, and its effect upon her mental and physical health. Her weak heart and mental instability establish her as a precusor of Anne Catherick, the title character in The woman in white. Collins’s sympathetic treatment of her and her illigimate daughter, Rosamund Frankland, as well as Leonard Frankland’s dismissal of class distinctions when he learns taht his wife is the daughter of a lady’s maid and a miner, embody Collins’s divergence from usually strict Victorian attitudes toward sexual morality and social stratification.

Two volumes of short fiction, After Dark (1856) and The Queen opf Hearts (1859), display an increasing preoccupation with suspense and an innovative approach to detection. Collins provided a frame narrative for both collections, but the main interest en each lies in the short stories and novelettes collected. "A Terribly Strange Bed", usually considered Collins’s best short story, appears in After Dark, as do "Sister Rose", a short novel set during the French Revolution and a possible influence of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and "The Yellow Mask", which features a Machiavellian priest-a character type developed at greater length in The Black Robe (1881). "A Terribly Strange Bed" is a horror story of considerable merit with debt to Edgar Allan’ Poe’s "The Pit and The Pendulum" and the tradition of Gothic haunted-chamber fiction. Two young Englishmen in Paris visit a shady gambling house where the narrator breaks the bank at rouge-et-noir and overindulges in champagne in celebration. Persuaded to spend the night at the house instead of risking robbery during the return to his hotel, he is unable to sleep and lies in his canopied four-poster bed watching "a dark old picture on the opposite wall. Gradually he realices taht his view of the picture has changed and that the canopy of the bed is descending. Paralyzed with fear, he rolls off the bed, "just as the murderous canopy touched me on the shoulder", he says. Macabre though it is, the story builds suspense through careful revelation of detail and the somewhat befuddled mental condition of the narrator, which make the slow realization of his plight more trerrifying and more believable.

Generally, the stories in The Queen of Hearts are better than those in After Dark. The frame narrative is more convincing. "Man Monkton" is an interesting study of an abnormal mental condition and the impact of family leyend upon an unstable personality. "The Dream Woman", in which man’s dream precisely predicts future action, maintains a feeling og inescapable doom. "The Bitter Bit", an epistolary tale usually considered the first humorous detective story, features an inexperienced policeman who is consistently misled by the thief he has set out to catch. "Anne Rodway", though sentimental, has an unusual heroine-detective, a poor seamstress who succeeds in finding the murderer of her friend after the incompetent police have failed to find a single clue.

Collins’s attempts throughout his life to make a career in the theater were not succesful. Many of his attempts to dramatize his own novels failed either to find a producer or to hold an audience, but the theatrical experiments were beneficial to his work as a novelist and contributed to the effectiveness of such superb set scenes as the opening of The Woman in White and the dramatic intensity with which he maintains suspense in the major novels.

No doubt the most important personal event was Collins’s liaison with Caroline Graves, a widow with a child. Iresembles the opening chapter of The Woman in White far too closely to be accepted without reservations, Collins’s meeting with Caroline, however it may have occurred effected significant change in his life.

The Woman in White, serialized in All the Year Round (successor to Household Words) from 26 November 1859 to 25 August 1860, and published in book form by Sampson Low in August 1860, was his most popular book and one of the most popular novels of the century. Public acclaim was shared by such notable figures as Prince Albert, William Gladstone, William Thakeray and Dickens, who told Collins the he found it "a very great advance on all your former writning". "Woman in White" cloaks, bonnets, perfumes, waltzes, and quadrilles became the rage. Most critics agreed that The Woman in White was "in point of intricacy a masterpiece" and praised its maintenance of suspense, many agreed with the Saturday Review that Collins was "an admirable story-teller...not a great novelist". The Victorian distinction between the novel of incident and the novel of character worked to Collins’s disadvantage, and although he himself professed contempt for such criticism, it is significant that in the preface to The Moonstone he wrote that he was attempting "to trace the influence of character on circumstances" rather than "the influence of circumstances upon character" as he had previously done. Contemporaries recognized that multiple narrators contributed to the dramatic development of the story and to its "lifelike" quality without, apparently, seeing that Collins had made not only a major advance in the possibilities of narrative, but had also devised a method for the revelation of personality that is inextricable from plot.

The Woman in White contains two secrets: the first is the identity of Anne Catherick (the title character); the second is the illegitimacy of Sir Percival Glyde. Sir Percival marries Laura Fairlie to gain access to her income and then, when that proves insufficient to meet his debts and because he thinks she knows his secret, imprisons her in a private asylum under Anne Catherick’s name and buries the dead Anne under Laura’s name. In these nefarious activities he is aided, or,one might better say, masterminded, by the most engaging villain in Victorian fiction, tha Italian Count Fosco, and opposed by one of its most fascinating heroines, Marian Halcombe, who "has the foresight and the resolution of a man", and Walter Hartright, the drawing master whose love for Laura and desire to restore her identity make him an amateur detective of outstanding ability.

Even the contrast between the pathetic Laura, a typical Victorian heroine in her submissive and dutiful attitude toward her father’s memory, and the "masculine" but effective Marian reveals the independence of Collins’s approach to female characterization. The Woman in White is indeed superb suspense fiction; but embodies serious comment on contemporary society. The law is "the pre-engaged servante of the longe purse", and the novel displays a knowing appreciation of he problems of the powerless and their lack of protection under the law. Suspense and social significance are soundly embedded in character. The haunting figure of Anne Catherick appears to Hartright on Hampstead Heath and establishes inmediately an atmosphere of secrecy and fear. Deception is the key here as it is in No Name (1862) and Armadale (1866).

Disguise, deception, and legal injustice are the mainsprings of the action in No Name, where Collins once again describes a world where reality blurs, shifts, and alters. Life itself is an amateur theatrical where characters play out assigned or chosen roles. The palcid amd happy Vanstone family of Combe-Raven is legally no family at all; an unfortunate early marriege precluded Mr. Vanstone’s marrying the woman he loves and with whom he lives in perfect amicability for a quarter century. They are able to live publicly as man and wife. They are eventually able to marry, but since Mr. Vanstone is killed in a train wreck before he can change his will, and she dies in childbirth, their two daughters are disinherited, and his fortune passes to his brother. The elder daughter, Norah, becomes a governess. Her younger sister, Magdalen, joins forces with a swindler named Captain Wragge. She does this to earn mony through a series of dramatic performances and then marries. Her conspiracy fails when her husband discovers her identity and disinherits her; but Magdalen is charming even when deceitful. Wragge, a comic and successful scoundrel contribute to the success of No Name, which blends humor, pathos, suspense, and social commentary.

Critical response to No Name was reasonably favorable and its popular success so great that Collins was given a five-thousand-pound advance for his next novel, Armalade. It is the most intricately plotted of Collins’s novels. The characterization of Lydia Gwilt, a beautiful, scheming, criminal heroine, bore the brunt of critical attack. The Spectator accused Collins of overstepping "the limits of decency" and revolting "every human sentiment". The plot involves two young men both named Allan Armalade, the foreshadowing dream which indicates that one will be murdered, and the involved plans of Miss Gwilt to marry one and become a rich widow.

In 1868 the second of Collins’s great novels, The Moonstone, appeared. No novel considered a detective story has received such praise or held its public over such a period of time. Collins limited the focus of this novel to one event, the disappearance of the fabulous Indian diamond of the title. He constructed a perfectly plotted fiction, which is also study of the unconscious mind and the limitations of individual perception.

The characters in The Moonstone are individuals. The heroine, Rachel Verinder, is a vivacious and independent-minded young woman who is described by family steward Gabriel Betteredge as her own worst enemy and her own best friend because of her "secrecy" and "self-will". The hero is Franklin Blake, whose dogged pursiut of evidence that will clear him of suspision of theft impresses the reader. Collins’s sympathy for the lower classes is evident in all his portrayals of servants but appears nowhere more compellingly than in Rosanna Spearman, the lame former thief whose hopeless love for Blake is both dignified and pathetic and whose siucide in the Shivering Sand is one of the most memorable moments in the story.

Integrating suspense and social criticism proved a difficult and often impossible feat for Collins in his later years.

In Man and Wife (1870), Colllins’s novel after The Moonstone, he addresses himself to three actual public grievances: the inconsistency and ambiguity of the Irish and Scottish marriage laws; the English property laws which gave a husband control of his wife’s earnings ans possessions; and the cult of athleticism. The most powerful portion of the novel concerns Hester Dethridge, a working-class woman who, after years of abuse, murders her husband in order to keep control of her wages. The weakest portion of the novel concerns Geoffrey Delamayne, a famous athlete who seduces Anne Sylvester and plots to murder her in order to marry a woman with an income of ten thousand pounds a year.

In subsequent novels Collins wove plots around such topical subjects as the fallen woman, divorce, antivivisection, the relationship between heredity and environment, and a woman’s place in the business world. Poor Miss Finch (1872) has what is perhaps the most implausible plot in English fiction: Lucilla Finch, blind since early childhood, when she developed a morbid horror of dark colors, falls in love with Oscar Dubourg. She recovers her sight shortly after a series of medical treatments have turned him dark blue. Fortunately, Lucilla’s blindness returns, Oscar’s twin brother’s plot to win her hand is foiled, and she finds happiness since she cannot see her lover. The novel was popular with the public, as Collins’s novels continued to be. His outstanding failure was The Fallen Leaves (1879), which features a hero called Amelius Goldenheart and his love for a redeemed prostitute named Simple Sally. The New Magdalen (1873) employs the deception theme; Mercy Merrick, a former prostitute, assumes the identity of Lady Janet Roy and, despite exposure, wins the affection of her employer and the hand in marriage of Julian Gray, a renowned preacher. Similar criticism can be made of Heart and Science (1883), where an oversimplified attack on vivisection yields an implicit though unintentional condemnation of scientific inquiry, and The Legacy of Cain (1888), where Collins’s misunderstanding of Darwinian theory creates an untenable hypothesis and forced contrast between the evil daughter of a minister and the good daughter of the murderess.

Among the most interesting of the later novels is Jezebel’s Daughter (1880), which offers a striking portrait of a fustrated woman whose natural abilities have no outlet. Unhappily married to a physician who has devoted himself to chemical research in a provincial German town, Madame Fontaine finds her social ambitions thwarted and chafes at the stricted boundaries of her life. By contrasting her unfulfilled life with that of Mrs. Wagner, Collins gives explicit form to his long-held aversion to the social and economic restrictions palced on women. His sympathetic presentation of a socially ostracized divorced woman in The Evil Genius (1886) expresses his continuing concern with the destructive effects of an uncharitable moral code. Collins’s discussion of the problems of women and his portrayals of independent but these things have been singled out as two of his major achievements by modern critics tired of the pallid, insipid heroines so common in Victorian fiction.

Of special interest to readers of mystery fiction are two late novels. The Law and the Lady (1875) is the first English detective story with a female protagonist. Valeria Woodville, with the help of a family lawyer, successfully undertakes the investigation of the death of her husband’s first wife. My Lady’s Money and Percy the Prophet (1877) reveals the influence of Émile Gaboriau in its detective, Old Sharon, modeled upon Père Tabaret, the elderly detective of his The Widow Lerouge (1873), and it is unique in that the vital clue is discovered by a dog. Of the later novelettes, "Mr. Policeman and the Cook" deserves mention. The story follows a young policeman through the investigation of his first murder case.

Despite the inferior quality of Collins’s later works, he continued to be popular with the public and was widely reviewed in influential periodicals and newspapers. His last years, marred by deteriorating eyesight and the constant pain of rheumatic gout, were not happy, but he continued working until his death, on 23 September 1889, from a stoke. He was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery. The inscription on his tombstone reads, by his own direction, his full name, the dates of his birth and death, and the words "Author of The Woman in White and Other Works of Fiction".

By integrating accurate depiction of contemporary manners and customs with the secrecy and romance of crime, he established a pattern which modern writers of mystery fiction still follow.
 
 

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Concise Dictionary of British.

Literary Biography. Volume 4.

Victorian Writers (1832-1890).