150 years ago it was 1851 - the year of the Great
Exhibition and an important year in the life of the young Wilkie Collins.
Aged 27, he had two books already published and two more were to follow
in the course of the year.
Rambles Beyond Railways or, Notes in Cornwall Taken A-Foot appeared
in January. It was a travelogue with 12 fine lithographs by his friend
and travelling companion Henry Brandling. Two extracts from the book appeared
in Harper's New Monthly Magazine the first time his work had appeared in
an American periodical. It set the pattern for the next 20 years. And in
December Wilkie's first Christmas book appeared. Mr Wray's Cash-Box; or,
the Mask and the Mystery was dated 1852 but published on December 13th
in good time for the Christmas market.
During the year he also began writing for two periodicals. A story called 'The Twin Sisters' was his first in Bentley's Miscellany. Published in March, six more appeared during 1851 and three in 1852. In September his first piece appeared in The Leader, a radical publication for which he continued writing until 1855. 'A Plea for Sunday Reform' is a polemical work calling for art galleries and museums to open on Sundays - read it here.
1851 was also the year when Collins met Dickens.
Charles Dickens was putting on a play Not So Bad As We Seem by the writer,
politician and aristocrat Bullwer Lytton. A small part in this play, Smart
the butler, was available after a colleague of Dickens' refused it. Dickens
suggested Wilkie took it. He agreed and we know that Charles Dickens and
Wilkie Collins met on Wednesday 12 March 1851 in the evening at the house
of John Forster, later to be Dickens's first biographer. From that day
until he died in 1870 Collins was Dickens's friend, confidante, and collaborator.
They dined together, drank together, travelled together, grew beards
together, went to plays together, wrote together, worked together, walked
the streets in London and Paris together - and shared the secrets of their
love lives.
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