oxford world’ s classics
authors in context
General Editor: patricia ingham, University of Oxford
Historical Adviser: boyd hilton, University of Cambridge
WILKIE COLLINS
Authors in Context examines the work of major writers in
relation to their own time and to the present day. The series pro-
vides detailed coverage of the values and debates that colour the
writing of particular authors and considers their novels, plays, and
poetry against this background. Set in their social, cultural, and
political contexts, classic books take on a new meaning for modern
readers. And since readers, like writers, have their own contexts, the
series considers how critical interpretations have altered over time,
and how films, sequels, and other popular adaptations relate to the
new age in which they are produced.
Lyn Pykett is a Professor of English and Pro Vice-Chancellor at
the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. She is the author of numer-
ous books and essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century litera-
ture and culture, including: Emily Brontë (1989), The Improper
Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing
(1992), Engendering Fictions: The English Novel in the Early
Twentieth Century (1995), and Charles Dickens (2002). She has also
written on Collins in The Sensation Novel from ‘The Woman in
White’ to ‘The Moonstone’ (1994) and Wilkie Collins: Contemporary
Critical Essays (1998).
AUTHORS IN CONTEXT
The Brontës Thomas Hardy
Patricia Ingham Patricia Ingham
Wilkie Collins Oscar Wilde
Lyn Pykett John Sloan
Charles Dickens Virginia Woolf
Andrew Sanders Michael Whitworth
George Eliot
Tim Dolin
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
LYN PYKETT
Wilkie Collins
1
3
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data applied for
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Pykett, Lyn.
Wilkie Collins / Lyn Pykett.
p. cm. – (Oxford world’s classics)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
1. Collins, Wilkie, 1824–1889. 2. Novelists, English – 19th century – Bibliography. 3. Authors and
publishers – Great Britain – History – 19th century. 4. Literature
publishing – Great Britain – History – 19th century. I. Title. II. Oxford world’s classics (Oxford
University Press)
PR4496.P94 2005 823′.8–dc22 2005001541
ISBN 0–19–284034–7 978–0–19–284034–9
1
Typeset in Ehrhardt by
RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations vii
A Chronology of Wilkie Collins ix
Abbreviations xviii
1. The Life of Wilkie Collins 1
Childhood and the Education of a Storyteller 2
Collins’s Literary Apprenticeship 6
The Dickens Years 11
Family Secrets and Secret Families 16
The Pains of Literary Labour 22
2. The Social Context 27
Protest and Reform 32
Women, the Law, and Law Reform 39
Crime, Criminality, and Policing 43
Gender and Sexuality 47
Class 51
Education 55
Religion 58
Empire and Race 66
3. The Literary Context 71
Novel Reading and Novel Readers 72
The Production and Distribution of the Novel 76
The Forms of the Novel 84
The Novel and the Theatre 93
The Novelist as Journalist and Journeyman-of-Letters 97
Collins and the Art of the Novel 101
Collins and the Reviewers 105
4. Masters, Servants, and Married Women: Class
and Social Mobility in Collins’s Novels 111
Class 112
Gender 123
Marriage, Family, and the Law 129
5. Sex, Crime, Madness, and Empire 138
Sexual Mores and Social Evils 138
vi Contents
Criminality and Roguery in Respectable Society 146
Madness and its Treatment 149
Race, Foreigners, and Empire 155
6. Psychology and Science in Collins’s Novels 165
Mesmerism, Dreams, and the Unconscious in Collins’s
Writings of the 1850s and 1860s 165
The Sensation Novel and Nineteenth-Century Medical
and Psychological Theories 178
Collins and the Discourses of Degeneration 181
Science and Scientists 186
7. Recontextualizing Collins: The Afterlife of
Collins’s Novels 192
Collins on Film and Television 196
Collins in Print 209
Collins in Criticism 213
Notes 227
Further Reading 237
Websites 243
Film and Television Adaptations 244
Index 245
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Wilkie Collins, 1850, by J. E. Millais 19
By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery
Caroline Graves in the early 1870s 19
Taken from Wilkie Collins: An Illustrated Guide by Andrew
Gasson. Courtesy of Faith Clarke.
Martha Rudd 19
Taken from Wilkie Collins: An Illustrated Guide by Andrew
Gasson. Courtesy of Faith Clarke.
Wilkie Collins photographed for Men of Mark 24
By courtesy of Andrew Gasson
The opening of Armadale, serialized in the Cornhill
Magazine, 1864 77
By courtesy of Andrew Gasson
James Blackwood’s 1856 edition of Basil 77
By courtesy of Andrew Gasson
Library label for W. H. Smith’s circulating library 77
By courtesy of Andrew Gasson
The Lyceum Theatre’s programme for the 1877 stage
production of The Dead Secret 96
By courtesy of Andrew Gasson
Illustration to The Woman in White play published in the
Illustrated London News 96
By courtesy of Andrew Gasson
viii List of Illustrations
Cartoon of Wilkie Collins, ‘The Novelist who invented
Sensation’, Vanity Fair, 1872 194
By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery
Caricature of Collins with Frederick Walker’s poster for the
stage version of The Woman in White, by F. W. Waddy 194
By courtesy of Andrew Gasson
Alan Badel as Count Fosco and Diana Quick as Marian
Halcombe in BBC Television’s 1982 adaptation of The
Woman in White 208
© BBC Picture Library
Peter Vaughan and Anthony Sher in BBC Television’s 1996
adaptation of The Moonstone 208
© BBC Picture Library
A CHRONOLOGY OF WILKIE COLLINS
Life Historical and Cultural Background
1824 (8 Jan.) Born at 11 New Death of Byron.
Cavendish Street, St Scott, Redgauntlet
Marylebone, London, elder son
of William Collins, RA
(1788–1847), artist, and Harriet
Collins, née Geddes
(1790–1868).
1825 Stockton–Darlington railway
opened.
1826 (Spring) Family move to Pond Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age
Street, Hampstead.
1827 Death of Blake; University College
London founded.
1828 (25 Jan.) Brother, Charles Birth of Meredith, D. G. Rossetti;
Allston Collins, born. Catholic Emancipation Act.
1829 (Autumn) Family move to Balzac’s La Comédie humaine begins
Hampstead Square. publication
1830 Family move to Porchester Death of George IV and accession of
Terrace, Bayswater. William IV; July Revolution in
France.
Hugo, Hernani
Tennyson, Poems Chiefly Lyrical
1831 British Association for the
Advancement of Science founded;
Britain annexes Mysore.
1832 Deaths of Bentham, Crabbe,
Goethe, Scott; First Reform Bill
passed.
1833 Slavery abolished throughout British
Empire.
Carlyle, Sartor Resartus
1834 Deaths of Coleridge, Lamb; new Poor
Law comes into effect; Tolpuddle
Martyrs.
1835 (13 Jan.) Starts school, the Dickens, Sketches by Boz (1st series)
Maida Hill Academy.
1836 (19 Sept.–15 Aug. 1838)
Family visits France and
Italy.
x Chronology
Life Historical and Cultural Background
1837 Death of William IV and accession of
Victoria.
Carlyle, The French Revolution
Dickens, Pickwick Papers
1838 (Aug.) Family move to 20 Anti-Corn Law League founded;
Avenue Road, Regent’s Park. Chartist petitions published;
Attends Mr Cole’s boarding London–Birmingham railway
school, Highbury Place, until opened; Anglo-Afghan War.
Dec. 1840. Dickens, Oliver Twist
1840 (Summer) Family move to 85 Birth of Hardy; marriage of Victoria
Oxford Terrace, Bayswater. and Albert; penny postage
introduced.
Browning, Sordello
Darwin, Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle
Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop
1841 (Jan.) Apprenticed to Antrobus Carlyle, Heroes and Hero-Worship
and Co., tea merchants, Strand.
1842 (June–July) Trip to Highlands Child and female underground
of Scotland, and Shetland, with labour becomes illegal; Chartist riots;
William Collins. Act for inspection of asylums.
Browning, Dramatic Lyrics
Comte, Cours de philosophie positive
Macaulay, Lays of Ancient Rome
Tennyson, Poems
1843 (Aug.) First signed publication Birth of Henry James; Thames
‘The Last Stage Coachman’ in Tunnel opened.
the Illuminated Magazine. Carlyle, Past and Present
Dickens, A Christmas Carol
Ruskin, Modern Painters begins
publication
1844 Writes first (unpublished) novel, Factory Act.
‘Iolani; or, Tahiti as it was; a Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural
Romance’. History of Creation
Elizabeth Barrett, Poems
1845 (Jan.) ‘Iolani’ submitted to Boom in railway speculation;
Longman and to Chapman and Newman joins Church of Rome.
Hall, rejected. Disraeli, Sybil
Engels, Condition of the Working Class
in England in 1844
Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination
1846 (17 May) Admitted student of Repeal of Corn Laws; Irish potato
Lincoln’s Inn. famine.
Lear, Book of Nonsense
Chronology xi
Life Historical and Cultural Background
1847 (17 Feb.) Death of William Ten-hour Factory Act; California
Collins. gold rush.
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Tennyson, The Princess
1848 (Summer) Family move to 38 Death of Emily Brontë;
Blandford Square. Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
(Nov.) First book, Memoirs of founded; Chartist Petition;
the Life of William Collins, Esq., cholera epidemic; Public Health Act;
RA published. revolutions in Europe.
Dickens, Dombey and Son
Gaskell, Mary Barton
Marx and Engels, Communist
Manifesto
Thackeray, Vanity Fair
1849 Exhibits a painting at the Royal Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture
Academy summer exhibition.
1850 (27 Feb.) First published novel, Deaths of Balzac, Wordsworth;
Antonina. Tennyson becomes Poet Laureate;
(Summer) Family move to 17 Public Libraries Act.
Hanover Terrace. Dickens, David Copperfield
Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke
Tennyson, In Memoriam
Thackeray, Pendennis
Wordsworth, The Prelude
Dickens starts Household Words
1851 (Jan.) Travel book on Cornwall, Death of Turner; Great Exhibition in
Rambles Beyond Railways, Hyde Park; Australian gold rush.
published. Ruskin, The Stones of Venice
(Mar.) Meets Dickens for the
first time.
(May) Acts with Dickens in
Bulwer Lytton’s Not So Bad As
We Seem.
1852 (Jan.) Mr Wray’s Cash-Box Death of Wellington; Louis
published, with frontispiece by Napoleon becomes Emperor of
Millais. France.
(24 Apr.) ‘A Terribly Strange Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Bed’, first contribution to Thackeray, Henry Esmond
Household Words.
(May) Goes on tour with
Dickens’s company of amateur
actors.
(16 Nov.) Basil published.
xii Chronology
Life Historical and Cultural Background
1853 (Oct.–Dec.) Tours Switzerland Arnold, Poems
and Italy with Dickens and Charlotte Brontë, Villette
Augustus Egg. Dickens, Bleak House
Gaskell, Cranford
1854 (5 June) Hide and Seek Birth of Wilde; outbreak of Crimean
published. War; Working Men’s College
founded.
Dickens, Hard Times
1855 (Feb.) Spends a holiday in Paris Death of Charlotte Brontë.
with Dickens. Browning, Men and Women
(16 June) First play, The Gaskell, North and South
Lighthouse, performed by Trollope, The Warden
Dickens’s theatrical company at
Tavistock House.
(Nov.–Dec.) ‘Mad Monkton’
serialized.
1856 (Feb.) After Dark, a collection of Birth of Freud, Shaw; Crimean War
short stories, published. ends.
(Feb.–Apr.) Spends six weeks in E. B. Browning, Aurora Leigh
Paris with Dickens. Reade, It Is Never Too Late to Mend
(Mar.) A Rogue’s Life serialized
in Household Words.
(Oct.) Joins staff of Household
Words and begins collaboration
with Dickens in The Wreck of
the Golden Mary (Dec.).
1857 (Jan.–June) The Dead Secret Birth of Conrad; Matrimonial Causes
serialized in Household Words, Act establishes divorce courts; Indian
published in volume form Mutiny.
(June). Dickens, Little Dorrit
(6 Jan.) The Frozen Deep Flaubert, Madame Bovary
performed by Dickens’s Trollope, Barchester Towers
theatrical company at Tavistock
House.
(Aug.) The Lighthouse performed
at the Olympic Theatre.
(Sept.) Spends a working
holiday in the Lake District
with Dickens, their account
appearing as ‘The Lazy Tour of
Two Idle Apprentices’, serialized
in Household Words (Oct.).
Collaborates with Dickens on
The Perils of Certain English
Prisoners.
Chronology xiii
Life Historical and Cultural Background
1858 (May) Dickens separates from Victoria proclaimed Empress of
his wife. India.
(Oct.) The Red Vial produced at Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life
the Olympic Theatre; a failure.
1859 From this year no longer living War of Italian Liberation.
with his mother; lives for the Darwin, Origin of Species
rest of his life (with one Eliot, Adam Bede
interlude) with Mrs Caroline Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard
Graves. (Jan.–Feb.) Living at Feverel
124 Albany Street; (May–Dec.) Mill, On Liberty
Living at 2a New Cavendish Samuel Smiles, Self-Help
Street. Tennyson, Idylls of the King
(Oct.) The Queen of Hearts, a Dickens starts All the Year Round
collection of short stories,
published.
(26 Nov.–25 Aug. 1860) The
Woman in White serialized in All
the Year Round.
(Dec.) Moves to 12 Harley
Street.
1860 (Aug.) The Woman in White British Association meeting at
published in volume form: a Oxford (Huxley–Wilberforce
best-seller in Britain and the debate).
United States, and rapidly Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
translated into most European
languages.
1861 (Jan.) Resigns from All the Year Death of Albert, Prince Consort;
Round. Offences Against the Person Act
(includes provisions on bigamy);
outbreak of American Civil War.
Dickens, Great Expectations
Eliot, Silas Marner
Palgrave, Golden Treasury
Reade, The Cloister and the Hearth
Ellen Wood, East Lynne
1862 (15 Mar.–17 Jan. 1863) No Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady
Name serialized in All the Year Andley’s Secret
Round, published in volume Clough, Poems
form (31 Dec.).
xiv Chronology
Life Historical and Cultural Background
1863 My Miscellanies, a collection of Death of Thackeray.
journalism from Household Eliot, Romola
Words and All the Year Round, Huxley, Man’s Place in Nature
published. Lyell, Antiquity of Man
Mill, Utilitarianism
Reade, Hard Cash
1864 (Nov.–June 1866) Armadale Albert Memorial constructed.
serialized in The Cornhill. Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife
(Dec.) Moves to 9 Melcombe Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua
Place, Dorset Square.
1865 Birth of Kipling, Yeats; death of
Gaskell.
Arnold, Essays in Criticism (1st series)
Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland
Dickens, Our Mutual Friend
Tolstoy, War and Peace
Wagner, Tristan und Isolde
1866 (May) Armadale published in Birth of Wells.
two volumes. Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
(Oct.) The Frozen Deep Reade, Griffith Gaunt: or Jealousy
produced at the Olympic Swinburne, Poems and Ballads
Theatre. Wood, St Martin’s Eve
1867 (Sept.) Moves to 90 Gloucester Second Reform Bill passed; Paris
Place, Portman Square. Exhibition.
Collaborates with Dickens on Bagehot, English Constitution
‘No Thoroughfare’, published Marx, Das Kapital
as Christmas number of All the
Year Round; dramatic version
performed at the Adelphi
Theatre (Christmas Eve).
1868 (4 Jan.–8Aug.) The Moonstone Report of Royal Commission on the
serialized in All the Year Round; Laws of Marriage.
published in three volumes Browning, The Ring and the Book
(July).
(19 Mar.) Mother, Harriet
Collins, dies.
Collins forms liaison with
Martha Rudd (‘Mrs Dawson’).
(29 Oct.) Caroline Graves
marries Joseph Charles Clow.
1869 (Mar.) Black and White, written Suez Canal opened.
in collaboration with Charles Arnold, Culture and Anarchy
Fechter, produced at the Mill, On the Subjection of Women
Adelphi Theatre.
Chronology xv
Life Historical and Cultural Background
(4 July) Daughter, Marian
Dawson, born to Collins and
Martha Rudd, at 33 Bolsover
Street, Portland Place.
1870 (June) Man and Wife published Education Act; Married Women’s
in volume form. Property Act; Franco-Prussian War;
(Aug.) Dramatic version of The fall of Napoleon III.
Woman in White tried out in D. G. Rossetti, Poems
Leicester. Spencer, Principles of Psychology
1871 (14 May) Second daughter, Trade unions become legal; first
Harriet Constance Dawson, Impressionist Exhibition held in
born at 33 Bolsover Street. Paris; religious tests abolished at
(May) Caroline Graves again Oxford, Cambridge, Durham.
living with Collins. Darwin, Descent of Man
(Oct.) The Woman in White Eliot, Middlemarch
produced at the Olympic
Theatre.
(Oct.–Mar. 1872) Poor Miss
Finch serialized in Cassell’s
Magazine.
(25 Dec.) Miss or Mrs?
published.
1872 (Feb.) Poor Miss Finch published Butler, Erewhon
in volume form.
1873 (Feb.) Dramatic version of Man Mill, Autobiography
and Wife performed at the Pater, Studies in the Renaissance
Prince of Wales Theatre.
(9 Apr.) Brother, Charles
Allston Collins, dies.
(May) The New Magdalen
published in volume form;
dramatic version performed at
the Olympic Theatre.
Miss or Mrs? And Other Stories
in Outline published.
(Sept.–Mar. 1874) Tours
United States and Canada,
giving readings from his work.
1874 (Nov.) The Frozen Deep and Factory Act; Public Worship Act.
Other Stories. Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd
(25 Dec.) Son, William Charles
Dawson, born, 10 Taunton
Place, Regent’s Park.
xvi Chronology
Life Historical and Cultural Background
1875 Copyrights in Collins’s work Artisans’ Dwellings Act; Public
transferred to Chatto & Health Act.
Windus, who become his main
publisher. The Law and the Lady
serialized in The London Graphic;
published in volume form.
1876 (Apr.) Miss Gwilt (dramatic Invention of telephone and
version of Armadale) performed phonograph.
at the Globe Theatre. Eliot, Daniel Deronda
The Two Destinies published in James, Roderick Hudson
volume form. Lombroso, The Criminal
1877 (Sept.) Dramatic version of The Annexation of Transvaal.
Moonstone performed at the Ibsen, The Pillars of Society
Royal Olympic Theatre. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
My Lady’s Money and Percy and
the Prophet, short stories,
published.
1878 (June–Nov.) The Haunted Hotel Whistler–Ruskin controversy;
serialized. Congress of Berlin; Edison invents
the incandescent electric lamp.
Hardy, The Return of the Native
1879 The Haunted Hotel published in Birth of E. M. Forster.
volume form. Ibsen, A Doll’s House
The Fallen Leaves–– First Series
published in volume form.
A Rogue’s Life published in
volume form.
1880 Jezebel’s Daughter published in Deaths of George Eliot, Flaubert;
volume form. Bradlaugh, an atheist, becomes
an MP.
Gissing, Workers in the Dawn
Zola, Nana
1881 The Black Robe published in Death of Carlyle; Democratic
volume form. Federation founded.
A. P. Watt becomes Collins’s Ibsen, Ghosts
literary agent. James, Portrait of a Lady
1882 Birth of Joyce, Woolf: death of
Darwin, D. G. Rossetti, Trollope;
Married Women’s Property Act;
Daimler invents the petrol engine.
1883 Heart and Science published in Deaths of Marx, Wagner.
volume form. Trollope, An Autobiography
Rank and Riches produced at the
Adelphi Theatre: a theatrical
disaster.
Chronology xvii
Life Historical and Cultural Background
1884 ‘I Say No’ published in volume Fabian Society founded; Third
form. Reform Bill.
1885 Birth of Lawrence; Criminal Law
Amendment Act (raising age of
consent to 16).
Maupassant, Bel-Ami
Pater, Marius the Epicurean
Zola, Germinal
1886 The Evil Genius published in Irish Home Rule Bill; Contagious
volume form. Diseases Acts repealed.
The Guilty River published in Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge
Arrowsmith’s Christmas Annual.
1887 Little Novels, a collection of Victoria’s Golden Jubilee;
short stories, published. Independent Labour Party founded.
Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet
Hardy, The Woodlanders
Strindberg, The Father
1888 (Feb.) Moves to 82 Wimpole Death of Arnold; birth of T. S. Eliot.
Street. Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills
1889 The Legacy of Cain published in Deaths of Browning, Hopkins; dock
volume form. strike in London.
(23 Sept.) Dies at 82 Wimpole Booth, Life and Labour of the People
Street. in London
Shaw, Fabian Essays in Socialism
Ibsen’s A Doll’s House staged in
London
1890 Blind Love (completed by Death of Newman; Parnell case; first
Walter Besant) published in underground railway in London.
volume form. Booth, In Darkest England
Frazer, The Golden Bough
William James, Principles of
Psychology
1895 (June) Caroline Graves dies and Morris, News from Nowhere
is buried in Wilkie Collins’s
grave.
1919 Martha Rudd (Dawson) dies.
ABBREVIATIONS
Letters The Letters of Wilkie Collins, ed. William Baker and William
M. Clarke (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), 2 vols.
Memoirs Wilkie Collins, Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq.,
RA (2 vols. repr. in 1; Wakefield: E.P. Publishing, 1978)
My Miscellanies Wilkie Collins, My Miscellanies (Farnborough: Gregg, 1971)
Pilgrim The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Madeline House, Graham
Storey, and Kathleen Tillotson (Pilgrim Edition, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1965–2002), 12 vols.
chapter 1
THE LIFE OF WILKIE COLLINS
My life has been rather a strange one. It may not seem
particularly . . . respectable . . . but it has been, in some respects
adventurous.
A Rogue’s Life, Chapter 1
From his second published novel (his first ‘story of modern life’),
Basil (1852), to his last, the posthumously published Blind Love
(1890), Wilkie Collins’s stories and novels were preoccupied with the
interconnections of the world of respectable society, the demi-monde,
and the criminal ‘underworld’. They were concerned with the plight
and progress of professional men, and also with the adventures
of rogues, and outsiders; with respectable families and their often
unrespectable secrets, with irregular liaisons, and the disreputably
chaotic state of the marriage laws which were the cornerstone of
respectable society; with doubles and with questions of social and
psychological identity. These fictional concerns were by no means
exclusive to Collins, indeed they were common preoccupations in
the Victorian novel. However, they did have particularly close links
with the circumstances of Collins’s own life. The family into which
he was born and the families which he created for himself in his
adult life were marked by a curious combination of respectability
and social fragility, of orthodoxy and unconventionality. Throughout
his adult life––and especially as a young man––Collins paradoxically
combined a taste for footloose bohemianism with the order and dis-
cipline associated with the professions, as he strove first to establish
himself and then to maintain his position as a successful professional
writer. His origins, his occupation, and his private life all made his
own respectability and class position rather ambivalent. The son of
educated parents who had descended in the social scale before they
rose by their own efforts, Collins did not attend a public school or a
university, and thus did not belong to the main Victorian homosocial
2 The Life of Wilkie Collins
networks of middle- and upper-class power and influence. His own
social views and conduct excluded him from ‘polite’ society. Never-
theless, he mixed easily with bankers, lawyers, and doctors, as well as
with actors, painters, and writers. He also included a number of their
wives among his friends. Collins was thus both an insider and an
outsider, or, perhaps more accurately, he was neither an insider nor
an outsider, but occupied a position somewhere in between––a limi-
nal position. It was a position which gave him a very interesting
perspective on Victorian society, and what he described in his Preface
to Armadale as its clap-trap morality.1 From his liminal position
Collins did not so much hold up the glass of satire to his contem-
poraries, as refract or re-present contemporary society through his
peculiarly angled lens.
Childhood and the Education of a Storyteller
William Wilkie Collins was born in London on 8 January 1824 to
Harriet Collins (née Geddes) and William Collins, a successful
landscape painter who had been elected to membership of the Royal
Academy in 1822. Collins’s second name, and the name by which he
chose to be known as a young man, was that of his godfather, his
father’s friend and in some respects his mentor, the painter Sir
David Wilkie. Collins had one sibling, a brother, Charles Allston
Collins, who was born on 25 January 1828. The brothers enjoyed a
generally happy and secure childhood as the offspring of intelligent,
creative, and upwardly mobile parents. Both of Collins’s parents
adopted an evangelical position on religion and his father was a Tory
in politics. William Collins––unlike his elder son––was also much
concerned with maintaining a respectable position in society. This
concern with respectability was, in part, religious and moral, but
William Collins also regarded respectability as the necessary condi-
tion for success in his chosen field. Lucrative commissions depended
on cultivating connections and making one’s way in respectable and
wealthy society: as he noted in his journal in 1816, ‘[a]s it is impos-
sible to rise in the world without connection, connection I must
have’ (Memoirs, i. 83).
Collins’s parents’ concern with financial success and social
acceptance was, no doubt, also linked to the downward mobility of
the families in which they had been brought up. Harriet Geddes, the
The Life of Wilkie Collins 3
daughter of an army officer, had been brought up in conditions of
genteel poverty, cushioned to some extent from the adverse effects of
her father’s financial position by joining in activities with her better-
off cousins. However, her father’s financial failure during her teenage
years made it necessary for her to earn her own living. A talented
actress, she was on the point of taking up a professional engagement
at the Theatre Royal, Bath––a socially compromising move for a
woman at this time––when she was ‘saved’ by an evangelical clergy-
man and his wife, who converted her to their religious views and
educated her for a career as a governess. Harriet maintained herself
by working as a teacher in a London school, and then as a governess
in several private households, before marrying William Collins in
September 1822, some eight years after their first meeting. The
lengthy period between their first meeting and their marriage was
the result of William’s need to recover from near destitution and to
make his way in the world before embarking on matrimony, his own
father having died a bankrupt in 1812. The life of Wilkie Collins’s
grandfather reads rather like the life of a fictional character created
by his grandson. As an impoverished youth William Collins the elder
had moved to London from County Wicklow in Ireland, and had
earned an uncertain living restoring and dealing in paintings. Like
his grandson, he had literary aspirations, and he published, among
other things, a poem against the slave trade and a novel, Memoirs of a
Picture (1805). This book, which details counterfeiting and other
shady practices in the world of art-dealing, and draws on the colour-
ful and scandalous life of his friend, the painter George Morland,
provided the inspiration for Wilkie Collins’s novella A Rogue’s Life
(1856). Collins discusses his grandfather’s narrative at some length
in his Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., RA (1848).
Although Wilkie Collins grew increasingly impatient with his
parents’ (and particularly his father’s) evangelicalism and social
conformity, it is clear that he regarded them with affection and
admiration. In later life he described his mother as a ‘woman of
remarkable mental culture’, and named her as the source of ‘what-
ever of poetry and imagination there may be in my composition’.2
His regard for his father can be seen in the memoir that he wrote
immediately after William Collins’s death in 1847. This memoir also
reveals something of Collins’s attitudes to his father’s snobbery and
to his conservative political and social views, as when he quotes his
4 The Life of Wilkie Collins
father’s view of ‘the speculation of marriage’ as ‘the most momentous
risk in which any man can engage’ (Memoirs, i. 209). Elsewhere,
Collins recounts the delight which he took as an 8-year-old in lighting
up the front windows of the family house in support of the pro-
Reform Bill demonstrators in 1832––to avoid having their windows
broken––and his father’s discomfiture as a ‘ “high Tory” and a
sincerely religious man’ who ‘looked on the Reform Bill and the
cholera (then prevalent) as similar judgements of an offended Deity
punishing social and political “backsliding” ’ (Letters, ii. 541). The
8-year-old radical, on the other hand, cheered with ‘the sovereign
people’ when they cheered for the Reform Bill (Letters, ii. 541).
If his father’s evangelical and Tory sympathies cast a shadow on
Collins’s childhood, and particularly on his Sundays, they do not
appear to have prevented Willie (as he was known to his family in
childhood) from reading widely and enthusiastically. The young
Collins immersed himself in his mother’s collection of Anne
Radcliffe’s Gothic romances and the poetry of Shakespeare, Pope,
Scott, Shelley, and Byron, as well as the usual fictional fare of the
middle-class boy of the nineteenth century: tales of Robin Hood,
Don Quixote, The Vicar of Wakefield, The Arabian Nights Enter-
tainment, and the novels of Frederick Marryat and Sir Walter
Scott. Willie was not sent to school until January 1835, when he
went to the Maida Hill Academy. His formal schooling was cut
short in September 1836, when his father followed Sir David
Wilkie’s advice and realized a long-held ambition to travel to Italy
to experience Italian landscape, art, and architecture at first hand
and to paint Italian scenes. The Collins family set out for Paris on
19 September 1836, and from there travelled to Nice, Florence,
Rome, Naples, and Venice. Collins later claimed that in the two
years he spent in Italy between the ages of 12 and 14, he learnt
more ‘which has since been of use to me, among the pictures, the
scenery and the people, than I ever learnt at school’.3 He learnt to
speak and write Italian, became familiar with the art galleries of
France and Italy, and mixed with many of the leading artists of the
day. This adolescent version of the Grand Tour customarily
undertaken by upper-class young men in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries apparently also served as a sexual initiation for
Collins, as it did for those other Grand Tourists. According to the
tales that he later told to his friends Augustus Egg and Charles
The Life of Wilkie Collins 5
Dickens, it was during his stay in Rome that the 12- or 13-year-old
Collins also fell in love for the first time––with a married woman.
Indeed, in some versions of his exploits Collins claims to have
seduced her.
When the family returned to England in August 1838, Collins was
sent to a boarding school in Highbury, North London, which he
attended for the next three years. With a total of no more than four
years’ formal schooling at two London schools, Wilkie Collins seems
to have avoided the conventional education and socialization of the
relatively well-to-do middle-class English male. In most respects, his
period at Henry Cole’s Highbury school was uneventful. Collins
kept up his Italian by writing letters home in that language. The
Reverend Cole regarded him as a lazy pupil who did not pay atten-
tion to his classes. Collins, in turn, felt rather out of place––perhaps
because of his recent cosmopolitan experience, perhaps because he
was self-conscious about his appearance: he was very short, with
extremely small feet and hands, and a misshapen forehead (having
been born with a bulge on its right side), and he was also very short-
sighted. Perhaps the most notable aspect of Collins’s stay at the
Highbury school was his induction into the role of storyteller––if
we are able to believe the account he gave in ‘Reminiscences of a
Story-Teller’ (published, with some omissions, in the Universal
Review, 1888). This account closely resembles Dickens’s description
of David Copperfield’s formation as a storyteller by his school-
fellow James Steerforth in Chapter 7 of David Copperfield (1849–50).
Collins describes his initiation at the hands of a ‘great fellow of
seventeen’ who was ‘as fond of hearing stories in bed, as the oriental
Despot to whose literary tastes we are indebted for the Arabian
Nights’: ‘On the first night, my capacity for telling stories was tested
at a preliminary examination––vanity urged me to do my best––and
I paid the penalty . . . I was the unhappy boy appointed to amuse the
captain from that time forth.’4 It was as a result of this experience
that Collins ‘learnt to be amusing at short notice’, a lesson from
which he ‘derived benefit . . . at a later period of my life’. Despite
being thrashed on the older boy’s instructions when he refused to
tell a story, or when invention failed him, Collins claimed (on
another occasion) that he owed a ‘debt of gratitude’ to the ‘brute
who first awakened in me, his poor little victim, a power of which but
for him I might never have been aware. Certainly no-one in my own
6 The Life of Wilkie Collins
home credited me with it; and when I left school I still continued
story-telling for my own pleasure.’5
Collins’s Literary Apprenticeship
An author I was to be, and an author I became in the year 1848.
(Letters, i. 207)
The first location in which Collins continued his pleasurable story-
telling was the Strand office of the tea merchant Edward Antrobus,
‘Teaman to Her Majesty’. It was here that William Collins found a
post for his son, when Wilkie declined to take up his father’s sugges-
tion that he should go to Oxford as a preparation for entering the
Church. As he put it in a ‘memorandum, relating to the life and
writings of Wilkie Collins’ which he sent to an unknown cor-
respondent in 1862: ‘I had no vocation for that way of life, and I
preferred trying mercantile pursuits. I had already begun to write in
secret, and mercantile pursuits lost all attraction for me’ (Letters, i.
206). Wilkie’s own career preference was for writing books. As he
recalled in an interview in 1887:
I told my father that I thought I should like to write books, though how to
write, or on what subjects, I don’t believe at the time I had the smallest
conception. However, I began to scribble in a desultory kind of way, and
drifted, I hardly know how, into tale-writing. . . . This went on for some
time, till an intimate friend of my father’s remonstrated with him on the
folly of allowing me to waste my time on a pursuit which could never
lead to anything but the traditional poverty of the poor author and
he mentioned an eligible opening in a tea-merchant’s firm as a suitable
position for me.6
Collins’s position at Antrobus’s seems to have been that of an
unpaid apprentice, and something of his attitude to the office which
he came to regard as his ‘prison on the Strand’, can be seen in his
account of the experience of Zack Thorpe in Hide and Seek (1854).
After three weeks at a tea broker’s office, Zack declares: ‘They all say
it’s a good opening for me, and talk about the respectability of com-
mercial pursuits. I don’t want to be respectable, and I hate com-
mercial pursuits’ (Hide and Seek, Book I, Chapter II). Despite his
own dislike of respectability and commercial pursuits, Collins
The Life of Wilkie Collins 7
worked at the tea merchant’s for the next five years, punctuated
by extended breaks for a tour of Scotland with his father in the
summer of 1842 (vividly recalled in the Memoirs), and two visits to
France––a five-week visit with his friend Charles Ward in 1844, and
an unaccompanied trip to Paris in 1845. These French expeditions
were the first of many such trips that Collins was to make during his
lifelong love affair with France, and particularly with its capital city.
Collins’s period of employment at the office on the Strand was pro-
longed by his father’s inability to find him a better position in the
Civil Service (through appeals to his former patron Sir Robert Peel)
and the Royal Academy (through Landseer). And perhaps the office
on the Strand was not such a bad place to be for an aspiring writer. It
was convenient for theatres and booksellers, and more importantly, it
was close to the centre of the publishing world. The offices of the
Saturday Magazine were next door to Antrobus’s, and nearby were
the offices of Punch, the Illustrated London News, Bell’s Life in London,
the Observer, and Chapman and Hall, the publisher of several monthly
magazines.
In some ways, during this period of his life Collins bore some
resemblance to the hero of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s
Secret, Robert Audley (during his French-novel-reading phase), or
to those young men of Dickens’s novels––Richard Carstone and
Eugene Wrayburn, for example––who live on their expectations
while they wait for an opening. Collins, however, was doing more
than biding his time; he was actively preparing himself for a literary
career. According to his friend Edmund Yates, Collins quickly got
through his office duties in order to devote himself to ‘tale-writing’
and experimenting with ‘tragedies, comedies, epic poems and the
usual literary rubbish invariably accumulated about themselves by
“young beginners” ’.7 By 1843 ‘The Last Stage Coachman’ (a fantasy
about the plight of the stagecoach in the railway age) appeared over
the signature of ‘W. Wilkie Collins’ in Douglas Jerrold’s Illuminated
Magazine, and other articles and stories had begun to find their way
into the periodicals. Collins also used his office hours to write his
first novel ‘Iolani; or, Tahiti as it was’, a Gothic romance in which, as
Collins put it, ‘my youthful imagination ran riot among the noble
savages’.8 In the late summer of 1845 Collins’s father offered the
novel to Longman’s and to Chapman and Hall, but both publishers
turned it down. It remained unpublished in Collins’s lifetime, and
8 The Life of Wilkie Collins
was thought to have been lost altogether until 1991; it has since been
published by Princeton University Press (1997).
Following this peremptory ‘shut[ting] of the gates of the realms of
fancy in my face’,9 Collins agreed to the suggestion of a friend of his
father’s that he should read for the Bar, and was duly admitted as a
student of Lincoln’s Inn on 17 May 1846. Embarking on a similar
course, one of Collins’s fictional creations confides: ‘At that time . . .
I had no serious intention of following any special vocation. I simply
wanted an excuse for enjoying the pleasures of a London life’ (‘Miss
Jeromette and the Clergyman’, II).10 However, according to Collins’s
own account of this period in his own life, he ‘worked hard and
conscientiously’ at his legal studies in the beginning, but ‘at the end
of two months I had conceived such a complete disgust for the law
that I was obliged to tell my father that I could endure the drudgery
no longer’.11 Certainly, there is little evidence that Collins did any
more than keep the legal terms, eat the legal dinners,12 and make
some legal friends who would later be the source of comradeship,
journalistic contacts, and useful information for his fiction. After
the first flurry of activity to equip himself as a student of the Bar
(including acquiring a ticket for the British Museum Reading Room),
Collins returned to work on the novel that he had begun about a
month before enrolling at Lincoln’s Inn.
This work was Antonina, an often lurid and violent historical novel
based on Gibbon’s account of Alaric’s conquest of Rome in ad 410
in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Collins’s own visit to
Rome in 1837, and his reading of the historical novels of Sir Walter
Scott and Bulwer Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1824). As
Catherine Peters notes, Collins’s manuscript indicates that from the
outset he worked on this novel in a meticulous and professional way,
carefully planning and pacing his plot.13 The manuscript also clearly
indicates the point (in the third chapter) at which the novel was
temporarily abandoned following the death of his father in February
1847, after a few years of declining health. Collins did not return
to work on his novel until 25 July 1848, when he had completed work
on what was to be his first published book, a biography of his father
entitled Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., RA: With
Selections from his Journals and Correspondence.
In writing this commemorative work, Wilkie Collins was fulfilling
a filial duty which his father had planned and prepared for him. As
The Life of Wilkie Collins 9
early as 1 January 1844 William Collins had noted in his journal
that he thought it ‘quite possible that my dear son, William Wilkie
Collins, may be tempted . . . to furnish the world with a memoir of
my life’ and that he therefore had the intention of ‘occasionally
noting down some circumstances as leading points, which may be
useful’. The writing of the memoir also served as another stage in
Collins’s apprenticeship in his chosen profession. Writing about the
life of his father gave Collins the opportunity to reflect upon his own
history and formation, and he used the occasion as a means of dis-
tancing himself from his father and defining himself and his own
beliefs in relation to––and sometimes in opposition to––those of
William Collins. Moreover, writing about a father who was a success-
ful painter also gave the aspiring fiction writer an opportunity to
reflect upon the formation of a professional artist. The publication
of the Memoirs in 1848 also served to place Collins in a useful pos-
ition from which to launch his career as a professional writer of
fiction when he completed Antonina. Certainly the Memoirs focused
public attention on its author as well as its subject. It had good
reviews in such leading periodicals as the Athenaeum, the Westminster
Review, and Blackwood’s, receiving praise for its style, judgement,
and insight.
William Collins’s death changed the dynamics of the Collins
family in ways which proved quite liberating for his wife and sons.
The prudence which had marked his professional and parental life
left William’s family well provided for, but the conditions of his will
also left his sons dependent on their mother, during her lifetime, for
any money that they did not earn for themselves. However, no longer
bound by her husband’s extreme prudence in financial matters, nor
by his extreme rectitude in matters of social conduct, Harriet Collins
became a much more entertaining companion, and provided a very
congenial setting for the social life of her sons, who were to remain
with her for the next decade (Collins did not finally move out of his
mother’s home until about 1859). First in Blandford Square, where
she moved shortly after her husband’s death, and then in Hanover
Terrace, Regent’s Park, Harriet seems to have recovered some of the
spirit of the youthful actress that she was before her conversion to
evangelicalism. She kept open house for her sons and their friends.
The young Pre-Raphaelite painters Augustus Egg, William Holman
Hunt, and John Everett Millais were frequent visitors; indeed,
10 The Life of Wilkie Collins
Millais more or less lived in the Collins household at Hanover Terrace
at one point. Other friends included Charles Ward (the Collins
family’s bank manager at Coutts and Wilkie’s sometime companion
on his French trips), Charles’s brother Edward, and their mutual
friend Edward Pigott, who was called to the Bar at the same time as
Collins. One episode involving this group, which was to inform a
number of Collins’s novels, was his involvement in arranging the
clandestine marriage of Edward Ward and his 16-year-old former
pupil Henrietta Ward. Collins made use of his rudimentary legal
‘training’ and his legal contacts to unravel the marriage laws, and he
employed some of his developing plotting skills to bring the Wards
together in the characters of bride and groom in May 1848.
With his mother’s active encouragement, Collins also began to
indulge the theatrical tastes which he had developed on his French
trips, by producing and acting in Sheridan’s The Rivals and
Goldsmith’s The Good-Natur’d Man, which he staged in the
‘Theatre Royal Back Drawing Room’ in his mother’s house. He also
wrote a pastiche eighteenth-century prologue for the Goldsmith
play, which he substituted for Samuel Johnson’s original. Collins also
tried his hand at playwriting, adapting a French melodrama which
was staged as A Court Duel at Miss Kelly’s Theatre, Dean Street, in
late February 1850. He also acted in this charity performance (in aid
of the Female Emigration Fund14), which took place just a few days
before Richard Bentley and Son published his first novel, Antonina.
By mid-March Antonina had been favourably reviewed in (among
others) the Spectator and the Athenaeum, although the reviewers
in both of these magazines felt it necessary to warn the young
author against his tendency to resort to ‘strong effects’,15 and ‘the
needless accumulation of revolting details’.16 Naturally enough,
Bentley’s Miscellany, which was owned by the publisher of Antonina,
welcomed the arrival of an author who ‘in his first work, has stepped
into the first rank of romance writers’.17 Bentley’s Miscellany not
only provided a ‘puffing’ review to propel Collins into the public
eye, but it was also, in the next few years, to provide a useful outlet
for his stories, essays, and reviews, and thus played an important part
in launching his career as a professional writer. Bentley also pub-
lished Collins’s next book, Rambles Beyond Railways (published in
January 1851), an illustrated collection of travel sketches describing
a journey around Cornwall which he had taken in the summer of
The Life of Wilkie Collins 11
1850 with his friend, the artist Henry Brandling (who provided the
illustrations).
The Dickens Years
By early 1851 Collins was the author of a biography, a novel, and a
travel book, all of which had received good notices and had sold
quite well. His unofficial writer’s apprenticeship in the ‘prison on
the Strand’ was beginning to bear fruit. Eighteen fifty-one was also a
milestone of another kind, since it was in this year that Collins began
a friendship that was to be as important for English fiction and
magazine writing in the mid-nineteenth century as it was for the two
individuals involved. It was through their mutual interest in the
theatre that Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens met early in 1851,
when Dickens, by then the leading novelist of the day, was putting
on a production of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Not So Bad As We
Seem. The staging of this specially commissioned play was intended
to raise money for the newly formed Guild of Literature, a benevo-
lent association which Dickens saw as a way of enhancing the status
of writers; Bulwer Lytton was its President and Dickens its Vice
President. When Dickens needed an extra actor he asked Augustus
Egg––who had been part of Dickens’s theatrical group for about
three years––to approach Collins. Not So Bad As We Seem was first
staged at Devonshire House (Dickens’s home at that time) on 16
May 1851, before an audience which included Queen Victoria and
Prince Albert as well as Collins’s mother and brother. Collins’s part
was a small one, and his acting talents were not of the first rank, but
his involvement in this extremely enjoyable and successful theatrical
venture––the first of many theatrical collaborations with Dickens––
cemented what was to be a lifelong interest in the theatre. The
company later went on a ‘wonderful theatrical campaign’ (Letters, i.
82), taking the play to theatres in Bristol, Manchester, Birmingham,
Newcastle, Shrewsbury, and Liverpool. Collins revelled in the
enthusiasm of the audiences in the provinces, declaring in a letter to
Edward Pigott, ‘King Public is a good king for Literature and Art!’
(Letters, i. 82).
As well as developing his interest in plays and the theatre, Not So
Bad As We Seem also provided Collins with a stimulating companion
and a professional ally. For the next fifteen years or so he and
12 The Life of Wilkie Collins
Dickens regularly dined together, visited theatres, and rambled the
streets of London and Paris together, wrote and acted together, and
worked closely together when Collins became a member of the staff of
Dickens’s magazine Household Words in October 1856 (see Chapter 3).
Collins frequently stayed with or near the Dickens family on their
summer holidays in France or on the Kentish coast, and he was
regarded as an honorary uncle by Dickens’s children. When not
plagued by the various illnesses which were to bedevil his life as he
grew older, Collins was an excellent companion for the married man
seeking an escape from his family or diversion within it. He was a bon
viveur, with a passion for fine wines, dry champagne, and French
food. Like Dickens he adored Paris, and even with his illnesses he was
an easygoing travelling companion. Dickens was drawn to Collins’s
unconventionality, and the social ease which came, in part, from
his complete lack of interest in social advancement and living as a
‘gentleman’. Collins’s tolerance in sexual matters made him a con-
genial fellow traveller on what Dickens described as their ‘Haroun
Alraschid’ expeditions (Pilgrim, viii. 623) in search of female com-
pany. The younger man’s own domestic arrangements, when he
made them, had no place for marriage (see below), and although
Dickens did not entirely approve of all aspects of his friend’s
domestic establishments, Collins’s unconventionality was no doubt a
source of support when Dickens’s marriage came increasingly under
strain––and finally collapsed––when he became involved with the
actress Ellen Ternan in the late 1850s.
As well as discovering a congenial companion in Collins, Dickens
also recognized him as a serious fellow professional and a talented
writer. He later recalled that he had, ‘from the Basil days’, regarded
Collins as ‘the writer who would come ahead of all the field––being
the only one who combined invention and power, both humorous
and pathetic, with that invincible determination to work, and that
profound conviction that nothing of worth is to be done without
work, of which triflers and foreigners have no concept’ (Pilgrim, x.
128). Dickens would have had ample opportunity to have observed
Collins’s industry at close quarters in the Basil days, since the young
writer was working on this novel while he was also touring in Not So
Bad As We Seem, and he completed it while he was staying with the
Dickens family in Dover in September 1852 (and while Dickens was
writing Bleak House). In fact, the completion of Collins’s first novel
The Life of Wilkie Collins 13
of modern life was delayed in part by his industrious and pleasurable
application to Dickens’s theatricals and in part by his regular writing
of art reviews and stories for Bentley’s Miscellany, an activity which
served to keep him in the public eye as well as generating an income.
The stories for Bentley’s included ‘The Twin Sisters’ (March 1851),
‘A Passage in the Life of Mr Perugino Potts’ (February 1852) and
‘Nine o’Clock’ (August 1852). During the writing of Basil Collins
was also writing reviews of plays, exhibitions, and books and con-
tributing to the ‘Portfolio’ section of the Leader, a weekly paper
espousing radical views, in which his friend Edward Pigott pur-
chased a controlling interest in 1851. Following Dickens’s example
(although not his financial success), Collins also interrupted his work
on Basil to write a Christmas book, Mr Wray’s Cash-Box; or The
Mask and the Mystery: A Christmas Sketch, published by Bentley
(with a frontispiece by Millais) for Christmas 1851. He also wrote ‘A
Terribly Strange Bed’, a story about an unpleasant night in a Paris
gambling house, which was his first contribution to Dickens’s
Household Words (24 April 1852).
Praised by Dickens for the ‘admirable writing, and many clear
evidences of a very delicate discrimination of character’ (Pilgrim, vi.
823), Basil attracted mixed reviews when it was published by Bentley
in November 1852. Several reviewers shared Dickens’s opinion that
Collins had too little respect for ‘the probabilities’ (Pilgrim, vi. 49),
and some thought he had too little respect for the proprieties. Collins,
however, was content to refer to the judgement of ‘King Public’, and
later claimed in his 1862 ‘Letter of Dedication’ to Basil that his story
slowly but surely ‘forced its way through all adverse criticism, to a
place in the public favour which it has never lost since’. Meanwhile
Collins continued to write for the Leader, wrote ‘Mad Monkton’ a
story about the curse of hereditary insanity, which Dickens declined
on the grounds that it might upset the readers of Household Words,
and ‘Gabriel’s Marriage’––a story of crime, family estrangement,
and forgiveness set in Brittany at the time of the French Revolu-
tion––which appeared in Household Words for 16–23 April 1853. In
the same week Collins began work on Hide and Seek, which he con-
tinued––with some interruptions by illness in the early summer
months––during an extended stay at the Dickenses’ summer base,
the Château des Molineaux in Boulogne. In early October Collins,
Dickens, and Egg returned to Boulogne to begin an extended pleasure
14 The Life of Wilkie Collins
expedition that would take them to Paris, which Collins found
‘overflowing with English travellers, and altered . . . past all recogni-
tion by the commencement of a magnificent new Street . . . [which]
will be the broadest, longest and grandest in the world when it is
finished’ (Letters, i. 98). From Paris they travelled to Venice, via
Strasbourg, Basle, Berne, Lausanne, Milan, Genoa, Naples, Rome,
and Florence.
Collins’s letters to his mother, brother, and friends give vivid
accounts of the people, places, and landscapes that they encountered
on their travels, including their sometimes unconventional travelling
arrangements: for example, Collins and Egg slept in the storeroom
on one of the boats they took, while Dickens ‘had share of a friend’s
cabin’ (Letters, i. 111). Collins and Egg were very much the junior
partners on this trip, travelling slightly in the shadow of the wealth-
ier and more successful man: Collins remarks on the ‘prodigious
sensation in the English colony at Lausanne’ caused by the arrival in
its midst of the eminent writer. In his letters to Harriet and his
brother Charles, Collins frequently recalls their Italian sojourn of
1836–8 (and Dickens’s letters to his wife on this trip indicate that he
found Collins’s constant harking back to his adventures as a cosmo-
politan 13-year-old rather irritating). Collins found Naples and
Genoa much changed, but Rome and Florence were exactly as he
remembered them in his childhood. Only the dramatis personae of
their Italian visit had changed, as he notes with pleasure in a letter to
Charles which throws light on Collins’s view of life at this time. He
describes a gloomy meeting with William Iggulden (a banker whom
the Collins family had known during their stay in Rome sixteen years
earlier) and his son, a ‘tall young gentleman with a ghastly face,
immense whiskers, and an expression of the profoundest melan-
choly’. ‘Do you remember little “Lorenzo” who was the lively young
“Pickle” of the family in our time?’ asks Collins with amazed
amusement, ‘Well! This was Lorenzo!!!!’ (Letters, i. 114). He is even
more delighted to recount that Lorenzo’s brother, ‘the pattern good-
boy who used to be quoted as an example to me’, has ‘married a
pretty girl without his parent’s consent––is out of the banking busi-
ness in consequence––and has gone to Australia to make his fortune
as well as he can’. Collins reports himself ‘rather glad to hear this, as
I don’t like “well-conducted” young men! I know it is wrong! But I
always feel relieved and happy when I hear that they have got into
The Life of Wilkie Collins 15
a scrape’ (Letters, i. 114–15). In Venice, the trio led ‘the most
luxurious, dandy-dilettante sort of life . . . among pictures and pal-
aces . . . operas, Ballets and Cafés’ (Letters, i. 118). Fresh from the
galleries of Rome and Florence, Collins was struck once more by the
‘glorious pictures’, and by the ‘superiority of the Venetian painters’,
especially Tintoretto. He writes to his mother that ‘Charley and
Millais and Hunt, ought to come here if they go nowhere else’ as
the Venetians, ‘employed as they almost always were, to represent
conventional subjects, are the most original race of painters that the
world has yet seen’ (Letters, i. 118).
It is clear that Collins intended his letters to be passed around
among his friends, and that he also regarded them as notes to stimu-
late ‘reflection and remembrance’ (Letters, i. 119) on his return, so
that he might work them up into travel sketches for publication. If
Collins had entertained hopes of defraying some of the expenses
of his journey in this way he was to be disappointed, as Bentley
declined to publish them on the grounds that the Miscellany had
recently run a series of essays on Italy and Italian art. Once back
in England, Collins returned to work on Hide and Seek, which was
published in three volumes on 5 June 1854, some ten weeks after the
outbreak of the Crimean War, an unfortunate timing which Collins
felt adversely affected the sales of this novel. Hide and Seek was
dedicated to Dickens, and it was with Dickens that Collins took
his relaxation following the novel’s completion. First he took up
Dickens’s invitation to be his ‘vicious associate’ in ‘a career of amiable
dissipation and unbounded license in the metropolis’ (Pilgrim, vii.
366), and then he accompanied him to Boulogne for the summer.
The years following the publication of Hide and Seek were
crowded with activity, as Collins pursued the busy journalistic career
and literary collaborations that were part of his working friendship
with Dickens. He completed a novella, A Rogue’s Life (serialized in
Household Words in 1856), and The Dead Secret, a novel about a
woman with a secret which foreshadowed the sensation novels of the
1860s (serialized in Household Words in 1857). He worked on the
manuscript of the autobiographical narrative which his mother had
written in 1853, and which she hoped that he might publish under
his own name; in the end he did not publish it, but used some of
the material from it in the narrative which linked together his first
collection of short stories, After Dark (1856), and he also borrowed
16 The Life of Wilkie Collins
some details for later novels. Collins also continued to write plays: The
Frozen Deep and The Lighthouse (based on his own story ‘Gabriel’s
Marriage’) were staged by Dickens in 1857, and The Red Vial was
put on at the Olympic Theatre in 1858 (and duly flopped). In
between––and sometimes during––this furious literary production,
there were regular trips to Paris with Dickens. On one such trip in
1856 Collins, browsing the Paris bookstalls, picked up Maurice
Méjan’s Recueil des causes célèbres which he was to use in plotting The
Woman in White. Despite being caught up in the Dickens whirlwind,
Collins did not neglect his other friends, and it was in this period
that he developed what was to become a lifelong passion for sailing,
after a trip with Edward Pigott. ‘The Cruise of the Tomtit’ was the
first literary outcome of this new interest, and it also made an
appearance in his novel Armadale. Without doubt, however, the
major event of the Dickens years was Collins’s response to Dickens’s
invitation to provide an exciting serial novel (to follow his own A
Tale of Two Cities) for his new periodical All the Year Round. This
novel, The Woman in White, which is usually credited with inaugur-
ating the fictional sub-genre known as the ‘sensation novel’, certainly
inaugurated the most successful decade of Collins’s career as a
novelist.
Family Secrets and Secret Families
The plots of sensation novels typically involve marital irregularities
of various kinds, and frequently focus on a woman with a secret. By
the time The Woman in White appeared both Collins and Dickens
were involved in their own ‘marital’ irregularities and each of them
was the cause of a woman becoming a woman with a secret. In May
1858 Dickens separated from his wife, made a public declaration that
no other person was involved and continued with his clandestine
relationship with Ellen Ternan, a young actress he had met while
acting in Collins’s The Frozen Deep in 1857. Collins, meanwhile,
with somewhat less secrecy (and in Dickens’s opinion, with con-
siderably less discretion), had formed a relationship with Caroline
Graves, a young widow whom he had met in the early 1850s, and
with whom he lived from about 1858 until his death––apart from
one break in 1868–9 when Caroline unaccountably married some-
one else. Caroline Graves (née Elizabeth Compton), was born in
The Life of Wilkie Collins 17
Toddington in Gloucestershire in about 1830––the exact date is not
known, and Caroline appears to have been in the habit of mis-
representing her age. She was the daughter of a carpenter named
John Compton and his wife, but her tendency towards socially
aggrandizing fantasies led her to describe herself as the daughter of
a gentleman named Courtenay. In 1850, when she was living in Bath,
she married George Robert Graves, a shorthand writer and son of a
stonemason. Caroline and George Graves subsequently lived in
Clerkenwell in London, and it was there that their daughter (and
Caroline’s only child) was born. George Graves died in January
1852.
It is not clear precisely when and how Collins first met Caroline,
although in his biography of his father, J. G. Millais suggested that
their first meeting inspired Collins’s depiction of Walter Hartright’s
first encounter with Anne Catherick in The Woman in White. It is
now thought most likely that they first met when Collins was staying
temporarily in lodgings in Howland Street (off the Tottenham
Court Road) in 1856. Certainly Caroline and her mother-in-law
were living in that neighbourhood at the time. By the end of 1858
Collins seems to have been living with Caroline at 124 Albany
Street; she was the registered ratepayer at this address, and Collins
wrote several letters from there in 1858/9. They moved from
Albany Street to 2a New Cavendish Street, and eighteen months
later to Harley Street, where they rented rooms from a dentist. At
this last address Caroline was known as Collins’s wife, and her
daughter was passed off as a young servant. At the Harley Street
address Collins completed a census return as a married lodger,
recording his profession as barrister and author of works of fiction.
Collins did not long trouble to maintain the fiction of their marital
status. To his male friends he openly acknowledged Caroline’s place
in his life, and she began to act as hostess at informal and convivial
dinners for them, and, later, to accompany him on trips in England
and on the Continent. Some of Collins’s female friends would have
known of his domestic set-up, but, in accordance with the customs
of the double standard, they would not have accompanied their
husbands to the dinners that Collins hosted with Caroline. The
fictional identity of Caroline’s daughter, who was known as Carrie,
was also quickly dropped. He described Carrie as his godchild,
treated her as an adopted child, and paid for her education. Carrie
lived with Collins until her own marriage to Henry Powell Bartley, a
18 The Life of Wilkie Collins
‘respectable’ solicitor who turned out to be much more extravagant
and reckless than her ‘bohemian’ adoptive father, and whose profli-
gacy was later to undo the careful plans which Collins had made to
secure her financial future.
Collins’s unconventional domestic establishment was one which
had many obvious advantages for the male partner, as it combined
the freedom of a bachelor existence with the security and comfort of
married life. His setting up of this establishment marked the end of
his apprenticeship in life and in letters. For the first time Collins
became quite independent of his mother, although he continued to
have a close and loving relationship with her. His arrangement with
Caroline provided him with a secure base from which to pursue his
increasingly successful career as a novelist. Caroline was Collins’s
constant companion during the planning and writing of The Woman
in White, staying with him––and ministering to his various health
complaints––on an extended visit to Broadstairs in the summer of
1859, when he was engaged in ‘slowly and painfully launching my
new serial novel’ (Letters, i. 176). She also helped him to enjoy the
fruits of its success, as Dickens noted in March 1861:
Wilkie is in a popular and potential state . . . He has made his rooms in
Harley Street very handsome and comfortable. We never speak of the
(female) skeleton in that house, and I therefore have not the least idea of
the state of his mind on that subject. I hope it does not run in any
matrimonial groove. I cannot imagine any good coming of such an end in
this instance. (Pilgrim, ix. 388)
Dickens’s sensitivities about Wilkie’s household skeletons were no
doubt heightened by his worries about his own female skeletons and
also by fears that he himself would be compromised by any scandal
that attached to the Collins family, as Wilkie’s brother Charles
had married Katie Dickens––against her father’s will––in the
summer of 1860.
Dickens need not have worried about Collins’s mind running ‘in
any matrimonial groove’ as far as Caroline, or indeed anyone else was
concerned. However, before too long Collins’s domestic affairs were
to become even more complicated and scandalous than Dickens
envisaged when he wrote the words quoted above. During the most
productive years of his career, when he wrote most of what are
generally acknowledged to be his best novels Collins doubled the
20 The Life of Wilkie Collins
irregularity of his domestic life by beginning another relationship
that was to lead to the establishment of a second Collins household
outside of the matrimonial groove. The beginnings of Collins’s rela-
tionship with Martha Rudd, who was to be the mother of his three
illegitimate children, are as shrouded in mystery as are the begin-
nings of his relationship with Caroline Graves. However, it is prob-
able that the 40-year-old Collins met the 19-year-old Martha when
he was staying in Great Yarmouth researching the Norfolk scenes of
Armadale in 1864. Martha and her elder sister, the daughters of a
Norfolk shepherd, were certainly working as servants for an inn-
keeper at Great Yarmouth in the early 1860s. It is not clear exactly
when Martha moved from Yarmouth to London, but by 1868 she
was living at 33 Bolsover Street in a house rented by Collins. It is
possible that this move was one of the circumstances that precipi-
tated Caroline’s rather surprising marriage to Joseph Clow, a much
younger man, in October 1868.
Collins’s mother’s death on 19 March 1868 may have led Caroline
to try to force the issue of matrimony: Collins could no longer claim
that Harriet’s objections were an obstacle to his marriage. Whether
in frustration at Collins’s refusal to marry her, or in pique at the
discovery of his relationship with Martha, or for some other reason
entirely, Caroline suddenly married Joseph Clow on 29 October
1868, in a ceremony witnessed by Collins and his doctor Frank
Beard. Martha gave birth to Collins’s first child, Marian, at Bolsover
Street in July 1869, and a second daughter, Harriet, was born in May
1871. Three and a half years later Martha gave birth to a son, William
Charles on Christmas Day 1874. This third child was the only one of
the Collins children whose birth he formally registered (by 1874
this was a legal requirement), but Collins recognized all the children
as his own, and provided for them with much the same care with
which his own prudent father had provided for his legitimate family.
Collins endowed his ‘morganatic family’ (as he described them to his
friends the Lehmans) with a modicum of respectability by assuming
the fictional identity of ‘Mr William Dawson’ at the addresses at
which they lived, and by describing Martha as ‘Mrs Dawson’ and
giving all of the children the surname of Dawson. Collins continued
to support Martha financially throughout the rest of his life, and he
made careful financial provision for her and all of their children in
his will.
The Life of Wilkie Collins 21
After Caroline’s marriage to Clow, her daughter Carrie (by then
aged 17) remained with Collins in his main household, and she
stayed with him until her own marriage in 1878. Caroline left Clow
after only two years of marriage and returned to live with Collins
and her daughter. Thereafter Collins maintained two separate
households, with Caroline acting as his housekeeper and continuing
to entertain his friends at his ‘official’ irregular residence. He made
regular visits to his other home which contained Martha and his
children, but he did not entertain his friends there. As far as is
known, Caroline and Martha did not meet, but the ‘Dawson’ children
made frequent visits to the house Collins shared with Caroline,
and they sometimes accompanied Caroline and Collins on holidays.
Collins also took separate seaside holidays with his Dawson family.
One odd episode in the life of this multiply unmarried man, was
the fictional marriage which he constructed in letters, written towards
the end of his life, to Anne Elizabeth le Poer Wynne, or ‘Nannie’
Wynne as he called her. Nannie was the daughter of a member of the
Indian Civil Service who had died of cholera when he was only 35
(and before his daughter’s birth). Catherine Peters surmises that
Collins probably met Nannie and her widowed mother in 1885
through his doctor Frank Beard, who was also doctor to the Wynnes.
Collins’s friendship with Nannie was conducted at luncheon parties
and afternoon visits with the mother and daughter, and through a
regular correspondence with Nannie. From June 1885, when she was
only 12 years old, until February 1888 Collins wrote a series of
letters to Nannie, addressing her as ‘Dear and admirable Mrs Collins’,
‘Mrs Wilkie Collins’, ‘dearest Mrs’, and ‘carrissima sposa mea’, and
referring to her mother as ‘my mother-in-law’. The letters are con-
sistently playful in tone and on one occasion Collins makes
encouraging comments about Nannie’s own writing: ‘I am proud of
my wife. Her account of the earthquake is the best that I have read
yet’ (Letters, ii. 508). Some twenty-first-century readers of these
letters might be perturbed by the thought of a 63-year-old man
imagining a 14-year-old girl rushing into the street during the earth-
quake in question ‘in the costume of a late queen of the Sandwich
Islands––a hat and feathers and nothing else’ (Letters, ii. 508), but
on the whole the correspondence seems odd and whimsical rather
than perverse. However, one cannot help but feel that Collins the
iconoclast, the man who resolutely did not marry either of the
22 The Life of Wilkie Collins
women whom in the eyes of society he should have married, took
great pleasure in constructing the fiction of a marriage with a girl
(some fifty years his junior) whom it would have been entirely
inappropriate for him to have married. For the most part, the letters
seemed to serve as a means by which Collins could displace some of
the anxieties about his work and health which troubled his later
years, by parodying them and joking about them. Thus, he welcomes
Nannie and her mother back from the holiday on which they have
experienced the earthquake: ‘Here we have had neuralgia in place of
earthquake terrors––I have been taking forced holidays with my
excellent friends Opium and Quinine until all my literary work has
fallen into arrear––and now I am obliged to perform the detestable
penance called “making up for lost time” ’ (Letters, ii. 509).
The Pains of Literary Labour
Although he seems to have been a reasonably healthy child, Collins
was plagued by illness and experienced increasing bodily discomfort
throughout his adult years. From his late twenties he suffered from
the painful symptoms of what he called ‘rheumatic gout’ and neur-
algia, and he also suffered from increasingly acute inflammation of
the eyes (which he wrongly attributed to gout). Some of Collins’s
health problems were possibly hereditary; Collins certainly thought
that he had inherited some of his afflictions from his father, whose
sufferings from violent rheumatic pains and inflammation of the
eyes he described in the Memoirs. Others of Collins’s problems were
undoubtedly self-inflicted; he was a gourmand who over-indulged
his appetite for rich food and good wine both at home and on his
frequent trips to France. Quite often the excesses of his trips to
France would incapacitate him; for example, in both 1855 and 1856
he was laid up with rheumatic pain when in Paris with Dickens. It
has also been suggested that some of Collins’s painful symptoms
might be attributable to a venereal disease, perhaps contracted on
one of his Haroun Alraschid expeditions with Dickens. Some of
Collins’s health problems were probably what we would now call
stress-related. It is surely not entirely coincidental that his symp-
toms and sufferings should have worsened during the 1860s under
the pressure of constantly writing to deadlines, nor that they should
have been further aggravated by the need to keep the literary
The Life of Wilkie Collins 23
pot boiling in the 1870s and 1880s. Collins’s working habits, like
Dickens’s, put a great strain on his health. His habit was to research
and ruminate on a novel for a lengthy period, constructing a kind of
mental scaffolding, before writing at some speed and under great
pressure of the deadlines for serial publication. The physical and
nervous symptoms produced by this process included palpitations,
trembling, and depression as well as gout, neuralgia, and eye prob-
lems. These symptoms sometimes impeded the progress of a work.
For example, the writing of The Moonstone was severely impeded by
‘suffering . . . so great . . . that I could not control myself and keep
quiet’, he told William Winter. ‘My cries and groans so distressed
my amanuensis, to whom I was dictating, that he could not continue
his work, and had to leave me . . . I was blind with pain, and I lay on
the couch writhing and groaning’.18 Carrie Graves often assisted
Collins by acting as his amanuensis when his health deteriorated
during the writing of a book. In later years, as his health deteriorated
further, the completion of a book would sometimes lead to a total
collapse. Thus in February 1883, after finishing Heart and Science,
he informed Nina Lehman: ‘For six months––while I was writing
furiously, without cessation, one part sane and three parts mad––I
had no gout. I finished my story, discovered one day that I was half
dead with fatigue––and the next day the gout was in my right eye’
(Letters, ii. 455).
During the 1860s, when Collins’s health really began to plague
him, he tried all manner of cures, including herbal remedies, visits to
Continental health spas, Turkish baths, and electric baths. Another
‘remedy’ that he was prescribed in the early 1860s was to make
Collins into a lifelong ‘opium eater’ through his addiction to laud-
anum. His friend and doctor, Frank Beard, first prescribed laudanum
to relieve the painful symptoms of Collins’s rheumatic gout in 1861.
Laudanum was freely available (until 1868) and was the main
ingredient of numerous patent medicines, such as ‘Battley’s Drops’
which his father had taken during the illnesses of his final years. At
first the laudanum prescribed by Beard relieved Collins’s symptoms.
However, he became increasingly dependent on it, needing larger
and more frequent doses, until he was taking it in a dose large
enough to have killed several ordinary people who had not developed
Collins’s tolerance for opium. In the early years of his dependency
Collins tried to wean himself off the drug. In 1863 he tried to control
The Life of Wilkie Collins 25
the pain of his gout by substituting laudanum with a course of
hypnosis with John Elliotson (described as ‘one of the greatest of
English physiologists’ by another laudanum user, Ezra Jennings, in
The Moonstone; see Chapter 6 below). In 1869 he tried replacing the
laudanum with morphine injections, but again to no avail. No doubt
some of Collins’s palpitations and depressions of the 1870s and
1880s were due to his opium dependency. He also experienced hal-
lucinations, and a sense of being haunted, and on some occasions he
did not recognize as his own work the writing which he had done
while in an opium trance. Several critics have attributed what they
see as a decline in the quality of Collins’s writing in the 1870s and
1880s to the effects of his opium addiction.
In 1868 Wilkie Collins was too ill to attend his mother’s funeral,
and from this point on his letters suggest that he was increasingly
preoccupied with his own health and with mortality, as he records
his physical and nervous afflictions and the deaths of friends.
Dickens’s very sudden death from a brain haemorrhage was one of
the first of these losses, as Collins reported rather tersely in a letter
to William Tindell: ‘I finished “Man and Wife” yesterday––fell
asleep from sheer fatigue––and was awakened to hear the news of
Dickens’s death’ (Letters, ii. 341). By 1870 the two men were not as
close as they had once been, separated, perhaps, by their divergent
‘domestic’ paths and perhaps also by the literary success which had
taken Collins out of Dickens’s shadow; nevertheless the loss to
Collins was significant. Dickens’s death was followed a couple of
years later by the death of his son-in-law, Collins’s younger brother
Charles, on 9 April 1873. Edward Ward, whose secret marriage
Collins had helped to arrange in the 1840s, committed suicide in
1879 during one of the depressions to which he was prone.
Edward’s brother Charles, Collins’s companion on some of his early
Paris trips and later on sailing holidays, died in 1883. Responding
to yet another death in 1886 (that of his Australian representative
Biers), Collins reported on his own health with a not entirely char-
acteristic stoicism: ‘As for my health, considering that I was 62
years old last birthday––that I have worked very hard as a writer––
and that gout has tried to blind me first and kill me afterwards, on
more than one occasion––I must not complain. Neuralgia, and
nervous exhaustion generally, have sent me to the sea to be patched
up’ (Letters, ii. 523).
26 The Life of Wilkie Collins
Debilitating though his health problems were, one must not
exaggerate the gloominess of the last two decades of Collins’s life.
He continued to travel, emulating Dickens by undertaking an exten-
sive reading tour of the United States in 1873–4 (although this was
curtailed by health problems and by a domestic emergency at his
‘family’ home). He continued to enjoy sailing trips with his friends,
to take seaside holidays with his various family groups, and to travel
on the Continent (although such visits were often represented to his
correspondents as primarily restorative). He continued to be very
productive in terms of literary output, and to try new forms of
publication, such as syndication with Tillotson’s Fiction Bureau (see
p. 78). He also enjoyed watching his children grow up, acting as
‘grandfather’ to Carrie’s children, and making new friends, such as
Nannie Wynne and her mother, the journalist Harry Quilter, and the
novelist Hall Caine. Quilter, who started the Universal Review in
1888, persuaded Collins to write one of his few autobiographical
pieces, ‘Reminiscences of a Story-Teller’ mentioned earlier.
Despite his illnesses, Collins retained his conviviality until the
end of his life. It was when he was returning from a dinner given by
Sebastian Schlesinger, an American whom he had met during his
American tour in the early 1870s, that Collins had a lucky escape
from death, when he was injured in a carriage accident. This acci-
dent occurred in January 1889, and ‘gave . . . [him] a shake and
stirred up the gout’ (Letters, ii. 562). By March he was suffering
from bronchitis and neuralgia, and envying the ‘happy lot of the
African savage, who lives under a nice warm sun’ and has never
heard of these conditions (Letters, ii. 562). He continued to work at
his current serial, Blind Love, but in July he suffered a stroke, and
despite the fact that at first he seemed to be making a good recovery
from it, he arranged for Walter Besant––a fellow novelist and former
colleague at All the Year Round––to complete it. A further attack of
bronchitis followed the stroke and Collins died on 23 September
1889. He was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery, where at least a
hundred mourners, some of them carrying copies of their favourite
Collins novels, thronged round the steps of the church.19 The chief
mourners included Harriet Graves and Carrie. Martha Rudd and
Collins’s children did not attend the funeral, but the ‘Dawson’ family
sent a large wreath.
chapter 2
THE SOCIAL CONTEXT
Wilkie Collins was born in the fourth year of the reign of
George IV (who had served as Prince Regent 1811–20), and he died
two years after Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. He was born twelve
years into Lord Liverpool’s lengthy period as Tory Prime Minister,
two years into Sir Robert Peel’s period as Home Secretary, and five
years after the disturbances at St Peter’s Fields in Manchester (the
Peterloo Massacre, 1819), when the Manchester Yeomanry and a
regiment of the Hussars violently broke up a large gathering which
had assembled to demand electoral reform. By Collins’s fourth year
the Duke of Wellington had become Tory Prime Minister and his
government had succumbed to pressure from the opposition to
repeal the Test and Corporation Acts which had prevented Catholics
and Nonconformists from holding public office and serving on
corporations, though it was many years before the Anglican monop-
oly on the Cabinet was broken. By Collins’s fifth year Robert Peel
and the Duke of Wellington had steered the Catholic Emancipation
Act through both Houses of Parliament and Peel had established the
Metropolitan Police Force (1829). Collins was 8 when the first
Reform Act was passed in 1832; by the time he died the Third
Reform Act (1884) had been passed, Gladstone had ended his
second period as Liberal Prime Minister (1880–5), having resigned
following the defeat of the 1885 Budget, the Irish Home Rule Bill
had been introduced and defeated (1886), and organized Socialism
was becoming an increasingly important part of the political scene
(both the Social Democratic Foundation and the Fabian society were
founded in 1884).
Collins’s early years coincided with a period of political agitation
and social reform (and resistance to reform), a period still haunted
by the spectre of the French Revolution. They also coincided with
revolutions of a different kind: the Industrial Revolution, the machine
age, and the transformation of Britain (and especially England) from
a predominantly rural, mercantile society to an entrepreneurial
28 The Social Context
industrial society that was mainly urban in character. When Collins
was born in 1824 (and even when Victoria ascended the throne in
1837), ‘only a handful of British workers had ever seen the inside of a
“dark satanic mill”, the most numerous occupational groups were
agricultural labourers and domestic servants’, and 50 per cent of the
British population lived in rural conditions.1 By 1885 over one mil-
lion people were employed in factories, compared with the approxi-
mately 355,000 thus employed in 1835, and the population of the
great towns and cities of Britain had multiplied several times over:
the population of London (then the largest city in the western
world) grew from 1,600,000 in 1821 to 4,770,000 in 1881, while in
the same period Birmingham grew from 102,000 to 546,000, Bradford
from 26,000 to 183,000, Cardiff from 4,000 to 83,000, Glasgow from
147,000 to 653,000, and Manchester from 135,000 to 502,000.
Another revolution which occurred in Collins’s lifetime was the
revolution in transport. Collins was born at the dawn of the railway
age, the age of the ‘iron horse’ and of the coming-of-age of steam
power. Although railways had existed in England since the seven-
teenth century they had been horse-drawn or, more latterly, cable
railways powered by static track-side engines. The real railway revo-
lution came with the advent of steam traction, and the transporting
of people as well as coal and goods. In the year after Collins’s birth
the Stockton–Darlington Railway, the first railway line to carry
passengers, was opened (September 1825). This was followed by
the Manchester–Liverpool line in 1830. By the time Collins died, in
1889, Britain had a comprehensive railway system (indeed, the main
railway lines of England were all completed or planned by 1852), and
London had the beginnings of the modern tube system (the Inner
Circle Underground Line had been completed in 1884). The railways
transformed the landscape and townscape of Britain, with cuttings,
embankments, viaducts, and bridges, signal boxes, linesmen’s huts,
and stations–– from the rural halt to the magnificent Gothic edifices
of the great metropolitan and city termini. Railways made the island
of Britain seem a smaller place, by shrinking journey times and
speeding up communications (as letters passed at great speed along
railway lines from one end of the land to the other). Railways thus
transformed the pace of life and the pursuit of work and leisure.
They enabled the better-off to put a greater distance between their
place of work and their home (opening up new and successive phases
The Social Context 29
of suburbanization). Rail links to seaports brought Continental
Europe ever closer for the businessman, or for those, like Collins, who
liked to make regular pleasure trips to the French coast or to Paris.
Cheap railway travel also increased the mobility of the less-well-off
sections of the community, enabling working people from all over
England to travel to the Great Exhibition held in London in 1851,
the London International Exhibition of 1862, and other exhibitions
in London and elsewhere. Cheap railway travel also enabled the
inhabitants of industrial towns and cities to take pleasure excursions
to the seaside or countryside–– at first simply for the day, but as
prosperity increased for longer periods.
What kind of world did Wilkie Collins live in and write about?
What kind of society formed this writer and the fiction that he wrote?
An incantation uttered by Solomon Gills in Dickens’s novel Dombey
and Son (1846–8) gives us one perspective on the early Victorian
years in which Collins came of age: ‘competition, competition–– new
invention, new invention–– alteration, alteration’ (Dombey and Son,
Chapter 4). Alteration, invention, and competition: these are indeed
Victorian keywords, and they convey a sense of the excitement and
energy, as well as the uncertainty and sense of instability experienced
by those who lived through this period of rapid social, political, and
intellectual change. Change was the order of the day: changes in
geography and demography as the landscape and townscape of
Britain were transformed by the building of railways, changing pat-
terns of agriculture, the building or enlarging of factories and ware-
houses, and the development of towns and cities in which to house,
feed, clothe, and entertain the ‘hands’ who worked in them. There
were changes, too, in the composition of the social groups or classes
that made up British society and changes in the relations between
these groups and classes. If there were changes in the nature of the
social family there were also changes in the family as a social unit,
and in particular in the roles of its male and female members and in
the relations between men and women more generally.
Alteration, for good and ill, was one of the themes of Thomas
Carlyle’s essay, ‘Signs of the Times’, published in 1829, just five years
after Collins’s birth:
What wonderful accessions have thus been made, and are still making, to
the physical power of mankind; how much better fed, clothed, lodged and,
30 The Social Context
in all outward respects, accommodated men now are, or might be, by a
given quantity of labour, is a grateful reflection which forces itself on
everyone. What changes too, this addition of power is introducing into the
social system; how wealth has more and more increased, and at the same
time gathered itself more and more into masses, strangely altering the old
relations, and increasing the distance between rich and poor.2
In addition to the widening of the gulf between the rich and the
poor, the most profound changes noted by Carlyle in this essay are
the increasing mechanization of society. He writes vividly of the way
in which steam power and machinery and a mechanistic conception
of economics worked together to reduce workers into mere ‘hands’,
he laments the growing tendency for the hearts and minds of human
beings to become mechanical, and he deplores the rise of materialism,
the loss of spirituality, and the erosion of traditional shared beliefs
about the meaning of life.
Edward Bulwer Lytton, writing seven years after Collins’s birth,
in the wake of the First Reform Act and some four years before
Victoria succeeded to the throne, focused on the discomforting
disorientation of living in an age of fundamental change, or, as he put
it, ‘visible transition’:
We live in an age of visible transition–– an age of disquietude and doubt–– of
the removal of timeworn landmarks, and the breaking up of the hereditary
elements of society–– old opinions, feelings–– ancestral customs and institu-
tions are crumbling away, and both the spiritual and temporal worlds are
darkened by the shadows of change. The commencement of one of these
epochs–– periodical in the history of mankind–– is hailed by the sanguine
as the coming of a new Millennium–– a great iconoclastic reformation, by
which all false gods shall be overthrown. To me such epochs appear but
as the dark passages in the appointed progress of mankind–– the times of
greatest unhappiness to our species–– passages into which we have no
reason to rejoice at our entrance, save from the hope of being sooner
landed on the opposite side.3
A quarter of a century after the above passage was published,
Dickens began A Tale of Two Cities (1859) with this sketch of the
‘times’:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of
wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the
epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of
Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had
The Social Context 31
everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going
direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way–– in short,
the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest
authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the
superlative degree of comparison only. (A Tale of Two Cities, Book the
First, Chapter I)
Of course, the best and worst of times about which Dickens is writing
here are the years leading up to and including the French Revolu-
tion. However, as the reference to ‘the present period’ indicates, this
wonderful evocation of the heady mixture of optimism and terror
which characterized the revolutionary period at the turn of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries serves equally well as a charac-
terization of the contrasts and contradictions of nineteenth-
century–– and especially of Victorian–– Britain. It also serves to
remind us of the continuing power of the French Revolution and
the spectre of revolution generally in the nineteenth-century cultural
imagination.
The years in which Collins grew up and began his writing career
were years of great prosperity, in which Britain became the work-
shop of the world. However, they were also years of fluctuating
economic conditions, of boom and depression, years which saw great
rural and urban poverty as well as lengthy periods of high wages and
social improvement. These were years when, according to many
commentators, Britain was not one, but two nations–– the rich and
the poor. Collins lived his adult life in the age of the great Victorian
cities. Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, and, of course
Collins’s home city London, all expanded rapidly during the
author’s lifetime, and in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s their improved
sanitation and housing and their splendid Greek, Gothic, or Italianate
town halls, banks, art galleries, and libraries and their public parks
and gardens were evidence of–– and became monuments to––
industrial and entrepreneurial wealth and civic pride. The Victorian
age was an age of progress and reform, an age of improvement which
was also experienced as the ‘crumbling away’, or violent destruction
of ancient customs and institutions. It was an age of science and
materialism, which also saw a growth of interest in mysticism
and the occult. It was the age of piety and public professions of faith,
and a flurry of church and chapel building, but it was also the age of
Darwin, doubt, and falling church and chapel attendance. It was an
32 The Social Context
age of ‘self-help’, of societies for the propagation of useful know-
ledge (Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help was published in 1859), but it
was also an age of self-destructive competitive individualism. It
was the great age of the family, but one in which both individual
families and the institution of the family became sites of conflict and
contestation.
Protest and Reform
Has anybody told you that ‘The Jubilee’ was an outburst of Loyalty? I tell
you that it was an outburst of Fear and Cant. In my neighbourhood, there
was a report that we should have our windows broken if we did not
illuminate. In the year 1832, when I was eight years old, my poor father
was informed that he would have his windows broken if he failed to
illuminate in honour of the passing of the First Reform Bill . . . Before we
went to bed the tramp of the people was heard in the street. They were
marching six abreast (the people were in earnest in those days) provided
with stones, and with their officers in command. They broke every pane of
glass in an unilluminated house, nearly opposite our house, in less than a
minute. I ran out to see the fun, and when the sovereign people cheered
for the Reform Bill, I cheered too. Fifty five years later, I heard of the
windows being in danger again, and illuminated again (on a cheap scale
which accurately represented the shabby nature of my loyalty). This time,
the people had no interest in the affair. . . . everywhere the people behaved
well–– and that was the one creditable circumstance in connection with the
Jubilee. (Letters, ii. 541)
Collins lived in an age of protest and reform, an age of increasing
democracy in which ‘the people’ (referred to in this letter), were
becoming more visible and vociferous. He published his first book––
the Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., RA–– in 1848, the
year of revolutions in Europe. By the 1870s he was questioning
whether ‘in these times of fierce political contention, and absorbing
political anxiety’, his efforts could be considered ‘important enough
to waken the attention, or even to amuse the leisure of others’ (Letters,
ii. 337). In the section of the Memoirs which refers to the early 1830s,
Collins notes the effect of the outbreak of the cholera and ‘the
Reform Bill agitation’ on the patrons of the arts:
those momentous public occurrences . . . produced that long and serious
depression in the patronage and appreciation of Art which social and
political convulsions must necessarily exercise on the intellectual luxuries
The Social Context 33
of the age. The noble and the wealthy . . . believing that their possessions
were threatened by a popular revolution, which was to sink the rights of
station and property in a general deluge of republican equality, had little
time, while engrossed in watching the perilous events of the day, to attend
to the remoter importance of the progress of national Art. . . . there were
not wanting many to predict, from the aspect of the times, the downfall of
all honourable and useful pursuits, the end of the aristocracy, and even
the end of the world . . . (Letters, i. 345)
The process of electoral reform which was to find legislative expres-
sion in the Reform Acts of 1832, 1867, and 1884 had been debated
since the mid-eighteenth-century. It had begun (slowly) in the 1820s
with attempts to rectify some of the worst excesses of electoral
corruption (where the outcomes of elections for over-represented
‘rotten boroughs’ or ‘pocket boroughs’ were determined by bribery
or controlled by an aristocratic patron), and it became an important
focus of social and parliamentary debate and various forms of extra-
parliamentary activism in response to the growing outrage at both
the continued exclusion of the majority of the population from the
electoral process and the inequitable distribution of parliamentary
seats. The composition of the electorate, like the distribution of
parliamentary seats, had remained more or less unchanged since
the eighteenth century. However, the social composition of Britain
and the distribution of its population had changed considerably
since this time, and was in the process of further rapid change in the
years of Collins’s boyhood and youth (as, indeed, it was throughout
his life). In 1830 Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds had no
separate parliamentary representation, and the only influence that
these rapidly expanding towns could exert on the composition on
the House of Commons was through the role played by some of
their citizens as County Electors, or by getting themselves repre-
sented for closed or rotten boroughs–– a process known as virtual
representation. Agitation for change by the new industrialists and
middle-class radicals throughout the 1820s, and by the rural popula-
tion (the so-called Swing riots) in the early 1830s were met by an
increasing willingness by the Whig government to effect a measure
of parliamentary reform–– on both philosophical and pragmatic
grounds.
Achieved after much debate, much marching and demonstrating
(some of which was witnessed by an excited 8-year-old Collins, as he
34 The Social Context
recalled in the letter quoted at the head of this section), and a general
election in which reform was the central issue, the First Reform Act
redistributed 143 parliamentary seats from relatively unpopulated
rural areas of the south and west of England to the increasingly
populous and urban areas of the midlands and north. After the 1832
Act, Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield, Bolton, and Oldham
all had an MP for the first time. Nevertheless, over fifty ‘pocket
boroughs’ survived the redistribution exercise, leaving a particular
member of the local gentry with the power to nominate the MP. The
1832 Act widened the electorate from about 515,000 to 813,000 from
a total population of about 24 million. However, this was far from
being democratic: women were still excluded from the electorate
(and remained so until the 1918 Representation of the People Acts
gave the vote to women over 30), and the right to vote was still
dependent on a property qualification (for example, the ownership
or occupancy of property of a certain rental value, or the leasing of a
particular piece of land for several generations). One important
change sought by reformers, the introduction of a secret ballot, was
not included in the 1832 Act, and consequently the electoral process
remained subject to open bribery and corruption as well as the more
subtle forms of influence and pressure that the powerful could bring
to bear on voters in their constituencies (see Dickens’s chapters on
the Eatanswill election in Pickwick Papers).
Successive Reform Acts in 1867, 1884, and 1885 led to further
redistribution of seats (1867 and 1885) and to changes in the size and
composition of the electorate. The electoral reform movement gained
fresh impetus in the early 1860s from the activities of trade unions,
middle-class radicals advocating the democratic systems of the
United States, Canada, and Australia, and the example of European
democratic and socialist movements–– some of whose adherents had
been living as exiles and émigrés in London since 1848, the year of a
series of attempted revolutions throughout Europe. The 1867 Act
virtually doubled the electorate from 1.36 million to 2.46 million,
most of the new voters being town-dwelling industrial workers: an
electoral leap in the dark which Thomas Carlyle likened to ‘shooting
Niagara’. In the boroughs there was something approaching dem-
ocracy (at least for men), but in the counties the property or tenancy
requirements prevented most agricultural workers and miners in
rural pit villages from obtaining a vote. Moreover, the 1867 elections
The Social Context 35
remained ‘the pre-engaged servant of the long purse’, like the law in
The Woman in White, as the lack of a secret ballot meant that voters
remained open to bribery and the newly enfranchised industrial
workers in the boroughs were susceptible to the influence (or pres-
sure) of their bosses or landlords. The parliamentary map and the
composition of the polity were further modified in Collins’s declin-
ing years: the Parliamentary Reform Act of 1884 again doubled the
electorate, although even as late as 1917 about 50 per cent of the male
population still could not vote (for example, adult sons living in the
parental home did not qualify for the vote).
The modest measure of electoral reform achieved in 1832 did not
deliver a new polity or a new political class. The Whig government
that emerged from the parliament elected by the reformed system in
December 1832 was still made up of wealthy aristocrats, most of
whom felt that they had done enough for the reform movement by
passing the 1832 Act. Nevertheless the post-Reform Act parliament
responded to pressure for social reforms from Benthamite Radicals,
evangelicals, and progressive factory owners and made the 1830s a
reforming decade, and the harbinger of a reforming era (or age of
‘improvement’). In 1833, after much opposition from the owners of
West Indian sugar plantations and those involved in the sugar trade
(whose number included many MPs), the Whigs passed an Act to
abolish slavery in the British Empire. In the same year, again after
much opposition, parliament passed a Factory Act which sought to
regulate and improve the conditions of employment in textile mills.
A Factory Inspectorate was established to monitor compliance with
the Act, which banned the employment of children under 9,
restricted the hours of employment of children and young people,
and introduced an element of compulsory education for factory chil-
dren (two hours per day for those between 9 and 13). The improve-
ment and regulation of working conditions in factories and mines
continued to occupy trade unions, humanitarian and evangelical
reformers (including some factory owners and MPs) throughout
Collins’s lifetime–– such improvements also continued to be resisted
by others who saw nothing wrong with the way things were, and were
afraid that improvements in the conditions of the labouring classes
would mean a reduction of their own power and comforts. Further
Factory Acts in 1844, 1847 (introducing the ten-hour day), 1850,
1874, and 1878 sought to regulate (and restrict) the employment of
36 The Social Context
children and women, and to reduce the working hours of all factory
workers. The Mines Act of 1842 extended to the mining industry
the ethos of the early Factory Acts concerning the employment
of women and children, and subsequent Acts in 1850, 1860, and
1887 sought to improve safety and regulate and monitor working
conditions through a Mines Inspectorate.
Another reforming act from the 1830s which paved the way for
subsequent social and health reforms was the Municipal Corporations
Act of 1835, which began the process of making local government
more democratic by establishing borough councils whose members
were elected for three-year periods by male ratepayers. The Act
also began the professionalization of local government by requiring
all councils to have a paid town clerk and treasurer, to form a police
force, and to have properly audited accounts. It also permitted
(though it did not require) councils to undertake social improve-
ments such as improved drainage and street-cleaning. A common
theme of the reforms of the 1830s, which was to reverberate
throughout Collins’s lifetime, was social improvement through
investigation, regulation, and monitoring. Collins lived in an age of
Parliamentary Blue Books, Royal Commissions, and a proliferation
of inspectorates (for factories, mines, education, public health, etc.).
The age of reform was also an age of measuring and recording. In
1836 the Births and Deaths Registration Act made the civil registra-
tion of births and deaths compulsory, a development which at once
contributed to Collins’s preoccupation with modern legal identities
and provided him with many narrative opportunities.
One ‘reform’ of the 1830s that brought about a very dubious
improvement was the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. The exist-
ing Poor Law (as it had been operated since 1795) was extremely
unpopular, because the system of ‘outdoor relief ’ (known as the
Speenhamland system after the place in which it had first been used)
had the effect of encouraging farmers to reduce the wages of their
labourers in the knowledge that they would be supplemented by
‘poor relief ’ which was a charge on an increasingly resentful com-
munity of ratepayers. In February 1832 a Commission was appointed
to look into the system of providing poor relief. The resulting legisla-
tion was extremely successful in providing relief for ratepayers, as
the new system was much cheaper. However, it did not relieve poverty,
indeed it increased poverty among the rural poor and it increased
The Social Context 37
social tension in the industrial north in the trade recession of the late
1830s. The failings of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 and of
the Reform Act of 1832 were instrumental in providing support for
popular protest movements in the 1830s, particularly the Chartist
movement.
Chartism belongs to the period which Collins retrospectively
labelled as the days in which ‘the people were in earnest’, and, as I
have already indicated, it was at the forefront of public attention in
1848, the year in which Collins published his first book. This was not
only the year of the climax of Chartist activities, but it was also the
year of revolutions in Europe, and the year in which the pivotal
events of The Moonstone occur. Thomas Carlyle, who belonged to an
older generation of writers although he died only four years before
Collins, described Chartism as ‘the bitter discontent grown fierce
and mad, the wrong condition therefore or the wrong disposition of
the Working Classes of England’.4 The ‘bitter discontent’ of the
working classes grew fiercer and madder as a result of poor economic
conditions (which were exacerbated by the 1834 Poor Law and by
the depression of trade in the late 1830s), difficult working condi-
tions, poor living conditions, and a lack of political power. From this
mass of frustrations the London Working Men’s Association was
formed in 1837 and its leaders drew up the ‘Charter’ which gave the
movement its name. By 1838 there were over a hundred branches
campaigning for the ‘six points’ contained in the Charter. The six
points aimed at a radical change in the social order via a parlia-
mentary democracy in which (to adapt the words of Chartist activist,
Bronterre O’Brien), working men would be at the top instead of at
the bottom of society, or else there would be a new kind of society in
which there would be no top or bottom. The six points demanded by
the Chartists were: a vote for every man over 21; a secret ballot; the
abolition of the property qualification for parliamentary candidates;
equal electoral districts (i.e. all MPs should represent approximately
the same number of voters); the payment of MPs; annual elections.
Various branches made their own additions to the six points, for
example, the abolition of the tax on newspapers, the repeal of the new
Poor Law Act, an eight-hour day for factory workers, the abolition of
child labour, and ‘the establishment of general happiness’.
In February 1839 a National Chartist Convention drew up a
petition containing some one and a quarter million signatures which
38 The Social Context
was taken to the House of Commons and presented to parliament,
where it was rejected by a huge majority. Strikes, protest meetings,
and rioting followed this rebuff, and several Chartist leaders were
imprisoned and in two cases transported. Three years later (1842)
another National Convention met and collected three and a quarter
million signatures for a second petition. This petition was escorted
to parliament by a hundred thousand people and presented by sym-
pathetic MPs, and again it was rejected by a huge majority. Once more
there were strikes and rioting–– this time accompanied by looting
and the death of several policemen in Manchester. In 1848, spurred
on by the news of the successful uprising in Paris, another National
Convention was organized and a third Charter was drawn up, to be
presented to parliament following a rally on Kennington Common.
There was talk of revolutionary consequences if the Charter were to
be rejected, and, perhaps mindful of recent events in France, the
Whig government banned the march on parliament and large num-
bers of troops and special constables were posted around London. A
mere handful of violent incidents–– not the revolution which had
been threatened–– followed the rejection of the Charter.
The Chartist movement had begun to dissipate by the time
Collins reached his mid-twenties, but the Chartist agenda did not
disappear. Political unrest and the threat (perhaps more than the
reality) of political violence were key features of the period between
Collins’s eighth and twenty-fourth years, and they continued to
resurface throughout his lifetime. Although Collins inhabited a
different world from the one in which industrial disturbances and
election riots of the 1850s and 1860s occurred, political unrest and
the power of the ‘mob’ did make an impact on well-to-do Londoners,
even bohemian Londoners such as Collins and his circle. Collins
was already working with Dickens at Household Words when the older
writer visited Preston to report on the conditions and activities of
striking workers in February 1854. In the following year the peace of
Hyde Park (in the heart of fashionable London) was disturbed by
rioters protesting against the ban on Sunday trading. There were
further Hyde Park riots in 1862 and again in 1866 in support of
the Second Reform Bill. Whether in the streets, around dinner
tables, or in the pages of the newspaper and periodical press, debates
about power–– its use and abuse, where it resides and who should
exercise it–– were waged throughout Collins’s life. Throughout this
The Social Context 39
period, too, the press was full of articles engaging in or reporting the
investigation and exposure of social evils of various kinds, making
suggestions for their reform, or, conversely, denying their existence.
Collins himself was associated with reforming journalism through
his work for the liberal weekly paper, the Leader, in the early 1850s
and subsequently for Dickens’s Household Words and, in the early
1860s, for All the Year Round. The Leader was founded by Thornton
Hunt and George Henry Lewes in 1850, and its main interests were
politics and economics (domestic and international) and the metro-
politan literary and artistic world. It stood, in the main, for political
and social reform (especially labour reform) and championed the
causes of the lower and middle classes. Collins became involved with
the paper in late 1851 when his friend Edward Pigott purchased the
paper and took over its general editorial policy. In 1852 Hunt
reassured readers that the new owner would not change the paper’s
politics and that he and Lewes would continue to argue for ‘national
franchise’ and ‘the right of labour to reproductive employment’.5
Collins’s main contributions to the Leader were reviews of books,
plays, and exhibitions, but he also contributed to the ‘Portfolio’ sec-
tion, which consisted of essays, poems, and serialized stories. One of
his first ‘Portfolio’ pieces was ‘A Plea for Sunday Reform’, which
argued against the restrictions of the English Sunday about which
the Hyde Park demonstrators were to protest in 1855 (27 September
1851). Certainly in his twenties Collins shared the Leader’s reforming
agenda, declaring himself in agreement with the paper’s ‘confession
of political faith’, and a supporter of its ‘Red Republicanism’.6
Women, the Law, and Law Reform
In January 1852 Collins wrote to his friend Edward Pigott offering
advice on the content and organization of the Leader. One subject
which Collins was particularly anxious for the Leader to engage with
was the law:
I should like to see Law [doubly underlined] made another division, and
more attended to in the Leader. Abstracts of the results of the week’s
‘cases’, both civil and criminal, are wanted–– They might be the merest
abstracts, and still be of use . . . And legal anomalies and corruptions might
be thoroughly [lashed] from time to time, in leading articles–– Legal abuse is
a subject on which even your mild Protestant ‘Church and State’ man, can
40 The Social Context
feel and talk furiously. King Public would go with us with all his heart and
soul, quote us, praise us, learn us by heart, on such a subject as Law
Reform, I find no articles in the Times and the Examiner so highly praised
by all parties, and so constantly reproduced second hand in conversation
as the Law articles. Let us then . . . as opportunity offers, politely d—
— m
Magistrates, and spit in the face of Juries. A birch-rod for the backside of
old Mother ‘Justice’, is a weapon for which people are beginning to feel
a household sympathy. Lay it on, Mr Editor! Lay it on thick! (Letters, i.
79–80, emphasis added)
The ‘antiquated and chaotic’7 state of English law was the cause of
much debate and reforming activity throughout the nineteenth cen-
tury, and, as readers of Collins soon discover, the unreformed legal
system provided a broad target for the novelist’s satiric arrow, and
rich pickings for the fiction writer in search of plot situations and
complications. The Woman in White and No Name are excellent
examples of this, as are the later, more self-consciously reforming
novels-with-a purpose, The Law and the Lady and Man and Wife.
During the course of Collins’s lifetime, legal reforms made the crim-
inal law more humane, simplified the law of real property, laid the
foundations of modern company law, and, in the great Judicature
Act of 1873, simplified the chaotic system of courts each with its
own separate procedures and bodies of law, into one Supreme Court
of Judicature.8
The legal abuses and law reforms which are particularly important
for the reader of Collins’s fiction are those concerned with the family,
marriage, and relations between the sexes. This area of the law,
particularly the laws relating to the property rights of married
women and broader issues relating to women’s legal position
within marriage–– including their freedom to end an unsatisfactory
marriage–– was also the subject of close scrutiny and reforming activ-
ism by feminist campaigners. One landmark in the history of femi-
nist campaigns was Barbara Leigh Smith’s (later Bodichon) A Brief
Summary, in Plain Language, of the Most Important Laws Concerning
Women, Together With a Few Observations Thereon (1854). The single
most important aspect of the laws concerning women was the
distinction in the legal status of the married woman as opposed to
her unmarried counterpart. A single woman had the same rights to
property and to the same legal protection as a man, and she could
also act as a trustee, be an executrix for a will, or an administratrix of
The Social Context 41
the personal property of her deceased next of kin. However, in
common law a married woman had no legal identity separate from
her husband, and for much of the nineteenth century the married
woman’s legal situation remained much as it was when it was memor-
ably summarized by Leigh Smith: ‘A man and wife are one person in
law: the wife loses all her rights as a single woman, and her
existence is entirely absorbed in that of her husband. He is civilly
responsible for her acts; she lives under his protection or cover, and
her condition is called coverture.’9 As far as property was concerned
the practice of coverture meant that, upon marriage, the legal pos-
session or control of any property owned by a woman, or inherited
by her during her marriage, passed to her husband. The exact nature
and degree of the husband’s control depended on the nature of his
wife’s property. Common law distinguished between ‘real’ and ‘per-
sonal’ property: real property–– property in freehold land and any
income arising from it–– was controlled by the husband during mar-
riage, but he could not dispose of his wife’s real property (during her
lifetime) without her consent which had to be recorded in court. A
woman’s personal property–– that is property in leasehold land, or
goods and chattels–– passed into the absolute control of her husband
upon marriage for him to use and dispose of as he wished during
his lifetime and (through his will) after his death. The Caroline
Norton case, which resulted in the Infant Custody Bill of 1849, gave
a divorced or separated wife limited rights to the custody of infants
and children under 7 years of age, but until the passing of the 1886
Custody of Infants Act a husband was considered in law to be the
sole parent of his legitimate children.
By the nineteenth century the custom and practice of equity,
which had grown up alongside the common law, recognized the
separate legal existence or identity of a wife, and her right to own
property independently of her husband. Equity operated on the
principle that although a wife could not, in common law, control
property, it could be controlled on her behalf by a trustee. Hence the
system of marriage settlements or pre-nuptial agreements according
to which a woman’s family or friends, or even the woman herself,
could designate certain property as her ‘separate property’, free from
her husband’s common law rights. However, if no trustee was
appointed to carry out the terms of the settlement, the Courts of
Equity named the husband as trustee. Equity law gave a woman
42 The Social Context
rights over her property but, like the common law, it gave her no
responsibilities: A wife with a ‘separate property’ in equity (exactly
as in common law) was not liable for her own debts, nor was
she legally liable to provide any support for her children or husband.
In short, the law disempowered and infantilized women, placing
them in the same category as criminals, idiots, and minors, to use the
phrase employed by Frances Power Cobbe in her Fraser’s Magazine
article in 1868 on the need for the reform of the law affecting women’s
property rights: ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors: Is the
Classification Sound?’
The campaigning activities of Caroline Norton in the 1830s and
1840s, Barbara Leigh Smith in the 1850s, Frances Power Cobbe in
the 1850s, and others throughout the period, led to a number of
improvements in the law affecting the property rights of married
women, their rights over their own bodies, and their ability to
divorce, and to have custody of their children. Such improvements
included the Custody of Infants Acts already referred to, the Married
Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, and the Divorce Act of
1857, the Matrimonial Causes Amendment Act of 1859, and the
Matrimonial Causes Acts of 1878 and 1884. Before 1857 the only
way in which a wife could extricate herself from a marriage was
by an annulment in the ecclesiastical courts or by private Act of
Parliament. The 1857 Divorce Act enabled a woman to divorce her
husband through the civil courts, but only on the grounds of aggra-
vated adultery–– that is if he were physically cruel or guilty of incest
or bestiality as well as being adulterous. The Matrimonial Causes
Acts of 1878 and 1884 were designed to restrict a husband’s ability to
treat his wife’s body as his legal property which he was free to
incarcerate, beat, or exercise his ‘conjugal rights’ on as he wished.
The sexual subordination of women and their rights to resist
the invasive appropriation or examination of their bodies was
also an important feature of the vociferous campaign to repeal the
Contagious Diseases Acts which were passed in 1864, 1866, and
1869 in an attempt to reduce the number of prostitutes (by rescuing
them from their trade) and to curtail the spread of venereal diseases
among soldiers and sailors. These Acts permitted the authorities to
submit any woman suspected of being a prostitute to an invasive
medical examination, and, if she were found to have a sexually
transmitted disease, to commit her to a ‘Lock Hospital’ for the
The Social Context 43
duration of her treatment and cure–– preferably from both the disease
and the condition into which she had fallen.
The legal rights and restrictions of women were kept in the public
consciousness or–– perhaps more accurately–– deeply embedded in
its political unconscious, in press debates about the reform cam-
paigns mentioned above, and in newspaper reports of the proceed-
ings of the divorce courts set up as a result of the Act of 1857.
Fiction, too, played its part in this process. The legal vulnerability of
women, and their position as objects of exchange between men were
already staples of the Gothic plot when Collins began writing, and
partly as a result of his efforts they became central to the plots of
sensation novels in the 1860s. Moreover, the laws of inheritance, the
economic and legal complexities of marriage, and women’s status
as marriageable objects were the founding conditions of domestic
fiction from the late eighteenth century onwards.
The feminist-inspired focus on women’s legal position not only
had the effect of removing some of their legal disabilities, but it also
put male conduct under the spotlight. From the 1840s onwards male
domestic violence was added to the raft of social problems which was
preoccupying social reformers and campaigning journalists. John
Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor wrote a series of letters to the Morning
Chronicle in 1850 and 1851 deploring the light sentences given to
wife-beaters and castigating parliament for its unwillingness to
address the matter by drafting new laws. By the 1860s, as Martin J.
Wiener has noted, ‘this new sensitivity to domestic violence had
clearly penetrated the criminal justice system’ and ‘the professional
men who increasingly made up the judicial bench . . . began to press
juries to crack down on violent husbands’.10 However, juries proved
resistant to the pressure of the judiciary, and continued to be sympa-
thetic to male defendants accused of domestic violence. In 1878,
after reading in the newspaper ‘a whole series of frightful cases of
this kind’,11 Frances Power Cobbe took up the cause and wrote an
article for the Contemporary Review on ‘Wife-torture in England’,
which helped in the enactment of the 1878 Matrimonial Causes Bill.
Crime, Criminality, and Policing
In several of his novels Collins was concerned with the chaotic state
of the law and its barbarousness (see Chapter 4). However, in the
44 The Social Context
first half of the nineteenth century most members of the middle and
upper classes were more concerned with the barbarity of criminals
and the threat of social chaos that they posed. Collins grew up at a
time when there was a growing alarm about a perceived rise in crime,
particularly of violent crime, which was seen as a sign of both moral
decay and social disorder. The growth of the industrial towns with
their factories in which men and women worked promiscuously
together, and their growing street and pub cultures led to a concern
with disorderly conduct, drunkenness, and prostitution. Added to
this, the fear of working-class violence, as seen in strikes, Swing riots,
and Chartist activism, combined to produce a spectre of savagery to
haunt the middle and upper classes, many of whom feared that the
barbarians were at the gates of society, and that the social order was
threatened by the dangerous and criminal classes. For much of the
first half of the nineteenth century criminality was associated with
the unleashing of unrestrained passions; it was considered to be a
form of moral insanity. The domestic ideal and contemporary ideas
about gender (see below) played an important part in the construc-
tion of criminality: lower-class women were thought to be more
vulnerable than their male counterparts to the degrading and
demoralizing effects of modern urban conditions.
The discourse on criminality, and debates about how to eliminate
it or mitigate its effects, were informed by the concepts of self-
management and self-discipline. However, the pervasive fear of the
absence of self-management was one of the factors that led to the
rise of policing during the second quarter of the century. Peel’s
Metropolitan Police Act (1829) established a professional police
force for London, and the Municipal Corporations Act (1835)
required the Corporations to establish their own police forces, each
controlled by a watch committee. The Rural Constabulary Act
(1839) and the County and Borough Police Act (1856) extended the
creation of local police forces and the latter established an inspector-
ate to oversee their activities. Attempts to discipline the criminal
population by a growing network of police forces were matched by
attempts to build a more disciplined and professional police force.
Both the conceptualization of criminality and the policing of it were
based on ideas of ‘public character building’.12 The police were to be
made more professional and respectable in order to enforce middle-
class standards of respectability on the lower, criminal classes. On
The Social Context 45
the other hand both the police and the criminal classes were to be
brought within middle-class conceptions of self-discipline. By the
1860s, as Martin Wiener points out, the law ‘was being employed
with increasing consistency as an instrument for developing self-
disciplining and gratification-deferring personalities in the popula-
tion at large. To counter the crime wave and immorality wave of the
first half of the century stood a newly character-building law.’13
By the 1860s the fear of the mob and of violent crime and casual
crime began to diminish, as more effective policing enforced self-
restraint if ‘character building’ was failing to do its work. Improved
economic conditions may also have contributed to an actual reduc-
tion of crime. At mid-century, attention began to shift from working-
class to middle-class conduct and crime. A whole new category of
‘white-collar’ crime arose from infringements of the new laws relat-
ing to employment and to health and safety at work (see above).
Railway mania and other frenzied episodes of financial speculation in
the 1840s and 1850s had turned the spotlight on fraud and financial
misconduct. The law was increasingly being used to regulate private
as well as public financial dealings through new forms of contracts
and wills. The private lives of the middle and upper classes were also
subjected to public and legal scrutiny through the divorce courts,
which established standards of marital conduct. All of these factors
meant that from the 1860s the attention of the middle classes turned
away ‘from the streets to the home, from the public house to the
counting house, and in general from the unruly populace to persons
of apparent respectability’.14 Indeed, whereas in the first half of
the century criminality was regarded as antithetical to respectability,
some of the new crimes which seized public attention in the 1860s––
such as fraud, embezzlement, poisoning, blackmail–– actually
depended on the appearance of respectability. The sensation novel of
the 1860s was one expression of and response to this development.
Crime became increasingly associated with professional criminality
in all sorts of ways in the second half of the nineteenth century. Not
only were the professional classes becoming implicated in criminal-
ity through a whole new series of laws, but there was also a wide-
spread perception that felons were becoming more professional. This
professionalization of crime was accompanied by (indeed, perhaps,
to some extent produced by) the increasing professionalization of
policing. By the time that Collins created his own professional
46 The Social Context
policeman, Sergeant Cuff in The Moonstone, his friend Dickens had
already brought the new detective force to public attention in a series
of articles in Household Words in 1850 and 1851. In the first of these
essays ‘Detective Police’ (Household Words, 27 July 1850), Dickens
draws a comparison between the policeman of the bad old days of
the Bow Street Runners (who were allowed to stay outside Peel’s new
unified Metropolitan Police force in 1829) and the new detective
force which had been established in London in 1842:
We are not by any means devout believers in the old Bow Street Police. To
say the truth, we think there was a vast amount of humbug about
those worthies. Apart from many of them being men of very indifferent
character, and far too much in the habit of consorting with thieves and the
like, they never lost a public occasion of jobbing and trading in mystery
and making the most of themselves. . . . [A]s a Preventive Police they were
utterly ineffective, and as a Detective Police were very loose and uncertain
in their operations . . .
On the other hand, the detective Force organised since the establishment
of the existing Police, is so well chosen and trained, proceeds so system-
atically and quietly, does its business in such a workmanlike manner, and is
always so calmly and steadily engaged in the service of the public, that the
public really do not know enough of it, to know a tithe of its usefulness.15
In order to make the public better acquainted with the usefulness of
the Detective Force Dickens introduces his readers to some of their
number and reports on their exploits. Two things stand out. The
first is Dickens’s insistence on the respectable appearance of the
officers; at least one of them might have been taken for a school-
teacher, and all of them are ‘respectable-looking men; of perfectly
good deportment and unusual intelligence’.16 The second point of
note is the way in which the officers explain their craft: they are
professionals who have to outwit fellow professionals–– the criminals
who all have their own particular specialisms and whose activities
they recount with a detail ‘exact and statistical’.17
Another aspect of the professionalization of crime was the rise of a
scientific discourse on crime and criminality. In the first half of the
century the new science of statistics was used to map and measure
criminal behaviour. At the same time, phrenology, a science which
sought to understand the mental make-up of a human being through
a study of the shape of the skull, was used to account for it physio-
logically. Criminal behaviour was also being explained in terms of
The Social Context 47
economic conditions and social environment. ‘Natural’ (non-moral)
explanations of criminality became more prominent in the second
half of the century, as criminality became increasingly medicalized
and psychologized. It was during the second half of the century that
the notion of the physically or mentally degenerate and hereditary
criminal type developed; the criminal was increasingly seen as
someone who inherits a faulty mental or physical constitution and
criminal propensities.
Gender and Sexuality
The campaigns about the legal disabilities of women, and the
interventions of the law in the regulation of family life, discussed in
the section on the law and reform above, were part of a wider
response to women’s demands for changes in their social and familial
roles, demands which grew more forceful as the century wore on.
They were also both symptomatic of and instrumental in the
redefinition of gender roles that was occurring throughout Collins’s
lifetime. Many contemporary commentators saw women’s desire for
improvements in their civil rights, for increased educational and
employment opportunities, and for a life that was not entirely
defined in terms of obedient daughterhood or marriage, or wifehood
and self-sacrificial motherhood, as a ‘masculinization’ of women.
Paradoxically this so-called ‘masculinization’ occurred in a period
seen by both nineteenth-century commentators and subsequent his-
torians as one in which there was a widespread ‘feminization’ of
middle-class society and culture.
By the 1850s, when a number of middle-class women had already
begun their campaigns to change women’s domestic roles and
expand their opportunities, and when a growing number of working-
class women had, for some years, been working outside the home in
factories and workshops of various kinds, the feminized ‘domestic
ideal’ was becoming increasingly firmly established in a range of
social and cultural discourses and practices. At the heart of the
domestic ideal was a moralized version of the home as a sacrosanct
privatized space, as opposed to the public sphere of work, economics,
and politics. The home of the domestic ideal was the repository of
moral and spiritual values which were nurtured and, to some extent,
policed by a particular version of feminine gentility embodied in the
48 The Social Context
middle-class wife and mother, or the angel in the house.18 One of the
most forceful contemporary articulations of this ideal is found in
John Ruskin’s essay ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ in Sesame and Lilies
(1865):
This is the true nature of home–– it is the place of peace; the shelter, not
only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt and division. In so far as it
is not this, it is not home; so far as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate
into it and the inconsistently-minded, unknown, unloved, or hostile society
of the outer world is allowed by either husband or wife to cross the
threshold it ceases to be a home; it is then only a part of the outer world
which you have roofed over and lighted fire in. But so far as it is a sacred
place, a vestal temple, a temple of the hearth watched over by household
gods . . . so far it vindicates the name and fulfills the praise of home.
And wherever a true wife comes, this home is always round her . . . home
is wherever she is; and for a noble woman it stretches far round her . . .19
The Ruskinian domestic ideal depends upon a theory of gender
difference in which men and women are complementary opposites.
According to this view, men and women ‘are in nothing alike, and the
happiness and perfection of both depends on each asking and receiv-
ing from the other what the other only can give’. Ruskin goes on to
delineate the ‘separate characters’ of men and women:
The man’s power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the
doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for specula-
tion and invention; his energy for adventure, for war, for conquest. . . . But
the woman’s power is for rule, not for battle and her intellect is not for
invention or recreation, but sweet ordering, arrangement and decision.
She sees the qualities of things . . . Her great function is to praise. . . . By
her office and place, she is protected from all danger and temptation. The
man, in his rough work in the open world, must encounter all peril and
trial–– to him therefore must be the failure, the offence, the inevitable
error; often he must be wounded or subdued, often misled, and always
hardened.20
Both Collins’s life and his fiction (in common with quite a lot of
Victorian fiction) suggest that the Victorian home, family, and gender
roles were rather more fluid and complex in practice than they were
in this ideological inscription (and, to be fair, Ruskin does go on to
complicate this version of the home, and to point out some of its
limitations). In practice, real historical men and women lived their
lives in a variety of ways. Nevertheless, the domestic ideal was a very
The Social Context 49
powerful force in shaping nineteenth-century thinking about gender
roles.
The concept of femininity at the heart of the domestic ideal was
used as a way of keeping women in their place (see, for example,
Collins’s representation of Laura Fairlie in The Woman in White),
but it was also a means of disciplining men and of shaping the culture
more generally. Martin Wiener regards some of the developments in
the civil and criminal law outlined in my earlier section on the law
and law reform (and more particularly the contest between judges
and juries on the sentences for crimes of domestic violence) as
examples of the disciplining of men by the ‘domestic ideal’, and as
part of a ‘broader “feminization” of social standards’: ‘at the same
time that women were being increasingly pressed to remain within
the boundaries of the home,’ he notes, ‘men were more and more
pressed to take on hitherto “feminine” characteristics.’21 The same
was true for women. They too were being increasingly pressed to
take on the ‘feminine’ characteristics of the middle-class domestic
ideal–– through etiquette and conduct books and manuals of instruc-
tion, such as Sarah Stickney Ellis’s The Women of England, The
Wives of England, and The Daughters of England in the 1840s or
Isabella Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1867), and
through novels and magazines, as well as through familial training.
This middle-class version of femininity also exerted its influence on
women in the classes above and below the class in which it was
formed.
Advice books also played their part in the construction of Victorian
masculinity. The ‘domestic affections and domestic authority’ per-
vaded the advice literature aimed at men for much of the Victorian
period, and domesticity was regarded as ‘central to masculinity’ in
an unprecedented way.22 If the dominant image of respectable femi-
ninity (or the womanly woman) was that of the wife and mother,
then the dominant image of respectable bourgeois masculinity was
that of the husband and father, the head of the family and household.
The cult of the home arose at a time when, for most men, the
workplace and the home were becoming physically separate, and
when the experience of work was becoming increasingly alienating
as a result of industrial and economic developments–– the growth
of technology and increasing commercial competitiveness. The
domestic sphere thus became not simply a place of mental and
50 The Social Context
physical rest and recreation, but also a space whose creation justified
men’s efforts in the world of work and which restored them to
themselves and made them fully human. As John Tosh has demon-
strated, there was always a tension between domestic masculinity
and two other important aspects of masculinity. The first of these
was ‘homosociality–– or regular association with other men’,23 a form
of male bonding which reinforced male power and privilege through
the pursuit of extra-domestic pleasures or through networking and
intervening in society by means of associations and committees. The
second was ‘heroism and adventure’ which required quite different
qualities from those needed ‘to sustain the routines of production
and reproduction’.24
One of the most important of the qualities needed to sustain the
domestic ideal and the routines of production and reproduction was
the ordering and regulation of emotion and passion, especially sexual
passion. Self-control and self-restraint were the watchwords of both
domestic man and woman. Victorian men and women were not uni-
versally the sexual prudes that they have sometimes been supposed
to be. There is a great deal of documentary evidence to suggest that
many Victorians lived very fulfilled sexual and emotional lives,
though many aspects of contemporary religion and medical thought
conspired to make some of their sexual pleasures guilty ones. Never-
theless, for most of the nineteenth century the only socially sanc-
tioned form of sexuality was heterosexuality within marriage. Of
course there were a great many other forms of sexual activity, and a
great many private and collective fears and fantasies about sexuality.
Many of these came together around the figure of the prostitute and
the fallen woman.
If the maternal angel in the house was at the heart of the domestic
ideal, paradoxically, so too was her opposite, the prostitute. In the
imagination of respectable society the prostitute represented both
female degradation (the antithesis of a femininity and womanliness
defined in terms of middle-class respectability) and illicit and
unbridled sexuality. A creature of the streets, who functioned (often
precariously) outside the regulated sexual economy of marriage, the
degraded prostitute was both a vindication of the domestic ideal and
a threat to it. The prostitute was also a product of the domestic ideal.
There is some evidence to suggest that in the 1850s and 1860s (when
there was a great deal of campaigning against the ‘social evil’ of
The Social Context 51
prostitution) men were postponing marriage in order to acquire
the income and social position necessary to sustain the kind of estab-
lishment increasingly required by middle-class marriage. This phe-
nomenon was referred to by W. R. Greg as the ‘growing and morbid
luxury’ of genteel marriage in an essay on ‘redundant woman’ that
he wrote for the National Review in 1862.25 In the mean time they
visited prostitutes, or, like Godfrey Ablewhite in The Moonstone,
they kept mistresses.
Although not socially sanctioned, this latter practice was tacitly
accepted, even by some of those who campaigned against prostitu-
tion and were involved in ventures to rescue ‘unfortunates’ or ‘fallen
women’, as prostitutes were euphemistically known. Charles Dickens
gave both time and money to such ventures, but it is quite likely that
the ‘Haroun Alraschid’ expeditions that he undertook with Collins
in the 1850s involved entertaining and being entertained by ‘ladies
of the night’. All this is evidence of the ‘double standard’ which
viewed male licentiousness as an acceptable part of the experience of
respectable men, but regarded illicit sexual activity on the part of
women as placing them completely beyond the pale of respectability.
Of course, such licentiousness was one of the defining characteristics
of the bohemian world of the male artist.
Class
It is undoubtedly the case that for most–– perhaps all–– of the nine-
teenth century, Britain was a hierarchical society ruled by a landed
elite. However, this broad generalization masks the lengthy and
uneven processes of change and challenge at work in this period.
One of the most important processes of change was the transform-
ation of the social structure of England from one based on rank to
one based on class. By the late 1860s (in the essays that made up
Culture and Anarchy) Matthew Arnold was describing England as a
society based on just three classes: the Barbarians (aristocracy), the
Philistines (middle classes), and the Populace (working class), each
with its own distinct character and interests. Ten years later T. H. S.
Escott divided English society into ‘the higher classes, the middle
classes, the lower middle classes, and that vast multitude [in fact
some 75 per cent of the total population], which for the sake of
convenience may be described as the proletariate [sic]’.26 Of course
52 The Social Context
the picture was more complex than either Arnold or Escott indicate,
and contemporary literary texts and the work of later social histor-
ians demonstrate the extent to which the Victorians remained
obsessed (as perhaps the English still are) with subtle distinctions of
class and rank.
Important changes in the social structure came as a result of the
challenges to the power of the landed elite posed by the increasing
economic and social power of the middle classes, and by the develop-
ment of a large urban working class. Changes to the social structure
also came from the ability of the aristocracy to adapt to and make
accommodations with these challenges. If England continued to be
ruled by a landed elite, it remained–– as it had long been–– a rela-
tively open (or at least permeable) one. Indeed, perhaps one of the
most interesting aspects of the social structure of nineteenth-century
England, and certainly one that was a subject of endless fascination
for the novelists of the day, was social mobility and the (admittedly
differential) permeability of the social classes. Here is Escott writing
on England: Her People, Polity, and Pursuits in 1879:
In the constitution of English society at the present day, the three rival
elements–– The aristocratic, the democratic, and the plutocratic–– are
closely blended. The aristocratic principle is still paramount, forms the
foundation of our social structure, and has been strengthened and
extended in its operation by the plutocratic, while the democratic instinct
of the race has all the opportunities of assertion and gratification which it
can find in a career conditionally open to all the talents.27
From the late eighteenth century onwards, the aristocracy had
involved itself in commerce and banking. Since they owned most of
the land, members of the aristocracy (and the landed ‘gentry’) were
also owners of coal mines, and the mining of other minerals which
fuelled successive industrial revolutions. In many cases they owned
the land on which railways and factories were built. The ‘middling
classes’ who grew prosperous on the proceeds of industry and com-
merce in their turn became landowners, and made alliances with
the aristocracy through marriages which conferred social status on
the middle-class family and bolstered the sometimes ailing family
fortunes of the aristocratic family involved in such a cross-class
marriage. Historians dispute just how permeable and open the ruling
elite was. However, if the open elite was a myth it was a very powerful
The Social Context 53
one, which arose from numerous actual and fictional examples of
wealthy individuals who, having made their money in industry and
commerce, entered the aristocracy or lived in aristocratic or gentry
style. Certainly, after 1840 it became increasingly common for suc-
cessful manufacturers and retailers to make their way into the landed
elite and to enhance the social position of their sons by sending them
to public schools. Here is (the somewhat Panglossian) Escott again:
Our territorial nobles, our squires, our rural landlords great and small,
have become commercial potentates; our merchant-princes have become
country gentlemen. The possession of land is the guarantee of respect-
ability, and the love of respectability and land is inveterate in our race.
The great merchant or banker of to-day is an English gentleman of a
finished type. . . . He is a man of extensive culture, an authority upon
paintings, or china, or black-letter books; upon some branch of natural
science; upon the politics of Europe; upon the affairs of the world. Does
he then neglect his business? By no means. He has, indeed, trustworthy
servants and deputies; but he consults personally with his partners,
gentlemen in culture and taste scarcely inferior, it may be, to himself.28
Respectability, self-cultivation, and self-improvement (often through
the imitation of one’s social superiors) were goals pursued by mem-
bers of all social classes in the nineteenth century. They also lie at the
heart of the nineteenth-century novel’s preoccupation with social
mobility and with manners and conduct.
The grandfather of the model merchant-prince referred to in the
last-quoted passage ‘would have lived with his family above the
counting-house’, but he himself would have had a town house in
Belgravia or Mayfair and a place in the country. According to the
complaisant Escott, one of the keys to this social harmony was the
law and custom of primogeniture, whereby the property of a family
passes to the eldest son, and as a result of which landed estates were
kept intact and younger sons were motivated to make their way in
the world (sometimes by marrying into the class beneath them).
Patterns of inheritance, the wills and codicils by which they are
secured, as well as the adventures of the younger sons and daughters
(of whatever position in the family) are, of course, the stuff of
nineteenth-century novels, not least those by Wilkie Collins.
Escott dates the ‘enlargement of English society’ (‘society’ here
means those with social status and power) from the enactment of
the Reform Bill of 1832. He describes the process of enlargement as
54 The Social Context
one which ‘has substituted, in a very large degree, the prestige of
achievement for the prestige of position’.29 Another feature of this
movement towards a more meritocratic society is the rise of the
professions:
The degrees of esteem allotted to the different English professions are
exactly what might be expected in a society organized upon such a basis
and conscious of such aims. Roughly it may be said professions in England
are valued according to their stability, their remunerativeness, their
influence, and their recognition by the State.30
The increasing complexity of the social and economic organization
of England, the growth of local government and state bureaucracies,
and the development of science and technology all led to a growing
demand for specialists of various kinds. Such specialists increasingly
organized themselves into professional groups to oversee the train-
ing of new entrants, to regulate entry into the profession (through
examinations), and to disseminate knowledge and good practice
through professional journals. From mid-century onwards, archi-
tects, engineers, doctors, pharmacists, and teachers all organized
themselves in this way.
There were, as always, subtleties of gradation. Escott, for example,
suggests that those professions whose members had ‘immediate
pecuniary dealings’ with their clients were likely to be regarded as
being lower in the social pecking order than those whose remuner-
ation came via a less direct route. In this respect, attorneys, surgeons,
dentists, and physicians are said to be socially indistinguishable from
tailors, wine merchants, and grocers.
Another socially ambiguous calling or profession is that of the
artist. Escott (irrespective of the accuracy or otherwise of his
delineation) throws interesting light on Collins’s own social position
and his fictional portrayal of artists and other professionals.
We live in an age whose boast is that it can appreciate merit or capacity of
any kind. Artists and actors, poets and painters, are the much-courted
guests of the wealthiest and the noblest in the land . . . To all appearance,
the fusion between the aristocracy of birth, wealth, and intellect is com-
plete . . . Still the notion prevails that the admission, let us say, of the
painter into society is an act of condescension on society’s part, none the
less real because the condescension is ostentatiously concealed.31
In Escott’s view, the painter, despite the nobility of his calling, is
The Social Context 55
more likely than the adherent of any other branch of the artistic
professions to carry the taint of a rather louche bohemianism. As
Dickens was eager to show in his depiction of David Copperfield,
the professional writer can be both respectable and methodical.
Indeed, methodicalness may even be essential to the writer’s success.
However, the painter is different, at least in the estimation of the
great British public:
The keen-scented, eminently decorous British public perceives a certain
aroma of social and moral laxity in the atmosphere of the studio, a kind of
blended perfume of periodical impecuniosity and much tobacco smoke.
. . . the popular view of the painter–– speaking now . . . of the guild, not
the individual member of it–– is that the calling which he elects to follow
lacks definitiveness of status, and that it is not calculated to promote those
serious, methodical habits which form an integral part of the foundation
of English society.32
Interestingly, serious methodical habits are precisely what the
painter Walter Hartright develops as he writes down the story of his
transition from professional painter and drawing master to Victorian
paterfamilias and membership of the landed elite through his wife’s
ownership of Limmeridge House. However, for much of the duration
of The Woman in White, Hartright is represented as a liminal figure,
with no clear social place or gender role. Hartight is a ‘cultural
intellectual’, and like many Victorian writers Collins seems to have
been extremely preoccupied with the status of this figure. As John
Kucich has persuasively argued, Collins’s novels repeatedly pit ‘cul-
tural intellectuals’–– artists, writers, dilettantes, proto-bohemians,
‘who live on the margins of intellectual and social life, and who
combine the methods of scientific deduction with creative imagin-
ation’ (such as Fosco and Hartright in The Woman in White, Ozias
Midwinter in Armadale, or Franklin Blake or Ezra Jennings in The
Moonstone)–– against ‘pretentious scientific intellectuals’, such as
professional detectives or doctors.33
Education
Education played an important part in the production and reproduc-
tion of class identities and roles as it did in the construction and
maintenance of gender identities and gender roles. Until 1833 educa-
tion was entirely in the hands of private individuals, religious
56 The Social Context
groups, or ancient foundations, and as far as the middle and upper
classes were concerned this remained the situation for most of
Collins’s lifetime. Collins’s own period of formal schooling was
much briefer than it would normally have been the case for a boy of
his class, but otherwise it was what might have been expected of a
son of the relatively well-to-do middle class: he attended private
schools–– the Maida Hill Academy and Highbury school. The sons
of wealthier men (and those with a more clearly defined social station
than Collins’s artist father) would have boarded at the so-called ‘pub-
lic’ schools (Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Rugby, and a number of less-
well-known establishments), following a classical curriculum and
acquiring the homosocial friendship networks that would assist them
in their later lives and careers and in running the country in their
roles as members of the House of Commons or Lords, judges, or
senior Civil Servants. As noted in the previous section, during
Collins’s lifetime the sons of landowners and aristocrats would have
increasingly been joined at their public schools by the sons of the
wealthier merchants and factory owners. Like the public schools, the
grammar schools also taught a curriculum based on Latin and Greek
but their fees were more modest than the public schools–– they even
provided free places for some poorer pupils. During Collins’s life-
time these schools also came to play an increasingly important part
in the education and formation of the growing middle class and
those who were to fill the new professions (see above).
The education of middle- and upper-class boys was a much-
debated topic during Collins’s own schooldays and beyond. In part,
the debate was fuelled by tensions arising from the domestication of
masculinity referred to earlier in this chapter: on the one hand, the
home was regarded as too feminine a space for the formation of the
male child into proper adult masculinity, but on the other, the trad-
itional public school was too barbarous for the formation of discip-
lined male subject of the domestic ideal. As John Tosh points out,
from the 1850s the job of the public schools became that of instilling
‘manly self-reliance in boys who had been raised in comfortable
conditions of domesticity’.34 From 1828, when Thomas Arnold
became the headmaster of Rugby School, the English public schools
were engaged in an extensive (and extended) process of reform. The
influence of Arnold and of his disciples led to the transformation of
the culture and the curriculum of public schools. Modern languages
The Social Context 57
were added to the classical curriculum, and the inculcation of
discipline, honesty, commitment to the school community and its
ethos, and athleticism developed a culture of Christian manliness or
muscular Christianity (which was satirized by Collins in Man and
Wife). The education of middle-class girls was no less hotly debated.
During the period of his childhood, girls of Collins’s class would
usually have been educated at home–– often in a rather rudimentary
fashion–– but the mid-century campaigns of feminists led to
demands for higher education for women and, with more immediate
success, for the foundation of schools for girls which would be on a
par with the public schools.
However, perhaps the most important developments in this period
were the increasing involvement of the state in the funding, provi-
sion, and regulation of education, and the widespread extension of
education beyond the privileged classes. As a result of Althorp’s
Factory Act of 1833, government accepted, for the first time, some
responsibility for educating the poor (or, indeed, for educating any-
one) by making a grant to the National Society (Anglican) and the
British and Foreign Schools Society (Nonconformist) to provide
the two hours’ schooling per day for factory children stipulated in
the Act. Thus began the process of state involvement in education,
through the provision of financial support which was eventually to
lead to Forster’s Education Act of 1870, and to produce the mass
readership which was exerting new pressures on the literary market-
place by the end of Collins’s writing career. During Collins’s boy-
hood and youth, the vast majority of the population received very
little education. To be sure, there were ‘voluntary’ schools of various
kinds–– Sunday Schools, dame schools (like the one which Dickens’s
Pip attends in Great Expectations, 1861), or charity schools. A number
of factory schools were established as a result of Althorp’s Act, and
another factory reformer, Anthony Ashley Cooper (Lord Shaftes-
bury) was president of the Ragged Schools Union which established
numerous ragged schools in very poor areas in the 1840s. In the
1840s government began to provide financial support for the teacher
training colleges established by the religious societies, and the
Department of Education was established in 1856 to administer the
increasing government expenditure on education (by now some
£500,000 a year). When the Newcastle Commission reported in
1861, one in seven children was said to be receiving some kind of
58 The Social Context
education. The Newcastle Report led to the ‘payment by results’
system, and the regular testing of children and ‘cramming’ methods
of teaching (attacked by Dickens in his depiction of the schools run
by Bradley Headstone and Miss Peacher in Our Mutual Friend,
1865). Fresh impetus for extending education to the poorer sections
of the population, and for increasing the involvement of the state in
its provision, came in part from the extension of the franchise in the
1867 Reform Act, and the growing economic power of industrial
workers. As the Liberal politician Robert Lowe noted as soon as the
Second Reform Bill was passed, it was now essential ‘to compel our
future masters to learn their letters’.35
Religion
Religion was a very contentious matter for Collins’s contemporaries,
and the nature, extent, impact, and meanings of Victorian religion
have been the subject of intense debate by subsequent historians.
Collins’s contemporaries habitually referred to England as a Christian
country. What did they mean by describing their country in this
way? Was it a statement of fact or of faith? Was it merely a pious
hope or a denial of the creeping tide of secularism that some histor-
ians have traced in the nineteenth century? The picture is complex.
However, if we begin by noting that there were important class and
regional variations of religious belief and practice, it is possible to
hazard the generalization that throughout Collins’s lifetime the
majority of the population (although historians disagree about the
exact size and composition of this majority) would have accepted
Protestant Christianity, even if in many cases their acceptance was
tacit and passive. This broad acceptance would have included, as
Hugh McLeod has suggested, ‘acceptance of the Bible as the highest
religious authority, and of moral principles derived from Protestant
Christianity, practice of the Christian rites of passage, and observance
of Sunday’.36
The ‘observance of Sunday’ included attendance at church or
chapel. However, the religious census of 1851 (as interpreted by later
social historians) reveals that on Sunday, 30 March 1851 not less
than 47 per cent but no more than 54 per cent of the total population
of England and Wales over 10 years old attended a religious service.
Of those present on census Sunday, 51 per cent attended Anglican
The Social Context 59
churches, 44 per cent attended Nonconformist churches or chapels,
and 4 per cent were at Roman Catholic churches. Clearly, therefore,
for quite a large proportion of the population Sunday observance
did not involve attendance at a religious service, and the observance
of Sunday certainly became a source of tension during Collins’s
lifetime. For most working people Sunday was the one day of the
week which they had free for rest and recreation, but custom, social
pressure, and the law all conspired to ensure that it was also the one
day of the week in which they could not pursue most recreations:
‘theatres, pleasure grounds, and all other places of entertainment
charging for admission remained . . . closed, and London’s pubs and
shops would have been . . . had not Parliament been intimidated by
popular demonstrations in their favour in 1855.’37
Collins hated the English Sunday, but one of the best descriptions
of the awfulness of the urban Victorian Sunday is to be found in
Dickens’s Little Dorrit:
It was a Sunday evening in London, gloomy, close and stale. Maddening
church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and flat, cracked and clear,
fast and slow, made the brick and mortar echoes hideous. Melancholy
streets in a penitential garb of soot, steeped the souls of the people who
were condemned to look at them out of windows, in dire despondency. . . .
Everything was bolted and barred that could by possibility furnish relief
to an overworked people. No picture, no unfamiliar animals, no rare plants
or flowers, no natural or artificial wonders of the ancient world–– all taboo
with that enlightened strictness, that the ugly South sea gods in the
British Museum might have supposed themselves at home again. . . .
Nothing to change the brooding mind, or raise it up. Nothing for the
spent toiler to do, but to compare the monotony of the seventh day with
the monotony of his six days, think what a weary life he led, and make the
best of it–– or the worst, according to the probabilities. (Book the First,
Chapter III)
The joylessness of the Victorian Sunday, and of much else, was often
associated with evangelicalism both within the Anglican Church and
in the Nonconformist community of dissenters who had broken
away from the hierarchically organized and ‘established’ Church of
England. The evangelical movement within the Anglican com-
munion became both fashionable and influential in high society and
the upper middle classes in the early nineteenth century, and,
throughout most of Collins’s lifetime, ‘claimed the high ground of
60 The Social Context
moral and social reform’.38 Its adherents organized themselves into
philanthropic societies and societies for the improvement and regu-
lation of individual behaviour and social conditions. Nonconformity,
too, gained in influence as the economic and political power of the
industrial middle classes increased and some of the prohibitions on
their involvement in local and central government were removed.
With its history of exclusion and dissent and its distrust of state
control, the culture of Nonconformity was in many ways an instinct-
ively reforming culture. In fact, Nonconformists and Anglican
evangelicals both played an extremely important part in campaigning
for many of the social reforms discussed in an earlier section of this
chapter.
Evangelicalism, whether Anglican or Nonconformist, was closely
based on the Gospel of the New Testament, and placed a great deal
of emphasis on individual conscience, personal conduct, and self
scrutiny. At the heart of evangelical religion was a very personal
recognition of the truth of the Gospel, a conversion experience by
which the individual achieved salvation by consciously (and repeat-
edly) acknowledging the depravity of humankind and giving him- or
herself up to God’s mercy as embodied in the atoning sacrifice of
Christ. Those who take their impressions of evangelicalism and
Nonconformity from nineteenth-century fiction are likely to have a
very negative view. From the Reverend Stiggins in Dickens’s Pickwick
Papers, through Brocklehurst in Charlotte Brontë’ s Jane Eyre, and
the Reverend Chadband in Bleak House, evangelicals are represented
as self-serving hypocrites (and sometimes as downright cruel). For a
more sympathetic picture we must turn to the portrait of the female
itinerant Wesleyan preacher, Dinah Morris, in George Eliot’s Adam
Bede (although, interestingly, this novel is set at the end of the
eighteenth century).
Frances Power Cobbe, an avowed atheist who corresponded with
Collins on the subject of vivisection (against which they both cam-
paigned in the 1880s), offers an interesting perspective on an evan-
gelical upbringing in her autobiography, The Life of Frances Power
Cobbe, As Told By Herself (1894). Cobbe writes affectionately of a
childhood lived ‘morally . . . in a room full of sunlight’, noting that
no one but a fanatic could ‘regret having been brought up as an
Evangelical Christian . . . of the mild, devout, philanthropic Armini-
anism of the Clapham School, which prevailed amongst pious
The Social Context 61
people in England and Ireland from the beginning of the century till
the rise of the Oxford Movement, and of which William Wilberforce
and Lord Shaftesbury were successively representative’. However,
Cobbe also indicates some of the damaging effects of the ‘evangelical
training’ which depends on a concept of God as ‘the All-seeing
Judge’. Chief among these is the ‘excessive introspection and self-
consciousness’39 which also (de)formed Miss Clack in The Moonstone.
The ‘Clapham School’ (sometimes known as the Clapham Sect)
was the name given by Sydney Smith (one of the founders of
the Edinburgh Review) to a group of middle-class evangelical and
anti-slave-trade philanthropists who were based in Clapham. The
Clapham Sect exerted a moral, political, and social influence
disproportionate to its size, as did the group associated with
Unitarianism. Heirs of the rational dissenters of an earlier age,
Unitarians were Christians who believed in the unity of God as a
single being, and rejected the idea of the Trinity and the divinity of
Christ. Like the Clapham Sect, they owed their influence in part to
their wealth and their prestige in their local communities, and partly
to their intellectual impact through their publications and organiza-
tion of discussion groups. Families such as the Hennells in Coventry
(who influenced the thinking of the young Marian Evans, who
became the novelist George Eliot) and the Unitarian minister Wil-
liam Gaskell and his wife, the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, in Man-
chester were at the centre of philanthropic and intellectual com-
munities which formed a powerful opposition to establishment
thinking in both religious and secular life throughout the first half of
the nineteenth century. Unitarians were involved in many of the new
developments in science and medicine, they led the opposition to
‘do-nothing’, laissez-faire, economic policies and spearheaded
movements for social reform.40
This section began by citing Hugh McLeod’s claim that for most
(perhaps all) of the Victorian period the majority of the population
of Britain would have accepted Protestant Christianity. However, as
the 1851 church and chapel attendance survey revealed, this did not
necessarily mean that the majority of the population would have
been regular church- or chapel-goers. Indeed, there was a great deal
of concern in some quarters about the failure of the new urban
working class to engage in such activity. Moreover, there were also
many exceptions to McLeod’s general rule of acceptance of Protestant
62 The Social Context
Christianity. First, there were those who embraced the Roman
Catholic faith: on mainland Britain, some of these would have
belonged to old Catholic families whose Roman Catholicism had
survived the sectarian religious turmoils of the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries, but many would have been of Irish or other immi-
grant descent. Second, there were the Anglo-Catholics or High
Anglicans, those members of the Church of England who believed in
the authority of the Church and a priesthood based on the Apostolic
Succession, and in the importance of ritual and sacramental worship:
the Oxford Movement (or Tractarians) of the 1830s and 1840s fol-
lowed the methods (if not the message) of the evangelicals, by
preaching fervently from the pulpit and in a series of tracts against
the heretical ‘liberalism’ of the modern Anglican Church. Then
there were those who were beyond the reach of Christianity. These
included British Jews who were descended from eighteenth-century
immigrants (mainly from Germany), and new immigrants who con-
tinued to settle in London and the larger cities throughout the nine-
teenth century; there were about 35,000 Jews in Britain in 1850, and
about 60,000 by 1881. However, for the social and cultural historian
of nineteenth-century Britain, perhaps the most important group of
non-Christians were the agnostics and atheists whose inability, or
unwillingness, to believe in the existence of God or in the divinity
of Christ, or to accept the Bible as revealed truth, were symptoms
or causes of the so-called ‘Crisis of Faith’.
From the 1840s letters, diaries, poems, novels, periodical articles,
and philosophical treatises testify to the religious doubt and some-
times intellectual and emotional turmoil of middle-class intellectuals
and artists born (like Collins) in the first quarter of the nineteenth
century. At the same time ‘thousands of working-class men and
women . . . joined secular societies and in doing so exposed them-
selves to economic discrimination much sharper than anything a
doubting Oxbridge don had to suffer’.41 The causes of this great
unsettling of religious faith were numerous: two important destabil-
izers of religious orthodoxy were the developments in geology in the
1830s–– such as Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830) and
Robert Chambers’s anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural
History of Creation (1844)–– which undermined the biblical account
of the creation of the earth, and the new historical studies of the
Bible which further undermined scriptural authority. As well as
The Social Context 63
these scientific objections there were also moral objections to the
evangelicals’ punitive conceptions of original sin and everlasting
punishment imposed by an all-seeing God. Indeed, many historians
now think that the moral revulsion against evangelicalism played a
more significant part in undermining religious belief than either the
developments in science or biblical criticism. However, as the cen-
tury went on the increasing influence of new scientific, materialist
explanations of the world, as seen for example in the impact of works
such as Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
(1859) continued to undermine the authority of Scripture, and
also, by further eroding the boundaries between humankind and
nature, undermined (for some Victorians) the sense of man’s div-
inely ordained place at the centre of God’s universe. In addition, the
growing prestige of scientists and the secular professions tended to
displace the clergy as repositories of wisdom and social authority.
Where did Collins stand on religious questions? Most of Collins’s
biographers up until the late twentieth century have concluded that
it is difficult to make definitive statements about Collins’s religious
and spiritual beliefs, or to infer them from his fiction. They have
tended to imply that he did not have any religious beliefs, or (as in
the case of Nuel Pharr Davis), that he actively rebelled against ‘his
father’s piety’ and developed an ‘aversion to religion’ which became
more profound as he got older. Davis even goes so far as to describe
Collins as ‘an atheist who was debarred from all that aspect of the
human drama even remotely connected with sin and salvation’.42
The situation is more complex, as both Sue Lonoff and Keith
Lawrence have shown. Lawrence agrees with the widely held view
that although ‘men of the cloth–– some of them renegades, some of
them more or less admirable–– figure importantly’ in Collins’s
fiction, his novels are, on the whole, ‘strangely silent’ on the ‘subject
of religion’. However, he suggests that if Collins ‘consistently veils
his personal beliefs’ in his fiction, an important correspondence
between the author and his friend Edward Pigott reveals a great deal
about his beliefs in the 1850s.43 Sue Lonoff suggests that there is
both biographical and fictional evidence to undermine the common
supposition that Collins was ‘an agnostic and a man who had no use
for religion’, a supposition which has arisen because he did not
appear to ‘believe in an afterlife . . . attended church rarely and
largely to please others, lived in “sin” with not one but two women,
64 The Social Context
and openly censured Catholics and Dissenters’.44 The biographical
evidence is to be found in the letters which Collins wrote to Pigott;
the fictional evidence comes from The Moonstone, which, as Lonoff
points out, repeatedly ‘alludes to the state of religion in mid-nine-
teenth-century England’,45 and from The Fallen Leaves (1879).
Amelius Goldenheart, the hero of this late novel, is initially sent to
America to be brought up by the members of a religious community
because his father believed that ‘the Christian religion, as Christ
taught it, has long ceased to be the religion of the Christian world. A
selfish and cruel Pretence is set up in its place’ (Book the First,
Chapter II). Amelius is brought up to live his life according to the
Christianity of the Sermon on the Mount rather than to follow
doctrine.
We find our Christianity in the spirit of the New Testament–– not in the
letter. . . . To reverence God: and to love our neighbour as ourselves: if we
had only those two commandments to guide us, we should have enough.
The whole collection of Doctrines (as they are called) we reject at once,
without even stopping to discuss them. We apply to them the test sug-
gested by Christ himself: by their fruits ye shall know them. The fruits of
Doctrines, in the past . . . have been the Spanish Inquisition, the Massacre
of St. Bartholomew, and the Thirty Years’ War–– and the fruits, in the
present, are dissension, bigotry, and opposition to useful reforms. Away
with Doctrines! In the interests of Christianity, away with them! We are to
love our enemies: we are to forgive injuries: we are to help the needy; we
are to be pitiful and courteous, slow to judge others, ashamed to exalt
ourselves. That teaching doesn’t lead to tortures, massacres, and wars; to
envy, hatred, and malice . . .
Of course we must be careful not to equate the words of this fictional
creation with the beliefs of their author. However, this advocacy of a
pure, ethical Christianity does seem to fit in with the repeated
attacks on doctrinal cant and the cant of religious ideologues which
we find in Collins’s novels: Miss Clack and Godfrey Ablewhite in
The Moonstone are perhaps the best examples.
The most direct expression of Collins’s personal views on
religious matters are to be found in his letters to Pigott. As noted in
the section on ‘Protest and Reform’ above, Pigott became the owner
of the freethinking weekly paper, the Leader, at the end of 1851. In
two letters written in February 1852 Collins wrote at some length
(and in a manner which suggests that he was continuing an argument
The Social Context 65
begun and to be continued in conversations with Pigott) about his
disagreements with, and distaste for, the paper’s approach to
religious matters. In the second of these letters, dated 20 February
1852, Collins declared himself in agreement with the Leader’s line
on literature, politics, and–– on the whole–– social matters. However,
he took serious issue with the paper’s policy of giving religion ‘equal
freedom of utterance’ with other matters. Collins objected to the
mixing of private spiritual belief and matters of public policy, the
sacred and the secular. On 16 February 1852 he wrote:
As to what is ‘irreligious’ or what is ‘heterodoxy’, or what is the ‘immens-
ity’ of the distance between them, you and I differ; and it is useless to
broach the subject. Nothing will ever persuade me that a system which
permits the introduction of the private religious, or irreligious, or hetero-
doxical opinions of contributors to a newspaper into the articles on politics
or general news which they write for it, is a wise or a good system . . . It is
for this reason only that I don’t desire to be ‘one of you’–– simply because
a common respect for my own religious convictions prevents me from
wishing to. (Letters, i. 82)
Four days later Collins made it clear that he objected to the ‘anomal-
ous coupling of the sacred and the profane’. He found it perfectly
acceptable for a newspaper to run opinion pieces on religious politics,
but not on religious belief:
It is not your freedom of religious thought that I wish to object to; but
your license of religious expression–– a license which is, to me, utterly
abhorrent. I have never seen any religious thought in the paper. . . . If you
are to take a leading position in religion as well as in Politics, let us know
what your religion is, just as you have let us know what your politics are––
What does the Leader believe in, and what does it disbelieve in?–– Readers
have a right to ask that question of a Journal which starts for the discus-
sion of religious subjects, as well as political. Surely your mission is to
teach, as well as to inquire. Surely you ought to teach something definite in
religion, just as you teach something in politics, if you must have this
‘freedom of religious thought’. Why not let Mr Holyoake [George Jacob
Holyoake, founder of the Secularist movement who was imprisoned for
atheism in 1841] write a series of articles on the advantages of atheism as
a creed?–– his convictions have been honestly arrived at, miserable and
melancholy as they are to think of.
But I repeat, religion itself is not a subject for the columns of a
newspaper–– religious politics . . . are fair game if you please . . .
66 The Social Context
I go with you in politics . . . in social matters . . . in Literature–– but, in
regard to your mixing up the name of Jesus Christ with the current
politics of the day, I am against you–– against you with all my heart
and soul. (Letters, i. 84–5)
A few paragraphs later Collins states unequivocally: ‘I do not desire
to discuss this or that particular creed; but I believe Jesus Christ to
be the Son of God . . .’
Collins himself may have believed in the divinity of Christ and in
certain of the Christian doctrines and the ethical framework that
derived from Christ’s divinity. However, as a further note to Pigott
suggests, he had little time for the Roman Catholic Church (or for
institutionalized religion more generally), or for the religious temper
of his times. The note to Pigott refers to the proclamation by Pope
Pius IX in 1854 which made the immaculate conception an official
Catholic doctrine. Collins dismissed the proclamation itself as a piece
of ‘sacred Tom Foolery’, but expressed surprise that his Protestant
fellow countrymen felt that such irrational Tom Foolery would dam-
age the Catholic Church: ‘Dunderheaded humanity when it falls to
being religious, wants anything you please in a religion–– except
common sense. In an age where thousands of people join the
Mormons, I cannot see, for one, why the Immaculate conception
should stand in the Papists’ way in making new converts’ (Letters, i.
85). As Lawrence notes, the correspondence with Pigott reveals
three important aspects of Collins’s ‘religion’: his ‘distrust of estab-
lished churches’, which, as we can also see from his fiction, ‘he
viewed as hypocritical and manipulative’; his broad acceptance–– at
least during his early and middle years–– of certain fundamental
Christian doctrines, centred in the divinity of Christ, and his abso-
lute insistence on ‘reticence and confidentiality in matters of
personal worship and religious conviction’.46 Collins’s later letters
suggest that these religious views persisted throughout his life.47
Empire and Race
The above discussion of the social, political, and economic contexts
of Collins’s life and work has focused mainly on the British mainland,
and particularly, given Collins’s experience and interests, on England.
I have tried to be quite careful in my use of the words ‘British’ and
‘English’, using the former only when referring to aspects of social
The Social Context 67
life that could be said to apply in all parts of mainland Britain. In this
last section I return to the concept of a wider Britain by looking at
the British Empire as one of Collins’s social, economic, and imagina-
tive contexts. Again, the language is tricky, since in the context of
empire the concept of Britishness is often rather Anglo-centric.
England’s history as a colonial power goes back to the Elizabethan
age. By the nineteenth century she had lost one major colony
(America), but otherwise continued to expand her territories
and influence, and became a self-proclaimed imperial power when
Victoria was made Empress of India in 1876, by means of an Act
passed in the Westminster Parliament. The idea of British imperial-
ism was not a Victorian invention, but it certainly gained a new force
and a distinctive character during Victoria’s reign. Britain’s unequal
relations with her ‘dependencies’ were essential to her economic
power in the nineteenth century, and the colonies and dependent
territories also provided her with a ‘dumping ground’ in which to
dispose of convicts until 1868 (various of the Australian colonies),
‘surplus women’ who couldn’t find husbands, unemployed workers,
and the problematic, impecunious younger sons of upper-class fam-
ilies. The Empire provided the raw materials for the newly emerging
workshop of the world, and also provided an expanding market for
its products, and, as P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins have shown, the
growth of commercial, financial, and service sectors of the British
economy were all deeply involved with the development of empire.48
If the British way of life in the nineteenth century was increas-
ingly dependent on the Empire, then the Empire was increasingly
justified in terms of the superiority of Britons and the British way of
life (for Briton we must usually read Englishman). British imperial-
ism in the nineteenth century was fuelled by a ‘civilizing mission’.
Convinced of both their innate and their cultural superiority the
British sought to bring Christianity and civilization (that is to say
their view of what constituted civilization) to the ‘primitive’ peoples
whose lands they took. Why did the British consider themselves
innately superior to the indigenous peoples of the lands which they
appropriated? One answer, which became of increasing importance
throughout the course of the century, is race. As Christine Bolt has
argued, British racial attitudes changed and hardened during the
Victorian period, not least because the general Victorian rage for
classification and categorization extended itself to the question of
68 The Social Context
race. In the first half of the century there was a general belief
49
(derived from a mixture of evangelical and utilitarian ideas) that
mankind was a single type or genus, and that the perceived back-
wardness of the non-white peoples was due to a lack of development.
By the 1860s, however, there was broad agreement that race was a
key determinant of physical, intellectual, and moral character, and
that the white races were superior to the dark ones. ‘Who are the
dark races?’ Robert Knox asked in Races of Men; A Fragment in
1850; ‘Are the Jews a dark race? The Gypsies? The Chinese, &c.?
Dark they all are to a certain extent; so are all the Mongol tribes––
the American Indian and Esquimaux–– the inhabitants of nearly all
Africa–– of the East–– of Australia’.50
The ‘dark’, ‘primitive’, or ‘savage’ races were seen as children of
nature–– at best innocent, at worst infantile, creatures merely of
instinct and passion. The theory (or superstition) of the superiority
of the white races was given further impetus after 1859 by interpre-
tations of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Although Darwin himself
was wary of such applications of his findings, others were quick to
suggest that his model of the evolution of higher from lower forms
could also be traced within the human species: in short, that the
white European male was the most highly evolved form of Homo
sapiens and that beneath him, occupying the different gradations in
the evolutionary scale, were other human forms from women to
‘savages’. Moreover, the version of the theory of natural selection, as
the survival of the fittest, that was popularized by some of Darwin’s
followers seemed to validate the casual treatment of the lives and
livelihoods of the less highly evolved, ‘primitive’, ‘dark’ races.
Although during Collins’s lifetime most Britons probably never
saw a black person, and relatively few of them lived in or visited any
of its far-flung outposts, the Empire was at the heart of the cultural
imaginary in a variety of ways. The ‘Great Exhibition of the Industry
of All Nations’ in 1851 was, in one sense, a great imperial display––
the British and Colonial section occupied one-half of the space. The
people and places of the Empire were the subject of numerous art-
icles in the periodical press, pictorial images of empire were to be
found in illustrated magazines, and many novels and stories had
imperial settings. From time to time colonized peoples drew them-
selves to the attention of the metropole, as the Bengal sepoys did in
1857 by staging a mutiny, and as the Jamaicans did in 1865 when they
The Social Context 69
rebelled against their British masters, only to be violently suppressed
by Governor Eyre.
The relationships between colony and metropole were extremely
complex on both a practical and a cultural and imaginative level.
Indeed the practical functioning of empire depended to a large
extent upon culture. Although military force played a major part in
both acquiring and keeping colonial territories, it was not the only
means of securing imperial rule. Other important strategies of domi-
nation included the development of elaborate bureaucracies (many
of them staffed by the new professionals mentioned in the section on
class), and the colonization of the minds of the subjected peoples
through Christianity and, later, through an Anglo-centric form of
education. If the native peoples were to survive, in Darwinian terms,
then the only way they could do so (or so some thought) was to
become more like the white man. Thus began the task of domesticat-
ing the savage and disciplining him or her to the same routines of
production and reproduction as the English man and woman at
‘home’.
Some of the problematic aspects of the relationship between colony
and home surface in The Moonstone, whose plot turns on the theft of
a diamond originally plundered in an imperial adventure in India,
and whose characters include a group of mysterious Indians, who
terrify the natives (i.e. the English people) and can only be under-
stood by Murthwaite the ‘expert’ in things Oriental. Collins’s main
narrator, Gabriel Betteredge, whose ‘bible’ is Robinson Crusoe (whose
hero colonizes the island on which he is shipwrecked and makes a
servant of the ‘native’ he encounters), brings into sharp relief the
relationship between colony and home when he laments the invasion
of ‘our quiet English house’ by ‘a devilish Indian Diamond’, and
confesses his surprise that such a thing could occur ‘in an age of
progress, and in a country which rejoices in the blessings of
the British constitution’ (The Moonstone, First Period, Chapter V;
discussed further on pp. 158 ff. and 170 ff.).
Like many of his contemporaries, Collins self-consciously anato-
mized and satirized the ‘age of progress’ and modernity in which he
lived and raised questions about the blessings of the British constitu-
tion and legal system. At the same time he also celebrated and
exploited the social changes that occurred during the course of his
lifetime, eagerly embracing the new reading public that emerged in
70 The Social Context
an increasingly prosperous and democratic society and in an age of
mechanized printing and cheap paper. Collins may have satirized the
materialism of the age of commerce and industry, but he also created
a role for himself as a productive and entrepreneurial professional
writer with an understanding of the demands of the consumer and
an eye for new markets. In his own private life, in which he contrived
to combine the role of a bohemian bachelor with the guise of a
middle-class paterfamilias, Collins enacted some of the complexities
and contradictions of contemporary sexual mores as well as the shift-
ing class, gender, and familial roles which were a prominent feature
of both the society in which he lived and of the fiction that he wrote
about it.
chapter 3
THE LITERARY CONTEXT
Collins’s first novel, Antonina, was published in 1850. His last,
Blind Love, appeared posthumously in 1890. When he began to
publish fiction Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray
were the leading novelists of the day, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth
Gaskell, and Charles Kingsley had just begun their novel-writing
careers, and George Eliot was still to publish her first work of fiction.
By the last decade of Collins’s career, all these novelists were dead
and the literary landscape had been occupied by new realists such as
Thomas Hardy, George Moore, and George Gissing, and new
romancers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Rider Haggard, and
Rudyard Kipling, none of whom had been born when Collins first
began to publish. Collins was thus the ‘lonely survivor of the mid-
century generation, still prolific and . . . still receiving his share of
attention from both readers and reviewers’ as the nineteenth century
drew to its close.1
Collins lived through a period of profound change in novel-
writing and publishing. When he was born the novel was still
regarded as a morally suspect form of amusement rather than a
serious literary form, by the time he died it had become the domin-
ant form of literature. In the early nineteenth century Utilitarians,
evangelicals, and dissenters had tended to dismiss novels as frivolous
or impious, but by 1848 it was not unusual to find the novel referred
to as a reviewer in Blackwood’s did in ‘A Few Words About Novels––
A Dialogue’: ‘the novel now really represents the mind of a country
in all its phases, and, if not the only, is nearly the best of its litera-
ture.’2 In 1859 David Masson, a particularly perceptive commentator
on the mid-nineteenth-century novel, reported that his studies of
the form led him to conclude that it was ‘becoming more real and
determinate, in so far as it can convey matter of fact, more earnest, in
so far as it can be made a vehicle for matter of speculation, and more
conscious, at the same time, of its ability in all matter of phantasy’.3
By 1870, in a lecture entitled ‘On English Prose Fiction as a Rational
72 The Literary Context
Amusement’, Trollope was announcing the triumph of the novel:
‘We have become a novel-reading people,’ he asserted,
[n]ovels are in the hands of us all: from the Prime Minister down to the
last-appointed scullery maid. We have them in our library, our drawing-
rooms, our bed-rooms, our kitchens,––and in our nurseries. Our memor-
ies are laden with the stories which we read . . . Poetry also we read and
history, biography and the social and political news of the day. But all our
other reading put together hardly amounts to what we read in novels.4
Of course, as a professional novelist Trollope had a vested interest in
affirming the importance and popularity of his chosen literary form,
but it is undoubtedly the case that throughout Collins’s lifetime
the audience for fiction was growing and diversifying, and the novel
was gaining in literary prestige. From the middle of the nineteenth
century the work of individual novelists and the novel as a genre
were the subject of serious critical discussion and debate in the
heavyweight periodical press.
Novel Reading and Novel Readers
Who were the readers of fiction in the nineteenth century? What
kind of fiction did they read? Where and how did they obtain it?
Questions about the nature and size of the nineteenth-century audi-
ence for fiction are notoriously difficult to answer, and they take us to
further questions about literacy, gender, and class, as we shall see
below. Collins himself was extremely interested in readers, or ‘King
Public’, as he called them in letters to Pigott in January 1852 (Letters,
i. 79, 82), and some ten years into his own career as a published
writer he wrote an essay in which he offered his own analysis of a
reading public that was clearly demarcated along class lines. In ‘The
Unknown Public’, first published in Household Words, 21 August
1858, Collins announced his ‘startling discovery’ that his previous
assumptions about the composition of the reading public were
entirely mistaken, and that there were, in fact, two reading publics
which inhabited different social worlds, and obtained their reading
material in quite different forms and from entirely different kinds of
outlets. The ‘known’ public, that is, the readers with whom Collins
and his Household Words readers were familiar––‘the customers
at publishing-houses, the members of book clubs and circulating
The Literary Context 73
libraries, and the purchasers and borrowers of newspapers and
reviews’––in fact represent ‘nothing but a minority’ of English
readers. This ‘known’ public was largely middle class, and made up
of sometimes overlapping sub-groups: the religious public with its
own literature; the public that reads for information and instruction,
‘and devotes itself to Histories, Biographies, Essays, Treatises,
Voyages and Travels’; the public that reads for amusement, ‘and
patronizes the Circulating libraries and the railway-bookstalls’; and
the public that read only newspapers. However, below the tip of this
iceberg of readers was the vast mass of the ‘unknown public’, ‘the
lost literary tribes’ (My Miscellanies, p. 252), the ‘monster audience’
(My Miscellanies, p. 262) whose existence Collins became aware of
(or, at least for rhetorical purposes, presents himself as becoming
aware of ) when looking at the publications displayed in the windows
of small stationers’ or small tobacconists’ shops in the course of his
walks around the ‘second and third rate neighbourhoods’ of London;
publications which could be found replicated in every town in
England, ‘in oyster shops, in cigar shops, in lozenge shops’.
The ‘new species of literary production’ which the middle-class
author had discovered was the literature of the millions, ‘the
unfathomable, the universal public’ (My Miscellanies, p. 251), who
read the penny weeklies which had emerged in the 1830s and 1840s,
and which offered soap-opera-like extended narratives, often with a
Gothic flavour, that went on interminably, or which came to an end
only when the public became bored with them. Collins’s essay offers
an early form of market research and content-analysis. From his
quizzing of the shopkeepers and his examination of the stories
published in the penny papers, Collins concludes that ‘the Unknown
Public reads for amusement, and that it looks to quantity in its
reading, rather than to quality’. From his examination of the ‘Answers
to Correspondents’ pages of the penny journals he makes further
deductions about ‘the social position, the habits, the tastes, and
the average intelligence’ of their readers (My Miscellanies, p. 253),
and ‘the general amount of education they have acquired’ (My
Miscellanies, p. 256). Collins assumes a working-class readership for
the penny weeklies, but by the late 1850s their readers also included
many lower-middle-class families. Whatever class it belonged to, the
unknown public which Collins constructs from his own reading
of the penny journals is one which is ‘in a literary sense, hardly
74 The Literary Context
beginning, as yet, to learn to read’; its members are, ‘from no fault of
theirs, still ignorant of almost everything which is generally known
and understood among readers whom circumstances have placed,
socially and intellectually, in the rank above them’. Collins’s interest
in the unknown public is, in large part, an interest in expanding the
audience for his own fiction, which he regards as having a literary
sophistication and merit which require ‘discriminating’ readers: the
unknown public must be taught to read ‘in a literary sense’ (My
Miscellanies, p. 263).
In ‘The Unknown Public’ Collins assumed a widespread basic
literacy, which, by 1858, had created a substantial market for the
penny journals. In fact, historians have disagreed widely about who
could and did read in the nineteenth century. There are no defini-
tive statistics on literacy, and those that are available are notori-
ously difficult to interpret. Some historians of reading use the
ability to sign the marriage register (rather than merely to make
one’s mark with a cross) as evidence of standards of literacy, as
people usually acquired the ability to write after they had learned to
read. By this measure about 67 per cent of men and 51 per cent of
women were literate in 1841. These figures had risen to 81 per cent
and 73 per cent respectively in 1871, and 97.2 per cent and 96.8 per
cent by 1901. So the ability to read was progressively increasing
throughout the century, but what about opportunity? Increased
prosperity and increased leisure time gave more opportunities for
reading at most levels in society. Successive Acts regulating the
working day and the working week (noted in Chapter 2) created
leisure time for those employed in factories and mines, and not all
of this increased leisure time was spent in gin shops and public
houses (as some temperance campaigners feared). Among the mid-
dle classes the increased separation of work and the home led to the
growth of commuting for men and increased leisure time for
women, each of which gave separate opportunities for reading for
amusement, and some of the shared family leisure time was also
given over to such reading. The middle-class fiction market was
thus both expanding and stratifying into distinctive (but overlap-
ping) niche markets: women’s reading, men’s reading, and family
reading.
The growth and democratization of the reading public, and par-
ticularly the growth in fiction reading, led to protracted and often
The Literary Context 75
heated debates throughout the century on the dangers of reading,
the power of fiction to corrupt, the vulnerability of women readers
and adolescent readers of both sexes, and the vulnerability or deprav-
ity of working-class readers. These debates, and the practice of fam-
ily reading among the middle classes, exerted their influence on what
subjects were permitted in novels, and how they could be treated.
The tone and temper of fiction reviewing and the mechanics of the
literary marketplace (see below) encouraged novelists to avoid ‘sensi-
tive’ subjects (particularly sex) which were likely to inflame the pas-
sions or bring a blush to the cheek of a young person. Similarly,
novels were scrutinized from the perspective of domestic discipline:
there was at least a tacit consensus among fiction reviewers that
fiction should not make its readers discontented with ‘the routines
of production and reproduction’, and, preferably, that it should pre-
pare them for and reconcile them to such routines and reinforce
moral norms. Some middle-class reviewers tended to feel that the
reinforcement of domestic discipline and moral norms was particu-
larly important in fiction intended for the working classes. Thus an
article on ‘Penny Novels’ which appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine
in 1866 refers back to an earlier anxiety that ‘our lower classes were
being entertained with tales of seduction, adultery, forgery, and
murder’.5
Collins was often taken to task for his treatment of sensitive
subjects, such as illegitimacy (particularly in No Name), adultery
(Basil ), forgery and fraud (The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale),
and prostitution (The New Magdalen and The Fallen Leaves).
In turn, he was equally ready to castigate what he thought of as
middle-class cant on fiction, such as the reply of the disreputable
Dr Downward (in Armadale) to a mother who asks whether his
patients are allowed novels:
Nothing painful, ma’am! There may be plenty that is painful in real life––
but for that very reason, we don’t want it in books. The English novelist
who enters my house (no foreign novelist will be admitted) must under-
stand his art as the healthy-minded English reader understands it in our
time. He must know that our purer modern taste, our higher modern
morality, limits him to doing exactly two things for us, when he writes us a
book. All we want of him is––occasionally to make us laugh; and invariably
to make us comfortable. (Armadale, Book the Last, Chapter III)
76 The Literary Context
The Production and Distribution of the Novel
How did ‘healthy minded English reader[s]’ obtain their fiction in
the nineteenth century? Most of Collins’s readers would not have
purchased his (or anyone else’s) novels hot off the press in volume
form. For most of the nineteenth century books were expensive to
buy, and most readers would either have borrowed fiction from a
circulating library (if they could afford the subscription) or pur-
chased it in individual paper-covered parts, or in weekly or monthly
instalments in a magazine. Whereas in our own day a novel first
appears in hardback (or large-format trade paperback) and then,
some little while later, in a cheaper paperback edition, for most of
Collins’s lifetime it was the other way round: the hardback version,
usually in three volumes (the ‘three-decker’), followed by a cheaper
one-volume edition, would appear after the novel had appeared seri-
ally in a cheap paper-covered form. Fiction written explicitly for
the working classes (Collins’s ‘Unknown Public’) would have been
published only in the cheap paper-covered version.
While Collins himself was still a schoolboy, Charles Dickens,
among others, adapted the serial fiction of the penny and twopenny
weeklies and took it upmarket, publishing his novels in twenty one
shilling monthly parts over a period of nineteen months (the last
number was a double issue). Dickens also played an important part
in creating a new market for serialized magazine fiction. He pub-
lished Oliver Twist in Bentley’s Miscellany, a monthly magazine
which sold for a shilling a copy, before establishing his own weekly
magazines, Household Words (1850–9) and All the Year Round (1860–
95). Both of Dickens’s magazines sold for twopence a copy and
contained stories and serialized novels alongside entertaining and/or
instructive essays on a wide range of subjects. All the Year Round, in
which The Woman in White and The Moonstone were first serialized,
was launched at the beginning of a decade which saw an enormous
growth in the number of fiction and general interest magazines for
the middle classes, following the abolition of the Stamp Duty (a tax
on publications carrying news items) in 1855, and the removal of the
tax on paper in 1861.
Collins first began to publish in serial form in 1857 when The
Dead Secret appeared weekly in Dickens’s Household Words (it also
ran in the United States, with a few weeks’ time lag, in Harper’s
78 The Literary Context
Weekly and Littell’s Living Age). From this point on until the late
1860s, all Collins’s novels made their first appearance in serial form
in Dickens’s weeklies, the only exception being Armadale, which
appeared in the Cornhill, a monthly magazine owned by George
Smith, and edited until March 1862 by Thackeray. In the 1870s,
when his popularity began to wane, Collins’s novels were serialized
in monthly miscellanies such as Temple Bar and Belgravia and week-
lies such as the Graphic and the World. In the last decade of his
career, Collins’s serial fiction reached a new audience in the pages of
newspapers. In 1873 William Tillotson, proprietor of the Bolton
Weekly Journal and several other Lancashire newspapers, established
his ‘Fiction Bureau’. For a fixed fee Tillotson’s bought the rights to
serialize the novels of popular authors in his syndicate of English
newspapers. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Reade, and Anthony
Trollope all became Tillotson’s authors. Collins saw this form of
publication as a way of maximizing the earnings from his fiction and
reaching some of that ‘unknown public’ which he had written about
in 1858. He first signed up with Tillotson’s in 1879, and Jezebel’s
Daughter appeared in the Bolton Weekly Journal and several other
northern newspapers from September 1879 until January 1880.
Partly because of his uneasiness about his changing status as a
‘commercial’ rather than a ‘gentlemanly’ author,6 Collins’s dealings
with Tillotson’s were not easy, and subsequently (in another innov-
ation) he used the services of A. P. Watt, one of the first of the
new literary agents, to arrange the syndication of The Evil Genius
(1885–6) and The Legacy of Cain (1888).
Whether it appeared in separate paperback numbers, in magazines,
or in newspapers, the serial mode of the publication of fiction clearly
exerted an influence on the form of the nineteenth-century novel.
Each instalment had to keep to a set length, and had to end in a way
that would make the reader look forward eagerly to reading (and
buying) the next one. In addition, each instalment had to work as a
free-standing unit as well as functioning in a longer narrative. As a
writer in the London Morning Herald for 10 January 1843 put it, in
‘publishing periodically, the author has no time to be idle . . . he must
always be lively, pathetic, amusing, or instructive; his pen must never
flag––his imagination never tire’. Because the reading process of
a serial novel was interrupted by the days or weeks between the
publication of the various parts, writers often gave their characters
The Literary Context 79
striking verbal tics or other mannerisms which helped readers
to recognize them or keep them in mind. Although some authors
simply published in instalments a book that they had already written,
others actually wrote their novels in parts, delivering their weekly or
monthly copy to the printer’s boy with the ink still wet. Writing in
instalments could be a precarious business, and it sometimes led to
unevenness and inconsistencies, as an author who wrote serially
could not revise the earlier part of the novel in the light of later
developments (although some authors, including Collins, did revise
their work in the course of its transition from part or serial publica-
tion to volume form). The serial production (rather than merely
the serial distribution) of fiction also meant that occasionally the
progress of a story was delayed by the author’s ill-health, or, like
Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was brought to a (literal)
dead end as a result of the author’s death. Collins gives a vivid
account of the pains of serial writing in his 1871 Preface to The
Moonstone, in which he recalls that he had written parts of the novel
‘under the weight of [the] double calamity’ of his mother’s final
illness and the crippling torture of his own rheumatic gout.
I had my duty to the public still to bear in mind. My good readers in
England and in America, whom I had never yet disappointed, were expect-
ing their regular weekly instalments of the new story. I held to the story––
for my own sake, as well as for theirs. In the intervals of grief, in the
occasional remissions of pain, I dictated from my bed that portion of
The Moonstone which has since proved most successful in amusing the
public––the ‘Narrative of Miss Clack.’
Collins found the rigours of serial writing increasingly difficult as his
health deteriorated in his later years, and in August 1889, realizing
that he was too ill to finish Blind Love which was then being serial-
ized in the Illustrated London News, he engaged his friend Walter
Besant (a popular novelist in the 1880s and 90s) to complete the
novel from the author’s working notes.
As serials were often reviewed during the course of their serial
run, an author who wrote in instalments was susceptible to the influ-
ence of reviewers, and also to pressure from readers. In many cases a
special relationship developed between authors and their serial-
reading public. Dickens famously resisted public pressure not to kill
off little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop in 1841, but succumbed to
80 The Literary Context
the persuasion of his friend John Forster in changing his intended
ending for Great Expectations in 1861. In his Preface to the first
three-volume edition (1860) of The Woman in White, Collins pro-
nounced himself compelled to note the ‘warm welcome which
my story has met with, in its periodical form, among English and
American readers’ and thanks his ‘many correspondents (to whom I
am personally unknown) for the hearty encouragement I received
from them while my work was in progress’. The Preface indicates
that the serial author had received advice and exhortations as well as
encouragement:
I remember very gratefully that ‘Marian’ and ‘Laura’ made such warm
friends in many quarters, that I was peremptorily cautioned at a serious
crisis in the story, to be careful how I treated them––that Mr Fairlie found
sympathetic fellow-sufferers, who remonstrated with me for not making
Christian allowance for the state of his nerves––that Sir Perceval’s ‘secret’
became sufficiently exasperating, in course of time, to be made the subject
of bets . . . and that Count Fosco suggested metaphysical considerations
to the learned in such matters.
If serial publication helped shape the form of the novel in the
nineteenth century, magazine publication helped shaped the ways in
which it was read. Many of the best-known nineteenth-century
novels (including most of Collins’s novels) were first read in maga-
zines or newspapers, alongside items of news, articles on contempor-
ary events, and polemical or campaigning pieces on issues of the day.
The first readers of nineteenth-century novels would thus have been
constantly moving between the fictional world and the real world,
and authors would often incorporate references to the events that
were reported or referred to elsewhere in the newspaper or magazine
in which the novel was appearing. Sometimes the relationship
between the serial novel and the material which surrounded it was
orchestrated in quite a self-conscious manner. Dickens, for example,
described his own editorial role as that of the ‘Conductor’ of his
magazines, and, as Deborah Wynne has demonstrated, in common
with other editors in the 1860s, he invited his readers ‘to adopt an
intertextual approach to magazines’,7 actively encouraging them to
read the various items in each issue in relation to each other and to
make connections between the serial novel and the other features.
Another way in which magazine editors shaped Victorian novels
The Literary Context 81
was through their active intervention in form and content. Dickens
was a notoriously interventionist editor who sought to ‘improve’
upon the style or structure of the novelists published in his
magazines––often in late proof stage, when it was too late for the
author to rescue their work from his efforts. The interventions of
some other editors were directed towards sparing the blush on the
cheek of the young person and avoiding offending against the official
morality of the middle classes. Such editorial interventions were
sometimes made at the instigation of publishers, and sometimes as a
consequence of an editor’s assumptions about what would be
acceptable to his publishers. For example, the publishers of Cassell’s
Magazine objected to some of the expletives used in Man and Wife
which they serialized in 1869–70. Collins agreed to remove an
offending ‘Damn it’, but noted that:
Readers who object to expletives in books, are––as to my experience––
readers who object to a great many other things in books, which they are
too stupid to understand. It is quite possible that your peculiar constitu-
ency may take an exception to things to come in my story, which are
essential to the development of character, or which are connected with a
much higher and larger moral point of view than they are capable of taking
themselves. In these cases, I am afraid that you will find me deaf to all
remonstrances––in those best interests of the independence of literature
which are your interests (properly understood) as well as mine.8
In 1875 Collins required the Graphic to print a statement acknow-
ledging that the editor had suppressed part of a passage of The Law
and the Lady, on the grounds that the original was ‘objectionable’, and
also to print the references to burning lips and physical grappling
which the editor had cut.9
It is easy to see how editorial and authorial assumptions about
what will and will not be acceptable to publishers and readers can
operate as a form of censorship just as much as the direct suppression
of material in my last example. A similar form of self-censorship,
as well as actual censorship, can be seen at work in the relationship
between writers and the owners of circulating libraries, the other
major players in the production and distribution of fiction in the
nineteenth century. As noted earlier, nineteenth-century novels for a
middle-class audience appeared either as a three-volume publication
followed (often much later) by a cheaper two-volume or one-volume
edition, or they appeared first in part form or as a serial in a magazine
82 The Literary Context
and then in three-volume (again sometimes followed by one-volume
form). In the early part of the century the cheap one-volume edition
of a novel might not have been produced until some years after the
issue of the three-decker, and when it appeared it often did so as part
of a reprint series that might have included ‘standard’ or ‘classic’ in
its title––such as Colborn and Bentley’s ‘Standard Novels’ which
began in 1831 and included one-volume editions of works by Jane
Austen and Bulwer Lytton among others. The main purchasers of
the three-decker novel were the circulating libraries, who hired
novels out by the volume to readers paying a yearly subscription.
Circulating libraries had been in existence since the eighteenth cen-
tury, but they became even more important with the expansion of
the reading public and the growth of novel reading in the nineteenth
century. The most famous and powerful of the nineteenth-century
circulating libraries was Mudie’s, owned by Charles Edward Mudie,
who opened his first ‘Select Library’ in Southampton Row in London
in 1842. By the time of Mudie’s death in 1890 his library had some
25,000 subscribers. An annual subscription of one guinea entitled a
reader to borrow one volume at a time, so in order to read a complete
novel each one-guinea subscription holder would have to complete
three transactions with Mudie’s. In the early 1860s W. H. Smith and
Son also entered the circulating library business (Smith’s also ran
railway bookstalls), and although they outlived Mudie’s they did not
challenge its dominance in the nineteenth century: Smith’s member-
ship was about 15,000 by 1894. Between them, Mudie’s and Smith’s
were the major purchasers of hardback fiction and were able to nego-
tiate purchasing deals with the main publishers of fiction. Mudie’s
decision to buy or reject a particular novel and the exact size of his
order could determine its success or failure.
Mudie’s and W. H. Smith were ‘the twin tyrants of literature’.10
Their own tastes and their assumptions (or prescriptions) about the
tastes of their readers were extremely influential in determining
what was published. For example, in 1873 Mudie suggested that
Collins should change the title of The New Magdalen, lest it should
give offence. Collins stood his ground, but wrote anxiously and
angrily to his publisher: ‘this ignorant fanatic holds my circulation in
his pious hands. Suppose he determines to check my circulation––
what remedy have we? What remedy have his subscribers?’11 In the
last decade of Collins’s life a number of authors began to challenge
The Literary Context 83
the tyranny of Mudie’s taste and the dictatorship of the circulating
library. In 1884 George Moore published (in the Pall Mall Gazette)
an essay, entitled ‘A New Censorship of Literature’, in which he
objected to the fact that a ‘mere tradesman’ such as Mudie should set
himself up ‘to decide the most delicate artistic question that may be
raised’.12 Moore’s essay was prompted by the failure of his novel,
A Modern Lover (1883), which had attracted extremely good reviews
but had been sunk by Mudie’s decision to order only fifty copies on
the grounds that it was ‘immoral’. Moore retaliated by seeking to cut
the circulating librarian out of the distribution chain and to attract
buyers rather than borrowers. To this end he published his next
novel, A Mummer’s Wife (1885) in a one-volume edition priced at six
shillings. Others followed his example, and by 1894 the three-volume
novel was all but dead. The demise of the three-decker was almost
certainly what Collins had in mind when he wrote to his publisher,
George Smith, in 1871 about a proposal (which he abandoned) to
take The Woman in White to the ‘unknown public’ by reissuing it in
penny numbers: ‘My own impression is that a very few years more
will see a revolution in the publishing trade for which most of the
publishers are unprepared . . . I don’t believe in the gigantic monop-
olies, which cripple free trade, lasting much longer. The Mudie
monopoly and the W. H. Smith monopoly are anomalies in a com-
mercial country’ (Letters, ii. 349). In fact, the revolution in the pub-
lishing trade which was to be completed with the demise of the
three-decker in 1894 had begun some years before Collins wrote this
letter. The move towards the single-volume novel began with the
phenomenon of ‘railway novels’ or ‘yellowbacks’. In December 1848
George Routledge issued the first volume in the Routledge’s ‘Railway
Library’ series––a one-volume reissue of James Fenimore Cooper’s
The Red Rover produced in a small format that was suitable for
carrying in a pocket or a handbag, bound in boards with an illustra-
tion on the front cover, and priced at one shilling. This series was
much imitated in the 1850s and 1860s, as several publishers adopted
the small format (approximately 17.5 by 12.2 centimetres), and the
distinctive yellow-glazed boards with a racy illustration on the front
and advertisements on the back. The growth of ‘railway reading’ was
also associated with the rise of the sensation novel in the 1860s
(discussed below) and other ‘fast’ novels, sold on railway bookstalls,
which offered ‘something hot and strong’ to grab the attention of
84 The Literary Context
‘the hurried passenger’ and relieve the dullness of the train journey.13
The mid-nineteenth century also saw the first paperback revolution,
as Blackwood, Bradbury and Evans, and others in the 1850s produced
one-volume paper-covered reissues of ‘classic’ novels, translations,
and abridgements. The availability of cheap reprints also created a
demand for cheap one-volume editions of current fiction, which
most publishers continued to resist until after Collins’s death.
The Forms of the Novel
The novel was the dominant literary form of the nineteenth century,
but as always the novel took many forms. For his first novel,
Antonina, Collins chose a genre, the historical romance, which had
been perfected at the beginning of the nineteenth century by ‘the
glorious Walter Scott (King, Emperor, President, and God Almighty
of novelists)’,14 and popularized by Bulwer Lytton in the 1820s and
1830s and by Harrison Ainsworth in the 1830s and 1840s. However,
by the time Collins began his novel-writing career the historical
romance had begun to go out of fashion. Collins’s second novel,
Basil, announced itself as a ‘story of modern life’, and this was more
in keeping with the growing tendency of nineteenth-century novel-
ists, at least those who wrote primarily for a middle-class audience,
to set their narratives in the present or the very recent past, and to
replace romance with realism. By the 1850s, the realistic, or ‘faithful’
treatment of ordinary, everyday life, advocated by George Eliot in
reviews and essays in periodicals and in the famous intervention by
the narrator in Chapter 17 of Adam Bede (1859; see below), was
replacing both the ‘mind-and-millinery species’ of novel which she
accused ‘lady novelists’ of producing in her 1856 essay on ‘Silly
Novels by Lady Novelists’,15 and the novels of high life (‘silver
fork’ novels) or low life (often criminal low life, as in the so-called
‘Newgate’ novels) produced by their male equivalents.
Although he did not publish his first novel until 1850, Collins
began writing fiction in the 1840s, a decade dominated by Dickens:
The Old Curiosity Shop appeared between 1840 and 1841, Barnaby
Rudge, a historical novel set at the time of the Gordon Riots, in 1841,
Martin Chuzzlewit in 1843–4, Dombey and Son, the first of his great
social novels, in 1846–8, and David Copperfield, his autobiographical
novel about the making of a nineteenth-century novelist, in 1849–50.
The Literary Context 85
The year 1850 also saw the completion of William Makepeace
Thackeray’s novel about (among other things) the making of a
nineteenth-century novelist, Pendennis (which appeared in monthly
parts between 1848 and 1850). Vanity Fair, Thackeray’s vast social
panorama set in the years around the battle of Waterloo, had
appeared in 1847–8. Whether they were set in the present, or in the
recent or the more distant past, the novels that Dickens wrote in the
1840s were very much concerned to represent, explore, and critique
what Thomas Carlyle called the ‘condition of England’. Other novel-
ists of the 1840s who concerned themselves with contemporary
social problems included Benjamin Disraeli, whose 1845 novel Sybil
described England as consisting of ‘two nations’ (the rich and the
poor), Charles Kingsley, whose Christian Socialist novel Yeast
appeared in 1848, and Elizabeth Gaskell, whose 1848 novel Mary
Barton was set in industrial Manchester at the time of strikes and
Chartist activism. Gaskell returned to the issue of industrial rela-
tions and relations between the rich and poor in North and South
(1854–5). Industrial unrest in the north of England is also one of the
contexts for Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849), although in this case
the unrest belongs to the Luddite protests of 1811–12. On the other
hand, Jane Eyre, the other novel which Charlotte Brontë published
in the 1840s (in 1847), was a mixture of realism and romance, which
combined a Bildungsroman (a novel about the development of
the central protagonist to maturity) with a ‘governess novel’, and
rewrote the Cinderella and Bluebeard stories. The novels of the
other Brontë sisters also belong to this decade: Emily’s Wuthering
Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey (another ‘governess novel’) both
appeared in 1847, and in 1848 Anne Brontë published The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall, an early example of the sensation novel, a genre which,
according to many commentators, Collins invented in The Woman in
White (1860). The 1840s also saw the beginning of Trollope’s prolific
career as a novelist with the publication of his Irish novels,
The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847) and The Kellys and the
O’Kellys (1848).
Thus, by the time Collins published his first full-length novel in
1850 the fiction market was extremely varied. In the 1850s Dickens
continued to be a major figure, striking out in new directions with his
sharp social satire Bleak House (1852–3), a condition-of-England
novel, Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1855–7), a dark novel of
86 The Literary Context
modern life, and his second historical novel, A Tale of Two Cities
(1859). However, in the 1850s Dickens’s supremacy was challenged
by newcomers such as Collins himself, and by their friend Charles
Reade, whose theatrical and melodramatic novels Peg Woffington and
Christie Johnstone appeared in 1853, followed by his ‘novel with a
purpose’, It Is Never Too Late to Mend, in 1856. Another new voice
appeared towards the end of the decade, when George Eliot pub-
lished her well-received Scenes of Clerical Life (1858) and the
extremely successful Adam Bede (1859). Having been a prominent
advocate of realism in art in her essays of the mid-1850s, Eliot now
became its chief exponent, seeking to put into practice what she had
earlier criticized Dickens for failing to do, by offering (what she saw
as) a truthful representation of the life of the people, of ‘their con-
ceptions of life and their emotions’, rather than simply of their
‘external traits’ (as, in her view, Dickens did).16 Eliot was responsible
for bringing a new seriousness and a new prominence to the
domestic novel in realist mode, which became a (perhaps the) domin-
ant sub-genre of fiction in the 1850s and 1860s. Like the Dutch
painters whom she admired, Eliot created and celebrated ‘faithful
pictures of a monotonous homely existence, which has been the fate
of so many more among my fellow-mortals than a life of pomp or of
absolute indigence, of tragic suffering or of world-stirring actions’
(Adam Bede, Chapter 17). Sometimes referred to as ‘sentimental
fiction’, domestic fiction was particularly (although by no means
exclusively) popular with women readers and writers during the
middle of the nineteenth century. Histories of provincial life such as
Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire
novels, and Margaret Oliphant’s Chronicles of Carlingford were
extremely popular during the middle years of the century. Eliot’s
Middlemarch (1872) is perhaps the high point of domestic realism,
which, as Henry James argued ‘set a limit’ to the genre.17
If the domestic novel in realist mode focused on the dramas of
everyday life, here now and in England, so too did the sensation
novel, a fictional sub-genre which came to the forefront of popular
and critical attention in the 1860s, and with which the name of
Wilkie Collins was closely associated. Although sharing some of its
characteristics, the sensation novel was defined in opposition to the
domestic novel and for a brief period in the 1860s it seemed to have
displaced it as the dominant fictional sub-genre. Thomas Hardy
The Literary Context 87
gives us something of the flavour of the sensation novel in his Preface
to Desperate Remedies (1871), when he describes this novel, his own
anonymously published contribution to the sensation genre, as a
‘long and intricately inwrought chain of circumstance’, involving
‘murder, blackmail, illegitimacy, impersonation, eavesdropping,
multiple secrets, a suggestion of bigamy, amateur and professional
detectives’. According to the anonymous reviewer of ‘The Popular
Novels of the Year’ in Fraser’s Magazine in August 1863, sensational-
ism had so completely taken over the fiction market, that a ‘book
without a murder, a divorce, a seduction, or a bigamy, is not appar-
ently considered either worth writing or reading; and a mystery and
a secret are the chief qualifications of the modern novel’.18 With their
sometimes racy characters and complicated plots, sensation novels
were accused of focusing on unpleasant subjects and unsettling their
readers, ‘destroying conventional moralities, and generally unfitting
the public for the prosaic avocations of life’.19 Sensation novels,
according to their critics, were aimed directly at the bodies and ner-
vous systems of their readers, providing shocks, thrills, and even
sexual arousal. The sensation ‘product’, as advertised in a parodic
prospectus for an invented newspaper called the Sensation Times
which appeared in Punch, was devoted to ‘Harrowing the Mind,
making the Flesh Creep . . . [and] Giving Shocks to the Nervous
System’.20
Sensation novels drew on the Gothic novels of the turn of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (such as Ann Radcliffe’s The
Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794, and The Italian, 1797), which employed
a variety of devices (including the supernatural) to instil fear and
terror into their readers, and whose plots often involved dynastic
ambition and intrigue, and the persecution and imprisonment of
women. They also owed something to the ‘Newgate’ novels of the
early nineteenth century. These novels took their name from the
London prison to which notorious felons were sent before trans-
portation or hanging, and drew on real-life crime stories from the
Newgate Calendar to create criminal protagonists and heroes who
were often represented sympathetically as being the victims of an
unjust and outmoded legal and penal system. Many sensation novels
derived their plot situations from newspapers, especially from
the police reports and the reports of the new divorce courts, and
they sometimes borrowed the techniques, character types, and plot
88 The Literary Context
situations of lower-class literary forms such as popular melodrama
and penny dreadfuls. Indeed, one of the many criticisms which
reviewers for middle-class magazines levelled at sensation novelists
was that they had blurred the boundaries between lower-class and
middle-class reading and readers by ‘making the literature of the
kitchen the favourite reading of the Drawing room’.21
Whatever their ancestry and antecedents, sensation novels were
tales of modern life. As one writer in the Quarterly Review put it:
The sensation novel, be it mere trash or something worse, is usually a tale
of our own times. Proximity is, indeed, one great element of sensation. It
is necessary to be near a mine to be blown up by its explosion; and a tale
which aims at electrifying the nerves of the reader is never thoroughly
effective unless the scene be laid in our own day and among the people we
are in the habit of meeting.22
A generic hybrid, the sensation novel mixed romance with realism,
the fantastic with the journalistic and, as Dickens observed of The
Moonstone, the ‘wild’ with the ‘domestic’ (Pilgrim, xi. 385).
Sensation novels were often concerned with family secrets.
Indeed, as Elaine Showalter has suggested, sensation novels focused
on secrecy as ‘the fundamental enabling condition’ of the middle-
class family in the nineteenth century.23 Unlike Gothic novels, which
usually involved the machinations of aristocratic characters in castles
or monasteries in exotic foreign settings, or Newgate novels which
centred on the urban dens, dives, and streets in which low-life crim-
inals carried out their trade, sensation novels involved middle-class
families (or the relations between middle-class and aristocratic fam-
ilies) in domestic settings in the English countryside, the suburbs, or
the ‘respectable’ areas of towns. As Henry James noted, Mary
Elizabeth Braddon ‘created the sensation novel’ with Lady Audley’s
Secret, but she ‘had been preceded in the same path by Collins who
must take the credit for
introducing into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries
that are at our own doors. This innovation gave a new impetus to the
literature of horrors . . . Instead of the terrors of Udolpho we were treated
to the terrors of the cheerful country house, or the London lodgings. And
there is no doubt that these were infinitely the more terrible.24
In many sensation novels, the middle-class home, which in
the domestic novel (and in the cultural imaginary) was a haven of
The Literary Context 89
tranquillity and a refuge from the harsh world of commerce and the
unruly world of the urban streets, was more likely to be the source
and scene of violence, intrigue, and crime. In The Woman in White,
the home is the scene of Sir Percival Glyde’s effective imprisonment
of his wife and her half-sister before abducting them and imprison-
ing them elsewhere, and his actions are motivated by a family secret
(the secret of his birth). In The Moonstone, ‘our quiet country house’
is disrupted by the theft of the diamond from the cabinet in Rachel
Verinder’s bedroom (a crime which has its origins in the domestic
secrets of its perpetrator). The narratives of both Armadale and No
Name originate in family secrets, and the development of the plots of
both novels involves the role of female impostors (Lydia Gwilt and
Magdalen Vanstone) who marry under a false identity in an effort to
gain, or, in Magdalen’s case, regain, their fortune. Mary Elizabeth
Braddon’s Lady Audley similarly marries under an assumed identity
and this lower-middle-class schemer disrupts the calm of an English
country house with her increasingly desperate efforts to maintain
her secret. In Ellen (Mrs Henry) Wood’s best-seller East Lynne,
the household of an upwardly mobile country lawyer is revealed as
a place of secrecy and jealousy even before it is disrupted by the
adultery of Isabel Vane, his aristocratic wife.
Braddon’s Lady Audley (and her later heroines such as Aurora
Floyd) and Wood’s, Isabel Vane, as well as in Collins’s Lydia Gwilt
and Magdalen Vanstone, were a new kind of female protagonist: the
‘angel in the house’ of the domestic novel had been re-created as
the devil in the house. Much of the critical debate on sensation
fiction focused on its creation of a new kind of heroine: a woman
whose conduct transgressed the norms of middle-class femininity,
but who nevertheless engaged the reader’s interest and sympathy.
Collins’s sensation heroines from Marian Halcombe, through
Magdalen Vanstone, to Lydia Gwilt and Rachel Verinder are all, in
their different ways, examples of this new kind of female protagon-
ist. In fact, women––as characters, writers, and readers––were at
the centre of the sensation novel phenomenon. As E. S. Dallas
observed in his Times review of Lady Audley’s Secret, the mid-
nineteenth century was ‘the age of the lady novelists, and lady
novelists naturally give first place to the heroine’ who is ‘pictured as
high-strung . . . full of passion, purpose, and movement––very
liable to error’.25 The Reverend Francis E. Paget, author of a satire
90 The Literary Context
on the novels of Braddon and Wood, was less sanguine about the
age of the lady novelists:
No man would have dared to write and publish such books . . . no man
could have written such delineations of female passion . . . No! They are
women, who by their writings have been doing the work of the enemy of
souls, glossing over vice, making profligacy attractive, detailing with
minuteness the workings of unbridled passions, encouraging vanity,
extravagance, willfulness, selfishness . . . Women have done this,––have
thus abused their power and prostituted their gifts,––who might have
been bright and shining lights in their generation.26
One lady novelist, Margaret Oliphant, repeatedly castigated women
writers for their sensational representation of female characters and
for focusing on their physical (and especially sexual) sensations, and
she also attacked female readers for flocking to buy such books: ‘It is
a shame for women so to write; and it is a shame to the women who
read and accept as a true representation of themselves and their ways
the equivocal talk and fleshly inclinations herein attributed to
them.’27 As a novelist who was reviewed as a sensationalist, Collins
was thus associated both with female writers (and readers) and with a
form of fiction that was perceived to be feminine, a fact which Tamar
Heller has argued gave him an ‘ambiguous place in Victorian literary
culture’.28
Collins’s The Woman in White has often been singled out as the
first sensation novel. It was the subject of one of the earliest influen-
tial reviews of sensation fiction, in which Margaret Oliphant reviewed
Collins’s novel alongside Dickens’s Great Expectations and Ellen
Wood’s East Lynne (1861).29 Did Collins or any of his contemporar-
ies actually see themselves as sensation novelists? Or was sensation
merely a new label which reviewers in the 1860s began to apply to
novels concerned with passions, crime, or madness? Mary Elizabeth
Braddon, who sometimes felt herself trapped by the sensationalist
tag, created a fictional sensation novelist, Sigismund Smith, who
demonstrated that sensationalism was both a label and a fact of
literary life: ‘Mr Sigismund Smith was a sensation author. That
bitter term of reproach, “sensation,” had not been invented for the
terror of romancers in the fifty-second year of this present century;
but the thing existed nevertheless in divers forms, and people wrote
sensation novels as unconsciously as Monsieur Jourdain talked
prose.’30 ‘Sensation’ may not have existed as ‘a bitter term of
The Literary Context 91
reproach’ in 1852, but in that year Collins published a novel, Basil,
which had many of the characteristics that were later labelled as
sensational: a tale of modern life which begins on an omnibus, it
revolves around a secret cross-class marriage, an adultery plot, and
an inter-generational revenge plot in which the deeds of the fathers
continue to reverberate in the lives of their sons. Four years earlier
Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall included many of the
ingredients of the sensation novel, especially as later developed by
Collins: a dispersed narrative (made up of letters, a journal, and an
editorializing commentary from its hero); a woman with a secret; and
a preoccupation with the sufferings that women undergo as the
result of the peculiarities and inequalities of the marriage laws and
the laws governing the custody of children. Moreover, long before
Oliphant labelled Great Expectations as a sensation novel in 1862,
Dickens had been writing sensation fiction in novels which focused
on family secrets and on crime and criminals. Dombey and Son has a
kind of adultery plot (when Edith Dombey ‘elopes’ with Carker),
and Bleak House has a woman with a secret (Lady Dedlock), a cross-
class marriage and a detective plot, all of which were to become
staples of the sensation novel of the 1860s.
Sensation novels often had a detective plot, and the growth of
detective fiction is another important part of the literary context in
which Collins wrote. Indeed, Collins has sometimes been credited
with either inventing or perfecting the English detective novel with
The Moonstone. From Dickens’s Inspector Bucket in Bleak House
through Collins’s Inspector Cuff in The Moonstone to Arthur Conan
Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories in the 1880s, the professional
detective became an important figure in English literature. Just as
important was what Collins termed ‘the Confidential Spy of modern
times . . . the necessary Detective attendant on the progress of our
national civilization’ (Armadale, Book the Third, Chapter xv). Such
figures include private detectives such as Dickens’s Nadgett in
Martin Chuzzlewit, Collins’s Bashwood (the younger) in Armadale
(1864–6), and Holmes himself. Other ‘confidential spies’ include
amateurs who get drawn into detection, such as Mary Elizabeth
Braddon’s Robert Audley (Lady Audley’s Secret, 1862) and Eleanor
Vane (Eleanor’s Victory, 1863), Collins’s Walter Hartright in The
Woman in White, and Franklin Blake and the others who fall prey to
the ‘detective fever’ that breaks out in The Moonstone. As Ronald
92 The Literary Context
Thomas has observed: ‘almost every Victorian novel has at its heart
some crime that must be uncovered, some false identity that must be
unmasked, some secret that must be revealed, or some clandestine
plot that must be exposed.’31
Thomas attributes the rise and pervasiveness of detection in the
nineteenth-century novel to ‘the creation of the modern bureau-
cratic state’ and the disciplined, self-policing subjectivity which it
required. Others have seen it as a symptom of a specifically urban
(even metropolitan) modernity. Walter Benjamin, for example, has
traced the origins of the nineteenth-century detective story to the
anonymity of modern city life––the ‘obliteration of the individual’s
traces in the big-city crowd’32 ––and to the universal suspicion with
which the inhabitants of the modern city regard each other. In the
mid-nineteenth century, detective novels, like sensation novels, were
criticized for putting plot rather than character at their centre. Per-
haps both this criticism and the literary practice which prompted it
were produced by an anxiety that character is a function of plot, just
as, in the modern bureaucratic state and the modern town or city,
human identity is a function or product of the tangled social plots
which human beings inhabit.
Sensation novels were often, like many domestic novels, also
‘marriage problem novels’ and ‘novels-with-a-purpose’, concerned
to expose social and moral ills of various kinds. Such novels were to
become even more prominent in the 1880s and 1890s as women (and
some of their male supporters) campaigned against the iniquities
and inequities of the laws and customs of marriage. In the first
decade of his career Collins ranked entertaining his readers more
highly than instructing them, taking as his dictum, ‘make ’em laugh,
make ’em cry’, make ’em wait’, and putting these words into the
mouth of Jessie Yelverton, a character in ‘The Queen of Hearts’:
I’m sick to death of novels with an earnest purpose . . . of outbursts of
eloquence, and large-minded philanthropy, and graphic descriptions,
and unsparing anatomy of the human heart . . . [W]hat I want is some-
thing that seizes hold of my interest, and makes me forget when it is
time to dress for dinner––something that keeps me reading, reading,
reading, in a breathless state, to find out the end. (‘The Queen of Hearts’,
Chapter 4)
At his best Collins was able to keep his readers reading ‘in a breathless
The Literary Context 93
state, to find out the end’ and at the same time to engage them with
characters, plots, and situations which were designed to make them
think seriously about themselves and their society, and about his own
particular preoccupations––such as the state of the family and mar-
riage. Later on, he seems to have forgotten the words he gave to
Jessie Yelverton, and wrote more self-consciously didactic novels-
with-a-purpose, such as Man and Wife (his 1870 attack on ‘the pres-
ent scandalous condition of the Marriage Laws of the united King-
dom’, Chapter I), The New Magdalen (1873) and The Fallen Leaves
which took up the cause of Christian Socialism and ‘fallen women’,
and Heart and Science (1882–3) which took up the cause of anti-
vivisectionism. Many critics, then and now, have felt that Collins’s
novels-with-a-purpose represented a falling off of his literary
powers, and have generally agreed with Swinburne’s oft quoted lines:
What brought good Wilkie’s genius nigh perdition?
Some demon whispered––‘Wilkie! have a mission!’33
However, even when he was pursuing a mission, Collins never forgot
how to tell a tale.
Some of the later novels––The Fallen Leaves and The Legacy of
Cain (1889), for example––explore questions of heredity, environ-
ment, and destiny. These questions had been taken up by the French
Naturalist novelist, Émile Zola in his Rougon-Macquart series of
novels which had begun to appear in 1871, and by his English imita-
tors such as George Moore. However, Collins was not in sympathy
with either the French or English Naturalist novel of the 1870s and
1880s, describing the ‘realistic rubbish’ of modern French novels as
‘Dull and Dirty’ (Letters, ii. 409). By the last decade of his career he
felt that he was living in ‘a period of “decline and fall” in the art of
writing fiction’ (Letters, ii. 467).
The Novel and the Theatre
As noted in the first chapter, Collins was extremely interested in
plays and the theatre. He took part in private theatricals from the late
1830s onwards, and was an enthusiastic playgoer both in England
and on his travels abroad (especially in his trips to Paris with Dickens
and others). He was in many ways a very dramatic novelist. Indeed,
as he noted in the Letter of Dedication to Basil, he saw the novel and
94 The Literary Context
the play as ‘twin-sisters in the family of Fiction . . . [the] one is a
drama narrated, as the other is a drama acted; and . . . all the strong
and deep emotions which the Play-writer is privileged to excite, the
Novel-writer is privileged to excite also’. Like many authors who
published fiction in serial form Collins made a great deal of use of
dramatic scenes, especially at the end of an episode. He also relied
heavily on dialogue, and his novels were often dramatic in structure.
No Name (1862) and The Black Robe (1881) were organized as a
series of ‘scenes’, while in both The Woman in White and The Moon-
stone the narrative is dispersed across a range of narrators who are
also actors in the story. Moreover, as was quite common in the mid-
nineteenth century, many of Collins’s novels were adapted for the
stage, either by the author himself, or, by a professional playwright,
with or without the permission of the author of the original novel.
As Collins noted in a letter to John Hollingshead:
My ‘Poor Miss Finch’ has been dramatised (without asking my permission)
by some obscure idiot in the country.
I have been asked to dramatise it, and have refused, because my experi-
ence in the matter tells me that the book is eminently unfit for stage
performances. What I dare not do with my own work, another man
(unknown in literature) is perfectly free to do against my will, and (if
he can get his rubbish played) to the prejudice of my novel and my
reputation. (Letters, ii. 362)
Collins also wrote directly for the stage. He made his own acting
debut on the professional stage in 1850 in A Court Duel!, which he
adapted from a melodrama set in the French court of 1726. He also
wrote (as well as acted in) two other melodramas in the 1850s,
The Lighthouse (1855) and The Frozen Deep (1857), which later
appeared as a short story. Another play, The Red Vial, whose plot
he subsequently used in his novel Jezebel’s Daughter (1880), was
produced––unsuccessfully––at the Olympic Theatre in 1858. The
New Magdalen and The Evil Genius (1886) were written simul-
taneously as both novels and plays, although The Evil Genius was
never produced on stage. One of Collins’s most successful plays,
No Thoroughfare (co-authored with Dickens), appeared first as a
mystery story in the Christmas number of All the Year Round on 12
December 1867, to be followed a fortnight later by a stage version at
the Adelphi Theatre in London. Collins enjoyed another stage suc-
cess with Man and Wife, initially conceived as a play, but in the event
The Literary Context 95
published first as a novel. The play version of Man and Wife opened
at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London on 22 February 1873. By
all accounts extremely well acted, and staged in a very up-to-date
way, this play enjoyed a very successful London run before going on
tour. In May 1873, The New Magdalen opened at the Olympic
Theatre, a day before the two-volume version of the novel was pub-
lished by Bentley. Again, the play was a great success with the public,
although the critics took issue with its verbosity, and what they per-
ceived to be its immorality.
By the 1870s Collins had become quite a successful dramatist
who was usually most successful when adapting a plot which he had
already developed for a novel or story. On more than one occasion
Collins wrote that in other circumstances he would have become a
playwright rather than a novelist:
If I had been a Frenchman––with such a public to write for, such rewards
to win, and such actors to interpret me, as the French Stage presents––all
the stories I have written from ‘Antonina’ to ‘The Woman in White’ would
have been told in dramatic form. Whether their success as plays would
have been equal to their success as novels, it is not for me to decide; But if
I know anything of my own faculty, it is a dramatic one. (Letters, i. 208)
Collins sometimes seemed to suggest that he became a novelist
rather than a playwright simply because he was writing at a time
when the novel was in the ascendant in England and the drama and
theatre were in decline. One form of theatre that was clearly not in
decline during Collins’s writing life was the melodrama. Originally a
lower-class form, melodrama also became one of the dominant forms
of middle-class theatre, just as it became one of the dominant modes
of the novel at mid-century. As Michael Booth notes, melodrama
had something for everyone: strong and extreme emotions, pathos or
tragedy, comedy, domestic sentiment, extraordinary incidents, plot
suspense, romantic or exotic touches, domestic scenes and settings,
and ‘sharply delineated stock characters . . . love, joy, suffering,
morality, the reward of virtue and the punishment of vice’.34 In an
important book on The Melodramatic Imagination (1976), Peter
Brooks has argued that melodrama is a mode particularly associated
with periods of rapid social change and ideological uncertainty, when
it can function either as a form of subversion or escapism. In the
early Victorian period the stage melodrama became increasingly
The Literary Context 97
urban in its settings and dealt with social and political anxieties in
the form of emotional dramas focused on the family. By the 1860s
both the content and the staging of melodrama had become more
sensational and spectacular, particularly in the larger theatres with
technical equipment for the staging of shipwrecks, avalanches, and
railway crashes. The ‘sensation drama’ raised the stakes in providing
audience excitement, and the challenge was taken up in the sensation
novel. There was considerable overlap between the stage melodrama
and the sensation novel in content as well as technique. The sensa-
tion novel took up the melodrama’s preoccupation with class conflict
or tension, cross-class sexual liaisons, social mobility, financial in-
stability (plots revolving around loss of place, bankruptcy, or business
failure), and with business crime (such as fraud, forgery, swindles,
and embezzlement).
The Novelist as Journalist and Journeyman-of-Letters
As the earlier sections of this chapter indicate, Collins, like many
novelists and aspiring novelists in the nineteenth century, made his
living by writing in a variety of forms, modes, and genres: the drama
and the short story, as well as in various genres of novel (domestic,
detective, sensational, and the didactic novel-with-a purpose). In
common with many of his contemporaries, Collins was also a
journalist––in the sense that he wrote regularly for weekly, fort-
nightly, or monthly magazines, particularly in the first decade of his
career. From 1851 until 1855 he wrote articles and reviews for the
radical weekly, the Leader, in whose prospectus (written by Thornton
Hunt), we can see a considerable degree of overlap with Collins’s
fictional concerns in the 1850s and 1860s.
The Leader will be thoroughly a news-paper: the news of the week is the
history of the time as it passes before our eyes, informing and illustrating
political and social science . . . [Nothing] will be overlooked as alien or
inferior to the regard of the true politician: the news should reflect the life
of our day, as it is; its materials must be accepted from whatsoever
source––from the Parliament or the police-office, from the drawing-room
or the workhouse. The utmost care of experienced journalists will be used
to collect for the reader every striking incident in the eventful story of
Humanity, and to convey it in such manner as to combine fullness of
statement with the avoidance of offence.35
98 The Literary Context
After Antonina, Collins’s novels were also a version of the history of
the time, full of ‘striking incident’ and taking their materials ‘from
whatsoever source’, often from the newspapers of the day.
In October 1856 Collins accepted Dickens’s offer of a position
on the staff of his weekly magazine Household Words: ‘I have been
thinking a good deal about Collins,’ Dickens wrote to his sub-editor
W. H. Wills on 16 September 1856, ‘and it strikes me that the best
thing we can do just now for H.W. is to . . . offer him Five Guineas a
week. He is very suggestive and exceedingly quick to take to my
notions. Being industrious and reliable besides . . . I think it would
do him, in the long run, a world of good’ (Pilgrim, viii. 188). For the
next five years Collins wrote articles and stories for Dickens and in
collaboration with him. Journalism remained Collins’s main
employment and source of income until the popular success of The
Woman in White enabled him to give up his position on the staff of
All the Year Round, the successor to Household Words. In the course
of his employment on Dickens’s weeklies, Collins published over
fifty short stories and articles. My Miscellanies (1863) includes a
couple of dozen examples of the pieces which Collins produced
weekly for Household Words and in the first year of All the Year
Round. They include humorous essays on (what he described as)
‘social grievances’ such as ‘Give Us Room’ (on the problems posed
by crinolines in confined spaces); biographical sketches on fellow
writers such as Balzac and Douglas Jerrold; narratives of historical
events; ‘Fragments of Personal Experience’ (as he described them in
the 1875 edition of My Miscellanies) such as ‘Laid Up in Lodgings’
(accounts of his experiences in lodging houses in London and Paris);
and character sketches. Collins also wrote more polemical pieces
on the state of modern culture: ‘A Petition to the Novel-Writers’
(a complaint about the dullness of much modern fiction); ‘The
Unknown Public’ (on the potentially huge audience for the mid-
nineteenth-century novelist to be found among the readers of penny
fiction); and ‘Dramatic Grub Street’ (on the parlous state of the
contemporary theatre).
In the course of his journeyman work for Household Words and
All the Year Round, Collins also produced numerous short stories
(several of which were collected in After Dark, published in 1856),
which both revealed and developed his talent for describing and
creating fear and mystery. They included the Gothic-influenced,
The Literary Context 99
locked-room mystery ‘A Terribly Strange Bed’, a ‘Dickensy’ curiosity
about a man who recognizes the scene of a narrow escape from death
in his misspent youth and tells the tale of how he had been tricked
into sleeping in a specially adapted bed after breaking the bank at a
low-life gambling den in Paris (the bed was designed so as to crush
its occupant to death and allow the plotters to escape with his win-
nings); ‘Gabriel’s Marriage’, set in revolutionary France, whose plot
concerns a mysterious priest and the estrangement of a father and
son over a crime that was never committed (the plot was later reused
in The Lighthouse); ‘Sister Rose’, also set in the French Revolution
and a probable influence on the characters and plot of Dickens’s
A Tale of Two Cities; and ‘The Yellow Mask’ (based on Edgar Allan
Poe’s, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’), which involves a plot to
trick a young sculptor into believing that the ghost of his dead wife
has returned to haunt him. Quite early in his period on Household
Words, Collins wrote another story with supernatural overtones,
entitled ‘The Monktons of Wincot Abbey’, whose plot turns on the
fear of hereditary insanity. Dickens rejected it as unsuitable for a
family magazine, but it was subsequently accepted for publication in
Fraser’s Magazine and it has proved quite popular with readers as
‘Mad Monkton’.
One of the most interesting aspects of Collins’s work for Household
Words and All the Year Round was his collaboration with Dickens.
Collins was a privileged member of the group which has been
described as Dickens’s young men, and the younger writer worked
closely with his editor and mentor at a very formative stage of his
development as a professional writer. Together, Collins and Dickens
produced ‘The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices’, a humorous
narrative of their walking holiday in Cumberland. Collins wrote in
the person of a natural born idler, while Dickens took on the persona
of one who had had to work hard to perfect his idleness. Collins was
also one of Dickens’s regular co-authors for the linked narratives
that he produced as special ‘extra’ numbers which became a regular
feature of the Christmas edition of Household Words from 1851. These
Christmas stories were, perhaps, the most interesting and important
of the Dickens–Collins collaboration and included detective stories,
tales of the uncanny and supernatural, and ‘The Perils of Certain
English Prisoners’––in response to Dickens’s request for a story of
civilian heroism that might be made relevant to the Indian Mutiny.
100 The Literary Context
The collaboration continued briefly in the Christmas numbers
for All the Year Round. Their last collaborative work was ‘No
Thoroughfare’ (1867), a mystery story which turns on the secrets
surrounding the birth (and legitimacy) of two of its main characters.
The pattern of mentorship and collaboration between Dickens
and Collins was by no means uncommon in the nineteenth century.
Collins was fortunate to have attracted the attention of one of the
most successful writers of his day, but the process of influence was a
two-way street. As Sue Lonoff notes, Dickens taught Collins the art
of pleasing digression, while the younger writer taught his mentor
something about compression, and careful plotting.36 Most import-
ant of all, perhaps, Collins’s employment by Dickens throughout
the 1850s provided him with both the opportunity for and the discip-
line of writing and publishing regularly. For Collins, as for so
many nineteenth-century novelists, magazines played an extremely
important part in the process by which he became a professional
writer and then maintained himself in this role. Collins gave up his
staff position on All the Year Round, following the success of The
Woman in White, and at the height of his fame in the 1860s his
contact with magazines and periodicals (in Britain and in the United
States) was mostly as the means for the serialization of the novels
which became his main form of literary output during this decade.
However, he returned to writing short stories for magazines in the
late 1870s, when the short-story form was beginning to have a revival
(particularly in the lucrative American market), and when his declin-
ing health and increasing addiction to opium combined to make it
more difficult for him to maintain the sustained effort of concentra-
tion and labour required for novel production. Most of the stories of
the late 1870s and early 1880s are tales of cross-class love and mar-
riage, and some of them have suggestions of the supernatural,
or contain detective elements (fourteen of them were revised for
Collins’s 1887 collection Little Novels).
Another aspect of the life of the modern man of letters in which
Collins followed Dickens’s example was that of the reading tour.
Dickens popularized public readings from his own fiction in the
early 1850s, and Thackeray undertook a very profitable series of
literary lectures in America in 1852–3 and again in 1855–6. In 1873
Collins decided to emulate his predecessors and embark on a reading
and lecture tour in the United States. A reading of his early Household
The Literary Context 101
Words story, ‘A Terribly Strange Bed’, which Collins gave at the
Olympic Theatre in London in preparation for his American
tour, revealed that he was no Dickens when it came to the public
performance of his own fiction. He chose ‘The Dream Woman’ for
his American reading, which received mixed reviews for both their
style and their content (see Chapter 7).
Collins and the Art of the Novel
Like many of his successful contemporaries Collins had a healthy
respect for the literary marketplace and for ordinary novel readers.
He claimed not to be interested in the opinions of middle-class
reviewers, asserting that he did not ‘attach much importance to the
reviews––except as advertisements which are inserted for nothing’,
and that he was more concerned with ‘the impression I produce on
the general public of readers’ (Letters, ii. 309). He was alert to the
potentially large new audience for fiction that existed in the
‘unknown public’ that devoured the penny magazines. He eagerly
exploited the numerous opportunities that arose at a time when the
market for fiction was growing apace and sought to gain access to
new readerships throughout his career. Edward Marston, a partner
in the publishing firm of Sampson Low, noted that ‘Mr Collins had a
perfect knowledge of his own value’,37 and one imagines that Collins
would have agreed with George Warrington, Thackeray’s sympa-
thetic portrait of a young novelist in Pendennis, who proudly
announces that he is a ‘prose labourer’ and that ‘capital . . . the
bargainmaster . . . has a right to deal with the literary inventor as
with any other’ (Pendennis, Chapter 32).
However, despite Collins’s eager participation in the literary
marketplace and in the process of literary commodification that was
well underway by the time he began publishing novels in 1850, the
prefaces that he wrote for the volume versions of his novels reveal
that he also wished to be taken seriously as an artist, and to be
considered as a serious novelist rather than (or as well as) merely a
popular writer and a good hand at a serial––to borrow the words
that Thomas Hardy later used to describe his own early aspirations
as a writer. From the very beginning of his career, Collins’s prefaces
variously elaborate his theories of art and the novel, defend his
procedures in the particular novel being prefaced, expound upon
102 The Literary Context
the care which he has devoted to his narrative and to the details of
chronology, development or setting, and deflect or (especially in the
case of later additions) rebut critical objections to his work. The tone
is set in the Letter of Dedication to Basil, in which he seeks to
forestall possible objections to the extravagance of his setting and
plot and engages in contemporary debates about realism and ideal-
ism in fiction, by claiming that his story is thoroughly grounded in
reality and experience. The ‘main event’ out of which his story
sprang, he wrote, was founded on ‘a fact within my own knowledge’,
and the narrative was shaped and guided ‘by my own experience, or
by the experience related to me by others’. He defends the use of
‘extraordinary accidents and events which happen to few men’ as
being just as ‘legitimate . . . [as] materials for fiction to work with––
when there [is] a good object in using them––as the ordinary acci-
dents and events which may, and do, happen to us all’. Anticipating
the arguments of George Eliot and George Henry Lewes in the mid-
1850s, Collins contended that an adherence to the ‘Actual’ was the
means to the ‘Ideal’ which was the proper concern of art: ‘Fancy and
Imagination, Grace and Beauty, all those qualities which are to the
work of Art what scent and colour are to the flower, can only grow
towards heaven by taking root in earth. Is not the noblest poetry of
prose fiction the poetry of every-day truth?’ Like Dickens before
him and like numerous novelists later in the century (notably Hardy
and George Moore), Collins, in the prefatory letter to his first novel
of modern life, defends his portrayal of scenes and experiences
which are beyond the confines of respectable life, as being in the
interests of both art and morality, and he attacks the hypocrisy and
cant of the respectable reader:
Nobody who admits that the business of fiction is to exhibit human life,
can deny that scenes of misery and crime must of necessity, while human
nature remains what it is, form part of that exhibition. Nobody can assert
that such scenes are unproductive of useful results, when they are turned
to a plainly and purely moral purpose. . . .
To those persons who . . . deny that it is the novelist’s vocation to do
more than merely amuse them; who shrink from all honest and serious
reference, in books, to subjects which they think of in private and talk of
in public everywhere; who see covert implications where nothing is
implied, and improper allusions where nothing improper is alluded to . . .
whose morality stops at the tongue, and never gets on to the heart––to
The Literary Context 103
those persons, I should consider it loss of time, and worse, to offer any
further explanation of my motives, than the sufficient explanation which I
have given already. I do not address myself to them in this book, and shall
never think of addressing myself to them in any other.
By the time Collins wrote the Preface to the first three-volume
edition (1860) of The Woman in White he was more confident of his
relationship with at least one section of his readers––the serial
readers whose response had made the novel the success which in
some sense authorizes the presentation of the work to a second, ‘new
class of readers’ (the circulating library readers) who will receive
the novel ‘in its complete form’. Collins was particularly anxious to
make this new class of readers (and also potential reviewers) fully
conscious of the care which he had taken in revising the novel for
volume publication, ‘with a view to smoothing and consolidating the
story’. He was also at pains to insist on the boldly experimental
nature of his narrative form (which assigns the telling of the story
entirely to the characters who ‘are all placed in different positions
along the chain of events’, each taking up the chain in turn and
carrying it on to the end), and to warn reviewers against prematurely
disclosing the significance of any of the links in the narrative chain.
The Preface to the New Edition of 1861 also focuses on narrative,
this time engaging with the critical debate which had begun to
develop about the tendency of the sensation novel to develop story at
the expense of character. Collins took the opportunity to reaffirm his
adherence to ‘the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of a
work of fiction should be to tell a story’, and his firm belief that the
novelist who properly performed this first condition of his art, was
in no danger of ‘neglecting the delineation of character’ since the
two are inextricably interconnected. Collins returns to the issue of
the relationship between character and plot in the Preface to the
1868 edition of The Moonstone, noting that whereas in ‘some of my
former novels, the object proposed has been to trace the influence of
circumstances upon character’, the project in the current novel was
to ‘trace the influence of character on circumstances’. In this Pref-
ace, as in the prefaces to Basil and The Woman in White, Collins once
more emphasizes the psychological reality of his plot and the pains
which he has expended on its accurate development.
When Basil was reissued in 1862, following the critical and
commercial success of The Woman in White, Collins added a section
104 The Literary Context
to the Letter of Dedication in which he further exonerated his own
procedures and attacked small-minded readers and critics:
On its appearance, it was condemned off-hand, by a certain class of
readers, as an outrage on their sense of propriety. Conscious of having
designed and written my story with the strictest regard to true delicacy,
as distinguished from false––I allowed the prurient misinterpretation of
certain perfectly innocent passages . . . to assert itself as offensively as it
pleased . . . I knew that ‘Basil’ had nothing to fear from pure-minded
readers . . . Slowly and surely, my story forced its way through all
adverse criticism, to a place in the public favour which it has never lost
since.
The responses of right-minded readers were clearly very much in
Collins’s mind in 1862. In the same year he wrote a Preface for the
first three-volume edition of No Name in which he disingenuously
uses ‘the authority of many readers’ of the periodical version of the
novel to underwrite the success and truth to ‘Nature’ of his treat-
ment of Magdalen as an embodiment of ‘the struggle of a human
creature under the opposing influences of Good and Evil’ (he already
knew that many readers and critics were disconcerted and offended
by his treatment of Magdalen). Similarly in 1866 Collins prefaced
Armadale with a brief statement indicating that the continuing
‘friendly reception’ of ‘Readers in general’ to his work rendered ‘any
prefatory pleading’ for his story unnecessary. Nevertheless, he went
on to warn ‘Readers in particular’ (or critics) that they may be ‘here
and there disturbed––perhaps even offended––by finding that
“Armadale” oversteps, in more than one direction, the narrow limits
within which they are disposed to restrict the development of mod-
ern fiction––if they can’. He took up this refrain again in his Preface
to Jezebel’s Daughter (1880) in which he complains that ‘there are
certain important social topics which are held to be forbidden to the
English novelist . . . by a narrow-minded minority of readers, and
. . . the critics who flatter their prejudices’. This attack on the
restrictions imposed by middle-class readers and reviewers on the
range of English fiction was to be echoed by a new generation of
writers in the 1880s and 1890s, including George Moore in Litera-
ture at Nurse or Circulating Morals (1885) and Thomas Hardy in his
contribution to the debate on ‘Candour in English Fiction’ which
appeared in the New Review in 1890. Collins’s own defence against
such restrictive views remained the same as that which he had
The Literary Context 105
outlined in the brief and terse Preface to Armadale, which asserts
the power and justice of his ‘offensive truth’ (to borrow the words
that Thomas Hardy later used of his own work): ‘I am not afraid of
my design being permanently misunderstood, provided the execu-
tion has done it any sort of justice. Estimated by the Clap-trap
morality of the present day, this may be a very daring book. Judged
by the Christian morality which is of all time, it is only a book that is
daring enough to speak the truth.’
Collins and the Reviewers
Despite his frequent protestations that he neither read nor heeded
reviewers, Collins had collected three scrapbooks of reviews of his
fiction by the time of his death, and both his letters and prefaces
reveal that he was familiar with the details of the critical praise and
blame that his novels received. At the beginning of his career, when
he was seeking to establish himself as a professional novelist, he went
out of his way to bring his work to the attention of influential reviews
and reviewers. He sent copies of Antonina with an accompanying
note to two or three reviews and got his friend Douglas Jerrold to
take a copy to the Athenaeum and recommend it to two of its regular
fiction reviewers. He exploited his connections with the Leader and
Bentley’s Miscellany to get a generally favourable notice for his second
novel, Basil. Collins later recalled that Antonina had received ‘such a
chorus of praise as has never been sung over me since’,38 and indeed
the young author was compared to Shakespeare and his first novel
was described as a ‘remarkable book’ (Observer) which showed a
‘splendour of imagination’ (Harper’s). Collins was, however, taken to
task for his over-reliance on description, for a tendency to ‘pictorial
display’ which was ‘frequently detrimental to the dramatic character
of the work’, and he was advised to ‘study thoroughly the art of
construction, especially in making his story more compact and rapid
in action’ (Eclectic Review).39 Collins’s subsequent novels and pref-
aces indicate that he took this lesson to heart, and reviews of his
novels show that he spent the rest of his career being alternately
praised and blamed for having done so.
The tone of the nineteenth-century critical debate on Collins’s
work was set by the reviews of Basil. The Leader praised Collins’s
storytelling abilities, but was critical of the novel’s ‘air of unreality’.40
106 The Literary Context
The Examiner pointed to the riskiness of Collins’s brand of storytell-
ing when it noted ‘the skill with which Mr. Collins has wrought out a
plot that in worse hands would be nonsense’.41 The moral objections
to his subject matter and his way of treating it, which were to prove a
persistent feature of the critical reception of Collins’s fiction, were
announced in the Westminster’s view that the central episode of Basil
was ‘absolutely disgusting’,42 and that the book lacked moral purpose.
The Athenaeum, perhaps harking back to the Newgate controversy
of the 1830s, warned Collins against adopting the ‘aesthetics of the
Old Bailey’,43 as it had previously warned him, in its review of
Antonina, ‘against the vices of the French school,––against the need-
less accumulation of revolting details,––against catering for a prurient
taste by dwelling on such incidental portions of the subject as, being
morbid, ought to be treated incidentally’.44
If Collins devoted considerable space in his prefaces to defending
his art of storytelling that was because the reviewers spent a great
deal of time pointing out its defects. Many reviewers took Collins to
task for being no more than a storyteller, a mere ‘plot machinist’ and
constructor of puzzles who was incapable of creating characters
‘which appeal to our feelings’.45 These words appeared in the Satur-
day Review’s notice of The Queen of Hearts, (1859) a collection of
short stories linked together by a connecting narrative. This review
also attempted a broader and fairly representative consideration of
Collins’s achievements as a novelist up until the autumn of 1859.
There are plenty of novels written in these days to unfold the philosophy
or to instil the instruction which finds favour with the writer. There are
novels in which the author attempts to elaborate character, and to show
how certain vices or virtues are revealed or fostered by the circumstances
in which the actors of the fiction are placed. There are, again, novels
intended to describe states of society which have passed away, or ways of
life unfamiliar to the English public, or scenery, customs, and institutions
foreign to our usual habits of thought. Mr. Collins considers that all these
attempts are divergences from the proper duty of a novelist. A Story-teller
should have a story to tell, and should tell it. It is his business not to
improve or to instruct mankind, but to amuse. Common life is full of
strange incidents. If these are related disjointedly and unmethodically, the
attention of a reader or hearer is only momentarily arrested. But here lies
the field for the novelist’s skill. He can so arrange the story that the
interest shall be prolonged. He can devise a number of minute incidents,
all converging in a central point. He can bring constantly home to the
The Literary Context 107
conviction of his reader that this central point exists, and yet can conceal
what it is. He can manage that, when this central point is revealed, all that
before seemed obscure shall seem clear, and every main incident shall
appear to have occurred independently and naturally, though conducing
to the evolution of the final mystery. A story thus becomes a well-managed
puzzle.46
The notion that Collins was merely a painstaking constructor of
plot also featured prominently in the reviews of The Woman in White,
despite eulogies from countless readers. Such satisfied readers
included fellow novelist Thackeray, who read it ‘from morning till
sunset’, and William Gladstone (soon to become Prime Minister),
who failed to attend a play because he found the novel ‘so very inter-
esting’. Gladstone thought that The Woman in White was ‘far better
sustained than Adam Bede’, and though he was not convinced that ‘it
rises quite so high’ as George Eliot’s novel he found the characteriza-
tion ‘excellent’.47 Most early reviews of Collins’s best-seller were far
from reaching this level of enthusiasm, but eventually it was favour-
ably reviewed in Blackwood’s and The Times. One early notice, which
appeared in the Saturday Review, praises Collins’s storytelling and
plotting, but takes up the refrain from the review of The Queen of
Hearts (quoted above), arguing that storytelling is all that he
can do: ‘he is a good constructor. Each of his stories is a puzzle,
the key to which is not handed to us till the third volume.’48 On
the other hand, ‘character, passion, and pathos’ are said to be
‘mere accessory colouring’: his people ‘have characteristics, but
not character’.49
The debate about Collins’s privileging of plot over character
continued to mark the critical reception of his fiction throughout
the 1860s where it became further complicated by becoming
entangled with the sensation debate (see also p. 90). The Woman in
White was reviewed retrospectively as a sensation novel in a Spectator
review of Frances Browne’s The Castleford Case which appeared on
28 December 1861:
we are threatened with a new variety of the sensation novel, a host of
cleverly complicated stories, the whole interest of which consists in
the gradual unravelling of some carefully prepared enigma. Mr. Wilkie
Collins set the fashion, and now every novel writer who can construct a
plot, thinks if only he makes it a little more mysterious and unnatural, he
may obtain a success rivalling that of The Woman in White.50
108 The Literary Context
Five months later in an unsigned review on ‘Sensation Novels’
referred to earlier, Margaret Oliphant was expressing her admiration
for Collins’s ‘highly-wrought sensation-novel’, for which ‘the author
has long been engaged in preparatory studies’, and congratulating
him on the creation of the pure sensation scene which opened
the novel. No Name was drawn into the sensation controversy as
one of the twenty-four examples of sensation fiction attacked by
H. L. Mansel in an unsigned review in the Quarterly in 1863. This
review placed Collins in the context of a new ‘class of literature’
which aimed merely at the production of excitement, and whose
growth was said to be indicative of the diseased state of the modern
commercial age. Sensation novels, Mansel asserted, were both the
symptoms and cause ‘of a widespread corruption . . . and disease’,
and they were tainted by a ‘commercial atmosphere . . . redolent of
the manufactory or shop’.51 As far as No Name itself was concerned,
the focus of Mansel’s attack was less on its plotting than on the
faulty logic and morality of the way in which Collins constructs his
‘protest against the law which determines the social position of
illegitimate children’.52 Alexander Smith, in an unsigned piece in the
North British Review, attacked the unreality of characters such as
Magdalen, Captain Wragge, Noel Vanstone, and Mrs Lecount, not-
ing that ‘Such people have no representatives in the living world.
Their proper place is the glare of blue lights on a stage sacred to the
sensation drama’––though he concedes ‘yet there are excellent
things in No Name’.53 Armadale was similarly reviewed (in the
Athenaeum) as a
‘sensation novel’ with a vengeance,––one, however, which could hardly
fail to follow No Name. Those who make plot their first consideration and
humanity the second,––those, again, who represent the decencies of life as
too often so many hypocrisies,––have placed themselves in a groove which
goes, and must go, in a downward direction, whether as regards fiction or
morals.54
Both Magdalen Vanstone and Lydia Gwilt were reviewed as sensa-
tion heroines. Lydia––‘a bigamist, thief, gaol-bird, forgeress,
murderess, and suicide’––was compared to the ‘big black baboon’
that was exhibited when ‘Richardson, the showman, went about with
his menagerie’.55 It was as the work of the leading luminary of the
‘sensation school in novels’ that The Times reviewed The Moonstone.
The Literary Context 109
However, for this reviewer the distinguishing characteristic of the
sensation school was not its bestial women, nor its faulty morality,
but its ‘habit of laying eggs and hiding them’, a ‘propensity for
secretiveness’ which, it is argued, Collins had in a complex form.
While the Times reviewer did not find egg-hiding to be incompatible
with the creation of interesting and sympathetic characters, other
reviewers continued to do so: the words ‘puzzle’ and ‘conundrum’
are repeatedly used to describe the narrative and the characters
are described as ‘puppets’.56 The American Lippincott’s Magazine,
on the other hand, pronounced The Moonstone to be ‘a perfect work
of art’.57
It has often been argued that Collins’s reputation as a novelist, and
perhaps even his novel-writing abilities, went into terminal decline
following The Moonstone. Certainly he never repeated the spectacu-
lar popular and critical success of The Woman in White. However,
throughout the 1870s and for most of the 1880s he continued to
produce novels which commanded a wide and numerous readership
and which attracted critical notice. To be sure, the reviews were not
always favourable, and many reviewers deplored what they saw as his
increasing use of the novel for propaganda purposes. Man and Wife,
for example, enjoyed excellent sales when it was serialized in Cassell’s
Magazine in 1870, and several reviewers judged that Collins had
lost none of his power as a storyteller. Indeed, the reviewer for the
Saturday Review claimed to have ‘taken the book, so to speak, at one
draught’ finding it ‘too amusing to be laid down unfinished’,58 and
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine pronounced that ‘as a romance’ it
was ‘pre-eminently superior to any fiction of the year’. However,
Harper’s also judged it to be a failure ‘as an indictment’ and the
Saturday Review noted that:
moral aims generally spoil any novel in which they are prominent, and
we think that they have led in this case to some serious artistic faults. If
one moral is generally too much, two morals are surely unjustifiable.
Mr Collins might be content with assaulting running and boat-racing
without breaking a lance at the same moment against all our marriage
laws.59
Throughout the last twenty years of Collins’s career reviewers
continued to debate whether he should be taken seriously and on his
own professed terms as a moral reformer, or whether he was merely a
110 The Literary Context
storyteller. Thus, J. A. Noble in his Spectator review of Collins’s last
completed novel, reflects on the ‘intellectual scheme’ of The Legacy
of Cain (1889) only to conclude that he may be ‘considering too
curiously, and breaking an intellectual butterfly on a critical wheel’.
Collins, he asserted, ‘may occasionally have a theory to illustrate, but
he always has a story to tell, and the story is more important both to
him and his readers’.60 And on the question of Collins’s merits as a
storyteller, the critical refrain remained substantially the same in the
closing decades as it had been in the first decades of his career: he
was by turns praised for his skill in storytelling and plotting, and
blamed for being a mere or mechanical plotter. The only new note,
perhaps inevitably given the length of his career, was that he was now
accused of repeating himself, and even of self-parody.
chapter 4
MASTERS, SERVANTS, AND MARRIED WOMEN
class and social mobility in collins’s novels
There are certain important social topics which are held to
be forbidden to the English novelist . . . by a narrow-minded
minority of readers and . . . the critics who flatter their prejudices.
(Preface to Jezebel’s Daughter)
Collins’s fiction both exemplifies and engages with a range of
contemporary social and cultural concerns and anxieties. Throughout
his career he used both his fiction and his journalism as vehicles for
social critique, and his own equivocal social position is reproduced
in his continuing fascination with marginal and liminal figures.
Sometimes, particularly in the last two decades of his writing career,
Collins devoted whole novels to specific issues: ‘certain important
social topics’ (as he puts it in the Preface to his late sensation novel,
Jezebel’s Daughter, 1880), such as the reform of prostitutes (in The
New Magdalen and The Fallen Leaves), or anti-vivisectionism (Heart
and Science). From the beginning of his writing career Collins was
preoccupied with issues of class and gender. Class inequality and
social mobility, and changing social relations feature prominently in
his fiction, as does an interest in changing conceptions of masculin-
ity and femininity and changing gender roles. Many of his novels
focus on the rights of women and children and explore the role
played by the law and government in constructing and regulating the
family, not least through their investigation of contemporary contro-
versies about the property rights of married women and the ‘chaos’
of the laws governing marriage and divorce. More generally, Collins’s
novels explore contemporary modes of policing individual and social
behaviour through social, sexual, and religious codes.
112 Masters, Servants, and Married Women
Class
In ‘A New View of Society’, published in All the Year Round in 1860,
Collins informs his readers that his most enjoyable party during ‘the
course of a long experience of Society’ was one which he had
observed in the company of ‘worthy fellow-outcasts’ out on the
street. Collins describes how, having decided against attending
the formal ritual of the dinner party to which he had been invited, he
had put on comfortable clothes and had gone to lounge with the
lower-class people gathered outside the house where the dinner was
being held, and had shared in their pastime of looking through the
uncurtained window at the spectacle within:
There [the guests] were, all oozing away into silence and insensibility
together; smothered in their heavy black coats, and strangled in their stiff,
white cravats!
There is a fourth place vacant . . . My place . . . I see my own ghost
sitting there: the appearance of that perspiring spectre is too dreadful to
be described . . . I turn away my face in terror, and look for comfort at
my street-companions, my worthy fellow-outcasts.1
This passage gives both the middle-class reader and the writer a new
perspective on the world of ‘Society’, whilst it also gives a very
familiar picture of the class distinctions and divisions of nineteenth-
century society. It is clear that the writer belongs to the world of
‘Society’, but it is equally clear that he feels uncomfortable with its
rituals, and that he surveys it from an ironic distance which renders
his own identity and position problematic. The new view of society
he obtains when he is at ease with his street companions also gives a
new–– and troubling–– perspective on the self, one which involves a
form of self-splitting. Both the insider–outsider perspective on the
world of ‘Society’, and the sympathetic identification with the lower
classes which are seen in this passage are characteristic of much of
Collins’s fiction. So too is the shifting sense of class identity that is
inherent in the suggestion that it can be put on and off like (or, indeed,
by) a change of clothing. This point is reinforced by Magdalen
Vanstone’s adoption of a series of different class identities in No
Name, and by her assertion that ‘A lady is a woman who wears a silk
gown, and has a sense of her own importance’ (No Name, The Sixth
Scene, Chapter II).
Masters, Servants, and Married Women 113
The plot of Basil (1852), the first of Collins’s novels of modern
life, turns on issues of social mobility and straying across class bound-
aries, as well as on cross-class tensions and resentment, all seen mainly
from the perspective of a confessional narrator who is also the novel’s
chief protagonist. One strand of the narrative, the secret cross-class
marriage between Basil, the younger son of a man who takes pride in
his noble and ancient lineage, and Margaret Sherwin, a linen-
draper’s daughter, originates in a chance meeting on an omnibus. In
1852 this was a distinctively modern form of transport; as Basil puts
it, ‘a perambulatory exhibition-room of the eccentricities of human
nature’(Basil, Part I, VII), which brought together ‘persons of all
classes’ in an unfamiliar proximity. The other main driver of this
early sensation narrative is the cross-class rivalry for Margaret’s
affections of Basil and Robert Mannion, clerk to Mr Sherwin, and
(it turns out) son of a disgraced former associate of Basil’s father.
The early part of the narrative focuses minutely on Basil’s experi-
ences of various signifiers of class. His own boyhood and education
are dismissed as of little interest, being merely those of ‘hundreds of
others in my rank of life’ (Part I, II). His relations with his father are
arguably also like those of hundreds of others in the narrator’s rank
of life–– although Basil sees them as peculiarly formative of his own
identity; ‘We . . . had to share his heart with his ancestors–– we were
his household property as well as his children . . . [and] were taught
. . . that to disgrace our family, either by word or action, was the
one fatal crime that could never be . . . pardoned’ (Part I, III).
Uncomfortable and insecure in his own class role, Basil nevertheless
reveals himself as formed by it. As he narrates what he retro-
spectively presents as the story of the entrapment of a naive and
vulnerable young man by the socially ambitious Sherwins, Basil
presents himself as a visitor to an alien world of the newly built
North London suburbs, a gimcrack world of glaring novelty and
display which assaulted his more refined sensibilities:
Everything was oppressively new. The brilliantly-varnished door cracked
with a report like a pistol when it was opened; the paper on the walls,
with its gaudy pattern . . . looked hardly dry yet; the showy window-
curtains . . . and the still showier carpet . . . seemed as if they had come
out of the shop yesterday . . . the morocco-bound picture books . . .
looked as if they had never been moved or opened since they had been
bought; not one leaf even of the music on the piano was dogs-eared or
114 Masters, Servants, and Married Women
worn. Never was a richly-furnished room more thoroughly comfortless
than this–– the eye ached at looking at it. There was no repose anywhere.
(Part I, X)
Basil is an early example of the way in which Collins’s moderniza-
tion of Gothic reverses some of its key terms, including those of
class. Whereas traditional Gothic habitually puts its middle- or
upper-class heroine at the mercy of a sinister ecclesiastical or aristo-
cratic power, Collins’s modern Gothic entraps its upper-class male
protagonist in a secular lower-middle-class world, whose power to
trap and terrify stems in part from the hero’s inability to read it
correctly. Basil ultimately survives his adventures in the suburbs and
is reconciled with his father, but he does not fully rejoin his father’s
world, and his narrative ends with his father’s death, his brother’s
inheritance of the family home, and his own retreat into rural
retirement with his sister.
Basil charts the social and self-estrangement of an aristocratic
hero through his sexual attraction to and subsequent obsession with
a lower-middle-class woman and his obsessive jealousy and hatred
for her scheming lover, the confidential clerk Mannion. The clerk, in
his turn, is obsessively jealous and resentful of his social superior
‘who, in his insolence of youth, and birth, and fortune, had snatched
from me the one long-delayed reward for twenty years of misery, just
as my hands were stretched forth to grasp it’, and who, to add insult
to injury, ‘was the son of that honourable and high-born gentleman
who had given my father to the gallows’ (Part III, V). The Woman in
White, on the other hand, charts the social advancement of a middle-
class drawing master through his involvement with an upper-class
woman and his dogged pursuit of her scheming aristocratic husband.
Walter Hartright’s story of ‘what a Woman’s patience can endure,
and what a Man’s resolution can achieve’ (The Woman in White, The
Story begun by Walter Hartright, I) is one which, as Ann Cvetkovich
has argued, ‘serves as a vehicle for his accession to patriarchal power
and property, making it possible for him to marry [Laura Fairlie]
despite their class difference’.2 Walter, the narrator of part of his own
story and the editor of the stories of the other protagonists in, and
‘witnesses’ to, the events, presents that story as one in which he seeks
to achieve the justice which is denied to Laura by the patriarchal
power of the aristocracy and the ‘long purse’ of the law. The story of
Masters, Servants, and Married Women 115
Walter’s unmasking of the crimes and misdemeanours of aristocratic
men, such as Sir Percival Glyde and Laura’s own father, is also a
story which (as Cvetkovich points out) provides a cover for the story
of his own acquisition of their power through marrying Laura––
after restoring her identity.
The different social positions of Walter, Laura, and Marian and
the changes which they undergo during the course of the novel are
very interesting. Like many of Collins’s (and Dickens’s) heroes,
Walter is, at the beginning of the novel, a young man who has no
clear social position, no secure income, and no clear vocation. He is
middle class, but his family lives in reduced circumstances and
must make what they can of such social connections that they have.
He has made a half-hearted attempt at one profession–– the law––
and is trying to make his way as an artist and drawing master, when
he first gains employment at Limmeridge. Laura, his pupil, and
the heiress of Limmeridge, is the daughter of an aristocratic father
and a mother whose social origins, habits, and tastes are middle
class. Laura’s modest bearing and dress align her with her mother’s
middle-class gentility, rather than with her father’s aristocratic
heritage. In contrast, the lower-born Marian, whose social position
depends, to a large extent on the good grace of her half-sister, is
described (by Walter) as having the ‘unaffected self-reliance of a
highly-bred woman’ (The Woman in White, The Story begun by
Walter Hartright, VI). As John Kucich notes, these three characters
‘undergo an unmistakable realignment with middle-class social
identities’3 in the later part of the narrative, when the more showy
and independent Marian adopts housewifely duties, and Walter
becomes an illustrator for journals, a profession in which it is pos-
sible to earn a reliable income by one’s own efforts and the exploit-
ation of professional networks, rather than being dependent on the
patronage of the upper classes. Even Laura play-acts (unbeknown
to her) a genteel occupation, by ‘earning’ pennies (from Walter’s
pocket) for her own illustrations. Thus when the three return to
Limmeridge House at the end of the novel, they can be seen as
both replacing an outmoded aristocratic world, and, in the case of
Walter and Laura, as taking their own middle-class values up a
social notch.
The fascination with cross-class sexual liaisons evident in Basil
and The Woman in White was one which Collins retained throughout
116 Masters, Servants, and Married Women
his career, and he repeatedly represented sexual attraction as ‘a state
of mind’ (as he puts it in The Guilty River, 1886) which rendered
his characters ‘insensible to the distinctions that separate the classes
in England’ (Chapter VII). Cross-class marriages also feature prom-
inently in his fiction, from Basil’s downwardly mobile marriage
to the linen-draper’s daughter, through Walter’s upwardly mobile
marriage to his aristocratic pupil, to the marriage of a former prosti-
tute (Mercy Merrick) to a clergyman (Julian Gray) in The New
Magdalen, the matching of an elderly aristocrat to a woman of
uncertain social position who has been seduced and betrayed by the
father of her illegitimate stillborn child (Sir Patrick Lundie and
Anne Sylvester in Man and Wife), and the marriage of a well-born
man to a miller’s daughter in The Guilty River. Among other things
cross-class marriages are symptomatic of the social mobility which
characterized mid-Victorian society, and Collins’s novels repeatedly
focus on anxieties about the signifiers of social status. One of the
reasons that Basil agrees to the proposal that his secret marriage to
Margaret Sherwin should not be consummated for a year, is his
belief that during this period–– which will permit ‘the finishing off
of her education and the formation of her constitution’ (Basil, Part I,
XI)–– she will lose some of the marks of the social difference between
them. Similarly, the plot complications of The Guilty River are
used to keep apart the hero and his lower-class beloved while her
education and accomplishments are improved by her aristocratic
patroness.
While many of Collins’s plots turn on the desire for upward social
mobility, or track its progress through the narrative, some of them
focus on downward mobility and the precariousness of social rank.
In The Dead Secret (1857), for example, Rosamond Frankland, the
heroine and inheritor of the fortune of Captain Treverton (whom
she and the world at large has always believed to be her father), loses
her fortune and is in danger of losing social caste when she discovers
that she is the daughter, not of Captain Treverton and his wife, but
of Mrs Treverton’s lady’s maid, Sarah Leeson and a tin miner. Simi-
larly, in No Name the Vanstone sisters lose their name and rank as
well as any entitlement to their father’s estate when it is discovered,
after the death of their parents, that Mr and Mrs Vanstone were not
in fact legally married at the time of their daughters’ birth (indeed
Mr Vanstone was legally married to someone else at that time).
Masters, Servants, and Married Women 117
The detective investigation upon which Rosamond embarks in The
Dead Secret, and the detective-cum-fraud plot in which Magdalen
Vanstone becomes embroiled in No Name, are used by Collins both
to explore the grounds on which class and social identities were
constructed in Victorian England, and to expose their shifting
nature. Both these novels employ plot situations which involve a
‘lady’ exchanging identities with a lower-class character. For example,
in the deception at the centre of The Dead Secret, Mrs Treverton
briefly exchanges both clothes and roles with her unmarried and
pregnant maid, Sarah Leeson, in order to protect the maid’s reputa-
tion and to provide Captain Treverton with a much-wanted child. In
order to further her schemes to avenge herself against the man who
has displaced the Vanstone sisters as their father’s heir and to restore
her family name, Magdalen, the heroine of No Name, impersonates
her former governess, Miss Garth. Later, having been tutored by her
own maid Louisa, she enters the household of Admiral Bartram in
the role of a parlourmaid.
As some of these examples might suggest, as well as exposing
and exploring–– often with satirical intent–– the somewhat minute
concern of his contemporaries with social codes, social gradations
within the growing middle classes, and relations between the middle
classes and aristocracy, Collins also focuses sympathetically on some
aspects of lower-class life, particularly through his portrayal of
servants. Something of Collins’s views of the artistic representation
of servants and the working classes was evident in his first published
work, Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., RA, in which he
had implied that his father, like many artists of his generation, had
sentimentalized the poor and failed to render adequately the ‘fierce
miseries or coarse contentions which form the darker tragedy of
humble life’ (Memoirs, ii. 311). In his 1856 Household Words essay,
‘Laid up in Two Lodgings’, Collins offers a comic but sympathetic
study of ‘those forlorn members of the population called maids-of-
all-work’ who pass through the clutches of his unsavoury London
landlady Mrs Glutch. For these ‘apprentices to the hard business of
service’ and ‘drudgery’:
Life means dirty work, small wages, hard words, no holidays, no social
station, no future . . . No human being ever was created for this. No state
of society which composedly accepts this, in the cases of thousands, as
one of the necessary conditions of its selfish comforts, can pass itself off
118 Masters, Servants, and Married Women
as civilized except under the most audacious of false pretences. These
thoughts rise in me often, when I ring the bell, and the maid-of-all-work
answers it wearily. I cannot communicate them to her: I can only do my
best to encourage her to peep over the cruel social barrier which separ-
ates her unmerited comfortlessness from my undeserved luxury, and
encourage her to talk to me now and then on something like equal
terms.4
In some of his novels Collins both focuses on the ‘cruel social barrier
which separates [the servant’s] unmerited comfortlessness from
[the] undeserved luxury’ of their masters and social superiors,
and makes his fictional servants ‘talk to’ his readers on something
like ‘equal terms’, by claiming common humanity with them. For
example, Rosanna Spearman in The Moonstone is not only an
important plot device, she is also a sympathetic and admonitory
portrait of the sufferings of a lower-class woman who transgresses
class boundaries by becoming infatuated with her social superior
Franklin Blake. Rosanna’s friend Lucy Yolland (‘Limping Lucy’)
speaks up for the dead servant and articulates the class resentment of
that procession of maids-of-all-work noted by Collins in ‘Laid up in
Two Lodgings’ when she rebuts Betteredge’s view of the respect
due to ‘Mr Franklin Blake’, with the revolutionary sentiment
that ‘the day is not far off when the poor will rise against the rich’
(The Moonstone, First Period, Chapter XXIII). Significantly, in the
novel’s calendar of events Lucy issues her warnings about the immi-
nent toppling of the rich by the poor in 1848, the year of the climax
of the Chartist movement and the year of revolutions in Continental
Europe. Lucy’s own call for social revolution follows what she per-
ceives to be Blake’s thwarting of her own plan to rescue Rosanna
from a life of servitude by establishing her in a sisterhood of digni-
fied labour in which they would live ‘by our needles’ (The Moonstone,
First Period, Chapter XXIII). Similarly, both Sarah Leeson
and Hester Dethridge, the servants-with-a-secret in The Dead Secret
and Man and Wife, are more than merely plot devices and stereo-
types, and their sufferings are presented sympathetically, if
melodramatically.
Anthea Trodd has linked Collins’s (and other nineteenth-century
novelists’) portrayal of servants to the ‘widespread perception of
a crisis in employer–servant relations’ in the mid-Victorian period,
a state of affairs which was much discussed in the contemporary
Masters, Servants, and Married Women 119
press. She has argued persuasively that this crisis found literary
expression in the unusually ‘high visibility’ of servants in mid-century
crime and detective fiction.5 As many social historians have pointed
out, the number and nature of the complement of servants in a
nineteenth-century household served to signify the status and gentil-
ity of that household. However, there was also a persistent anxiety,
especially amongst the new middle classes, that the presence of
lower-class people in the upper- or middle-class household threat-
ened the domestic privacy upon which middle-class gentility was
increasingly constructed. Hence servants were frequently repre-
sented by Collins and his contemporaries as invaders or interlopers,
plotters and spies.
On a number of occasions Collins placed a servant (or servants) at
the very heart of his plot. Sarah Leeson, in The Dead Secret, is a
servant who bears the guilty burden of her own and her mistress’s
secret, and her disturbed and disturbing appearance signals the pres-
ence of a mystery that the characters and readers want to solve.
Indeed there would not be a mystery in this novel if it were not
for Sarah’s action in concealing the deathbed confession which
Mrs Treverton writes for her husband. Servants are often close
either to the centre of the mystery or to the prolongation of the
mystery in Collins’s novels. The high visibility of servants in plot
terms derives from Collins’s exploitation of their invisibility in class
terms. Thus the retired ladies’ maid, Mrs Catherick, in The Woman
in White and Rosanna Spearman, the crippled ‘second housemaid’
with a criminal record in The Moonstone, both write letters which
contain vital clues which the heroes of those novels fail to read
correctly in their too hasty dismissal of the servants’ missives. More-
over, Rosanna also prolongs the mystery of the theft of the Moon-
stone partly as a consequence of misinterpreting the ‘evidence’ of
Franklin’s nightshirt and by seeking to exploit her ‘knowledge’ in
order to gain emotional access to him. The mystery is also prolonged
by the difficulty which Rosanna has in gaining any kind of access to
Franklin by virtue of their class difference and their relative
positions as ‘family’ and servant in Lady Verinder’s household. To
Franklin Blake the besotted Rosanna is to all intents and purposes
invisible as she pursues her duties in the house in which he is a guest
and she is merely part of the system that keeps the household func-
tioning for his (and the others’) comfort. She may inhabit the same
120 Masters, Servants, and Married Women
house, but she traverses it by different pathways and staircases. A
kind of class blindness also causes Geoffrey Delamayn to misread the
desperation of the crazed, speechless, persecuted cook Hester
Dethridge whose secret he seeks to exploit in Man and Wife. Hester
is an interesting case. Viewed from one perspective she is the ideal
servant, and perhaps the misogynist’s ideal woman: ‘A woman who
can’t talk, and a woman who can cook–– is simply a woman who has
arrived at absolute perfection. Such a treasure shall not go out of the
family, if I can help it’ (Man and Wife, Chapter XXVI). However, her
odd behaviour (and the story behind it), reveal some of the fears and
fantasies of the middle classes about the domestic ‘treasures’ upon
whom their own treasured domesticity depended.
Servants are not simply associated with the crimes or mysteries
that lie at the heart of some of Collins’s fictions, they are also, in
some cases, themselves criminals. Hester’s secret–– and the cause of
her dumbness and her odd behaviour–– is that she has countered
prolonged domestic violence with violence and has planned, exe-
cuted, and concealed a murder. Rosanna is a reformed thief, whom
the philanthropic Lady Verinder has taken into her household as part
of her rehabilitation, and who conceals what she takes to be the
evidence of Franklin’s guilt of a crime in order to protect the man
she loves. In other novels, Collins exploits the contemporary associ-
ation of professional servants and crime even more sensationally. For
example, Lydia Gwilt, the femme fatale of Armadale, who adopts the
guise of governess to further her scheming, began her life of crime as
a 12-year-old lady’s maid. In a life history that has enough material
for several sensation plots, Lydia has, among other things: exploited
her privileged position as a lady’s maid to capitalize on the family
secrets in which she becomes involved, and used her position and ill-
gotten gains in order to acquire an education and accomplishments
(first, during periods as a pupil at a French school, and then, follow-
ing a scandal, a Belgian school for young ladies); become the lure
working with a group of professional swindlers and card-sharpers;
snared a wealthy young man into marriage; been imprisoned for
poisoning him; gained a pardon and a retrial. Like Mary Elizabeth
Braddon’s Lady Audley, the chameleon-like Lydia Gwilt both plays
out a fantasy of upward social mobility and represents a pervasive
middle-class insecurity about the unreliability of class signifiers in a
period of rapid social change.
Masters, Servants, and Married Women 121
Collins shows more sympathy for lower-class characters who
are drawn into crime than he does for his aristocratic and upper-
middle-class criminals such as Sir Percival Glyde and Godfrey
Ablewhite who seek to manipulate the law to their own ends and to
prey on the social, economic, and emotional vulnerability of women.
Thus, one of his early stories, published in Harper’s New Monthly
Magazine in 1857, depicts the heroic efforts of Bessie, a stone-
mason’s daughter, to resist the violent attempts of burglars to steal a
pocketbook whose safekeeping has been entrusted to her. Perhaps
echoing the views of her creator, Bessie notes: ‘It is one thing to
write fine sentiments in books about uncorruptible honesty, and
another thing to put those sentiments into practice, when one day’s
work is all that a man has to set up in the way of an obstacle between
poverty and his own fireside’ (‘Brother Owen’s Story of the Black
Cottage’ in The Queen of Hearts). The plight of the poor and the
socially disadvantaged is given greater prominence in some of the
later novels, such as The New Magdalen and The Fallen Leaves, in
which Victorian capitalism is observed from the perspectives of
their respective heroes, the radical clergyman Julian Gray and the
Christian Socialist Amelius Goldenheart. ‘I had no idea . . . of what
the life of a farm labourer really was, in some parts of England,’
proclaims the ‘Radical, Communist, Incendiary Clergyman’ (Julian)
in The New Magdalen:
never before had I seen such dire wretchedness as I saw in the cottages . . .
the martyrs of old could endure, and die. I asked myself if they could
endure and live . . . year after year on the brink of starvation, and see their
pining children growing up around them; live with the poor man’s parish-
prison to look forward to as the end, when hunger and labour have done
their worst! (The New Magdalen, Chapter 8)
Collins’s novels are fairly consistent in their sympathetic portrayal
of the predicament of the poor and outcast. They are also consistent
in their treatment at the other end of the social spectrum: the
upper classes are almost always portrayed as outmoded, and either
barbaric or effete. Collins also fairly consistently satirized and criti-
cized the pretensions of a middle-class gentility that aped the aris-
tocracy. However, as John Kucich argues, he also wrote about, and to
some extent for, a middle-class elite of ‘cultural intellectuals’. As
Kucich points out, Collins’s central characters ‘tend to be drawing
122 Masters, Servants, and Married Women
masters, writers, actresses, amateur painters and philosophers––
especially in his major novels of the 1860s, when he was consolidat-
ing his literary success’.6 These protagonists are usually presented as
being in conflict and competition with both superannuated aristo-
crats, and also–– perhaps even more so–– with other more secure
middle-class and upper-middle-class professionals who had recently
established a position of power in the social hierarchy: lawyers,
doctors (whose social pretensions are mocked in A Rogue’s Life),
and scientists (in Heart and Science). Perhaps unsurprisingly, given
Collins’s persistent attacks on the law and the legal system, lawyers
seem to be the most despised amongst the new professionals. Law-
yers are often presented as being merely self-serving, but they are
always presented as being the servants of double-thinking. Thus, Mr
Gilmore in The Woman in White is a decent enough fellow, but mor-
ally blinded by that ‘great beauty of the Law’ which enables it to
‘dispute any human statement, made under any circumstances’.
When called upon to respond to the evidence that Marian and
Walter have provided about Sir Percival Glyde’s dealings with Anne
Catherick, he concludes:
If I had felt professionally called upon to set up a case against Sir Percival
Glyde, on the strength of his own explanation, I could have done so
beyond all doubt. But my duty did not lie in this direction: my function
was of the purely judicial kind. I was to weigh the explanation we had just
heard; to allow all due force to the high reputation of the gentleman who
offered it; and to decide honestly whether the probabilities . . . were
plainly with [Sir Percival], or plainly against him. My own conviction
was that they were plainly with him. (The Woman in White, The Story
continued by Vincent Gilmore, I)
Of course, Gilmore is also blinded by class and by gender: he is more
inclined to accept the word of a male member of the aristocracy than
of an enfeebled girl. As far as Collins is concerned, their tendency to
identify with the social status quo is one of the main problems with
lawyers. They tend to be insufficiently questioning of those with
social power, and universally suspicious of those without it.
Collins reserves the full force of his animus for ‘imitation’ profes-
sionals or quacks who consciously exploit the modern rise of special-
ist professional expertise, turning its language and methods to their
own ends, rather than merely following them slavishly or unthink-
ingly colluding in their obfuscations. Collins’s quacks include the
Masters, Servants, and Married Women 123
‘moral agriculturalist’, Captain Wragge (in No Name), an early
example of a public relations professional who also bamboozles
Mrs Lecount with his fake scientific talk; ‘Doctor’ Downward (in
Armadale), an abortionist turned quack psychologist and Principal
of a sanatorium which is used to exploit the ignorant as well as acting
as a cover for more nefarious activities; even Count Fosco is a kind of
quack, an amateur of medicine who ‘treats’ both Marian and Laura
with drugs at various times. As these last two examples indicate,
Collins’s quacks or imitation professionals are often also criminals,
and as such are directly involved in the central crimes and mysteries
in the novels in which they appear. The real ‘expert’ professionals
are usually simply involved in the prolongation of the mystery
through the failure and failings of their expertise. As John Kucich
notes, Collins’s championing of his own preferred elite of cultural
intellectuals can be seen in their plot role as solvers of the mystery.7
Thus Walter Hartright, the socially liminal artist, joins forces with a
woman to outwit the quacks and to achieve what the professionals
are unable to do. Similarly Franklin Blake, the German-educated
philosopher, is assisted by the social outcast Ezra Jennings (an
‘under-professional’ with a self-taught knowledge of both opium and
the operations of the human mind) in providing explanations which
elude Cuff the famous policeman, Bruff the lawyer, and Candy the
medical man.
Gender
From his first novel Iolani (unpublished in his life time) to Blind
Love, the novel he left for Walter Besant to finish after his death,
gender roles and gender relations were a recurring preoccupation in
Collins’s work. In particular his novels repeatedly focused on the
victimization of women by men who plot against, mistreat, and
imprison them, very often with the support of the law or social
custom. However, instances of female victimization were, from the
outset, always accompanied by counter-examples of female resist-
ance. From ‘primitive’ Tahiti (in Iolani), through ancient Rome (in
Antonina), to nineteenth-century England (in most of his novels),
‘culture’ made victims of women who were by ‘nature’ made of
sterner stuff. In his best-known fiction Collins repeatedly explored
the social construction of both femininity and masculinity, and also
124 Masters, Servants, and Married Women
dramatized pervasive cultural anxieties about changing gender roles.
Nevertheless, his fiction often worked with and within the very
assumptions about gender difference–– and particularly about
femininity–– which they purported to explore and question. This
reflection by the male narrator of Iolani is not untypical:
In women, more universally than in men, the necessity for action gener-
ates the power. Their energies, though less various, are more concentrated
and–– by their position in existence–– less over-tasked than ours; hence in
most cases of extremity, where we deliberate, they act; and if, in con-
sequence, their failures are more deplorable, their successes are, for the
same reason, more triumphant and entire.8
Although they repeatedly focus on what it means to be a man or a
woman in a particular kind of society at a particular historic
moment, Collins’s novels also repeatedly return to the universal and
essentialist ‘truth’ about the real natures of men and women offered
in the above statement. Thus a significant part of the action of
Antonina is motivated by the powerful intuitive resolve of a mother
(the Goth, Goisvintha) seeking to avenge the slaughter of her children
by the Romans. The fall of Rome in Collins’s account was, at least in
part, attributable to the actions of a primitive mother who was also
an emasculating woman. In his novels of contemporary British life,
the social fabric of a modern imperial nation is by turns, and some-
times simultaneously, threatened by an ‘emasculating’ primitive
womanly nature, by women who do not know–– or who refuse to
accept–– their assigned place in society; by feminized men, or by
coarse brutal masculinity.
Basil, as Jenny Bourne Taylor has noted, offers an exploration of
the ‘formation and breakdown of the codes that shape masculine
upper-middle-class identity’.9 It does this, among other things, by
focusing on the way in which such an identity is constructed in
relation to available versions of femininity, as well as being actively
shaped by particular women. Thus Basil’s precarious masculine
identity is shaped, on the one hand, by his feelings of alienation from
his father and his father’s conceptions of upper-middle-class mascu-
linity, and, on the other, by a complex set of responses to a variety of
femininities. These include his idealization of his younger sister,
Clara, who is an embodiment of the nineteenth-century womanly
ideal and a substitute for the mother who had died shortly after
Masters, Servants, and Married Women 125
giving birth to her, and his nervousness about a new kind of femininity
which threatens both his father’s conception of masculinity and
Clara’s version of ‘womanliness’. It is worth quoting at length from
the fifth chapter of Basil’s narrative, because the opposing versions
of femininity which he articulates here recur throughout Collins’s
fiction. For Basil, it is women such as Clara who preserve ‘that claim
upon the sincere respect and admiration of men on which the power
of the whole sex is based’:
There was a beauty about [Clara’s] unassuming simplicity, her natural––
exquisitely natural–– kindness of heart, and word, and manner, which
preserved its own unobtrusive influence over you, in spite of all other
rival influences . . . You remembered a few kind, pleasant words of hers
when you forgot the wit of the wittiest ladies, the learning of the most
learned. The influence thus possessed, and unconsciously possessed, by
my sister over every one with whom she came in contact–– over men
especially–– may, I think, be very simply accounted for, in very few
sentences.
We live in an age when too many women appear to be ambitious of
morally unsexing themselves before society, by aping the language and
manners of men–– especially in reference to that miserable modern dandy-
ism of demeanour, which aims at repressing all betrayal of warmth of
feeling . . . Women of this exclusively modern order, like to use slang
expressions in their conversation; assume a bastard-masculine abruptness
in their manners, a bastard-masculine licence in their opinions . . . Noth-
ing impresses, agitates, amuses, or delights them in a hearty, natural,
womanly way. (Basil, Part I, V)
Margaret Sherwin is one such modern woman who not only
‘unsexes’ herself by flaunting her sexual attractiveness and conspir-
ing to entrap Basil into marriage, but also unsexes or unmans him by
the ‘humiliating terms of dependence and prohibition’ (Basil, Part
II, V) which she and her father impose upon that marriage. Like her
lover, the upstart clerk Mannion, Margaret is expelled from the
narrative, which comes to rest in a world which is isolated and insu-
lated from both modernity and insurgent modern women, as Basil
relates his retreat into a feminized world of rural domesticity––‘ this
last retreat, this dearest home’ (Basil, Letters in Conclusion, Letter
III)–– with his sister on a small estate which she has inherited from
her mother.
At the end of his narrative Basil presents himself as having freely
126 Masters, Servants, and Married Women
chosen a version of feminine domesticity which for many of Collins’s
later female characters is a humiliating, dependent, and prohibitive
condition, imposed upon them by social custom. Indeed, Collins’s
novels of modern life are full of women who variously chafe against
the bonds of what Marian Halcombe describes as their petticoat
existence. Basil may be quite content with his retreat from the
world, and, in the end, the narrative of The Woman in White recon-
ciles Marian to a domestic existence as the helpmeet of Walter and
Laura and a kind of co-parent to their child. However, at the begin-
ning of the novel Collins’s early example of one of those strong
heroines who were alternatively admired and decried by fiction
reviewers of the 1860s is outspoken in her hostility to the limitations
of feminine domesticity. It is unreasonable, she objects, to expect
four women to dine together alone every day, and not quarrel: ‘We
are such fools, we can’t entertain each other at table. You see I don’t
think much of my own sex . . . no woman does . . . although few
of them confess it as freely as I do’ (The Story begun by Walter
Hartright, VI). In fact, Marian does not think much of either sex, as
presently constituted, and rages over Sir Percival’s arrangements for
his wedding to her half-sister, Laura: ‘Men! They are the enemies of
our innocence and our peace–– they drag us away from our parents’
love and our sisters’ friendship–– they take us body and soul to
themselves, and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they chain up a
dog to his kennel’ (The Story continued by Marian Halcombe, II).
Collins uses Marian’s proto-feminist pronouncements and her
active involvement in rescuing Laura and helping Walter to restore
her half-sister’s identity as a way of questioning and challenging
current gender roles. She is also one of a number of characters who
are used to destabilize gender boundaries. As first seen through the
eyes of Walter Hartright (a man whose own class and gender iden-
tity is presented from the outset as being extremely unstable), Marian
is both masculine and feminine: ‘the rare beauty’ of her uncorseted
feminine figure being belied by her ‘large, firm, masculine mouth
and jaw’, and an expression, ‘bright, frank, and intelligent’ which
was ‘altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of gentleness
and pliability’ (The Story begun by Walter Hartright, VI), Marian,
in turn, sees Walter as feminine, and repeatedly exhorts him to act
like a man: ‘Don’t shrink under it like a woman . . . trample it under
foot like a man’ (ibid., X). In fact Walter’s story is, in part, the story
Masters, Servants, and Married Women 127
of how he learns to be a man: it is a story which involves going off
and dicing with death in the Brazilian jungle, and vying with a man
with more social power than himself for the possession of a dependent
woman.
In The Woman in White sex–gender hybridity is not restricted to
Marian and Walter: it is everywhere. Frederick Fairlie, Laura’s
uncle, is unpleasantly feminized, both in his appearance, which is
described as ‘frail, languidly-fretful, over-refined’ (The Story begun
by Walter Hartright, VII), and in his constitution, which is defined
in terms of his invalidism and a susceptibility to ‘nerves’. Sir Per-
cival Glyde, seen by Marian as a typical male predator, is also
presented as an effete aristocrat with a nervous disposition, and his
accomplice, Fosco is ‘nervously sensitive’, and, in Marian’s words, is
‘a fat St Cecilia masquerading in male attire’ (Second Epoch, The
Story continued by Marian Halcombe, III). Fosco is, of course, also
Italian, and thus outside a conception of masculinity that is con-
structed in terms of (upper-) middle-class Englishness. Collins’s
representation of the feminized nervous sensitives Ozias Midwinter
in Armadale and Ezra Jennings in The Moonstone also foregrounds
the ways in which class, gender, and nationality intersect in the
construction of identity. Midwinter is said to have a ‘sensitive femi-
nine organization’ (Armadale, Book the Second, Chapter VI) and
Jennings has a self-proclaimed female constitution: ‘Physiology says,
and says truly, that some men are born with female constitutions––
and I am one of them!’ (The Moonstone, Second Period, Third
Narrative, Chapter IX). In both cases their feminine organization is
associated with their liminal position in English society and with
their foreignness and racial otherness. Both men are described as
dark skinned, and both are of mixed parentage: Midwinter is the son
of a white British father and a mother whose ‘hot African blood
burnt red in her dusky cheeks’ (Armadale, Prologue, Chapter III),
and Jennings is a sort of racial melting pot, whose ‘complexion was
of a gypsy darkness’, and whose ‘nose presented the fine shape and
modelling so often found among the ancient people of the East, so
seldom visible among the newer races of the West’ (The Moonstone,
Second Period, Third Narrative, Chapter IV).
Collins’s representation of the blurring of gender boundaries
is sometimes (as in the case of Frederick Fairlie) associated with
grotesqueness, and this is certainly the case in his portrayal of
128 Masters, Servants, and Married Women
Miserrimus Dexter in The Law and the Lady (1875). Dexter, who has
‘the eyes and hands of a beautiful woman’ and a legless body of
otherwise ‘manly proportions’ is (as he is described in the report of
Eustace Macallan’s trial) quite ‘literally the half of a man’ (The Law
and the Lady, Chapter XX). Feminized by his nerves and his
propensity to hysteria, yet at the same time aggressive and sexually
predatory, Dexter is a grotesque hybrid. He is not only the physical
embodiment of the question of what it means to be a man, but he
also calls attention to the mutability of gender norms, as for example,
when he explains his own elegant garb by giving a potted history of
fashion, concluding that: ‘Except in this ignoble and material nine-
teenth century, men have always worn precious stuffs and beautiful
colours as well as women. A hundred years ago, a gentleman in pink
silk was a gentleman properly dressed’ (Chapter XXVII). This
novel’s blurring and relativizing of gender boundaries through its
presentation of Dexter is complicated (or off-set) by its representa-
tion of the heroine, Valeria Macallan, who seeks to defend her
marriage by becoming one of the ‘lawyes in petticoats’ (Chapter
XIV). Although, like Marian Halcombe, she turns detective partly in
order to escape the constraints of a conventionally defined feminine
role, in the end she could be said to collude in the oppression of
women by perpetuating the womanly protection of men from the
consequences of their actions when she advises her husband against
reading the suicide letter left by his first wife.
While most of Collins’s novels explored the ways in which gender
roles were constructed, and, at the same time, explored various pres-
sures for and anxieties about changes in gender roles in the mid-
nineteenth century, one novel in particular was a very self-conscious
indictment of a specific version of masculinity. Man and Wife,
published a year after Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy
(1869), echoes Arnold’s attack on an increasingly rough and unruly
populace, and, more particularly, on a ‘barbarian’ aristocracy in its
study of the savage brutality of Hester Dethridge’s drunken husband
and the barbarity and savagery of the cult of athleticism and the
ideals of upper-middle-class masculinity, as exemplified by Geoffrey
Delamayn. As Collins notes in his 1870 Preface:
We have become so shamelessly familiar with violence and outrage, that
we recognise them as a necessary ingredient in our social system, and class
our savages as a representative part of our population, under the newly
Masters, Servants, and Married Women 129
invented name of ‘Roughs’. Public attention has been directed by
hundreds of other writers to the dirty Rough in fustian . . . [but just as
important is] the Rough with the clean skin and the good coat on his back
[who] is easily traced through the various grades of English society, in the
middle and upper classes.
Or, as Sir Patrick Lundie, one of the novel’s more sympathetic
characters puts it:
There is far too much glorification in England, just now, of the mere
physical qualities which an Englishman shares with the savage and the
brute . . . We are readier than we ever were to practise all that is rough in
our national customs, and to excuse all that is violent and brutish in our
national acts. Read the popular books; attend the popular amusements––
and you will find at the bottom of them all, a lessening regard for the
gentler graces of civilized life, and a growing admiration for the virtues of
the aboriginal Britons. (Man and Wife, Chapter III)
As well as being an attack on brute masculinity, Man and Wife–– in
common with many of Collins’s novels–– is also an attack on the
‘rough’ national customs and laws relating to marriage in mid-
nineteenth-century Britain.
Marriage, Family, and the Law
The general idea of the scope and purpose of the institution of marriage is
a miserably narrow one. The same senseless prejudice which leads some
people, when driven to extremes, to the practical confession . . . that they
would rather see murder committed under their own eyes, than approve of
any project for obtaining a law of divorce which shall be equal in its
operation on husbands and wives of all ranks who cannot live together, is
answerable also for the mischievous error in principle of narrowing the
practice of the social virtues, in married people, to themselves and their
children . . . The social advantages which [marriage] is fitted to produce
ought to extend beyond one man and woman, to the circle of society amid
which they move’. (‘Bold Words by a Bachelor’)10
You marry the poor man whom you love . . . and one half your friends
pity, and the other half blame you . . . you sell yourself for gold to a man
you don’t care for; and all your friends rejoice over you; and a minister
of public worship sanctions the base horror of the vilest of all human
bargains (Count Fosco in The Woman in White, Second Epoch, The Story
continued by Marian Halcombe, III).
130 Masters, Servants, and Married Women
Nearly all of Collins’s novels are very obviously concerned with the
role of the law in constructing and controlling family life––
especially the lives of the property-owning classes. Many of his plots
are organized around legal issues, such as wills, inheritance laws,
property rights, and marriage laws, and, as several critics have
pointed out, ‘in most cases it is women who are depicted as the
victims of inequities in the law’.11 One of the exceptions to this
general rule is Collins’s first novel of modern life, Basil, which is
concerned, among other things, with the law of primogeniture, and
focuses on the predicament of the younger son who cannot in the
normal course of events inherit a fair share of his father’s property.
As Basil complains:
When a family is possessed of large landed property, the individual of
that family who shows least interest in its welfare; who is least fond of
home, least connected by his own sympathies with his relatives, least
ready to learn his duties or admit his responsibilities, is often that very
individual who is to succeed to the family inheritance–– the eldest
brother.
My brother Ralph was no exception to this remark. (Basil, Part I, IV)
It is, in large part, Basil’s dependent position which renders
him vulnerable to the Sherwins’ marriage plot, and which also
aligns him with female characters and his social inferiors. Unusually,
in this novel Collins uses the ‘reformed rake’ plot to make
Basil’s older brother, Ralph, worthy of his inheritance: Ralph
is redeemed by ‘a reformatory attachment to a woman older than
himself, who was living separated from her husband’, whilst the
younger son remains in a dependent role, living in retirement with
his sister.
However, from the beginning of the 1860s with the publication of
The Woman in White, the first of his novels to be reviewed as a
sensation novel, Collins turned his attention to the law as it affects
women. He took the plot for The Woman in White from Maurice
Méjan’s Recueil des causes célèbres, which tells of the successful con-
spiracy in 1788 by the brother of Madame de Douhault to obtain
the money that she had inherited from their father by incarcerating
her in a lunatic asylum under a false name. Madame de Douhault
was presumed dead and as a consequence her brother and a male
cousin inherited her fortune. Although she subsequently regained
Masters, Servants, and Married Women 131
her freedom she was unable to prove her identity, or regain her
estate. In Collins’s novel, Sir Percival Glyde and his co-conspirator
Count Fosco obtain Laura Fairlie’s fortune by falsifying her death
and incarcerating her in a lunatic asylum; they substitute her for a
long-term inmate, her half-sister Anne Catherick, who dies of heart
disease after having been given Laura’s identity. Sir Percival’s
schemes take advantage of the scandalous ease with which men could
confine their female relatives to lunatic asylums in mid-nineteenth-
century England (as well as in pre-revolutionary France). This scan-
dal was one of the issues addressed by the Parliamentary Select
Committee Inquiry into the Care and Treatment of Lunatics and their
Property in 1858–9, whose findings were the subject of much discus-
sion during the writing and publication of The Woman in White. The
Select Committee and its report marked an important stage in a
continuing debate about the definition and treatment of madness.
Collins would have been very familiar with these debates as there
had been several articles in Dickens’s Household Words on the topic
of madness, the boundaries between sanity and insanity, and the
incarceration of the mad (or those deemed to be so). Stories and
articles on madness and the treatment of the mad continued when
Household Words was replaced by All the Year Round and included
The Woman in White as one of its first serialized novels. For example,
one episode of Collins’s novel appeared alongside two pieces which
gave opposite views of lunatic asylums. In ‘Without a Name’, a
woman who had spent a period in Bedlam tells of her positive
experience of treatment for a condition which left her ‘silent and
moody’.12 On the other hand The Black Tarn, a novella in three parts
which appeared at the same time as some of the episodes of The
Woman in White, tells of a husband who kills his wife after having
failed in his attempts to have her locked up on grounds of insanity;
his second wife becomes mad and dies when she discovers her
predecessor’s fate.
Sir Percival resorts to his substitution and confinement plot
because his initial attempt to obtain Laura’s fortune by the simple
tactic of marrying her is thwarted by the terms of the marriage
settlement drawn up by her lawyer. This marriage plot thus focuses
attention on the problems and complexities of the laws affecting the
property of married women of the middle and upper classes, and
the vulnerability of these women to the tyranny of their husbands.
132 Masters, Servants, and Married Women
Gilmore, the Fairlies’ lawyer, seeks to protect Laura from the legal
disadvantages of the common law (by which all her property would
become her husband’s upon marriage), through a marriage settle-
ment (under the law of equity) which seeks to allow Laura to retain
control of her property, under the management of a trustee, and to
allow her the sole use of the income deriving from it during her
lifetime. He proposes that Sir Percival’s interest in her property
should be restricted to the inheritance of the income in the event of
her death, and that the principal or capital should be inherited by her
children or, in the absence of children, by her named heirs. However,
Sir Percival is able to take advantage of the fact that, as a woman,
Laura lacks legal agency, and, in the absence of support from her
only male relative (Frederick Fairlie), Gilmore is forced to concede a
vital clause to Sir Percival which will allow him to inherit all of
Laura’s fortune in the event of her death. After a short period of
marital bullying during which he fails to persuade Laura to sign
away those rights that Gilmore’s settlement has secured for her,
Sir Percival resorts to the substitution plot which will remove Laura’s
legal and social identity, and give him control of all of her property as
her heir.
The plot of The Woman in White depends on a wilful manipula-
tion of the laws affecting married women’s property; that of No
Name depends on the laws concerning inheritance and the legitim-
acy of children. Having made a foolish marriage during a period of
military service in Canada, and being unable to divorce his wife,
Andrew Vanstone has entered what Collins was wont to describe in
his own case as a morganatic marriage, with a woman with whom he
subsequently has two daughters. Although Norah and Magdalen
Vanstone are illegitimate, and thus have no legal right to his prop-
erty, their father has provided for them in his will. The complica-
tions of No Name result from Andrew’s unwitting disinheritance of
his daughters when news of the death of his Canadian wife enables
him to legalize his union with their mother. When both Vanstone
and his wife die shortly after their marriage, their daughters are left
penniless as well as nameless, since their parents’ marriage does not
confer retrospective legitimacy upon the children they bore out of
wedlock, and, as their lawyer Pendril points out, a man’s marriage
‘destroys the validity of any will which he may have made as a single
man’ (No Name, The First Scene, Chapter XIII). As a result,
Masters, Servants, and Married Women 133
Vanstone’s property passes first to his brother, Michael Vanstone,
and, when he dies, to Michael’s son Noel: neither man acknowledges
any moral claim that the daughters might have to a portion of their
father’s property. Subsequently the Vanstone inheritance passes to
Noel’s cousin, Admiral Bartram, and finally to the Admiral’s
nephew, George Bartram, who (in Collins’s squaring of the circle of
injustice) has recently married Norah Vanstone.
Although the most impassioned outbursts in the novel are directed
at what Pendril and Miss Garth describe as the ‘cruel law’, the
‘disgrace to the nation’ (The First Scene, Chapter XIII) which visits
the sins of the parents on their illegitimate children, this novel like
its predecessor shifts its focus from the rights of children to the legal
and property rights of married women, and to contemporary marriage
customs. The adventures of Magdalen, the scandalous heroine who
adopts a range of disguises in order to entrap Noel Vanstone into
marriage, are used to foreground the hypocrisies and machinations
in which numerous nineteenth-century men and women engaged in
order to make an advantageous marriage. By making ‘the general
Sense of Propriety [her] accomplice’ (No Name, Between the [Third
and Fourth] Scenes, X), Magdalen acquires the legal right to her
family name and, after a period of social marginalization as a profes-
sional actress, she also acquires a legitimate social identity via
marriage. As Magdalen writes to her former governess:
I am a respectable married woman . . . I have got a place in the world, and a
name in the world, at last. Even the law, which is the friend of all you
respectable people, has recognized my existence, and has become my friend
too . . . my wickedness . . . has made Nobody’s Child, Somebody’s Wife.
(Between the [Fifth and Sixth] Scenes, III)
However, when her husband dies having excluded her from his will,
Magdalen soon learns that the common law offers as little protection
to a wife as it does to an illegitimate child. As in the case of Laura
Fairlie, the only protection open to Magdalen is the love of a good
man. Although, in The Woman in White, Hartright presents his nar-
rative as the story of the process by which Laura’s identity is
restored to her, it is in fact the story of how she takes on a different
identity–– that of Mrs Walter Hartright, the wife and dependent of a
prosperous artist, and the mother of the male heir of Limmeridge
House. Similarly, the resourceful and independent Magdalen fails in
134 Masters, Servants, and Married Women
her attempts to regain her father’s property, and exchanges her legally
acquired name of Vanstone for that of her father’s closest friend,
whose son rescues her from illness and penury and marries her.
If The Woman in White and No Name were responses to the
debates around the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857
and the defeated Married Women’s Property Bill of 1856, then Man
and Wife (1870) was Collins’s response to the 1865 Royal Commission
which inquired into the state of the marriage laws, and to the debates
surrounding the Married Women’s Property Bill which came before
Parliament in 1868. The Preface which Collins wrote in 1870
emphatically announces Man and Wife as a novel-with-a-purpose.
This . . . fiction is founded on facts, and aspires to afford what help it may
towards hastening the reform of certain abuses which have been too long
suffered to exist among us unchecked.
As to the present scandalous condition of the Marriage Laws of the
United Kingdom, there can be no dispute. The Report of the Royal
Commission, appointed to examine the working of those laws, has sup-
plied the solid foundation on which I have built my book. Such references
to this high authority as may be necessary to convince the reader that I am
not leading him astray, will be found collected in the Appendix. I have
only to add that, while I write these lines, Parliament is bestirring itself to
remedy the cruel abuses which are here exposed in the story of ‘Hester
Dethridge’. There is a prospect, at last, of lawfully establishing the right
of a married woman, in England, to possess her own property, and to
keep her own earnings. Beyond this, no attempt has been made by the
Legislature, that I know of, to purify the corruptions which exist in the
Marriage Laws of Great Britain and Ireland.
As the Preface indicates, Man and Wife takes as its starting point
the inconsistencies within and between the Irish, Scottish, and
English marriage laws. It is these inconsistencies–– and specifically
‘the Irish Statute of George the Second’ (Prologue, Part the First,
III)–– which, in the prologue to the main story, allow the lawyer
Delamayn to secure the annulment of Anne Sylvester’s marriage to
John Vanborough when the latter seeks to make a better match with
an aristocratic widow. In the main narrative, the daughter of Anne
Sylvester falls foul of the Scots custom of ‘irregular marriage’ which
permits a couple to marry merely by making a public declaration
that they are man and wife. As a result of this practice Anne finds
herself legally bound to her seducer, Geoffrey Delamayn, the son of
Masters, Servants, and Married Women 135
the lawyer who had undone her parents’ marriage, though not before
she has escaped from being deemed to have married her best friend’s
fiancé, Arnold Brinkworth. The confusion arises because, when
acting as an intermediary for Delamayn, Brinkworth had been per-
suaded to pretend to be Anne’s betrothed in order to gain access to
the inn where she was staying. He had subsequently been forced to
spend the night in her room because of a storm, and under Scots law
these two circumstances were regarded as constituting a public
declaration of marriage. However, what begins as an attack on the
confused state of the marriage laws subsequently develops into a
continuation of Collins’s attack on the position of women within
marriage, and, at points, into an attack on marriage as an institution.
As in The Woman in White, an important part of the plot of Man and
Wife turns on the right of a man to regard his wife as his property
and to imprison her in his home. In the later novel, however, Collins
brings the full force of his rhetorical power as well as his plotting
skills to bear on this situation. Thus when Geoffrey Delamayn (for
his own purposes) finally claims the wife whom he has unwillingly
and inadvertently married with the words, ‘the law tells her to go
with her husband . . . The law forbids you to part Man and Wife’,
the narrator responds:
True. Absolutely, undeniably true. The law sanctioned the sacrifice of
her, as unanswerably as it had sanctioned the sacrifice of her mother before
her. In the name of Morality, let him take her! In the interests of Virtue,
let her get out of it if she can!
. . . Done, in the name of Morality. Done, in the interests of Virtue.
Done, in an age of progress, and under the most perfect government on
the face of the earth. (Chapter LI)
The horrors of marriage under the unreformed marriage laws are
graphically portrayed in the Gothic drama of the final two ‘scenes’ of
the novel in which Anne is, in effect, imprisoned by her husband in a
lonely cottage in Fulham which is surrounded by a large garden and
a high wall. Wishing to be rid of her, and having no legal grounds for
divorce, Geoffrey plans to murder her. Although her relatives fear
for her welfare and safety, the law sanctions Delamayn’s tyranny:
There were outrages which her husband was privileged to commit, under
the sanction of marriage, at the bare thought of which her blood ran
cold . . . Law and Society armed her husband with his conjugal rights.
136 Masters, Servants, and Married Women
Law and Society had but one answer to give, if she appealed to them:––
You are his wife. (Chapter LV)
The legally sanctioned marital sufferings of the middle-class heroine,
which lead up to the novel’s denouement, are counter-pointed by
the story of the marital trials of a working-class woman which is
retrospectively narrated in Hester Dethridge’s ‘Confession’ of how
she came to murder her brutal husband. It is the discovery of the
manuscript containing this ‘Confession’ that gives Geoffrey the idea
for how he might dispose of Anne. Hester’s narrative is a vivid
illustration of the legal disabilities of the married woman, and of the
fact that there ‘is no limit, in England, to what a bad husband may
do–– as long as he sticks to his wife’ (Chapter LIV). Tied to a violent
husband who drinks away her small inheritance, and periodically
returns to rob her of (i.e. claim his legal right to) any money and
possessions which she manages to acquire as a result of her labours,
Hester has no recourse in law. As the officer in the Police Court to
which she appeals after one incident informs her:
Yours is a common case . . . [i]n the present state of the law, I can do
nothing for you. . . . you are a married woman. The law doesn’t allow a
married woman to call anything her own–– unless she has previously (with
a lawyer’s help) made a bargain to that effect with her husband, before
marrying him. You have made no bargain. Your husband has a right to
sell your furniture if he likes. I am sorry for you; I can’t hinder him.
(Chapter LIX)
Hester’s account of her own bemused response and of the conversa-
tion between the officers on the bench dramatize the fact that the
working-class woman is even more disadvantaged by ‘the present
state of the law’ than her middle-class counterpart, since, as the court
officer observes: ‘Poor people in this condition of life don’t even
know what a marriage settlement means. And, if they did, how many
of them could afford to pay the lawyer’s charges?’ (Chapter LIX).
Collins wrote the first Preface to Man and Wife just as the 1870
Married Women’s Property Bill was about to be enacted. However,
as he noted in an addition to the Preface in 1871, the passing of
this Act (which still did not give married women the same property
rights as men) did not mean that his novel was immediately
outmoded: ‘Being an Act mainly intended for the benefit of the poor,
it was, of course, opposed by the House of Commons at the first
Masters, Servants, and Married Women 137
reading, and largely altered by the House of Lords . . . it is, so far,
better than no law at all’13 Man and Wife is Collins’s most overt
attack on nineteenth-century marriage laws and marriage customs,
but from Basil onwards virtually all of Collins’s novels seek to dem-
onstrate and explore changing expectations about marriage in an age
in which the roles and aspirations of both men and woman were
subject to change and questioning.
chapter 5
SEX, CRIME, MADNESS, AND EMPIRE
As well as examining marriage as a legal, social, and economic entity
(as shown in the last chapter), Collins’s novels also focus on mar-
riage as a means of regulating sexuality and explore sexual mores
on the fringes of and outside marriage. Contemporary sexual
mores and morality come under scrutiny as Collins investigates the
hypocrisies of ‘respectable’ Victorian society and the relationship
between respectable society and the demi-monde, and, like many of
his contemporaries, joins in the debate on the social evil of prostitu-
tion. His fascination with social outsiders is matched by a well-
developed interest in crime and criminality. Another contemporary
social issue which figures prominently in Collins’s fiction and jour-
nalism is the categorization and treatment of mental disorders, and
particularly the ease with which women could be incarcerated in
asylums by their male relatives. Collins’s interest in ‘others’ is also
evident in the way his fiction engages with issues of race and empire,
and in his depiction of exiles, including that diverse London
community of exiles and fugitives from the social upheavals of
nineteenth-century Europe.
Sexual Mores and Social Evils
The narrator and chief protagonist of Basil tells the story of how
he falls in love at first sight with a veiled woman, whom he marries,
subject to her father’s condition that the consummation of the
marriage will be delayed for one year. This tale of Basil’s sexless
marriage and (what turns out to be) his permanently deferred sexual
gratification, is framed by the tale of his older brother’s sexual
adventures outside marriage. Basil presents his brother Ralph as a
typically dissolute eldest son bent on avoiding ‘the domestic con-
spiracy of which he was destined to become the victim’, and putting off
for as long as possible the evil day when he must marry a girl of his
own class and take up his place in English society.
Sex, Crime, Madness, and Empire 139
Ralph had never shown much fondness at home, for the refinements of
good female society. Abroad, he had lived as exclusively as he possibly
could, among women whose characters ranged downwards by infini-
tesimal degrees, from the mysteriously doubtful to the notoriously bad.
The highly-bred, highly-refined, highly-accomplished young English
beauties had no charm for him. (Basil, Part I, IV)
Ralph’s conduct puts him temporarily beyond the pale of polite
society. Protective society mothers remove their daughters from the
immediate danger of his predatory presence, and his father sends
him abroad. However, it does not permanently affect his social pos-
ition: according to the double standard of sexual morality, male rakes
can be welcomed back into the fold if they repent their youthful
excesses (especially if they also inherit a large estate at the same
time). In fact, Ralph is an interesting variation on the theme of
the reformed rake, since he reforms according to ‘the continental
code of morals’, and enters into a ‘morganatic’ marriage with an
older woman to whom he refers as ‘Mrs Ralph’. The worldly Ralph,
who ultimately proves his worth by his actions on Basil’s behalf, will
have no truck with his more conventional brother’s ‘second-rate
virtue’ when the latter complains about his mentioning ‘that woman’
in the same breath as their virtuous and virginal sister Clara (Basil,
Part III, VI).
Ralph attributes his own moral progress to the influence of this
‘really superior woman’, who, as he jokes to his prim brother, has
been responsible for his ‘dropping down to playing the fiddle, and
paying rent and taxes in a suburban villa! How are the fast men
fallen!’ (Basil, Part III, VI). It is not clear what happens to the
‘morganatic Mrs Ralph’ when Ralph assumes his place as ‘the head
of our family’, and is ‘aroused by his new duties to a sense of his new
position’ (Basil, Letters in Conclusion, Letter III). Perhaps she
becomes the legal Mrs Ralph, or perhaps she has to remain in her
suburban villa having trained Ralph to be the husband of a highly
bred young English beauty. In the 1850s and 1860s there was quite a
lot of debate in the press about the growing tendency for quite
ordinary (as well as rather ‘fast’) middle- and upper-middle-class
men to set up accomplished and experienced women in suburban
villas, as an alternative to marriage, or (more usually) as a stop-gap
measure until they were ready to take on the role of husband to a
wife who was much less experienced in the ways of the world than
140 Sex, Crime, Madness, and Empire
the mistress whom she replaced. As W. R. Greg observed in his 1862
essay, ‘Why Are Women Redundant?’:
Society–– that is, the society of great cities and of cultivated life–– high
life–– has for some years been growing at once more expensive and less
remunerative . . . All this time, while the monde has been deteriorating, the
demi-monde has been improving . . . The ladies there are now often clever
and amusing, usually more beautiful, and not infrequently (in external
demeanour at least) as modest, as their rivals in more recognised society.1
Ralph is quite open about his domestic arrangements, not least
because as the heir to a large estate and a family name of distinction
he can afford to be. The young men in Greg’s article tended to be
more discreet, or, like Collins’s Godfrey Ablewhite, more secretive.
In a late section of The Moonstone, we not only learn what Ablewhite
has done with the Diamond, but we are also given an explanation
of his motive for taking it. Sergeant Cuff ’s revelations about
Godfrey’s double life both exploit and feed Victorian anxieties about
the secrets upon which respectable life was built. It is worth quoting
at length.
I may state, at the outset, that Mr Godfrey Ablewhite’s life had two sides
to it.
The side turned up to the public view, presented the spectacle of a
gentleman, possessed of considerable reputation as a speaker at charitable
meetings, and endowed with administrative abilities, which he placed at
the disposal of various Benevolent Societies, mostly of the female sort.
The side kept hidden from the general notice, exhibited this same gentle-
man in the totally different character of a man of pleasure, with a villa in
the suburbs which was not taken in his own name, and with a lady in the
villa, who was not taken in his own name, either.
My investigations in the villa have shown me several fine pictures
and statues; furniture tastefully selected . . . and a conservatory full of
the rarest flowers . . . My investigation of the lady has resulted in
the discovery of jewels which are worthy to take rank with the flowers,
and of carriages and horses which have (deservedly) produced a sensation
in the Park . . .
All this is, so far, common enough. The villa and the lady are such
familiar objects in London life, that I ought to apologise for introducing
them to notice. But what is not common and not familiar (in my experi-
ence), is that all these fine things were not only ordered, but paid for . . .
the villa . . . had been bought, out and out, and settled on the lady. (The
Moonstone, Second Period, Sixth Narrative, Chapter III)
Sex, Crime, Madness, and Empire 141
One of the causes of the disruption of the domestic peace of what
Betteredge describes as ‘our quiet English house’, is its opposite (or
inversion), the luxurious sexualized space of the villa in the suburbs
(not to be confused with Sherwin’s gimcrack new edifice in Basil).
Like Greg’s article, Ablewhite’s life story suggests that Victorian
respectability is built upon ‘fallen’ women and the social evil of
prostitution, as well as upon an idealized conception of the family
headed by a chaste husband and wife.
The parallels between the lives of respectable women and those of
their fallen sisters were a frequent topic in Collins’s novels. Several
of his most resolute and independent female characters–– Magdalen
Vanstone and Lydia Gwilt are good examples–– trade on their sexual-
ity in the same way that prostitutes do. The marriage plot of the
scheming actress Magdalen Vanstone in No Name is used to suggest
that marriage itself can be seen as a form of legalized prostitution.
Like Braddon’s Lady Audley, Magdalen cites contemporary marriage
customs as a justification for her own mercenary marriage to her
cousin Noel Vanstone: ‘Thousands of women marry for money . . .
Why shouldn’t I?’ (No Name, The Fourth Scene, Chapter XIII).
Magdalen has better cause than many to make such an alliance, since
she marries not to gain a name and fortune but to reclaim her
father’s name and fortune of which the law on illegitimate children
has robbed her. The natural justice of her cause and Collins’s sympa-
thetic, if sensational, presentation of the self-loathing which her
schemes induce both tend to press the reader towards a sympathetic
response to the woman, if not to her apparently cynical, criminal
and ‘unwomanly’ conduct. Nevertheless, the reader is repeatedly
reminded of the connections between Magdalen’s name (prostitutes
or fallen women were often referred to as ‘Magdalens’) and her
actions. Much is made of her sense that she has prostituted herself in
marrying Noel. Moreover, following his death she actively compares
herself to a fallen woman first in her response to her maid Louisa’s
revelation that she is an unmarried mother who has forged her own
character reference prior to taking up her current post, and second
by taking on Louisa’s identity in order to pursue the next phase of
her plotting. Magdalen’s response to Louisa’s falling to her knees to
pronounce herself a ‘miserable, degraded creature’ who is not fit to
be in the same room as her mistress, is to proclaim: ‘For God’s sake,
don’t kneel to me! . . . If there is a degraded woman in this room, I
142 Sex, Crime, Madness, and Empire
am the woman–– not you!’ (The Sixth Scene, Chapter I). Magdalen’s
recognition of her degradation–– rather than her mere acceptance of
society’s labels–– is one step on her route to reclamation, although
many readers and reviewers found it difficult to accept that such a
brazen hussy was a suitable candidate for redemption. Margaret
Oliphant was not alone in disapproving of Magdalen’s ‘career of
vulgar and aimless trickery’ nor in expressing her surprise that Collins
should expect his readers to believe that his heroine could emerge
from the ‘pollutions’ of such a career ‘at the cheap cost of a fever, as
pure, as high-minded, and as spotless as the most dazzling white of
heroines’.2
If Magdalen exploits her sexuality to regain what she sees as her
rightful place in the social and economic hierarchy, Lydia Gwilt, the
heroine of the novel that followed No Name, exploits her sexual
attractiveness in a much longer career of trickery in order to gain
wealth and social position. Lydia enters the dramatic present of the
plot of Armadale as a scheming governess, like Thackeray’s Becky
Sharp and Braddon’s Lucy Graham/Audley. However, like so many
sensation heroines or villainesses, she is a woman with a past–– in this
case a very mysterious past whose details are revealed sporadically
and partially throughout the narrative. The history which Collins
constructs for Lydia makes her the repository of a range of Victorian
fascinations with and anxieties about the social outsider, the femme
fatale, the fallen woman, and the female social schemer. Lydia Gwilt
is a woman of dubious origin. She may be the child of a nobleman or a
streetwalker (or both), but she is the foster child of Mrs Oldershaw
and her husband, who use her to lure customers to their travelling
shop to buy cosmetics. When she is 12 she is taken on as a lady’s
maid by a spoiled young heiress, Jane Blanchard, who is attracted by
her flaming red hair (a badge of villainy to many Victorians). She is
spoiled by her mistress, persuaded into the crime of forgery by her
mistress’s husband Allan (Ingleby) Armadale, and possibly seduced
by him. The price of her silence is an education in France and an
income which depends on her permanent removal from England.
Whilst still in her teens she is the cause of the attempted suicide
of a married music teacher, and she is subsequently taken up by a
card-sharp who uses Lydia’s beauty to attract victims to the card
tables. One of these victims exposes the card swindling and seeks to
blackmail her into becoming his mistress, but she secures a marriage
Sex, Crime, Madness, and Empire 143
instead. Once back in England both parties discover the hazards of
respectable marriage, when she is mistreated by her jealous husband
and he is betrayed and then poisoned by his adulterous wife. Follow-
ing a sensational trial she is found guilty of murder, but sensational
and sentimental newspaper reporting secures a pardon and a reduced
sentence for theft. Upon her release she makes a bigamous marriage
to the man with whom she had committed adultery (a Cuban who is
already married), who subsequently robs her of the money she
obtains by blackmailing her former employer, and leaves her. It is her
suicide attempt at this stage in her career that starts off the chain of
events that lead to the blond blue-eyed Allan Armadale inheriting
Thorpe-Ambrose.
Despite (or perhaps because of) her early career, Lydia is pre-
sented as an intelligent, articulate, and cultivated woman who––
rather like those denizens of the demi-monde referred to by W. R.
Greg in the article quoted above–– is a more interesting companion
than Neelie Milroy, the insipid girl who is to marry the heir of
Thorpe-Ambrose. What was most surprising in Collins’s frank
depiction of the exploits of Lydia Gwilt–– and what shocked and
disgusted some of his reviewers–– was the fact that he constructed
his novel in such a way as to elicit sympathy for ‘one of the most
hardened of female villains whose devices and desires have ever
blackened fiction’.3 He does this by portraying her as one who is as
much a victim as a villain–– a social outsider in an economically and
sexually vulnerable position who, to some extent, learns exploitation
from the adults who exploit her. The novel also directs the reader’s
sympathies towards Lydia by progressively presenting the action
from Lydia’s point of view, most notably in the extracts from her
diary in which she scrutinizes her own life and her feelings for
Midwinter and provides a very accurate assessment of some of the
other characters. Lydia may be a sexual predator who has made a
career of exploiting her own sexual power and the sexual weakness of
others, but she is also capable of moral introspection and self-
criticism. One of the effects of presenting Lydia’s self-critical reflec-
tions on her own predicament is to make readers compare their own
situations with hers. This is done explicitly in an extract from
Lydia’s diary in which she compares her lot to that of a woman she
observes driving by in her carriage: ‘[s]he had her husband by
her side, and her children on the seat opposite. . . . a sparkling,
144 Sex, Crime, Madness, and Empire
light-hearted, happy woman. Ah, my lady, when you were a few
years younger, if you had been left to yourself, and thrown on the
world like me––’ (Book the Fourth, Chapter I). This is not merely
self-justification of the kind that Thackeray’s Becky Sharp engages
in when she asserts that she could be a good woman if she had five
hundred a year.
Further links between the respectably married lady in her carriage
and the fallen woman or the prostitute are suggested through the
novel’s depiction of Mrs Oldershaw (or ‘Mother Jezebel’ as she is
sometimes referred to). Lydia’s foster mother (who, as Richard
Altick has shown, is partly modelled on Madame Rachel Leverson4),
offers services to women of all stations and vocations. She is cer-
tainly a practitioner in the dark arts of making women maximize
their physical attractiveness, with more than ‘twenty years’ experi-
ence . . . in making up battered old faces and worn-out old figures to
look like new’ (Book the Second, Chapter I). She may also be a
procuress and controller of prostitutes, and, through her association
with Doctor Downward, an abortionist. Her shop, The ‘Ladies’
Toilette Repository’ in Pimlico, is described (as seen through the
eyes of Pedgift Junior) as being ‘essentially furtive in its expression’,
its very bricks and mortar signalling secrecy. ‘It affected to be a shop
on the ground floor; but it exhibited absolutely nothing in the space
that intervened between the window and an inner row of red cur-
tains, which hid the interior entirely from view’. The door, next to
the shop door, has a bell marked ‘Professional’ and ‘a brass plate,
indicating a medical occupant’. Doctor Downward, who is named on
this brass plate, is said to be
one of those carefully-constructed physicians, in whom the public––
especially the female public–– implicitly trust. . . . His voice was soothing,
his ways were deliberate, his smile was confidential. What particular
branch of his profession Doctor Downward followed, was not indicated
on his door-plate; but [Pedgift Junior] had utterly mistaken his vocation if
he was not a ladies’ medical man. (Armadale, Book the Third, Chapter III)
A further hint about the nature of Downward’s work as a ladies’
medical man is given in the reference in Lydia’s diary to the risks the
doctor runs in his particular form of practice.
In some of his later novels Collins focuses more directly and
polemically on the social evil of prostitution and on the case of the
Sex, Crime, Madness, and Empire 145
reformed prostitute, taking up a cause that had been the focus of
prolonged press campaigns from the mid-1850s onwards. These
campaigns had been orchestrated by feminists and by others cam-
paigning for the moral purity of society who had dedicated them-
selves, practically and through propagandizing, to the eradication
of prostitution and the reform of fallen women. In both The New
Magdalen and The Fallen Leaves it is the prostitute’s predicament
rather than her trade that is presented as the social evil. Both Mercy
Merrick, the heroine of The New Magdalen, and Simple Sally, one of
the ‘fallen leaves’ in the later novel, are illegitimate children. Left a
‘starving outcast’ on the death of her mother, Mercy becomes one of
the women ‘whom Want has driven into Sin’ (The New Magdalen,
Chapter 2), and Sally ends up on the streets never having known her
family (she has been kidnapped by her father and given into the care
of a baby farmer).
Mercy’s life story is narrated in the form of a confession which
she makes to Grace Roseberry, during a pause in a battle on French
territory in the Franco-Prussian War (which had just finished when
the novel began its serialization in Temple Bar). Mercy, who had
earlier been rescued from her life of sin by the preaching of the
radical clergyman Julian Gray at the refuge for fallen women in
which she had been living, is working as a Red Cross nurse in the
war. At the time of her first meeting with Mercy, Grace (who has
also been left without relatives or money on the death of her father)
is en route for England and a job as a paid companion. As Jenny
Bourne Taylor has pointed out, Mercy’s account of her life is ‘not so
much a reformed sinner’s confession as a philanthropist’s case his-
tory’ told by someone who has thoroughly assimilated the terms of
her own ostracism.5
I am accustomed to stand in the pillory of my past life. I sometimes ask
myself if it was all my own fault. I sometimes wonder if society had no
duties towards me when I was a child selling matches in the street–– when
I was a hard-working girl fainting at my needle for want of food . . . What
I am can never alter what I was . . . Everybody is sorry for me . . . Every-
body is kind to me. The lost place is not to be regained. I can’t get back!
(The New Magdalen, Chapter 2)
When Grace is hit by a German shell and left for dead, Mercy seizes
upon what she sees as the only way of escaping the taint of her
146 Sex, Crime, Madness, and Empire
past–– she adopts Grace’s identity and travels back to England to
take Grace’s place as companion to Lady Janet Roy. The success of
Mercy’s impersonation of Grace, and her acceptance as a respectable
woman, tends to reinforce Magdalen Vanstone’s contention that
respectable femininity is a role that involves successful acting on one
side and the acceptance of the illusion on the other. However, like
No Name, The New Magdalen also suggests that respectable or gen-
teel femininity is a quality that some women either possess innately,
or acquire through painful struggle. Collins’s narrative demonstrates
that Mercy really has escaped the moral taint of her past, by making
her confess the truth of her situation when Grace, who has miracu-
lously recovered, returns to reclaim her identity–– even though
everyone else believes (or pretends to believe) that Grace is the
imposter. However, Mercy is ultimately unable to escape the judge-
ment of society. Collins’s reformed prostitute avoids the tragic death
which is the usual fate of her fictional sisters, and is granted the
alternative ending of marriage (to Julian Gray), but she cannot be
assimilated into conservative English society and, like Elizabeth
Gaskell’s Mary Barton she is dispatched to the New World and a
new life in Canada. Like Gaskell before him, Collins represents
Canada as a kind of promised land in whose wide open spaces the
hero and heroine can build a better English society than the one they
leave behind.
Criminality and Roguery in Respectable Society
English society . . . is as often the accomplice as it is the enemy of crime.
. . . I say what other people only think; and when all the rest of the world
is in a conspiracy to accept the mask for the true face, mine is the rash
hand that tears off the plump pasteboard, and shows the bare bones
beneath. (The Woman in White, Second Epoch, The Story continued by
Marian Halcombe, III)
The genteel Marian Halcombe dismisses these words of Fosco’s as
‘glib cynicism’ but we can surmise that Collins, who was just as
much a ‘a citizen of the world’ as was his Italian with white mice,
would have had more sympathy with them. Of course, it is one of the
triumphs of Collins’s narrative method in The Woman in White that
there is no single authoritative narrative voice, and here, to compli-
cate matters further, Fosco’s words are reported by a shocked
Sex, Crime, Madness, and Empire 147
Marian. However, Fosco’s discourse on the ‘clap-trap’ with which
Society consoles and deceives itself for its own shortcomings states
overtly what virtually all of Collins’s narratives imply: that concep-
tions of virtue are culturally defined, and that ‘John Englishman’
and ‘John Chinaman’ each define virtue in their own terms; that
crime very often does pay, especially if the criminal goes undetected
by the police–– and the ‘resolute, educated, highly-intelligent
man . . . in nine cases out of ten’ does; that an individual’s crime is
often simply the response to social injustice–– it is only as a result
of her crime that the plight of the starving dressmaker who ‘falls
under temptation and steals’ is brought to the attention of ‘good-
humoured, charitable England’ whereas her honest sister is left to
starve.
Collins’s novels are littered with ‘resolute, educated, highly-
intelligent’ men, and the occasional woman, whose crimes go
undetected by the police and who are not dealt with by the legal and
penal system. Several of them receive summary justice: Mannion
falls to his death after a cliff-top struggle with Basil, Glyde is burnt
to death in a fire, Fosco is killed by a fellow countryman (one of his
former co-conspirators), Ablewhite is killed by the Indian guardians
of the Moonstone, and Geoffrey Delamayn dies from overstraining
his weak heart. Lydia Gwilt is, at least in part, an exception to this
general rule. Some of her crimes are dealt with by the legal system,
albeit rather ineffectually. Ultimately, however, Lydia judges and
disciplines herself by committing suicide when Midwinter foils her
plot to kill Allan Armadale. Another character who metes out justice
to himself is Dr Benjulia, in Heart and Science (1883); he sets fire to
his laboratory and commits suicide, having first released the animals
on which he had been experimenting. On the other hand, Doctor
Downward (under his new alias of Le Doux), Lydia’s accomplice in
her final attempt on Armadale’s life, not only evades the law (as a
result of Midwinter’s desire to protect his wife’s reputation) but
even prospers from the results of his failed crime. As Pedgift Senior
writes to his son:
The doctor’s friends and admirers are . . . about to present him with a
Testimonial, ‘expressive of their sympathy under the sad occurrence
which has thrown a cloud over the opening of his Sanatorium, and of their
undiminished confidence in his integrity and ability as a medical man.’ We
live . . . in an age eminently favourable to the growth of all roguery which
148 Sex, Crime, Madness, and Empire
is careful enough to keep up appearances. In this enlightened nineteenth
century, I look upon the doctor as one of our rising men. (Armadale,
Epilogue, Chapter I)
‘Roguery’ was also the subject of one of Collins’s early novellas,
and the only one of his works to have a convicted criminal as its sole
narrator. A Rogue’s Life: Written by Himself, which appeared in five
instalments in Household Words from 1 to 29 March 1856 (and was
reissued in 1879 as A Rogue’s Life: From his Birth to his Marriage) is a
kind of satirical Newgate novel in which Frank Softly recounts the
story of his ‘strange’ life ‘for the edification of [his] countrymen’:
My life . . . may not seem particularly useful or respectable; but it has
been, in some respects, adventurous; and that may give it claims to be
read, even in the most prejudiced circles. I am an example of some of the
workings of the social system of this illustrious country on the individual
native, during the early part of the present century. (A Rogue’s Life,
Chapter 1)
Using the same insouciant tone for his own adventures and his
comments on the hypocrisies of his family and contemporary society,
Frank tells how he failed to make useful connections, although sent
away to boarding school by his snobbish father expressly for the
purpose of doing so; how he tried various professions (medicine,
portrait painting, administering a scientific institution), and failed
at all of them; and how he became an unsuccessful forger of Old
Masters, before becoming involved with a gang of forgers of money
after falling in love with the daughter of their leader, Dr Dulcifer.
Frank’s narrative then recounts how he was caught, tried, convicted,
and transported to Australia, where, as a model ‘ticket of leave man’,6
he was allowed to become a servant to his own wife (who had fol-
lowed him to Australia disguised as a widow). Like Dickens’s Mag-
witch, the rogue prospers in Australia and by the end of his story he
was a ‘convict aristocrat–– a prosperous, wealthy, highly respectable
mercantile man, with two years of my sentence of transportation
still to expire’. At this point he brings his story to an abrupt end,
asking how as a ‘rich and reputable man’ he could be expected ‘to
communicate any further autobiographical particulars . . . to a dis-
cerning public of readers’, and declaring that he is ‘no longer inter-
esting . . . only respectable like yourselves’. Here Collins is not only
mocking his respectable readers for finding criminality more inter-
Sex, Crime, Madness, and Empire 149
esting than respectability, but he is also reminding them that their
vaunted respectability may be built on foundations just as dubious
as Frank’s, but at least the self-confessed rogue is frank about his
roguery.
Frank’s career of criminal roguery as a forger and fraudster is
typical of the kind of criminality that Collins’s novels focus on.
There are some violent crimes, and Lydia Gwilt’s criminal history is
clearly linked to some famous trials and the broader cultural fascin-
ation with murderous women in the 1860s. However, much of the
crime in Collins’s fiction–– and particularly in the fiction of the
1850s and 1860s–– is the white-collar crime that fascinated many of
his contemporaries: crimes such as fraud, swindling, forgery,
embezzlement, and blackmail. All these might be described as crimes
of advanced capitalism; they are crimes which arise from the traffic
in paper currency, from the manipulation of the documents of a
bureaucratic culture, and the control, misrepresentation, or misuse
of information.
Madness and its Treatment
Another white-collar crime which plays an important part in the
plots of The Woman in White and Armadale and also features in
Jezebel’s Daughter is that of wrongful confinement in lunatic asy-
lums. In The Woman in White, Collins’s use of the wrongful confine-
ment of both Anne Catherick and Laura Fairlie is one of the ways in
which he modernizes and makes more realistic the conventions of
Gothic imprisonment: instead of being incarcerated in a monastery
or a remote castle, or even a disreputable madhouse run by corrupt
owners, Anne and then Laura are confined within a modern lunatic
asylum run according to the new humane, non-restraint methods of
moral management. In this novel, the incarceration of two of the
central female characters in a lunatic asylum is not merely a conveni-
ent plot device, but rather, as both Jenny Bourne Taylor and Deborah
Wynne have demonstrated,7 it is a means of exploring contemporary
definitions of insanity and intervening in current debates about the
diagnosis and treatment of the insane.
At the end of the opening sensation scene of The Woman in White,
Walter Hartright’s reaction to the news that Anne Catherick has
escaped from a lunatic asylum plunges the reader directly into a
150 Sex, Crime, Madness, and Empire
range of issues concerning the definition and treatment of madness
in the mid-nineteenth century.
‘She has escaped from my Asylum!’
I cannot say with truth that the terrible inference which those words
suggested flashed upon me like a new revelation. Some of the strange
questions put to me by the woman in white . . . had suggested the conclu-
sion either that she was naturally flighty and unsettled, or that some recent
shock of terror had disturbed the balance of her faculties. But the idea of
absolute insanity which we all associate with the very name of an Asylum,
had, I can honestly declare, never occurred to me, in connexion with her.
I had seen nothing, in her language or her actions, to justify it at the time;
and, even with the new light thrown on her by the words which the stran-
ger had addressed to the policeman, I could see nothing to justify it now
(The Story begun by Walter Hartright, V).
Walter’s reaction to the question of Anne’s possible madness sug-
gests a spectrum of mental oddity or disturbance ranging from
inherent or ‘natural’ flightiness, through temporary loss of the bal-
ance of the mind as a result of shock, to ‘absolute insanity’. The
latter, it is implied, can be detected through language or behaviour,
and the authority for labelling it lies with the Asylum and the
medical profession. In this case the authority of the Asylum is
thrown into question by Walter’s appeal to his own ambivalent
experience of the woman in white, and by his subsequent reference
to the practice of confinement on the basis of a misreading (deliber-
ate or otherwise) of the signs of madness as ‘the most horrible of all
false imprisonments’: ‘What had I done? Assisted the victim of the
most horrible of all false imprisonments to escape; or cast loose on
the wide world of London an unfortunate creature, whose actions it
was my duty, and every man’s duty, mercifully to control?’ (The
Story begun by Walter Hartright, V). If Walter’s response to
Anne’s behaviour is ambivalent or confused then so too is his ques-
tioning of his actions in assisting her to escape from her persecutors
or carers. Walter seems to be torn between two conflicting duties––
the duty to assist the victim of wrongful imprisonment, and the
duty (which he shares with ‘every man’) to control the unruly
female. In the second case it is unclear whether it is the duty of
every man to control unruly women in order to protect them from
the wicked world or, rather, to protect the wide world of London
from such women.
Sex, Crime, Madness, and Empire 151
Laura’s wrongful confinement initially appears to raise quite
different issues, and seems to be more closely connected to Gothic
plots–– and the fears which they embody–– about the false imprison-
ment of sane people in lunatic asylums by relatives who wish to
appropriate their money or property. However, on reconsideration,
Laura’s wrongful confinement raises some of the same questions as
Anne’s. One of the reasons that Laura is so easily substitutable for
Anne is that some of the symptoms of madness that they both dis-
play are also symptoms of their feminine passivity, infantilization,
and powerlessness, as well as their shared mistreatment by Sir
Percival. Whether inside or outside the asylum, Laura might be
described in the same way in which Walter describes Anne: ‘there
was nothing wild, nothing immodest in her manner: it was quiet and
self-controlled, a little melancholy and a little touched by suspicion’
(The Story begun by Walter Hartright, IV)–– in both cases this man-
ner is perfectly understandable in light of their circumstances. The
confinement of both women in an asylum raises questions about
definitions of madness at a time when there was increasing debate
about the ‘problematic borderlands of insanity’,8 and when the con-
trol of odd or deviant behaviours was becoming increasingly special-
ized and professionalized. These questions, and the related question
of the grounds on which confinement could be justified, were being
investigated by the Parliamentary Select Committee Inquiry into the
Treatment of Lunatics and Their Property that reported in 1859–60,
just as The Woman in White was being serialized in Dickens’s All the
Year Round. During the serial run of The Woman in White, All the Year
Round also ran several articles and stories concerning the treatment
of insanity and wrongful confinement. It returned to the subject in
1862 in an article entitled ‘M.D. and MAD’ which discussed the
reports of the Commissioners of Lunacy in 1862.
[W]e do not . . . attribute to any . . . of these medical gentlemen, a con-
scious action under mercenary motives. The public danger arising from
their influence would be infinitely insignificant if the fact were so. They
are highly trained men, who have honestly devoted themselves to a special
study of the most difficult questions that can occur to a physician. There
is no clear dividing-line between sickness and health of mind; unsound-
ness of mind is, no doubt as various and common as unsoundness of
body. . . .
. . . In questions that concern the mind, the less heed we pay to the
152 Sex, Crime, Madness, and Empire
theorist, and the more distinctly we require none but the sort of evidence
patent to the natural sense of ordinary men in determining what the
citizen shall suffer the privations, or what criminal shall enjoy the privil-
eges of unsoundness of mind, the better it will be for us. Let us account no
man a lunatic whom it requires a mad-doctor to prove insane.9
Collins also took up the theme of the mad-doctor in the career of
Doctor Downward in Armadale. As this novel nears its denouement,
Downward, who has hitherto advertised himself as a doctor special-
izing in women’s complaints (see above), reinvents himself as ‘Doctor
Le Doux, of the Sanatorium, Fairweather Vale, Hampstead’ (Book
the Fourth, Chapter III). Le Doux is Collins’s parody of the modern
mad-doctor and his Sanatorium, which is located in a large house in
a half-developed suburb, is a parody of a private asylum for the
nervous, which is closely based on aspects of John Connolly’s
The Treatment of the Insane Without Mechanical Restraints (1856).10
The discarded objects of the old restraint system, ‘Horrible objects
in brass and leather and glass’, occupy one wall of Le Doux’s private
room. Another bears ‘a collection of photographic portraits of
men and women, enclosed in two large frames’, one set illustrating
‘the effects of nervous suffering as seen in the face’, the other exhib-
iting ‘the ravages of insanity from the same point of view’, whilst
between the two was ‘an elegantly-illuminated scroll’ with the
inscription ‘Prevention is better than Cure’. The unctuous Le Doux
decodes the room for Lydia Gwilt:
there is my System mutely addressing you just above your head, under a
form of exposition which I venture to describe as frankness itself. This is
no madhouse, my dear lady. Let other men treat insanity as they like–– I
stop it! No patients in the house as yet. But we live in an age when nervous
derangement (parent of insanity) is steadily on the increase; and in due
time the sufferers will come (Book the Fourth, Chapter III)
Le Doux’s system is based on moral management along domestic
lines, using ‘carriage-exercise and horse-exercise’, cheerful drawing-
room gatherings, and activities which are designed to ‘elevate’ and
improve the patient. He actively markets his Sanatorium as a domestic
sanctuary for those suffering from ‘domestic anxiety’, ‘shattered
nerves’, and ‘nervous derangement’, a place of quiet from which
all the irritations of everyday life are removed; ‘On those plain
grounds my System is based. I assert the medical treatment of
Sex, Crime, Madness, and Empire 153
nervous suffering to be entirely subsidiary to the moral treatment of
it. That moral treatment of it, you find here. . . . sedulously pursued
throughout the day, [it] follows the sufferer into his room at night;
and soothes, helps, and cures him, without his own knowledge’
(Book the Last, Chapter III).
However, for all its superficial modernity, and for all Le Doux’s
caution about the possible intervention of the Lunacy Commis-
sioners if they get to hear of any irregularities even in an unlicensed
establishment such as his own, this Sanatorium is used by Collins as the
site of a melodramatic plot involving wrongful incarceration and
attempted murder. Le Doux agrees to be party to Lydia’s plot to
lure Allan Armadale to his sanatorium so that she can kill him. With
Le Doux’s connivance, Lydia plans to murder Allan in one of the
closed rooms which has been specially adapted for particularly dif-
ficult patients. The doors and windows of this room can only be
opened from the outside, and fresh air (or any other substance)
can be circulated through it by means of a pipe in the wall. In
the end, of course, it is Lydia who is (so to speak) buried alive in the
Asylum––as are so many of her real female contemporaries and also
Braddon’s Lady Audley––when this room becomes the site of her
melodramatic suicide.
Collins returned to debates about asylum conditions and different
systems of treating the insane in his late novel Jezebel’s Daughter.
The action of this novel begins in 1828, but the events are narrated
some fifty years after they have occurred. It begins by reviewing the
career of the recently deceased Mr Wagner, ‘a man who thought
for himself . . . [who] had ideas of his duty to his poor and afflicted
fellow-creatures’ which in the 1820s ‘were considered nothing less
than revolutionary’, but in ‘these days [the late 1870s], when his
opinions have been sanctioned by Acts of parliament, with the gen-
eral approval of the nation’, he is more likely to be considered as a
‘ “Moderate Liberal” . . . a discreetly deliberate man in the march of
modern progress’ (Part 1, Chapter 2). One of the radical causes that
Wagner espoused was that of asylum reform. As a governor of the
Bethlehem Hospital (Bedlam) he had opposed (as his widow puts it)
‘the torturing of the poor mad patients by whips and chains, and
had proposed an experiment, at his own risk and expense’, to try
‘the effect of patience and kindness in the treatment of mad people’
(Part 1, Chapter 3). His widow’s determination to continue his work
154 Sex, Crime, Madness, and Empire
by seeking out the ‘poor chained creature’ whom he had selected for
his benign experiment takes the reader to an unreformed asylum,
and along ‘dreary stone passages’ in which are heard ‘cries of rage
and pain . . . varied by yelling laughter, more terrible even than the
cries’ (Part 1, Chapter 4). The object of Mrs Wagner’s attention is
Jack Straw, who is known as the ‘lucky lunatic’ on the grounds that
he has gained access to a royal institution usually reserved for ‘luna-
tics of the educated class’, by virtue of having been discovered in the
street by a royal personage whose carriage had run over him (Part 1,
Chapter 4). This fellow is so lucky that he has had ‘irons specially
invented to control him’ and a new–– and many-lashed–– whip pur-
chased especially to keep him in order. There follows an asylum
scene that would not have been out of place in one of Dickens’s early
novels.
We found ourselves in a narrow, lofty prison, like an apartment in a tower.
High up, in one corner, the grim stone walls were pierced by a grated
opening, which let in air and light. Seated on the floor . . . we saw the
‘lucky lunatic’ at work [plaiting straw] . . . A heavy chain held him to the
wall. It was not only fastened round his waist, it also fettered his legs
between the knees and the ankle. . . . [I]t was long enough to allow him a
range of crippled movement, within a circle of five or six feet . . . above his
head . . . hung a small chain evidently intended to confine his hands at the
wrists. . . . His ragged dress barely covered his emaciated form. (Part 1,
Chapter 4)
In a move which appears to underline the validity of Wagner’s
beliefs, the narrator shifts his focus from the pathetic, childlike luna-
tic with his ‘vacantly-patient brown eyes’ and ‘nervously sensitive
lips’, to the whip which his wandering eyes detect in the hand of the
asylum assistant: ‘In an instant the whole expression of the mad-
man’s face changed. Ferocious hatred glittered in his eyes; his lips
suddenly retracted, showed his teeth like the teeth of a wild beast’
(Part 1, Chapter 4). The implication is clear–– the restraint method
produces the beast rather than contains him. The rest of the compli-
cated plot is designed, among other things, to vindicate Wagner’s
belief and bring his experiment to a successful conclusion. Released
from his restraints and brought up by Wagner’s widow, Jack Straw
survives as ‘the most popular person in the neighbourhood; a happy,
harmless creature’ (Postscript, 9).
Sex, Crime, Madness, and Empire 155
Race, Foreigners, and Empire
If Collins satirized conventional and illiberal conceptualizations of
the madman as savage, he also explored–– even if he did not always
avoid–– stereotypical representations of race. In Armadale, one of
the first descriptions of Ozias Midwinter, the son of a ‘negro’
mother and a white British father, makes him appear like a mad-
man. Ozias (who has recently recovered from a brain fever) is said
to be ‘a startling object to contemplate’. With his ‘shaven head, tied
up in an old yellow silk handkerchief; his tawny, haggard cheeks;
his bright brown eyes, preternaturally large and wild; his rough
black beard; his long supple sinewy fingers . . . [which] looked like
claws’. It is a combination of physical characteristics which evokes
stereotypical representations of the savage, the gipsy and the Jew,
and it has the effect of making the ‘healthy Anglo-Saxon flesh’ of
Mr Brock creep. Midwinter, who serves among other things as a
kind of foreign double to the blond English Allan Armadale, is
ultimately integrated into English society where a great future is
predicted for him (Epilogue, Chapter II). On the other hand, Ezra
Jennings–– Collins’s other most notable mixed race character––
disappears entirely from view after he has performed his vital role
in solving the mystery of the disappearance of the Moonstone: he
dies from a longstanding wasting illness and insists on his few
personal papers being buried with him in an unmarked grave. The
first detailed description of Jennings, like the initial description of
Midwinter, represents him as both a tortured soul and a racial
melting pot.
His complexion was of a gipsy darkness; his fleshless cheeks had fallen
into deep hollows, over which the bone projected like a penthouse. His
nose presented the fine shape and modelling so often found among the
ancient people of the East, so seldom visible among the newer races of the
West. . . . From this strange face, eyes, stranger still . . . dreamy and
mournful, and deeply sunk in their orbits . . . took your attention captive
at their will. Add to this a quantity of thick closely-curling hair, which, by
some freak of Nature, had lost its colour in the most startlingly partial and
capricious manner. (The Moonstore, Third Narrative, Chapter IV)
Jennings’s remarkable appearance is partly caused by and (perhaps)
partly the cause of the mysterious persecution that has led him to
156 Sex, Crime, Madness, and Empire
wander from place to place in an attempt to escape the effects of a
‘vile slander’. His foreignness, and especially his orientalism, is
reinforced by his association with opium to which he has become
addicted after using it as a painkiller for many years.
Like Midwinter, Jennings represents a kind of colonial return to
the heart of Empire. As he explains to Franklin Blake, ‘I was born,
and partly brought up, in one of our colonies. My father was an
Englishman; but my mother . . .’ (Third Narrative, Chapter IX). In
this respect both Armadale and The Moonstone are early examples
of the ‘reverse colonization’ narrative, a type of fiction which
Stephen Arata has associated with the ‘cultural guilt’ of the end of
the nineteenth century. In their representation of ‘the marauding,
invasive Other’, Arata argues, novels such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula
(1897) ‘mirrored back in monstrous forms’ Britain’s own imperial
practices, and thus had ‘the potential for powerful critiques of
imperialist ideologies’–– a potential which, in Arata’s analysis, is
rarely realized, as, in his view, these narratives tend to displace
British imperial guilt onto the ‘invasive Other’.11
An interest in questions concerning empire and imperialism is
evident throughout Collins’s career as a novelist. Although at first
sight his first published, novel, Antonina–– an imperial adventure
which drew on Edward Gibbon’s account of how ancient Rome
fell to the invading Goths–– appears to have little connection with
British imperialism, Collins repeatedly alerts his readers to possible
analogies between the two empires. He does this with such phrases
as ‘in Ancient Rome, as in Modern London . . .’ (Chapter XXII),
and (as Conrad was to do in Heart of Darkness) by ventriloquizing
the ‘official’ defence of the superiority of the motivations and
methods of the empire controlled from modern London: the Roman
Empire is said to have been built and sustained by ‘incessant blood-
shed’, whereas the British acquired theirs in the pursuit of noble
ideas and ideals. In fact, Antonina belongs to a particular moment in
the history of British imperial expansion, having been written during
the years in which Britain expanded its imperial gains in India by
annexing the Punjab (1848–9). Collins’s Roman novel repeatedly
makes analogies between the imperial practices of the Romans and
those of the British officers and employees of the East India Com-
pany who lived luxuriously on the wealth of the colony and raped
and misused its indigenous women.
Sex, Crime, Madness, and Empire 157
When Collins abandoned the historical romance after the publica-
tion of Antonina, he did not abandon his preoccupation with
imperial practices, nor with the growth and decline and fall of
empires: he merely translated them to a modern setting. In both
Armadale and The Moonstone, the main narrative concerns the dis-
ruption of English domestic life by a colonial legacy. In Armadale,
the violent, sensual, and acquisitive past of their parents in the Brit-
ish West Indies in the 1820s returns to haunt the next generation of
Armadales; and in The Moonstore, a ‘devilish Indian Diamond’, the
legacy of violent imperial plunder at the storming of Seringapatam
in 1799, disrupts the peace of a quiet country house and its apparently
blameless residents:
here was our quiet English house suddenly invaded by a devilish Indian
Diamond–– bringing after it a conspiracy of living rogues, set loose on us
by the vengeance of a dead man. . . . Who ever heard the like of it–– in the
nineteenth century, mind; in an age of progress, and in a country which
rejoices in the blessings of the British constitution? (The Moonstone, First
Period, Chapter V)
Both Armadale and The Moonstone problematize the relationship
between colony and metropole in narratives in which the ‘home
country’ is invaded by Creoles (Ozias Midwinter and Ezra Jennings)
or Hindus (the Indians who have travelled to England to reclaim the
Moonstone).
The main narrative of Armadale is set in 1851, the year in which
the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations,
another version of imperial plunder, was held in London. However,
its concern with violence in the sugar colonies was particularly top-
ical at the time of the novel’s appearance in the Cornhill between
November 1864 and June 1866. The composition and serial publica-
tion of Armadale overlapped with the American Civil War, in which
slavery was one of the points of contention between the North and
South. Even more pertinently, the serialization of Armadale over-
lapped with the Jamaica Insurrection (or Eyre Rebellion) of 1865.
Jamaica had been in British hands since 1655, and throughout the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it was a lucrative source of
trade in sugar and in the slaves who were brought from Africa to
work on the British-owned plantations. The novel’s pre-narrative is
set in the 1820s when liberal and evangelical campaigns to free the
slaves were well under way, and its Prologue, set in Wildbad in 1832,
158 Sex, Crime, Madness, and Empire
just predates the 1833 Emancipation Act, which sought to liberate
slaves throughout the British West Indies by making them free
apprentices. In the 1860s low sugar prices and low wages, combined
with continued injustices and ill-treatment by their former masters,
led ex-slaves in Jamaica to seek political reforms. When their
demands were rebuffed by Governor Eyre, they attacked a court-
house in Kingston, and after a bloody confrontation Eyre declared
martial law, violently suppressed the uprising, and hanged its leader,
George Gordon. Eyre was recalled to England where he was tried for
murder, and acquitted. Subsequently his actions were made the sub-
ject of a Royal Commission of Inquiry. Eyre’s conduct, which was
widely discussed in the press during the period of Armadale’s serial-
ization, polarized British public opinion: Dickens, for example, was a
member of the Eyre Defence Committee which sought to exonerate
his conduct as the use of justifiable force against the ‘inferior’ races;
John Stuart Mill, on the other hand, belonged to the Jamaica Com-
mittee which campaigned for Eyre’s conviction. Armadale seems to
accept colonial guilt by depicting the corruption, cupidity, and vio-
lence of the white colonists, but it displaces that guilt into the past,
where it is associated with the ‘idleness and self-indulgence’ of Allan
(Wrentmore) Armadale’s ‘wild’ and ‘vicious’ youth in the Barbados
of the 1820s, where he is corrupted by the power which he enjoyed
as a slave owner, lording it over ‘slaves and half-castes . . . to whom
my will was law’ (Prologue, Chapter III). Collins’s depiction of the
older Allan Armadales, and Lydia Gwilt (who has also spent her
formative years in Barbados), suggests that he is, as Lillian Nayder
has noted, ‘more concerned with the corrupting effects of slavery
on the plantation owners than with the suffering of the slaves’.12
Collins’s portrayal of these characters also suggests that he displaces
some of the burden of colonial guilt onto the ‘otherness’ of the
colonies. The ‘civilized’ subjects of the colonizing power succumb to
the ‘primitive’ wild otherness of the foreign lands and peoples which
are colonized: the colony colonizes the colonizers.
Collins seems more willing to acknowledge the British burden of
imperial guilt when he turns to the legacy of British India in The
Moonstone. Like Armadale, The Moonstone begins with a Prologue set
in the colonial past–– Sir John Herncastle’s theft of the Moonstone
during the storming of Seringapatam in 1799–– which shapes the
novel’s main narrative. In this later novel there is also an Epilogue,
Sex, Crime, Madness, and Empire 159
which includes Mr Murthwaite’s letter to Mr Bruff, dated 1850,
which returns the narrative to India and relates an act of restitution,
in which the Moonstone is returned to what readers are encouraged
to see as its rightful home. In the main narrative of The Moonstone,
which is set in the period 1848–9, the legacy of Sir John’s act of
imperial plunder is played out. The peace of the quiet country house
eulogized by Gabriel Betteredge–– or at least the peace of mind of
some of its inhabitants–– is disturbed by the lurking presence of the
Indians who have travelled to England in order to retrieve the dia-
mond. More seriously disruptive of domestic peace, however, is the
second theft of the diamond, which is taken from its new shrine in
Rachel’s bedroom in an act of violation which is as shocking for the
English as was the removal of the Moonstone from the moon god
for the Hindus. By this sleight of hand Collins suggests that the
Englishman’s home is not a castle but a temple, whose sacred jewel is
the chaste goddess whom he will win as his wife.
This perspective on the novel’s central event is just one example
of the many ways in which Collins complicates the usual terms of
imperialist discourse. The English characters perceive the Indians as
the alien and mysterious other, and they are linked to reverse colon-
ization or invasion scares by the novel’s oriental specialist,
Murthwaite, who presents them as members of a secret society made
up of other Indian immigrants and the worst kind of Englishman:
a very trumpery affair, according to our ideas, I have no doubt . . . [involv-
ing] the command of money; the services, when needed, of that shady sort
of Englishman, who lives in the byways of foreign life in London . . . [and]
the secret sympathy of such few men of their own country, and (formerly,
at least) of their own religion, as happen to be employed in ministering to
some of the multitudinous wants of this great city. (Second Narrative,
Chapter III)
In their conduct, however, the Indians demonstrate the ‘English’
virtues of patience, stoicism, resolution, and dedication to justice.
The English, by contrast, are represented as duplicitous and secret-
ive, and, in the case of Franklin Blake and Ezra Jennings, foreign.
After listening to the stories of the India specialist Murthwaite on
the fate that might befall her if she were to wear the diamond in
India, Rachel ‘safe in England, was quite delighted to hear of her
danger in India’ (First Period, Chapter X)–– but the narrative is
160 Sex, Crime, Madness, and Empire
designed to demonstrate that her sense of English safety is illusory.
The novel also offers an ironic running commentary on imperialism
through Betteredge’s constant references to his book of consolation,
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, a textbook of colonization. The sharpest
irony is that Betteredge, as a white man, identifies with the colon-
izing hero of Defoe’s narrative, and fails to see that his relationship
to Franklin and to Lady Verinder makes him more of a Friday than a
Crusoe. Another commentary on the ideologies of imperialism is
offered by the solution of the mystery of the diamond’s disappear-
ance, and the explanation of Franklin Blake’s role in it. Like imperial
conquerors or colonizers, Blake has committed an act of appropri-
ation, a ‘bad’ act, for an unconsciously ‘good’ reason–– the desire to
protect Rachel. As Tamar Heller has pointed out, this explanation of
Blake’s conduct also serves to reinforce the analogy which the novel
makes between ‘Victorian ideologies of gender and imperialism’.13
The 1799 assault on Seringapatam in the Prologue to The
Moonstone was one of the key moments in the establishment of
British India, because the defeat of Tipu (an ally of the French) gave
the British an important foothold in the East. Interestingly, Collins’s
account of the storming of Seringapatam plays down the emphasis
on the brutality of the Indians contained in his source (Theodore
Hook’s life of General David Baird) and seems to owe more to
accounts of the lawless behaviour of the British troops more than
half a century later, during the Indian Mutiny of 1857–8, when
Indian soldiers (mainly Bengali Muslims) serving in the British
army rebelled against their British masters and marched to Delhi to
join the Mughal emperor. The Mutiny was another defining moment
in the history of the British in India. Its immediate cause was the
introduction of cartridges which had been greased with cow’s or
pig’s fat–– the handling of which was offensive to both Muslims and
Hindus. Its underlying cause was the rapid social change introduced
by the British. In part, the Mutiny was a reaction against this
upheaval of traditional Indian society, and an attempt to return to a
former political order. The suppression of the Mutiny after a year of
fighting was followed by the break-up of the East India Company,
the exile of the deposed emperor and the establishment of the British
Raj, and direct rule of the Indian subcontinent by the British.
In many ways The Moonstone is a displaced version of the Mutiny
novels of the 1860s which Patrick Brantlinger discusses in Rule of
Sex, Crime, Madness, and Empire 161
Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. However, if
Collins’s novel deals with the Mutiny at one remove, it also takes a
somewhat different stance both to the Mutiny and to the Indians
from that taken by the Mutiny novelists considered by Brantlinger.
‘Victorian accounts of the Mutiny’, Brantlinger argues, tend to dis-
play a ‘racist pattern of blaming the victim’ which is ‘expressed in
terms of an absolute polarization of good and evil, innocence and
guilt, justice and injustice, moral restraint and sexual depravity, civil-
ization and barbarism’. Mutiny novels generally mobilize these cat-
egories on behalf of calls for ‘the total subjugation of India and at
times for the wholesale extermination of Indians’.14 Collins’s novel,
on the other hand, while not exactly reversing these categories,
applies them equally to ‘the lawless Mohammedan’ Tipu (Prologue,
II), and to the ‘deplorable excesses’ (Prologue, III) of the British
soldiers and John Herncastle. There is no suggestion (as there is in
the Prologue to Armadale) that the British have ‘gone native’, nor
that they have been morally colonized by the colony. Rather, The
Moonstone identifies the metropole as the location of depravity
through Godfrey Ablewhite and his role (and motivation) as the
latest thief of the much-stolen diamond. Moreover, through its
depiction of the Hindu Brahmins who dedicate their lives to the
restitution of the diamond, and also of the response of the British to
them, The Moonstone examines the racist thinking of the British and
explores the ways in which they blame the oppressed people for the
crimes of the imperialist oppressor.
The response to the Mutiny and to the indigenous population
of India in The Moonstone is consistent with Collins’s earlier writings
on the subject. In 1857 Collins was co-author (with Charles Dickens)
of one of the earliest Mutiny fictions, ‘The Perils of Certain
English Prisoners’, which these frequent collaborators wrote for the
Christmas number of Household Words. Dickens’s feelings about the
Mutiny were given with alarming clarity in a letter to his friend
Angela Burdett Coutts in which he expressed the wish to be Com-
mander in Chief in India in order that he might ‘strike that Oriental
race with amazement’ and ‘proclaim to them . . . that I should do my
utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late
cruelties rested’ (Pilgrim, viii. 459). Instead, Dickens set about writ-
ing a story to commemorate ‘some of the best qualities of the English
character that have been shown in India’. Dickens set this story in an
162 Sex, Crime, Madness, and Empire
English colony in Central America, on an island where silver from
the local mine is stored under the care of the English population.
The Mutiny is represented in the form of a pirate raid on the English
community. Dickens supplied both the first chapter, which
recounted the happy life of the English colonists before the attack,
and the last chapter, which related their escape from imprisonment
and their vanquishing of their captors. Collins was responsible for
the middle chapter, ‘The Prison in the Woods’, in which he signifi-
cantly altered the emphasis of Dickens’s depiction of the differences
between the prisoners and their captors. While Dickens emphasizes
the exotic nature of the pirates, Collins casts them in the mould of
dandified English soldiers who abuse their subordinates. In so doing,
Collins emphasised what many saw as the underlying cause of the
Mutiny. In February 1858, a few months after this story appeared,
Collins wrote another Household Words piece, ‘A Sermon for Sepoys’,
which comments on the mental colonization that accompanied
imperial expansion and emphasizes the common ground shared by
Western and Eastern religions.
While we are fighting for possession of India, benevolent men of various
religious denominations are making their arrangements for taming the
human tigers in that country by Christian means. . . . [I]t might, perhaps,
not be amiss . . . to begin the attempt to purify their minds by referring
them to the excellent moral lessons which they may learn from their own
Oriental literature.15
There follows an account of an Indian parable about the active versus
the contemplative life, whose lesson is that ‘the life that is most
acceptable to the Supreme Being, is the life that is most acceptable to
the human race’. The piece closes with a question: ‘Surely not a bad
Indian lesson to begin with, when Betrayers and Assassins are the
pupils to be taught?’ This question raises the issue of whether it is
only the Indians who are betrayers and assassins, just as the opening
commentary raises questions about English and Christian assump-
tions about the superiority of their value systems over those of the
Indians over whom they are fighting for possession.
The clash between oriental and European value systems was by
no means the only ideological battleground in the mid-nineteenth
century. Nor were reverse colonization or invasion scares confined to
fears about the oriental colony invading the heart of Empire. When
Sex, Crime, Madness, and Empire 163
Murthwaite refers in The Moonstone to ‘that shady sort of English-
man, who lives in the byways of foreign life in London’, Collins’s
readers would not simply have associated ‘foreign life’ with Indians
and other colonial subjects. Throughout the nineteenth century
London was home to numerous exiles and émigrés associated with a
wide range of nationalist and revolutionary movements in various
European countries. In The Woman in White, the story of the social
and romantic progress of a middle-class drawing master and crime
and intrigue among the English upper classes is played out against a
background in which the reverberations of European events are
felt. Walter is introduced into the Limmeridge household through
the Italian Professor Pesca, with whom he had struck up a friendship
after ‘meeting him at certain great houses, where he taught his
own language and I taught drawing’ (The Story begun by Walter
Hartright, II). Formerly employed in the University of Padua, Pesca
‘had left Italy for political reasons’, like Gabriele Rossetti (father of
the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the poet Christina), and was a
member of a secret society of revolutionary Italian patriots, which
was involved in Italian wars and revolutions of 1848–9–– the years in
which the events of the novel occur–– and 1859–60, the years in
which the novel appeared. When pondering the mystery of Count
Fosco and speculating on his reluctance to visit his native country
Marian’s first recourse is to locate him in the wider mysteries of
European political intrigue, and to encourage the reader to speculate
further on this:
Perhaps, he has been made the victim of some political persecution? At all
events, he seems to be patriotically anxious not to lose sight of any of his
own countrymen who may happen to be in England. On the evening of his
arrival, he asked how far we were from the nearest town, and whether we
knew of any Italian gentlemen who might happen to be settled there. He is
certainly in correspondence with people on the Continent, for his letters
have all sorts of odd stamps on them . . . [and one had] a huge official-
looking seal on it. Perhaps he is in correspondence with his government?
And yet, that is hardly to be reconciled . . . with my other idea that he
might be a political exile. (Second Epoch, The Story continued by Marian
Halcombe, II)
In the light of Fosco’s subsequent fate it would appear that Marian
is describing the fears and the correspondence of a double agent.
Fosco’s demise, when it occurs, may serve as a kind of wild justice
164 Sex, Crime, Madness, and Empire
for his involvement in the plot to incarcerate Laura and rob her of
her identity and wealth, but his death is, in fact, a punishment for
treachery. When his body is removed from the river Seine it bears the
sign of the traitor: ‘two deep cuts in the shape of the letter T, which
entirely obliterated the mark of the Brotherhood’–– the brotherhood
of Italian nationalists to which Pesca also belonged (The Story
concluded by Walter Hartright, II).
chapter 6
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENCE IN
COLLINS’S NOVELS
‘Be pleased then to remember (first) that the actions of human
beings are not invariably governed by the laws of pure reason’, Col-
lins wrote in the ‘Note to the Reader’ with which he prefaced the
bound edition of The Law and the Lady. From first to last, his novels
explore the multiplicity of factors which shape or motivate human
actions. In fact, most Victorian readers––and especially Collins’s
readers––would hardly have needed the reminder which he provided
in his note. This may seem a surprising assertion to make about a
period which saw the expansion and professionalization of science,
and the proliferation of scientific methodologies and materialist
philosophies and modes of explanation. However, although the sci-
entific revolution of the nineteenth century challenged and under-
mined religious and other non-rationalistic modes of thought, it did
not by any means obliterate them. Moreover, science brought its own
mysteries: the ‘laws’ of evolution seemed to require as much com-
mentary and exegesis as the biblical and theological ‘laws’ which they
sought to replace, and new theories of consciousness and the mind
were no less perplexing for being based (as they often were) in physio-
logy. Other new sciences, or pseudo-sciences, coexisted alongside,
and sometimes fed into, the developing new sciences of evolutionary
biology and mental science and psychology. Phrenology and mes-
merism were just two examples of the pseudo-sciences which
attracted a great deal of attention in Collins’s formative years and in
the early years of his writing career.
Mesmerism, Dreams, and the Unconscious in
Collins’s Writings in the 1850s and 1860s
One of Collins’s earliest public engagements with scientific contro-
versy was a series of letters which he wrote for the Leader between
January and April 1852 under the general title ‘Magnetic Evenings at
166 Psychology and Science in Collins’s Novels
Home’. These letters were addressed to a sceptical George Henry
Lewes, one of the Leader’s founding editors, and subsequently
author of (among many other books) The Physiology of Common Life
(1859) and an ambitious work on psychology, Problems of Life and
Mind (1873–9). Collins’s letters report on several demonstrations of
mesmerism, animal magnetism, and clairvoyance which he claims to
have observed in a variety of domestic settings in Somerset during
1851. The private and domestic setting is important, because in the
1840s demonstrations of mesmerism and hypnotism had become a
popular form of public entertainment, and were frequently associated
with trickery and quackery. In the opening letter Collins dissociates
himself from such charlatan displays, noting:
Had those proceedings been publicly exhibited for hire, I should certainly
not have taken the notes of them from which I am now to write. But they
were of a private nature; they were shown only from motives of hospitality
and kindness. . . . [therefore] I gladly commit my materials to press . . .
believing that they will furnish specimens of evidence, which the
opponents of Animal Magnetism will find it much easier contemptuously
to reject than fairly to confute.1
Collins goes on to report the mesmeric feats performed by
‘Count——’ on a young girl, ‘so quiet and natural in her manner’
that it was difficult to imagine that she was ‘soon to display before us
all the mysterious phenomena of magnetic influence . . . [and] open
to our view glimpses into the dim, dark regions of the spiritual
world’. He also reports the unnamed Count’s version of the theory
of Animal Magnetism.
My idea about it is briefly this [says the Count]. We consist of three
parts––the organic matter (i.e., bodily structure), the vital principle
which animates it, and the soul. We feel that the soul has many of its
divinest prerogatives suspended in this life, through its connection with
the bodily part of us. To find out such a means of acting on the vital
principle, without injuring or destroying it, as to render the organic matter
perfectly passive, and thereby to weaken, if not suspend, its influence on
the soul, is to give back to that soul, for the time, some portion of its
inherent and higher nature––its immortal capacity to overstep all mortal
boundaries of time and space. . . . [I]n this way I explain the phenomena
of what we term clairvoyance. As to what constitutes the essence of the
influence thus communicable from one individual to another, I believe it to
be simply electricity! But I must repeat that I am only a student in the
Psychology and Science in Collins’s Novels 167
science; that we are all groping in the darkness of a mystery which is still
unrevealed. The relation between cause and effect is not yet traced out in
Animal Magnetism. With regard to the practical purpose to which it may
be directed, I think it might be used as a curative agent in more forms of
disease––especially nervous diseases . . .
This foreign Count, who is in some respects an early version of
Collins’s more famous aristocratic mesmerist Count Fosco, thus
announces himself a follower of Anton Mesmer, whose Mémoire sur
la découverte du magnétisme animal (1779) claimed to offer a cure for
both physical and mental or psychological conditions. Mesmer’s
theory of animal magnetism was based on the concept of a force or
flow which was governed by particular laws and which formed ‘a
mutual influence between the Heavenly Bodies, the Earth, and
Animate Bodies’.2 According to Mesmer, a misdirection in this force
or fluid might cause either a physical or a nervous disorder which
could be cured by the redirection of the force through trance or
somnambulism. Collins makes a brief reference to the curative prop-
erties of mesmerism in No Name when Noel Vanstone considers
whether he might employ mesmerism to deal with the ‘neuralgic
attack’ which Magdalen suffers under the strain of maintaining the
illusion of her borrowed identity as ‘Susan Bygrave’: ‘Mesmerism
was frequently useful in these cases. Mr Noel Vanstone’s father
had been the most powerful mesmerist in Europe; and Mr Noel
Vanstone was his father’s son. Might he not mesmerize?’ (No Name,
The Fourth Scene, Chapter V).
Mesmerism came to prominence in England in the 1830s and
1840s, and was taken up by John Elliotson, Professor of Medicine
at University College London, who founded Zoist: A Journal of
Cerebral Physiology and Mesmerism and their Application to Human
Welfare in 1843. Elliotson was also a champion of phrenology, a
branch of science developed by Franz Joseph Gall, and popularized
in England by George Combe. Phrenology sought to develop a
physiology of the brain, and to ‘read’ people’s characteristics and
dispositions from the shape of their skulls, and it had a considerable
impact on the diagnosis of mental disturbance in the first half of the
nineteenth century. Elliotson saw both phrenology and mesmerism
as ways of exploring the dim, dark regions of the mental world.
However, his own attempts to practice mesmeric therapy on his
patients at University College Hospital had led to his resignation
168 Psychology and Science in Collins’s Novels
from this post after his methods were attacked in the Lancet in 1838.
James Braid, whose Neurypynology; or, the Rationale of Nervous
Sleep, considered in Relation with Animal Magnetism appeared in the
same year as the first issues of Zoist (1843), sought to separate mes-
merism (or, to use his term, ‘hypnotism’) from the more scientifically
dubious theories of animal magnetism. Braid also developed the idea
of suggestibility––the notion that some people were particularly sus-
ceptible to the suggestions of their would-be mesmerizer or hypno-
tist. Mesmerism, in its guise of hypnotism, subsequently played a
significant part in the study and treatment of a range of physical and
mental conditions. Most famously, the French scientist Jean-Martin
Charcot used hypnotism as a means of studying hysteria, a condition
which was thought to be increasing rapidly in the mid- to late nine-
teenth century. Charcot believed hysteria to be a progressive, incur-
able and degenerative condition which was usually induced by a
traumatic event but which was also rooted in a hereditary weakness
in the neurological system. Charcot’s students included Sigmund
Freud, who took the view that both hypnosis and hysteria were
psychological rather than neurological phenomena. Freud’s own use
of hypnosis in the study of hysteria formed the subject of Studies
on Hysteria (1893–5), a series of case studies written jointly with
Josef Breuer, which became one of the founding texts of modern
psychoanalysis.
Collins makes several references to mesmerism and hypnosis in his
novels. Ironically, the otherwise firm and resolute Marian Halcombe
is a particularly susceptible subject. The ease with which she falls
under the influence of Fosco appears to give substance to this
Count’s claim to have ‘experience of the more subtle resources
which medical and magnetic science have placed at the disposal of
mankind’ (The Woman in White, The Second Epoch, The Story con-
tinued by Marian Halcombe, X). Marian focuses on Fosco’s eyes as
the source of his magnetic or mesmeric power: ‘the most unfathom-
able gray eyes I ever saw . . . they have at times a cold . . . irresistible
glitter in them, which forces me to look at him and yet causes me
sensations, when I do look, which I would rather not feel’ (ibid., II)
Later on in the narrative the suggestible Marian also falls spon-
taneously into a clairvoyant trance––‘a strange condition’, neither
waking nor sleeping, in which ‘my fevered mind broke loose from me
. . . and, in a trance, or daydream of my fancy . . . I saw Walter
Psychology and Science in Collins’s Novels 169
Hartright’ (ibid., VI). Ozias Midwinter in Armadale is a similarly
suggestible subject, prone to premonitory dreams, and ‘mesmerised’
by the sexual power of Lydia Gwilt. But it is The Moonstone which
makes the most significant narrative use of Collins’s fascination with
the mental processes upon which mesmerism and hypnosis depend,
when Ezra Jennings puts Franklin Blake into an opium trance in
order to get him to recover a suppressed memory by re-enacting a
scene from the past and solve the mystery of the disappearance of
the diamond.
One of the fascinations of mesmerism and hypnotism in the nine-
teenth century was that they appeared to give access to the dim, dark
regions of the human psyche or soul, and––like the ‘sciences’ of
physiognomy and phrenology that they replaced––to offer a way
of ‘reading the “hidden man” ’ and disclosing ‘a concealed domain of
inner selfhood’.3 This point was not lost on the novelists of the
period, nor on their readers. Critics of sensation fiction often
phrased their objections to such novels in terms of the sensation
authors’ apparent fixation on the idea of a hidden, inner self. A
frequent complaint against sensation novelists such as Collins was
that they would have their readers believe that their ordinary-looking
neighbour carried some dark secret around within him- or herself. In
fact, Collins often seems to represent his characters according to a
kind of reverse physiognomy: instead of being able to ‘read’ the truth
about a person’s disposition in their physical features, Collins’s
readers discover, in characters such as Godfrey Ablewhite, that dark
secrets lurk in the most innocent of faces and in the most respect-
able-looking people. As one would expect of a mystery writer, Collins
was fascinated by hidden realities, and by the slow working out of the
consequences of past actions and events. His novels also explore and
make interesting narrative use of the hidden meanings of apparently
supernatural events, such as mysterious premonitory dreams and
visions. In all of these respects Collins’s novels consistently engage
with contemporary psychological debates, particularly debates about
the relationship between the brain and the mind, and between the
unconscious and the conscious mind.
The concept of ‘unconscious cerebration’ was developed by
William Carpenter, Professor of Forensic Medicine at University
College London (from 1856), and a leading figure in the theory and
practice of mental physiology in the second half of the nineteenth
170 Psychology and Science in Collins’s Novels
century. Carpenter first outlined his theory of ‘unconscious cerebra-
tion’ in the fifth edition of his Human Physiology (1855), and he went
on to expand it further in Principles of Mental Physiology (1874), in
which he wrote about the human capacity for ‘spontaneous’, ‘auto-
matic’, or ‘unconscious’ recall of something we have tried (and
failed) to recall consciously. Building on eighteenth-century ideas of
mental association, Carpenter developed the notion of unconscious
memory, which works by hidden associations: ‘as our ideas are linked
in “trains” or “series”,’ he wrote, ‘so . . . an idea which . . . seems to
have faded completely out of conscious memory may be reproduced,
as by the touching of a spring, through a nexus of suggestions.’4
Collins makes repeated use of unconscious memory, hidden mental
associations, and a nexus of suggestions in a range of novels. But it is
The Moonstone that makes the most explicit reference to nineteenth-
century debates about psychology. Both William Carpenter and John
Elliotson are directly quoted by Ezra Jennings to provide scientific
justification for the experiment he proposes to conduct on Franklin
Blake in order to prove Franklin’s innocence and to provide a key to
the mystery at the heart of Collins’s narrative––the disappearance of
the diamond. Jennings gleans from Dr Candy’s delirious ramblings
during his illness (another example of the unconscious at work) that
on the night of the Moonstone’s disappearance the doctor had
secretly conducted his own experiment on Franklin by slipping a
small quantity of the opiate laudanum into his drink. Candy’s pur-
pose was to triumph over Franklin by demonstrating that he could
cure the younger man’s sleeplessness despite the latter’s protest-
ations against the effectiveness of or need for drugs in such cases.
Jennings, himself an opium user and thus well acquainted with its
effects, proposes to repeat Dr Candy’s experiment in order to re-
create the conditions in which Franklin apparently took the Moon-
stone from its lodging place in Rachel Verinder’s bedroom. ‘Science
sanctions my proposal, fanciful as it may seem’, Jennings observes,
and he goes on to cite ‘no less a person than Dr Carpenter’ as the
authority for ‘the physiological principle on which I am acting’.
Jennings presents Franklin with a slip of paper inscribed with these
words from Carpenter’s work:
There seems much ground for the belief, that every sensory impression
which has once been recognised by the perceptive consciousness, is
registered (so to speak) in the brain, and may be reproduced at some
Psychology and Science in Collins’s Novels 171
subsequent time, although there may be no consciousness of its existence
in the mind during the whole intermediate period. (The Moonstone, Sec-
ond Period, Third Narrative, Chapter X)
Jennings also refers Franklin to ‘Dr Elliotson’s Human Physiology’
and, in particular, to its citation of the case, discussed by the phren-
ologist George Combe, of an Irish warehouse porter who had mislaid
a parcel when drunk and when sober had no recollection of what had
happened to it. However, when he was drunk again he was able to
return to the house where he had left it.
The two doctors upon whom Jennings (and Collins) draws, would
have been reasonably well-known to middle-class readers in the
1860s as representing two very different aspects of nineteenth-
century psychology: Carpenter was a respectable and respected repre-
sentative of a modern mainstream physiological psychology while
Elliotson had become a more marginal figure associated with the
quackery of mesmerism. What they shared, however, was a common
belief in the existence of the unconscious, and a belief that the mind
will retain traces of whatever it has taken in, even material which has
completely disappeared from the conscious memory. They would
also have shared the belief that what cannot be recalled consciously
can be reproduced through suggestion and association.
Collins uses contemporary scientific and psychological theories to
explain how Franklin took the diamond and what he did with it. He
also uses such theories to provide an explanation of why he did it.
The answer to the question of what makes Franklin Blake a thief
is important both for his own self-conception and for his role as
a fictional hero whose fate is to outgrow his youthful fancies and
settle down to life as the master of ‘our quiet country house’ and
the husband of Rachel Verinder. Referring to Thomas De Quincey’s
Confessions of an English Opium Eater as well as to Carpenter’s
theorization of the unconscious as a collection of ‘automatic’ reflexes
beyond the immediate control of the will, Jennings explains
Franklin’s turning thief as follows:
The action of opium is comprised, in the majority of cases, in two influ-
ences––a stimulating influence first, and a sedative influence afterwards.
Under the stimulating influence, the latest and most vivid impressions left
on your mind––namely, the impressions relating to the Diamond––would
be likely, in your morbidly sensitive nervous condition, to become intensi-
fied in your brain, and would subordinate to themselves your judgment
172 Psychology and Science in Collins’s Novels
and your will––exactly as [in] an ordinary dream . . . Little by little, under
this action, any apprehensions about the safety of the Diamond which you
might have felt during the day would be liable to develop themselves from
the state of doubt to the state of certainty––would impel you into practical
action to preserve the jewel––would direct your steps, with that motive in
view, into the room which you entered––and would guide your hand . . .
until you had found the drawer which held the stone. In the spiritualised
intoxication of opium, you would do all that. Later, as the sedative action
began to gain on the stimulant action, you would slowly become inert
and stupefied . . . fall into a deep sleep . . . [and] wake up . . . absolutely
ignorant of what you had done in the night. (Second Period, Third
Narrative, Chapter X)
Jennings’s account of the effects of the opiate on Franklin’s
unconscious mind not only indicates why Franklin cannot remember
taking the diamond (like the drunken Irish porter in Combe’s story
of the missing parcel), but it also suggests that when he took the
stone he was, at one and the same time, not himself and most him-
self. He was not himself because ‘under the influence’ of laudanum
he was not responsible for his own actions, but at the same time the
theft was an expression of the hidden, unconscious self that was
anxious to protect both the diamond and Rachel.
Jennings’s experiment is an interesting combination of Carpenter
the mental physiologist and Elliotson the mesmerist. In a sort of
replay of the magnetic evenings at home, Collins’s readers are
required to observe a small group of characters in the act of observ-
ing Franklin’s opium-induced somnambulistic trance––with Bruff,
the lawyer, cast in the role of a less intellectual George Henry
Lewes, proclaiming that ‘it was quite unintelligible to his mind,
except that it looked like a piece of trickery, akin to the trickery
of mesmerism, clairvoyance, and the like’ (Second Period, Fourth
Narrative). But the experiment also depends on Carpenter’s idea of
the spring which links the broken trains or series through a nexus of
suggestions. Jennings notes that Franklin will not only have to
take laudanum, but he will also have to be ‘put . . . back again into
something assimilating to your nervous condition on the birthday
night . . . [and] revive, or nearly revive, the domestic circumstances
which surrounded you; and . . . occupy your mind again with the
various questions concerning the Diamond’ (Second Period, Third
Narrative, Chapter X). Jennings’s experiment thus depends on
Psychology and Science in Collins’s Novels 173
creating a series of associations which will unlock Franklin’s
unconscious memory.
Jennings’s explanation of the operations of laudanum on Franklin’s
mind draws on mid-nineteenth-century theories about the uncon-
scious and about dreams. The opium dream, Jennings asserts, is just
like an ‘ordinary dream’ in the way in which it allows ‘the latest and
most vivid impressions left on [the] mind’ to become ‘intensified in
[the] brain’ and to subordinate the judgement and will. This was one
of the kinds of dream work that John Abercrombie identified in his
Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers and the Investigation of
Truth (1830). In dreams, Abercrombie wrote, ‘ideas and images of
the mind follow one another according to associations over which we
have no control’.5 Dreams are a form of memory: recent impressions,
events, and emotions become mixed up with each other and with
impressions, events, and emotions from the past; ‘trains of images
brought up by association with bodily sensations’; ‘the revival of old
associations, repeating things which had entirely passed out of mind
and which seem to have been forgotten’.6 According to the phrenolo-
gist Robert Macnish, whose influential study The Philosophy of Sleep
appeared in the same year as Abercrombie’s Inquiry, dreams are a
‘state of partial slumber’ in which the dreamer reworks the recent
past, and does so in a way which is determined by his or her own
character.7 Another aspect of dreams that fascinated nineteenth-
century psychologists was the uncanny way in which their combin-
ing and reworking of past and present emotions and events could
often appear prophetic. Nineteenth-century dream theory thus
naturalized the apparently supernatural.
Like many sensation novelists (indeed, like many nineteenth-
century novelists), Collins made frequent use of and reference to
prophetic or premonitory dreams. Perhaps the most prominent
example of this is the dream which lies at the heart of the narrative
of Armadale. This is the ‘ugly dream’ which Allan Armadale experi-
ences (and whose disturbing effects on Allan’s sleeping body are
witnessed by Midwinter) in a chapter entitled ‘The Shadow of
the Past’. This dream is described and variously interpreted in the
following chapter, ‘The Shadow of the Future’. In this chapter,
the contents of Allan’s dream are revealed to the reader and to
Mr Hawbury, the local doctor, as a series of scenes transcribed in
Midwinter’s notebook. Armadale, Midwinter, and Hawbury each
174 Psychology and Science in Collins’s Novels
interpret the dream according to their personal disposition or
inclination or, in Hawbury’s case, according to their professional
training. The bluff young Armadale initially attributes the dream to
indigestion, but is subsequently persuaded by the medical man
Hawbury’s reading of the dream which traces each of its elements
back to its causes in ‘something that [Allan] has said or thought, or
seen or done, in the four-and-twenty hours, or less, which preceded
his falling asleep’ (Armadale, Book the First, Chapter V). Hawbury
takes the ‘essentially practical point of view’ and espouses the theory
of dreams ‘accepted by the great mass of [his] profession’ (such as
Abercrombie and Macnish):
A Dream is the reproduction, in the sleeping state of the brain, of images
and impressions produced on it in the waking state; and this reproduction
is more or less involved, imperfect, or contradictory, as the action of
certain faculties in the dreamer is controlled more or less completely, by
the influence of sleep.
Despite an initial willingness to escape into the comfort of Hawbury’s
practical explanation, the nervously susceptible Midwinter retains
his ‘terrible conviction of the supernatural origin of the dream’ and
feels condemned to ‘wait till the living originals [of the shadows in
the dream] stand revealed in the future’.
Collins’s narrative self-consciously manipulates both the super-
natural and the psychological interpretations of Allan’s dream.
When read retrospectively, in the context of the frame narrative of
Allan’s father’s history, the elements of the dream can be traced back
much further than the twenty-four hours before Allan fell asleep.
They can be traced back to his family history and his own psycho-
logical history. The dream is also prospective or prophetic, insofar as
it prefigures scenes played out in later stages of the narrative in ways
which are variously interpretable as coincidence or providence, the
enactment of a family curse, or the working out and working through
of social and psychological history in complex ways that go beyond
the realms of Victorian dream theory.
Midwinter’s supernatural interpretation of Allan’s dream involves
reading that dream as a prophetic moral allegory. Such a reading is
just one of the possibilities which Collins offers in his multi-layered
use of the dream of two women which the narrator and chief protag-
onist of Basil has on the night after his first meeting with Margaret
Psychology and Science in Collins’s Novels 175
Sherwin. As with Armadale’s dream, Collins uses Basil’s dream both
as a vehicle for sensational effect and as a means of building narrative
tension. In this case he also uses the dream as a way of providing
another perspective on the ‘unreliable’ first-person narrator who
offers a vivid description of a dream in which he gives himself up to
the embraces of an alluring, hot-breathed, dark woman (whom the
reader has no problem in identifying immediately as Margaret), who
emerges from the ‘dark secret depths’ of a wood, rather than follow-
ing the beckoning of another woman (clearly his sister Clara) who is
clad in a ‘white . . . pure, and glistening’ robe and who descends
from the brightly illumined, clear and cold hills. Basil offers various
interpretations of his own dream ranging from an immediate super-
stitious reading to a retrospective reading which combines moral
allegory with psychology. The initial, superstitious, response to the
dream is quickly dismissed by the dreamer:
Was it a warning of coming events, foreshadowed in the wild visions of
sleep? But to what purpose could this dream, or indeed any dream,
tend? Why had it remained incomplete, failing to show me the visionary
consequences of visionary actions? What superstition to ask! What a
waste of attention to bestow it on such a trifle as a dream! (Basil, Part
I, VIII)
Another perspective is offered by the sadder but wiser Basil who
narrates his own story, and who presents himself as knowing ‘now’
(as he narrates his story) what he ‘knew not then’ as he experienced
its events. What the narrating Basil ‘knows’ is that the dream was at
once a moral allegory, a kind of moral choice, and an expression of
his unconscious desires. Basil has learned to see the dream as the
acting out in his psyche of a battle between two different kinds of
femininity, between flesh and spirit, between sexuality and family:
[I]t was easy enough [then] for me to dismiss as ridiculous from my mind,
or rather from my conscience, the tendency to see in the two shadowy
forms of my dream, the types of two real living beings, whose names
almost trembled into utterance on my lips; but I could not also dismiss
from my heart the love-images which that dream had set up there for the
worship of the senses. (Part I, VIII)
Collins presents Basil’s dream not only as a kind of shadow play
which reveals his unconscious desires to him, but also as a form of
experience which changes him. The dream is also both a sign of
176 Psychology and Science in Collins’s Novels
Basil’s derangement and an event which further deranges him. In
Basil as in many of Collins’s later novels the dream is used to mark
the faultline between normal and abnormal mental states. Basil’s
dream of the dark and fair women is the first stage of a process which
ends in behaviour that is interpreted as ‘Mad!’ (Part II, VII), and to
the brain fever, delirium, and hallucinations which are so vividly
described at the beginning of Part III of the novel. Basil’s ‘dream-
vision[s]’ read like something from Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ or
‘The Pains of Opium’ in Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an
English Opium Eater:
Away! to a City of Palaces, to measureless halls, and arches, and domes,
soaring one above another, till their flashing ruby summits are lost in the
burning void . . . Far down the corridors rise visions of flying phantoms
. . . their raving voices clanging like the hammers of a thousand forges . . .
then an apparition of . . . two monsters stretching forth their gnarled
yellow talons . . . the fiend-souls made visible in fiend-shapes––Margaret
and Mannion! . . . We stood on a wilderness . . . Outspread over the
noisome ground lay the ruins of a house, rooted up and overthrown to
its foundations. The demon figures . . . drew me slowly forward to the
fallen stones, and pointed to two dead bodies lying among them.
My father!––my sister! (Part III, I)
Here Basil replays his own history as persecution, aberration, and
betrayal and also confronts his own guilt. Collins, on the other hand,
replays his protagonist’s history as a nightmare from which he finally
awakes. This latter pattern is repeated in many of Collins’s novels,
in plots in which mid-Victorian England is transformed into a
dreamlike world whose surreal twists and confusions his characters
must negotiate.
‘It was like a dream’, writes Walter Hartright of his first strange
meeting with the woman in white which disrupts his sense of self
and initiates the train of events which turns his world upside down.
‘It was like a dream. Was I Walter Hartright? Was this the well-
known, uneventful road, where holiday people strolled on Sundays?
Had I really left, little more than an hour since, the quiet, decent,
conventionally-domestic atmosphere of my mother’s cottage?’ (The
Woman in White, The Story begun by Walter Hartright, IV). The
Walter who narrates his own state of confusion has already begun
to represent himself as a somnambulistic subject who walks on
Hampstead Heath as if in a trance, and who seems to conjure the
Psychology and Science in Collins’s Novels 177
woman in white from his own imaginings: she first appears just as he
was ‘idly wondering . . . what the Cumberland young ladies would
look like––when, in one moment, every drop of blood in my body
was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly and sud-
denly on my shoulder’. Walter’s narrative not only conveys his own
sense of disorientation, but it is also the means of disorientating the
novel’s readers, and propelling them from their own ‘quiet, decent,
conventionally-domestic atmosphere’ to a strange, dreamlike world
in which the ‘ordinary rules of evidence’ are replaced by an associ-
ative logic, albeit one which Walter suspects might be delusional.
Thus when Marian Halcombe informs him that they are about to be
visited by Laura’s fiancé, Sir Percival Glyde, Walter immediately
links this baronet with Anne Catherick’s ‘suspicious question about
the men of the rank of baronet whom I might happen to know’, but
notes:
Judging by the ordinary rules of evidence, I had not the shadow of a
reason, thus far, for connecting Sir Percival Glyde with the suspicious
words of inquiry . . . [of] the woman in white. And yet, I did connect
him with them. Was it because he had now become associated in my mind
with Miss Fairlie; Miss Fairlie being, in her turn, associated with Anne
Catherick, since . . . I had discovered the ominous likeness between them?
Had the events of the morning so unnerved me already that I was at the
mercy of any delusion which . . . common coincidences might suggest to
my imagination? (The Story begun by Walter Hartright, XI)
Collins does not simply create a delusional or dreamlike world in The
Woman in White, but, as in Basil and Armadale, he also makes use of
premonitory dreams. However, unlike Basil and Armadale, in The
Woman in White his dreamers are female. The first of these female
dreamers is Anne Catherick, whose dream of Laura’s marriage to
Sir Percival is narrated in her anonymous letter to Laura––a letter in
which she claims scriptural authority for her dream: ‘See what
Scripture says about dreams and their fulfilment (Genesis xl. 8, xl. 25;
Daniel iv. 18–25)’ (The Story begun by Walter Hartright, XI). Then
there is Marian’s ‘trance, or daydream of my fancy’––a ‘strange
condition’ neither waking nor sleeping––in which her ‘fevered mind
broke loose’ from her ‘weary body’ and she has a vision of Walter
Hartright. Marian’s trance occurs at Blackwater Park, during Walter’s
sojourn in South America, and it consists of four visions of Walter in
each of which Marian addresses him or he communicates with her.
178 Psychology and Science in Collins’s Novels
First, Marian sees Walter lying on the steps of a ruined temple
surrounded by a group of other men, ‘colossal tropical trees’, and
‘hideous stone idols’, and wreathed in a threatening mist bearing
disease and pestilence. Marian begs Walter to escape from the dan-
gers of the jungle and return to keep his promise to Laura and
herself. Walter, in turn, affirms that the pestilence will spare him and
he will return to fulfil the destiny implicit in his first meeting with
the woman in white––to be the ‘instrument of a Design that is yet
unseen’. In the second vision, Walter is in the forest with fewer
companions and surrounded by ‘dark, dwarfish men’ lurking ‘mur-
derously among the trees, with bows in their hands’, and in the third
he is marooned in a wrecked ship. In both of these visions Walter
reassures Marian that he will be spared the dangers which are about
to befall his dwindling band of companions in order that he may take
another step ‘on the dark road’ of his destiny. In the final vision
Walter kneels beside a tomb of white marble as ‘the shadow of a
veiled woman rose out of the grave beneath, and waited by his side’,
proclaiming ‘Death takes the good, the beautiful, and the young––
and spares me. The Pestilence that wastes . . . the Grave that closes
over Love and Hope, are steps of my journey, and take me nearer and
nearer to the End’ (The Second Epoch, The Story continued by
Marian Halcombe, VI).
The dreams of both Anne and Marian function simultaneously
as supernatural prophecy, as clairvoyance, and as psychological
revelations which disclose the hidden fears and longings of the
dreamers. Collins uses Anne’s dream-letter and Marian’s trance as
ways of developing narrative tension and he also fully exploits their
sensational potential.
The Sensation Novel and Nineteenth-Century
Medical and Psychological Theories
Sensation was at the heart of Associationism, and Associationism
was the philosophical foundation of much psychological theory in
the mid-nineteenth century. The roots of Associationism lay in
the philosophy of John Locke and in the psychological theories of
his eighteenth-century contemporary David Hartley. Put simply,
Associationism developed a model of the mind as a receiver and
translator of sensations. The mind was conceived of as a blank sheet
Psychology and Science in Collins’s Novels 179
(or, as Locke put it, a tabula rasa) which received sensations, trans-
lated them into ideas of sensations, and then linked them together
according to principles of similarity, proximity, or causality. In other
words, the mind worked by associating or bringing together sensa-
tions, ideas, and events that seemed similar to each other, were close
together in time or space, or which seemed to be connected as cause
and effect. Most nineteenth-century Associationists saw this process
of linking or association as having a physiological basis in the brain
and neurological system. Alexander Bain, for example, expressed
this process in terms of neural pathways or currents.
Collins offers a particularly vivid example of Associationism
through sensation in his depiction of the way in which Walter
Hartright comes to link Laura Fairlie and Anne Catherick together
in his mind, long before he learns of any other kind of link between
them. Walter’s first meeting with Laura (like his first meeting with
Anne) is described in terms of sensation:
Among the sensations that crowded on me, when my eyes first looked
upon her . . . there was one that troubled and perplexed me; one that
seemed strangely inconsistent and unaccountably out of place in Miss
Fairlie’s presence.
Mingling with the vivid impression produced by the charm of her fair
face . . . was another impression, which, in a shadowy way, suggested to
me the idea of something wanting. At one time it seemed like something
wanting in her; at another, like something wanting in myself, which
hindered me from understanding her as I ought. (The Woman in White,
The Story begun by Walter Hartright, VIII)
A few pages and a few hours later Walter’s account of his sensations
sets off a secondary process of association, which causes the reader
to begin to link Walter’s sensations––even before he does––with
events narrated earlier. As Marian is reading out a passage about
Anne Catherick from a letter written by the late Mrs Fairlie, Walter
‘start[s] up’, ‘chilled . . . again’ with a ‘thrill of the same feeling
which ran through me when the touch was laid upon my shoulder on
the lonely high-road’. The thrill of the same feeling is caused by the
appearance of Laura––which Walter experiences almost as an
apparition:
a white figure, alone in the moonlight . . . the living image, at that distance
and under those circumstances, of the woman in white! The doubt which
180 Psychology and Science in Collins’s Novels
had troubled my mind for hours and hours past, flashed into conviction in
an instant. That ‘something wanting’ was my own recognition of the
ominous likeness between the fugitive from the asylum and my pupil at
Limmeridge House.
Walter’s sensational and mental association of Laura and Anne
prefigures the narrative revelation of their familial association and
their coincidental (or uncanny, depending on the point of view) link
to Sir Percival Glyde. These different but connected processes of
association also set up other associative possibilities for the reader.
Thus, Ann Cvetkovich reads both Walter’s and the text’s sensational
association of Laura and Anne as an example of a particular ‘politics
of affect’ which enables Walter (and Collins) to represent his trans-
formation into a hero and his rise up the social scale ‘as though it
were the product of chance occurrences, uncanny repetitions, and
fated events’ rather than a series of social negotiations.8
In Collins’s narrative, Anne Catherick and Laura are not simply
associated in the sensations of Walter and the reader, but they are
also associated by heredity. Anne and Laura look alike because they
are half-sisters who share the same father, and they share something
of his frailty. Sir Percival seeks to exploit their physical resemblance
in his plot to obtain control of Laura’s fortune by substituting the
dead Anne for her living half-sister, who in her turn, is to take ‘mad’
Anne Catherick’s place in the asylum. When Laura claims that
she has been wrongfully confined and that she is, in fact, Lady
Glyde, her protestations are treated as a symptom of her deranged
condition. The association between Laura and Anne, and in particu-
lar the physical likeness they inherit from their father, is reinforced
by Laura’s ordeal at the hands of Sir Percival and her incarceration
in the asylum. As a result of being treated like a madwoman, Laura
comes to look more like a madwoman. As Walter notes: ‘the fatal
resemblance which I had once seen and shuddered at seeing, in idea
only, was now a real and living resemblance which asserted itself
before my own eyes’ (The Third Epoch, The Story continued by
Walter Hartright, III).
Madness, and the social construction and treatment of madness,
features prominently and frequently in Collins’s novels as it does in
the work of many sensation novelists. This fascination with madness
and extreme emotional states was much discussed by reviewers, as
for example in an essay on ‘Madness in Novels’ which appeared in
Psychology and Science in Collins’s Novels 181
the Spectator in 1866. This essay presents the rise of madness in the
novel in the 1860s as a fictional convention that allows an author
either to dispense with probability or to transcend the limitations of
a prosaic and materialistic modern age. ‘The nineteenth century
believes in love and jealousy, and in a feeble way, even in hate,’ the
author of the essay wrote, ‘but it is aware that the mental concentra-
tiveness out of which these passions spring is in this age rare.’
Madness was the device that sensation novelists used to ‘intensify’
such qualities or propensities as courage, hate, jealousy, or wicked-
ness.9 Most sensation writers, in their varying ways, made use of
contemporary medical discourses and psychological theories, and in
their turn, reviewers of their work employed these theories to
describe and account for sensation fiction and its effects on the
reader. The sensation novel, as Henry Mansel famously expressed it
in his review in the Quarterly Review in 1863, worked by ‘preaching
to the nerves’, with the sole aim of producing ‘excitement’:
And as excitement, even when harmless in kind, cannot be continually
reproduced without becoming morbid in degree, works of this class mani-
fest themselves as belonging, some more, some less, but all to some extent,
to the morbid phenomenon of literature, indications of a widespread cor-
ruption, of which they are in part both the effect and the cause; called into
existence to supply the cravings of a diseased appetite, and contributing
themselves to foster the disease, and to stimulate the want that they
supply.10
For critics such as Mansel, sensation fiction did not simply work on
the nerves of the individual reader, but it was also a shared mania, a
collective nervous disorder, or a ‘morbid addiction’ to which the mid-
dle classes had succumbed. In short, in the accounts of its detractors
in the periodical press (newspaper reviewers tended to be less cen-
sorious about the genre) the sensation novel was represented as both a
symptom and a cause of individual and cultural degeneration.
Collins and the Discourses of Degeneration
Collins’s sensation novels––indeed his fiction more generally––were
not, pace Mansel, simply morbid symptoms which were both pro-
duced by and provided evidence of the depravity and degeneracy of
modern mass culture and modern urban-industrial society. On the
contrary Collins’s fiction was often fairly directly concerned with a
182 Psychology and Science in Collins’s Novels
range of issues and ideas in biology, psychology, and social theory
that can be subsumed together under the general heading of
degeneration. By the mid-nineteenth century degeneration was
regarded as both a distinctively modern condition and as an explan-
ation of insanity. From the late 1850s and 1860s onwards there was a
perception and concern that the incidence of insanity and mental
and physical disorders of various kinds was growing apace with
modernity, exacerbated by the speed and pressure of modern urban
life. In 1859 George Robinson linked the growth of insanity to social
progress, noting that in looking for the causes of moral insanity: ‘we
shall discover ample evidence of its frequent origin in the vices of a
spurious and hollow civilisation’.11 Such vices (according to com-
mentators like Robinson) included the ceaseless striving after social
elevation, a love of display, and foreign (especially French) influence.
Another commentator (in the Edinburgh Review) linked the growth
of ‘brain disorders’ to increased strain in commercial and public
life, and in particular to the ‘intense competition which exists
between the liberal professions . . . the excitement accompanying
the large monetary transactions which distinguish the trading of the
present day . . . the gambling nature of many of its operations, and
the extreme tension to which all classes . . . are subjected in the
unceasing struggle for position and even life’.12
The mid-nineteenth-century discourse on degeneration was made
up of oppositions and contradictions. On the one hand, degeneration
was said to be the product and symptom of the over-refinement of
modern civilization: Collins’s nervous, effeminate, and hypochon-
driacal bachelors Frederick Fairlie and Noel Vanstone are examples
of this. Yet, on the other hand, degeneration was also associated with
atavism or throwbacks to a more primitive biological and social phase
of existence, as, for example in the upper-class barbarism of Geoffrey
Delamayn in whom the ‘savage element in humanity . . . show[ed]
itself furtively in his eyes; . . . [and] utter[ed] itself furtively in his
voice’ (Man and Wife, Chapter IV). Degeneration was associated
with moral insanity and with a criminality which was either caused
or exacerbated by modern social conditions, but it was also thought
to be an inherited trait (or set of traits), passed on from parents
to children. Collins repeatedly refers to matters of hereditary
transmission in his fiction. Examples of this include Mannion’s
inheritance of his father’s villainy, and possibly worse: ‘there has
Psychology and Science in Collins’s Novels 183
been madness in his family or his brain has suffered from his internal
injuries’, notes the doctor who deals with him after his fall, and who
pronounces him ‘morally . . . a dangerous monomaniac’ although
‘legally . . . quite fit to be at large’ (Basil, Part III, VII). Another
example is the protagonist of ‘Mad Monkton’ who is obsessed with
the family madness which he fears he is biologically doomed to
inherit. On the other hand, in Armadale both Allan Armadale and
Ozias Midwinter contrive to escape the moral degeneracy of their
biological destinies and the enmity to which their family histories
have appeared to condemn them. Midwinter, however, does so only as
a result of painfully confronting his fears and fantasies about his
origins and after an almost intolerable struggle with his ‘nerves’.
No Name, another novel deeply concerned with family history,
directs its readers’ attention to degeneration as a function of heredi-
tary transmission, the thinning out or wearing down of the natural
characteristics of the parent as they are passed on to the next gener-
ation. Thus, Norah Vanstone inherits ‘the dark majestic quality of
her mother’s beauty’ but her features are less delicate, there is
‘less refinement and depth of feeling in her expression’, and she is
shorter. Underlining his point about the degenerative operations
of hereditary transmission, the narrator links it to the idea of
degeneration as a distinctive pathology of modern society:
If we dare to look closely enough, may we not observe, that the moral force
of character and the higher intellectual capacities in parents seem often to
wear out mysteriously in the course of transmission to children? In these
days of insidious nervous exhaustion and subtly-spreading nervous
malady, is it not possible that the same rule may apply, less rarely than we
are willing to admit, to the bodily gifts as well? (No Name, The First
Scene, Chapter I)
The narrative which Collins constructs for this thinned-down
version of her mother’s biological stock raises questions about social
evolution and adaptation. For the pale and enervated Norah never-
theless proves herself fit to survive and become the wife of the heir to
her father’s name and fortune. On the other hand, her ebullient
sister Magdalen is ‘one of those strange caprices of Nature, which
science leaves still unexplained’ (The First Scene, Chapter I), and
bears no resemblance to either parent. Magdalen’s appearance is
not only a kind of denial of her inheritance, but it also has a restless
184 Psychology and Science in Collins’s Novels
and oppositional dynamic which is all its own. Her features are ‘self-
contradictory’ and mobile, and they also contradict gender norms––
she is too tall and her mouth is ‘too large and firm . . . for her sex and
age’. There is no modern ‘nervous exhaustion’ here, all is rude
health and vitality: ‘all sprang alike from the same source; from the
overflowing physical health which strengthened every muscle, braced
every nerve, and set the warm young blood tingling through her
veins like the blood of a growing child’ (The First Scene, Chapter I).
Magdalen is thus one of nature’s fittest, but she does not easily fit
into the habitat which mid-Victorian society has shaped for a mid-
dle-class woman. Indeed, Magdalen survives as a social being only
after suffering a complete physical and mental breakdown and by
being nursed back to health by the manly Mr Kirke.
If degeneration was the dark side of progress, it is precisely this
aspect of progress which was the focus of several of Collins’s late
novels with a purpose. Man and Wife, for example, juxtaposes the
degeneration of the urban working class (in the shape of Hester
Dethridge’s drunken and violent husband), with the inculcated
superficial ‘fitness’ which masks the physical and moral atrophy of
the public school educated Geoffrey Delamayn. Indeed, Collins’s
1870 Preface makes a direct connection between the medical and
moral results of ‘the present rage for muscular exercises’ among ‘the
rising generation of Englishmen’, and the ‘violence and outrage’ of
‘ “Roughs” ’. Urban degeneration is dealt with even more directly
and more polemically in The New Magdalen. For example, in this
narratorial intervention on a pauper child:
the daughter of the London streets! The pet creation of the laws of
political economy! The scourge and terrible product of a worn out system
of government and of a civilization rotten to its core! Cleaned for the
first time in her life, dressed in clothes instead of rags for the first time in
her life. (The New Magdalen, Chapter 39)
Here it is not the dirty and puny pauper child who is degenerate, but
the ‘rotten’ civilization which constructs and accepts the ‘laws of
political economy’ and a ‘worn out system of government’. The laws
of political economy and the social Darwinist notion of competitive
individualism which explain class difference in terms of the
degeneration of the urban poor are further explored a few years later
in The Fallen Leaves, one of Collins’s less successful later novels,
Psychology and Science in Collins’s Novels 185
which focuses on the randomness of social exclusion by telling
the stories of ‘people who have drawn blanks in the lottery of life . . .
the friendless and the lonely, the wounded and the lost’ (The Fallen
Leaves, Book the First, Chapter III). One such helpless and
unfriended creature is the young prostitute ‘Simple Sally’, whose fall
into prostitution is the result not of inherent degeneration, but of life
chances which have been shaped by the ambitions of her father, John
Farnaby, who, having seduced her mother (his employer’s daughter)
in order to force her to marry him, abandons their child to a baby-
farmer. Sally’s story is, in part, a story about nature versus nurture
and heredity versus environment, and it is a story whose terms are
slightly slippery. Brought up among such creatures as her drunken
stepfather, ‘one of the swarming beasts of low London . . . the living
disgrace of English civilization’ (Book the Sixth, Chapter I), the
child of the streets none the less retains an ‘artlessly virginal and
innocent’ appearance, and ‘looked as though she had passed through
the contamination of the streets without being touched by it’ (Book
the Sixth, Chapter I).
Questions of heredity and environment are also at the centre of
The Legacy of Cain (1889), a speculative fiction on the inheritance
and transmission of degenerative tendencies. The legacy which is
explored in this narrative is the legacy of inherited evil, an issue
which is debated in the novel’s Prologue––set in a prison––in which
a doctor, a clergyman, and the prison governor discuss the moral and
medical implications of the case of a woman who has been found
guilty of the brutal murder of her husband. The doctor believes in
heredity and espouses a degenerationist view, maintaining that he
has ‘often found vices and diseases descending more frequently to
children than virtue and health’ (The Legacy of Cain, First Period,
Chapter VI). On the other hand, the clergyman, the Reverend Abel
Gracedieu, believes in the influence of environment on character and
in the shaping power of upbringing and moral management. In order
to demonstrate the validity of his hypothesis, Gracedieu adopts the
murderess’s daughter and brings her up with his own daughter
without letting either know which of them is his natural child. In the
ensuing narrative both the doctor and the clergyman prove to be
right, although in unexpected ways. The narrative of the two girls is
recovered and reconstructed by the prison governor and is told, in
part, through the juxtaposition of their diaries. These journals and
186 Psychology and Science in Collins’s Novels
the unfolding drama of the narrative reveal that the murderess’s
daughter does indeed inherit something of her mother’s ‘evil genius’,
but this aspect of her inheritance only comes to the surface as a result
of extreme pressure and provocation and she is able to control it,
thus proving the clergyman right and escaping what the doctor had
seen as her destiny. The doctor’s view is given some substance by the
fate of the clergyman’s natural daughter, who is imprisoned for
attempted murder, having inherited the morbid tendencies of her
own dead mother. However, in an interesting twist, this woman also
proves herself her father’s daughter by emigrating to America (after
serving two years in prison) and becoming the leader of a female
religious cult.
Science and Scientists
The plot of The Legacy of Cain involves a sort of experiment with
human lives by a clergyman. In a number of other novels in the late
1870s and 1880s Collins turned his attention to questions of scien-
tific experimentation, and in particular to the role and power of the
scientist and the morality of experimenting on human and animal
lives. The first of these novels was Jezebel’s Daughter (discussed in
Chapter 5), which takes the form of a reconstruction in 1878 of a
series of events which occurred in Germany and London some fifty
years earlier. This novel contrasts the very different inheritances of
two widows. The first of these, Mrs Wagner, is the widow of the
senior partner in a firm of merchants, Wagner, Keller, and Engelman,
who takes up her husband’s position running the London office
and plans to employ women clerks. Mrs Wagner also takes up her
husband’s interest in the lunacy reform movement and, having read
the copy of Samuel Tuke’s A Description of the Retreat13 which she
has found among her husband’s books she continues his work by
rescuing Jack Straw from Bedlam, an old-fashioned asylum which
uses the restraint system. The other widow, Madame Fontaine, had
been married to an experimental chemist from whom she has
obtained a collection of poisons and their antidotes which he had
intended should be destroyed on his death, but which she seeks to
use as her own means to power. The two widows are connected by
Madame Fontaine’s designs on the son of one of the partners in
Wagner, Keller, and Engelman (Fritz Keller, whose father seeks to
Psychology and Science in Collins’s Novels 187
prevent his marriage to Madame Fontaine’s daughter Minna), and,
more importantly by Jack Straw, whose mental impairment is the
result of an accident in her husband’s laboratory. Madame Fontaine
is an example of the bad or mad mother whose ‘natural’ desire to
advance the interests of her own daughter becomes excessive and
thus a perversion of nature. Her malign use of her husband’s work
on poisons and anti-toxins is also an example of a perversion of
science––a theme which Collins was to explore more fully in Heart
and Science (1882–3)
Subtitled ‘A Story of the Present Time’, Heart and Science is both
a contribution to a particular scientific controversy of the day and a
novel which takes issue with the pretensions of modern science more
generally. The particular scientific controversy was the vigorous
debate about vivisection, or experiments on live animals, which
raged in the law courts, in Parliament and in the newspaper and
periodical press from the mid-1870s to the mid-1880s. The contro-
versy began in earnest when a case was brought by the Royal Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals against the French physi-
ologist Eugène Mangan, who had injected a live dog with absinthe at
the annual meeting of the British Medical Association. The failure
of the case against Mangan led anti-vivisectionists to campaign for
new legislation. This campaign also spawned numerous articles
(for and against) in periodicals such as the Spectator, Macmillan’s
Magazine, the Contemporary Review, the Nineteenth Century, the
Cornhill, and Punch. A Royal Commission was established to look
into the pros and cons of vivisection. Numerous literary figures
joined the fray, writing and speaking out against what they saw as a
cruel and unjustifiable practice, including Christina Rossetti, Robert
Browning, John Ruskin, Lewis Carroll, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and
George Bernard Shaw. On the other side, scientists such as Charles
Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley wrote stressing the importance
of vivisection for medical and scientific progress. The Cruelty to
Animals Act, which introduced a measure of regulation into animal
experiments, was passed in 1876. In 1881, shortly before Collins
began work on Heart and Science, and after a few years of much less
widely publicized campaigning, vivisection came into prominence
again, when the International Medical Congress (which was meeting
in London) declared that experimentation on live animals was
‘indispensable’ to the future of medical research. This was also the
188 Psychology and Science in Collins’s Novels
year of the much-publicized case against David Ferrier, the author of
The Localization of Cerebral Disease (1878), who was accused of
conducting animal experiments without the correct licence. Ferrier’s
acquittal after the briefest of trials led to a further war of words in
the press, in which Frances Power Cobbe (a long-time campaigner
against the inequities of women’s legal position) wrote powerfully on
the anti-vivisectionist case. Some pro-vivisectionists responded with
attacks on unfeminine and spinster anti-vivisectionists. Heart and
Science was Collins’s attempt ‘to add my small contribution in aid of
this good cause’.14
As well as being a specific attack on vivisection, Heart and
Science, as Collins indicated in his Preface to the first edition of the
novel, also shares Sir Walter Scott’s scepticism about ‘the extreme
degree of improvement to be derived from the advancement of
Science; for every study of that nature tends, when pushed to a
certain extent, to harden the heart’. In Collins’s novel, the practice
of vivisection is, in one sense, simply a particular instance of the
general tendency of modern experimental science to oppose itself to
feeling and to harden the human heart. In fact, the novel does not, in
the end, offer a simple opposition between ‘heart’ and ‘science’,
rather it offers a more complex exploration of good science, which
works in harmony with nature and for the good of others, and bad
science, which sets itself up over nature, becomes detached from
human culture, and works only (or mainly) to satisfy the curiosity of
the individual scientist and to further his or her personal ambitions.
The novel’s two chief examples of the dehumanizing tendencies of
modern science are Mrs Galilee and Dr Benjulia. Mrs Galilee, an
extremely unsympathetic picture of a defeminized bluestocking,
neglects her children in favour of her scientific committees, and
cares more for ‘the Diathermancy of Ebonite’ and Thomson’s the-
ory of atoms than for her husband and family. She has no interest in
painting or poetry and is interested in music only as a means of
testing the acoustics of the concert hall. In Mrs Galilee’s mental
universe, flowers exist merely to be collected and dissected and the
purpose of children is simply to perpetuate the future of scientific
study. Mrs Galilee seeks to prevent the marriage between her son
from her first marriage, Ovid Vere (the novel’s good scientist), and
her niece Carmina Graywell, in order that she may retain control of
Carmina’s inheritance to solve the financial problems caused by her
Psychology and Science in Collins’s Novels 189
spending on her numerous scientific committees. As a consequence
of her machinations against Carmina and Ovid––and of their
failure––Mrs Galilee becomes completely alienated from her family
and suffers a nervous breakdown. She recovers from the breakdown
but she remains within a self-enclosed world in which she fails to
appreciate the extent of her isolation from her family and the dam-
age that she has done. She ends the novel proclaiming her satisfac-
tion at having hosted what she feels has been a very successful
scientific conversazione (an evening of scientific discussion): ‘At last,
I’m a happy woman!’
The novel’s other bad scientist, Dr Nathan Benjulia, brings
together the novel’s general and particular preoccupations. Like
Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein before him and Robert Louis
Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll who came a few years later, Benjulia is a classic
example of the driven scientist for whom scientific knowledge is both
its own justification and the justification of any practice which will
yield such knowledge. Thus, when Carmina becomes ill as a result of
the nervous shocks induced by Mrs Galilee’s plotting against her,
Benjulia, a specialist in diseases of the brain and nervous system,
watches her condition get worse––out of scientific interest––instead
of intervening to treat it. The extent of Benjulia’s possession by his
amoral passion for science is dramatically revealed in an outburst to
his brother in Chapter XXXII:
Knowledge sanctifies cruelty . . . In that sacred cause, if I could steal a
living man without being found out, I would tie him on my table, and
grasp my grand discovery in days, instead of months . . . Have I no feel-
ing, as you call it? My last experiments on a monkey horrified me. His
cries of suffering, his gestures of entreaty were like the cries and gestures
of a child. I would have given the world to put him out of his misery. But I
went on. In the glorious cause I went on. . . . I suffered––I resisted––I
went on. All for Knowledge! all for Knowledge!
Feeling is like a foreign language to Benjulia. It is like a language
that he knows about but which his scientific passion has prevented
him from internalizing and using appropriately. Benjulia is all the
more convincing for not being simply an inherently evil monster.
Indeed, in a letter to Frances Power Cobbe, who advised him on the
anti-vivisectionist context for the novel, Collins was at pains to point
out that Benjulia’s moral coarseness is as much the product of his
scientific work as its enabling condition:
190 Psychology and Science in Collins’s Novels
In tracing the moral influence of those [detestable] cruelties [of the labora-
tory] on the nature of the man who practises them, and the result as to his
social relations with the persons about him, I shall be careful to present
him to the reader as a man not infinitely wicked and cruel, and to show the
efforts made by his better instincts to resist the inevitable hardening of
the heart, the fatal stupefying of all the finer sensibilities, produced by the
deliberately merciless occupations of his life.15
In that part of the Preface to Heart and Science which is addressed to
‘Readers in General’ Collins was also at pains to emphasize that his
contribution to the anti-vivisection debate was made primarily in
terms of the coarsening moral and emotional effects of vivisection on
those who practised it rather than of the physical effects on the
animals on whom it was practised.
From first to last, you are purposely left in ignorance of the hideous
secrets of Vivisection. The outside of the laboratory is a necessary object
in my landscape––but I never once open the door and invite you to look in.
I trace, in one of my characters, the result of the habitual practice of
cruelty . . . in fatally deteriorating the nature of man––and I leave the
picture to speak for itself.
As well as using the delineation of character to demonstrate the
harmful (one might almost say the degenerative) effects ‘of the
habitual practice of cruelty’, Collins also uses dramatized argument
and plot to make the case against experiments on animals. Chapter
XXII provides a good example of the use of dramatized argument, in
the dialogue between Benjulia and his brother Lemuel, who has
recently joined an anti-vivisectionist society. Collins uses Lemuel to
elucidate the central issues of the anti-vivisectionist position whilst
the moral and rhetorical weakness of the vivisectionist position is
represented in Benjulia’s initial failure to counter his brother’s
argument and in his subsequent eruption in a fit of rage. The defeat
of Benjulia’s position is also dramatized in a plot development at the
end of the novel, when Ovid Vere returns from his exile in Canada
armed with a scientific manuscript on brain diseases written by an
anti-vivisectionist, which he uses as the basis of a new and successful
treatment of Carmina. Persuaded by the manuscript and the evi-
dence of Carmina’s treatment of the futility of his position, Benjulia
releases his laboratory animals and kills himself.
In 1883 the Academy pronounced Heart and Science ‘thoroughly
readable and enthralling from its first page to its last’.16 Whatever
Psychology and Science in Collins’s Novels 191
their view of the quality of Collins’s polemic several other reviewers
also commented favourably on his storytelling ability. However, the
critical reputation of this late novel-with-a-purpose has been dogged
by Swinburne’s dismissal of it (in his obituary of Collins) as a ‘childish
and harmless onslaught on scientific research attempted if not
achieved by [a] simple-minded and innocent author’.17 For most of
the twentieth century Heart and Science was one of the less widely
read of Collins’s novels, but in the last ten years it has enjoyed
something of a renaissance. In her 1991 biography, Catherine Peters
remarks that she senses a return of Collins’s ‘old energy’ in Heart
and Science.18 Several new editions have recently appeared, so
twenty-first-century readers will be able to decide whether they
agree with Steve Farmer (editor of the Broadview edition) that this
novel is both readable and thought-provoking, and has more in
common with Collins’s novels of the 1860s than has previously been
acknowledged.
chapter 7
RECONTEXTUALIZING COLLINS
the afterlife of collins’s novels
Perhaps more than any other novelist in the nineteenth century, or
since, Collins was an author who recontextualized his own fiction
by adapting his novels for the stage, either at the time of their first
appearance (see Chapter 3), or as a way of reviving interest in
them or capitalizing on their success––or merely recycling the
material––some time after their first publication. Thus, at the end of
his most successful decade as a novelist Collins extensively rewrote
the novel that had made his name for the London stage. Collins’s
own adaptation of The Woman in White opened at the Olympic
Theatre in October 1871 and was an immediate success with both
audiences and critics. For the stage version Collins dropped the
dramatic scene in which Hartright meets Anne Catherick on the
road to Hampstead––evidence, as the reviewer for The Times noted
of the many changes that Collins made, that he had ‘firmly grasped
the rarely appreciated truth, that situations which appear dramatic
to the reader, are not necessarily dramatic when brought to the
ordeal of the footlights’.1
In adapting The Woman in White and later The Moonstone Collins
also demonstrated that he had firmly grasped the fact that situations
that are mysterious and dramatic for the first readers of a mystery
novel are considerably less so for a theatre audience which is already
very familiar with the plot of that novel. Collins addressed this prob-
lem by removing much of the mystery that was such an important
part of the novel’s plot and, instead, generated dramatic tension by
using the dramatic irony which results from the audience’s superior
knowledge of the characters’ situations. Thus, in the stage version of
The Woman in White the family relationship between Anne and
Laura is revealed early on (in a scene not found in the original novel),
and the substitution plot is made very obvious to the audience. Collins
clearly felt that his complex fictional plots had to be severely com-
pressed and his extensive cast of characters considerably reduced
Recontextualizing Collins 193
for successful translation to the Victorian stage. He explained his
methods in the programme for the Olympic Theatre production of
The Woman in White:
[The dramatist] has not hesitated, while preserving the original story in
substance, materially to alter it in form. Scenes which he dismissed, when
writing as a novelist, in a few lines, he has developed, when writing as a
dramatist, into situations which more than once occupy an entire act. On
the other hand, passages carefully elaborated in the book have been in some
cases abridged and in others omitted altogether, as unsuitable to the play.
This method of treatment has necessarily resulted in much that is entirely
new in the invention of incident and in the development of character,
being the presentation of the story of the novel in a purely dramatic form.2
Collins opted for a similar kind of compression in the stage
version of Man and Wife which was performed by Squire and
Marie Bancroft at London’s Prince of Wales Theatre in 1873. The
fascinating sub-plot concerning Hester Dethridge is not included
in the stage version, which has only four settings, one for each
act: ‘The Summer House at Windygates’, ‘The Inn at Craig Fernie’,
‘The Library’, and ‘The Picture Gallery’. However, Armadale was
the novel which Collins most radically altered in translating it from
page to stage. He wrote a play entitled Armadale in 1866, which was
published in an edition of only twenty-five copies (by Smith, Elder),
largely to protect his own copyright in stage adaptations of his novel.
The play Armadale was quite different from the novel on which it
was based. Set ‘in our own time’, whereas the novel is set in 1851, the
play compresses the action into three acts. The first, set in the park
at Thorpe-Ambrose during a ‘fancy fair’ to raise funds for a local
infirmary, brings together Dr Downward, Mrs Oldershaw, and Lydia
Gwilt (who now conspire to ensnare Allan Armadale in a marriage
trap), Allan and Neelie Milroy (who plan an elopement), and Ozias
Midwinter, whose confession of his love for Lydia gives her the
idea for the marriage plot. Act Two presents Lydia in her London
lodgings masquerading as the widow of Allan Armadale (who
has ostensibly perished at sea), only to find her plot disrupted by
Allan’s return. The act closes with Ozias’s reappearance and Lydia’s
decalaration that ‘I am not your wife’. The final act takes place in
Downward’s sanatorium. Its events are closely based on the sana-
torium scene in the novel, but it is dramatically dominated by
Lydia’s soliloquizing in the manner of Lady Macbeth. Armadale was
Recontextualizing Collins 195
never staged, but Collins worked on another adaptation with his
French friend François Regnier, and an English version partly based
on this collaboration was performed as Miss Gwilt at the Alexandra
Theatre in Liverpool in December 1875 and London’s Globe
Theatre in April 1876. This drama in five acts was more melo-
dramatic than the three-act version, had shorter speeches, more
characters and stage action, and more varied settings–– the third act
is set in Naples. Miss Gwilt also gave a far more sympathetic por-
trayal of Lydia than either the earlier dramatization or the original
novel, and it recast Dr Downward as the main villain of the piece.
Collins also made drastic changes to The Moonstone when, in an
attempt to capitalize on his theatrical successes of the 1870s, he came
to adapt this novel for performance as a drama in three acts at the (by
then) Royal Olympic Theatre in 1877. First he reduced the period
and scope of the action from five years in various settings to twenty-
four hours ‘in the present time’, and a single setting: the inner hall of
Rachel Verinder’s country house in Kent. Second, knowing that his
story would be familiar to most members of the audience, he allowed
them to witness Franklin’s theft of the diamond at the end of Act
One and used the remaining two acts to unfold the explanation of
what they had witnessed. He also made extensive changes to the
characters. The Indians, Murthwaite, Rosanna Spearman, Limping
Lucy Yolland, Ezra Jennings, and the London characters are all
dropped, Godfrey Ablewhite’s role is considerably reduced and his
reasons for committing the theft are merely hinted at, Betteredge
becomes a comic buffoon, and Miss Clack is given a more prominent
role than she has in the novel, joining Betteredge in comical asides
and slapstick routines. The resulting drama only ran for nine weeks
and received rather mixed reviews. The Athenaeum was not alone in
its opinion that it was obvious from the outset that ‘a work so ambi-
tious in aim, and so composite in nature, could not without some
sacrifice of character and story be brought within the compass of a
play’, and that there must have been ‘some means of obtaining the
desired result at a sacrifice less damaging than that of the whole
character and conception of the novel’.3
As well as adapting his novels for the stage, Collins, following the
example of Dickens, also adapted his fiction for the public readings
he gave in England, the United States, and Canada in the early 1870s
(see Chapter 3). The centrepiece of his North American tour in
196 Recontextualizing Collins
the autumn and spring of 1873–4 was ‘The Dream Woman’, a
supernatural tale which he had originally written for the Christmas
1855 number of Household Words. This story, which was later
included in The Queen of Hearts as ‘Brother Morgan’s Story of the
Dream Woman’, relates the strange history of Isaac Scatchard, an
ostler, who wakes on the night of his birthday to see an apparition
about to stab him. Seven years later he marries a woman who,
according to his disapproving mother, bears an uncanny resemblance
to his description of the dream woman. Following their marriage
Isaac’s wife takes to drink and fulfils his mother’s fears and partially
fulfils the prophecy of the dream by attacking him on the night of his
birthday. She subsequently disappears, but the fear that she will
return to complete her deadly purpose haunts Isaac for the rest of his
life and prevents him from sleeping. In preparing this story for public
reading Collins expanded significantly on his original, adding a great
deal of descriptive and circumstantial detail, and in the process
removing some of its mystery, its suggestion of the uncanny, and the
slightly threatening openness of its ending. The reading version,
which took some two hours to perform, is a more sensational tale in
which the dream woman is a fallen woman who succeeds in her
deadly intent. It clearly offended some of Collins’s audience and the
local press when he read it in Philadelphia in October 1873: ‘It was
not pleasant to hear a famous Englishman describing, before several
hundred pure girls, how one wretched, fallen woman, after mysteri-
ously killing her man, had captivated two more, and stabbed another
to death in a drunken frenzy.’4
Collins on Film and Television
Two decades after his death Collins’s novels were adapted for the new
medium of silent moving pictures that began to replace the melo-
dramatic theatre in the early twentieth century. Collins’s popularity
with the makers of melodramatic silent movies is perhaps unsurpris-
ing given his own associations with the stage melodrama–– as actor,
playwright, and borrower of its conventions. As well as silent screen
adaptations of The Woman in White and The Moonstone (see below),
there was a silent version of The Dead Secret (directed by Stanner
E. V. Taylor) in 1913, and no less than four different versions of The
New Magdalen between 1910 and 1914. This flurry of interest in one
Recontextualizing Collins 197
of Collins’s less successful later novels is intriguing. This novel had
sold much better in the United States than it had in England when it
first appeared. Despite some disapproving comments on its morality,
the stage version of The New Magdalen had been one of the most
frequently performed of Collins’s plays in England. The stage ver-
sion was less of a success in America, but it was still being performed
in 1882, when Oscar Wilde saw a stunning performance by Clara
Morris as Mercy Merrick. The New Magdalen’s portrayal of a female
victim struggling against both unjust social exclusion and her own
selfish instincts struck a chord with the debates about the nature and
social role of women generated by the turn-of-the-century women’s
movement. No doubt its popularity with makers of silent movies also
derived, in part, from the opportunities it provided for actresses to
show off their range in the title role.
Later in the twentieth century several of Collins’s novels and
stories were adapted for cinema, and, more frequently, for radio
(either as readings or in dramatized form), and for television, first as
genre pieces, and then as nineteenth-century classics. Unsurpris-
ingly, The Woman in White and The Moonstone, his two most endur-
ingly popular novels, have been the most frequently adapted for all
three media. However, on the whole Collins has not been well served
by cinema, and there are no great or controversial screen adaptations
of his work to compare with David Lean’s Great Expectations or
Roman Polanski’s Tess. Perhaps the most successful cinematic ‘adap-
tations’ of Collins’s fiction have been the indirect ones, in which his
plot situations, character types, dream scenes, and his creation of
atmosphere and suspense have influenced the development of the
psychological thriller by directors such as Alfred Hitchcock. Indi-
vidual novels by Collins have transferred more successfully to the
small screen. Indeed, more than one television critic has observed
that The Woman in White and The Moonstone reveal Collins as a
prototype television script-writer. These two novels are also the pro-
genitors of two of the genres that became the staples of the small
screen in the twentieth century–– the thriller and the detective yarn.
Of all of Collins’s novels, it is The Woman in White that has been
the most frequently and variously reproduced. Its basic plot–– reread
as a story of damsels in distress, their imprisonment and persecution
by sinister aristocrats, and their rescue by a modest but noble young
hero–– lent itself well to the melodramatic treatment of the silent
198 Recontextualizing Collins
cinema, and gave rise to three productions in this medium, in 1912,
1913, and 1929. Something of the style of the 1912 version (produced
by the Tannhauser Film Corporation) can be inferred from the
breathless account which appeared in Bioscope on 18 January 1913:
The scene opens with the escape from the asylum of Ann Catherine [sic],
‘The Woman in White,’ who secures a hiding place in the house of an old
friend in the village. At the same time at the ‘big house’ . . . Laura Fairlie,
the squire’s daughter and heiress, is waiting for the arrival of Walter
Hartright, her new drawing master. Hartright meets the ‘Woman in
White, and her appearance leads him to misdirect the keeper when, later,
they ask him in what direction the lunatic has gone. Walter falls in love
with his pupil, and learns that she shares his feeling, but a letter brings the
lovers to a realization of the hopelessness of their dream. Sir Percival
Glyde, the fiancé of Laura, announces an approaching visit . . . Laura
parts from Walter, who seeks forgetfulness in foreign travel. . . . [Follow-
ing the marriage of Sir Percival and Laura] Ann confronts Sir Percival
with the words, ‘I am not mad, and you are not Sir Percival,’ but his
passion frightens her and she falls insensible . . .5
Bioscope goes on to relate how, struck by Anne’s resemblance to
Laura, Sir Percival drugs his wife and leaves her prone body outside
the gates of the lunatic asylum, where she is discovered and assumed
to be the escaped Anne. In fact, Anne has died of shock at
Sir Percival’s outburst––‘ but not before she has scribbled a message
in her own blood inside a book’ at the Glydes’ house. In this film
Walter and Laura are reunited as they are in the novel, but, in
another departure from Collins’s story, they go together to confront
Sir Percival, who denies that Laura is his wife. The denouement is
brought about when a servant discovers the book in which Anne
had written her dying message, which reveals that the proof that
Sir Percival is not who he claims to be is to be found in the register of
the old church. Laura and Walter hurry to the church, but Sir Percival
is before them, intent on destroying the papers. An overturned lamp
sets the building alight and Sir Percival dies after confessing the
truth, leaving Laura and Walter united at last. Perhaps the most
remarkable feature of this film version is its complete removal from
the plot of two of the main characters in Collins’s original, Marian
and Fosco–– an even more surprising omission than Collins’s own
cutting of Rosanna Spearman and Ezra Jennings from his stage
adaptation of The Moonstone.
Recontextualizing Collins 199
The second of the silent movie versions of The Woman in White
(another American production by Gem), also leaves Marian out of
the picture but gives a prominent place to Fosco, who is forced to
leave Italy after betraying his fellow conspirators, and, together with
his wife, takes charge of a young heiress. A drawing master falls in
love with Fosco’s charge but such a marriage does not suit the Count
and he marries her off to Sir Percival Glyde. When she refuses to pay
his debts, her new husband (assisted by his accomplice Fosco), first
incarcerates Lady Glyde in a lunatic asylum under another identity,
and then replaces her in his household with the woman in white–– a
sick girl who resembles Lady Glyde. The sick girl dies and is buried
as Lady Glyde. Lady Glyde herself escapes from the asylum and
is reunited with her drawing master. Confronted with his crime,
Sir Percival accidentally upsets a lamp and dies, but not before being
forgiven by his wife, who subsequently marries Hartright. Fosco
meanwhile is assassinated, having been tracked down by his Italian
co-conspirators.
The first British silent film version of The Woman in White was
directed by Herbert Wilcox in 1929. This movie certainly conveys
the air of strangeness and mystery that marks the original story, and
it also sticks much more closely to the original than do its shorter
American predecessors. Wilcox’s most significant departure from
Collins’s text is his treatment of Fosco’s death–– which he presents
as a suicide. George King’s Crimes at the Dark House (1939) took far
greater liberties with Collins’s novel. In this melodrama, Tod
Slaughter, one of the last great barnstormers of the British melo-
dramatic theatre, plays the role of an evil count who (in a very loose
adaptation of Collins’s plot) enlists the help of an escapee from a
lunatic asylum to masquerade as his murdered wife. As Collins’s
literary reputation began to advance beyond that of merely the
Victorian best-seller, critics–– if not cinema audiences–– became
more preoccupied with the issue of the ‘faithfulness’ of screen adap-
tations. For example, Peter Godfrey’s 1947 Warner Bothers film was
castigated for not sticking sufficiently closely to the original and for
using American actors (with American accents). On the other hand
he was both praised and blamed for the fidelity with which he repro-
duced Collins’s narrative: some reviewers thought he had succeeded
in capturing both the atmosphere and the period, whilst others
thought that Collins’s story was simply too long and complicated to
200 Recontextualizing Collins
be condensed into a one-and-a-half-hour film. It is worth noting that
this film points up some of Collins’s ambiguities, and perhaps dis-
plays an immediately post-war preference for the feisty woman and
interest in the fluidity and multiplicity of relationships, by changing
Collins’s ending: in this version Laura finds fulfilment through
motherhood (having borne Percivel’s child) and Walter proclaims his
love for Marian.
The Woman in White was first offered to British and American
television audiences in 1957 and 1960 respectively. These early tele-
vision versions were short anthology pieces: the British version was
first transmitted as one of the ‘Hour of Mystery’ dramas by ABC
Television, and in the United States Collins’s novel was also
condensed into just under an hour for the ‘Dow Hour of Great
Mysteries’. The Woman in White was first given the full BBC Sunday
classic treatment in a fairly faithful six-part adaptation by Michael
Voysey (shown on BBC1 from 2 October until 6 November 1966),
with Jennifer Hilary playing both Laura and Anne, Nicholas Pennell
as Walter Hartright, Alethea Charlton as Marian, Francis de Wolff as
Fosco, and Geoffrey Bayldon ‘exquisitely pained as the hypo-
chondriac connoisseur’ Frederick Fairlie.6 The first colour television
version of The Woman in White appeared on BBC2 in five fifty-five
minute episodes running from 14 April until 12 May 1982; it was
later shown in the United States on public television’s ‘mystery’
series in 1985. This adaptation (by Ray Jenkins) works hard to find
inventive ways of addressing the key problem that faces any writer
who seeks to translate The Woman in White from the page to the stage
or screen: how to negotiate the fact that Collins’s narrative is, in fact,
a series of narratives, each told by a different character who narrates
his or her own version of events as if he or she were in a witness box
in a court of law. One of Jenkins’s responses to this challenge is
to translate some of the individual character’s musings into dialogue
(this works particularly well in the case of Walter). For his part, the
director (John Bruce), makes good use of close-up reaction shots,
and recurring motifs (such as the sketch Walter makes of his first
meeting with Anne Catherick). Interestingly, the absence of the
individual narratives, each with its own distinctive voice and perspec-
tive, has the effect of liberating the characters from the perceptual
frameworks through which they are mediated to the readers of
Collins’s text. Thus Laura is freed from the straitjacket of Walter’s
Recontextualizing Collins 201
and Marian’s infantilizing narratives about her, and Marian, freed
from Walter’s mediating perceptions, is presented directly as a beauti-
ful and independent young woman. This representation of Laura
(played by Jenny Seagrove) and Marian (played by Diana Quick)
undoubtedly owes something to the women’s movement of the late
1970s which made the writer, director, and actors alert to Collins’s
mixed responses to the women’s movement of the later 1850s.
The two-part television film directed by Tim Fywell and shown
on BBC1 at Christmas 1997 also follows the modern tendency to put
Marian at the centre of the narrative and to cast a very attractive
actress in the role (in this case Tara Fitzgerald). In this production
Marian is the first character the audience sees, and hers is the first
voice we hear. It is also Marian whose voice-overs move the narrative
along, and thus she replaces Walter as the ‘editor’ and shaper of the
story. This thoroughly modern Marian is not constrained by the
petticoat existence about which she complains in Collins’s original,
but rushes up to London, unchaperoned, to try to discover the truth
about Laura’s death and Anne’s disappearance, and subsequently
dashes around the countryside in search of Anne in the company of a
man (Walter) to whom she is not married. She resorts to a form of
sexual blackmail on two occasions. First, in order to force Walter join
her in the search for Anne Catherick, she threatens to throw herself
on the mercies of the rough men in the bar where a disgraced Walter
(see below) is earning his living by making sketches of the men and
their paramours. She also obtains an appointment for a medical
examination with the doctor who had first committed Anne to an
asylum, and having stripped to her petticoats for the examination,
she threatens to accuse him of sexual assault unless he discloses the
whereabouts of the asylum in which Anne (actually Laura) has been
incarcerated.
David Pirie, who wrote the screenplay for this production, clearly
had to be fairly ruthless with Collins’s complicated and capacious
narrative in order to condense it into a two-hour film. He made
important revisions to the end and beginning of Collins’s story by
cutting all reference to Fosco’s demise and transplanting the thrilling
Hampstead Heath scene to Cumberland, where Walter’s eerie first
encounter with the woman in white takes place as he walks from
the railway station to Limmeridge House to take up his new post as
drawing master. By locating the meeting with Anne in the vicinity of
202 Recontextualizing Collins
the house where she grew up Pirie also seeks to reduce the Victorian
novelist’s reliance on an over-abundance of rather extraordinary
coincidences. Pirie also reduces the novel’s geographical range by
confining the action to England: in this version Walter does not go off
to learn how to be a man by confronting himself and overcoming the
terrors of nature in the jungles of Brazil when he flees Limmeridge,
but rather he journeys into the nether world of darkest London.
This very late-twentieth-century adaptation of The Woman in
White also updates some of the novel’s social concerns. The mid-
nineteenth-century story of domestic imprisonment and asylum
abuse also becomes a story of domestic violence and child abuse. In
this version Laura is in physical fear of her husband and she has the
bruises to show both Marian and the audience why she is so afraid of
him. One of Anne Catherick’s secrets (and one of the causes of her
derangement) is the fact that Sir Percival had been in the habit of
visiting her bed ‘as a husband does his wife’ when she was a mere
child of 12. Here, as in most late-twentieth-century adaptations of
Collins, the sexual undertones of the novel are not only brought to
the surface but they are also emphasized and additional details are
provided. For example, there are a number of sexually charged
encounters between the drawing master and his pupil which are
voyeuristically observed by Marian. Moreover, in this version Walter
does not leave Limmeridge in an act of self-suppression and advised
by Marian acting as his moral mentor, but instead is dismissed from
the house when a maid accuses him (falsely as it turns out) of
trying to make her undress. The maid is later revealed as one of Sir
Percival’s co-conspirators and also his mistress. James Wilby’s Sir
Percival adds an air of perverse sexuality, and even sadism to Col-
lins’s original characterization, and this is underlined by Laura in a
dialogue with Marian–– which was added by the screenwriter–– in
which she confesses that she had not realized that a man could take
pleasure in ‘the act’ even when he hates his wife.
Perhaps responding to the observations of late-twentieth-century
literary critics and cultural historians on Collins’s fascination with
issues of heredity and degeneration, Pirie added to the novel’s sug-
gestions of hereditary degeneration by changing the relationship
between Marian, Laura, and Anne. In Collins’s novel Marian and
Laura are half-sisters who share the same sensible, bourgeois mother,
and Laura and Anne are half-sisters who share the same effete and
Recontextualizing Collins 203
morally lax aristocratic father. In Pirie’s screenplay all three are
half-sisters who share the same father–– Mr Fairlie. Much is made of
Marian’s sense of their father’s sexual degeneracy, both as the father
of an illegitimate child and as a man who subsequently connives
(or so it is implied) at that child’s sexual abuse at the hands of
Sir Percival. Marian is represented as coming to fear that both she
and Laura may have inherited their father’s propensity to sexual
degeneracy and moral degradation, and the film closes with a shot of
Marian clutching Laura and Walter’s daughter Anne to her breast as
her voice-over expresses the wish that the cycle has come to an end
at last. In their search for late-twentieth-century relevance and reso-
nance Pirie and Fywell do not neglect the Gothic and melodramatic
elements of Collins’s story–– Pirie even has Marian and Laura discuss
their taste for the Gothic novel in one added scene. The deranged
Anne haunting the woods around Limmeridge is extremely melo-
dramatic, as are Marian’s dreams of Laura’s fate. Excellent camera-
work also brings out the filmic nature of Collins’s hallucinatory
imagination.
The most recent adaptation of The Woman in White is also the
most unusual, indeed, as far as I know it is unique. In July 2003 at
his private arts festival at Sydmonton, his English country home,
Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, composer of the extremely successful
musicals Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Phantom of the Opera, and
Cats (based on T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats),
presented parts of his semi-operatic musical, The Woman in White.
The Sydmonton presentation, which was directed by Sir Trevor
Nunn, was a workshop version of the first act of the show which was
to replace Lloyd Webber’s Les Misérables when it ended its nineteen-
year run at London’s Palace theatre in 2004. The book for this
musical, very freely based on Collins’s novel, is by Charlotte Jones, a
young playwright whose extremely successful 2001 play, Humble
Boy, updates Hamlet. The songs for The Woman in White are written
by David Zippel, whose previous work includes City of Angels
(1989), a spoof of 1940s detective movies. The full production
opened at the Palace Theatre in September 2004 to mixed reviews,
both for the music and the liberties taken with Collins’s novel. Many
admirers of the book were particularly disappointed to see that
although Jones’s adaptation followed recent trends in giving the
narrative a feminist slant and putting Marian Halcombe at the centre
204 Recontextualizing Collins
of the action it also transforms Marian from Walter’s feisty and
resourceful assistant into a love-sick woman pining for his affection.
(This shift is underlined by the lyricist who gives Marian the con-
stant refrain ‘I close my eyes and still I see his face’). Even more
alarming is the spectacle of Marian attempting to seduce Count Fosco,
especially as this Count is played for laughs by Michael Crawford
who is coiffed with a curly wig and made up to look hugely fat. Fosco
is prominent in other ways, and he is given one of the liveliest songs,
in which he celebrates his own ability to ‘get away with anything’.
On the other hand, Laura and Anne are reproduced fairly faithfully
as twin victims of their crucially different circumstances, and Walter
is presented as a fairly straightforward hero. While it would be
unreasonable to expect a musical to replicate the complexity of the
novel’s innovative narrative method (as Michael Billington pointed
out in the Guardian on 16 September 2004), Trevor Nunn’s produc-
tion is quite successful in conveying its multiple settings by means of
the designer William Dudley’s shifting video projections. The use of
this early twenty-first-century technology and cinematic technique
is sometimes suggestive of the video game and sometimes of the
nineteenth-century diorama or sensation drama. The sensation
theatre is particularly strongly evoked in the second act when a
railway train rushes noisily out of a tunnel which is projected on to
the set, and seems about to crash into the front row of the stalls.
As far as I know, there are no plans to stage a musical version of
The Moonstone. However, one could envisage some splendid song
opportunities for the lovelorn Rosanna Spearman, the embittered
Limping Lucy, and the garrulous Miss Clack. Moreover, Franklin’s
opium-induced re-enactment of the theft of the diamond has dis-
tinct balletic possibilities. Notwithstanding the absence of a musical
version, in most other respects the twentieth-century history of
adaptations of The Moonstone follows a remarkably similar pattern to
that of The Woman in White. There were at least three silent versions
at the beginning of the century, all entitled The Moonstone. The first,
an American production of 1909, gave great prominence to the hyp-
notic trance. Two years later a French production focused on the
curse which is visited on those who steal the diamond. A second
American production followed in 1915 and apart from changing
the surname of the villain from Ablewhite to White it stuck fairly
faithfully to Collins’s original. The same cannot be said of the next
Recontextualizing Collins 205
American version (1934, with sound), which relocated Collins’s
narrative to the 1930s, renamed some of his characters (all of whom
have transatlantic accents), and rearranged his plot, most notably by
making the doctor who drugs Franklin the father of the heroine and
hence Franklin Blake’s prospective father-in-law. In this version
Franklin, accompanied by his Hindu servant Yandoo (an invention
of the screenwriter), arrives on a dark and stormy night at Vandier
Manor, the home of a doctor, Sir John Verinder. Franklin’s mission
is to deliver the diamond–– which, as in the novel has been stolen
from an Indian Temple in 1799–– to his fiancée Anne Verinder. Anne
is warned to lock the diamond away, but instead, places it under her
pillow, from where it is stolen as she sleeps. Inspector Cuff of Scotland
Yard is called in to investigate, and duly questions in turn Anne (who
refuses to say anything), a money-lender, the Indian servant, Bet-
teredge the female housekeeper (an interesting change of sex here), a
parlourmaid with a criminal past, Franklin, and his cousin Godfrey
Ablewhite (in this version, a dealer in rare books). A delirious Sir
John Verinder subsequently reveals that he had drugged Franklin’s
bedtime glass of milk on the night of the theft, and Cuff arranges for
Franklin (without his knowledge) to be given another drugged
nightcap. Franklin repeats his sleepwalking actions and reveals that
he was intercepted by Godfrey. Cuff speeds off to London to appre-
hend the thief (Godfrey) as he arrives at the money-lender’s with the
diamond. It is not Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, as the Monthly
Film Bulletin noted when the film came out: ‘there is enough of the
plot left to make it difficult to understand if one does not know the
original, but not enough to say that it is the original.’7
Television has been rather kinder to The Moonstone, with three
quite sympathetically adapted BBC versions to date. The first (shot
in black-and-white film and shown in seven thirty-minute episodes
between Sunday, 21 August and Sunday, 2 October in 1959) was
produced by Shaun Sutton, later head of Drama at the BBC
and producer of a wide range of material from Shakespeare’s plays
to Dr Who. The screenplay was written by A. R. Rawlinson, whose
earlier screen adaptations of nineteenth-century novels and plays
included Tom Taylor’s 1863 stage melodrama, The Ticket of Leave
Man, Rider Haggard’s novel King Solomon’s Mines, and Dinah
Mulock Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman. The Irish-born playwright
Hugh Leonard wrote the screenplay for the five-part version of The
206 Recontextualizing Collins
Moonstone directed by Paddy Russell and shown by the BBC between
16 January and 13 February 1972. This production was strong on
period detail and it also worked hard to enmesh the viewer in the
intricacies of the puzzle at the centre of the plot. Indeed, at some risk
of sacrificing pace, Leonard and Russell took great pains in the open-
ing episode to lay out all of the elements of the plot and to establish
the characters. A strong cast included Basil Dignam as Betteredge,
Peter Sallis as an irascible Bruff, Robin Ellis as Franklin, Martin Jarvis
as Godfrey, Vivien Heilbrun as a strong-minded but capricious
Rachel and Anna Cropper as Rosanna.
The most recent BBC television version of The Moonstone was
shown in two one-hour parts on 29 and 30 December 1996. The
screenplay was written by the playwright Kevin Elyot, the author of
a stage version of The Moonstone first performed in 1990. In his stage
play Elyot retained the multiple narrators used in Collins’s original,
but in the television version he relied heavily on Betteredge (splen-
didly played by Peter Vaughan) to read out letters which explain the
plot, or to pick up and disseminate essential plot information during
the course of his duties in the Verinder household. Anthony Sher’s
Cuff emphasizes (and adds to) the quirks of Collins’s detective and
in doing so underlines for a late-twentieth-century audience the
nineteenth-century origins of the eccentric professional detectives
who fill their television screens in series after series. To some extent
this production sidelines the aristocratic characters who are osten-
sibly at the centre of the story. Rachel Verinder (played by Keeley
Hawes) and Franklin Blake (Greg Wise) are less interesting than
Collins’s originals. Rosanna Spearman (Lesley Sharp), on the other
hand, is both spiky and complex and her death in the Shivering
Sands is done in a brilliantly atmospheric close-up. This production
makes good use of visual effects to bring the different worlds of the
novel into sharp relief. The film opens with a vivid and colourful scene
showing the theft of the diamond in the storming of Seringapatam,
and cuts immediately to a very white image of Franklin Blake, who
has just awoken from this dream of the assault and who is lying
beside his sleeping wife in their bed in a quiet country house whose
peace is disturbed by the violent dream. Throughout the film the
colourful garden and the warm domestic interiors of the Verinder
house are juxtaposed with the stark grey image of the Shivering
Sands. The closing shots of the production provide a visual reprise
Recontextualizing Collins 207
of these different worlds as a strangely dreamlike Indian scene
depicting the purification of the Brahmins is followed by a repeat of
the scene of Franklin and Rachel sleeping in their bed, and then a
long fading shot of the Shivering Sands. One effect of these juxta-
posed scenes is to suggest the oriental otherness of the Indians;
another is to suggest that empire is a troubling element of the English
psyche, a nightmare from which the English paterfamilias struggles
to awake.
Although The Woman in White, together with The Moonstone, have
been the most copied and adapted of Collins’s novels, the most
recent film version of a Collins novel reworks one of his least repro-
duced novels. Radha Bharadwaj’s Basil (1997), first shown on the
American Movie Classics channel in the United States in November
1998, is, as far as I know, the only film version to date of Collins’s
first novel of modern life, and, indeed, the only other twentieth-
century reworking of Basil seems to have been a BBC radio adap-
tation in 1983. Bharadwaj, who wrote, produced, and directed this
film, has added a pre-history to Collins’s narrative. Her film opens
with a long section on Basil’s childhood and early youth that seeks to
give its own explanation of Basil’s family circumstances, which in
Collins’s novel are conveyed in a few economical paragraphs. In
Bharadwaj’s version Basil (played by Christian Slater) does not meet
Margaret Sherwin on an omnibus, but instead is introduced to Julia
(as Margaret is renamed) by Mannion, whom he has already met in
the film’s opening section, when he saves Basil from drowning.
Bharadwaj points up the resonances of Collins’s tale of mid-
nineteenth-century modern life with the realities of late-twentieth-
century postmodern life by focusing on the novel’s preoccupation
with money, class, and cross-class relations. At the end of the decade
in which the watchword of many was ‘greed is good’, Julia (played by
Claire Forlani) is represented as an avaricious young woman who
responds to Basil’s courtship of her with disdain and contempt, but
nevertheless makes a calculating marriage with the blessing of her
mercenary father (played by Derek Jacobi). Mannion and Julia con-
duct a prolonged secret affair until they are discovered in bed by
Basil, who launches a ferocious attack on Mannion, whom he leaves
for dead. Basil is rejected by his father and is forced to work for a
living. He is subsequently pursued by a vengeful Mannion who has
been seriously disfigured by the attack. As in the novel, Mannion
Recontextualizing Collins 209
explains his actions in terms of his desire to avenge the mistreatment
of a member of his own family by one of Basil’s relatives. However,
Bharadwaj sexualizes the revenge plot by locating Mannion’s enmity
towards Basil in the sexual misdemeanours of Basil’s brother rather
than in the soured business relations of his own and Basil’s father. In
this version, Mannion is motivated by the desire to avenge the death
of his sister, who has died as the result of an attempted abortion after
being seduced and abandoned by Basil’s reprobate brother Ralph.
Another tale of 1852, ‘A Terribly Strange Bed’ has had several
outings as a genre piece. It has appeared in three different versions as
a kind of mystery anthology piece for television. In 1949 it was one
of the early fifteen-minute episodes in a new American television
network series called Fireside Theatre. In 1961 it formed the second
act of Ida Lupino’s ‘Trio for Terror’, a compendium episode in a
series called Thriller which was shown on American television. In the
early 1970s Collins’s story appeared in yet another series of mysteries,
when it was directed by Alan Cooke for an Anglo-American televi-
sion anthology production entitled Orson Welles Great Mysteries.
This twenty-four-minute colour film, shown in the United States in
1973 and in Britain in July 1974, was adapted by Anthony Fowles
and starred Rupert Davies and Colin Baker.
Collins in Print
Collins’s shift in status, from a popular nineteenth-century author
whose books and stories were thought to be suitable for adaptation
for genre or mystery slots on radio or television to a ‘classic’ author
whose novels are given the full-blown BBC classic treatment or
served up as a Christmas feast, is mirrored by his explosion back into
print in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Although The
Woman in White and The Moonstone have never been out of print
since their first publication in the 1860s, by 1985 they were the only
two of Collins’s novels that were widely available. At the beginning
of the twenty-first century things look very different. At the time of
writing, No Name, Armadale, and The Law and the Lady have been
added to the Penguin Classics Library. The more extensive Oxford
World’s Classics series currently includes Armadale, Basil, The Dead
Secret, Hide and Seek, The Law and the Lady, Mad Monckton and Other
Stories, Man and Wife, Poor Miss Finch, and No Name, as well as the
210 Recontextualizing Collins
single-volume Miss or Mrs?, The Haunted Hotel, The Guilty River.
Unlike Penguin and Oxford, Sutton Publishing do not include The
Woman in White or The Moonstone in their list of Collins’s works.
However, they have made available several titles which have long
been out of circulation.8 These publishers’ lists are a sign of both a
renewal of interest in Collins’s work by the general reader and an
increase in his critical status in the last quarter of the twentieth
century. Another sign of his critical status was the inclusion of The
Woman in White and The Moonstone in the two hundred and fifty
‘major’ works of literature that were to be sent out to every secondary
school in Britain as part of a joint project by Millennium Commission
and Everyman publishers (a further 1,500 sets of the books were to
be sent overseas under the auspices of the British Council).
Another way of looking at Collins in print at the turn of the
twenty-first century is to consider the ways in which his work has
been adapted or recontextualized by later writers. As an extremely
successful early exponent of the thriller, mystery, and detective
genres, Collins had a very important influence on the development
of the novelistic form of the thriller and the detective yarn both in
the latter part of the nineteenth century and in the twentieth cen-
tury. The Moonstone effectively established what were to become the
main features of a dominant form of the English detective novel for
the remainder of the nineteenth and the whole of the twentieth
century: it involves a crime committed in a quiet country house at
which a number of people have been gathered together by circum-
stance; it emerges that there is circumstantial evidence against virtu-
ally all of these people; the novel’s main mystery (the disappearance
of the diamond) is solved by gathering together some of the main
protagonists and re-enacting the crime; there is a blundering local
policeman (or policemen) who actively complicates the mystery
through his incompetence; the incompetent local policeman acts as a
foil to an eccentric but acute professional, in this case Sergeant Cuff,
the eccentric detective with a wry sense of humour and a passion for
growing roses, who ‘might have been a parson, or an undertaker–– or
anything else you like, except what he really was’ (First Period,
Chapter XII). Fictional detectives from Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sher-
lock Holmes to Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse all owe some-
thing to Cuff. Collins also formulated what were to become what
Dorothy L. Sayers, one of the twentieth-century ‘queens of crime’,
Recontextualizing Collins 211
described as the rules of fair play–– that ‘no vital clue should be
concealed, that reader and detective should start from scratch and
run neck and neck to the finish’.9 Another of the rules of the game of
the detective novel which Collins perfected was the prolongation of
the mystery by distributing the narrative between several narra-
tors–– each of whom only knows part of the story–– and interleaving
these narratives with the text of letters, diaries, and other documents
(a technique which is still used to great effect by current best-selling
authors such as Minette Walters).
Some contemporary novelists have returned to Collins’s work in a
more self-consciously referential manner. Sarah Waters is one
example of a late-twentieth-century novelist who has both emulated
and re-investigated her nineteenth-century predecessors (including
Collins) in her reworking of the sensation novel, the ghost story, the
tale of mystery and suspense, and the crime novel in Affinity (Virago,
1999) and Fingersmith (Virago, 2002). Like Collins, Waters focuses
on the duplicities and constraints of respectable Victorian society
and on the relationship between respectable middle-class society and
the other worlds of the working class and the criminal classes. Affinity
is a kind of ghost story set in and around a London women’s prison
in the 1870s. It shares Collins’s interest both in cross-class (and in
this case same-sex) liaisons and in seances and the mesmeric. The
form of Waters’s novel also owes something to Collins’s experiments
with narrative technique. Like many of Collins’s novels, this tale of
mystery and intrigue is told in the form of intertwined narratives––
in this case the diaries of the two women at the centre of the novel.
Waters’s next novel, Fingersmith, borrows some of its dark atmos-
phere as well as some of its plot elements from The Woman in White:
Richard Rivers, a dashing criminal, poses as a drawing master and
gains entry to the home of the effete scholarly uncle of a vulnerable
young heiress, Maud Lilly, in order to entrap her into marriage. Like
Collins’s Frederick Fairlie, Waters’s recluse lives surrounded by his
treasures, but in this case the treasures are the books and pictures
that comprise his extensive collection of pornography, for which–– in
a well-established Victorian taxonomic tradition–– he is preparing an
index (with the assistance of his niece). Like Sir Percival Glyde in
The Woman in White, Rivers is involved in a plot to rid himself of his
wife and gain access to a fortune by dumping her in an asylum.
Again, Waters borrows Collins’s technique of telling the story (or
212 Recontextualizing Collins
stories) from different points of view–– in this case, from the per-
spectives of the two women at the centre of the novel’s plot. If
anything, Waters outdoes her Victorian predecessor in the intricacy
of her plotting and in the surprise produced by an extremely deft
twist of the plot as the narration changes hands for the first time.
The Woman in White has also become caught up in the recent
fashion for sequels to, or revisions of, iconic novels of the nineteenth
century. James Wilson’s The Dark Clue (Faber, 2001) does at length
what many nineteenth-century readers probably did, at least briefly,
in their own imaginations–– he speculates on possible developments
in the relationship between Collins’s Walter Hartright and Marian
Halcombe. Wilson begins his novel by unpicking the ending of
Collins’s narrative. Collins’s novel ends by transporting Walter to
Limmeridge to join Laura and Marian in a ménage à trois dedicated
to the care of the heir of Limmeridge–– Walter and Laura’s first-
born–– and any subsequent children they may have. This ending
leaves unresolved the tension between Walter, the father of the heir
to a family fortune which includes a landed estate, and Walter the
aspiring professional who hitherto had been concerned to establish
himself in a ‘permanent engagement on the illustrated newspaper, to
which I was only occasionally attached’, and had succeeded in earn-
ing a steady income on which the family could live ‘simply and
quietly’ (The Story concluded by Walter Hartright, III). Wilson
begins by splitting up the ménage à trois with which Collins closes
The Woman in White, and maroons a pregnant Laura in Limmeridge
caring for her children, whilst Walter and Marian are left together in
the family’s London home. He picks up on Collins’s clue that the
unconventional and spirited Marian understands Walter better than
Laura ever could, and endows Marian with an understanding of the
frustrated artist who lies under the skin of the drawing master who
married his mistress:
[Y]ou have become restless, and distracted. You paint and draw less than
you did . . . you still harbour the faint suspicion that you have somehow
become a pensioner, and it is an agony to you . . . Worse still, you feel a
certain vacancy at the centre of your life. You have everything that, in the
eyes of the world, should make a man happy: a gentle and loving wife, two
beautiful children, a fine estate, and the regard of your brother artists. Yet
something is lacking: a cause capable of stirring your soul, and carrying
you beyond the concerns of family and home.10
Recontextualizing Collins 213
In an effort to assuage Walter’s frustration with the role of Victorian
paterfamilias and to give him a cause and purpose, Marian arranges
for him to become the biographer of the painter J. M. W. Turner. In
his quest to understand the mind of the great artist and to penetrate
the mysteries and secrets which surround his life Walter leaves the
drawing rooms of fashionable London and haunts the capital city’s
less salubrious regions. In the process Walter and Marian discover
something of their own hidden selves and desires. Wilson’s narra-
tive, as Collins’s is in part, is constructed in the form of diaries and
letters. However, the individual narratives which make up Wilson’s
narrative function rather differently from those which comprise
Collins’s tale. Collins’s Walter Hartright collects and marshals the
narratives and diaries of others in order to reveal the truth of events;
his purpose is to tell the whole story, a story which, were it not for
his efforts, would go untold under the pressure of the ‘lubricating
influences of oil of gold’ (The Story begun by Walter Hartright, I).
The story told by Wilson’s Hartright, on the other hand, is a twice-
(or even thrice-) buried tale. In Wilson’s novel Marian and Walter
confront their own buried lives as well as the buried life of their
biographical quarry, Turner, but they do so only to have Walter
re-bury the stories of these buried lives, as indicated in the statement
signed WH which prefaces the narrative:
This is a book begun, but not finished.
I could not finish it.
Many times I have come close to destroying it . . .
I could not bring myself to do it.
I have therefore given instructions that it should be sealed in a box, which
is to remain unopened until I, my wife, Laura, our sister, Marian Hal-
combe, and all our children are dead . . .
Collins in Criticism
In 1974 the editor of a collection of extracts designed to illustrate
the critical reception of Collins’s work in the nineteenth century
prefaced his volume with a slightly apologetic justification of the
claims of his chosen author on the attention of the twentieth-century
reader, and more especially, literary critic. Norman Page found it
214 Recontextualizing Collins
necessary to remind his readers that despite the fact that Collins was
one of the most popular and prolific authors of the second half of the
nineteenth century ‘only two novels have achieved undisputed classic
status’ and a mere ‘handful of others (Armadale, for instance, and No
Name) still retain some kind of currency’. The rest of Collins’s
substantial output, he adds, is ‘forgotten by all except the most dedi-
cated specialists’.11 In fact, the process of critical sifting, which
involved the ‘forgetting’ or downgrading of most of Collins’s sub-
stantial output apart from the four big novels of the 1860s, had
begun in the last decade of his career and was continued in obituaries
and reviews of his achievements following his death in September
1889. For example, some eighteen months before Collins’s death,
Harry Quilter struck a somewhat obituary tone in an essay for the
Contemporary Review, entitled ‘A Living Story-teller’, which he pre-
sented as an attempt to rescue from critical neglect ‘the last of that
group of great novelists whose work will make the fiction of the
Victorian era for ever famous’.12 Despite his continuing popularity
with readers, Quilter asserts, and despite his importance as an
inimitable storyteller, whose tightly organized plots–– at their best––
depend ‘on the influence exercised by character over circum-
stance’,13 ‘we rarely hear the name of Wilkie Collins mentioned in
England nowadays . . . [or] read a word in his praise, or hear of the
slightest claim being made on his behalf ’.14 In a long and detailed
essay, Quilter reviews Collins’s early career–– displaying an
unusually high regard for the humour of Hide and Seek (1854)–– as a
preparation for the height of his fictional achievement in the four
great novels of the 1860s. For Quilter, as for many critics before and
after him, The Woman in White was a groundbreaking text, ‘a book
which made a new era in novel-writing’ and ‘opened up a new view
of the art’.15 The enormous popularity of The Moonstone is acknow-
ledged, but Quilter regards this as ‘the least important’ of Collins’s
‘four finest novels’, and considerably less interesting than No Name,
which is said to be ‘the most fascinating’ of all of Collins’s fictions.16
The greatest accolade, however, is reserved for Armadale, as ‘the
most important’, indeed ‘the greatest’ of all Collins’s work and the
culmination of his powers as a novelist: ‘It has all the interest and
sustained purpose of The Woman in White, while it is drawn on a
much larger scale, and shows a much wider knowledge of character
. . . but it is more than this. It is . . . a successful attempt, to deal
Recontextualizing Collins 215
from the imaginative point of view with the doctrines of heredity,
both physical and moral’.17
Armadale was also ranked as one of Collins’s best novels–– a rank-
ing it shared with The Moonstone–– in the obituary article which
appeared in the Athenaeum just five days after his death. Like most
other immediately post-mortem assessors of Collins’s achievements
the Athenaeum’s obituarist also acknowledged the importance of The
Woman in White, but, rather unusually, this writer also gave honour-
able mention to some of the later novels, including Man and Wife
and The New Magdalen. More in keeping with what was to become
the settled view in the years immediately following Collins’s death,
Armadale was not ranked highly in the obituary in the Spectator,
which appeared on the same day as the Athenaeum’s (28 September
1887). However, the Spectator, like the Athenaeum, also included
Man and Wife in its list of Collins’s four main achievements–– the
others are The Woman in White, No Name, and The Moonstone, the
latter singled out as ‘the one which will live for years’.18 The poet
and critic A. C. Swinburne, writing in the Fortnightly Review some
four or five weeks later, gave a similar ranking of Collins’s novels,
which he offered as ‘the general opinion–– an opinion which seems to
me incontestable’, namely that The Woman in White and The Moon-
stone were the two works of ‘indisputable’ and ‘incomparable ability’,
with No Name ‘an only slightly less excellent example of as curious
and original a talent’.19 For Swinburne, Man and Wife ranks fourth,
even if it is some way behind the first three: ‘the first and best of
Wilkie Collins’s didactic or admonitory novels is so brilliant in
exposition of character, so dexterous in construction of incident, so
happy in evolution of event, that its place is nearer the better work
that preceded it than the poorer work which followed it’.20 Like most
late-nineteenth-century commentators on Collins, Swinburne was
very dismissive of most of the later fiction. He denounced The New
Magdalen as ‘silly, false and feeble in its sentimental cleverness’, and
found The Fallen Leaves ‘too ludicrously loathsome for comment or
endurance’.21 On the other hand he did not share in the general
condemnation of Heart and Science, which he pronounced ‘less
offensive’ and ‘more amusing’ than the latter two, and ‘the best––
after Man and Wife, and a good way after–– of all its writer’s moral or
didactic tales’.22 Few other commentators in the next few years
troubled to discriminate between the novels of Collins’s later years,
216 Recontextualizing Collins
but tended, like Andrew Lang, writing in the Contemporary Review
in January 1890, to offer a blanket dismissal of ‘the flood of later
novels, in which he so decidedly fell below his own standard [but
which] . . . will be forgotten’.23
These late-career and obituary reassessments of Collins’s work
returned time and again to the questions which had dominated
critical discussion of his fiction throughout his publishing life. Was
he a literary artist or a mere plot-maker and manufacturer of
effects? Was he a consummate and innovative storyteller who had
elevated a particular kind of storytelling into a new art form? Did
he sacrifice character to plot? Was he capable of creating credible
characters, or did he merely manufacture eccentrics, and did it
matter? Was he merely a producer of ‘light reading’ and an enter-
tainer who had a facility for mastering certain ‘low’ literary modes
and genres such as melodrama, sensation, mystery, and detection?
Could he be taken seriously as a social critic or as a commentator
on the human condition? By the end of Collins’s career some
critics, like Swinburne, were willing to concede that he was ‘in his
own way a genuine artist’, but that ‘the crowning merit, the
most distinctive quality of his very best work was to be . . . found
in the construction of an interesting and perplexing story,
well-conceived, well contrived, and well moulded into lifelike and
attractive shape’.24
The indisputable fact that Collins, in common with many of his
contemporaries, wrote a great deal over the course of a very long
career was often translated into the critical judgement that he wrote
too much and for far too long. His critical reputation also suffered
because, again like many of his contemporaries, he was associated
with popular or low genres and ephemeral modes of publication
(such as weekly or monthly periodicals, or newspapers). Like many
of his contemporaries, he also suffered in the general reaction
against Victorianism which had begun to set in by the last decade of
his career–– hence Quilter’s attempt to rescue one of ‘those authors
who have gladdened us in former days’.25 This reaction against the
Victorians became even more pronounced in the twenty or thirty
years following Collins’s death. He was one of several Victorian
authors whose reputations languished at the turn of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. He received the briefest of mentions in most
of the literary histories of the nineteenth century published during
Recontextualizing Collins 217
this period. George Saintsbury, for example, gives him only one
paragraph in The English Novel (1913), and he was not included in
the ‘English Men of Letters’ series edited by John Morley (which
had been inaugurated in 1878). ‘[S]igns of a considerable revival of
interest in the books of Wilkie Collins’ were detected in the American
edition of the Bookman in August 1912,26 and he was given fairly full
consideration in Walter C. Phillips’s Dickens, Reade, and Collins:
Sensation Novelists (1919)–– though Phillips tended to echo the con-
ventional judgement that Collins’s novels are dominated by plot and
structure and that his characters are ‘automata’.27 Collins also
appeared alongside Dickens and Reade as the subject of a fairly
unexceptionable chapter in the second volume of Oliver Elton’s A
Survey of English Literature, 1830–1880 (1920).
In fact, despite the fact that he received only brief, and often
condescending, mention in the standard literary histories of the first
two decades of the twentieth century, Collins’s novels never lacked
readers, and nor did their author lack champions. By the 1920s,
however, Collins’s reputation certainly began to undergo something
of a revival, not least at the hand of T. S. Eliot, in an essay on ‘Wilkie
Collins and Dickens’, which appeared in the Times Literary Supple-
ment (4 August 1927), and in his introduction to the 1928 World’s
Classics edition of The Moonstone. In these essays, Eliot made con-
siderable claims for Collins as both a master of melodrama and an
extremely skilled exponent of the genre of detective fiction (claims
that were echoed by Dorothy L. Sayers in her introduction to The
Omnibus of Crime, published in New York in 1929). In describing
Collins’s contribution to the development of the English detective
novel, Eliot implicitly rejected a dominant Victorian judgement of
Collins as a mere plot machinist or chess player: ‘the detective story,
as created by Poe, is something as specialised and intellectual as a
chess problem; whereas the best English detective fiction [which
Collins inaugurated] has relied less on the beauty of the mathemat-
ical problem and much more on the intangible human element’.28
Eliot implicitly took issue with a critical tradition which had
devalued a novelist such as Collins on the grounds that his works
were merely thrilling or melodramatic, and instead he looked back to
(or possibly invented) a Victorian golden age in which there were no
false distinctions between ‘such terms as “high-brow fiction”,
“thrillers” and “detective fiction”’ , an age which realized that
218 Recontextualizing Collins
‘melodrama is perennial and that the craving for it is perennial and
must be satisfied’, an age in which ‘[t]he best novels were thrilling’.29
Eliot’s essay in the Times Literary Supplement did much for Collins’s
reputation by discussing him in the same breath as Dickens (even
though he judged him ‘a Dickens without genius’30), by champion-
ing him as the writer who first perfected the art of the English
detective novel, and by defending his abilities as a creator of char-
acter. More than this, however, Eliot also argued for the importance
of Armadale, The Frozen Deep, The Haunted Hotel, and The New
Magdalen–– as classics of melodrama. There is no contemporary
novelist, Eliot opined, ‘who could not learn something from Collins
in the art of interesting and exciting the reader’.31
Eliot’s essays were symptomatic of a broader revival of interest in
Collins in the late 1920s and early 1930s. His fiction was praised
(even as his negative influence on Dickens was lamented) in Hugh
Walpole’s 1929 essay on ‘Novelists of the ’Seventies’ (in Harley
Granville-Barker, ed., The Eighteen-Seventies). Walter de la Mare’s
1932 essay, ‘The Early Novels of Wilkie Collins’ (in John Drinkwater,
ed., The Eighteen-Sixties) presented him as a fine, if inconsistent,
craftsman who was on occasion able to write brilliant prose. S. M. Ellis
devoted a generally positive chapter to Collins in his 1931 book on
Wilkie Collins, Le Fanu and Others. He was also the sole subject of a
chapter in Malcolm Elwin’s Victorian Wallflowers (1934), which
expressed some surprise at the relative lack of serious attention that
Collins had received hitherto. For the most part Elwin discussed
Collins in the familiar terms–– as a writer who ‘lacks distinction’, but
one who ‘[a]t his best . . . tells his story simply and well, occasionally
gaining a certain grandeur from baldness and brevity’ and who even
at his worst produced plots ‘remarkable for ingenuity in construc-
tion’.32 Elwin’s essay is noteworthy for the claims which he makes for
Collins’s modernity and his influence on the development of the
novel in English: ‘by rigorously excluding any matter extraneous to
the action and independent of the plot, [Collins] introduced an
economy of expression upon the lines from which the modern style
in fiction has developed.’33 In the same year Thomas J. Hardy also
argued for Collins’s modernity in a chapter on ‘The Romance of
Crime’, which placed The Woman in White as the first novel ‘that
made the new scientific outlook and method its own’, and claimed
that ‘Collins was too true an artist, too acute an explorer in the
Recontextualizing Collins 219
unworked vein of Psychology to be dismissed with a few references
to melodrama and clumsy contrivance’.34
During the 1940s Collins became the focus of more serious
academic attention–– especially in the United States–– and his life
and work were the subject of several Ph.D. theses. This flurry of
academic interest resulted in the publication of several books and
articles in the 1950s, including Robert Ashley’s ‘Wilkie Collins
Reconsidered’ (1950) and his ‘Wilkie Collins and the Detective
Story’ (1951);35 Bradford Booth’s ‘Collins and the Art of Fiction’
(1951);36 Kenneth Robinson’s Wilkie Collins: A Biography (1951), a
solid account of Collins’s life and work drawing on his (then) uncol-
lected letters; Robert Ashley’s volume on Collins for an American
series on ‘The English Novelists (1952) which attempted to
‘rehabilitate Collins the novelist, . . . revitalise Collins the man and
to present the known biographical facts’;37 and Nuel Pharr Davis’s
lively but rather speculative The Life of Wilkie Collins (1956). Ashley’s
book (drawing on his Ph.D. research and the articles he published in
Nineteenth-Century Fiction) started from the premiss that his author
had been ‘the victim of more misrepresentation and slipshod scholar-
ship than any other English novelist of comparable stature, chiefly
because until recently no one had made him the object of a major
investigation’, as critics had tended to stumble on Collins ‘in the
course of investigating someone else, most frequently Dickens’.38 In
his slim but well-informed volume Ashley succeeded in undermin-
ing the ‘legend that the Collins of the ’seventies and ’eighties was a
pitiful but heroic figure laboriously and painfully grinding out
“wretched” novels which nobody bothered to read’,39 and in per-
suading his readers that Collins had a salutary influence on the
unruly plotting and shape of the nineteenth-century novel as well as
being an unrivalled master of suspense and atmosphere.
Further articles reassessing various aspects of Collins’s work
appeared in the 1960s, several of them exploring his contribution to
the development of the detective novel. One reassessment of
Collins’s work dating from this period, which proved very influen-
tial on rereadings of Collins’s fiction in the 1980s and 1990s, was
Kathleen Tillotson’s concise recontextualization of The Woman in
White in relation to ‘the lighter reading of the eighteen-sixties’ in her
introduction to the 1969 Riverside edition of this novel. Tillotson
takes The Woman in White, Great Expectations, East Lynne, and Lady
220 Recontextualizing Collins
Audley’s Secret–– four novels that ‘would never now be spoken of in
the same critical breath’–– and demonstrates why it is important to
read them alongside each other as Victorian best-sellers, sensation
novels, and (in varying degrees) ‘experiments in narrative form,
stimulated by the need to sustain a mystery and delay its solution’.40
Viewed in this light, Collins is revealed not as a mere carpenter of
plot, but rather as a writer working at the cutting edge of fictional
form, the evolver of ‘a new and severer method’ for sustaining both
mystery and ‘the sense of actuality and close involvement’.41
It was not until 1970 that Collins’s fiction was the subject of a
book length critical study–– William Marshall’s short, general intro-
duction in the Twayne Authors series. Marshall, who claimed that
his book was the first ‘to deal extensively and exclusively with the
literary art of Wilkie Collins and the part it played in the develop-
ment of the English novel’,42 presented Collins as a ‘minor novelist’
who produced five major novels–– The Woman in White, No Name,
Armadale, The Moonstone, and Man and Wife. In a chapter entitled
‘The World of Wilkie Collins’, Marshall also sought to read Collins’s
fiction in relation to the time in which it was written–– albeit in a
rather general discussion of Collins’s treatment of modern alien-
ation, which concluded that Collins’s novels, in fact, make ‘very little
reference to the intellectual currents of his own time, or even to their
cultural ramifications’.43 On the contrary, much of the most interest-
ing work of the last third of the twentieth century focused on the
complexities of the various ways in which Collins’s fiction engaged
with the social, cultural, and intellectual environment in which he
grew up and worked. This trend began in the five-year period follow-
ing the publication of Marshall’s book with the publication of several
articles exploring Collins’s relationship to the intellectual, psycho-
logical, and cultural currents of his own age. Particularly influential
were John R. Reed’s ‘English Imperialism and the Unacknowledged
Crime of The Moonstone’, in Clio in 1973, and U. C. Knoepflmacher’s
‘The Counterworld of Victorian Fiction and The Woman in White’,
which appeared in 1975.44 In the first of these essays Reed opened up
what was to become a very rich seam of argument for Collins studies
by claiming that, far from being simply a classic detective tale, The
Moonstone ‘is a novel of serious social criticism, conveying its mean-
ing through unconventional characters and historical allusion’.45
This essay reads Herncastle’s original theft of the diamond in 1799
Recontextualizing Collins 221
as an act of individual greed which the novel presents as being
‘emblematic of a far greater crime’46 – the British military conquest
and commercial exploitation of India. Collins’s representation of
English life is seen as exposing the hollowness and moral bankruptcy
of the society which is built on such crimes. The hollowness of
conventional Victorian society was also the focus of Knoepflmacher’s
essay, which read The Woman in White as a novel that makes no
attempt to suppress its fascination with the anarchic counterworld
which (it was argued) lay below the ordered, civilized world on
which the official morality of the Victorian novel was posited. On the
contrary, Knoepflmacher argued, Collins took great relish in pre-
senting outspoken villains, such as Fosco, with his belief in the fragil-
ity of moral and social identity and the hypocrisy of respectable
society.
Assessing Collins’s critical standing in 1974, Norman Page noted
that his ‘place in general critical esteem is [now] perhaps sufficiently
firmly established without inflated claims being made for him of a
kind which inevitably produce an eventual reaction’.47 Since the
mid-1970s, however, there has been a sea change in Collins’s critical
importance and in the kind of critical scrutiny that he has received.
Reviewing studies of Wilkie Collins in the last twenty years of the
twentieth century for Dickens Studies Annual (1999), Lillian Nayder
notes that not only has a wide range of Collins’s work become
‘increasingly well known to general readers’ during this period, but
also that ‘his claim to artistic renown has been secured’ and ‘virtually
all of [his] writings have now become a legitimate subject of academic
discussion’.48
Collins has undoubtedly gained both greater critical visibility and
academic credibility as a result of the refocusing of literary studies
and Victorian studies that took place in the last third of the twentieth
century. He has certainly benefited from the shift of critical attention
to popular culture and to genre fiction such as the sensation novel
and the Gothic–– often (though not exclusively) prompted by a
feminist interest in re-examining forgotten or undervalued genres.
Kathleen Tillotson’s recontextualizing of Collins’s novels of the
1860s in relation to the sensation phenomenon (see above) and Philip
Edwards’s Some Mid Victorian Thrillers: The Sensation Novel,
its Friends and Foes (1971) led in the 1980s and 1990s to fuller,
more politicized, discussions of Collins’s fiction in relation to other
222 Recontextualizing Collins
sensationalists, for example by Winifred Hughes in The Maniac in
the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (1980), and Lyn Pykett in
The Sensation Novel from ‘The Woman in White’ to ‘The Moonstone’
(1994), both of whom read Collins’s novels of the 1860s in relation to
the cultural meanings of the sensation novel and the debates sur-
rounding it. Jenny Bourne Taylor’s In the Secret Theatre of Home:
Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psycho-
logy (1988) took a longer view of Collins’s sensationalism–– as
extending from Basil to The Legacy of Cain–– and read it in relation
to nineteenth-century theories of mind. Taylor’s complex and
rewarding study is informed by feminist cultural history and theory
and also by Michel Foucault’s work on both the history of sexuality
and of the construction and management of madness. However, as
she points out, it seeks to avoid the monolithic nature of much of
Foucault’s work by focusing on the ‘dissonances’ in both nineteenth-
century theories of the mind and in Collins’s novels. To this end,
Taylor reads Collins’s novels in relation to literary, medical, and
psychological theories of sensation in the nineteenth century, focus-
ing particularly closely on contemporary definitions of insanity and
the theory and practice of the ‘moral management’ of psychological
deviance or moral insanity. She argues that these theories both
derived from and reproduced a contradictory conception of identity,
which ‘provides the overarching ideological framework for Collins’s
fiction’.49 Taylor’s Collins is a ‘ “modern” (even postmodern)’ novel-
ist, a disruptive writer who focuses on the instability and social con-
structedness of identity, and on ‘play, doubling and duplicity’, in
narratives which are ‘dialogic and self-reflexive’.50
Jonathan Loesberg, on the other hand, in his 1986 essay on
‘The Ideology of Narrative Form in Sensation Fiction’, interpreted
Collins’s concern with ‘identity and its loss’ as symptomatic of a
distinctively Victorian anxiety about the threat (or promise) of
reform politics to merge or change class identities, and read the
contradictions of The Woman in White as evidence of that novel’s
‘politically charged structure’.51 Nicholas Rance also located Collins’s
sensation fiction in a political context in Wilkie Collins and Other
Sensation Novelists: Walking the Moral Hospital (1991), reading
Collins’s sensation novels as a response to and a satiric exploration of
the mid-Victorian doctrine of ‘self-help’. Rance is at pains to present
Collins as a radical, and to distinguish his brand of sensationalism
Recontextualizing Collins 223
from the conservative sensationalism of, for example, Ellen Wood.
The politics of Collins’s novels has come under ever closer scrutiny
in the last twenty-five years or so as a result of the growing pre-
occupation of cultural historians and critics with the ideological
work performed by fiction. On the one hand Collins has been ‘recon-
textualized’ as a subversive or dissident writer, whose novels offered
a critique of the class and gender hierarchies of Victorian society; as
a proto-feminist whose portrayal of such transgressive, independent
women as Marian Halcombe, Magdalen Vanstone, Lydia Gwilt, and
Valeria Macallan were part of a more general exposure of the social
constraints on women; and as a social critic who exposed the hyp-
ocrisies involved in constructing and sustaining Victorian bourgeois
respectability. On the other hand, his fiction has been explored (or
exposed) as evading or retreating from radical social critique.
Thus, Tamar Heller in Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female
Gothic (1992) explores the way in which (she argues) Collins flirts
with the subversive potential of a genre such as female Gothic which
(as interpreted by feminist critics) exposes the victimization of
women in a patriarchal society, only to distance himself from both
the genre and social critique in order to establish his credentials as a
male professional. Collins, Heller suggests, appropriates female
Gothic as ‘a way of being a social critic’ and expressing his
‘often liberal view on social issues’, but ends up by constructing
Gothic plots which contain ‘the Gothic as a site of subversion and
literary marginality’.52 Alison Milbank came to similar conclusions
in Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction––
also published in 1992–– arguing that The Woman in White and The
Moonstone are versions of female Gothic in which the plot of female
escape is discredited, whilst No Name and Armadale are more like
‘the male Gothic’ in which transgressive women are reined in and
made to ‘collapse into passive conformity’ in ways which serve the
novelist’s ‘erotic aims’.53
In a period in which postcolonial theory and criticism have come
increasingly to the fore, Collins has also been recontextualized in
relation to the politics of race and empire. John R. Reed’s 1973
positioning of Collins as an anti-imperialist for his critique of colo-
nial plunder and violence and his valorization of the morality and
culture of the Hindus in The Moonstone has been endorsed by several
subsequent critics, including Patricia Miller Frick, who argues that
224 Recontextualizing Collins
this novel contrasts the ‘sincerity’ and ‘persistence’ of the Indians
with the ‘doubt and disorder’ of the English middle classes.54 On the
other hand Ashish Roy has questioned The Moonstone’s reputation as
an anti-imperialist text, arguing that it is a more thorough justifi-
cation of empire than even Robinson Crusoe.55 Deidre David has also
questioned the extent of The Moonstone’s critique of British imperi-
alism, suggesting that it is limited to a critique of the earlier, milita-
ristic phase of empire, and that the novel is a kind of defence of a
domesticated form of empire which rules by disciplining its subjects;
David offers the marginalized and orientalized Ezra Jennings as an
example of a colonized, disciplined subject.56 Other recent critics––
including Jaya Mehta and Lillian Nayder–– have read The Moonstone
as a contradictory response to a relatively recent episode of imperial
violence, the Indian Mutiny of 1857. In ‘English Romance; Indian
Violence’, Mehta charts the ambiguities of Collins’s critique of
imperialism in which ‘colonial retribution’ is rewritten as ‘colonial
violence’, and colonial, racial, and gendered knowledge ‘emerges and
submerges like clues in the quicksand’.57 In her 1997 book (which
replaces Marshall’s volume in the Twayne Authors series) Lillian
Nayder reassesses The Moonstone’s career as Collins’s anti-
imperialist text, by demonstrating that various of his novels (includ-
ing Antonina, Armadale, and The New Magdalen) dramatize imperial
crime and punishment in their staging of ‘the reverse colonization’
of England by the Creoles, Hindus, and others ‘who invade the home
country’.58 Nayder suggests that these novels also assuage imperial
guilt by naturalizing political and cultural differences.
Critics often base their assessments of Collins’s political sym-
pathies on their judgements of the significance and innovativeness of
his narrative strategies.59 Collins’s avoidance of a single narrative
voice, whether it be that of an omniscient third-person narrator or a
privileged first-person narrator, in favour of a dispersal of his narra-
tive across a range of narrators of various classes, each of whom
views events from a different and partial perspective, has been vari-
ously associated with moral relativism, disruption or subversion of
the status quo, and the author’s radical politics or his democratic
instincts. The late-twentieth-century critical recontextualization of
Collins as a rebel with various causes which were pursued with
varying degrees of narrative and representational dexterity con-
tinues into the twenty-first century, but so too does the questioning
Recontextualizing Collins 225
of his radical credentials. Perhaps the most influential attacks on the
claims that were made for Collins’s subversiveness and dissidence in
the 1970s and early 1980s were those that came from Foucauldian
critics. One particularly influential work in this respect was D. A.
Miller’s The Novel and the Police (1988), which drew on Michel
Foucault’s Discipline and Punish in order to recontextualize Collins as
a social disciplinarian or narrative policeman whose two most widely
discussed novels work to discipline their readers and reinscribe the
Victorian class and gender norms which they appear to question or
subvert. Thus, in Miller’s reading, The Woman in White appears to
blur or subvert conventional gender boundaries through its portrayal
of womanly men (Hartright) and manly women (Marian), but ulti-
mately, he argues, Collins’s plot restores these apparently transgressive
or subversive characters to their proper gendered place. This rein-
scription of gender norms is said to be reinforced by Collins’s use of
sensation and, in particular, Walter’s female nervousness, to elicit a
homophobic response from his male readers. Similarly, Miller argues
that the apparently subversive narrative method of The Moonstone is
merely an illusion. This novel’s multiple narrators appear to relati-
vize perception and democratize narrative control, but this dialogism
(Miller asserts) is actually monological because the novel’s several
narrators all tell the same story of a highly specific guilt and thus
reinforce a single perception of power.
Miller’s powerful (if partial) rereading of Collins certainly put his
fiction at the centre of important late-twentieth-century debates
about the nature of narrative and its role in the ideological work of
the novel in the nineteenth century. One thinks, for example, of Ann
Cvetkovich’s exploration of the ideology of the sensation narrative
form of The Woman in White, which argues that many of the most
sensational moments in the narrative serve to mask the material and
social realities of Walter’s ‘accession to power’ (through his marriage
to Laura). The narrative is structured, Cvetkovich argues, so as to
make it appear as if his rise ‘were the product of chance occurrences,
uncanny repetitions, and fated events’.60 However, despite the
attempts of critics such as Miller and Cvetkovich to read Collins
merely as a social policeman whose narratives both mask and
reinforce the operations of social discipline and the existing hier-
archies of power, other late-twentieth-century critical recontextual-
izations of his fiction have continued to produce a version of Collins
226 Recontextualizing Collins
as a social detective intent on exploring and exposing the various
forms of social discipline and the operations of power–– in the law
and policing, and also in the structures of marriage and the family.
Anthea Trodd, for example, sees ‘middle-class domesticity [as] . . .
the real crime to be discovered’ in Basil,61 and Elizabeth Rose
Gruner presents The Moonstone as a novel which exposes the secrecy,
hypocrisy, and criminality of the Victorian family.62
In short, Collins criticism at the beginning of the twenty-first
century seems to be as voluminous and as contradictory as the novels
on which it comments. The publication of two volumes of Collins’s
selected letters and of his first and previously unpublished novel
Iolani in 1999 will no doubt lead to further rereadings and recontex-
tualizations of Collins’s novels in the next few years. However, what-
ever Collins’s fortunes may be in the changing fads and fashions of
literary criticism, the sheer readability of his best novels and the
power of his narratives to grip the attention of the reader will ensure
that he continues to command a large and wide readership among
‘King Public’.
NOTES
chapter 1. The Life of Wilkie Collins
1. Wilkie Collins, Armadale, ed. Catherine Peters (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989), p. xxxix.
2. ‘Our Portrait Gallery: Mr Wilkie Collins’, Men and Women, 3 (5 Feb.
1887), 281.
3. ‘Memorandum Relating to the Life and Writings of Wilkie Collins 1862’,
Bentley’s Miscellany, 21 Mar. 1862, 37.
4. ‘Reminiscences of a Story-Teller’, Universal Review, 1 (1888), 182–92,
quoted in Catherine Peters, The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins
(London: Secker and Warburg, 1991), 49.
5. L. B. Walford, Memories of Victorian London (London: Edward Arnold,
1912), 325.
6. Quoted in William M. Clarke, The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins (Stroud:
Alan Sutton Publishing, 1999 [1988]), 44.
7. Quoted ibid. 45.
8. Ibid. 46.
9. ‘Our Portrait Gallery: Mr Wilkie Collins’, Men and Women, 3 (5 Feb.
1887), 281.
10. Reprinted in Little Novels, 1887. First published as ‘The Clergyman’s
Confession’ in the World, 4–18 August 1875.
11. Quoted in Clarke, Secret Life, 47.
12. The process of qualifying to become a barrister involved being accepted
for a pupillage in a legal practice or Chamber, and attending formal
dinners at the Inns of Court.
13. See Peters, King of Inventors, 69.
14. Concerns about the numbers of ‘superfluous’ women who were unable to
marry or gain employment in Britain led to the encouragement of female
emigration, and the establishment of societies to assist women seeking to
emigrate.
15. Spectator, 11 March 1850, 257.
16. Athenaeum, 16 March 1850, 285.
17. Bentley’s Miscellany, April 1850, 378.
18. Quoted in Andrew Gasson, Wilkie Collins: An Illustrated Guide (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998), 70. Gasson notes that in fact ‘only six
pages of the manuscript, part of ‘The Narrative of Miss Clack’, were
dictated.
19. Pall Mall Budget, 3 Oct. 1889, 5.
228 Notes to Pages 28–48
chapter 2. The Social Context
1. Norman McCord, British History, 1815–1906 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1991), 83.
2. Thomas Carlyle, ‘Signs of the Times’, in Thomas Carlyle: Selected
Writings, ed. Alan Shelston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 64–5.
3. Edward Bulwer Lytton, England and the English (Paris: Bandry’s European
Library, 1834), 318–19, emphasis added. First published 1833.
4. Carlyle, ‘Chartism’, in Carlyle: Selected Writings, ed. Shelston, 151.
5. Leader, 17 Jan. 1852, 45.
6. Letter to Pigott, 16 Sept. 1852, quoted in Kirk H. Beetz, ‘Wilkie Collins
and The Leader’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 151 (1982), 25.
7. Lee Holcombe, ‘Victorian Wives and Property: Reform of the Married
Women’s Property Law, 1857–1882’, in M. Vicinus (ed.), A Widening
Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women (London: Routledge, 1980
[1977]), 4.
8. Ibid.
9. Barbara Leigh Smith (later Bodichon), A Brief Summary, in Plain
Language, of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women, Together With a
Few Observations Thereon (London: J. Chapman, 1854), 4.
10. Martin Wiener, ‘Domesticity: A Legal Discipline for Men?’, in Martin
Hewitt (ed.), An Age of Equipoise? Reassessing Mid-Victorian Britain
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 158.
11. The Life of Frances Power Cobbe By Herself (1894), quoted in Mary
Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England,
1850–1895 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 164.
12. Martin Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law and Policy in
England, 1830–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 67.
13. Ibid. 91.
14. Ibid. 244.
15. Charles Dickens, Selected Journalism, 1850–1870, ed. David Pascoe
(London: Penguin, 1997), 246.
16. Ibid. 248.
17. Ibid.
18. The doctrine of the separate spheres and the figure of the angel in the
house were developed in the early nineteenth century. In Family Fortunes:
Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987), Leonora Davidoff and Catherine Hall
link their development to the growing separation of the home and the
workplace under capitalism and (increasingly) industrialism. As I note in
the current chapter, the doctrine of the separate spheres was breaking
down during Collins’s lifetime (especially after 1850). Indeed, Amanda
Vickery has suggested that even in the first half of the nineteenth century
‘separate spheres’ was a normative rather than a descriptive doctrine,
and that it signalled male anxieties about women’s attempts to change
their roles as much as it described social realities. See Amanda Vickery,
‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and
Notes to Pages 48–61 229
Chronology of English Women’s History’, Historical Journal, 36 (1993),
383–414.
19. John Ruskin, ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, Sesame and Lilies [1865], in The
Works of John Ruskin (London: George Allen, 1880), i. 91–2.
20. Ibid. 91.
21. Wiener in Hewitt (ed.), Age of Equipoise?, 155.
22. John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in
Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 6.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. W. R. Greg, ‘Why Are Women Redundant?’, National Review, 14 (1862),
446.
26. T. H. S. Escott, England: Her People, Polity, and Pursuits (1879), reprinted
in J. M. Golby (ed.), Culture and Society in Britain, 1850–1890: A Source
Book of Contemporary Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, in
association with the Open University Press, 1986), 27.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid. 28. Although Escott is probably correct in dating the gentrification
(so to speak) of the master manufacturers and retailers to about 1832,
some aspects of his dating of the processes he describes would not be
accepted by most modern historians. The gentrification of the great
bankers and professionals began in the late eighteenth century (some
would put it even earlier).
30. Ibid. 30. For a more recent view of the processes described by Escott, see
Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880
(London: Routledge, 1989).
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid. 30–1.
33. John Kucich, The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 81 ff.
34. Tosh, A Man’s Place, 177.
35. Robert Lowe, quoted in Asa Briggs, Victorian People: A Reassessment of
Persons and Themes, 1851–67 (Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1965), 362.
36. Hugh McLeod, Religion and Society in England, 1850–1914 (London:
Macmillan, 1996), 1.
37. Geoffrey Best, Mid-Victorian Britain, 1851–75 (London: Fontana, 1979
[1971]), 193.
38. Robin Gilmour, The Victorian Period: The Intellectual and Cultural Context
of English Literature, 1830–1890 (London: Longman, 1993), 72.
39. Quoted ibid. 74.
40. The Hennells were a family of Manchester manufacturers. Charles C.
Hennell was the author of An Inquiry Into the Origins of Christianity
(1838). He became acquainted with George Eliot through his sister
Caroline, who married Charles Bray, son of a Coventry ribbon manu-
facturer and author of Philosophy of Necessity or The Law of Consequences;
as Applicable to Mental, Moral and Social Science (1841).
230 Notes to Pages 62–84
41. Gilmour, Victorian Period, 87.
42. Nuel Pharr Davis, The Life of Wilkie Collins (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1956), 19, 21–2.
43. Keith Lawrence, ‘The Religion of Wilkie Collins; Three Unpublished
Documents’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 52 (1989), 389.
44. Sue Lonoff, Wilkie Collins and his Victorian Readers (New York: AMS
Press, 1982), 216.
45. Ibid. 218.
46. Lawrence, ‘Religion of Wilkie Collins’, 393.
47. See Beetz, ‘Wilkie Collins and The Leader, 20.
48. See P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and
Expansion, 1688–1914 (London: Longman, 1993).
49. Christine Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1971).
50. Quoted in Susan Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s
Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 15.
chapter 3. The Literary Context
1. Norman Page (ed.). Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 1.
2. John Eagles [unsigned] ‘A Few Words About Novels–– A Dialogue’,
Blackwood’s, 64 (1848), 462.
3. David Masson, British Novelists and their Styles (1859), from extract
reprinted in Edwin Eigner and George Worth (eds.), Victorian Criticism of
the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 152.
4. Anthony Trollope, ‘On English Prose Fiction as a Rational Amusement’,
in Four Lectures, ed. M. L. Parrish (London: Constable, 1938), 108.
5. ‘Penny Novels’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 14 (1866), 97.
6. See Graham Law, Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press (London:
Palgrave, 2000), 171.
7. Deborah Wynne, The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 100.
8. Quoted in Sue Lonoff, Wilkie Collins and his Victorian Readers (New York:
AMS Press, 1982), 53.
9. Graphic, 30 Jan. 1875, 107.
10. Guinevere Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel
(Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1970), 32.
11. Collins, 18 March 1873, quoted in Catherine Peters, The King of Inventors:
A Life of Wilkie Collins (London: Secker and Warburg, 1991), 340.
12. ‘A New Censorship in Literature’, reprinted in G. Moore, Literature at
Nurse, or, Circulating Morals, ed. Pierre Coustillas (Hassocks: Harvester,
1976), 28.
13. H. L. Mansel [unsigned] ‘Sensation Novels’, Quarterly Review, 113
(1863), 485.
14. Collins, quoted in Lonoff, Wilkie Collins and his Victorian Readers, 5.
Notes to Pages 84–106 231
15. George Eliot [unsigned] ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’, Westminster
Review, October 1856, reprinted in George Eliot, Selected Critical Writings,
ed. Rosemary Ashton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
16. See Eliot’s essay ‘The Natural History of German Life’ first published
(unsigned) in the Westminster Review in July 1856, reprinted in Ashton
(ed.), Selected Critical Waitings.
17. Henry James, unsigned review of Middlemarch in Galaxy, March 1873,
reprinted in David Carroll (ed.), Middlemarch: The Critical Heritage
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 359.
18. ‘Popular Novels of the Year’, Frazer’s Magazine, 68 (1863), 262.
19. From the prospectus to ‘The Sensation Times’ in Punch, quoted in
Christian Remembrancer, 46 (1864), 210.
20. Ibid.
21. W. F. Rae, ‘Sensation Novelists: Miss Braddon’, North British Review, 43
(1865), 204.
22. Mansel, ‘Sensation Novels’, 488–9.
23. Elaine Showalter, ‘Family Secrets and Domestic Subversion: Rebellion in
the Novels of the Eighteen-Sixties’, in A. S. Wohl (ed.), The Victorian
Family: Structure and Stress (London: Croom Helm, 1978), 104.
24. Henry James, ‘Miss Braddon’, Nation, 9 Nov. 1865, 594.
25. The Times, 18 Nov. 1862, 8.
26. Lucretia; or, The Heroine of the Nineteenth Century. A correspondence, sen-
sational and sentimental. By the Author of ‘The Owlet of Owlstone Edge’
(F.E.P) (London: Joseph Masters, 1868), 305.
27. ‘Novels’, Blackwood’s, 102 (1867), 274–5.
28. Tamar Heller, Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 7.
29. ‘Sensation Novels’, Blackwood’s, 91 (May 1862), 564–84.
30. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife, ed. Lyn Pykett (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998), 11.
31. Ronald Thomas, ‘Detection in the Victorian Novel’, in Deidre David
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 169.
32. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High
Capitalism (London: Verso, 1973), 43.
33. A. C. Swinburne, ‘Wilkie Collins’, Fortnightly Review, 1 Nov. 1889,
reprinted in Page (ed), Critical Heritage, 262.
34. Michael Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), 151.
35. Leader, 30 March 1850, 20.
36. Lonoff, Wilkie Collins and his Victorian Readers, 50–1.
37. Edward Marston, After Work (London: Heinemann, 1904), 85.
38. Quoted in Robert Ashley, Wilkie Collins (London: Barker, 1952), 29.
39. All quotations from Page (ed.), Critical Heritage, 6–7.
40. Leader, 27 Nov. 1852, 1142.
41. Quoted in Page (ed.), Critical Heritage, 7.
232 Notes to Pages 106–130
42. ‘The Progress of Fiction as an Art’, Westminster Review, 60 (1853), 373.
43. Page (ed.), Critical Heritage, 48.
44. Ibid. 41.
45. Ibid. 77.
46. Ibid. 74–5.
47. Gladstone’s diary, quoted in Amy Cruse, The Victorians and their Books
(London: George Allen and Unwin, 1935), 322.
48. Saturday Review, 25 Aug. 1860, 249.
49. Ibid. 249–50.
50. ‘The Enigma Novel’, Spectator, 28 Dec. 1861, 1428.
51. Mansel, ‘Sensation Novels’, 483.
52. Ibid. 495.
53. Alexander Smith [unsigned], ‘Novels and Novelists of the Day’, North
British Review, 38 (1863), 184.
54. Athenaeum, 2 June 1866, 732.
55. Westminster Review, Oct. 1866, 270.
56. The Times, 3 Oct. 1868, 4.
57. Lippincot’s Magazine, Dec. 1868, 679.
58. Saturday Review, 9 July 1870, 52–3.
59. Ibid. 53.
60. J. A. Noble, ‘Recent Novels’, Spectator, 26 Jan. 1889, 120.
chapter 4. Masters, Servants, and Married Women
1. All the Year Round, 1 (1860), 396.
2. Ann Cvetkovich, ‘Ghostlier Determinations: The Economy of Sensation
and The Woman in White’, Novel, 23 (1989), reprinted in Lyn Pykett (ed.),
Wilkie Collins: Contemporary Critical Essays (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1998), 111.
3. John Kucich, The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 88.
4. This quotation is from the version reprinted as ‘Laid up in Lodgings’ in
My Miscellanies, 226.
5. Anthea Trodd, Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1989), 8.
6. Kucich, Power of Lies, 81–2.
7. Ibid. 102.
8. Iolani, or Tahiti as it was, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1999), 20.
9. Jenny Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins,
Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (London:
Routledge, 1988), 72.
10. Household Words, 13 Dec. 1856, reprinted in My Miscellanies, 419.
11. R. Barickman, S. McDonald, and M. Stark, Corrupt Relations: Dickens,
Thackeray, Collins and the Victorian Sexual System (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1982), 111.
Notes to Pages 131–169 233
12. All the Year Round, 21 Jan. 1860, 291.
13. Quoted in Catherine Peters, The King of Inventors; A Life of Wilkie
Collins (London: Secker and Warburg, 1991), 320.
chapter 5. Sex, Crime, Madness, and Empire
1. W. R. Greg, ‘Why Are Women Redundant?’, National Review, 14 (1862),
453.
2. Margaret Oliphant, unsigned review, Blackwood’s, Aug. 1863, 170.
3. Athenaeum, 2 June 1886, 732.
4. See R. D. Altick, The Presence of the Past: Topics of the Day in the Victorian
Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991), 54 ff. Mrs Sarah
Rachel Leverson, known as Madame Rachel, had a shop in New Bond
Street in London where she sold beauty products. It was also rumoured
that she provided other services for women–– such as abortion.
5. Jenny Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins,
Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (London:
Routledge, 1988), 217.
6. Convicts who were transported to Australia were required to perform
forced labour for public works or ‘assigned’ individuals. A ticket of leave
enabled them to work outside of this system, on condition that they
continued to live in a particular area and report regularly to the
authorities.
7. See Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home and Deborah Wynne, The
Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2001).
8. Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home, 103.
9. ‘M.D. and MAD’, All the Year Round, 22 Feb. 1862, 103.
10. Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home, 171.
11. Stephen D. Arata, ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of
Reverse Colonization’, Victorian Studies, 33 (1990), 623.
12. Lillian Nayder, Wilkie Collins (New York: Twayne, 1997), 107.
13. Tamar Heller, Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 146.
14. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism:
1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 200.
15. ‘A Sermon for Sepoys’, Household Words, 27 Feb. 1858, 244.
chapter 6. Psychology and Science in Collins’s Novels
1. ‘Magnetic Evenings at Home’, Leader, 17 Jan. 1852, 63.
2. Quoted in Jenny Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie
Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (London:
Routledge, 1988), 57.
3. Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth (eds.), Embodied Selves: An
Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830–1890 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1998), 3.
234 Notes to Pages 170–210
4. William B. Carpenter, Principles of Mental Physiology, with their Application
to the Training and Discipline of the Mind and the Study of its Morbid
Conditions (1874), quoted in Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home, 60–1.
5. John Abercrombie, Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers and the
Investigation of Truth (Edinburgh: Waugh and Innes, 1830), 37.
6. Ibid. 289.
7. See Taylor and Shuttleworth, Embodied Selves, 69.
8. Ann Cvetkovich, ‘Ghostlier Determinations: The Economy of Sensation
in The Woman in White’, Novel, 23 (1989), reprinted in Lyn Pykett (ed.),
Wilkie Collins: Contemporary Critical Essays (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1998).
9. ‘Madness in Novels’, Spectator, 3 Feb. 1866, 135–6.
10. H. L. Mansel [unsigned], ‘Sensation Novels’, Quarterly Review, 113
(1863), 482–3.
11. George Robinson, On the Prevention and Treatment of Mental Disorders
(London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1859), 7.
12. Review of Forbes Winslow, On Obscure Diseases of the Brain, in Edinburgh
Review, 113 (1860), 526.
13. William Tuke founded The Retreat, an asylum for insane Quakers near
York in 1792. His son Samuel published a history of The Retreat,
describing the humane, ‘moral management’ method, in 1813.
14. Collins in a letter to Surgeon-General Charles Alexander Gordon, quoted
in Wilkie Collins, Heart and Science, ed. Steve Farmer (Peterborough,
Ontario: Broadview, 1999), 17.
15. 23 June 1882, reprinted in Heart and Science, ed. Farmer, 370.
16. Academy, 28 April 1883, 290, reprinted in Normen Page (ed.), Wilkie
Collins: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974),
213.
17. A. C. Swinburne, ‘Wilkie Collins’, Fortnightly Review, 1 Nov. 1889,
reprinted in Page (ed.), Critical Heritage, 261.
18. Catherine Peters, The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins (London:
Secker and Warburg, 1991), 299.
chapter 7. Recontextualizing Collins
1. The Times, 12 Dec. 1871, quoted in Catherine Peters, The King of Inventors:
A Life of Wilkie Collins (London: Secker and Warburg, 1991), 334.
2. Quoted in Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone, ed. Steve Farmer (Peterborough,
Ontario: Broadview, 1999), 613 n. 1.
3. Athenaeum, 22 Sept. 1877, 381.
4. Quoted in Peters, King of Inventors, 361.
5. Bioscope, 16 Jan. 1913, p. xxxiv.
6. Daily Telegraph, 3 Oct. 1966.
7. Monthly Film Bulletin, Oct. 1934, 82.
8. At time of writing these include: My Lady’s Money, ‘No Thoroughfare’
and Other Stories, The Biter Bit and Other Stories, A Rogue’s Life, The
Legacy of Cain, The New Magdalen, The Evil Genius, Jezebel’s Daughter, ‘I
Notes to Pages 211–220 235
Say No’, The Two Destinies, Fallen Leaves, and The Frozen Deep/Mr
Wray’s Cashbox.
9. Sayers, Introduction to The Moonstone (London: J. M. Dent, 1944), p. vi;
quoted in Farmer’s edn., pp. 13–14.
10. James Wilson, The Dark Clue (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), 19.
11. Norman Page (ed.), Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), p. xiii.
12. Harry Quilter, ‘A Living Story-teller’, Contemporary Review, April 1888,
reprinted in Page (ed.), Critical Heritage, 230.
13. Ibid. 233.
14. Ibid. 230.
15. Ibid. 241.
16. Ibid. 246, 244.
17. Ibid. 244, 245.
18. Spectator, 28 Sept. 1887, reprinted in Page (ed.), Critical Heritage, 250.
19. Fortnightly Review, 1 Nov. 1889, reprinted in Page (ed.), Critical Heritage,
257.
20. Ibid. 260.
21. Ibid. 261.
22. Ibid.
23. Andrew Lang, ‘Mr Wilkie Collins’s Novels’, Contemporary Review, Jan.
1890, reprinted in Page (ed.), Critical Heritage, 267.
24. Swinburne in Page (ed.), Critical Heritage, 255 and 263.
25. Quilter in Page (ed.), Critical Heritage, 229.
26. Bookman, 35 (1912), 571.
27. Walter C. Phillips, Dickens, Reade, and Collins: Sensation Novelists
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1919), 186.
28. T. S. Eliot, ‘Wilkie Collins and Dickens’, in Selected Essays (London:
Faber and Faber, 1932), 464.
29. Ibid. 460.
30. Ibid. 465.
31. Ibid. 469.
32. Malcolm Elwin, Victorian Wallflowers (London: Cape, 1934), 226.
33. Ibid.
34. Thomas J. Hardy, Books on the Shelf (London: Philip Allan, 1934), 223
and 226.
35. Robert Ashley, ‘Wilkie Collins Reconsidered’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction,
4 (1950), 265–73; ‘Wilkie Collins and the Detective Story’, Nineteenth-
Century Fiction, 6 (1951), 47–60.
36. Bradford Booth, ‘Collins and the Art of Fiction’, Nineteenth-Century
Fiction, 6 (1951), 131–43.
37. Robert Ashley, Wilkie Collins (London: Barker, 1952), 5.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid. 127.
40. Kathleen Tillotson, ‘The Lighter Reading of the Eighteen-sixties’, Intro-
duction to Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, Riverside Edition, 1969), pp. ix and xx.
236 Notes to Pages 220–226
41. Tillotson, ‘The Lighter Reading of the Eighteen-sixties’, p. xxi.
42. William Marshall, Wilkie Collins (New York: Twayne, 1970), 5, emphasis
added.
43. Ibid.
44. In Jerome H. Buckley (ed.), The Worlds of Victorian Fiction (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975).
45. John R. Reed, ‘English Imperialism and the Unacknowledged Crime of
The Moonstone’, Clio, 2 (1973), 281.
46. Ibid. 284.
47. Page (ed.), Critical Heritage, 32.
48. Lillian Nayder, ‘Wilkie Collins Studies: 1983–1999’, Dickens Studies
Annual, 28 (1999), 258.
49. Jenny Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins,
Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (London:
Routledge, 1988), 31.
50. Ibid. 1.
51. Jonathan Loesberg, ‘The Ideology of Narrative Form in Sensation
Fiction’, Representations, 13 (1986), 117 and 116.
52. Tamar Heller, Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 8.
53. Alison Milbank, Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian
Fiction (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 14.
54. Patricia Miller Frick, ‘Wilkie Collins’s “Little Jewel”: The Meaning of
The Moonstone’, Philological Quarterly, 63 (1984), 318.
55. Ashish Roy, ‘The Fabulous Imperialist Semiotic of Wilkie Collins’s The
Moonstone’, New Literary History, 24 (1993), 657–81.
56. Deidre David, Rule Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).
57. Jaya Mehta, ‘English Romance; Indian Violence’, Centennial Review, 39
(1995), 620 and 621.
58. Lillian Nayder, Wilkie Collins (New York: Twayne, 1997), 101.
59. See Nayder, Dickens Studies Annual, 28 (1999), 304.
60. Ann Cvetkovich, ‘Ghostlier Determinations: The Economy of Sensation
and The Woman in White’, Novel, 23 (1989), reprinted in Lyn Pykett (ed.),
Wilkie Collins: Contemporary Critical Essays (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1998), 111.
61. Anthea Trodd, Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1989), 103.
62. Elizabeth Rose Gruner, ‘Family Secrets and the Mysteries of The
Moonstone’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 21 (1993), reprinted in
Pykett (ed.), Wilkie Collins: Contemporary Critical Essays.
FURTHER READING
contextual material
(a) The literary context
Altick, Richard D., The English Common Reader: A Social History of the
Mass Reading Public (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1957).
—— The Presence of the Past: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991).
Brantlinger, Patrick, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in
Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1998).
Gilmour, Robin, The Victorian Period: The Intellectual and Cultural
Context of English Literature, 1830–1890 (London: Longman, 1993).
Griest, Guinevere, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel
(Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1970).
Hughes Linda K., and Lund, Michael, The Victorian Serial (Charlottes-
ville: University Press of Virginia, 1991).
Hughes, Winifred, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).
Jordan, J. O., and Patten, R. L. (eds.), Literature in the Marketplace:
Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Miller, D. A., The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1988).
Pykett, Lyn, The Sensation Novel from ‘The Woman in White’ to ‘The
Moonstone’ (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994).
—— ‘Sensation and the Fantastic in the Victorian Novel’, in Deidre
David (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 192–211.
—— ‘The Newgate Novel and Sensation Fiction, 1830–1868’, in Martin
Priestman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 19–40.
Sutherland, J. A., Victorian Novelists and Publishers (London: Athlane,
1976).
—— Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers (Basingstoke: Macmil-
lan, 1995).
Trodd, Anthea, Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1989).
238 Further Reading
Wynne, Deborah, The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).
(b) Protest and reform
Brantlinger, Patrick, The Spirit of Reform: British Literature and Politics,
1832–1867 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977).
Vernon, James, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture
c. 1815–1867 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
(c) The law, crime, criminality, and policing
Emsley, Clive, Crime and Society in England, 1750–1900 (London:
Longman, 1996 [1987]).
Holcombe, Lee, Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women’s Prop-
erty Law in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Martin Robertson,
1983).
Shanley, Mary Lyndon, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian
England, 1850–1895 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).
Wiener, Martin, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law and Policy in
England 1830–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
(d) Gender and sexuality
Adams, James Eli, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculin-
ity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).
Davidoff, Leonora, and Hall, Catherine, Family Fortunes: Men and Women
of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1987).
Mason, Michael, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994).
—— The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1994).
Miller, Andrew, and Adams, James Eli (eds.), Sexualities in Victorian
Britain (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).
Mangan, J. A., and Walvin, J. (eds.), Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class
Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940 (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1987).
Nead, Lynda, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian
Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988).
Tosh, John, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in
Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
—— and Roper, Michael (eds.), Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain
Since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1991).
Vickery, Amanda, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the
Further Reading 239
Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History’, Historical
Journal, 36 (1993).
Walkowitz, Judith, Prostitution in Victorian Society: Women, Class and the
State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
Weeks, Jeffrey, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality in
Britain Since 1800 (London: Longman, 1981).
(e) Social class
Joyce, Patrick, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of
Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
—— (ed.), Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Reader, W. J. Professional Men: The Rise of the Professional Classes in
Nineteenth-Century England (London: Fontana, 1988).
Stedman Jones, Gareth, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship
Between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
Vincent, David, Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750–1914
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
(f) Religion
Cockshut, A. O. J. (ed.), Religious Controversies of the Nineteenth Century:
Selected Documents (London: Methuen, 1966).
McCleod, Hugh, Religion and Society in England, 1850–1914 (London:
Macmillan, 1996).
Moore, James R. (ed.), Religion in Victorian Britain: Sources (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, in association with Open University
Press, 1988), vol. iii.
Parsons, Gerald (ed.), Religion in Victorian Britain: Traditions (Manches-
ter: Manchester University Press, in association with Open University
Press, 1988), vol. i.
—— (ed.), Religion in Victorian Britain: Controversies (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, in association with Open University
Press, 1988), vol. ii.
(g) Empire and race
Bolt, Christine, Victorian Attitudes to Race (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1971).
Brantlinger, Patrick, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism,
1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988).
Malchow, H. Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996).
Mukherjee, U. P., Crime and Empire: The Colony in Nineteenth-Century
Fictions of Crime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
240 Further Reading
Stepan, Nancy, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960
(Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1982).
(h) Science and psychology
Oppenheim, Janet, ‘Shattered Nerves’: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in
Victorian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
Scull, Andrew, The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in
Britain, 1700–1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
Taylor, Jenny Bourne, ‘Obscure Recesses: Locating the Victorian
Unconscious’, in J. B. Bullen, (ed.) Writing and Victorianism (London:
Longman, 1997).
—— and Shuttleworth, Sally (eds.), Embodied Selves: An Anthology of
Psychological Texts, 1830–1890 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
Winter, Alison, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998).
criticism
(a) Articles or chapters about individual novels or specific areas of
Collins’s work
Allan, Janice M., ‘Scenes of Writing: Detection and Psychoanalysis in
Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone’, Imprimatur, 1 (1996), 186–93.
Ashley, Robert, ‘Wilkie Collins Reconsidered’, Nineteenth-Century
Fiction, 4 (1950), 265–73.
——‘ Wilkie Collins and the Detective Story’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction,
6 (1951), 47–60.
Balée, Susan, ‘Wilkie Collins and Surplus Women: The Case of Marian
Halcombe’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 20 (1999), 197–215.
Bernstein, Stephen, ‘Reading Blackwater Park: Gothicism, Narrative
and Ideology in The Woman in White’, Studies in the Novel, 25 (1993),
291–305.
Booth, Bradford, ‘Collins and the Art of Fiction’, Nineteenth-Century
Fiction, 6 (1951), 131–43.
Duncan, Ian, ‘The Moonstone, the Victorian Novel and Imperialist Panic’,
Modern Language Quarterly, 55 (1994), 297–319.
Fass, Barbara, ‘Wilkie Collins’ Cinderella: The History of Psychology and
The Woman in White’, Dickens Studies Annual, 10 (1982), 91–141.
Frick, Patricia Miller, ‘Wilkie Collins’s “Little Jewel”: The Meaning of
The Moonstone’, Philological Quarterly, 63 (1984), 313–21.
——‘ The Fallen Angels of Wilkie Collins’, International Journal of
Women’s Studies, 7 (1984), 342–51.
Further Reading 241
Horne, Lewis, ‘Magdalen’s Peril’, Dickens Studies Annual, 20 (1991),
259–80.
Kucich, John, ‘Competitive Elites in Wilkie Collins: Cultural Intellectuals
and their Professional Others’, in his The Power of Lies: Transgression in
Victorian Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 75–118.
Loesberg, Jonathan, ‘The Ideology of Narrative Form in Sensation
Fiction’, Representations, 13 (1986), 115–318.
MacDonagh, Josephine, and Smith, Jonathan, ‘ “Fill Up All the Gaps”:
Narrative and Illegitimacy in The Woman in White’, Journal of Narra-
tive Technique, 26 (1996), 274–91.
Mangum, Teresa, ‘Wilkie Collins, Detection, and Deformity’, Dickens
Studies Annual, 26 (1998), 285–310.
Maynard, Jessica, ‘Telling the Whole Truth: Wilkie Collins and the Lady
Detective’, in Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys (eds.), Victorian Iden-
tities: Social and Cultural Formations (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996),
187–98.
Mehta, Jaya, ‘English Romance; Indian Violence’, Centennial Review, 39
(1995) 611–57.
Michie, Helena, ‘ “There is no Friend Like a Sister”: Sisterhood as Sexual
Difference’, English Literary History, 56 (1989), 401–21.
Milbank, Alison, ‘Breaking and Entering: Wilkie Collins’s Sensation
Fiction’, and ‘Hidden and Sought: Wilkie Collins’s Gothic Fiction’, in
her Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 25–53, 54–7.
Nayder, Lillian, ‘Robinson Crusoe and Friday in Victorian Britain:
“Discipline”, “Dialogue”, and Collins’s Critique of Empire in The
Moonstone’, Dickens Studies Annual, 21 (1991), 213–31.
—
—‘ Wilkie Collins Studies: 1983–1989’, Dickens Studies Annual, 28
(1999), 257–323.
Perkins, Pamela, and Donaghy, Mary, ‘A Man’s Resolution: Narrative
Strategies in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White’, Studies in the Novel,
22 (1990), 392–402.
Reed, John R., ‘English Imperialism and the Unacknowledged Crime of
The Moonstone’, Clio, 2 (1973), 281–90.
—
—‘ The Stories of The Mooonstone’, in Nelson Smith and R. C. Terry
(eds.), Wilkie Collins to the Forefront (New York: AMS Press, 1995),
91–100.
Roy, Ashish, ‘The Fabulous Imperialist Semiotic of Wilkie Collins’s The
Moonstone’, New Literary History, 24 (1993), 657–81.
Schmitt, Cannon, ‘Alien Nation: Gender, Genre, and English Nationality
in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White’, Genre, 26 (1993), 283–310.
Surridge, Lisa, ‘Unspeakable Histories: Hester Dethridge and the
242 Further Reading
Narration of Domestic Violence in Man and Wife’, Victorian Review, 22
(1996), 102–26.
Welsh, Alexander, ‘Collins’s Setting for a Moonstone’, in Strong Represen-
tations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 215–36.
(b) Books and edited collections on Collins’s work
Gasson, Andrew, Wilkie Collins: An Illustrated Guide (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998).
Heller, Tamar, Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
Nayder, Lillian, Wilkie Collins (New York: Twayne, 1997).
O’Neill, Philip, Wilkie Collins: Women, Property and Propriety (Totowa,
NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1988).
Pykett, Lyn (ed.), Wilkie Collins: Contemporary Critical Essays (Basing-
stoke: Macmillan, 1998).
Rance, Nicholas, Wilkie Collins and Other Sensation Novelists: Walking the
Moral Hospital (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991).
Smith, Nelson, and Terry, R. C. Wilkie Collins to the Forefront: Some
Reassessments (New York: AMS Press, 1995).
Taylor, Jenny Bourne, In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins,
Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (London:
Routledge, 1988).
WEBSITES
collins
http://www.deadline.demon.co.uk/wilkie/wilkie.htm Paul Lewis’s Wilkie
Collins website is an excellent place to start. It has lots of useful information
and images of the author and his contemporaries, plus information about
and links to other websites on Collins, as well as links to e-texts of most of
Collins’s published work.
http://lang.a-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/collins.html Another excellent Collins
site with useful links.
http://www.rightword.com.au/writers/wilkie/ David Grigg’s Wilkie
Collins Appreciation Page.
http://members.aol.com/MG4273/sensatio.htm A site on British sensa-
tion fiction maintained by Michael Grost; has some useful summaries and
analyses of some of Collins’s novels.
general victorian
http://lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp~matsuoka/victorian.html Probably the most
comprehensive guide to websites offering information on Victorian literature
and culture.
http://landow.stg.brown.edu/victorian/victor.html The Victorian Web, an
Overview has links to material on political, social, and economic history,
gender matters, philosophy, religion, science and technology, and the visual
arts as well as material on authors and genres and links to e-texts.
FILM AND TELEVISION ADAPTATIONS
Armadale (US; director Richard Garrick, 1916).
Basil (US; director Radha Bharadwaj, 1997).
The Dead Secret (US; director Stanner E. V. Taylor, Monopol, 1913).
The Moonstone (US; Selig Polyscope, 1909).
The Moonstone (France; Pathé, 1911).
The Moonstone (US; director Frank Hall Crane, 1915).
The Moonstone (US; Monogram, director Reginald Barker, 1934).
The Moonstone (GB; BBC TV, producer Shaun Sutton, 1959).
The Moonstone (GB; BBC TV, director Paddy Russell, 1972).
The Moonstone (GB; BBC TV, director Robert Bierman, 1996).
A Terribly Strange Bed (US; TV, 1949).
A Terribly Strange Bed, in A Trio for Terror (US; director Ida Lupino,
1961).
A Terribly Strange Bed (Poland; director Witold Lesiewicz, 1968).
A Terribly Strange Bed (GB/US; Anglia Television/CBS-TV, director
Alan Cooke, 1974).
The Woman in White (US; Tannhauser, 1912).
The Woman in White (US; Gem, 1913).
The Woman in White (GB; director Herbert Wilcox, 1929).
Crimes at the Dark House (loosely based on The Woman in White; GB;
director George King, 1939).
The Woman in White (US; director Peter Godfrey, Warner Brothers, 1947).
The Woman in White (GB; ABC TV, director Herbert Wise, 1957).
The Woman in White (US; The Dow Hour of Great Mysteries, director
Paul Nickell, 1960).
The Woman in White (GB; BBC TV, director Brandon Acton Bond, 1966).
La Femme en Blanc (France; ORTF, director Pierre Gautherin, 1970).
The Woman in White (GB; BBC2 TV, director John Bruce, 1982).
The Woman in White (GB/US; BBC/Carlton, director Tim Fywell,
1997).
INDEX
Abercrombie, John 173, 174 Athenaeum 9, 10, 105, 106, 108, 195, 215
abolition of slavery 35, 157–8 Austen, Jane 82
Academy (magazine) 190
Adam Bede (Eliot) 60, 84, 86, 107 Badel, Alan 208
adultery 75, 87, 91, 143 Bain, Alexander 178
Agnes Grey (Brontë) 85 Baker, Colin 209
agnosticism 62, 63 Balzac, Honoré de 98
Albert, Prince 11 bankruptcy 3
All the Year Round (weekly magazine) 16, Barnaby Rudge (Dickens) 84
39, 76, 98, 99, 100, 112; articles on Bartley, Henry Powell 17
mental illness 131, 151 Basil (Collins) 12, 13, 84, 93–4; adultery
Althorp, Lord 57 theme in 75, 91; cross-class marriage
American Civil War (1860–5) 157 in 116; family secrets in 91; film
animal magnetism 166–8 version of 207, 209; gender roles in
anti-vivisection 60, 93, 111, 187–91 124–6; inherited characteristics in
Antonina (Collins) 8, 10, 71, 84; 182–3; Letter of Dedication to 102,
femininity in 123, 124; imperialism in 103–4; primogeniture law in 130;
156, 224; reviews of 105, 106 prophetic dreams in 174–6; radio
Antrobus, Edward 6 adaptation of 207; reviews of 105–6;
Arata, Stephen 156 sexuality in 138–9; social mobility in
architecture 31 113–14, 116
aristocracy 51, 52–3, 56, 117, 121–2, Bayldon, Geoffrey 200
184 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation)
Armadale (Collins) 20, 55, 78, 209; 200, 205, 206
colonial legacy in 157, 158; critical Beard, Dr Frank 20, 21, 23
assessments of 214, 215, 218, 223, 224; Beeton, Isabella 49
detection in 91; family secrets in 89; Belgravia (monthly magazine) 78
forgery and fraud in 75; gender Benthamites 35
identity in 127; moral degeneration in Bentley, Richard 10
183; novel reading in 75; play based Bentley’s Miscellany (magazine) 10, 12,
on 193, 195; Preface to 2, 104, 105; 15, 76, 105
prophetic dreams in 173–4; quacks in Besant, Walter 26, 79, 123
123, 147–8, 152–3; racial stereotype in Bharadwaj, Radha 207, 209
155; review of 108; sailing in 16; bigamy 87, 143
servants in 120; suggestibility in 169; Bildungsroman 85
villainess in 142–4; wrongful Billington, Michael 204
imprisonment in 149, 152–3 Bioscope (magazine) 198
Arminianism 60 Black Robe, The (Collins) 94
Arnold, Matthew 51; Culture and blackmail 45, 87, 143
Anarchy 128 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 9, 71,
Arnold, Thomas 56 107
art-dealing 3 Bleak House (Dickens) 60, 85, 91
artists 54–5 Blind Love (Collins, unfinished) 26, 71,
Ashley, Robert 219 79, 123
Associationism 178–9 Bolt, Christine 68
atheism 62, 63, 65 Bolton Weekly Journal 78
246 Index
Booth, Bradford 219 Clow, Joseph 20, 21
Booth, Michael 95 Cobbe, Frances Power 42, 43, 60–1, 188,
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, Lady Audley’s 189
Secret 7, 78, 88, 89, 90, 91, 142, Cole, Henry 5
153 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, ‘Kubla Khan’
Braid, James, Neurypynology 168 176
Brandling, Henry 11 Collins, Charles Allston (brother) 2, 11,
Breuer, Josef 168 14; death 25; marriage to Katie
bribery 34, 35 Dickens 18
British Empire 67–70, 156–62, 223–4 Collins, Harriet (mother) 2–3, 9, 11, 14,
Brontë, Anne 85, 91 15, 18; death of 20
Brontë, Charlotte 60, 85 Collins, William (father) 2, 3–4, 6, 7, 8–9, 22
Brontë, Emily 85 Collins, William (grandfather) 3
Browne, Frances, The Castleford Case 107 collins, (william ) wilkie
Browning, Robert 187 character; bon viveur 12, 22; self-
Bruce, John 200 consciousness 5; unconventionality
Bulwer Lytton, Sir Edward 8, 30, 82, 84; 12, 18, 20
Not So Bad As We Seem 11, 12 interests: France 7; hidden meanings
169; reading 4; sailing 16; story-
Cain, P. J. and Hopkins, A. G. 67 telling 5–6; theatre 10, 11
Caine, Hall 26 life: appearance 5, 19; caricatures of 194;
Canada 146 and Caroline Graves 16–21; carriage
Carlyle, Thomas 34, 37, 85; ‘Signs of the accident 26; childhood 2, 4; children
Times’ 29–30 20; collaborations with Dickens 94,
Carpenter, William, theory of 99–100, 161–2; death 26; death of
‘unconscious cerebration’ 169–70, close friends 25; death of father 8–9;
171, 172 death of mother 20, 25; education 1,
Carroll, Lewis 187 4, 5, 56; employment at a tea
Cassell’s Magazine 109 merchant’s 6–7; friendship with
Catholics 27, 59, 62, 66 Dickens 11–16; ill health 12, 13, 22, 23,
censorship 81, 82–3 25, 26, 79; journalistic career 12, 13, 15,
Chambers, Robert, Vestiges of the Natural 39, 97–101; liminal social position 2,
History of Creation 62 111; and Martha Rudd 20; and ‘Nannie’
Chapman and Hall (publishers) 7 Wynne 21–2; obituaries 215–16;
Charcot, Jean-Martin 168 opium addiction 23, 25, 100; reading
charity schools 57 for the Bar 8; reading tour in North
Charlton, Alethea 200 America 100–1, 195–6; relationships
Chartism 37–8, 44, 85, 118 with women 4–5, 12; theatrical career
children: abuse of 202; custody of 41; 11–12, 16, 93–5; travels 4–5, 13–14, 26;
factory 35, 57; rights of 133 witness to radical riots 4, 32
cholera 4, 32 opinions: anti-vivisection 60, 93, 111,
Christianity 57, 69 187–91; circulating libraries 82, 83; the
church attendances 58–9, 61 English Sunday 59; his parents 3–4;
Church of England 62 law and lawyers 39–40, 122; middle-
cinema 199–200, 205, 207, 209; silent class prejudice 81, 104; reading public
196, 197–9, 204 72–4; religion 63–6
cities: anonymity of 92; degeneration in works:
184–5; development of 31 articles and essays: ‘Bold Words by a
clairvoyance 166, 168, 211 Bachelor’ 129; ‘Dramatic Grub
Clapham Sect 60–1 Street’ 98; ‘The Dream Woman’ 101,
class 51–5, 55–6, 111, 112–23 196; ‘Gabriel’s Marriage’ 13, 16, 99;
classification 67–8 ‘Laid Up in Two Lodgings’ 98, 117,
Index 247
118; ‘The Last Stage Coachman’ 7; Connolly, John, The Treatment of the
‘Miss Jeromette and the Clergyman’ 8; Insane Without Mechanical Restraints
‘The Monktons of Wincot Abbey’ 152
(‘Mad Monckton’) 13, 99, 183; ‘A Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness 156
New View of Society’ 112; ‘Nine Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866,
o’Clock’ 13; ‘A Passage in the Life of and 1869) 42
Mr Perugino Potts’ 13; ‘A Petition to Contemporary Review 43, 187, 214, 216
the Novel-Writers’ 98; ‘A Plea for Cooke, Alan 209
Sunday Reform’ 39; ‘Reminiscences of Cooper, James Fenimore 83
a Storyteller’ 5, 26; ‘A Sermon for Cornhill Magazine 77, 78, 157, 187
Sepoys’ 162; ‘Sister Rose’ 99; ‘A counterfeiting 3
Terribly Strange Bed’ 13, 99, 101, County and Borough Police Act (1856)
209;‘The Twin Sisters’ 13; ‘The 44
Unknown Public’ 72–4, 98; ‘Yellow Coutts, Angela Burdett 161
Mask’ 99 Crawford, Michael 204
general: assessment of 213–26; Crimes at the Dark House (1940) 199, 244
clandestine marriage plots 10; class criminality 138; degeneration and
112–23; criminality 146–9; cultural 185–6; middle-class 45, 149; quack
intellectuals in 55; degeneration professionals 122–3, 147–8; in
181–6; dramatic structure of novels respectable society 146–9; study of
94; gender 123–9; imperialism and 46–7; working-class 43–5, 121
race 155–64, 223–4; influence on Cropper, Anna 206
detective fiction 210–11; insanity 99, Cruelty to Animals Act (1876) 187
149–54, 180–1; marriage law 129–37; culture 54–5
mesmerism and hynotism in 168–9; Custody of Infants Act (1886) 41
novels-with-a-purpose 93, 109,
134–7, 184; prefatory writing Dallas, E. S. 89
101–5, 128–9, 134, 136–7, 165, 188, dame schools 57
190; in print 209–10; psychology Darwin, Charles 31, 69, 187; On the
169–78; reviews 9, 10, 13, 101, Origin of Species 63, 68
105–10, 143, 190–1, 192, 195, 196, David Copperfield (Dickens) 5, 55, 84
214; science 186–91; serialization Davies, Rupert 209
76–8, 79; sexuality 138–46; Davis, Nuel Pharr 63, 219
summary justice in 147; theatrical ‘Dawson’ children, Harriet, Marian, and
adaptations 94–6, 192–6; working William 20, 21, 26
method 23 de la Mare, Walter 218
plays: Armadale 193, 195; A Court Duel De Quincey, Thomas, Confessions of an
10, 94; The Frozen Deep 16, 94, 218; English Opium Eater 171, 176
The Lighthouse 16, 94; Miss Gwilt 195; Dead Secret, The (Collins) 15, 76, 209;
The Red Vial 16, 94 detective investigation in 117;
short story collections: After Dark 15, downward mobility in 116; servants in
98–9; Little Novels 100; Mad Monckton 118, 119; silent film version of 196
and Other Stories 13, 99, 183, 209; My Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe 160, 224
Miscellanies 98; The Queen of Hearts degeneration 181–6, 202–3
92, 106–7, 121, 196 demi-monde 138, 140, 143
travel writing: Rambles Beyond Railways democratization 32, 34, 36
10–11 detective fiction 87, 91–2, 99, 117, 119,
see also individual works in bold 128, 210–11, 217, 218, 219
colonialism 67–70, 157–62 Dexter, Colin 210
Combe, George 167, 171 Dickens, Charles 4–5, 11, 18, 29, 30–1,
common law 41, 42, 132, 133 34, 55, 71, 94, 99, 218; articles on the
condition-of-England novels 85 new detective force 46; collaborations
248 Index
Dickens, Charles (cont.) equity law 41–2
with Wilkie Collins 94, 99–100, 161–2; Escott, T. H. S. 51, 52, 53–5
death of 25, 79; domination of fiction evangelicalism 3, 35, 59–61, 63, 71
market 84, 85–6; editorial style 80–1; Evil Genius, The (Collins) 78, 94
education references in 57, 58; and evolution 63, 68, 165
Ellen Ternan 12, 16; employment of Examiner (magazine) 106
Wilkie Collins 98; on the English Eyre, Edward John, Governor of Jamaica
Sunday 59; on The Moonstone 88; 69, 168
praise for Basil 13; racial views 158,
161–2; reading tours 100, 195; Factory Acts 35–6, 57
religious references in 60; reporting on Fallen Leaves, The (Collins) 64; critical
industrial disputes 38; responding to assessment of 215; prostitution in 75,
influence of readers 79–80; saving 93, 145; social exclusion in 121, 184–5
‘fallen women’ 51; sensation novels Farmer, Steve 191
90, 91; serial fiction 76; travels with Female Emigration Fund 10
Collins and Egg 13–14 femininity 48–9, 123–8
Dickens, Katie 18 feminism 40, 43, 57, 126, 145, 188, 201
Dignam, Basil 206 Ferrier, David 188
Disraeli, Benjamin 85 financial misconduct 45
Dissenters 71 Fitzgerald, Tara 201
divorce 87, 111, 129 forgery 75, 148, 149
Divorce Act (1857) 42 Forlani, Claire 207
Dombey and Son (Dickens) 29, 84, 91 Forster, John 80
domestic ideal 47–50, 119 Forster, William Edward 57
domestic novels 86, 92 Foucault, Michel 222, 225
domestic violence 43, 49, 202 Fowles, Anthony 209
domesticity 125–6 Franco-Prussian War (1870–1) 145
Doyle, Arthur Conan 91, 210 Fraser’s Magazine 42, 87, 99
dreams 173–8 fraud 45, 75, 117, 148, 149
drunkenness 44 French Revolution (1789) 27, 31
Dudley, William 204 French Revolution (1848) 38
Freud, Sigmund 168
East India Company 156, 160 Fywell, Tim 201
Edinburgh Review 61
education: for factory children 35; Gall, Franz Joseph 167
middle class 55–7; working class 57–8 Gaskell, Elizabeth 61, 71, 85; Mary
Education Act (1870) 57 Barton 146
Edwards, Philip 221 gender 44, 48–9, 111, 123–9
Egg, Augustus 4, 9, 11, 13 geology 62
electoral reform 33–4, 37–8 George IV, King (formerly Prince
Eliot, George 60, 61, 71, 84, 86, 102, 107 Regent) 27
Eliot, T. S. 217, 218 Gissing, George 71
Elliotson, John 25, 167, 170, 171, 172 Gladstone, William Ewart 27, 107
Ellis, Robin 206 Godfrey, Peter 199
Ellis, S. M. 218 Goldsmith, Oliver, The Good-Natur’d
Ellis, Sarah Stickney 49 Man 10
Elton, Oliver, A Survey of English Gordon Riots (1841) 84
Literature 217 Gothic novels 4, 7, 43, 73, 87, 88, 114,
Elwin, Malcolm 218 149, 151, 221, 223
Elyot, Kevin 206 ‘governess novels’ 85
emigration 67, 146 Graphic (weekly magazine) 78, 81
émigrés 163 Graves, Caroline 16–17, 20, 21, 26
Index 249
Graves, Carrie 23, 26 industrialization 27–8, 44, 49–50
Great Exhibition (1851) 29, 68, 157 Infant Custody Bill (1849) 41
Great Expectations (Dickens) 57, 80, 90, 91 inheritance 43, 53, 130, 132–3
Greg, W. R. 51, 140 insanity 99, 131, 138, 149–54, 180–1,
Guardian 204 182–3, 186–7, 222
Guild of Literature 11 Iolani; or, Tahiti as it was (Collins)
Guilty River, The (Collins) 116, 210 (first published in 1997) 7–8, 123, 226
Irish Home Rule Bill 27
Haggard, H. Rider 71 Italian nationalists 163, 164
Hard Times (Dickens) 85 Italy 4, 14–15
Hardy, Thomas 71, 87, 101, 104–5
Hardy, Thomas J. 218 Jacobi, Derek 207
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 109, Jamaica Insurrection (1865) 68–9, 157
121 James, Henry 86, 88
Harper’s Weekly 76, 78 Jane Eyre (Brontë) 60
Harrison, Ainsworth 84 Jarvis, Martin 206
Hartley, David 178 Jenkins, Ray 200
Haunted Hotel, The (Collins) 210, 218 Jerrold, Douglas 7, 98, 105
Hawes, Keeley 206 Jews 62
Heart and Science (Collins) 23, 93, 122, Jezebel’s Daughter (Collins) 78, 94;
147; anti-vivisection argument in Preface to 104; treatment of insanity
187–91; critical assessment of 215 149, 153–4, 186–7
Heilbrun, Vivien 206 Johnson, Samuel 10
hereditary transmission 182–6, 202 Jones, Charlotte 203
Hide and Seek (Collins) 6, 13, 15, 209, journalism 97–8
214
Hilary, Jennifer 200 King, George 199
historical romance novels 84 Kingsley, Charles 71, 85
Hitchcock, Alfred 197 Kipling, Rudyard 71
Hollingshead, John 94 Knoepflmacher, U. C. 220–1
Holyoake, George Jacob 65 Knox, Robert, Races of Men: A Fragment
Hook, Theodore 160 68
Household Words (weekly magazine) 12, Kucich, John 55, 115, 121–2, 123
13, 15, 38, 39, 46, 72, 76, 98, 99, 117,
131, 161–2 Lancet 168
Hughes, Winifred 222 Landseer, Sir Edward Henry 7
Hunt, Thornton 39, 97 Lang, Andrew 216
Hunt, William Holman 9 law 130; marriage 134–5; reform 39–42,
Huxley, Thomas Henry 187 49
hypnotism 25, 166, 168–9 Law and the Lady, The (Collins) 40, 81,
hysteria 168 128, 209; Preface to 165
Lawrence, Keith 63, 66
identity: class 112, 115; false 89, 117, lawyers 122
133, 146, 148; gender 44, 48–9, 111, ‘Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices,
123–9; racial 127 The’ (Dickens–Collins) 99
Iggulden, William 14 Leader (magazine) 13, 39, 64–6, 97, 105,
illegitimacy 75 165–6
Illuminated Magazine 7 Lean, David 197
Illustrated London News 79 Legacy of Cain, The (Collins) 78, 93,
imperialism 67–70, 156–62, 223–4 110, 185–6
India 67, 156, 157, 158–9 Lehman, Nina 23
Indian Mutiny (1857–8) 68, 99, 160–1 Lehman family 20
250 Index
Leigh Smith, Barbara 40–1 Mehta, Jaya 224
leisure 28–9, 74 Méjan, Maurice, Recueil des causes célèbres
Leonard, Hugh 205, 206 16, 130–1
Lewes, George Henry 39, 102, 166 melodrama 95, 97, 196, 217–18
libraries 73, 76, 82–3 Memoirs of the Life of William Collins,
Lippincott’s Magazine 109 Esq. RA (Collins) 3, 7, 8–9, 22, 32–3,
literacy 57, 70, 74 117
Littell’s Living Age (magazine) 78 Mesmer, Anton 167
Little Dorrit (Dickens) 59, 85 mesmerism 165, 166, 168–9, 172, 211
Liverpool, Lord 27 Metropolitan Police Act (1829) 44
Lloyd Webber, Sir Andrew 203 middle class 52–5; cultural intellectuals
Locke, John 178–9 121–2; education 55–7; family secrets
Loesberg, Jonathan 222 88–9, 91; feminization of 47–9;
London Morning Herald 78 masculinity 124–5, 128–9; mistresses
London Working Men’s Association 37 139–41; philanthropy 59–60;
Lonoff, Sue 63, 74, 100 prejudices 104; readers 72–3, 74–5,
Lowe, Robert 58 81; self-discipline 44–5; servants
Luddites 85 threatening privacy of 119; social
lunatic asylums 131; see also insanity gradations within 117; ‘white-collar’
Lupino, Ida 209 crime 45, 149
Lyell, Charles, Principles of Geology 62 Middlemarch (Eliot) 86
Milbank, Alison 223
McLeod, Hugh 58, 61–2 Mill, John Stuart 43, 158
Macmillan’s Magazine 75, 187 Millais, J. G. 17
Macnish, Robert, The Philosophy of Sleep Millais, John Everett 9–10, 13
173, 174 Miller, D. A. 225
magazines 76–81, 100, 187; see also Mines Act (1842) 36
individual titles Miss or Mrs? (Collins) 210
Man and Wife (Collins) 25, 40, 57, 93, Monthly Film Bulletin 205
209; critical assessment of 215; cross- Moonstone, The (Collins) 23, 37, 209,
class marriage in 116; degeneration in 210; colonial legacy in 157, 158–60;
182, 184; dramatization of 94–5, 193; critical assessments of 214, 215, 220–1,
marriage law in 135–7; masculinity in 223–4, 225, 226; detection in 46, 55,
128–9; Preface to 128–9, 136–7; review 91, 123; dramatic structure of 94;
of 109; servants in 118, 120 dramatization of 195; film versions of
Mangan, Eugène 187 205; gender identity in 127; laudanum
Mansel, Henry L. 108, 181 use in 25, 170–3; mesmerism and
marriage: bigamy 87, 143; cross-class hypnosis in 169; mistress in 51,
116; law 40–2, 111, 129–37; middle- 140–1; Preface to 103; psychology in
class delayed 51; morganatic 18, 20, 170–3; race and imperialism in 69,
139; and prostitution 141–4 155–61, 163; religion in 61, 64; reviews
Married Women’s Property Acts (1870 of 108–9, 214–15; romance and realism
and 1882) 42 hybrid 88; secrecy in 89; serialization
Marshall, William 220 of 76, 79; servants in 118, 119–20;
Marston, Edward 101 silent film versions of 196, 204;
Martin Chuzzlewit (Dickens) 84, 91 television adaptations of 205–7, 208
masculinity 49–50, 56–7, 123–9 Moore, George 71, 82, 93, 102, 104
Masson, David 71 moral degeneration 181–4
materialism 31 Morland, George 3
Matrimonial Causes Acts 42, 43 Morley, John 217
mechanization 30 Morning Chronicle 43
medical science 167–8, 187–8 Morris, Clara 197
Index 251
Mr Wray’s Cash-Box; or The Mask and 76–80; single-volume 83–4; and the
the Mystery: A Christmas Sketch theatre 93–7
(Collins) 13 novels-with-a-purpose 92–3, 109, 134–7,
Mudie, Charles Edward 82–3 184
Municipal Corporations Act (1835) 36, Nunn, Sir Trevor 203, 204
44
murder 87, 143, 153, 185 Old Curiosity Shop, The (Dickens) 79, 84
Mutiny novels 160–2 Oliphant, Margaret 86, 90, 91, 108, 142
Mystery of Edwin Drood, The (Dickens) Oliver Twist (Dickens) 76
79 omnibuses 113
mysticism 31 opium 23, 25, 100, 170, 171–3
Our Mutual Friend (Dickens) 58
National Chartist Conventions 37–8 Oxford Movement 61, 62
National Review 51
natural selection 63, 68 Page, Norman 213–14, 221
New Magdalen, The (Collins) 82, 93; Paget, Revd Francis E. 89–90
critical assessments of 215, 218, 224; Pall Mall Gazette 83
cross-class marriage in 116; Paris 14
prostitution in 75, 145–6; silent film parliamentary reform 4, 27, 32, 33–4, 35,
versions of 196–7; socially 37–8, 58
disadvantaged in 121; stage adaptation Peel, Sir Robert 7, 27, 44
of 94, 95, 197; urban degeneration in Pennell, Nicholas 200
184 penny weeklies 73–4, 75, 76
New Review (magazine) 104 ‘Perils of Certain English Prisoners,
Newgate novels 87, 88, 148 The’ (Dickens–Collins) 99, 161–2
newspapers 73, 78, 80 Peterloo Massacre (1819) 27
Nineteenth Century (magazine) 187 Peters, Catherine 8, 21, 191
No Name (Collins) 40, 209; class philanthropy 60
identity in 112; critical assessments of Phillips, Walter C., Dickens, Reade, and
214, 215, 223; detective-cum-fraud Collins: Sensation Novelists 217
plot 117; downward mobility in phrenology 46, 165, 167, 169, 171, 173
116–17; dramatic structure of 94; physiology, mental 169–70, 172
family secrets in 89; forgery and fraud Pickwick Papers (Dickens) 34, 60
in 75; hereditary transmission in Pigott, Edward 10, 11, 13, 16, 39, 63,
183–4; illegitimacy in 75; law in 64–6, 72
132–4; marriage as legalized Pirie, David 201–2, 202, 203
prostitution 141–2; mesmerism Pius IX, Pope 66
reference in 167; Preface to 104, 134; Poe, Edgar Allan 217; ‘The Masque of
quacks in 122–3, 144; review of 108; the Red Death’ 99
social mobility in 116 poisonings 45
‘No Thoroughfare’ (Dickens–Collins) Polanski, Roman 197
94, 100 police 27, 36, 44–5, 45–6
Noble, J. A. 110 politics 4, 27, 223–6
Nonconformists 59–60 Poor Law Amendment Act (1834) 36–7
North British Review 108 Poor Miss Finch (Collins) 209
Norton, Caroline 41, 42 population growth 28
novelists 54–5, 89–90, 97–8 poverty 36–7, 57–8
novels 71; art of the 101–5; circulating primogeniture law 53, 130
libraries and 81–3; corrupting professionals 54–5, 122; quacks 122–3,
influence of 74–5, 108; genres 84–93; 144, 151–2
magazine editors and 80–1; property rights 41–2, 111, 130, 131–7, 151
readership 72–4, 101; serialization of prophetic dreams 173–8
252 Index
prostitution 42–3, 44, 50–1, 75, 93, 111, Routledge, George 83
138, 141, 145, 184 Roy, Ashish 224
Protestants 58–61 Royal Academy 7
psychoanalysis 168 RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention
psychology 165, 166, 170–81 of Cruelty to Animals) 187
public health 36 Rudd, Martha 19, 20, 26
public schools 53, 56–7, 184 Rural Constabulary Act (1839) 44
Punch 187 Ruskin, John 48, 187
Punjab 156 Russell, Paddy 206
quack professionals 122–3, 144, 151–2 Saintsbury, George, The English Novel
Quarterly Review 88, 108, 181 217
Quick, Diana 201, 208 Sallis, Peter 206
Quilter, Henry 26, 214, 216 sanitation reforms 36
Saturday Review (magazine) 106–7, 109
race 67–8, 127, 158, 159, 160–4, 223–4 Sayers, Dorothy L. 210–11, 217
Radcliffe, Ann 4, 87 Schlesinger, Sebastian 26
radio adaptations 197, 207 science 31, 54, 165, 186–7; criminology
Ragged Schools Union 57 46–7; deduction and 55; pseudo
railway novels (‘yellowbacks’) 83–4 165–78; and religion 62–3; vivisection
railway speculation 45 187–91
railways 28–9 scientists 122
Rance, Nicholas 222 Scott, Sir Walter 8, 84, 188
rank 51, 52 Seagrove, Jenny 201
Rawlinson, A. R. 205 secret ballots 34, 35, 37
Reade, Charles 78, 86 Self-Help (Smiles) 32
reading tours 100–1 sensation drama 97
realism in novels 84, 86 sensation novels 16, 43, 45, 83, 85, 86–91,
Reed, John R. 220, 223 92, 103, 107–8, 221–2, 225;
Reform Acts (1832, 1867, and 1884) 4, Associationism and 178–9; inner self
27, 32, 33, 35, 58 169; insanity 180–1; premonitory
Reform Bills 53 dreams 173
registration of births, deaths, and serialization 15, 76–81
marriages 36 Seringapatam (1799) 160, 206
Regnier, François 195 servants 117–20
religion 31, 58–66, 162; see also individual sexual relations 114, 115–16, 211
denominations sexuality 50, 138–46, 222
respectability 45–6, 51, 53, 88, 133, 138, Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper,
146; and criminality 146–9; and Lord 57, 61
prostitution 141–4; and sexuality Sharp, Lesley 206
138–46 Shaw, George Bernard 187
revolutions in Europe 27, 31, 32, 37, 38, Shelley, Mary 189
118, 163 Sher, Anthony 206, 208
riots 38, 44 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, The Rivals
Robinson, George 182 10
Robinson, Kenneth 219 Shirley (Brontë) 85
Rogue’s Life, A (Collins) 3, 15, 122, 148 silent movies 196–9, 204
Roman Catholics 27, 59, 62, 66 Slater, Christian 207
Roman Empire 156 Slaughter, Tod 199
Rossetti, Christina 187 slavery, abolition of 35, 157–8
Rossetti, Gabriele 163 Smiles, Samuel 32
rotten boroughs 33, 34 Smith, Alexander 108
Index 253
Smith, George 78, 83 Trollope, Anthony 71, 72, 78, 85
Smith, Sydney 61 Tuke, Samuel, A Description of the
Smith, W. H., and Son 82 Retreat 186
social change 28–31, 182–4 Turner, J. M. W. 213
social mobility 52–3, 56, 111; in Basil
113–14, 116, in The Dead Secret 116; in Unitarianism 61
The New Magdalen 116; in The Woman Universal Review 26
in White 114–15 urbanization 28, 44, 184–5
social unrest 84, 85 Utilitarians 71
Socialism 27, 34
Spectator 10, 107, 110, 181, 187, 215 Vane, Eleanor 91
speculation 45 Vaughan, Peter 206, 208
Stamp Duty, abolition of (1855) 76 Victoria, Queen 11, 27, 28, 67
statistics 46 Voysey, Michael 200
Stevenson, Robert Louis 71, 189
Stoker, Bram, Dracula 156 Walpole, Hugh 218
strikes 38, 44, 85 Walters, Minette 211
suburbia 28–9, 113–14 Ward, Charles 7, 10, 25
sugar colonies 157, 158 Ward, Edward 10, 25
Sunday observance 58–9 Waters, Sarah, Affinity; Fingersmith
Sunday schools 57 211–12
Sunday Trading Bill 38, 39 Watt, A. P. 78
supernatural 99, 169, 173–4 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke
Sutton, Shaun 205 of 27
Swinburne, A. C. 93, 191, 215 West Indies 157, 158
Swing Riots (1830) 33, 44 Westminster Review 9, 106
Whig Party 33, 35
Tale of Two Cities, A (Dickens) 16, 30–1, Wiener, Martin J. 43, 45, 49
86, 99 Wilberforce, William 61
Taylor, Harriet 43 Wilby, James 202
teacher training colleges 57 Wilcox, Herbert 199
television adaptations 197; The Wilde, Oscar 197
Moonstone 205–7, 208; A Terribly Wilkie, Sir David 2, 4
Strange Bed 209; The Woman in White Wilson, James, The Dark Clue 212
200–3, 208 Winter, William 23
Temple Bar (monthly magazine) 78, 145 Wise, Greg 206
Tenant of Wildfell Hall, The (Brontë) 85, 91 Wolff, Francis de 200
Tennyson, Alfred Lord 187 Woman in White, The (Collins) 16, 17,
Ternan, Ellen 12 18, 163, 209, 210; Associationism in
Test and Corporation Acts 27 179–80; crime and respectability in
Thackeray, William Makepeace 71, 78, 146–7; critical assessments of 214, 215,
85, 100, 101, 107, 142, 144 218, 219–20, 221, 222, 223, 225;
theatre: and novels 93–7 detection in 91; dramatic structure of
Thomas, Ronald 92–3 94; dramatization of 96, 192–3; dreams
‘three-decker’ novels 76, 81–3 in 176–8; film versions of 199–200;
Tillotson, Kathleen 219–20, 221 first sensation novel 85, 90; forgery
Tillotson’s Fiction Bureau 26, 78 and fraud in 75; gender roles in 49,
Times, The 108–9, 192 126–7; law in 35, 40, 130–2; lawyers in
Times Literary Supplement 217, 218 122; Lloyd Webber’s musical
Tosh, John 50, 56 adaptation of 203–4; marriage in 129,
Tractarianism 61, 62 131–2, 133; mesmerism in 168; plot
trade unions 34 adapted by modern authors 211; plot
254 Index
Woman in White, The (Collins) (cont.) working class 51–3; Chartism and 37–8;
idea from Méjan’s Recueil des causes crime 121; degeneration 184;
célèbres 16, 130–1; popular success of education 57–8; fiction for 76; labour
98, 192; Preface to 103; professional conditions reform 35–6, 74; marriage
artist in 55; reviews of 107, 214; 136; readers 73–5; servants 117–20;
secrecy in 89; ‘sequel’ to 212–13; and Sunday observance 59, 61; violent
serialization of 76, 80, 83; servants in crime 44–5
119; silent film versions of 196, 197–9; World (weekly magazine) 78
social mobility in 114–15; television Wuthering Heights (Brontë) 85
adaptations of 200–3, 208; wrongful Wynne, ‘Nannie’ Anne Elizabeth le Poer
confinement in 149–51, 180 21, 26
women: civil rights of 47; criminality
and 44; education 57; and electoral Yates, Edmund 7
reform 34; legal status of 40–3;
readers 74–5; and sensation novels Zippel, David 203
89–90; villainess characters 142–4, 149; Zoist (journal) 167, 168
see also marriage Zola, Émile 93
Wood, Ellen, East Lynne 89, 90, 223