SOURCE: “More than Sensational: The Life & Art of Wilkie Collins,” in The New Criterion, Vol. 12, No. 4, December, 1993, pp. 31-40.

[In the following essay, Allen offers an assessment of Collins's works as modern and enduring, rather than merely melodramatic and sensationalistic.]

Wilkie Collins, the author of Victorian masterpieces of suspense including The Woman in White and The Moonstone, seems to have found the secret to a happy life: Do as you please and be damned. He had not an ounce of the native puritanism of the Anglo-Saxon. He loved pleasure of all kinds: food, drink, women, the theater. Visits to France and Italy early in life had confirmed him in the belief that his fellow-Englishmen were hypocrites regarding sex and barbarians when it came to the arts of the table, that “a man who eats a plain joint is only one remove from a cannibal—or a butcher.” His self-indulgent habits told on him, and in middle age, according to Julian Hawthorne, the son of the novelist, “he was soft, plump, and pale, suffered from various ailments, his liver was wrong, his heart weak, his lungs faint, his stomach incompetent, he ate too much and the wrong things.” Nevertheless, he continued to take his pleasures where he could, determined to make the most of life.

He was a firm enemy of social convention. A radical and a bohemian with a bourgeois fondness for comfort, Collins did exactly as he liked, shocking a number of people in the process. From 1858 until the end of his life he lived with a semi-respectable widow, Caroline Graves, and her daughter Elizabeth (called Carrie); from about 1865 he had also a second mistress, Martha Rudd, by whom he fathered two children. This he called his “morganatic family.” Public disapproval bothered Collins not at all; he had always hated “Society,” and was only too pleased to be excluded from it. His friends remained his friends.

In any case, many of his circle enjoyed or suffered from marital irregularities. There was Charles Dickens's separation from his wife, Catherine; Holman Hunt's long and stormy liaison with his illiterate model, Annie Miller; John Everett Millais's marriage to Mrs. Ruskin, whose first marriage had never been consummated; William Frith's seven children by his mistress and his twelve by his wife. George Eliot and George Lewes lived together openly, as did Charles Reade and the actress Laura Seymour.

What set Collins apart was his specific dislike for the institution of marriage, and he was not afraid to voice his objection in print. “The real fact seems to be, that the general idea of the scope and purpose of the Institution of Marriage is a miserably narrow one. … The social advantages which it is fitted to produce ought to extend beyond one man and one woman, to the circle of society amid which they move,” he wrote in “Bold Words by a Bachelor” (1856). Collins did not shy from the responsibilities that marriage involved—he willingly supported both his households—or even from a more settled way of life; his relationship with Caroline was a settled one, and time with his “morganatic family” was spent in conventional domestic activity. His stated objections to the institution appear to have been quite sincere, and when in 1868 Caroline tried to pressure him into wedlock by threatening to marry another man, he called her bluff. (She lived with her new husband, Joseph Clow, for two years, then returned to Collins upon exactly the same basis as before.)

Sensitive though he was to the potential selfishness of marriage, Collins was amazingly obtuse when it came to the actual selfishness of his own bachelor existence. As the author of No Name, he had passionately criticized the law that deprived illegitimate children of their legal rights and place in society; as a father, he blandly condemned his own children to suffer these indignities. As a result, his daughters, who lived until 1955, never married and never acknowledged their connection with the novelist. It seems that Collins, generous friend though he was, had a tough streak of egotism, or at least of stubbornness: no one was going to make him do otherwise than his own inclinations directed. Yet he was a kind man, and inspired only affection in the overwhelming majority of his acquaintances. His charm partly stemmed from his lack of interest in social advancement. “Wilkie was entirely without ambition to take a place in the competition of society,” wrote Holman Hunt, “and avoided plans of life that necessitated the making up of his mind enough to forecast the future. In this respect he left all to circumstance.” Yet Collins was anything but careless; he worked industriously, with a conscientious professionalism, and met his deadlines even when incapacitated by illness, as he was throughout his last years.

To today's readers, he is known simply as the author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White. A few others have read Armadale and No Name, and though Collins was the author of thirty-three books as well as many plays and magazine articles, his modern reputation rests exclusively on these four novels, all published in the 1860s.

They are indeed extraordinary, the more so in that they belong, at least in part, to the most ephemeral of all literary genres: melodrama. T. S. Eliot, one of Collins's most influential admirers, wrote of Armadale that “it has no merit beyond melodrama, and it has every merit that melodrama can have.” I think it is time that Eliot's judgment, taken as gospel by many twentieth-century readers, be challenged, or at least broadened. Collins's best fiction comprises melodrama, suspense, and mystery: but it is made complete, made literature rather than simply genre fiction, by a strange and passionate moral vision. This perhaps is one of the reasons that his books are as startlingly vivid, as mesmerically readable, today as they were upon their appearance. Comparing The Woman in White or No Name with other popular melodramas of the nineteenth century—The Mysteries of Udolpho, say, or Uncle Tom's Cabin—Collins's novels have the ring of absolute modernity while the others have dwindled into fusty, faintly ridiculous dullness. Suspense novels with great longevity are rare (how absurd will the works of Stephen King appear to readers a century hence?) and for this reason alone Wilkie Collins might be accounted an extraordinary writer. But there are other reasons, many others.

First among these is Collins's abundant gift for invention. So great was it that he could afford to be profligate with ideas. With The Moonstone, for example, he virtually invented the modern detective novel. (I say “virtually” because Poe had already written his tales of C. Auguste Dupin; but the book-length, fleshed-out plot with a crime at its center was Collins's creation, and many of the book's details have now become conventions of the genre.) But while The Moonstone's innovations have been refined, elaborated, and imitated by thousands of writers over more than a century, Collins himself never again exploited the genre he had created.

Another characteristic that gives Collins's work its life was the assurance, which he shared with many of his great contemporaries—Thackeray, Trollope, Charlotte Brontë, but most of all his brother-in-arms Dickens—that writing for the masses did not imply writing down to them. In Collins's day, highbrow and lowbrow had not yet parted company; the best literature was popular literature, and Collins considered his readers (measured in volume of sales) to be the final judges of his work, rather than the convention-bound critics. Had he lived long enough to witness the Joycean ideal of godlike aesthetic detachment in the writer, he would have been disgusted. As it was, he sought an audience even broader than the voracious general readership of his own period, trying again and again to entrap even the lowest echelon of readers, the “Unknown Public” which read cheap and sensational newspapers rather than books. Though he never succeeded in this final goal, Collins was throughout his career a democratic artist who boldly made his bid for popularity and won it in an almost unhoped-for measure. Swinburne was correct when he offered that “though Dickens was not a Shakespeare, and though Collins was not a Dickens, it is permissible to anticipate that their names and their works will be familiar to generations unacquainted with the existence and unaware of the eclipse of their most shining, most scornful, and most superior critics.”

Collins was exceptional, too, in the way that he adorned his sensational plots with a finely drawn psychological truth. Unlike the typical characters of melodrama, his are no mere types but living people, sometimes etched with a delicacy of nuance that brings to mind George Eliot rather than his fellow-melodramatists, even the greatest melodramatists, of all, Dickens. In spite of Collins's friendship with Dickens—and it was certainly the formative friendship of his career, if not of his life—it was to Balzac that Collins looked for inspiration, and to Balzac's breadth of vision that never excluded the petty, the sordid, the contradictory. Balzac he saw as the greatest portrayer of women, while Dickens was limited in this area: Collins believed Nancy in Oliver Twist to be “the finest thing [Dickens] ever did. He never afterwards saw all sides of a woman's character—saw all round her.” He himself tried always, with varying levels of success, to see “all round” his women characters, an attempt that did not commend him to certain of his critics. When No Name was published in 1862, the reviewer Margaret Oliphant wrote in horror of Magdalen Vanstone, the book's heroine, revolted by her “career of vulgar and aimless trickery and wickedness … from all the pollutions of which he intends us to believe that she emerges, at the cost of a fever, as pure, as high-minded, and as spotless as the most dazzling white of heroines.” Of course Collins never intended even the reformed Magdalen to seem high-minded or spotless; she remains the flawed but attractive character she has been from the beginning. Her sister Norah, who bears the sisters' discovery of their illegitimacy and their subsequent fall into penury with modest resignation, ultimately wins back the family fortune by virtue alone, but it is almost as though Collins simply threw her in as a sop for those who require virtue in a heroine. It is always the ruthless Magdalen with whom the reader identifies, though she goes so far as to prostitute herself by tricking into marriage a man who repels her. Collins deftly manipulates the reader's sympathies so that they turn against Norah and the girls' governess, who have Magdalen's best interests at heart, perversely presenting them as mere encumbrances to Magdalen's search for revenge against the cousin who has robbed her of her fortune and her name.

He again employs a “double heroine” in The Woman in White. Here is the most memorable character in all his fiction, the magnificent Marian Halcombe, a vigorous, passionate, strong-minded young woman who is the most active force for good in the book. Yet, as though to comment upon society's ideal of feminine dependency, Collins condemns Marian to permanent spinsterhood, making the helpless Laura Fairlie the book's nominal heroine. When Laura agrees to marry the sinister Sir Percival Glyde, her father's choice, rather than the young drawing instructor Walter Hartright, whom she loves, her passive betrayal not only for her lover but of herself means that she more or less colludes in the plot to steal her identity and confine her to an insane asylum. Yet the colorless Laura is rewarded with a loving husband and son; Marian, the fighter, who risks her life for Laura, must content herself with the role of aunt. Again, Collins manipulates the reader's sympathies so that they are at odds with the accepted moral code and the role it assigned to women.

He simply felt that life was more complicated, circumstances more extenuating than middle-class English society was willing to admit. Sex, and sex among the unmarried, was a fact of life. Why could others not acknowledge it? He was outraged by the concurrence of Dickens's friend and biographer, John Forster, in the platitude that all of Dickens's work could be put into the hands of children. “It is impossible to read such stuff as this without a word of protest,” he wrote.

If it is true, which it is not, it would imply the condemnation of Dickens's books as works of art, it would declare him to be guilty of deliberately presenting to his readers a false reflection of human life. If this wretched English claptrap means anything it means that the novelist is forbidden to touch on the sexual relations which literally swarm about him, and influence the lives of millions of his fellow-creatures, [except when] those relations are licensed by the ceremony called marriage. One expects this essentially immoral view of the functions of the novelist from a professor of claptrap like the late Bishop of Manchester. But that Forster should quote it with approval is a sad discovery indeed.

The modernity of Collins's books, then, is largely due to his moral vision, which harmonizes far more readily with the relativistic attitudes of our own time than it did with the popular standards of the 1860s. Many have called Collins an atheist. He was not a churchgoer, but he was emphatically not an atheist; he simply believed God's tolerance and forgiveness to be extended far beyond some narrow elect—a belief to be found throughout No Name, an essentially Christian book. Cruelty was hard to forgive, sexual weakness easy.

How was this easygoing iconoclast formed? In her new and entertaining biography of Wilkie Collins,¹ Catherine Peters proposes that he determined to escape “the mental inhibitions of the obsession with class that his father had allowed to throttle his freedom.” For though Collins's childhood was a happy one, his parents prosperous and affectionate, there can be no doubt that the father's character—which Peters represents as a “mixture of grovelling humility, anxiety and family affection”—forced an uncongenial code of behavior upon the son.

William Collins was a well-known painter, a member of the Royal Academy, and very much a pillar of England's artistic establishment. He was not, perhaps, an artist who would appeal much to modern tastes, for he ran to heavy-handed conversation pieces with titles like “The Burial-Place of a Favourite Bird” and “The Sale of the Pet Lamb.” Nor was he greatly admired by his more brilliant contemporaries. Constable, who despised his work, described one of William's contributions to the Academy Exhibition as “a coast scene with fish, as usual, and a landscape like a large cow-turd.” Nevertheless, William gave his sons, William Wilkie (born 1824) and Charles Allston (born 1828), a wonderful education in the art of seeing and an appreciation for the privileges of an artist's life. He often expressed his belief that “the study of the Art was in itself so delightful, that it balanced almost all the evils of life … that an artist with tolerable success had no right to complain of anything.” Wilkie (who dropped the “William” from his name in adolescence) later wrote of his father that “an excursion with him in the country was a privilege. … He possessed the peculiar facility of divesting his profession of all its mysteries and technicalities, and of enabling the most uneducated in his Art to look at Nature with his eyes, and enjoy Nature with his zest.”

Wilkie Collins was always a visual writer, constructing his scenes in a vivid, painterly fashion. In this his father's training was instrumental, as was the fact that he spent his entire life around painters. As a child he was surrounded by his father's friends in the profession, who included Turner; his aunt, Margaret Carpenter, was one of the best portraitists of her time; his younger brother, Charley, was a fairly considerable Pre-Raphaelite painter; Wilkie himself studied painting and even had a work exhibited at the Academy Exhibition of 1849. Wilkie included among his own intimate friends the Pre-Raphaelites Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt, as well as the Academy Painters (whose work he preferred) W. P. Frith, Augustus Egg, and Edward Ward.

A careful (some said niggling) artist, William Collins was anything but a bohemian. His modest gifts had afforded him an escape from the obscurity and near-poverty of his youth to the privilege and social position he craved, and he passionately embraced the values of the upper-middle class. Among the perks of his trade were professional visits to the country houses of the great, from where, Peters tells us, “his loving letters to his wife often contain, as well as chat about the titled and famous people he is mixing with, reference to a good sermon, or a pious exhortation not to forget the blessings of the Almighty.” When he sent Wilkie to school, he chose Mr. Cole's establishment at Highbury, telling the boy that there “you will make aristocratic connections which will be of the greatest use to you in life.”

It goes without saying that Wilkie never did make use of these connections. He had already rejected his father's ambitions for upward mobility, turning with gusto toward the raffish and the sybaritic. He became a conscientious nonconformist: “He had only to identify a conventional attitude,” writes Peters, “to want instantly to outrage it; to hear a platitude and contradict it; to have an expectation held of him and disappoint it.” The boy cheerfully failed at each new start in life his father arranged for him, including a five-year stint with a tea-merchant in the Strand, an establishment Wilkie baldly called “a prison.”

William Collins took his family on a long visit to Italy and France from 1836 to 1838, when Wilkie was an adolescent, and from this time on the boy adopted continental attitudes to religion, sex, and food, in obvious reaction to his father's neophobia and piety. Also in contrast to his father, Wilkie was bumptious and sexually self-confident, in spite of his strange appearance: he stood under 5′ 6″, his hands and feet were smaller than a woman's, and there was a bulging protuberance on his forehead.

Though Wilkie began studying law in 1846, his ambitions were by that time wholly literary: he had started a novel. Its composition was interrupted, however, by the death of William Collins, and Wilkie set about the task of writing his father's official “Life.” The finished biography² was Collins's first published book, and it was received with enthusiasm: “… no better work upon art and artists has been given to the world in the last half-century,” wrote the Observer critic.

Though she had been devoted to her husband, Harriet Collins felt unexpectedly liberated upon his death. After years as the sober helpmeet of a serious and ambitious man, she became ebullient and witty, the dominant force in her sons' lives. She moved to a new house and began running what was in effect a salon for the artists who were her sons' friends: Millais, Frith, and Egg, among others. Wilkie and Charley were content for many years to live with Harriet, using her as landlady, banker, and hostess. She had a firmer hold on her sons than did any of the women in their lives, and Collins was repeatedly to speak of her death (in 1868) as the greatest sorrow of his life.

The new atmosphere at home proved a fruitful one for Collins. He at last completed his novel, Antonina: or the Fall of Rome, published in 1850. It was a historical romance modeled upon the works of Bulwer-Lytton and Scott, and dealt with the destructive nature of religious fanaticism and extremism of all sorts; it was a great success with reviewers. He followed this with a light travel book about Cornwall, Rambles Beyond Railways (1851). His publisher was Richard Bentley, a useful connection in that he also put out a magazine, Bentley's Miscellany, that became an outlet for Collins's growing stream of articles and stories. The first editor of this periodical had been Charles Dickens, and it was at this point in his life that Collins first became acquainted with the older novelist.

Dickens was producing a new play, Not So Bad As We Seem, in aid of the Guild of Literature and Art. Himself the star, he recruited Collins to play a small part. Dickens's rehearsal pace—long, grueling hours followed by riotous parties—suited Collins's temperament, and the two men quickly became friends. John Forster's jealousy of Collins's friendship with Dickens caused him practically to omit Collins from what was for years the definitive biography of the great man, but we now know that during the mid-Fifties Collins became Dickens's bosom-friend, taking the place of earlier companions like Forster and Daniel Maclise. Collins's professionalism matched Dickens's, and his liking for fun and dissipation made him especially attractive. For Dickens had become something of a prisoner in the role of household deity he had created for himself, and family life was growing less congenial to him as he became estranged from his wife and disappointed in his children. Collins's taste for brothels, music halls, and actresses was shared by Dickens; his openness about sexual matters was exciting, if a little threatening to Dickens's chosen image. They traveled together in Europe, Collins flaunting his knowledge of painting and his adolescent sexual experiences in Italy before the more insular Dickens, but generally making himself agreeable: “Collins eats and drinks everything,” Dickens wrote home to his wife. “Gets on very well everywhere, and is always in good spirits.”

Dickens gave Collins valuable business advice about the publication of Basil (1852), his first novel with a modern setting; he gave him work writing stories for his magazine Household Words, including one classic, “A Terribly Strange Bed”; and, in 1853, he made Collins one of the “young men” on the magazine's staff. Collins attacked social convention here and in The Leader, a radical newspaper founded by George Lewes and Thornton Leigh Hunt: “A Plea for Sunday Reform,” for instance, or an editorial on the dreadful legal status accorded married women. When his outbursts became too radical for Household Words' more middle-of-the-road politics, Dickens would gently edit him.

Peters demonstrates that it required an effort for Collins to retain his independence from the Dickens machine. “All Wilkie's good-humored stubbornness was needed to keep his own style and literary integrity, to remain something more than one of Dickens's ‘young men.’” And though Collins continued to publish his own novels (Hide and Seek, 1854; The Dead Secret, 1857), his output was markedly slower during these years than at other times in his life. Dickens could be high-handed: when Collins showed him a play he had written, The Lighthouse, Dickens appropriated it, did some rewriting, and gave it an amateur production with himself in the lead, rather than the professional one with which Collins sought to break into the theater. Nevertheless, Collins's long apprenticeship with Dickens strengthened his work. The older man's energy and rich imagination were infectious, and it is worth noting that after Dickens's death in 1870 Collins never again wrote anything of great imaginative force.

In 1858 the lives of both men changed direction. Dickens's love for the young actress Ellen Ternan forced him to a final break with his wife, and Collins began living openly with Caroline Graves, leaving his mother's house for the first time at the age of thirty-four. (In his biography of his father, John Guille Millais tells a melodramatic story of Collins's first meeting with Caroline: alone and dressed entirely in white, fleeing a mesmerist at dead of night, she appeared like a ghost to Collins and his companions. Peters ridicules the unsubstantiated story.) The way in which Dickens and Collins dealt with their personal crises marks the profound differences between them. Collins was perfectly open about his relationship with Caroline, and if he did not invite her everywhere he went, it was not out of shame but because he often preferred traveling as a bachelor. Dickens took the opposite tack. But while he tried to keep his link with Ellen Ternan a secret, his separation from his wife was inevitably made public, and he responded with defensive bluster, even destroying Household Words because its publishers refused to print his own version of the separation in Punch.

The dissolution of the magazine gave birth to a larger one, however, when Dickens replaced it with All the Year Round. He decided that each number would begin with a serialized piece of fiction by a well-known author. He himself launched the periodical with A Tale of Two Cities, and he asked Collins to follow it up with a new novel of his own. The result was The Woman in White.

The kernel of the story, based [on] a true case, Collins described as “a conspiracy in private life, in which circumstances are so handled as to rob a woman of her identity by confounding her with another woman, sufficiently like her in personal appearance to answer the wicked purpose.” Challenged by Dickens's example, Collins set out to write, above all, a page-turner. “I must stagger the public into attention, if possible, at the outset. They shan't drop a number, when I begin, if I can help it.” But he overstepped the mark in his zeal. “I have yielded to the worst temptation that besets a novelist—the temptation to begin with a striking incident, without counting the cost in the shape of explanations that must and will follow.” He had to begin again—but the new beginning, of course, was more striking yet: Walter Hartright's famous meeting with Anne Catherick, the Woman in White, late in the evening on a Hampstead road.

Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Collins chose to ignore the stringencies of serial publication. He felt that the most important thing was to keep “the story always advancing, without paying the smallest attention to the serial division in parts, or to the book publication in volumes.” The result is a remarkably free-flowing, suspenseful narrative, unmarred (at least to the modern reader) by subplots or comic supporting characters. Unquestionably thrilling, the book has many other virtues. Its narration by a series of characters in turn (inspired by Collins's visit to a criminal trial) ensures a continual freshness of outlook, gives differing interpretations of the events, and shows, in Collins's best style, the relativism of any received moral notions. The feminist heroine, Marian Halcombe, is something quite new in English literature; the arch-villain, Count Fosco, is an equally superb creation, with his brilliant and all-too-plausible attacks upon the English moral code. Most striking of all is Collins's use of humor, which is always intrinsic to the central situation and never, as in so many popular novels of the period, appended as mere filler. Take, for example, Walter's first meeting with Marian.

I looked from the table to the window farthest from me, and saw a lady standing at it, with her back turned towards me. The instant my eyes rested on her, I was struck by the rare beauty of her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude. Her figure was tall, yet not too tall; comely and well-developed, yet not fat; her head set on her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness; her waist, perfection in the eyes of a man, for it occupied its natural place, it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays. … She turned towards me immediately. The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window—and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps—and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer—and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly!

The Woman in White was nothing less than a blockbuster. Lines formed to buy each new number of All the Year Round, and the periodical achieved staggering circulation figures, three times that of Household Words. There were “Woman in White” perfumes and toiletries, cloaks and bonnets; there was a Fosco Galop and a Woman in White Waltz. Collins's commercial success now allowed him to dictate his own price to publishers, and though the highbrow Cornhill was too late to snag his next book, already promised to All the Year Round, its editor offered him an enormous sum for the following one. Collins was gleeful. “Five Thousand Pounds!!!!!! Ha! ha! ha! Five thousand pounds for nine months or at most a year's work—nobody but Dickens has made as much.”

He was already at work on No Name. Dickens was excited by what he read, but gave his protégé a suggestion:

It seems to me that great care is needed not to tell the story too severely. In exact proportion as you play around it here and there, and mitigate the severity of your own sticking to it, you will enhance and intensify the power with which Magdalen holds on to her purpose. For this reason I should have given Mr. Pendril some touches of comicality, and should have generally lighted up the house with some such capital touches of whimsicality and humour as those with which you have irradiated the private theatricals.

Fortunately, Collins ignored this advice. Only a writer of Dickens's own genius could have carried off such “whimsicality” and “comicality” without destroying the straightforward narrative rush which was Collins's particular strength. No Name sold well, though critics were repelled by its heroine. Armadale, Collins's next novel, was serialized in Cornhill from 1865 to 1866. Again, he chose a heroine who would shock: Lydia Gwilt was even more cynical and tough than Magdalen Vanstone. Armadale did not justify the magazine's financial output, selling relatively slowly. But it is one of Collins's best books, in fact the very acme of the “sensation novel” of the Sixties that he did so much to define and popularize. The sensation novel dealt with crime, adultery, bigamy, illegitimacy, sex, murder, or any combination thereof. Armadale and No Name are the best the genre has to offer; Collins now set out to challenge his audience's expectations by changing the rules of the game.

In so doing he created a new and more durable genre. “The Moonstone is the first and greatest of English detective novels,” according to Eliot, and this is an opinion shared by many. In this novel the detective story as we know it today bursts amazingly, fully matured, upon the scene. Its precedents were few. There was the Inspector Bucket subplot of Dickens's Bleak House. There were, as I've said, the Dupin stories: but, as Eliot pointed out, “the detective story, as created by Poe, is something as specialized and as intellectual as a chess problem; whereas the best English detective fiction has relied less on the beauty of the mathematical problem and much more on the intangible human element.” It is Collins's Sergeant Cuff, with his inductive reasoning and his passion for roses, who is the direct ancestor of Sherlock Holmes and his progeny.

Like The Woman in White, The Moonstone has many virtues other than those of its genre. The first is the respect accorded the Hindu religion. The jewel has been stolen from a Hindu temple by the wicked John Herncastle and left in his will to his niece Rachel Verinder. Though the book's series of narrators all treat the diamond as Rachel's rightful property—and indeed, Rachel is innocent of any taint of theft—Collins gently enlists our sympathies with the mysterious, even murderous, Brahmin priests who seek the stone, and we rejoice at the moonstone's ultimate return to its temple. This may seem straightforward enough today, but the novel was written hardly a decade after the Indian Mutiny, and the vengeful jingoism it had caused in England was still the overwhelmingly dominant attitude.

The novel was also remarkable in its bold sympathy for poor working women. With The Moonstone's Rosanna Spearman, the ugly housemaid who dares to fall in love with the young gentleman Franklin Blake and commits suicide for her unrequited love, Collins cast a very uncomfortable shadow over the reader's feelings for the charming Franklin. His inability to recognize the girl's love and her pain is a real fault: as Rosanna's friend Lucy says, “He bewitched her. Don't tell me he didn't mean it, and didn't know it. … Cruel, cruel, cruel.”

The Moonstone was another best seller, spawning imitations of all kinds: The Eustace Diamonds, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and The Sign of Four are three of the more famous books which drew inspiration from the story. But The Moonstone was the last of Collins's great books. After this, his talents seemed to fade, for several reasons.

His health, never good, began to handicap him intolerably. He suffered from a debilitating condition which he described as “rheumatic gout,” and as it grew more severe, he became more and more dependent on laudanum (an opium-based drug) to ease his discomfort. Eventually he was taking massive doses, and the disease and the drug combined to make long periods of concentrated work a painful process. The death of Dickens, two years after the publication of The Moonstone, ended Collins's most fruitful working relationship. Also, his success as a playwright began to play havoc with his fiction; he took to writing his books with one eye on their immediate transformation into plays, and his fictional constructions suffered for it. Some feel, too, that his consuming political interests—the rights of women, anti-vivisectionism, divorce law reform—began during this period to take precedence over his attention to art, and that in the absence of Dickens, he became a disciple of Charles Reade, the leading proponent of “Fiction with a Purpose.” Swinburne's parody of Pope—

What brought good Wilkie's genius nigh perdition?
Some demon whispered—‘Wilkie! have a mission’

—is, perhaps, partly true.

Meanwhile, in the eyes of the great public, Collins was becoming old hat. The most intelligent readers no longer turned to melodrama, and the style of the time, naturalism, was a closed book to him. He was too highbrow for the new mass-readership newspapers, yet out-of-touch with the tastes of educated readers. He was in fact one of the first victims of the new rift between literature for the elite and literature for the masses, and Peters points out that “Collins, who had always believed passionately that the two could and should be combined, found himself caught in the middle.” A younger writer such as Robert Louis Stevenson was able to take Collins's material and turn it once more to magic—for surely Collins, with his recurrent motif of the double, is one inspiration behind both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Master of Ballantrae. But for Collins himself the magic no longer worked. He wrote several more novels, notably Heart and Science (1883), The Evil Genius (1886), and Blind Love, which he was still working on when he died, in agonizing pain, in 1889. Walter Besant finished the novel, on Collins's request and following his fantastically thorough notes.

Meredith, Hardy, and Harry Quilter raised a subscription for a memorial to Collins in St. Paul's, but the Dean and Chapter refused to consider memorializing so notorious a fornicator. The money was used in a way that Collins would have preferred, to create the “Wilkie Collins Memorial Library of Fiction” at the People's Palace in the East End, later Queen Mary's College.

Catherine Peters's biography is timely, for Wilkie Collins is a strangely modern character, his eccentricities likely to appeal to late-twentieth-century readers, his books worthy of a new surge of interest. His disdain for cant and for social niceties are as merciless as anything that came out of his own century, or has come out of ours. “Shall I tell you what a lady is?” Magdalen Vanstone asks her maid. “A lady is a woman who wears a silk gown, and has a sense of her own importance. I shall put the gown on your back, and the sense in your head.” Collins knew that gentility and respectability are constructed of surfaces, with no more solidity than air. But any disdain he felt for the human race was always far overshadowed by his principal quality—kindness. Collins was, above all, a kind man, and he understood the well-kept secret that kindness is not a simple virtue but a difficult one, closely allied with intelligence and sensibility. “Examples may be found every day of a fool who is no coward,” he wrote; “examples may occasionally be found of a fool who is not cunning; but it may be reasonably doubted whether there is a producible instance anywhere of a fool who is not cruel.”

Notes

1. The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins, by Catherine Peters; Princeton University Press, 502 pages.

2. Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., R.A.; London, 1848.