SOURCE: “Rewriting the Male Plot in Wilkie Collins's No Name: Captain Wragge Orders an Omelette and Mrs. Wragge Goes into Custody,” in Out of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender (ed) Criticism, University of Massachusetts Press, 1990, pp. 186-96.

[In the following essay, David argues that No Name's questioning of Victorian gender politics disrupts its conventional narrative discourse.]

Whether Wilkie Collins was a feminist, deployed popular literature for feminist ideology, or even liked women is not the subject of this essay. My interest is in something less explicit, perhaps not fully intentional, to be discovered in his fiction: an informing link between restlessness with dominant modes of literary form and fictional critique of dominant modes of gender politics. In what follows, I aim to show how the narrative shape of one of Collins's most baroquely plotted, narratively complex novels is inextricably enmeshed with its thematic material. I refer to No Name, a novel whose subversion of fictional omniscience suggests Collins's radical literary practice and whose sympathy for a rebellious heroine in search of subjectivity suggests his liberal sexual politics.¹ To be sure, there are other Collins novels as narratively self-reflexive as No Name, The Moonstone, for one; and Man and Wife, for example, mounts a strong attack on misogynistic subjection of women (particularly when exercised by heroes of the Muscular Christian variety). But no Collins novel, in my view, so interestingly conflates resistance to dominant aesthetic and sexual ideologies as No Name, even as it ultimately displays its appropriation by the authority that both enables its existence and fuels its resistance.

Challenging authoritarian, patriarchal-sited power in his interrogation of form and theme, Collins collapses a binary opposition between the two, a separation assumed in Victorian criticism of the novel and still, perhaps, possessing a lingering appeal in these deconstructive times. The intense dialogism, the insistent relativism, of No Name makes it impossible to align in one column what is represented and in another the ways in which representation takes place. Neither is it possible to construct a neat alignment of fictionality and representation, to say that at this moment the novel performs self-reflexive cartwheels and that at another we are in the realm of strict mimesis. Mimesis, one might say, is always simultaneous with semiosis in No Name, so much so, in fact, that representation, say, of a character obsessed with the record keeping which is the means of his social survival, becomes a field for self-reflexive fictionality; and, to a lesser extent, fictionality is sometimes the ground on which Collins maps his persuasively realistic narrative.² Collapsing the neat polarities of literary analysis, upsetting the conventions of omniscient narrative, showing a woman's struggle for survival as she is both exiled from and enclosed within patriarchal structures—all this is the business of No Name, in my view an exemplary novel for “naming” Collins's disruptive place in the tradition of Victorian fiction.

The original publication of Collins's novels covers some forty years, from Antonina in 1850 to Blind Love, left unfinished at his death in 1889, and his career encompasses two distinct periods in the history of Victorian fiction: At the beginning we are in the age of Dickens and Thackeray; at the end we enter a new generation composed of Hardy, Stevenson, Moore, Gissing, and Kipling.³ With Antonina, a historical romance set in fifth-century Rome and owing much to Gibbon and Bulwer-Lytton, Collins established himself as a powerful storyteller with a commendable eye for detail, and by the time of his fifth novel, The Woman in White, he emerged as a master of diegesis with a narrative something for everyone: omniscience, free indirect discourse, autobiography, diary, letter, newspaper story, ledger book, memoranda. No Name appeared during the 1860s (Collins's stellar decade of literary production) between his two best-known novels, The Woman in White and The Moonstone, and was first published in Dickens's weekly magazine All the Year Round from March 1862 to January 1863 and published in three volumes at the end of 1862. Divided into eight dramatic “scenes,” punctuated by groups of letters which are, in turn, interpolated with newspaper stories and journal entries, No Name was phenomenally successful. Collins received 3,000 pounds for the first edition, sold nearly 4,000 copies on the day of publication, netted 1,500 pounds for American serial rights, and obtained 5,000 guineas from Smith Elder for his next novel before having written a word.⁴

Unlike most Collins novels, however, No Name discloses no secrets, rattles no nerves with sensational excitement; rather, as he observes in his preface, “all the main events of the story are purposely foreshadowed, before they take place—my present design being to rouse the reader's interest in following the train of circumstances by which these foreseen events are brought about.”⁵ For some critics, the absence of suspense seriously impairs No Name's success. Jerome Meckier, in particular, finds “the biggest mistake” to be “procedural” and believes Collins “sadly misjudges his own strengths” in forgoing surprise. From another perspective, however, one can argue that even before it begins No Name, a story about an unconventional female response to legal disinheritance, seeks to demystify the power of conventional, one might say inherited, Victorian narrative discourse. Rather than demanding from the reader acquiescence in a controlled revelation of plot, the narrator collaboratively offers a chance to see how plot comes into being, an opportunity to experience plot-in-process, so to speak, rather than plot-as-product. What's more, as several contemporary critics perceived, in forgoing narrative suspense for readerly collaboration, Collins situates his narrative practice in contention with the sort of instructive discourse perfected by George Eliot, whose Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, with their exemplary narrative discursions into questions of social responsibility, artistic representation, and cultural change preceded No Name by several years.⁶

As it is difficult to discuss any Collins novel without summarizing what happens, I shall do that briefly before showing how No Name disrupts conventional narrative discourse in the process of interrogating Victorian gender politics. On the death of their father Andrew Vanstone, eighteen-year-old Magdalen and her older sister Norah are unable to inherit his considerable fortune. As a young officer in Canada, he married impetuously, repented quickly, and returned to England, where he met the mother-to-be of Magdalen and Norah, a woman courageous enough to live with him. In the opening chapter, Vanstone and his forty-four-year-old pregnant not-wife learn of the death of his legal wife and quickly go off to London to marry. But a few days later Vanstone is killed in a railway accident, and the now legal second wife rapidly declines into death after childbirth, leaving her orphan daughters to discover that, although they are now legitimate, they are disinherited because Vanstone made his will before marrying their mother. They are named “Nobody's children,” and their inheritance goes to a mean-spirited uncle who quickly departs the novel—leaving his puny son Noel immensely rich and vulnerable to Magdalen's considerable attractions. A born actress, she undertakes numerous disguises with the assistance of one Captain Horatio Wragge (a scoundrel who achieves respectability by the end of the novel), marries Noel under an assumed name, is unmasked by her husband's craftily intelligent housekeeper, falls desperately ill after the death of Noel, and is dramatically rescued by the son of a friend of her father, a Captain Kirke—whom she marries in a symbolic reconciliation with the father figure who left her legitimate yet disinherited at the beginning of the novel. Exiled from patriarchal protection in the opening chapters, she is enfolded within patriarchy's embrace by the end. And to complete this story of return to one's heritage, her sister marries the man who inherits the estate from Noel Vanstone.

No Name is notable for Collins's bold delineation of a heroine who sells her sexuality to regain her rightful fortune. An outraged Mrs. Oliphant (always good for a scandalized response) declared in 1863 that Magdalen engages in “a career of vulgar and aimless trickery and wickedness, with which it is impossible to have a shadow of sympathy,” that she is tainted by “the pollutions of … endless deceptions and horrible marriage.”⁷ The “horrible marriage” part distressed almost all reviewers, and even now, in our far less prudish time, it is difficult not to be troubled, even embarrassed, by Collins's sexual frankness. He describes a young woman bursting with “exuberant vitality,” possessed of “a figure instinct with such a seductive, serpentine suppleness, so lightly and playfully graceful, that its movements suggested, not unnaturally, the movements of a young cat … so perfectly developed already that no one who saw her could have supposed that she was only eighteen,” undergoing “the revolting ordeal of marriage” to a frail little man with a miserable moustache, the complexion of a delicate girl, an appalling habit of screwing up his pale eyes, and a forehead that is always crumpling “into a nest of wicked little wrinkles.”⁸ But the chilling picture of sexual bargain between vibrant young woman and sickly older man, undisguised as it is by the cosmetic of Victorian piety, serves its political purpose: Collins makes us see that disinherited middle-class women, deprived of paternal protection, assume an identity that is both inscribed and concealed by the gender politics of their social class—that of sexual object. We also see how the literal incarceration of women to be found in Collins's earlier novel The Woman in White becomes, in No Name, an incarceration formed of rigid laws, of patriarchal injunctions.

In his focus upon the “sensational” aspects of The Woman in White, the ways that this novel (and others in the “sensation” genre) elaborates “a fantasmatics of sensation,” D. A. Miller observes that Laura Fairlie “follows a common itinerary of the liberal subject in nineteenth-century fiction: she takes a nightmarish detour through the carceral ghetto on her way home, to the domestic haven where she is always felt to belong.”⁹ In No Name, Magdalen Vanstone also makes that journey. But whereas Laura is essentially passive, the quintessentially pale and quivering victim, Magdalen is aggressive, robustly in rebellion against the law that confines her to impecunious humiliation. What's more, Magdalen's awesomely vibrant performances (first in legitimate roles as Julia and Lucy in an amateur production of The Rivals at the beginning of the novel, then in illegitimate impersonations of her former governess and a parlormaid) constitute energetic difference from the passivity of women in The Woman in White (excluding, needless to say, that fascinating pioneer woman detective, Marion Halcombe).

Magdalen possesses a frightening ability to lose her own self in the assumption of other identities,¹⁰ and her first strategy for survival when she finds herself “Nobody's” daughter is to leave home and seek out the manager of the amateur theatricals, who, amazed by her talent for mimicry, had given her his card and declared her a “born actress.” Unable to find him, she is befriended (or, rather, appropriated) by Captain Wragge: He will turn her into a professional and will be compensated when Magdalen recovers her rightful fortune. Wragge's recounting (in one of his numerous Chronicles, which I shall discuss in a moment) of her first appearance in an “At Home” (a performance featuring one actor assuming a series of extraordinarily different characters) indicates some of the larger meanings of gender politics in the novel. Wragge devises “the Entertainment,” manages “all the business,” writes two anonymous letters to the lawyer authorized to find her, fortifies her with sal volatile as antidote to unhappy memories of her family, and sends her on stage:

We strung her up in no time, to concert pitch; set her eyes in a blaze; and made her out-blush her own rouge. The curtain rose when we had got her at red heat. She dashed at it … rushed full gallop through her changes of character, her songs, and her dialogue; making mistakes by the dozen, and never stopping to set them right; carrying the people along with her in a perfect whirlwind, and never waiting for the applause.¹¹

Endowed with a natural vitality which is “managed,” disciplined, and shaped by Wragge, Magdalen, during the actual performance reasserts her naturally vital, rebellious female self in “out-blushing” her own rouge, thereby suggesting how the novel, in general, addresses the way woman's “natural” talent is shaped by patriarchal culture, society, and the law. If Wragge, then, as stage manager operates as an omnipotent string puller, let us see how his other activities strongly suggest the omnipotence associated with narrative omniscience. Wragge may be seen as parodic emblem, as Collins's embodied and symbolic critique of prevailing literary form in the Victorian period.

Omniscience, according to J. Hillis Miller, finds its authority and its origin in the unsettling of established religious beliefs: “The development of Victorian fiction is a movement from the assumption that society and the self are founded on some superhuman power outside them, to a putting in question of this assumption, to a discovery that society now appears to be self-creating and self-supporting, resting on nothing outside itself.”¹² As remedy for the profound unease occasioned by such a discovery, society turns to … authorizes the fictionally omniscient … omnipotent narrator to fill the void, retard slippage from belief to skepticism. Through his unrelenting insistence on diegetic relativism, which is expressed in the multiple narrative perspectives we encounter in almost all his fiction, Collins refuses to perform the consolatory functions Miller identifies. Very much like Thackerary in Vanity Fair, who interrogates all forms of authority and wants us to examine the unthinking ways we accept fictions of various sorts, how, especially, we believe in a novelist's total knowledge of the world, Collins insists that we see the subjective, arbitrary nature of fictional representation, the hubristic nature of novelistic omnipotence.

Defining himself as a “moral agriculturalist; a man who cultivates the field of human sympathy,” Wragge scoffs at being labeled a “Swindler”: “What of that? The same low tone of mind assails men in other professions in a similar manner—calls great writers, scribblers—great generals, butchers—and so on.”¹³ Identifying himself with “great writers” who cultivate “the field of human sympathy,” he becomes, of course, both like and unlike Wilkie Collins, the Victorian inheritor and reviser of conventional narrative discourse. But this is not all; Wragge's deft talent for inventing characters and identities also associates him with the creation of fiction. For example, one of the books in his “commercial library” (a repository of reference works in roguery and deception) is entitled “Skins to Jump Into.” Concocting plausible identities for himself, Mrs. Wragge, and Magdalen in the plot to attract and snare Noel Vanstone, he selects the “skins” of a Mr. Bygrave, Mrs. Bygrave, and niece Susan and instructs Magdalen as follows:

My worthy brother was established twenty years ago, in the mahogany and logwood trade at Belize, Honduras. He died in that place; and is buried on the south-west side of the local cemetery, with a neat monument of native wood carved by a self-taught negro artist. Nineteen months afterwards, his widow died of apoplexy at a boarding-house in Cheltenham. She was supposed to be the most corpulent woman in England; and was accommodated on the ground floor of the house in consequence of the difficulty of getting her up and down stairs. You are her only child; you have been under my care since the sad event at Cheltenham; you are twenty-one years old on the second of August next; and, corpulence excepted, you are the living image of your mother.¹⁴

His imperative omniscience, his persuasive attention to detail, his energetic keeping up of numerous journals and ledgers that record assumable identities, characteristics of different “districts,” narratives of successful and unsuccessful swindles—all affirm his status in No Name as parodic narrator, as emblem of convention, order, and legitimacy (despite and because of his vagabond status).

Insisting “he must have everything down in black and white,” announcing that “All untidiness, all want of system and regularity, causes me the acutest irritation,”¹⁵ in a manner worthy of Conrad's accountant in Heart of Darkness, he writes his narratives of deception in precise pages of neat handwriting, obsessively aligns rows of figures, and permits no blots, stains, or erasures. To complete this empire of fiction making, of fabrication of identity, he has, quite literally, authorized himself; everything, he proudly declares, is verified by “my testimonials to my own worth and integrity.” In sum, Wragge performs a kind of burlesque of Victorian narrative discourse, of the sovereign omniscience that dominates the period—and this, of course, is the mode of arbitrary narrative from which Wilkie Collins implicitly disinherited himself in his persistent interpolation of omniscience with the relativism of diary, letter, journalistic fragment, and so on. Bakhtin's observation that the novel form “is the expression of a Galilean perception of language, one that denies the absolutism of a single and unitary language,” is richly borne out by the dialogism of No Name.¹⁶

If Captain Horatio Wragge serves as vehicle for Collins's restlessness with dominant modes of literary form, then it is his wife, Matilda Wragge, who, absolutely unconsciously, expresses Collins's critique of dominant modes of gender politics. No Name, thick with the inherited themes of Victorian fiction—marriage, family, money, wills, female desire, male governance—contains an irregular, disruptive episode that functions as an important signifier for Collins's indictment of patriarchal law. Mrs. Wragge is the alarming center of this episode, an illegitimate, irregular, symbolically political action that molests the attempts at omnipotence practiced by her husband. She is affiliated more with modes of signification, with interrogations of fictionality, than with the events of the signified, with what is being represented. I'm going to name this episode “Captain Wragge Orders an Omelette.” And to explain what I mean by this, let me take you to the scene where Magdalen meets Matilda for the first time.

Characterized by her husband as “constitutionally torpid” and declared by Lewis Carroll to be an uncanny anticipation of his White Queen,¹⁷ Mrs. Wragge is a physical marvel. A gigantic six feet, three inches, she has an enormous, smooth, moonlike face, “dimly irradiated by eyes of mild and faded blue, which looked straightforward into vacancy,”¹⁸ and complains constantly of a “Buzzing” in her head. This buzzing is not helped by her husband's compulsion to bark orders like a sergeant major: Confiding to Magdalen that he is a “martyr” to his own sense of order, Wragge shouts, “Sit straight at the table. More to the left, more still—that will do,”¹⁹ and “Pull it up at heel, Mrs. Wragge—pull it up at heel!”—this occasioned by the sight of her worn slippers. The buzzing, she explains, began before she married the Captain and was working as a waitress in Darch's Dining Rooms in London: “The gentlemen all came together; the gentlemen were all hungry together; the gentlemen all gave their orders together.”²⁰ Years later she is still trying to get the gentlemen's orders sorted out; becoming “violently excited” by Magdalen's sympathetic questioning, she begins to repeat the orders retained in her muddled mind:

Boiled pork and greens and peas-pudding for Number One. Stewed beef and carrots and gooseberry tart, for Number Two. Cut of mutton, and quick about it, well done, and plenty of fat, for Number Three. Codfish and parsnips, two chops to follow, hot-and-hot, or I'll be the death of you, for Number Four. Five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Carrots and gooseberry tart—peas pudding and plenty of fat—pork and beef and mutton, and cut 'em all, and quick about it—stout for one, and ale for t'other—and stale bread here, and new bread there—and this gentleman likes cheese, and that gentleman doesn't—Matilda, Tilda, Tilda, Tilda, fifty times over, till I don't know my own name.”²¹

In this City chophouse, eerily suggestive of Harold Pinter's Dumb-Waiter where two hit men attempt to fill orders for steak and chips, jam tarts, and so on, Matilda, disoriented by the barrage of gentlemen's orders, does not know her own name, feels herself deprived of identity by the incessant discipline of male directions; she becomes, in a sense, somewhat like Magdalen, a woman deprived of her identity as inheriting daughter and disciplined by laws that legislate legitimacy and correct irregularity.

It is at Darch's Dining Rooms that Mrs. Wragge meets the Captain, “the hungriest and the loudest” of the lot. Once married, her servant duties are transferred from a multitude of hungry and demanding gentlemen to one: She shaves him, does his hair, cuts his nails, presses his trousers, trims his nails, and, misery of miseries, cooks his meals. This latter duty requires constant recourse to a “tattered” cookery book, and when Magdalen meets her, she is attempting to master the directions for making an omelette (ordered by the Captain for breakfast the next day). As I'm going to suggest, this is an omelette with many fillings.

Here's how she interprets the recipe to Magdalen:

“Omelette with Herbs. Beat up two eggs with a little water or milk, salt, pepper, chives, and parsley. Mince small” There! mince small! How am I to mince small, when it's all mixed up and running? “Put a piece of butter the size of your thumb into the frying pan.”—Look at my thumb, and look at yours! whose size does she mean? “Boil, but not brown.”—If it mustn't be brown, what colour must it be? … “Allow it to set, raise it round the edge; when done, turn it over to double it … Keep it soft; put the dish on the frying-pan, and turn it over.” Which am I to turn over … the dish or the frying-pan? … It sounds like poetry, don't it?²²

Probably not, I think is our response, but Mrs. Wragge's innocent deconstruction of a recipe generates a kind of narrative poetics and gender politics for No Name. On the level of narrative, her contention with the cookery book implies female subversion of male-authorized texts or laws (the cookery book written by a woman for the instruction of other women in filling male orders); on the level of story, her resistance to accepted interpretation intimates the larger battle in this novel between legitimacy and illegitimacy, between male governance and female revenge. And she doesn't let up. Grandiosely introducing Magdalen to the Wragge way of life, the Captain offers “A pauper's meal, my dear girl—seasoned with a gentleman's welcome”; his wife begins to mutter, “Seasoned with salt, pepper, chives, and parsley.” Negotiating terms with Magdalen for her dramatic training, the Captain begs her “not to mince the matter on your side—and depend on me not to mince it on mine;” his wife (of course) mutters that one should always try to “mince small.” Her “torpid” yet disruptive presence not only prefigures Lewis Carroll's White Queen but also anticipates the interrogation of arbitrary systems of signification that we find in Alice in Wonderland. If her husband's attitudes, despite his raffish demeanor and picaresque career, represent conformity and conservatism, then Mrs. Wragge's attitudes represent resistance and interrogation.

And what of Mrs. Wragge's omelette? Well, she makes it, but, as she says, “It isn't nice. We had some accidents with it. It's been under the grate. It's been spilt on the stairs. It's scalded the landlady's youngest boy—he went and sat on it.”²³ Her interpretation of male orders results in something not “nice,” and certainly illegitimate as an omelette. And what of Captain Wragge? Abandoning “moral agriculture” for “medical agriculture,” he goes in for the manufacture and sale of laxatives. Turning his talent for narrative to the production of stories about “The Pill,” his skill in creating identities to the fabrication of testimonials about its dramatic effects, he becomes very rich. Meeting Magdalen at the end of the novel, “the copious flow of language pouring smoothly from his lips,” he declares, “I merely understand the age I live in.”²⁴ It seems as if his attitudes no longer represent conformity and acceptance (as I suggested earlier); speaking the dominant sociolect of “the age,” which will never be understood by his wife, he ceases to function as parody or burlesque and becomes the thing itself. In other words, he goes legit. And instead of shouting at his wife, he appropriates her astonishing physical presence for the narrative that makes him rich: She is, he says, “the celebrated woman whom I have cured of indescribable agonies from every complaint under the sun. Her portrait is engraved on all the wrappers, with the following inscription beneath it:—‘Before she took the Pill, you might have blown this patient away with a feather. Look at her now!!!’”²⁵ Just as Magdalen's story of return to legitimate social identity in marriage assumes conventional narrative form, so Mrs. Wragge's story of respectable celebrity puts an end to her disruption of parodic omnipotence. No longer the resisting reader of a recipe, like the Captain she becomes the thing itself and is read by others, engraved and inscribed as she is on all the wrappers for “The Pill.” Mrs. Wragge is in custody, just as, one might venture, Collins's interrogations of narrative form, patriarchal law, misogynistic sexual politics are (must be) eventually placed in the demanding custody of his serialized novel. They are disciplined by the contingent demands of his career, by the male-dominated directives of his culture. In sum, the subversiveness of No Name must ultimately be contained by the structure that enables its existence. Shall we say real life as opposed to fiction? But perhaps we should remember Noel Vanstone's astonished response to the revelation of Magdalen's plot for revenge: “It's like a scene in a novel—it's like nothing in real life.”²⁶ In deconstructing Collins's literary practice and gender politics in No Name, we should not try to break the dialectical bond between theme and form, life and novel.

Notes

1. Comparing No Name with Great Expectations (which it followed in Dickens's periodical All the Year Round), Jerome Meckier finds Collins's novel inferior. Meckier's interest is in the way these two novels address barriers to “social progress,” their meaning as “serious, philosophical critique of shortcomings traceable to the very nature of things.” Meckier's tendency to focus exclusively on informing connections between the private plight of Pip and public disorder blinds him, I think, to the very real social difficulties experienced by women in Collins's novel. Jerome Meckier, Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction: Dickens, Realism, and Reevaluation (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), 129.

2. For stimulating discussion of relationships between mimesis and semiosis, I am indebted to Michael Riffaterre's lecture series at the University of Pennsylvania, February 1988.

3. Norman Page, ed., Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage, Critical Heritage Series (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), i-xvi.

4. Ibid., 169.

5. Wilkie Collins, No Name (1864; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); preface pages are not numbered.

6. An unsigned review in Dublin University Magazine in February 1861 observes that “a writer like George Eliot may look down from a very far height on such a dweller in the plains as he who wrote The Woman in White.” For this critic, Collins's novel is infected by “the spirit of modern realism.” In 1863, Alexander Smith in the North British Review more neutrally noted that Collins was “a writer of quite a different stamp from George Eliot.” Page, Wilkie Collins,104, 140.

7. Page, Wilkie Collins, 143.

8. Collins, No Name, 6, 357, 205.

9. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 172.

10. Jonathan Loesberg makes the interesting point that “sensation novels evoke their most typical moments of sensation response from images of a loss of class identity. And this common image links up with a fear of a general loss of social identity as a result of the merging of the classes—a fear that was commonly expressed in the debate over social and parliamentary reform in the late 1850s and 1860s.” Part of the implicit threat to established gender and class politics posed by Magdalen's protean ability to switch roles may be ascribed to such a fear. Jonathan Loesberg, “The Ideology of Narrative Form in Sensation Fiction,” Representations 13 (Winter 1986): 117.

11. Collins, No Name, 175.

12. J. Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction: Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot, Meredith, and Hardy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 30.

13. Collins, No Name, 153.

14. Ibid., 235-36.

15. Ibid., 147.

16. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 366.

17. Page, Wilkie Collins, 245.

18. Collins, No Name, 146.

19. Ibid., 151.

20. Ibid., 148.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid., 150.

23. Ibid., 161.

24. Ibid., 529.

25. Ibid., 526.

26. Ibid., 403.