COLLINS, (William) Wilkie

Nationality: English. Born: London, 8 January 1824; son of the painter William Collins. Education: Maida Hill Academy, London, 1835-36; with his parents in Italy, 1836-38; at a private school, Highbury, London, 1838-41; apprentice, Antrobus and Company (tea merchants), London, 1841-46; studied at Lincoln's Inn, London, 1846-51; called to the bar, 1851. Family: Lived with Caroline Graves, 1859-68 and 1870-80, adopted her daughter; supported Martha Rudd ("Mrs. Dawson"), 1868-89, two daughters and one son. Career: Friend and literary collaborator of Charles Dickens, q.v., 1851-70; staff member and contributor, Household Words and All the Year Round, 1856-61; addicted to opium from mid-1860s; gave reading tour of United States, 1873-74. Also a painter with works exhibited at the Royal Academy, London, 1849. Died: 23 September 1889.

Publications

Collections

The Complete Shorter Fiction. 1995.

Short Stories

After Dark. 1856.

Miss or Mrs.? and Other Stories in Outline. 1873; revised edition, 1875.

Readings and Writings in America: The Frozen Deep and Other Stories. 1874.

Little Novels. 1887.

The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, No Thoroughfare, The Perils of Certain English Prisoners, with Charles Dickens. 1890.

The Best Supernatural Stories, edited by Peter Haining. 1990.

Mad Monkton and Other Stories. 1994.

Novels

Antonina; or, The Fall of Rome. 1850.

Mr. Wray's Cash-Box; or, The Mask and the Mystery. 1852.

Basil: A Story of Modern Life. 1852; revised edition, 1862; edited by Dorothy Goldman, 1990.

Hide and Seek. 1854; revised edition, 1861.

The Dead Secret. 1857.

The Queen of Hearts. 1859.

The Woman in White. 1860; edited by Harvey Peter Sucksmith, 1975.

No Name. 1862; edited by Virginia Blain, 1986.

Armadale. 1866; edited by Catherine Peters, 1989.

The Moonstone. 1868; edited by J.I.M. Stewart, 1966.

Man and Wife. 1870.

Poor Miss Finch. 1872.

The New Magdalen. 1873.

The Law and the Lady. 1875.

The Two Destinies. 1876.

The Haunted Hotel: A Mystery of Modern Venice (with My Lady's Money). 1879.

A Rogue's Life, From His Birth to His Marriage. 1879.

The Fallen Leaves. 1879.

Jezebel's Daughter. 1880.

The Black Robe. 1881.

Heart and Science: A Story of the Present Time. 1883.

I Say No. 1884.

The Evil Genius: A Domestic Story. 1886.

The Guilty River. 1886.

The Legacy of Cain. 1889.

Blind Love, completed by Walter Besant. 1890.

Plays

A Court Duel, from a French play (produced 1850).

The Lighthouse, with Charles Dickens, from the story "Gabriel's Marriage" by Collins (produced 1855).

The Frozen Deep, with Charles Dickens (produced 1857). 1866; inUnder the Management of Mr. Charles Dickens: His Production of The Frozen Deep, edited by R. L. Brannan. 1966.

The Red Vial (produced 1858).

A Message from the Sea (produced 1861).

No Name, with W. B. Bernard, from the novel by Collins. (produced 1871). 1863; revised version, by Collins alone, 1870.

Armadale, from his own novel. 1866.

No Thoroughfare, with Charles Dickens and Charles Fechter, from the story by Collins and Dickens (produced 1867). 1867.

Black and White, with Charles Fechter (produced 1869). 1869.

The Woman in White, from his own novel (produced 1870; revised version produced 1871). 1871.

Man and Wife, from his own novel (produced 1873). 1870.

The New Magdalen (produced 1873). 1873.

Miss Gwilt (produced 1875). 1875.

The Moonstone, from his own novel (produced 1877). 1877.

Rank and Riches (produced 1883).

The Evil Genius (produced 1885).

Other

Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, R.A., with Selections from His Journals and Correspondence. 2 vols., 1848.

Rambles Beyond Railways; or, Notes in Cornwall Taken A-Foot.1851; revised edition, 1861.

My Miscellanies. 2 vols., 1863; revised edition, 1875.

Considerations on the Copyright Question Addressed to an American Friend. 1880.

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Bibliography:

Collins: An Annotated Bibliography 1889-1976 by Kirk H. Beetz, 1978.

Critical Studies:

The Early Novels of Collins by Walter de la Mare, 1932; Collins: A Biography by Kenneth Robinson, 1951; Collins by Robert Ashley, 1952; The Life of Collins by Nuel Pharr Davis, 1956; Collins by William H. Marshall, 1970; Collins: The Critical Heritage edited by Norman Page, 1974; Collins: A Critical and Biographical Study by Dorothy L. Sayers, edited by E.R. Gregory, 1977; Collins: A Critical Survey of His Prose Fiction, with a Bibliography by R.V. Andrew, 1979; Collins and His Victorian Readers by Sue Lunoff, 1982; Collins: Women, Property, and Propriety by Philip O'Neill, 1988; The Secret Life of Collins by William M. Clarke, 1988; In the Secret Theatre of Home: Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology by Jenny Bourne Taylor, 1988; The Sensational Novel: From The Woman in White to The Moonstone by Lyn Pykett, 1994; The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins by William M. Clarke, 1996.

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Wilkie Collins was a prolific writer of short stories, most of them appearing initially in magazines (including Household Words, under the editorship of his friend and mentor Charles Dickens), and most of them being collected subsequently in a series of volumes. He was very active in this genre from the early 1850s; possibly there are even earlier stories, not credited to him, that appeared anonymously in various periodicals. During the 1860s, the period during which his major novels were written, he produced few short stories, but he returned to the form in the 1870s and 1880s.

Collins's stories fall into a number of categories and bear an interesting relationship both to his full-length fiction and to established and emerging types of story. One of his most important innovations was in the field of the detective story, and his "A Stolen Letter" has been described as the first English detective story. (It appeared in 1855, in the special Christmas edition of Household Words, written jointly by Collins and Dickens and titled "The Seven Poor Travellers"; the title "A Stolen Letter" was supplied later, Collins not infrequently changing the titles of his stories for their successive appearances.) The story, involving forgery, blackmail, plotting and counterplotting, spying, the deciphering of a cryptic message, a desperate search against the clock, last-minute success, and a practical joke at the villain's expense, contains many ingredients that were to be used again by Collins and others, including Arthur Conan Doyle in the Sherlock Holmes stories. The narrative is also characteristically given to a storyteller with an idiosyncratic style, resulting in a brisk, crisp narrative pace and the sense of an audience within the storytelling situation. A related but somewhat different technique is used in another detective story, "The Biter Bit" (originally titled "Who Is the Thief?" for its appearance in the Atlantic Monthly in 1858), where the epistolary method is employed in a narrative that uses the device of the least-likely criminal and that can even be read as a subverting of the new detective story genre.

A different kind of detective story is "The Diary of Anne Rodway" (in Household Words, 1856), in which the detective is a young girl anxious to discover her friend's murderer. The account of the lives of the very poor is rendered vivid by the use of Anne's diary as a vehicle for the narrative: a seamstress without parents or friends, she shows courage and resourcefulness in tracking down the man responsible for her fellow-lodger's death on the basis of a tiny, almost insignificant clue.

Collins also wrote a number of stories that owe a debt to the Gothic tradition, and these can be divided into those exploiting the supernatural or the uncanny and those simply designed to shock and thrill with their account of horrifying events that (as in his best-known story, "A Terribly Strange Bed") turn out to have a rational explanation. "The Dream Woman" (originally "The Ostler," in Household Words, 1855) uses one of Collins's favorite motifs, a chance meeting with a mysterious woman. Despite his mother's warning that she is "the woman of the dream"—a terrifying figure who had appeared to him during a night spent in a lonely inn seven years earlier—the protagonist marries her and narrowly escapes a murderous attack. The conclusion is open-ended: has he escaped danger once and for all, or will the woman reappear in his life? As he does so often, Collins sets the main story within a frame involving a narrator and a listener as well as the central actor in the drama, now an old man but still living in daily dread of the woman's reappearance. Collins used an expanded version of this story for his public readings given in America in 1873, though regrettably the effectively ambiguous ending was changed for one of a more decisive kind.

While some of Collins's stories are relatively short, others are virtually novellas, a good example being "Mad Monkton." The hero comes from a family suffering from "the horrible affliction of hereditary insanity," and the title turns out to be ambiguous, raising the question whether Monkton is genuinely haunted by his uncle's ghost or whether he is suffering from delusions. A family tradition holds that, if the uncle's body remains unburied, the family will become extinct; hence Monkton sets off for Italy (a favorite setting for Gothic horror stories) to find and bury it. He is accompanied by a young friend, who is the story's narrator. The graphic scene of the body's discovery, involving a detailed description of a putrefying corpse, was too much for Dickens, who declined to publish "Mad Monkton" in his magazine (it appeared in Fraser's Magazine in 1855).

Another ghost story, "The Dead Hand," introduces another favorite motif of Collins's and of much nineteenth-century sensational writing, that of the double (in this case plausibly provided by a half-brother). This story, which appeared as "The Double-Bedded Room" in Household Words in 1857, includes several other elements that relate it to other writings by Collins and to wider traditions of storytelling: the bold introduction of the theme of illegitimacy looks forward to Collins's novel No Name—the phrase "no name" actually appearing in the story—while the setting of the action in an inn recalls not only Collins's own frequent use of such settings but a long tradition that extends forward at least as far as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.

As these selected examples suggest, Collins showed a marked preference for certain types of story but also showed considerable ingenuity in his variations on established themes as well as originality in his early experiments in detective fiction (anticipating, among much else, his own classic The Moonstone). Of particular interest to the student of fictional technique is his use of a variety of narrative voices, often set within a frame that establishes the narrative situation and hence interposes a credible intermediary between the reader and events that are in themselves often bizarre or fantastic. Many of the ideas, incidents, or character-types in the stories were used again, in modified or expanded form, in his full-length works of fiction. Moreover, the eccentric lawyer in "A Stolen Letter" has been seen as providing Dickens with suggestions for the character of Jaggers in Great Expectations, and Collins's story of the French Revolution, "Sister Rose" (in Household Words, 1855), may have been in Dickens's mind when he conceived A Tale of Two Cities.

Collins is, thus, not only one of the earliest substantial writers of short fiction in England but a significant innovator and a significant influence upon at least one major writer. Not only did he contribute to the expansion and popularity of the genre and to the sophistication of its technique, but he produced a number of stories (represented in several current selections) that are still highly readable today.

—Norman Page

See the essay on "A Terribly Strange Bed."