Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins (1824-1889), English writer, originator of the sensation novel. Born in London, Collins trained as a lawyer, but never practised. His work includes fiction, plays, journalism, and biography, but it is on his 22 novels that his reputation rests. His first book was a portrait of his father, the artist William Collins, but he soon turned to fiction, publishing a historical romance, Antonina, or the Fall of Rome (1850). Much influenced by the style of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the novel made him a minor literary celebrity, and brought him into contact with Charles Dickens, who was a close friend from 1851. The pair collaborated on dramatic productions, both writing and performing The Frozen Deep (1857), which Collins eventually adapted into a novella. His play The Red Vial (1858) was a failure, but some of its plot was successfully re-used in the novel Armadale (1866).

Throughout the 1850s, Collins contributed stories and articles to Dickens's periodicals Household Words and All the Year Round, developing a style of fiction that by the following decade had become known as the sensation novel. Other practitioners of this high-impact narrative style included Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mrs Henry Wood, Charles Reade, and Dickens himself: a novel such as Great Expectations (1861) has all the distinguishing features of the genre. Typically, the sensation novel contained elements such as madness, bigamy, and murder, bringing the horrors of Gothic fiction into the suburbs of Victorian Britain. Although phenomenally popular, it was much criticized for its effect on the nerves of its readers. The first of these novels was Collins's Basil (1852), in which a young man enters into a secret marriage arrangement that eventually drives him to a nervous breakdown. One critic found it “absolutely disgusting”, objecting to the author's “resolution to spare us no revolting details”.

However, it was with The Woman in White (1859) that Collins established his reputation. The hero Walter Hartright's moonlit meeting with the ghostly Anne Catherick is a striking example of the “sensation” that his fiction was held to impart. It was later claimed that this incident mirrored his first meeting with his lifelong companion, Caroline Graves. The novel registers contemporary anxieties about the poorly regulated asylum system, in which it was possible for family members to dispose of sane but troublesome relatives. Its success allowed Collins to abandon journalism and concentrate on novels and plays, through which he developed his profound interest in bizarre extremes of human psychology. He adapted many of his novels for the stage, and wrote two plays in collaboration, No Thoroughfare (1867) with Dickens, and Black and White (1869) with the actor Charles Fechter.

His fictional method rejects the use of an all-seeing narrator in favour of collections of first-person narratives, often voiced by eccentric and unconventional characters. Some of his most memorable creations are Count Fosco, the obese, charming villain of The Woman in White; Lydia Gwilt in Armadale, a fascinating adventuress with a talent for poisoning; and Dr Benjulia, a twisted vivisectionist who terrorizes the characters of Heart and Science (1883). Strangest of all is the legless Miserrimus Dexter, paranoid anti-hero of The Law and the Lady (1875), who, when not scuttling about on his hands, careers at speed around his mansion in a battered wheelchair.

Other important novels include No Name (1862), the story of a woman who reconstructs herself when the revelation of her father's bigamous marriage robs her of her legal identity; The Moonstone (1868), which, though not really part of the genre, is often seen as the first detective novel; and Poor Miss Finch (1872), the strange tale of a blind woman's relationship with a pair of twin brothers, one a charismatic artist, the other having epilepsy and whose skin has been tinged blue by chemical therapy. Collins's later novels display a more obvious emphasis on social commentary, and a growing interest in marginal medical and scientific theory. For instance, telepathy features in The Two Destinies (1871), and theories of hereditary criminality in The Legacy of Cain (1888).

Collins's own life explains the preoccupation of much of his fiction with both mental instability and also people on the margins of society. He suffered from bouts of painful illness that made him heavily dependent on laudanum, a potentially hallucinogenic mixture of opium and alcohol. He also led an unconventional sexual life. From 1858 he lived with Caroline Graves, who eventually left him to marry a man called John Clow in 1868, possibly as a protest at her precarious position as his mistress, or at the fact that he was also conducting a relationship with another woman, Martha Rudd, by whom he had three children. In 1871 Caroline returned, and Collins's unconventional family continued to live together in London until his death in 1889. His final novel, Blind Love (1890), was completed by his friend Sir Walter Besant.