Wilkie Collins

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Standard Name: Collins, Wilkie
Used Form: William Wilkie Collins
Used Form: W. Wilkie Collins
Best remembered for his sensational fiction of the 1860s, WC was, in the course of his forty-year writing career, the author of many ingeniously-plotted novels, as well as a writer of plays (some in collaboration with Charles Dickens ), short stories, a biography of his father, and a travel book. Innovative narrative technique is a feature of his work, along with legal and social critique. His writings are also notable, in a literary culture that viewed physical difference as a marker of moral failure, for their sympathetic representation of disability.
Caricature of Wilkie Collins, with oversized head and hat and skinny legs. He is putting up a poster for The Woman in White and his jacket pocket is stuffed with posters.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Occupation Frances Eleanor Trollope
Frances Eleanor Ternan (later FET ), her sisters Maria and Ellen , and her mother Frances , performed with Dickens in Wilkie Collins 's The Frozen Deep, which opened at the New Free Trade Hall in Manchester.
Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. HarperCollins, 1990.
786-8, 790
Occupation Helen Taylor
F. A. Hayek speculates that she played a small role in Wilkie Collins ' The Red Vial on its opening night at the Olympic Theatre in October 1858.
Hayek, Friedrich Augustus von et al. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor; Their Correspondence [i.e. Friendship] and Subsequent Marriage. University of Chicago Press, 1951.
260-1
Performance of text Elizabeth Inchbald
It was published at Dublin in 1789, and held the stage well during the early nineteenth century: October-November 1824 saw two rival productions at different theatres. Dickens directed the production of a much-revised version in...
Publishing Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Several collections of MEB 's short fiction appeared in the early twenty-first century: The Cold Embrace and Other Ghost Stories (2000) from Ash-Tree Press , At Chrighton Abbey and Other Horror Stories (2002) from Wildside Press
Publishing Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens's romance about the French Revolution set largely in Paris, appeared in 1859 in several forms:first serially in his new journal All the Year Round, and, overlapping...
Publishing Mary Elizabeth Braddon
It ran as a serial in Temple Bar competing with the Cornhill Magazine's Armadale by Wilkie Collins , whose power MEB felt she had to fight with his own weapons, mystery, crime, etc.
qtd. in
Wolff, Robert Lee. Sensational Victorian. Garland, 1979.
167
Reception Jean Plaidy
In 1991, JP said of Mistress of Mellyn: This was the sort of book that I loved to write, because I had read so much of the BrontësCharlotte BrontëAnne Brontë , over and over again, and...
Reception Sarah Waters
SW calls this book on the one hand a homage to the sensation novels of Braddon and Wilkie Collins , on the other hand a reflection of 1990s excitement over the concept of queer. Writing...
Reception Lucy Walford
After the publication of Recollections of a Scottish NovelistLW decided that there were still stories in her mind that rank among the great days of my life, yet which did not fit in with...
Reception Queen Victoria
Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands outsold many books that appeared in 1868, including Wilkie Collins 's The Moonstone, Robert Browning 's Ring and the Book, and Louisa May Alcott
Reception Harriet Smythies
In April 1863 HS 's novel The Daily Governess; or, Self-Dependence (1861) was included as part of Henry Mansel 's attack on sensation novels in the Quarterly Review. Although HS was not a major...
Textual Features Mary Elizabeth Braddon
MEB recalled the publisher's desire for a blend of the human interest and genial humour of Dickens with the plot-weaving of G. W. M. Reynolds .
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth et al. “My First Novel”. The Trail of the Serpent, edited by Chris Willis and Chris Willis, Modern Library, 2003, pp. 415-27.
422
She indeed opens with a Dickensian flourish, conjuring...
Textual Features Dinah Mulock Craik
This original fairy tale features the Prince Dolor, who is crippled as an infant, deprived of his rule by a Prince Regent uncle, and brought up in miserable conditions. A fairy godmother gives him a...
Textual Features Ella D'Arcy
Perhaps aimed at a Temple Bar formula, it has thriller-style action and stilted dialogue which suggests a sensation novel by Wilkie Collins or Mary Elizabeth Braddon , but which proved not to be D'Arcy territory...
Textual Features Mary Elizabeth Braddon
In a letter to Bulwer-Lytton from this period, Braddon admits studying the inventive plotting of Frédéric Soulié and borrowing from it.
Wolff, Robert Lee. Sensational Victorian. Garland, 1979.
128
This plot-driven sensation novel features a former valet, Joseph Wilmot, who, having taken...

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