The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Here’s to crime fiction’s original poster boy
How Wilkie Collins invented literature’s most addictive genre
Many years ago, I was in crisis. As a result of university, I had come to hate reading, an experience all too familiar to those who study literature. What saved me was picking up an unfashionable Victorian novel in a bookshop: Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860). A short way into its opening pages – in which the hero, Walter, recounts how, returning from his mother’s cottage in Hampstead, he is accosted by a terrified young woman dressed in white, assists her, then learns that she has escaped from an asylum – I was gripped. The story, filled with vivid characters, satirical observation and a captivating mystery, returned to me the powerful pleasures of fiction, and enabled me to become a novelist myself.
Born 200 years ago this month, Collins created what TS Eliot called “the first and best detective novel” in 1868’s The Moonstone. Every subsequent writer in this genre – from Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers to Abir Mukherjee and Mick Herron – is indebted to his instinct for meticulous plotting and psychological complexity.
As John Mullan, UCL professor and author of The Artful Dickens, says, Collins “is simply one of the most influential of all English novelists” because he invented the genre to which contemporary viewers of film and television, as well as readers, are addicted. Today, we are accustomed to cliffhangers, body doubles, gaslighting, adultery, secret identities and murder: essential components of the place where, as Mullan puts it, “genre fiction and literary fiction overlap”. The psychological thriller is the thinking person’s entertainment of choice. Yet such popularity also suggests why the pioneer of what the Victorians called the “sensation” novel is not as esteemed as he ought to be.
Punch magazine in 1863 parodied sensation fiction’s purpose as: “Harrowing the Mind, Making the Flesh Creep, Causing the Hair to Stand on End… and generally Unfitting the Public for the Prosaic Avocations of Life.” Some critics, such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton, were even more brutal, describing Collins’s work as “trash”. The Victorian public, however, went wild for Collins, snapping up Woman in White perfumes and Woman in White bonnets. Even Henry James recognised his originality, writing in The Nation in 1865: “To Mr Collins belongs the credit of having introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors.”
Some still believe, like Jane Austen’s Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey, that bad things cannot possibly happen in England; even to suggest that they might in a literary work is considered bad form. Yet it is my contention that almost all the fiction that lasts does so because it combines the “sensational” with the “emotional”, and that Collins, like Dickens, does both.
It is easy to overlook how brilliantly written his best novels are. He did not write in a single style that we recognise as “Collinsian”, in the way we instantly recognise Dickensian. Instead, The Woman in White and The Moonstone give each narrator a different and distinctive tone, vocabulary and attitudes; others, such as Armadale (1866), are formally inventive in weaving letters and diaries into the narrative. Collins conceals his own feelings and opinions, and we, as readers, must deduce the truth from a series of contradictory stories. Which of the narrators of The Moonstone – servant, solicitor, gentleman, apothecary, detective – can we trust? Is Count Fosco in The Woman in White a devil or benign?
It’s no surprise that Collins, like Dickens, was fascinated by doubles and contradictions. A strikingly unVictorian Victorian, he never married but kept two households for two mistresses, and was one of the few to whom Dickens confided his affair with the actress Ellen Ternan (for whom he left his long-suffering wife, Catherine). He was also one of the first to hear of Dickens’s death in 1870, and his anguished scrawl to the family at Gad’s Hill can be seen in an ongoing exhibition at the Charles Dickens Museum in Bloomsbury, Mutual Friends, which explores Dickens and Collins’s unique relationship.
After The Woman in White, he was given a sum no novelist, except Dickens, had ever received
Despite Collins being 12 years younger than the famous Dickens, the two men became fast friends in 1851, united by a mutual passion for theatricals. Appearing in an amateur production of BulwerLytton’s comedy Not So Bad as We Seem, Dickens took the lead role of Lord Wilmot, and Collins played his valet. Queen Victoria was amused by it, and from 1852, Collins began to contribute to Dickens’s journal Household Words, producing stories and articles for an annual payment of £275
over five years (roughly equivalent to £22,000 in today’s money).
Collins never missed a deadline, even when bedridden with gout. A charming man, he was loved by all.
“He is not put out by small matters… gets on very well everywhere, and is always in good spirits,” Dickens wrote. The two men enjoyed walking, and before long were taking holidays together by the sea and around Europe. Collins had experienced a far more cosmopolitan childhood than Dickens, thanks to his artist father taking the family to Rome (where, he would later boast, he lost his virginity aged 12 to a woman three times his age). On one holiday, according to Peter Ackroyd’s biography, they even competed in a moustachegrowing contest: Dickens’s was luxand uriant; Collins’s, “as scanty as the eyebrows of a child”. Eventually, their families were joined when Collins’s brother Charles married Dickens’s daughter Kate.
On other matters, they could hardly be more different. Collins hated religion; Dickens supported conventional Christian feeling. Dickens wanted perfect neatness; Collins was irritatingly messy. Dickens extolled the domestic and had 10 children by his wife; Collins had just three by his two mistresses and despised “the claptrap morality of the present day”, as he puts it in the preface to Armadale. But when Collins produced his bestselling The Woman in White, and was given a contract for £5,000 for the next – a sum that no other living novelist save Dickens had ever received, which enabled Collins to leave Dickens’s employment – there was no apparent envy.
Unfairly overshadowed today by Dickens, Collins was more than a writer of melodramas. His ability to place his tales in a landscape is striking, and painterly – who can forget the handicapped maidservant Rosanna in The Moonstone describing her vision of the Shivering Sand (a stretch of quicksand on the Yorkshire coast) “as if it had hundreds of suffocating people under it – all struggling to get to the surface, and all sinking lower and lower in the dreadful deeps!” Collins gives dignity to a character whom one suspects would have been sentimentalised by Dickens. Equally, the eponymous Woman in White, whose distressed appearance on the Hampstead Road at the start of the novel presages its themes of lunacy and innocence, is given pathos as well as horror. We feel these creations as more than mere puppets of the plot. Collins points the way for the novel to regenerate as something that feeds both the heart and the mind.
He could also be very funny. When Walter’s patron in The Woman in White recoils at the young drawing master being described as a genius – “We don’t want genius in this country unless it is accompanied by respectability” – it still elicits laughter. And showing a story through the facets of different characters gives his novels a diamond-like sharpness – it was an original literary device of real artistic and psychological merit.
To read a Wilkie Collins novel is to confront received opinions. The enormous yellow diamond or Moonstone, ripped by a thieving British officer from the forehead of a Hindu god and brought back to England, has disquieting echoes of the ever-topical battle over the Elgin Marbles. Collins’s novel is also notable for being fair-minded towards its Indian characters in pursuit of the jewel. He respects the Brahmin priests’ tenacity, courage and self-sacrifice. Ultimately, the Moonstone is returned to its rightful place on the statue’s forehead back in India: an unusual twist, given the prevailing attitudes of the 1860s. By contrast, Dickens, outraged by the Indian Rebellion of 1857, wished to “exterminate the Race… and raze it off the face of the Earth”.
True, Collins does not write miraculous sentences like Dickens, but his plainer prose and empathetic sensibility are far closer to our own. When he begins The Woman in White with “This is a story of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can achieve”, it is not as resonant as “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, but you know that what follows will be absorbing.
No snob, his heroes and heroines are not only drawn from the middle class but are servants, nurses and policemen. Several of his characters are disabled, yet treated to a full interior life – unlike Tiny Tim of A Christmas Carol. His women are strong, witty and intelligent. The ostensible heroine of The Woman in White is the pretty, feminine Laura, but it is her half-sister Marian, so “masculine” that she has “almost a moustache”, who steals the show. Collins’s heroine in Armadale is a murderess, and works such as The New Magdalen (1873) show sympathy for the “fallen woman”, whom Victorian readers were expected to despise. These were risky and radical choices.
Dickens’s work remains a touchstone of greatness for readers and writers alike. But Collins, alongside his utterly compelling stories, had an artist’s ability to show rather than tell his readers about the complexity of the human condition. In the bicentenary of his birth, it’s high time he was given his due.
Amanda Craig’s latest novel is
The Three Graces (Abacus £18.99); Mutual Friends: The Adventures of Charles Dickens & Wilkie Collins is at the Charles Dickens Museum, London WC1 (dickensmuseum.com) until April 21