Wilkie Collins

08 January 1824 - 23 September 1889

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.

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Connections

Connections Sort ascending	Author name	Excerpt
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...
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
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...
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
Material Conditions of Writing	Mary Angela Dickens	The journal All the Year Round, founded by MAD 's grandfather and then edited by her father, was one of the first and most significant platforms for her short stories and serialized novels. Other...
Literary responses	Charlotte Yonge	During her lifetime CY was ranked as a serious novelist with Austen , Trollope , Balzac , and Zola . Contemporaries like Louisa Alcott , Margaret Oliphant , Ellen Wood , and Rhoda Broughton made...
Literary responses	Mary Elizabeth Braddon	Margaret Oliphant 's critique of the sensation novel in 1867 relied heavily on attacking MEB 's reputation. The best she would say was that some of Braddon's works deserved some of their success. Braddon's sole...
Literary responses	Ellen Wood	The Saturday Review praised her craft in Dene Hollow, stating that even Mr. Wilkie Collins himself, to whom ingenuity is the Alpha and Omega of his craft, is not greater than she in the...
Literary responses	Ellen Wood	Within a few years EW 's popularity had decidedly waned. Margaret Oliphant in The Victorian Age of English Literature found nothing to say about Wood beyond that fact that her works sold by the fifty...
Literary responses	Mary Cholmondeley	George Bentley referred to The Danvers Jewels as bright and humorous. qtd. in “Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC. 197 In 1900, the Edinburgh Review judged that it had no great merit since the devices used had been worn rather threadbare in the...
Literary responses	Marjorie Bowen	Critically, the book was very well received. Edward Wagenknecht in the New York Times Book Review enthused over MB 's settings, calling her a genius in the creation of atmosphere, qtd. in Johnson, George M., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 153. Gale Research, 1995. 153: 45 and stated that...
Literary responses	Marie Belloc Lowndes	It was reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement by Walter de la Mare , who wrote appreciatively of the faint arresting strangeness, the sense of sinister events impending, which is present from the opening sentence...

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