Amid all the brouhaha surrounding the bicentenary of Charles Dickens, Peter Ackroyd's short biography of Wilkie Collins, a close friend and occasional collaborator of the great man, is particularly welcome.
Born in 1824, Collins was Dickens' junior by 12 years. The two men shared a passion for the stage and first got to know each other in 1851 when Dickens recruited Collins to take on the role of his valet in a charity performance of Bulwer-Lytton's Not So Bad As We Seem. When they collaborated on a nautical story in 1856, Dickens assured a friend: "I am the Captain of the Golden Mary. Mr Collins is the Mate."
To some extent these remain the roles that literary history has allotted them. Despite suffering chronic ill health, Collins was Dickens' equal when it came to hard work. Frequently prostrated by neuralgia and rheumatic gout, and by the huge doses of laudanum he took to combat these disabling complaints, he nevertheless produced a prodigious amount of writing. After the false start of Antonina (1850), a historical romance set in ancient Rome, he found his proper fictional milieu with his second novel, Basil (1852). Subtitled "A Story of Modern Life", it describes in startling detail an obsession that leads to an unconsummated mesalliance and provokes murderous jealousy.
Credited as the progenitor of the "novel of sensation", Collins is certainly its finest practitioner. His plots seem at first glance both improbable and grotesque — The Law and the Lady (1875) features a fast-wheeling maniacal dandy, "literally the half of a man [...] absolutely deprived of the lower limbs"; the blind heroine of Poor Miss Finch (1872) is duped by a pair of identical twins, one of whom has been turned blue by a treatment for epilepsy — but meticulous research and watertight plotting provide a solid background against which these lurid melodramas achieve the heightened "realism" for which Collins always strived.
By 1857, the literary journalist Edmund Yates would place Collins fourth among contemporary English novelists, just behind Dickens, Thackeray and Charlotte Bronte. "As a storyteller he has no equal," Yates declared and readers have agreed: The Moonstone (1868) has never gone out of print, while The Woman in White remains as thrilling to read today as it did when first published in 1860. Until recently, Collins' other novels have fared less well, but many of them have now been reissued in the Oxford World's Classics series.
One reason for this revival is Collins' portrayal of women, many of whom take a central role in his novels and are strongly independent rather than Dickensianly winsome. The patronising title of Poor Miss Finch, for example, is undercut by the heroine's courage and self-sufficiency, while Valeria Woodville, digging out the truth about her husband to clear his name in The Law and the Lady, has some claim to be the first woman detective in fiction. This proto-feminism, combined with Collins's dark sense of humour, are what make his novels — unlike Dickens' — seem so modern. Some of his heroines stray even further from the passive ideal of Victorian womanhood. Instead of bowing to circumstances when she is disinherited, 18-year-old Magdalen Vanstone in No Name (1862) uses her physical charms to take revenge on the family that reduced her to penury. Collins' portrait of her was criticised for its immorality.
His reaction was to write Armadale (1866), featuring perhaps the best villainess in all Victorian fiction: Lydia Gwilt. The Spectator's review complains that the novel "gives us for a heroine, a woman fouler than the refuse of the streets, who has lived to the ripe age of 35, and through the horrors of forgery, murder, theft, bigamy, gaol, and attempted suicide, without any trace being left on her beauty." Miss Gwilt is monstrous, but also very funny, and Collins deliberately makes her much better company than the wet young couple at the centre of this famously convoluted but absolutely wonderful novel.
Collins' refreshing contempt for what he called "the claptrap morality of the present day" extended to his private life. Having specialised in stories of hidden relationships and disguised identities, he covered his own tracks with equal skill. No one knows how or when he first met Caroline Graves, the widow with whom in 1858 he set up house without troubling to marry her. Apart from a brief interlude when Graves married someone else, the couple lived together until Collins' death 30 years later, despite having acquired a second mistress, Martha Rudd, whom he set up in nearby lodgings under the name "Mrs Dawson". When visiting Rudd or taking her on holidays, Collins adopted the name of "William Dawson", and the couple had three much-loved illegitimate children.
Ackroyd zips through Collins' extraordinary life and work in under 200 pages, producing no new material but efficiently synthesising the work of earlier scholars. Some repetition suggests that the book was written at speed. His account of Collins' friendship with the 11-year-old Nannie Wynne (whom he addressed in letters as "Mrs Collins") seems skimped and oddly incurious, and he is surely wrong when he writes that Collins's creations "do not have the overflowing energy and vitality of even Dickens's minor characters". What about Captain Wragge, the superb professional swindler in No Name who comically invigorates every scene in which he appears; or Madame Pratolungo, the absurd and unreliable narrator of Poor Miss Finch, with her much-touted revolutionary ideals? Ackroyd's brief account nevertheless remains a highly readable introduction to a marvellous and still underrated writer.
-The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2012
Wilkie Collins By Peter Ackroyd, Chatto & Windus, 208 pages, £12.99
