Collins, Count Fosco, and the Concertina
When Margaret Oliphant reviewed The Woman in White in 1862, she described Count Fosco partly in terms of what she perceived to be his Italianate character: No villain of the century, so far as we are...
View Article“Belt-and-Braces” Serialization: The Case of Heart and Science
By “belt-and-braces” serialization is meant the publication of a novel in instalments simultaneously in both a metropolitan periodical distributed nationwide and in a syndicate of provincial journals...
View ArticleCould Lydia Gwilt Have Been Happy? A New Reading of Armadale as Marital Tragedy
Much of Wilkie Collins’s Armadale is taken up by Ozias Midwinter’s internal debate about whether the dream in the novel has a natural or a supernatural origin, and by Lydia Gwilt’s plots to acquire...
View ArticleThe Ruins of Copán in The Woman in White: Wilkie Collins and John Stephens’s...
In Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (serialized in All the Year Round 1859-60) Walter Hartright disappears from the English setting to serve as illustrator for an archeological expedition to...
View ArticleReading Landscape: Wilkie Collins, the Pathetic Fallacy, and the Semiotics of...
In his assessment of the art of Wilkie Collins, Harry Quilter highlights the way in which the “facts of Nature” are combined with the “emotions of his story” (578). Quilter’s comments are astute: for...
View ArticleYes and No: Problems of Closure in Collins’s “I Say No”
Relatively little critical attention has been paid to Wilkie Collins’s “I Say No“. For example, Catherine Peters summarises it as “a mystery story, with no message beyond a practical warning that it is...
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Action and Attitude: Wilkie Collins and the Language of Melodramatic Gesture
In his introduction to After Dark, W. A. Brockington remarks that Wilkie Collins was fascinated by the stage, and offers the opinion that the writer “understood the world of theatre … better than [he]...
View ArticleFrances Dickinson: Friend of Wilkie Collins
A photograph of Dickens’s acting company taken after the London performances of The Frozen Deep, includes a woman in a bonnet sitting behind Wilkie Collins, between his friends Edward Pigott and...
View ArticleWilkie Collins and Edmund Yates: A Postscript
In his article “Wilkie Collins, Edmund Yates and The World” (Wilkie Collins Society Journal 4 (1984) 5-17), Andrew Gasson documented the long friendship between Collins and Yates, noting a number of...
View ArticleWilkie Collins – An Interpretation of Christian Belief
In 1852 Wilkie Collins wrote to his friend and colleague Edward Pigott: “I make no claim to orthodoxy. I am neither a protestant, a catholic nor a dissenter. I do not desire to discuss this or that...
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“Oh Doctor, Doctor, don’t expect too much of me! I’m only a woman, after...
Introduction On 22nd November 1876, the Fun newspaper reported the following incident: An unrehearsed performance of the Sanitorium scene from Miss Gwilt has been given with some success in Shrewsbury...
View ArticleWilkie Collins’s Monomaniacs in Basil, No Name and Man and Wife
Monomania. This word has of late become a jest in the mouth of the public. But the public is unfortunately far from being well-informed on some things, and may perhaps laugh when it ought to be grave....
View ArticleThe New Magdalen and the Rhetoric of Prostitution: Restoring Mercy Merrick’s...
Of Wilkie Collins’s oeuvre, The New Magdalen receives little scholarly attention and is often dismissed as a failed experiment of his later sensation fiction. However, the narrative, produced in...
View ArticleRedefining Bodies and Boundaries in Wilkie Collins’s Armadale and the Law and...
Cosmetics and poisons share a complex relationship in the work of Wilkie Collins and, as I will argue, their commonalities make visible his challenge to the ideological matrices which governed the...
View ArticleAuthenticism and Post-Authenticism: Wilkie Collins’s Armadale and Michael...
Michael Cox’s thriller, The Meaning of Night: A Confession (2006), starts with the narrator’s matter-of-fact report that he murdered a red-haired man before dining on oysters. Inspired by the sensation...
View ArticleWilkie Collins: Scholarship and Criticism: Past, Present, and Future
Following his death in 1889 until the third quarter of the last century, Wilkie Collins’ critical fortunes were largely at a low ebb. Today, Collins is in vogue, and interest in his work is undergoing...
View ArticleWilkie Collins: Scholarship and Criticism: Past, Present, and Future –...
Wilkie Collins’s Work: Antonina; or The Fall of Rome. A Romance of the Fifth Century. 3 vols. London: Richard Bentley, 1850. Armadale. Ed. John Sutherland. London: Penguin Books, 1995. Basil: A Story...
View ArticleJohn Kitto’s The Lost Senses: Deafness and Blindness and Wilkie Collins’s...
An unsigned review of Wilkie Collins’s Hide and Seek (1854) describes this novel as one which “borders on romance without sacrificing probability” (Page 59). Another contemporary reviewer of Poor Miss...
View ArticlePaternal Trauma: Economic Emasculation and Sensationalised Stepfathers in...
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View Article‘he’d let me turn the house into a theatre’: rewriting the domestic in the...
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