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Unit 9: The Traveller's Story of a Terribly Strange Bed by Wilkie Collins

representation of female characters, and for his emphasis on careful plotting and revision, Notes
a practice that foreshadowed modern methods.
After Dark is Wilkie Collins’s first collection of six short stories, published in 1856. Collins
provides a narrative framework, ‘Leaves from Leah’s Diary’, set in 1827. Leah Kerby’s husband,
William, is a poor travelling portrait-painter forced to abandon his profession for six months in
order to save his sight. Leah realises that if she acts as amanuensis William can support them by
turning author. This situation may have been prompted by a period of eye-trouble suffered by
Collins’s father. In the preface to After Dark, Collins also acknowledges the painter W.S. Herrick
as his source for the facts on which ‘A Terribly Strange Bed’ and ‘The Yellow Mask’ are based.

9.1 About the Author

Collins was born at 11 New Cavendish Street, Marylebone, London, the son of well-known
Royal Academician landscape painter, William Collins and his wife Harriet Geddes.

Figure 9.1: Wilkie Collins

Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/(William)_Wilkie_Collins_by_
Rudolph_Lehmann.jpg

9.1.1 Early Life

Named after his father, Collins swiftly became known by his second name (which honoured his
godfather, David Wilkie). The family moved to Pond Street, Hampstead, in 1826. In 1828 Collins’s
brother Charles Allston Collins was born. Between 1829 and 1830, the Collins family moved
twice, first to Hampstead Square and then to Porchester Terrace, Bayswater. Wilkie and Charles
received their early education from their mother at home. The Collins family was deeply
religious, and Collins’s mother enforced strict church attendance on her sons, which Wilkie did
not like.
In 1835, Collins began attending school at the Maida Vale academy. From 1836 to 1838, he lived
with his parents in Italy and France, which made a great impression on him. He learned Italian
while the family was in Italy, and began learning French, in which he would eventually become
fluent. From 1838 to 1840, he attended The Reverend Cole’s private boarding school in Highbury.
At this school, a boy who would force Collins to tell him a story before allowing him to go to
sleep bullied him. “It was this brute who first awakened in me, his poor little victim, a power of

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