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

volume form by Bradbury & Evans. Collins’s play The Lighthouse was performed at the Olympic Notes
Theatre in August. The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, based on Dickens’s and Collins’s
walking tour in the north of England was serialised in Household Words in October 1857.
In 1858, he collaborated with Dickens and other writers on the story “A House to Let”.
In 1858, Collins began living with Caroline Graves and her daughter Harriet. Caroline came
from a humble family, having married young, had a child, and been widowed. Collins lived
close to the small shop kept by Caroline, and the two may have met in the neighbourhood in the
mid-1850s. He treated Harriet, who he called “Carrie”, as his own daughter, and helped to
provide for her education. Excepting one short separation, they lived together for the rest of
Collins’s life. Although Collins disliked the institution of marriage, he remained dedicated to
Caroline and Harriet, considering them his family.

According to biographer Melisa Klimaszewski, “The novels Collins published in the 1860s are
the best and most enduring of his career. The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale, and
The Moonstone, written in less than a decade, show Collins not just as a master of his craft, but as
an innovator and provocateur. These four works, which secured him an international reputation,
and sold in large numbers, ensured his financial stability.”
The Woman in White was serialised in All the Year Round from November 1859 to August 1860,
and was a great success. The novel was published in book form soon after serial publication
ended, and reached an eighth edition by November 1860. Due to his increased stature as a writer,
Collins resigned his position with All the Year Round in 1862 in order to focus on novel writing.
During the planning of his next novel, No Name, he continued to suffer from gout; this time it
especially affected his eyes. Serial publication of No Name began in early 1862, and finished in
1863. His continued to suffer from gout and his addiction to opium became a serious problem.
At the beginning of 1863, he travelled to German spas and Italy for his health with Caroline
Graves. In 1864, he began work on his novel Armadale, travelling in August to do research for
it. It was published serially in The Cornhill Magazine from 1864 to 1866. His play No Thoroughfare,
co-written with Dickens, was published as the 1867 Christmas number of All the Year Round,
and dramatised at the Adelphi Theatre on December 26, afterwards lasting for 200 nights before
it was taken on tour.
His search for background information for Armadale took him to the Norfolk Broads and the
small village of Winterton-on-Sea. Here he first met and began a liaison with Martha Rudd, a
19-year-old girl from a large, poor family. A few years later, she moved to London to be closer
to him. His novel The Moonstone was serialised in All the Year Round from January to August
1868. His mother, Harriet Collins, died that same year. During his writing of The Moonstone,
while he was suffering an attack of acute gout, Caroline left him and married a younger man
named Joseph Clow. Caroline had wanted to marry Collins, but he had resisted.
Collins’ and Martha Rudd’s daughter Marian was born in 1869. After two years of marriage,
Caroline left her husband and returned to Collins. Collins divided his time between Caroline,
who lived with him at his home in Gloucester Place, and Martha who was nearby. When he was
with Martha he assumed the name William Dawson, and she and their children used the last
name of Dawson themselves. This arrangement continued for the rest of Collins’s life.

9.1.3 Later Years

In 1870, his novel Man and Wife was published. This year also saw the death of Charles Dickens.
Dickens’s death caused tremendous sadness for Collins. He said of his early days with Dickens,
“We saw each other every day, and were as fond of each other as men could be.” Collins’s second
daughter with Martha Rudd, Harriet Constance, was born in 1871. The Woman in White was
dramatised and produced at the Olympic theatre in October 1871. His novel Poor Miss Finch was

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