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Elective English—III

Notes serialised in Cassell’s Magazine from October to March 1872. His short novel Miss or Mrs? was
published in the 1872 Christmas number of the Graphic. His novel The New Magdalen was
serialised from October 1872 to July 1873. His younger brother Charles Allston Collins died
later in 1873. Charles had married Dickens’ younger daughter, Kate.
In 1873-74, Collins toured The United States and Canada giving readings of his work. He met
American writers including Oliver Wendell Holmes and Mark Twain, and began a friendship
with the photographer Napoleon Sarony who took several portraits of him. Collins’s and Martha
Rudd’s son, William Charles, was born in 1874. His novel The Law and the Lady was serialised
in the Graphic from September to March 1875. His short novel The Haunted Hotel was serialised
from June to November 1878. His later novels include Jezebel’s Daughter (1880), The Black Robe
(1881), Heart and Science (1883), and The Evil Genius (1886). In 1884, Collins was elected
Vice-President of the Society of Authors, founded by his friend and fellow novelist Walter
Besant.

The inconsistent quality of his dramatic and fictional works in the last decade of his life was
accompanied by a general decline in his health, including diminished eyesight. He was often
unable to leave his home, and had difficulty writing. During these last years, Collins focused on
mentoring younger writers, including the novelist Hall Caine, and helping to protect other
writers from copyright infringement of their works. His writing became a way for him to fight
his illness, and not allow it to keep him bed-ridden. Carrie also served as an amanuensis for
several years.
Collins died on September 23, 1889, at 82 Wimpole Street, following a paralytic stroke. He is
buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, West London. His grave marker describes him as the author
of The Woman in White. Caroline Graves died in 1895 and buried with Collins. Martha Rudd
died in 1919. Collins’s last novel Blind Love, left unfinished at his death, was finished and
published by Walter Besant in 1890.

9.2 Works

Collins’s works were classified at the time as “sensation novels,” a genre seen nowadays as the
precursor to detective and suspense fiction. He also wrote penetratingly on the plight of women
and on the social and domestic issues of his time. For example, his 1854 Hide and Seek contained
one of the first portrayals of a deaf character in English literature. As did many writers of
his time, Collins published most of his novels as serials in magazines such as Dickens’s All the
Year Round and was known as a master of the form, creating just the right degree of suspense
to keep his audience reading from week to week. Sales of All The Year Round increased when
The Woman in White followed A Tale of Two Cities.
Collins enjoyed ten years of great success following publication of The Woman in White in 1859.
His next novel, No Name combined social commentary – the absurdity of the law as it applied
to children of unmarried parents – with a densely plotted revenge thriller. Armadale, the first
and only of Collins’s major novels of the 1860s to be serialised in a magazine other than All the
Year Round, provoked strong criticism, generally centred upon its transgressed villainess Lydia
Gwilt, and provoked in part by Collins’s typically confrontational preface. The novel was
simultaneously a financial coup for its author and a comparative commercial failure: the sum
paid by Cornhill for the serialisation rights was exceptional, eclipsing by a substantial margin
the prices paid for the vast majority of similar novels, yet the novel failed to recoup its publisher’s
investment. The Moonstone, published in 1868, and the last novel of what is generally regarded as
the most successful decade of its author’s career. Despite a somewhat cool reception, it was from
both Dickens and the critics, a significant return to form and re-established the market value of
an author whose success in the competitive Victorian literary marketplace had been waning in
the wake of his first “masterpiece.”

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