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

night. Just as Mr. Faulkner pronounced these words, he started in his chair, and resumed his stiff, Notes
dignified position in a great hurry. “Bless my soul!” cried he, with a comic look of astonishment
and vexation, “while I have been telling you what is the real secret of my interest in the sketch
you have so kindly given to me, I have altogether forgotten that I came here to sit for my
portrait. For the last hour or more I must have been the worst model you ever had to draw
from!” “On the contrary, you have been the best,” said I. “I have been trying to catch your
likeness; and, while telling your story, you have unconsciously shown me the natural expression
I wanted to insure my success.”
Note by Mrs. Kerby.
I cannot let this story end without mentioning what the chance saying was, which caused it to be told at the
farmhouse the other night. Our friend the young sailor, among his other quaint objections to sleeping on
shore, declared that he particularly hated four-post beds, because he never slept in one without doubting
whether the top might not come down in the night and suffocates him. I thought this chance reference to the
distinguishing feature of William’s narrative curious enough, and my husband agreed with me. However,
he says it is scarcely worthwhile to mention such a trifle in anything as important as a book. I cannot
venture, after this, to do more than slip these lines in modestly at the end of the story. If the printer should
notice my few last words, perhaps he may not mind the trouble of putting them into some out-of-the-way
corner. L. K.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
1. …………………… is Wilkie Collins’s first collection of six short stories, published in 1856.
2. …………………… introduced Collins’s to Charles Dickens in an instrumental event in
March 1851.

3. His novel Armadale was published serially in …………………… from 1864 to 1866.
4. Collins last novel Blind Love was finished posthumously by …………………….
5. Walter Hartright is a character from the novel …………………….

9.9 Summary

William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824–23 September 1889) was an English novelist,
playwright, and author of short stories. His best-known works are The Woman in White,
The Moonstone, Armadale, and No Name.

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.
Collins’s story A Terribly Strange Bed, his first contribution to Household Words, appeared
in April, 1852.
Collins and Charles Dickens became lifelong friends and collaborators.
In A Terribly Strange Bed, an artist, who remains unnamed, has been hired to paint the
portrait of a wealthy man named Faulkner.
Collins has been called “the father of the English detective novel” and many critics have
observed that his principal strength lies in his expert manoeuvring of characters through
complex plots.
Collins’s works were classified at the time as “sensation novels,” a genre seen nowadays
as the precursor to detective and suspense fiction.

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