Phyllis’s Reviews > Wilkie Collins: A Brief Life > Status Update

“So long as you have his book open, you are spell-bound... the book enchains you, but you detest it while it enchains." The "chain”…is one of the key metaphors…-the chain of events, the chain of connections, the chain binding the reader to the tale. This mesmeric power can be associated with Collins's interest in clairvoyance and animal magnetism together with the other hidden powers of the mind.

Collins…liked to invoke the notion of "King Public." When he was once told that his novels were read "in every back-kitchen in England" he considered it to be a compliment rather than an insult. He was always attempting to find new ways of appealing to the public... Even towards the end of his life he was eager to engage the attention of "the halfpenny public."

Dickens' [published a] ferocious reaction to the Indian Mutiny of that year…was supposed to celebrate the heroism of the English... Collins persuaded him that the native revolt should be set on an imaginary island in the Caribbean rather than in India and, in his contribution, he mitigated the racist frenzy of his collaborator with a narrative at once more comic and more sympathetic.

He [Dickens] did have slight misgivings about his junior partner [Collins], however. He once told Wills that Collins sometimes betrayed a tendency to be "unnecessarily offensive to the middle class."

Dickens was also mildly irritated by Collins's general untidiness; while Dickens lived in perfect neatness and order, Collins's room was always messy with random objects strewn all over the place.

[Augustus Egg] and Collins would converse about the work they saw, much to Dickens's impatience; he had no particular interest in the Old Masters, and considered artistic discourse to be so much humbug. "To hear Collins learnedly holding forth to Egg…about reds, and greens, and things 'coming well with other things, and lines being wrong, and lines being right, is far beyond the bounds of all caricature."

Dickens proposed that they should all grow moustaches; …Collins enquired, four years later, whether "the most trustworthy banker's clerk in the whole metropolis have the slightest chance of keeping his situation if he left off shaving his chin?" Dickens's moustache grew luxuriant, but those of Collins and of Egg did not "take." Dickens compared that of Collins to the eyebrows of his one-year-old child.

But he never once contemplated matrimony. …It was not a risk he cared to undertake, and instead he engaged in what might be described as two illicit relationships. In an article he declared that "the general idea of the scope and purpose of the institution of marriage is a miserably narrow one"…In his novels, too, he dilates upon the injustices and defects of the married state. It was one of his principal themes.