My Persistent Phantom

By Susan R. Hanes

March 30, 2009

The Chicago Literary Club

I have a confession to make. I have a relationship with a certain gentleman that has endured for more than forty years and yet continues to captivate me even today.

Does it lessen the intrigue that the target of my obsession would now be 185 years old? That he was short, bespectacled, and had a long, shaggy beard and unusually small hands and feet?

I have been fascinated by Wilkie Collins ever since the summer before my sophomore year in high school, when I picked up his novel The Moonstone as part of a summer reading assignment. I am not sure whether it was the title of the book or the author’s name that first enticed me to choose it from my English teacher’s suggested list, but I remember that once I started reading, I couldn’t put it down. The story of the disappearance of the Moonstone, a fabulous diamond, was full of excitement and mystery, with a little love, revenge, and drug use sprinkled in, but it was the way the plot unfolded that was uniquely absorbing. The characters themselves told the story in a series of narratives, enabling the reader to become intimately engaged with them.

Wilkie and I didn’t meet again until many years later, when I was having breakfast with a biblio-friend who happened to mention that she was thinking of reading The Woman in White. I remembered that book as the other famous novel that Wilkie wrote, and I made a mental note of it. As it turned out, my friend never got around to reading the book, but I did, finding an old copy with an intriguing cover at a used bookstore a few days later.

Again, I was hooked, starting with its beguiling opening line: “This is the story of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can achieve.” I couldn’t put it down. As each chapter pulled me into the next one, I was caught in a mesmerizing web of rambling, dark houses with long, shadowy hallways; of swishing skirts and burning candles, of secret journals and hidden identities. And there was more: Wilkie’s rapier wit, his idiosyncratic, complex characters, and his intuitive pronouncements about humanity and its foibles. As I read the last lines and closed the book, I wondered about Wilkie Collins, this man with the unusual name who had, so many years later, captivated me once again.

So I looked him up. I learned that Wilkie Collins had been one of the most popular and prolific authors of the nineteenth century. I learned that he was the father of the detective novel and the prime exponent of sensation fiction, the mid-Victorian British literary genre focused on shocking subject matter like adultery and murder and set in familiar, domestic surroundings.

Wilkie was an associate of Charles Dickens, who he first met when they performed in a play by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1851. Although their earliest affiliation was through such amateur theatrical productions, Dickens and Collins became close friends. They collaborated on Dickens’s two literary periodicals, Household Words and All the Year Round. They traveled together, hiking in the Lake District of England and exploring the pleasures and excesses of Paris. They visited each other at home, particularly at Dickens’s Gad’s Hill Place, where they shared family holidays and critiqued each other’s work. In fact, Wilkie’s younger brother, Charles Collins, was married to Dickens’ beloved daughter, Katey.

Wilkie wrote more than thirty novels, as well as numerous short stories, essays, and plays. His best-known novels, The Moonstone and The Woman in White, have never been out of print. He excelled in plot and character development, but above all, he was a consummate storyteller. Many well-respected writers have been fans of Wilkie Collins, including Dorothy Sayers, Arthur Conan Doyle, and P.D. James. He has been described as “the most readable of all major English writers,” and T.S. Eliot said of him, he had “the immense merit…of never being dull.”

William Wilkie Collins was born on January 8, 1824, the eldest son of celebrated English landscape painter William Collins and Harriet Geddes Collins, herself a member of a noted family of artists. His godfather was the Scottish painter, Sir David Wilkie, for whom he was named. Although he lived his entire life in the Marylebone area of London, Wilkie always enjoyed the seaside and sought inspiration for his writing and relief from chronic physical ills in the sea air.

Within the strict upbringing of his evangelical father and the rigid constraints of Victorian society, Wilkie developed a particularly rebellious spirit that was to remain with him throughout his life. As a young man, he did not share his father’s dream that he become a lawyer. He wanted to write. Although he was warm and charming company, (one woman wrote of him, “To sit next to Wilkie at dinner is to have a brilliant time of it”) he avoided society’s demands and preferred an unconventional Bohemian lifestyle. He related an example of this inclination in Dickens’s weekly literary magazine, All the Year Round, to which he was a regular contributor. He told of one hot summer night, when he rebelled against dressing for an evening party, instead putting on comfortable clothes and joining an admiring group of the working class peering in at the party through the windows. In Wilkie’s words:

There they all were, all oozing away into silence and insensibility together, smothered in their heavy black coats and strangled in their stiff white cravats! There is a fourth place vacant, my place … I see my own ghost sitting there: the appearance of that perspiring specter is too dreadful to be described. I shudder as I survey my own full-dressed apparition at the dinner table … I turn away my face in terror, and look for comfort at my street companions, my worthy fellow-outcasts.

Wilkie never married, although he spent his adult life in long- term relationships with two women. The story of his mysterious meeting with Caroline Graves on a moonlit night reads like a parody of his own novels. She lived with him and posed as his “housekeeper,” entertaining his guests and accompanying him on his writing expeditions. Some years later, Martha Rudd, a much younger woman, drifted into his life and eventually became the mother of his three children. For the rest of his life, Wilkie supported two households, taking full responsibility for both.

His American friend, drama critic William Winter, wrote a wonderfully warm description of Wilkie. In his memoir, Winter recalls:

Wilkie was a great writer: as a storyteller, specifically, he stands alone—transcendent and incomparable: but his personality was even more interesting than his authorship. To be in his society was to be charmed, delighted, stimulated and refreshed. …The hours that I passed in the company of Collins are remembered as among the happiest of my life. … His humor was playful. His perception of character was intuitive and unerring. He manifested, at all times, a delicate consideration for other persons, and his sense of kindness was instantaneous and acute.

I found the life of this enigmatic man, who lived on the outside of convention, as intriguing as any tale that came from his own pen. That he was born into a fine and loving family, yet never chose to marry the women he supported and cared for; that he remained a faithful friend and charming companion in spite of acute suffering and addiction to laudanum; that he wrote some of the best-loved fiction of his time, yet his books today are too often overlooked: all contributed to my fascination with Wilkie Collins.

In the fall of 1998, after months of planning, I made a pilgrimage with my husband Houston, following Wilkie’s footsteps within the London that he knew, and around the England that he loved. It was a magical journey for me. As we explored the ghostly abbey near Whitby, where Wilkie hoped for a quiet place to write (and found instead a brass band that played under his hotel window every afternoon); or hunted along the foggy Yorkshire Coast for Mulgrave Castle, the setting for The Moonstone; or climbed among the fells in the Lake District, where he hiked with Dickens (and sprained an ankle), I sensed Wilkie’s presence. The climax of that trip was an evening with Wilkie’s great-granddaughter Faith, to whom I had been introduced by letter through a professor friend of mine. The moment I met her, I felt as if time had been reordered, and that I was somehow meeting her great-grandfather as well. Faith invited me to sit at Wilkie’s desk. As I felt the soft writing leather and handled his well-used books, it was as if I were reaching across the decades toward my old friend.

Three months later, the tragedy of my life occurred, when I lost my husband in a senseless accident. In my sorrow, I wrote to Faith. Although we had only met once, that meeting was so full of meaning that I wanted to share my loss with her. She invited me to return to London. And so I did, again and again.

In the fall of 2000, I planned another Wilkie Collins journey, hiking through Cornwall with my son Chris. We retraced the tour that Wilkie made 150 years earlier and recorded in his book, Rambles Beyond Railways. Back in London, I introduced Chris to Faith, and he immediately sensed her connection to the past. My visits to London continued, each spring and again in the fall, and Faith, with her distinguished husband Bill, became an important part of my life.

After I remarried, I continued to return to London, often with my husband, George. We always arranged to see Faith and Bill. Each time, I had the same feeling that I was somehow connecting with friends on both sides of the Looking Glass.

In May 2004, I joined members of the Wilkie Collins and Thackeray Societies for a formal dinner at London’s venerable Reform Club. Faith and Bill and I had been looking forward to the evening for months, when we would hear Wilkie Collins Society Grand Patron, Baroness James of Holland Park, a.k.a. P.D. James, speak about Wilkie’s influence on detective fiction. The evening was all we had hoped it would be.

We arrived together to find the library filled with round dining tables with a long head table in the center. I was seated there, between Faith and Bill and across from Lady James. The portly and perspiring president of the Thackeray Society smacked the table with a wooden mallet for silence and asked the blessing in a slow, ponderous Latin. Dinner was elegant and beautifully presented. After dessert and coffee and chocolates, Lady James got up to speak.

Afterward, she inscribed a copy of her latest book, The Murder Room, for me and I gave her a bound paper I had written about Wilkie and another detective writer, Dorothy Sayers.

George and I returned to London in September of the same year, when we joined Faith and Bill for the opening night of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical version of Wilkie’s The Woman in White at the Palace Theatre. As the final curtain came down, Faith turned to me and said, “You know, the old man would have really loved all this.” I thought so, too.

Through the years, I read all of Wilkie’s writings and most of what had been written about him. There was, however, one part of his life about which little was known. From September 1873 to March 1874, he toured the United States and Canada, hoping to replicate the success of Dickens, Thackeray, and others by reading his way across the continent. Dickens, who died in June 1870, had made two immensely profitable tours of North America in 1842 and 1867-8. In light of the extraordinary success of own his novels and plays in America, Wilkie believed that he, too, could make a good deal of money and enhance his reputation across the ocean; by this time he was acknowledged by many as the most popular living author writing in English.

I decided to try and recreate his itinerary and to discover how he felt about Americans, and their response to him. My intention was to determine a sense of the America that Wilkie encountered, and, in so doing, contribute to an understanding of the challenges and successes of celebrities who came to America in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Little did I realize, however, that what started as a summer project would become a four-year passion, involving thousands of miles and thousands of hours and eventually culminating in a book, Wilkie Collins’s American Tour, published in 2008 in London.

My plan was to create a biographical narrative of Collins’s tour by identifying possible “stops” on his trip and collecting contemporary periodical reviews that recorded his reception and the public response to his performances.

I soon realized that learning about the Dickens and Thackeray tours was significantly facilitated because both were accompanied by assistants who meticulously recorded their activities. Dickens traveled with George Dolby who carefully documented Dickens’s time in America in Dickens As I Knew Him,[1] while Thackeray brought along Eyre Crowe who, as an artist and personal assistant, detailed their trip in his book, With Thackeray in America[2]. Although Wilkie hired his godson Frank Ward to assist him for part of his own tour, no records from Ward have been found. Published works about Wilkie’s tour were confined to short articles or chapters based on known letters, in spite of the fact that he gained impressions from his visit that would influence his writing for the remainder of his life.

I began my project with an article written in 1940 about Collins’s visit to America. Only two pages in length, it nonetheless contained the most comprehensive research on the topic in spite of it’s being written almost 70 years ago. I also had the advantage of two recently published collections of his letters, The Public Face of Wilkie Collins[3] and The Letters of Wilkie Collins.[4] Using the dates and places provided by these sources, I made my first rough itinerary of Wilkie’s American tour. The earlier article cited reviews from newspapers in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago, so I knew that Collins had traveled to those places. The collections of letters also included letters written from Buffalo, Cleveland, and Sandusky, Ohio.

At that point, a little detective work was called for. Using contemporary railroad maps, I constructed possible routes that Wilkie might have taken. I determined where he could logically have traveled next, taking into consideration the train schedules for the period, the availability of suitable speaking venues, and the itinerary of Wilkie’s friend and mentor, Charles Dickens. George and I packed up the car and headed east to follow my assumptions concerning Wilkie’s travels. The sources I was seeking were not available online, nor for the most part, were they indexed.

During a period of four years, we visited more than 85 institutions in over 45 cities. My method was to drive to a possible location and visit the local historical society and the special collections of academic and public libraries. We combed through boxes of letters and piles of journals, and scoured the small print of late 19^th century newspapers. Cranking away on scratchy microfilm readers, we looked for any mention of our man during the logical period that he could have been in a particular location.

We discovered that it was easiest to look first for the announcement of a reading, for those were usually in larger print. The appearance of an announcement, however, did not necessarily mean that Wilkie had actually spoken at the time publicized. The proof could only be found by locating reviews appearing a day or so after the advertised readings.

As we connected the dots from one speaking engagement to another, I began to get a picture of his American experience. Once I had a date and place affixed in his calendar, I expanded my search to try and find letters, diary entries, or published articles that would shed more light on his appearance in a particular place: his reception, those he met, and his other related activities. There were many “needle-in-a-haystack” searches and lots of dead ends. The newspaper reports themselves were a jumble of contradictions. For example, a cross section of the newspapers I examined alternately described him as:

… a short, thick-necked man

… small in stature

… medium in height

… a rather tall man.

The papers variously stated that as a reader:

… he read in a very clear and distinct manner

… [he had] a monotonous cockney accent

… he was distinctly audible

… his voice was too low for our great halls

… [he] succeeded better than was expected

… [he was] unquestionably a failure

There were wonderful moments of serendipitous discovery that kept me going. For instance, at Brown University, I found an exchange of letters between New York raconteur William Seaver and American statesman John Hay. Seaver writes, “My dear Hay, Come to me on the 22^nd at the Union Club, at 12 and help thrust a swell breakfast down the throat of Wilkie Collins, That’s a good child.” Hay asks in reply, “Shall I bring a sausage stuffer or will you provide them?”

After learning that Wilkie had given a reading in Providence, Rhode Island, I found a letter in the archives at Swarthmore College, written by a young man named Chalkey Collins (no relation), who had attended the event with a small group from the local Quaker School. Chalkey writes later to his brother,

Some of the teachers and the seniors went down to hear Wilkie Collins lecture. He read from one of his novels … which I suppose was very interesting to some but I did not think much of it: he read so low that I could not understand some of it. I don’t think he did much honor to the name of Collins.

On another occasion, Wilkie was entertained at a grand affair at the venerable Century Club of New York. The guest list included some 60 or 70 writers, journalists, and artists. The New York World reported that the festive good cheer and lively talk continued late into the evening. A sense of the merry atmosphere was evident by examination of a menu, now at the Morgan Library, that had been circulated for the purpose of collecting the autographs of this august group. Wilkie started the menu around by signing his name, followed by the other guests. Eventually the menu came back to him and he signed it again, followed by several others who signed it again too.

I was eventually able to confirm 25 readings in 22 locations during the 154 days that Wilkie spent in North America. During his American tour, he used New York and Boston as bases from which he traveled to his readings. From these points of departure, he completed four major circuits, heading northwest to upstate New York, north to Canada, west to Chicago, and south to Washington, D.C.

On Thursday, September 25, 1873, Wilkie Collins stood on the deck of the Algeria as it steamed into New York harbor, beginning his American tour. He checked into the cozy Westminster Hotel at Irving Place and was shown to his rooms, the same suite, with a private door and staircase, occupied by Charles Dickens six years earlier. According to reports, Wilkie was moved to tears to see his mentor’s desk.

Two days after his arrival in New York, Wilkie was honored at a Saturday evening reception and dinner at the Lotos Club. In attendance were many of the City’s most prominent men, including politicians, business leaders, writers, artists, and theatrical celebrities. The president of the Lotos introduced Collins, saying,

We have met tonight to greet a visitor from the other side, of whom nothing is unknown to us but his face. May he give us long and frequent opportunity for better acquaintance with that.

Wilkie came forward and was greeted with great enthusiasm. He spoke of his experiences with American hospitality and the kindness that he had received from Americans.

British actor Wybert Reeve, one of Wilkie’s close friends, remembered the extent to which the author was hounded by reporters and interviewers during those early weeks in America. He related an incident that greatly amused Wilkie shortly after he arrived in New York. Reeve writes:

Before leaving England Collins found himself in want of a rough traveling suit of clothes, and driving though London he … bought a cheap shoddy suit. The New York Herald, in a later description of Collins, gave an elaborate account of his person. He was wearing at the time the slop suit, and the description in the papers wound up with a statement that Mr. Collins was evidently a connoisseur of dress, having on one of those stylish West End tailor’s suits of a fashionable cut by which an Englishman of taste is known.

Wilkie’s first American reading was in Albany, New York on an October evening in 1873. According to the papers, he “tripped across the stage” to “hearty applause.” Before he began his reading, Wilkie remarked that the story, "The Dream Woman," had been revised and amplified for the purpose of his readings. He added,

In the hour and a half in which I shall have the honor of appearing before you this evening, you can judge for yourselves whether or not I have succeeded in making it entertaining.

He then opened his manuscript and began his story. A newspaper review enthusiastically described the effect that the reading had on the audience, in spite of a “threatening fire” that broke out at a nearby machine shop. The article continued:

It would be impossible to bring together a better representation of the lovers of fine literature and more cultivated minds than greeted Mr. Collins. The mental quality of the audience and the power of the reader in holding the attention of his listeners was well shown by the perfect composure with which an alarm by the fire bells was taken—it seemed really to be considered only a minor impertinence and was not heeded.

The following day, the Albany Argus concluded, “If Mr. Collins meets with such appreciative listeners throughout the country as he has found in Albany, it will be no less a gratification to him than to us that he has come to America.”

But, that was not to be the case. A review of his presentation the following night in Troy concluded that as a reader, Collins was “no actor, and only the thrilling nature of the story redeemed his reading from dullness,” because he was “far from being an elocutionist.” There were similar reviews of his readings in Utica and Syracuse. The enthusiastic reports that had preceded his earlier performances were replaced by more honest assessments. Although his skills as a novelist were never contested, on the stage, he was no Dickens.

The reception of his readings was not Wilkie’s only problem. Years later, he still recalled the discomforts of American rail travel and its effect on his constitution. He wrote:

I remember once, after two days’ and a night’s traveling, I was so utterly worn out that I asked the landlord of the hotel if he had any very dry champagne. He replied that he had. ‘Then’ I said, ‘send a bottle up to my bedroom.’ I drank the whole of it, and informed him that though it was only noon, I was going at once to bed, and that all visitors were to be told that I might possibly not get up for a week. I heard afterwards that after twenty-four hours some callers were allowed to come up and peep in at the door, which I had not locked; but all they saw was ‘Mr. Collins still fast asleep.’

In December, he headed north to Canada where he read in Toronto and Montreal before appearing in Buffalo, New York. While in that city, he had the opportunity to write to an old friend about his views of the American people. Again he wrote:

No matter where I go, my reception in America is always the same. The prominent people in each place visit me, drive me out, dine me, and do all that they can to make me feel myself among friends. The enthusiasm and the kindness are really and truly beyond description. I should be the most ungrateful man living if I had any other than the highest opinion of the American people. I find them to be the most enthusiastic, the most cordial, and the most sincere people I have ever met with in my life.

From Buffalo, Wilkie continued west along the southern shore of Lake Erie to Cleveland (where he celebrated his 50^th birthday), Sandusky, Toledo, Detroit, and finally, Chicago, arriving on the morning of January 16, 1874 after another grueling train journey.

He settled into the newly opened Sherman Hotel, located on the southwest corner of Randolph and Clark Streets. Designed by prominent Chicago architect William Boyington, it was considered one of the finest hotels in the city, catering to public figures in the stock and agricultural trade. Wilkie had little time to recuperate from the trip, as his reading was scheduled for the evening of his arrival at the grand new Music Hall, located opposite the Sherman House on Clark Street.

You might think that the people of Chicago would be out in great numbers to see the man who was “widely known in the world of literature as a novelist of wonderful imagination.” In fact, two of his plays, Man and Wife and The New Magdalen had recent runs in the city.

But for Wilkie’s presentation of “The Dream Woman,” The Chicago Tribune estimated that the hall’s 1700 seats were only about half filled, albeit with “an unusual number of local celebrities, the church being unusually well represented.” Among these was Robert Collyer, popular pastor of Unity Church and the first president of the Chicago Literary Club. Clinton Locke, another CLC officer, was also there.

The Tribune mentioned that the hall was uncomfortably cold in spite of its new steam heating system, reporting “the calorific apparatus of the hall stupendously defective.” The Chicago Evening Journal suggested, “Perhaps the frigidity of the atmosphere had something to do with the rigidity of the audience.” The reviews were not complimentary. The Journal’s response, although unique in observation, was not unlike the others in tone:

…But not withstanding the reader’s monotonous cockney accent and jerky elocution and inability to change from his own tone to the imaginary ones of his characters, the reading was worth all it cost to anybody simply because it was done by one of the great masters of English fiction.

Apparently, the arduous journey to Chicago had caused Wilkie to reassess his travel plans. In Buffalo, early in January, he was still considering his western adventure, writing, “I am going ‘Out West’… and I may get as far as the Mormons.” At one point he had even considered continuing as far as the Pacific coast. He had cousins who lived in San Francisco, whom he had hoped to see. But after arriving in Chicago, Wilkie’s attitude seemed to change. He wrote to his American publisher, Joseph Harper, “My plans are a little uncertain.” In a letter to Jane, wife of American statesman John Bigelow, Wilkie complained,

I am not going further west, because I cannot endure the railway traveling. A night in a “sleeping car” destroys me for days afterwards.

In Jane, Wilkie sensed a sympathetic ear, and he shared with her his impressions of the brash new city that had not only emerged from a frontier settlement in less than fifty years, but from the ashes of the Great Fire two years earlier. Calling Chicago “this city of magnificent warehouses,” he continued to Jane,

Don’t tell anybody—but the truth is I am not sorry to leave Chicago. The dull sameness of the great blocks of iron and brick overwhelms me. The whole city seems to be saying “See how rich I am after the fire, and what a tremendous business I do!” and everybody I meet uses the same form of greeting. “Two years ago, Mr. Collins, this place was a heap of ruins—are you not astonished when you see it now?” I am not a bit astonished. It is a mere question of raising money—the re-building follows as a matter of course.

This letter reflects a significant reversal of attitude. Shortly after the Fire in 1871, Wilkie sent a check, valued at around $700 today, to the Committee of the American Chicago Relief Fund, along with the following heartfelt message:

I beg to enclose a cheque … offered to your Fund, as a trifling expression of my sympathy with the sufferers by the Fire of Chicago, and of my sincere admiration of the heroic spirit with which your countrymen have met the disaster that has fallen on them.

Wilkie’s disaffection with Chicago was probably somewhat exacerbated by his travel and social schedule, as well as homesickness from his extended absence from home. (This conjecture might be supported by the fact that is third child, Charley, was born almost nine months to the day after his return to London.)

Back in Boston, Wilkie was honored by “a select group of his most intimate friends” at a banquet at the St. James Hotel. Organized by Boston publisher William Gill, the remarkable assembly included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, as well as Mark Twain and the Vice-President of the United States, Henry Wilson. Oliver Wendell Holmes read a poem that he had written especially for the occasion.

At the close of the evening, each guest was presented with a leather-covered bon-bon box, in the shape and size of the cabinet edition of Collins’s works, and containing his photograph, his autograph, and the number of his important works exactly corresponding with the number present at the reception.

Wilkie must have still been feeling euphoric when he wrote to a friend, “Such a banquet yesterday!” adding that the only detail the papers failed to mention was “a dove with a pen in her mouth—hanging from the chandelier.”

Was Wilkie’s American reading tour a success? Unfortunately, that question cannot be answered with an unequivocal yes. Whether it met his expectations can never fully be known. His own descriptions of his public reception often contradicted the tone of newspaper reviews. His written account that he “riveted” his Albany audience contrasted with a newspaper review questioning his success as a speaker. A reviewer in New Bedford observed that Collins’s powerless voice was lost to “the ill-mannered crowd” while later reporting that Wilkie was “delighted with his audience.”

It is clear that his appearances drew crowds that came principally to see the great novelist rather than to listen to his readings. He was swarmed by countless admirers and met some of the most influential men in the United States. He was extravagantly entertained and gloriously fêted. He learned about the American character and earned the admiration and respect of everyone he met. He had the opportunity to witness the effect that his books had on a population that lionized him as the greatest living English novelist.

Perhaps Wilkie Collins best summarized his feelings for America in a letter written from the steamer Parthia as he sailed for home:

I leave you with a grateful heart—with recollections of American kindness and hospitality, which will be, as long as I live, among the happiest recollections to which I can look back.

My years following Wilkie Collins through his family, his writings, and his travels in England and America have given me a closer understanding of him as a man and as a literary figure. I have traveled with him on both sides of the ocean, and sensed his presence through the veil of time. As I have gotten to know him, I have discovered that our enchanted relationship has enriched my life by giving me a sense of my own place in history; by knowing Wilkie, I see my world in perspective, and it is a richer, warmer place because of him.

[1] Dolby, George, Dickens As I Knew Him (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1885).

[2] Crowe, Eyre, With Thackeray in America (London: Cassell and Company, 1893).

[3] Baker, William and Andrew Gasson, Graham Law, Paul Lewis, eds., The Public Face of Wilkie Collins, 4 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005).

[4] Baker, William and William M. Clarke, eds., The Letters of Wilkie Collins, 2 vols. (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1999).