Wilkie Collins - No Name

No Name (1862) is the second, and perhaps the least characteristic, of the four great novels published by Wilkie Collins during the 1860s. It was written at the height of his popularity; his previous book, The Woman in White (1860), had proved a runaway bestseller, and Collins suddenly found himself at the top of the tree,), while its successor, Armadale (1866), he pre-sold to Smith and Elder for the even more outlandish sum of 5,000. Nobody but Dickens, he notes proudly, has made as much.

It is generally agreed that The Woman in White inaugurated the genre of the Sensation Novel which so dominated the fiction market of the ensuing decade, during which writers such as Mrs Henry Wood, Mary Braddon, Charles Reade and Sheridan Le Fanu all achieved impressive sales with variations of the essential Collins theme the grisly skeleton lurking in the highly respectable cupboard. To Mr Collins, as Henry James pointed out in a review of Mary Braddons Aurora Floyd in 1865, belongs the credit of having introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries that are at our own doors.

Collins was determined, however, to avoid simply repeating the winning formula of The Woman in White. In the preface to No Name he draws the readers attention explicitly to the new novels divergence from its predecessor:

It will be seen that the narrative related in these pages has been constructed on a plan, which differs from the plan followed in my last novel, and in some other of my works published at an earlier date In trying this new ground, I am not turning my back in doubt on the ground which I have passed over already. My one object in following a new course, is to enlarge the range of my studies in the art of writing fiction, and to vary the form in which I make my appeal to the reader, as attractively as I can.

Charles Dickens, for one, was particularly impressed by this aspect of his protgs inventiveness: I find in the book every quality that made the success of the Woman in White without the least sign of holding on to that success or being taken in tow by it, he commented enthusiastically in a letter to Collins shortly before serialization began in Dickenss own magazine, All the Year Round.

The suspense generated by No Name is of a quite different kind from that which mesmerizes the reader of The Woman in White, Armadale or The Moonstone (1868). The book features no mysterious apparitions, foreboding dreams, Shivering Sands, or exotic Orientals. Combe-Raven, where the story begins, is a placid, utterly commonplace country residence which Collins takes pains to evoke in the opening pages in the most realistic of ways: details such as the ticking clock, the red-nosed housemaid, the snoring dog, the cook with her rheumatism, the kindly twinkling head of the family taking his Scottish terrier for an early morning walk, combine to create a reassuring tableau of stability and ordinariness. Subliminally and because this is a Wilkie Collins novel one intuits everything is about to go horribly wrong, but the subtly suffused aura of impending catastrophe is all the more disturbing for being so hard to locate.

Whereas in most Collins novels the narrative is determined by the characters attempts to follow a series of clues that lead them to the truth about some mysterious event in the past, in No Name, conversely, it is the disclosure of the books single secret early on which initiates its main action. From that point, as Collins explains in the Preface, all the main events of the story are purposely foreshadowed, before they take place my present design being to rouse the readers interest in following the train of circumstances by which these foreseen events are brought about. Despite his meticulous researches, Collinss fictions often contain turns of event so zany they leave even the most credulous staggering one thinks particularly of Poor Miss Finch (1872), in which the blind heroine first recovers her sight, then loses it again, while the hero has dark blue skin as a result of the medicine he takes to cure his epileptic fits! but in No Name Collins barely flouts the laws of probability. The revelation of the Vanstone daughters illegitimacy, and their consequent loss of social status and all inheritance rights, is distressingly believable, and, more importantly, it opens the novel out towards all sorts of compelling moral, social and legal issues. Even the dour lawyer Mr Pendril is provoked into a growl of dismay when he contemplates the sisters plight: