Collins Wilkie - Wilkie Collins : the critical heritage

Wilkie Collins was one of the most popular novelists of the second half of the nineteenth century; yet of all his large outputthe results of forty years spent in the pursuit of literature as a careeronly two novels have achieved undisputed classic status. A handful of others (Armadale, for instance, and No Name) still retain some kind of currency; the rest are forgotten by all except the most dedicated specialists. In spite of this, the contemporary reception of his books offers much of interest to the student of English fiction, and of its critics and its reading public, between 1850 and 1890. As a young writer, Collins was widely reviewed in journals of the highest standing and was frequently hailed as a novelist of exceptional promise; his early novels were given close and serious attention, and he was held up for comparison with Dickens, Thackeray, Charlotte Bront, Mrs Gaskell, and others. He became, and remained, one of the most widely-read authors of his day throughout the English-speaking world, and he was widely translated. Though there were fluctuations in popularity during his long career, these were nothing like so dramatic as has sometimes been suggested. More significantly, however, there were at times disparities between the enthusiasm for his work manifested by the book-buying and book-borrowing public and the pronouncements of the usually anonymous arbiters of taste who reviewed for the leading newspapers and journals. In a shrewd obituary assessment (28 September 1889), the Spectator suggested that the position of Mr. Wilkie Collins in literature was a very unusual one. He was an extremely popular writerdeservedly popular, as we thinkwho was not very highly esteemed. That is an odd position, and we do not know that it has been quite satisfactorily explained. If this is not the whole truth about Collinss reputation, it is certainly an interesting and suggestive part of it. What it demonstrates is that his novels posed certain distinctive critical problems which made the placing of them a delicate and controversial operationa task for which Victorian reviewers were not always adequately equipped.

As the acknowledged leader of what came to be known as the sensational novel, he unavoidably associated himself with the purveyors of a proliferating sub-literature, feeble in quality and ephemeral innature; yet there were, as Dickens and others were quick to recognize, unmistakable qualities in Collinss novels which raised them high above most other specimens of the class to which they appeared to belong. In his hands, fictional sows ears were apt to turn out as silk purses; and the reviewer was faced with a problem which may be put briefly in some such form as Under what circumstances can a third-rate literary genre accommodate a first-rate work? The modern reader, trained by such modern instances as the thrillers of Graham Greene, takes the paradox in his stride; but Victorian men of letters, many of them with a classical background, entertained stricter notions of a hierarchy of genres, and felt a genuine puzzlement at the difference between the kind of novel Collins appeared to be writing and the powerful and unignorable response of the reader.

Again, he was generally admitted even by hostile critics to be a supremely skilful fashioner of plots, and this inevitably raised the question of the importance of plot in the novel and its relationship to other elementsa question which had had a long innings in criticism of the drama, but which the nineteenth century found itself called upon to grapple with in relation to fiction. Yet again, Collinss remarkable experiments in narrative technique, though they offer no problems to the competent undergraduate of today, provided another test of critical understanding which Victorian reviewers did not always pass with honours. As late as 1889 a writer in the Academy could still urge that unbroken sequence of narrative is one of the greatest charms of a work of fiction, and the originality of Collinss use of multiple viewpoints had evidently taken his contemporaries by surprise.