The Letters of Wilkie Collins

THE LETTERS OF WILKIE COLLINS Portrait of Wilkie Collins (1850) by Sir John Everett Millais (reproduced by courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery) The Letters of Wilkie Collins Volume1 1838-1865 Edited by William Baker and William M. Clarke First published in Great Britain 1999 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-0-333-67466-6 Volume 1:1838-1865 ISBN 978-0-333-73246-5 Volume 2: 1866-1889 ISBN 978-0-333-73247-2 two-volume set First published in the United States of America 1999 by ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-1-349-62293-1 ISBN 978-1-137-09804-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-09804-7 ISBN 978-0-312-22344-1 Volume 2: 1866-1889 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Collins, Wilkie, 1824-1889. [Correspondence. Selections] The letters of Wilkie Collins I edited by William Baker and William M. Clarke. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents:v.l.l838-1865-v.2.1866-1889. -ISBN 978-0-312-22344-1 (v. 2) I. Collins, Wilkie, 1824-1889-Correspondence. 2. Novelists, English-19th century-Correspondence. I. Baker, William, 1944- Il. Clarke, William M. (William Malpas) III. Title. PR4496.A4 1999 823'.8-dc21 99-19642 CIP Selection and editorial matter© William Baker and William M. Clarke 1999 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1999 978-0-312-22343-4 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIP OLP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 For our wives Contents List of Illustrations viii Preface ix Acknowledgements xiii Editorial Principles xvi Abbreviations XVlll Introduction XX Chronology of William Wilkie Collins' Life xxxviii Family Trees xi Part I Youth (1838-1846) 1 Part II Early Writing: Dickens (1847-1854) 41 Part III Literary Activity: Folkestone, Paris, London (1855-26 July 1859) 133 Part IV The Woman in White, No Name, and Armadale (7 August 1859-1865) 171 Appendix: Unpublished Letters 261 The Index of Correspondents and Subject Index are printed at the end of Volume 2 vii List of Illustrations Volume 1 Plates 1 and 2 William and Harriet Collins, Wilkie's parents, by John Linnell. (Faith Clarke) Plate 3 Charles and Wilkie as children by Alexander Geddes. (Horace Pym Collection) Plate 4 Wilkie as a baby by William Collins. (Faith Clarke) Plate 5 Charles Collins, Wilkie's brother and son-in-law to Charles Dickens. Plate 6 Charles Collins with Dickens and other members of the family at Gad's Hill. Plate 7 Wilkie Collins by Herbert Watkins in 1864. Plate 8 Caroline Graves in the 1870s. (From The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins by William Clarke) Volume 2 Plate 9 Martha Rudd. Plate 10 Wilkie Collins with Martha Rudd. (Faith Clarke) Plate 11 The cover of The Bookman, June 1912. Plate 12 A Christmas card featuring titles by Wilkie Collins, actual size. Plate 13 F.W. Waddy's caricature of Collins, 1872. Plate 14 "I am dying old friend." Plate 15 "I am too muddled to write. They are driving me mad by forbidding the [Hypodermic] Come for God's sake." The last letters Wilkie Collins wrote to his doctor. (Princeton University Library) viii Preface This edition of the letters of Wilkie Collins will shed light on the life and activities of one of the few remaining major Victorian creative personalities whose letters and papers remain uncollected and unpublished. Although Collins has been the subject of recent biographies, these works only quote brief extracts from the limited correspondence already available to biographers. One of the reasons there has been no edition is the reluctance of his heirs to expose to public scrutiny the author's unconventional lifestyle. Collins had at least two common law wives and the stigma of ille gitimacy has haunted the resulting children and their descendants even into the latter half of the twentieth century. Now that permission has been given to examine and publish the long-hidden correspondence - one of the editors, William Clarke, is the husband of Collins' great-granddaughter and author of the revealing biography of Collins The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins (1988, 1996)- the edition will illuminate an extraordinarily rich and varied Victorian life. It will shed light on Victorian literature and publishing, music, art and many other areas of intellectual, cultural and artistic endeavour. There are two main sources for Collins letters: those which survive in institutional holdings or in private hands, and those which have disappeared but survive in printed form. In Letters of Charles Dickens to Wilkie Collins, published by Harper Brothers in New York in 1892, Laurence Hutton collected the letters Dickens sent to his close friend Collins. In his preface to Wilkie Collins (1952) Robert Ashley wrote of "the huge bonfire at Gad's Hill to which, irritated at the invasion of his privacy by the press, Dickens consigned the whole of his correspondence". Consequently, he concluded,"although we have many of the letters Dickens wrote to Collins, we have none of those which Collins wrote to Dickens". Ashley also noted that "another loss was occasioned when Collins himself burnt the greater part of his correspondence before moving from Gloucester Place to Wimpole Street in the closing years of his life". Kenneth Robinson's biography Wilkie Collins appeared in the same year as Ashley's work. Robinson drew upon unpublished letters and other materials then in the possession of John Lehmann, Frank H. Arnold, the Morrish L. Parrish Collection at Princeton, and letters in the possession of A.P. Watt & Son, the London literary agents. Since 1952 many of these letters have moved across the Atlantic to Princeton, or have remained in ix X Preface private hands. Another biographer to utilize institutional holdings to cite brief extracts from the letters was Nuel Pharr Davis in his The Life of Wilkie Collins (1956). In his doctoral dissertation "The University of Texas Collection of the Letters of Wilkie Collins, Victorian Novelist", (the University of Texas at Austin 1975), William Rollin Coleman presented an edition of 262 letters from the holograph manuscripts, transcriptions and photocopies at the University of Texas. Subsequently the University of Texas has added to its Collins holdings, especially with its acquisition of the Robert Lee Wolff collection of Victorian novelists. Two biographies have drawn upon some of the many extant letters throughout the world in university libraries and private collections. William Clarke's intention in his biography is to unravel the secrets of Collins' complicated private life. Clarke's pioneering research revealed the identity of Collins' copyright holder and identified 18 institutions whose libraries held Collins' letters and the names of some private holders. Catherine Peters in her The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins (1991), building upon Clarke's foundation, interweaves Collins' complicated life with her subject's literary achievements. Clarke's biography prompted Sir John Lawrence to reveal the existence of letters sent by the ageing Collins in the last years of his life to an eleven-year-old girl and her mother. The bulk of the letters to "Nannie" are published in full here for the first time. The largest institutional collections of Collins letters are to be found at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the Parrish Collection at Princeton and at the University of Texas. The Pierpont Morgan has over 300 Collins letters. These include 117 revealing letters to his mother, 86 to his close friend Charles Ward, and letters to publishers such as Harper and Brothers and William Henry Wills (1810-1880) the general manager and proprietor of Household Words and All the Year Round. There are also many letters, not included here, by other members of Collins' family- his mother, his father and his brother Charles. The Parrish Collection has upwards of 250 letters including those to Collins' close friends the Lehmanns, to his physician Dr Frank Beard, his various publishers and a host of other cor respondents. The University of Texas has been adding to its Collins holdings edited by Coleman in the 1970s and now has just under 300 letters. These three repositories alone yield upwards of 850 letters. There are also significant Collins holdings at the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, including letters to the publishers George Bentley (94), and George Smith (21), at Harvard, the Huntington Library, the University of Illinois at Urbana, the Beinecke Library, Yale University, and elsewhere including Kansas and Stanford. Interestingly there are fewer Collins letters in insti tutional holdings in the British Isles. The largest of these, over 140 letters to Collins' solicitor W.F. Tindell, are at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow.

Load more