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This Electronic Thesis Or Dissertation Has Been Downloaded from the King’S Research Portal At This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ The other twin : a study of the plays of Wilkie Collins Clarke, Alison Thora The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 08. Oct. 2021 THE OTHER TWIN: A STUDY OF THE PLAYS OF WILKIE COLLINS Alison Thora Clarke Department of English, King's College London Submitted for PhD degree July 2005 i:, '_'.i' ', I _ ( ABSTRACT ILJL.F This doctoral thesis is a study of the plays of Wilkie Collins in the social and theatrical context of the times, and the context of his other writings, most notably his novels. Severalof the plays discussedin the thesis were adaptedfrom his novels, including his most popular and enduring works, The Womanin White and The Moonstone,whilst other plays were original works either written in collaboration or alone. The plays are examinedin the context of the climate of the Victorian theatre and are, where applicable, comparedwith other dramaticworks of the time. Contemporaryconditions of the drama and the stageare studied,including somediscussion of prominent figures of the time and Collins's relationship with them. The first chaptergives a brief introduction to Collins and the body of scholarly work about his life and works. The next two chaptersprovide an overview of theatre in the Victorian age including working conditions, social and class attitudesto the theatre and the dramatic literature of the period. Subsequentchapters discussthe dramatic works of Wilkie Collins chronologically in turn, studying the plays, the productions and theatresin which they were produced,and critical reception of the works by the major papersand dramatic critics of the time, as well as Collins's own feelings on dramatic literature and dramatic theory. Given that Dickens and Collins met and becameclose friends during an amateurproduction of Bulwer-Lytton's play Not So Bad As WeSeem, their relationship also forms a part of the generaldiscussion. The conclusion assertsthat Wilkie Collins had some influence on the works of the dramatists of the later Victorian period, who are often seenas rising abovethe morassof melodramaticdrama that was churnedout during the majority of the Victorian age. Believing that the Novel and the Play are twin-sisters in thefamily of Fiction; that the one is a drama narrated, as the other is a drama acted; and that all the strong and deep emotions which the Play-writer is privileged to excite, the Novel-writer is privileged to excite also... Wilkie Collins, 1852 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter I- Introduction ........................................................................ Chapter 2- Victorian Theatre 15 .................................................................. Chapter 3- Victorian Dramatic Literature 42 ................................................... Chapter 4- Collins's Early Plays 61 .............................................................. Chapter 5- Black & White 87 ...................................................................... Chapter 6- The Woman in White 108 .............................................................. Chapter 7- Man Wife 133 and ...................................................................... Chapter 8- TheNew Magdalen 151 ............................................................... Chapter 9- Miss Gwilt 176 .......................................................................... Chapter 10 The Moonstone - ................................................................... 192 Chapter II- Conclusion ........................................................................ 218 Bibliography 232 ...................................................................................... CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION Chapter I Wilkie Collins has long been consideredthe father of the detective novel, the masterof sensationfiction, and is best known as the author of The Womanin White and The Moonstone,two of the greatestexamples of nineteenthcentury sensationand detective fiction. But Collins was much more than this. He was a prolific journalist, a master story-teller, an author of twenty three novels, a writer who could almost match Dickens word for word, given the opportunity (he wrote almost half of The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices during a working holiday in Cumberlandand Doncaster,suggested by Dickens after the hectic theatrical tour of The Frozen Deep), an accomplishedshort story writer, and a successful playwright, who contributed to the developmentof dramatic literature during the nineteenthcentury. If he is not now consideredto have written the first detective novel, he was the first to put the detectiveplay on stage,with his own dramatic version of The Moonstone. Nuel Pharr Davis, in his biography of Wilkie Collins, also credits him with having "forced his theory of the Actual down the throats of later Davis that, "at the level ( ) Conan all generations of novelists". explains of ... Doyle this meant stickling for accuracy in the now familiar paraphernalia of laboratory,police, and legal routine". For the writer in general,this meant "taking the trouble to go and look at one's settingsbefore putting them into a novel. Fuzzy backgroundsbecame harder to put off on the public". ' In recent years,Collins the novelist has beenrevisited more frequently by academicwriters. Scholarsaround the world are re-examining his fictional works in their sociological and historical context. CatherinePeters's seminal biography, 'Davis, Nuel Pharr. The Life of Wilkie Collins. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956, pp. 216-217. Chapter I light The King ofInventors, was published in 1991, sheddingmore on Collins's life than ever before. This work, in combination with the delightful The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins by William A Clarke, who is married to Collins's great- granddaughter,has madeus far better informed about Collins's life. Also recently published is Andrew Gasson'sextremely useful "dictionary", Wilkie Collins: An Illustrated Guide, of 1998. In the decadesafter Collins's death, fairly little was written about him, and the majority his novels, until around the last decadeof the 20thcentury, were largely out of print. Apart from various obituaries and recollections by friends, Collins for the most part fell out of the reading public's eye. In 1932, Walter De La Mare considered 'The Early Novels of Wilkie Collins' in a collection of essays entitled The Eighteen Sixties, edited by John Drinkwater. In 1951 Kenneth Robinson published a biography of Collins, and SM Ellis included a critical biography as part of his Wilkie Collins, LeFanu and Others. Thesewere followed in 1956 by a biography of Collins by Nuel Pharr Davis and, in 1970,by that of William Marshall, published in America. Twenty years after Davis's biography, in 1976,Ashley Robert published another.Both of these latter works were largely basedon the sameinformation usedby Robinson and Davis, and they usedthe sameapocryphal stories. In 1974,however, Norman Pageedited the very useful and informative Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage, a collection of, amongst other things, reviews of his novels. It was not until 1991, in the new climate of revelation and re-evaluation in academiccircles, that Peters's fully rounded biography was published. 2 Chapter I From the 1980's, academicinterest in Collins has grown considerably, notably with Sue Lonoff s Wilkie Collins and his Victorian Readers in 1982, Audrey Peterson's Victorian Masters of Mystery in 1984, Jenny Boume Taylor's In the Secret TheatreofHome. - Wilkie Collins, SensationNarrative and I gth Century Psychology, and Philip O'Neill's Wilkie Collins: Women, Property and Propriety, both published in 1988. Interest has continued into the 1990's with a collection of extremely useful contemporarycritical essaysedited by Lyn Pykett in Britain, and with Lillian Nayder's work in America. Lillian Nayder's book, though it doestouch briefly upon two of Collins's original plays (Black and nite and The Frozen Deep) in the final chapter, "The Noncanonical Collins", makes no assessmentof the plays createdfrom his novels. Most recently, and most revealing for the Collins scholar,has beenthe publication of his letters in two volumes, edited by William Baker and William A Clarke. In recent decades,there has also beena close re-examinationof Victorian theatre and Victorian dramatic literature, by scholarssuch as
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