It was always William Wilkie Collins’s good luck — though in later life something of a humiliation — that he was dragged along on Dickens’s coat-tails — not least in this bicentennial ‘year of Dickens’. In December, the BBC will be showing a dramatisation of The Moonstone. T. S. Eliot (no less) called that tale of theft, somnambulism, Scotland Yard, opium and wily Indian thugs ‘the first and best of detective novels’. That, one imagines, would have elicited a snort of contradiction from the author of Bleak House, but the compliment is not far off the mark. Andrew Lycett is currently at work on a full-length biography and, in the meantime, Peter Ackroyd offers us this elegant extended essay between hard covers.
‘We shall probably never know anything about Wilkie except his dates of birth and death’ lamented the distinguished American biographer Gordon Ray. That we do know relatively little is measurable in the sizes of Ackroyd’s 1,000-page biography of Dickens and the less than 200 pages he manages to squeeze out of Wilkie’s longer life.
It was, by Victorian standards, a disreputable one. But he was careful to cover his tracks. His letters survive to furnish only a measly two volumes. His monument, he ensured, should be his 30 published works of fiction. Ackroyd restricts his discussion to 15 of these, on the wholly plausible grounds that many of the later ‘novels with a purpose’ are not much good. As, indeed, they are not.
The outlines of the life are familiar enough, although the anecdotal evidence on which every biography of Collins depends for colour and detail is shaky. He was born the son of a second-rate Royal Academician, from whom he inherited his first forename, and was known as Willie throughout his childhood.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in