Wilkie Collins

Mrs Badgery

A Christmas short story by Wilkie Collins, illustrated by Carolyn Gowdy and with an introduction by Philip Hensher

Wilkie Collins’s ‘Mrs Badgery’, rarely seen since its first publication in Dickens’s Household Words magazine in September 1857, is an enchanting little chip off the block. Like a lot of British short stories, it is absurd, very funny, and in uproarious bad taste. British writers have often enjoyed stories of making a home, and also the theatrical trappings of grief. (George Bernard Shaw commented on the national enthusiasm for requiems). Here they collide, with richly enjoyable results. The narrator is clearly stuck withMrs Badgery for ever. In time, he might even regard her as a picturesque addition to his home, like an indoor and rather saline water feature. Philip Hensher

‘They’re from your Twitter followers.’

Is there any law in England which will protect me from Mrs Badgery? I am a bachelor, and Mrs Badgery is a widow. Let nobody rashly imagine that I am about to relate a common-place grievance, because I have suffered that first sentence to escape my pen. My objection to Mrs Badgery is, not that she is too fond of me, but that she is too fond of the memory of her late husband. She has not attempted to marry me; she would not think of marrying me, even if I asked her. Understand, therefore, if you please, at the outset, that my grievance in relation to this widow lady is a grievance of an entirely new kind. Let me begin again. I am a bachelor of a certain age. I have a large circle of acquaintance; but I solemnly declare that the late Mr Badgery was never numbered on the list of my friends. I never heard of him in my life; I never knew that he had left a relict; I never set eyes on Mrs Badgery until one fatal morning when I went to see if the fixtures were all right in my new house.

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