Wilkie Collins

Starred review from May 18, 2015
This compact but detailed biography illuminates the literary career of Wilkie Collins (1824–1889), whose “sensation stories” made him one of the Victorian era’s most popular authors. Collins, the son of a respected painter (whose biography would be one of his first publishing successes), escaped from the drudgery of a civil service career—his father’s idea—while still in his early 20s by unleashing a torrent of novels, short stories, essays, and journalistic pieces that ensured his literary fame. He befriended Charles Dickens, becoming his frequent collaborator on stories and amateur theatrical adaptations in which the two occasionally acted. Ackroyd (Charles Chaplin: A Brief Life) identifies “contemporary melodrama” as Collins’s métier. He was “a master of plot rather than of character” whose novels—notably The Woman in White and The Moonstone (regarded as the first detective novel)—are memorable for their suspense and narrative ingenuity. Collins also flouted Victorian mores and sometimes incensed critics with his realistic depictions of working-class life and the plight of women. The depiction of Collins as an artist afflicted with gout and neuralgia who worked himself to the brink of nervous prostration with each book he wrote makes him as interesting as one of his own fictional characters. Ackroyd’s appraisal of his subject—that “he breathed upon facts and kindled them into life”—is applicable to his own achievement here.

September 15, 2015
The latest installment in the author's Brief Lives series is dedicated to the popular British novelist Wilkie Collins (1824-1889). Uber-prolific biographer and novelist Ackroyd (Alfred Hitchcock, 2015, etc.) calls Collins the "sweetest-tempered of all the Victorian novelists." His fictional London was one of "confused identities, both sexual and social, in which no one had a secure home." Thanks to his accomplished painter father, Collins' home life was very secure; his first book was a biography of his dad. Ackroyd begins by describing Collins' "peculiar" appearance. He was shortish, as were his arms and legs, and his head was large and had a noticeable bump on one side. Ackroyd thinks the attention that Collins always draws to his characters' physical abnormalities can be traced back to his own. He was also plagued throughout his life by frequent pains in his face and eyes and became addicted to laudanum early on. He went to law school but never practiced. His knowledge of the law, however, was put to good use in his novels, and Collins and Charles Dickens became close friends and collaborators. Dickens' magazines published some of Collins' works, and they acted together in plays each had written. Collins' first published novel, Antonia, about pagan Rome, which Ackroyd calls "essentially hokum," sold well. Other workmanlike novels-plot and suspense were his strengths-followed, but the 1860s brought him massive popularity and sales. Ackroyd makes a strong case for reading (and rereading) the masterpieces from this period: the "elaborate and ingenious" The Woman in White, his "greatest" novel, and the innovative, influential The Moonstone, the "paradigm of the detective story." He also resuscitates and rescues from obscurity some of Collins' lesser-known works, such as No Name and Armadale. A compact, pithy, and generous biography of a novelist who found great success despite writing in the age of Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope.

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June 15, 2015

Ackroyd, a prolific writer acclaimed for his histories of London (London) and the Thames (Thames), adds a new author to his oeuvre of great lives concisely chronicled. Here he synthesizes the high points of two dozen longer Wilkie Collins (1824-89) biographies in a conversational style. Collins is mostly known today only to Victorian literature aficionados and students, yet he was among the best-regarded writers of his time and an intimate of such luminaries as Charles Dickens and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. While beloved by his peers for his sensational story lines, as exemplified by The Moonstone and The Woman in White, Collins pushed both literary and societal boundaries. He is credited with penning the first English detective story, the first female detective in English literature, and the first detective novel. And while he never married, he supported two mistresses concurrently. VERDICT Ackroyd's approachable narrative and the book's near-pocket size will appeal to Collins fans (and time-pressed students), but no new research is presented, therefore limiting the book's appeal to large public and academic libraries only.--Megan Hodge, Virginia Commonwealth Univ. Libs., Richmond

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