“Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation”, by Andrew Lycett

544 pages, Windmill, ISBN-13: 978-0099557340

Eh, what’s that? Never heard of Wilkie Collins? Well, ya heard of The Moonstone? Or how about The Woman in White? That’s better. Maybe even Poor Miss Finch? Okay, too much, but William Wilkie Collins, the master of the Victorian sensationalist novel – hell, practically the inventor of the Victorian sensationalist novel – was a mover and a shaker in the literary and theatrical world during ole’ Queen Vic’s long-ass reign (second only to Dickens), and Andrew Lycett’s biography Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation is the first proper account of Collins’ life in two decades…and, brother, what a life: a peculiar, to say nothing of scandalous, private life consisting of two – TWO – mistresses and hers-and-their children with them both; a lifetime of illness soothed by a magnificent hallucinogenic cocktail of drugs and booze; and a body of work that would appear to reflect the disregarded usage of both. While Lycett’s research produces no Copernican revolution in Collins studies (mistresses Graves and Rudd, for instance, remain mysterious and indistinct the end), he sharpens our vision of the man, nonetheless.

Here was a man who understood the potency of hidden things, the power (and danger) of secrets; a man who expended much ink on the legal plight of the married woman in Victorian society, and yet still managed to keep two women at his beck and call. Lycett paints a vivid picture of Collins, both physically – with his distinctive thicket of a beard, his ever-present glasses and misshapen forehead – and morally, as a man who cared not for convention and walked his own path, though not always one that readers of his novels might expect. For, as Lycett shows, Collins tapped into a neurosis which lay at the heart of the Victorian moral project: the fear that amid so much outward prosperity and security lurked agencies and individuals who were not what they seemed. The man (and woman) pretending to be something else is a feature of Collins’ novels and the veneer that separates “respectable” life from the brothel and the mad-house is sometimes horribly thin.

In pain-racked old age, Collins appears to have hardened somewhat, his earlier protofeminism falling away and his views shifting to become more in keeping with the accepted Victorian stance on such matters but, as Lycett acknowledges, “Wilkie Collins has never been easy to pigeonhole”, and there remains something slippery and elusive about him, despite all the work gone in to bring to light this near-forgotten artist.