This talk was given on 19 March 2005
The text here may not be identical to the written text and omits the slide show

On 26 April 1877 Wilkie Collins wrote to a young autograph hunter probably in America but perhaps as far away as Australia.

"Dear Miss Harriet

Your kind letter found me in bed - suffering from the painful malady called rheumatic gout.

Now that I am getting better, I find my desk covered with unanswered letters. I take you as my first correspondent - and I contribute to your autograph-collection with the greatest pleasure.

We are thousands of miles away from each other - but I kiss my young reader’s hand nevertheless, and beg her to forgive me if I only write this brief reply."

This short charming note was written when Wilkie Collins was at the height of his fame, he was ill and as he put it three weeks later ‘a prisoner in my room’. But he still finds time to write so kindly and gracefully to this young fan on another continent.

Collins wrote this letter to Harriet Thompson on Thursday 26 April 1877. Although Collins says his desk was "covered with unanswered letters", this short note is the only one of the replies he wrote to those many letters which has survived.

His next extant letter was dated 10 May and related to a story he was engaged on. After that the fifteenth of May.

So of all the letters that covered his desk, this is our single surviving reply.

In the four volumes of The Public Life of Wilkie Collins we have collected nearly 3000 (2983) letters – from more than 100 sources around the world - Australia, Japan Poland, France, Germany, UK, the USA. More than 2100 (2139) of these have never been published before. And of those that have been published most were in obscure volumes. Who reads Temple Bar or The Critic – or even knows where to find the The Hornet or The Author? Altogether we culled letters from 48 published works.

But the more I read these 3000 letters the more I have come to realise that they are just a small sample, a tantalising glimpse, of the letters which Collins wrote. And the letter to Miss Harriet first put me onto this.

So today I am going to talk to you not about what we have found, but about the gaps, the ghosts, the letters that were but are not.

This paper will examine the ‘ghosts’ of letters from Wilkie Collins to Charles Dickens and will

More generally it will set a framework for future work on Wilkie Collins’s ghost letters and make some estimate of how many letters he may have written altogether and to whom.

Miss Harriet Jackson is just one example of Wilkie complaining about the quantity of letters he had to answer – sometimes when he returned from travelling, at other times when he had been ill, and occasionally just because he had received so many. At times Wilkie thought he was plagued with letters.

In January 1887 he said

"The worst ills of life – after rheumatic gout or poverty – are letters."

6 January 1887

There are at least 50 examples of Wilkie complaining about the large numbers of letters he has to answer, as he did to Miss Harriet Jackson.

"All my correspondence has latterly fallen sadly in arrear" 27 July 1860

"I am overwhelmed with letters" he wrote on 10 June 1871

"…dozens of unanswered letters stare me in the face..." 15 February 1875

"I have returned to find many letters waiting for answer…" 10 December 1877

"I am overwhelmed with a mass of unanswered letters." 18 August 1878

"…my present large arrears of correspondence…" 27 July 1883

"We sail away again in a few hours – and oh, I have so many letters to write." 15 September 1884

"Arrears of correspondence are in my way today" 21 December 1886

"I have found it a hard task to keep up with the demands of a large correspondence." 30 July 1888.

No wonder he once wrote

"I am thinking of running away somewhere to escape letters and callers"

16 July 1874

Over 28 years he was struggling to answer his letters.

In the extant letters we have fifty examples of Wilkie writing, as he did to Miss Harriet Jackson, about the quantity of letters he had to answer. But in every case all we have from this overwhelming mass of letters which he settles down to answer – is one or two or very rarely three replies.

Now it could be of course that he simply didn’t answer them. That the letters we have are the ones he chose to reply to. But here is his reply to another autograph hunter, written in 1888.

"The only letters from my readers which I deliberately lea[ve] without a reply are requests for autographs which are not accompanied by a stamped and directed envelope – and other requests which invite me to read manuscripts and find publishers for them. In every other case, I answer my letters – and I may say for myself that I am incapable of knowingly neglecting to thank a lady when she is so kind as to write to me."

So

• Wilkie had piles of unanswered letters
• he answered all of them
• not many remain

Can we use this to get a handle on how many might be missing?

On the 29 August 1860 he wrote to his friend Charles Ward.

"I have come back from the Isle of Wight and found eighteen letters to answer."

And adds

"My furniture bill makes the 19th letter and amounts to £103. Aie! Aie! Aie!"

Let’s assume he answered all 19. How many do we have?

Well, we have the one to Charles Ward. We have one written the day before it.

And that’s it. Two out of 19 if you count the furniture bill. Are we really saying that we have less than one ninth of the letters he wrote?

To assess that we have to look at another piece of evidence for ghosts.

Empty envelopes – the white sheets that enclose a ghost.

The only ghosts that appear in The Public Face are envelopes. And there are 25 empty envelopes in the four volumes.

They include

• Two to his mother.
• One to the artist John Everett Millais.
• One to Dickens’s sister Georgina Hogarth
• One to his friend Edward Pigott.
• One to his wine merchant.

But there is a series – apparently trivial - which is important to us ghost-hunters.

These eight envelopes to Charles Thomas.

Thomas was the printer for The World which serialised Wilkie’s book The Fallen Leaves in 30 weekly parts from 1 January 1879 to 23 July 1879. In addition to the 8 envelopes we also have four letters. 12 bits of correspondence in all.

But Wilkie had a very active correspondence over about ten months with Charles Thomas. Wilkie sent his copy, Thomas returned proofs, Wilkie sent them back corrected. Thomas returned them. Wilkie sent final revises back. And occasionally sent an extra letter.

It is not clear exactly how many exchanges there would have been – but with 30 episodes and copy and proofs for each it is at least 60. And the toing and froing mentioned in these letters shows that it could have been 90 or 100, three letters per instalment. And we have 12. Say one in eight. Not too far off the one in nine that we found earlier.

If that is right, then we can conclude that our 2891 letters indicates that Wilkie may have written as many as 26,000 letters. And over an active working life of 40 years that is 12 a week. So two each weekday and one each on Saturday and Sunday. It seems reasonable.

Because we know when Wilkie liked to write his letters.

Day by day.

But however many there were, here is what we’ve got.

Year by year.

The trend of this line is clearly upwards. But that could be because he wrote more letters as he got older and had more business to do. Or because as he got more famous his letters were kept rather than destroyed. Probably both.

So far we’ve looked at two bits of ectoplasm our ghosts have left behind.

Apart from envelopes there is another piece of physical evidence about missing letters.

Mentions by Wilkie of a letter that is now missing

11 October 1887 Andrew Chatto – letter missing

"I have written to Mr Leng by today’s post – a good-tempered remonstrance, I need hardly say."

So we know there is a letter to C D Leng, dated 11 October 1887 editor of the Sheffield Weekly Telegraph, who had just advertised that he was serialising a novel with a very similar name to Collins’s The Evil Genius. Collins and Chatto considered this was a breach of Wilkie’s rights – though in fact they didn’t stop it.

These letters can be identified one by one – and entered in the database. A job I haven’t done yet. Though it is worth saying that Pilgrim does attempt to include such letters in the twelve volume edition of Dickens’s letters.

Similarly we can add a fourth ghost’s footprint.

These are difficult. Because we have very few searchable collections of letters by his contemporaries. But there are a few. I’ll come back to these.

And there are other things that we can use

A little sideline here about a real ghost that we found among a hoard of letters from Wilkie mainly to his mother which are now lodged in Pembroke College, Cambridge.

Examining them I found an apparently blank piece of paper with a note by someone else on one side. But then I looked carefully at the other side and saw this.

I photographed it and brought it home. On the computer I reversed the image.

and then enhanced it

and with careful reading we recovered the whole text, who it was to, and roughly when it was written.

A ghost, brought back to life.

And here’s another, at the Huntington library in Los Angeles.

From Collins to his friend Edward Pigott, sent from Naples n 4 November 1853. Written on very thin paper to reduce postage costs – like airmail paper. The ink had leached through from the other side. In places, blots had eaten away at the paper. And then it looked as if it had floated to London across the Mediterranean.

But I think we have got just about every word in it. The first time that has been done.

These are resurrected ghosts. But some souls are lost forever.

There is a complete lack of any letters to the people who were the closest to him – in particular his two lovers and his three children.

His lovers

Caroline Graves – 0 letters

Martha Rudd - ‘Mrs Dawson’ – 0 letters

His children

Marian – 0 letters

Harriet Constance – 0 letters

William Charles – 0 letters

His step daughter Carrie – 8 letters, once she was a respectable married woman

And perhaps more usefully,

the different quantities of letters that have survived from people who should have had a similar correspondence.

His mother, Harriet Collins 167 letters

• His brother, Charles Collins 8 letters
• His father, William Collins 2 letters
• His lawyer William F Tindell, 9 years, 125 letters
• His lawyer Henry Powell Bartley, 23 years, 4 letters all personal.
• His wine merchants, 5½ years – 18 letters
• His wine merchants before that – 0 letters

And there are many other examples where we have hard evidence of a missing letter. Lost, thrown away, torn up, or perhaps languishing unrecognised in a library, or an attic, or a collection of autographs. Or of course burned.

Burning letters was almost a Victorian hobby. Collins himself wrote many times of burning documents.

In the Christmas 1854 edition of Household Words Collins wrote 'The Fourth Poor Traveller'. The storyteller, a lawyer, says

"My experience in the law, Mr. Frank, has convinced me that if everybody burnt everybody else's letters, half the Courts of Justice in this country might shut up shop"

A few months later in 1855 Collins wrote 'The Yellow Mask' also for Household Words. Father Rocco, a Catholic priest and the villain of the piece, says

"private papers should always be burnt papers" (7).

Collins returned to burning letters and documents again and again.

Here is an illustration from the serial publication of The Haunted Hotel in Belgravia in1878.

The caption

A few years later, and just a few months before Dickens made his historic bonfire, Collins wrote of burning a letter in The Woman in White. Marian Halcombe has received a letter from Walter Hartright. Her half-sister Laura loves Hartright but has agreed to fulfil her promise to her dying father to marry someone else.

Hartright has gone away and is about to embark on a ship for South America. Marian decides not to tell Laura about the contents of the letter. And adds

Somewhere under this grass lie the few black fragments of maybe 10,000 letters, the ashes of the correspondence written by the great figures of Victorian England.

On Tuesday 4 September 1860, Dickens said in a letter to William Henry Wills, the sub-editor of his weekly periodical Household Words

‘Yesterday I burnt, in the field at Gad’s Hill, the accumulated letters and papers of twenty years. They sent up a smoke like the Genie when he got out of the casket on the seashore; and as it was an exquisite day when I began, and rained very heavily when I finished, I suspect my correspondence of having overcast the face of the Heavens.’

It was not of course his correspondence that went up in smoke. It was letters to him. Four years later Dickens confirmed the value and quantity he had burnt.

"shocked by the misuse of private letters of public men, which I constantly observed, I destroyed a very large and very rare mass of correspondence. It was not done without pain, you may believe, but, the first reluctance, conquered, I have steadily abided by my determination to keep no letters by me, and to consign all such papers to the fire."

And Dickens went further

‘Daily seeing improper uses made of confidential letters, in the addressing of them to a public audience that has no business with them, I made, not long ago, a great fire in my field at Gad’s Hill, and burnt every letter I possessed. And now I always destroy every letter I receive - not on absolute business, - and my mind is, so far, at ease.’

People he wrote to such as publishers Bradbury & Evans, Richard Bentley, and Chapman and Hall; artists like John Millais and Daniel Maclise; and other Victorian giants such as Charles Babbage and Thomas Carlyle. And of course literary figures including George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Henry Lewes, Alfred Tennyson, William Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, Edmund Yates – and Wilkie Collins. Tens of thousands of key historical documents perished in Dickens’s flames. Dickens liked to call himself the inimitable. That day he was more the inimical.

It may shock us. But Wilkie clearly took it in his stride. Another new letter reveals what Wilkie thought of Dickens’s burning his letters.

The publisher George Bentley wrote to Collins asking if he had any letters of his father, Richard Bentley. And on 24 November 1871, eighteen months after Dickens had died, Collins replied

"It is possible that your father’s letters are already destroyed. After you left this house, I called to mind that Dickens had told me, some time before his death, that he had burnt a great sheaf of letters."

Among those burnt letters are of course just about all the letters which Collins wrote to Dickens.

Thanks to the wonderful work of the Pilgrim edition of Charles Dickens’s letters, we have 14,252 letters of Dickens’s and of those 165 are to Collins. However, I have identified another 10 letters from Dickens to Collins that are not in Pilgrim. These 10 new letters come from four sources.

Let’s look at these.

A P Watt was Wilkie’s literary agent – the first literary agent and Collins was one of his first clients. Between them they invented the literary agency. Wilkie demanding things and Watt doing them.

The A P Watt list is a remarkable document found in the New York Public Library. It was drawn up after Wilkie’s death, partly to help with the publication of a volume of letters from Dickens to Collins, but also it seems to list those letters which Dickens’s sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth could sell – and she did.

Watt lists 136 letters from Dickens to Collins and enlists the help of Georgina Hogarth to edit them.

He lists another four on a separate sheet – recommending they should not be sold. They referred to arguments, health, and one to "Sheriff Gordon of Edinburgh and his habits." Georgina was clear what she wanted to do with them.

‘These I should wish to cancel – to destroy, if possible!’

And she was paid to do this.

As this receipt shows.

The Watt and Hogarth lists give us three letters which are not in Pilgrim. One for reasons that are not clear. The other two are from the destroy list. Two of the four were saved and found their way to the Free Library of Philadelphia. The others presumably gone.

Then we have one new letter which emerged onto the market after Pilgrim vol XII was published – vol XII itself contains one important new letter which came to the market in that time.

Then we have hard evidence from three letters which clearly mention other letters.

One of these new letters, not in Pilgrim, was written around 1 June 1866. The text comes from a long quote from the letter in a letter from Wilkie Collins to his mother, Harriet, on 4 June 1866. It concerns Dickens’s view of Wilkie’s new book Armadale – the book that Wilkie himself thought his best.

Wilkie says "Dickens and Forster have both written to me about the last Chapter. Here is Dickens:-"

"I think the close extremely powerful. I doubt the possibility of inducing the reader to recognize any touch of tenderness or compunction in Miss Gwilt after that career, and I even doubt the lawfulness of the thing itself after that so recent renunciation of her husband - but of the force of the working out, the care and pains, and the art, I have no doubt whatever. The end of Bashwood I think particularly fine and worthy of his whole career."

81 words of Dickens that without the letters of Wilkie Collins would have been lost forever. And which are not in Pilgrim.

Another is a letter to a doctor who was treating Wilkie’s brother Charles. Collins writes on 8 July 1868.

"I have received a very alarming account of my brother today in a letter from Dickens"

So we know that the letter was written by Dickens, received on 8^th and almost certainly sent the day before from Gad’s Hill Place.

Finally we come to ‘deduced’ – the weakest link but only used where very clear.

Dickens writes to Collins on 14 October 1862

"I will write to you again from Paris"

We deduce he did.

Collins writes to Dickens 8 September 1864 "Have you got a bedroom empty… and…may I come on… Saturday.."

And we know he was there so we deduce that Dickens wrote back to say ‘of course’.

One letter does not quite make it.

5 September 1861 Collins writes to his mother "I hear from Dickens that Charley & Katie…" now that could be a letter or it could be a conversation at the office. So that does not enter the list.

But that leaves us with 176 certain letters – 11 more than Pilgrim reports.

This graph shows their distribution in time starting in 1851 when they met and ending in 1870 when Dickens died.

They peak when they worked together the most on Household Words and ATYR. Fell off as Wilkie became more independent, and then peaked again in 1867 when they wrote No Thoroughfare together. I don’t hold much with the theory that the relationship between the two men cooled in the years before Dickens’s death – though it is widely believed. You can read more about that – and about their relationship and how it changed – in my paper ‘Dear Wilkie’ in the Wilkie Collins Society Journal, 2001.

So, 176 letters from Dickens to Collins that we know were written and we have the texts of almost all of them. The other side of the correspondence is much sparser. We know that Dickens destroyed most of his letters including all but three of the letters from Collins in that bonfire in 1860 – or subsequently. Just three survive. One dated 2 November 1851 is about the sale of tickets for their amateur dramatic performance. The second, dated 7 August 1860, accepts the renewal of his job on ‘All The Year Round’ those were the letters on essential business which even Dickens didn’t destroy. And the third was 8 September 1864 about a visit to Gad’s Hill. Rare survivors of Dickens’s Bonfire of the Vanities.

But just as we can deduce some new Dickens letters from the texts we have, can we deduce anything useful or interesting about the missing letters from Collins to Dickens?

After all, letters between friends are a dialogue – so if Dickens wrote 176 to Collins, then Collins might be expected to have written a similar number to Dickens.

So let’s look at them.

They fall into two groups.

And by analysis them we do find

86 letters from Dickens which are a reply – implying 86 letters from Collins to which they are answers.

For example

25 May 1858

My Dear Wilkie

A thousand thanks for your kind letter…

24 October 1860

My Dear Wilkie

I have been down to Brighton to see Forster, and found your letter here on arriving by Express this morning…

28 August 1861, Office of ATYR

My Dear Wilkie. I have been going to write to you ever since I received your letter from Whitby…

31 October 1861, Great White Horse Ipswich

My Dear Wilkie

On coming here just now (half past one) I found your letter awaiting me, and it gave me infinite pleasure

12 October 1862

My Dear Wilkie

I came home last night, and found your letter.

25 January 1864

My Dear Wilkie.

I am horribly behind hand in answering your welcome letter

12 February 1867

My Dear Wilkie,

Coming back here yesterday, I found your letter awaiting me.

These are clear physical evidence of letters. The dates of the letters can be roughly deduced from the context – and the location of the two parties – are they both in London when the letter and the reply could well have been on the same day – with six deliveries on a weekday. Or are they in Europe or the USA when letters took longer. Though occasionally we get a definite date.

31 January 1868, Philadelphia

My Dear Wilkie

Your letter dated on the eleventh reached me this morning.

So a definite letter written on the 11 January – and taking a surprisingly long 20 days to reach Dickens in Philadelphia.

Then we get things like

New Year’s Day 1863

My dear Wilkie

Many thanks for the book.

Also clearly a reply, or…

29 January 1863

My Dear Wilkie

I came back yesterday and was truly concerned to read your poor account of yourself.

Or

22 April 1863

My dear Wilkie

…I am heartily glad you have got away at last…

Another reply.

24 February 1854

…If you are disengaged next Saturday, March the 4^th and it should be a fine day, what do you say to making it the occasion for our Rochester trip?

15 October 1856

…Will you read Turning the Tables…enclosed and let me know whether you care to play Edgar de Courcy…Send me back the book when you answer.

So this is - bilateral evidence. Evidence from within the two sets of letters from D to C and from C to D. But sometimes we get hard evidence of a letter in a letter to someone else, like this one from Dickens to William Macready, the actor manager, on 9 January 1862

My Dearest Macready.

You were asking me the other day about Fechter's Othello. This morning I have a letter from Wilkie, from which I extract a passage about it that I think will amuse you.

"Fechter by the bye. I have seen him in an utter and unspeakable failure. Badly dressed even. Wrong throughout, in conception and execution. If he gave me any idea at all, he gave me the idea of a Sepoy. The play is beautifully got up; but Mr. Ryder trying to be intelligent, and relapsing into boisterous stupidity at every available opportunity--Miss Leclerq pawing Fechter--Mr. Somebody or other acting Roderigo so that the fourth Act ended amidst the hearty laughter of the pit--Mr. Somebody else imitating Anderson (!), in Cassio--everybody concerned doing everything with the promise of extra-ordinary intelligence, and the performance of downright stupidity - so disgusted me, that I have registered a vow to see no more of that much-injured man, Shakespeare, on the stage"

129 words of a brand new Wilkie Collins recovered from the text of a letter by Charles Dickens.

And we get things like this. On 23 May 1854 Dickens wrote to Collins

My dear Collins

I shall be delighted to see my name in that good company, and am very heartily sensible of the feeling in which in which I know you "propose" to put it there.

Always faithfully yours

Charles Dickens

Clearly a reply. In fact Collins was asking Dickens if he could dedicate his new book, Hide and Seek to Dickens. So we know that Collins wrote to Dickens, probably the day before. And we know what he said.

22 May 1854

My dear Dickens (that was how he addressed him)

If you agree, I propose to dedicate Hide and Seek to you and, if you will allow me, call you my friend.

And he replied to Dickens’s acceptance too.

[Friday 26] May

The book is finally done, with the dedication which he hopes Dickens will like when he sees it. Why not celebrate his freedom with a day in the country, maybe Tunbridge Wells? Would Lemon come too?

We know that because on 30 May Dickens wrote to Lemon

"Collins wants to make a day in the country with us next week. What do you say to Thursday?

So we can piece together a whole exchange, a whole set of events.

[Thursday 1st] Lemon accepts

Dickens wrote to Collins on 6 June sending him a spoof railway ticket showing they should meet at London Bridge Station heading for Tunbridge Wells.

Wednesday 7th Lemon to D ‘something in his foot’

Wednesday 7th D to C inviting C to dinner at 2 on Sunday 11th and a walk on Hampstead Heath.

[Thursday 8th] C to D probably rejecting as he is engaged.

[Friday 9th] D to Lemon saying all cancelled [evidence – D writes to Lemon on 11th about a play and not referring to any meeting. Alternatively it did take place and Lemon left the play then and Dickens reads it in the evening and returns it.]

A trivial example – but one which shows how the missing pieces of the jigsaw can be fitted together by careful examination of the pieces that we have.

Another example.

16 March 1855 Collins sends dickens the first two portions of his story ‘Sister Rose’

19 March 1855 Dickens replies commenting on Sister Rose and inviting Collins to Ashford for a reading on behalf of a railway benevolent fund (fares paid)

20 March Collins says he is not sure if he will be well enough, the whole family ill including Millais who is staying with them [Wilkie Collins to Ward 20 March]. Likes some of his suggestions on Sister Rose but not others [he made some changes not all]. Sends him Pigott’s address [D had asked for it and see D to C 4 April].

23 March Collins writes again. He is much improved and will make the 27^th [tone of D’s reply and the fact that D sends him travel details]. Has read Dinah Mulock’s ‘Ghost Story’ and, knowing that writer, believes he sees Dickens’s hand in it? As he is improving he hopes to see Millais's new picture of firemen rescuing a child from a burning building [in fact he sees it early in April Wilkie Collins to Pigott 9/4].

24 March Dickens replies. Charmed to hear of the great improvement. Travel details. ‘You have guessed right!’ about Mulock. Has found a useful quotation for Millais should he want one for his fireman rescue picture.

[It seems that Wilkie Collins did go to Ashford despite the late hour but had a relapse].

1 April Collins writes to Dickens. Encloses a piece from the Leader by his friend Pigott which he thinks CD will enjoy. He cannot make the Pantomime on Saturday. Ashford was a strain and he has had to call the doctor back to treat his condition and fears what the treatment may involve. Sorry that he is such a hermit.

4 April Dickens replies that he liked Pigott’s piece. Met Pigott in the Olympic by chance. By the way has mislaid Collins’s letter with his address in it so could he have it again? Don’t let the Dr cut your nose off to spite your face. Pantomime was amazingly good. Had a letter from our friend Pugh in Ashford (evidence that C went there).

9 April Collins writes to D saying the treatment worked! He can emerge from his hermit state and eat and drink with CD! Wants to change the name ‘Danville’ to ‘Dubois’ in ‘Sister Rose’. [date from letter to Pigott when he is clearly up and about again].

15 April Dickens writes that he will be charmed to see him in his Normal state and suggests Friday 20^th to meet at the Garrick and then the Ship and Turtle. Problems with Wills over the name change 2^nd part of Sister Rose.

This tells us new things about Collins

And finally the crucial time when the Dickens Collins friendship took two turns closer.

29 August 1857

My Dear Collins.

Partly in the grim despair and restlessness of this subsidence from excitement, and partly for the sake of Household Words, I want to cast about whether you and I can go anywhere -- take any tour -- see any thing -- whereon we could write something together. Have you any idea, tending to any place in the world? Will you rattle your head and see if there is any pebble in it which we could wander away and play at Marbles with? We want something for Household Words, and I want to escape from myself. For, when I do start up and stare myself seedily in the face, as happens to be my case at present, my blankness is inconceivable -- indescribable -- my misery, amazing.

I shall be in town on Monday. Shall we talk then? Shall we talk at Gad's hill? What shall we do?

That of course when Dickens was going through the turmoil of his infatuation with the young actress Ellen Ternan. Wilkie replied. Examination of the chronological series of the letters from Dickens to Collins shows that between August and October 1857 Dickens changed from addressing them My Dear Collins to My Dear Wilkie. On 29 August he wrote of his despair – at the time he was still struggling with his love for the young actress Ellen Ternan. Dickens and Collins went away to Cumberland for a trip and so Dickens could see Ellen. After that, Dickens addressed him My Dear Wilkie. We can only surmise what Collins wrote in reply to that rather desperate letter – but reply he certainly did. The change was a sign perhaps of the kindness and intimacy of the response.

Then on 25 May 1858 Dickens to Collins

"A thousand thanks for your kind letter. I always feel your friendship very much and prize it in proportion to the true affection I have for you…can you come round to me in the morning. I can tell you all in lieu of writing. It is rather a long story – over now I hope."

Dickens writes on the Tuesday. On the Saturday before, with the help of John Forster, he had finally negotiated his separation from his wife Catherine, the mother of his ten children, leaving Dickens free to pursue Ellen Ternan – in secret of course. So what might Collins have said in that crucial letter?

It seems clear that Dickens had not written to him. So Forster must have told him. Collins clearly wrote to Dickens and might have said

Forster has told him, in strict confidence, that he has finally separated from Catherine. How brave he has been and how much Wilkie Collins hopes that this will help resolve the restlessness and strain he has been under. He can always count on his friendship and support.

And from that day on, Dickens signed himself not ‘ever faithfully’ but ‘ever affectionately’.

Other things we can deduce.

On 29 September 1855 Collins writes to Dickens the moment he lands after his trip to the Scillies giving Dickens a full account of the journey and in particular telling him about the hornpipes danced by the three brothers Dobbs who sailed the ship, sending best wishes to Dickens’s family staying at Folkestone, and asking when he will be back in London.

Another letter recovered from the contents of the reply to it.

Here are the numbers

And these 155 letters are ones that we can date, we say often where they were sent from, and we can recover a lot of the content.

From those replies of Dickens we learn about Wilkie’s delayed trip to Paris in February 1856, the storm on his journey back, his views on the iron steamship the Great Eastern, his suggestions about improvements to A Tale of Two Cities, his visits to the electro-chemical baths of John Caplin in 1863, his trip to Rome in 1864 and the reaction of his step-daughter Carrie to the frescoes, the development of the dramatic version of Armadale and of No Thoroughfare and his suggestions to Dickens for reading Oliver Twist. In another he asks what has become of the original painted scenery for The Frozen Deep and that he is without a copy of his own first book Antonina.

We know he wrote all these things because Dickens replied to them, point by point. Allowing us to recapture the content of what he said.

Looking at the letters of Collins alone is like trying to do a jigsaw puzzle by sorting out all the red pieces. We need the blue pieces too – the letters of Dickens. And the green and mauve pieces of Wilkie’s family. And the other coloured pieces – the letters of Lemon, of Macready, of Dickens’s sister Georgina Hogarth.

One brief insight about her to end with. Someone Wilkie was always polite to and whom he helped greatly when she was publishing Dickens’s letters.

Georgina Hogarth wrote to Annie Fields 30 August 1873, Huntington Library – and if you think Wilkie’s writing is difficult, try Georgina Hogarth’s!

"…Wilkie Collins is going to America in September – you shall see him no doubt – I have but the slightest idea whether he is likely to be successful or not – I have heard he is to read but I cannot imagine his reading well. He seems to me to have no physical qualification for it – I forget whether you know him? He is agreeable and easy to get on with – and he has many fine qualities but he has an unusual amount of conceit and self-satisfaction – and I do not think any one can think Wilkie Collins a greater man than Wilkie Collins thinks himself…"

Only when we have all those letters fitted together does our jigsaw begin to make sense. And from the colours and patterns on the surrounding pieces we can begin to sketch in the missing pieces.

The ghosts. The footprints.

The missing letters of Wilkie Collins.

19 March 2005

e-mail Paul Lewis