"I have been thinking a good deal about Collins and it strikes me that the best thing we can do just now for H.W. is to...offer him Five Guineas a week. He is very suggestive and exceedingly quick to take to my notions. Being industrious and reliable besides...I think it would do him, in the long run, a world of good."
(Dickens to his sub-editor W H Wills 16 September 1856).
Until the summer of 1857 Collins wrote mainly fiction for Household Words - short stories and then a serialised novel, The Dead Secret. But once that was finished he embarked on a series of non-fiction pieces - a mixture of reviews, retold stories from history, and social comment. These formed the bulk of his contributions for the remaining two years. Twenty of his Household Words essays were collected in My Miscellanies (1863) but that has long been out of print and the rest have never been published since they first appeared.
'Deep Design on Society', one of his wittiest contributions, is social comment verging on satire. He used a favourite technique, adopting the persona of an imaginary inhabitant of the Victorian world and aiming his jibes perfectly at both the writer and his milieu.
The writer whom he uses as the basis of his mockery, John Timbs, was in many ways making his living from the same growthin literacy and education as Collins himself did. Timbs wrote a whole series of popular knowledge books following on from the success of Things Not Generally Known, Familiarly Explained for Young and Old which was published as a small 12mo volume in 1856 by David Bogue. In his preface Timbs states 'You may perhaps say, 'your volume contains but a small portion of the 'Things not generally Known' here are no fewer than FIVE HUNDRED groups of instances". The book had immediate success and spawned numerous sequels. He also says that he does not want to instruct 'but to contribute to the intellectual chat of the fireside'. It was on this simple phrase that Collins built his witty edifice.
As an experienced reviewer Collins apparently got not further than p41 (of 250) for his essay. But each of his page references are accurate. The Age of the Globe, The Three Motions of the Earth, Power of Oil to Still Angry Waves, and Phenomena of Vision can all still be consulted in Timbs's book together with hundreds of others.
Contributors to Household Words were paid half a guinea (10s-6d) for a column in print which consisted of just under 500 words. Once Collins was taken onto the staff, his earnings rose considerably. He was initially paid five guineas a week but this was raised to six guineas from October 1857.
"...I have made the arrangement with Collins---that he is extremely sensible of the extra Fifty, and was rather unwilling to take it---and that I have no doubt of his being devoted to H.W. and doing great service." (Dickens to Wills 2 October 1857).
At the start of 1858 he wrote weekly in the periodical. So for the barely eight columns of 'Deep Design on Society' he was paid six guineas, fifty percent more than the standard contributor's rate. And for most of the time when he was on the staff he did not write an item every week - his work appeared 24 times in 1858, ranging between 4.5 and 12 columns. As a member of staff he may have done other things as well, perhaps read or sub-edited the work submitted by other contributors, but no evidence has emerged that he did anything but write his own material. Altogether, Collins wrote more than half a million words in 94 numbers of Household Words and was paid £1,053 for it.
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23rd February 1997
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