ELECTRONIC TEXTS

OF WORK BY

WILKIE COLLINS

These pages provide the texts of out of print or unpublished works by Wilkie Collins

Although most of Wilkie Collins's fiction is in print, almost all his non-fiction is not. Indeed most of it has not been republished since its first appearance. The non-fiction work is a mixture of sketches, essays, reviews, and histories written for a number of periodicals. Much of it has lasted remarkably well. And it is presented here for the first time this century.

The Last Stagecoachman Illuminated Magazine August 1843
A Pictorial Tour to St. George Bosherville (May 1851) (60k)
The Exhibition of the Royal Academy (June 1851) (45k)
A Plea for Sunday Reform (September 1851)
The Midnight Mass (June 1852) (38K) a translation by Collins of a Balzac story
Laid Up in Two Lodgings (June 1856) Illness in Paris and London
Deep Design on Society (Jan 1858) (27k) a social satire disguised as a book review
The preface to the french edition of The Woman in White 1861
Considerations on the Copyright Question address to an American Friend (June 1880) (32k) a diatribe against the lack of international copyright in the USA

A lot of his fiction and some of his non-fiction can also now be found on the web. Click here for the links.

Editorial Policy
The e-texts published here are faithful copies of the original Victorian printed text. Spelling, punctuation, and printing errors are kept. The typographical arrangement is also preserved as far as possible. Wilkie was very particular about the typography used for his work. So the pages here are exact page-for-page, line-for-line, character-for-character transcripts of the original. Text which appeared in columns is reproduced column by column.

However, the limitations of the language which is used to write Web pages (called HTML) and the browsers which read them make exact preservation of the typographical arrangement impossible.

Because it is impossible to ensure that some punctuation marks are translated properly, double and single open and closing quotes are replaced by their neutral versions ' and " which should appear correctly. Also the long dash which is used a lot in Victorian typography is replaced with three short dashes --- which are about the same length.

A special character called a non-break space has been used to attempt to recreate some of the appearance of the text. A non-break space is between these two dots . . if your browser shows something other than a space between those dots, that character will also appear in parts of the text where layout has been reproduced.

Unfortunately it is not possible to reproduce the typeface of the original. The standard Times face used by most web browsers is not a bad compromise.

For more detail on how these problems are dealt with see Transcription policy.