e-mail Paul Lewis on
paul@deadline.demon.co.uk
At the start of February 1972 Wilkie Collins was at the height of his fame - and his earning power. His old friend Charles Dickens had died nearly two years earlier, leaving him with the mantle of most popular living novelist.
It was more than ten years since his greatest work The Woman in White had hit Victorian society like a bombshell. It had given him financial security and he enabled him to stop the journalism which had supported him through the 1850s. Now he wrote fiction full-time. After The Woman in White (1860) had come No Name (1862), Armadale (1866), The Moonstone (1868), and Man and Wife (1870).
The start of 1872 was a busy time for Collins. He had just finished Poor Miss Finch, which was coming to the end of its six month serialisation in Cassell's Magazine. It was published in book form on Thursday 1 February, just two days before this portrait appeared in Vanity Fair. Bentley had paid £750 for the first edition of 2000 copies. Miss or Mrs? a short novel had also appeared recently in the Christmas issue of The Graphic Illustrated Newspaper. And the one volume edition of Man and Wife, for which he had written a new preface, appeared towards the end of 1871. He was also finally achieving some success as a dramatist. The stage version of The Woman in White was running at the Olympic Theatre where it had opened in October. Described by a contemporaty reviewer as 'an elaborate dramatic version' of the story he concluded that 'the force and ingenuity of the work are not to be denied'. The public loved it and it brought Wilkie £50 a week or more.
His private life was settling down after some turbulence in the late 1860s. He had moved to
90 Gloucester Place where he was to live almost until his death in 1890. Sharing that address with him was his long-time companion Caroline Graves who, after a brief marriage to someone else which probably came to an end in 1871, was to share the house with him for the rest of his life. Her daughter Harriet, now 18, was acting as Wilkie's secretary. Although he lived in Gloucester Place, Wilkie also kept house with Martha Rudd who lived with their two daughters nearby. When the second child was born in May 1871 Wilkie had raised her allowance by £5 to £25 a month.
e-mail Paul Lewis on
paul@deadline.demon.co.uk