Wilkie Collins : His Contribution to English Fiction

Contents: Preface. 1. Introduction: English fiction during 1840-1900. 2. Wilkie Collins and some predecessors. 3. Wilkie Collins and dickens. 4. Wilkie Collins  and his successors. Conclusion. Bibliography.

Wilkie Collins was a contemporary of Charles Dickens. This book discusses the contribution of Wilkie Colilns to Victorian fiction. Scholars have not bothered with him to the extent they have with other novelists of this era probably because of want of adequate biographical and other materials.

It is also a matter of regret that the literary relationship of this novelist with Charles Dickens in spite of their intimacy and their sincere and valuable collaboration in the pages of journals like Household words and All the Year Round has not been adequately explored.

This is an attempt to look at Collins’s major works. The two masterpieces of Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White and The Moonstone most clearly convey the extraordinary talent of the author and his creative power in the new genre of mystery and detection.

It is evident that Dickens was highly impressed with the young Collins’s second novel Basil and with a Thorough conviction declared that Colons has a call to this same art of fiction. Collins’s subsequent novels particularly The Woman in White and The Moonstone attracted more and more assurance and admiration from Dickens and other important contemporary writers and reviewers. This has been discussed at length in this book. IN his later career Dickens was also found to have been included to experiment along the channel of mystery and detection introduced by his much younger colleague Collins.

The contribution of Wilkie Collins in the world of English fiction is also at the linguistic level. A Comparative study shows how the greatest novelist of the era was influenced by his collaborator and a junior practitioner. Special features of Wilkie Collins art, as far as possible, have also been indicted and discussed.