ABSTRACT
Mr. Wilkie Collins has one at least of the prime requisites of a novelist. His object, from the first chapter to the last, is to tell his story. He does not trouble the reader with wearisome reflections or picturesque descriptions, neither does he exercise any of the arts by which a tale that could be easily told in two volumes is expanded into three. He knows how to make a plot and how to develop it, gifts which some recent novelists affect to despise, probably because they do not possess them. Mr. Collins, in the early days of his novel-writing, was in the habit of inventing a secret or puzzle which taxed the reader’s curiosity to unravel. This rather childish exercise of ingenuity was dearer to him, or easier, than the delineation of character; neither did he give much heed to verisimilitude, and perhaps regarded improbabilities as an aid to the faith demanded of the novel-reader. In his latest work, there is no skein to be disentangled, and no accidents or coincidences more remarkable than we are accustomed to in fiction. The novel before us commands the reader’s attention throughout. He is never tempted to lay it down, neither does he come to passages he can afford to skip. It is full of dramatic scenes, and might, we think, be readily transformed into a sensational drama….
