ABSTRACT

With the death of Wilkie Collins we have lost almost the last of the great English novelists who made the middle of the nineteenth century memorable in the history of fiction. Thackeray, Dickens, Charles Reade, Trollope, Kingsley, Mrs. Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot; only one of them reached the allotted threescore years and ten. Collins, by a few years the younger of the coterie, has joined them; and the world is the poorer for want of one of the most fearless and honest fictionists who ever fed the public’s sensation hunger while seeking to influence the public’s serious sentiments. His time, the time not of to-day but of twenty or thirty years ago, was one of straight speaking, when men wrote from their hearts in a way that would be scorned in these days of subtle intellectualism, told their tale, set forth their moral, if there was one, and were content. The complications in which Collins revels are never of the subjective or metaphysical kind. The field of his narratives bristles with ingenious obstacles, but he goes at them like a steeplechaser at a hurdle, and the emotions of his men and women are as simple as those of the dramatis personæ of an Adelphi drama.