The Impact of Wilkie Collins Had on Charles Dickens Life And Works - Essay Example

I plan to show the literary impact Wilkie Collins had on Charles Dickens’ life and works and how these two caused the Sensation Novel to be on the forefront of Victorian literary accomplishments. Scholars commonly acknowledge that these two Victorians were bound by a close friendship and by a number of collaborations; however, the notion that Wilkie Collins actually influenced the writings of the great master Dickens is often quickly dismissed, and the focus is generally on Collins’ literary indebtedness to Dickens. Dickens was a tremendous source of inspiration and counsel for Wilkie Collins, and without Dickens undoubtedly Collins would not have reached his full potential as a writer. When the two writers first met in 1851, their friendship evolved out of a mutual interest in drama. Dickens, who had already published eight novels and was established as one of the greatest Victorian novelists, continually encouraged Collins to write and eventually requested that Collins join the staff of Dickens’ journal Household Words in 1856 (Phillips 109-11). In addition to offering suggestions for improvements for Collins’ works and serving as his editor, however, Dickens held tremendous admiration for his understudy. In a letter to Collins after the publication of No Name, Dickens expressed his esteem for Collins when he wrote, “I find it wonderfully fine. […] I was certain from the Basil days that you were the Writer who would come ahead of all the Field” (qtd. in Phillips 129). I intend to examine, therefore, that the literary influence of these two writers was not unilateral; when studying Dickens’ later works such as Our Mutual Friend and comparing them with previous works such as The Pickwick Papers, one notices a significant change in Dickens’ style. Whereas his earlier works are meritorious mostly for his strength of character portrayals, the latter novels place more emphasis on plot development. This thesis will argue that this shift in Dickens’ style was a direct result of his friendship and collaboration with Collins, who was known as “the master of plot and situation” (Eliot 308). As the almost insurmountable volume of Dickens scholarship proves, most scholars consider him the greatest of all Victorian writers. Interest in Wilkie Collins’ works is comparably minute; however, these two novelists are often studied side by side in the context of the development of the Victorian novel. Walter Clarke Phillips, in his book Dickens, Reade, and Collins: Sensation Novelists, discusses the direct impact of the rise in serialized journals to the advent of the Sensation Novel in Victorian England. As the volume of readership increases, writers adapt their themes to the preferences and tastes of their clientele; Phillips in his book argues that Charles Dickens, Walter Reade, and Wilkie Collins led the movement toward “strong emotions, unusual incident, dramatic method”. In Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage, Norman Page discusses the multifaceted relationship between Collins and Dickens. Page refutes the mainstream opinion that Collins had little or no influence on the superior Dickens and argues that Dickens “came under Collins’s spell to a remarkable degree” , citing correspondence between the two writers as primary evidence. In addition, T. S. Eliot treats the unique relationship between Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins in his article “Wilkie Collins and Dickens” and asserts that each writer borrowed from the other to make his own style more refined. Dickens improves in plot development after having studied the works of Collins, who in turn became more competent at character portrayal. Eliot focuses his study on Collins’ The Woman in White and its main characters to show Collins’ improvement. This presentation will argue that the trauma of death creates textual gaps in narrative, exemplified by the missing corpse. The novels in this study all feature a missing dead body, one whose re-presence threatens both the characters in the text and the stability of the narrative. Collins The Woman in White enacts a series of burials and resurrections, hauntings and ghost sightings. As part of its suspenseful plot, the novel is vulnerable to mis-readings of death; in fact, it prematurely buries and postpones exhumations. The themes of haunting, drowning, salvaging, and resurrection make up the larger theme of Dickenss Our Mutual Friend. As in The Woman in White, here bodies, corpses and identities are doubled, those who are thought to be dead miraculously appear un-dead, the plot centers on inheritance, and capitalism is parodied in the commodification of the corpse: death provides life. Like the other novels in this study, re-visions Gothic themes and conventions in its expression of death and the return of the dead. It will be argued that the texts hysteric response is representative of the inability for death to be truly accepted by the narrative itself. In mourning for something lost, these texts attempt to speak the unspeakable, they repeatedly represent and perform loss. They point to events that can never be truly related, to continuous referrals of meaning, to mere imitations instead of realities. These subliminal spaces of death are textual symptoms of cultural doubt, loss, and repression. In a sense, all of these Victorian novels are representative of not only cultural anxieties regarding mortality, but the modern dilemmas of language, signification, and representation. For the Victorians especially, the narrating of death was important to the social and cultural understanding of absence, separation, and displacement. Rapid industrialization and urbanization, along with the decline in faith and belief in the afterlife, resulted in attempts to invent performances of spiritual certainty, seen in the aestheticization of mourning rituals and the overall Victorian "cult of death." Narrative endings could be seen as a form of assurance in a world of change and uncertainty, and death in literature became commonplace. Death bed and grave bed scenes, exhumations and resurrections, ghosts and figures of living death populate the Victorian novel. In a world of doubt, the Victorian novel therefore questions notions of the afterlife while dramatizing the immortal and liminal spaces of fictional death. For most of the twentieth century Collins was probably best known even by literary historians as a friend, protégé and sometime collaborator of Charles Dickens. Collinss progressive depictions of women and of sexuality, meanwhile, have also generated a number of studies. It is worth pointing out that Collins never wrote about the Anglo-American relationship as extensively or as explicitly as his mentor Dickens. Collins never wrote a novel like Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44), Dickenss transatlantic tale, nor produced an account of his visit to the United States like the older writers travelogue, American Notes (1842). No doubt for this reason, barely a fraction of the amount of critical attention given to Dickenss interest in America has been paid to Collinss treatment of the nation and its people. Indeed, out of the two-dozen novels and almost fifty short stories that Collins published, I can find only two short stories and half a page of one novel actually set in the USA. However, as I now want to suggest, America and Americans are significant in much of Collinss fiction. Crime fiction, which makes up 25% of fiction published in the US, is the most studied genre of popular literature. It began at a time when the power of reason and logic were replacing brute physical power (confession by torture). Scientific method (like technology in the thriller) then becomes a form of social control over superindividuals, the criminals. Crime stories are often described as escapist, or as a way of coping with anxieties about death and violence, or displacing the murder we all subconsciously wish to commit. Jürgen Habermas says there are blind spots in life where the narrative of modernity as progress is thrown into doubt by the violence that is its other side. By reducing this violence to (usually) a single murder, and solving it, the crime novel ritualises the fear of modernity.  In so doing it provides the reader with an identity (McCracken 69). Our narcissism depends not only on mirror images of ourself, but also the expression of repressed sides of the personality. The doppelganger, or the alter ego, has appeared countless times in literature since the Romantic period, as well as in German expressionist cinema and the American Western and horror film. Doubling in literature, especially in the last hundred years or so, is based on a comparison between normality and deviance of some kind. The gradual process of clarification and revelation is what makes up the plot. Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens stories contrast the mysterious, mystic East with the clear and logical West. They reflect contemporary optimism about the power of science. The exchange of the two women in white in the narrative of Wilkie Collinss The Woman in White (l860) may be regarded as a covert representation of Collinss anxieties about the piracy of his works by mid-ninteenth-century American publishers. Collins appears to be lobbying against the lack of "copy-book morals"(here read literally as a lack of publishing morals) evident in the contemporary American custom of reprinting English books. One failing in D.A. Millers famous analysis of Collinss "novel," "Cage aux folles: Sensation and Gender in Collinss The Woman in White," is the wish to read the exchange of narratorial control effected by Count Foscos seizing, and inscribing himself into, Halcombes diary as solely a figurative "raping" of her rather than as also what, on a literal level, it is--the theft of a text. In addition, the many instances of "closeting" evident in Collinss narrative might not only be thematizing those sensational closetings of gender/genre instabilities that interest Miller but they might also, on a more mundane level, be simply representing the closeting of texts With Dickens. sexual and religious desires were never entirely distinct. His erotic and idealistic impulses merged naturally in his fascination with the feminine. With the catalyst of Mary Hogarths death early in his career, he developed a highly spiritualized personal religion embodied in the heroines of his early novels, icons of feminine purity and innocence like Rose Maylie of Oliver Twist. The shining perfections of these paragons reflect a prim and sterile idealism, but over the years his feelings grew more complex, and the heroines of the later novels begin to betray a moral ambiguity reflecting increasingly ambiguous impulses in Dickens himself. Lizzie Hexam of Our Mutual Friend expresses this complexity most fully. As a daughter of the London Thames she emerges from an insistently muddy and carnal background--pollution decay, and drowning; but, though she partakes of the rivers darkness, her dark sensuality mysteriously informs and enriches her moral excellence. With Lizzie, Dickenss rarefied feminine ideal acquired a body and became a woman with both a pysical and moral nature. For Dickens, the only antidote to the instabilities of such speculative relations was to locate a solid moral or economic ground that could, in turn, stabilize the moral and economic relations that had been disrupted by Englands speculative social and economic system. Deploying a modified version of the separate spheres ideology, Dickens locates this ground in the feminine figure and the influence of the childlike and virginal Little Dorrit. However, when this ground, too, is destabilized in the course of the novel, Dickenss feminine solution to the problem of moral responsibilities and value is sorely compromised. In works written in the years after Collinss US trip, American characters appear more frequently than they had done in the stories he had published before it. In the light of his apparently unequivocal praise of real-life Americans, it is perhaps unsurprising to note that the fictional Americans of Collinss later fiction are almost always depicted favorably. Their good humor and sincerity represented for Collins a welcome counterpoint to the more formal and inhibited manners of the English. But Collinss juxtaposition of New World candor with Old World reserve was not merely a superficial comparison of modes of etiquette. As I aim to demonstrate here, Collins saw in American attitudes and behavior a possible remedy to the moral inflexibility, the intolerance, petty-mindedness and hypocrisy of life in Victorian England that, throughout his career, he made it his authorial project to attack. One of the characteristics of the central Victorian spirit was a tendency to substitute a certain more or less satisfied seriousness for the extremes of tragedy and comedy. This is marked by a certain change in George Eliot; as it is marked by a certain limitation or moderation in Dickens. Dickens was the People, as it was in the eighteenth century and still largely is, in spite of all the talk for and against Board School Education: comic, tragic, realistic, free-spoken, far looser in words than in deeds. It marks the silent strength and pressure of the spirit of the Victorian middle class that even to Dickens it never occurred to revive the verbal coarseness of Smollett or Swift. The other proof of the same pressure is the change in George Eliot. She was not a genius in the elemental sense of Dickens; she could never have been either so strong or so soft. But she did originally represent some of the same popular realities: and her first books (at least as compared with her latest) were full of sound fun and bitter pathos. Charles DIckens has created a number of novels that are both loved and hated by many people. He was a great novelist and the popularity that some of his novels have today (over 100 years later), proves this to be true. His ability to craft such round, in-depth, interesting characters and plots, added to the success of writing for him early on. However, all good things must come to an end, and in his last novel, Our Mutual Friend, I dont feel that the same great effect has occurred. Indeed, Dickens had gone backwards. Dickens had returned to writing and it began with the title. When it is broken down, the title Our Mutual Friend, really doesnt mean anything at all. Titles are sually significant to a story, so it made me think, "is there a significance to this story or was it just put together like the very words Dickens had thrown onto the cover of the novel?" (Just something to think about here). This is a novel that starts out very slow, and its difficult to follow. First, Dickens makes the reader feel that the Veneerings will be the main characters in the story, but later on, they basically disappear. I dont know why an author would have such a great emphasis on characters in the beginning (which is the introduction to the contents of a story), and then, have them mean nothing at all. After recognizing that the main plot was that which centered on John Harmons inheritance, the story started to get more interesting, but its themes of death and darkness really didnt allow me to want to get into the story. As readers learn about this major plot, character after character gets introduced and like the novels that Dickens wrote early on, these characters have nothing to do with the plot at all. Many of the characters in this story come and go with no explanation. They are there one minute and the next, theyre not. We are just made to accept it. One of my major interests in this novel was the existence of Jenny Wren who was a crippled dolls dressmaker, a child of an alcoholic father. Jennys character was very confusing at first because she took the role of a harsh caregiver/adult to her father, who cowered down and took her "abuse." Through a child, Dickens explains the harsh reality of growing up with deformities as a result of alcoholism. I see Jennys behavior toward her father as a type of defense against what her father has left her with. She was one of the most difficult characters for me to follow, but equally one of the most interesting. I also feel that Dickens doesnt allow the men in Our Mutual Friend to be characters. Unlike his characters in early texts, I feel that Dickens has a string on some of the men, allowing them only to go to certain points, restricting their development. The women, on the other hand, grow enormously from beginning to end. Lizzie Hexam comes out of a shell and experiences new people and social classes, and Bella Wilfer is adopted into a new home, therefore entering a higher social class. While both women experienced great changes, I feel that Bella changed for the worse because of the fact that she basically disowned her family because she had money and they didnt. Dickens has incorporated a lesson into the story by showing his readers that money is the root of all evil. Money changes the lives of many characters in this story, and some do realize the negative effects of it on themselves through a moral awakening of some kind, but the fact that greed overcame in the first place is a sad thing. Dickens incorporated the fight for money and social class into this novel, as well as the journey that some made to get higher on the ladder. Since the plot was centered on money, greed and death, I feel that the strength of the novel came by getting these points across through character relationships and environment. On the other hand, I thought there were more weaknesses in the story as a whole. I noticed that some of the chapters ended in confusion and mystery, sometimes not unravelling until several chapters later. At this point, it was difficult to go back and try to remember what was occurring at that exact time, because new plots had already formed in the following chapters. This was probably due to the fact that Our Mutual Friend (like many Dickens novels), was published in parts. I also felt as though I was in the process of reading two stories because there really was two main plotlines with only one connection - the river murders. Three quarters of the way through the novel, I was still confused about what was going on with the inheritance and the novel quickly ends as though Dickens rushed it. It is obvious that Dickens took a very long time to develop and tell the story, for it to just hurry up and end. The middle was interesting, but due to length and confusion, as well as a slow start, I wouldnt say that it was a great Dickens novel. I would recommend it if someone wanted to see how Dickens wrote at the end of his career for comparison purposes, but it wasnt very high up on my list. The story of The Women in White has nearly everything the romantic reader wants (no risk for spoilers here, I daresay): dark woods, stormy nights, tender love, mysterious characters, murderous intentions, fraudulence, stolen fortunes, kidnappings, look-alikes, gruesome church-yards, secret societies, Italian villains... Nearly everything, because one thing I failed to find in the book was real, romantic Passion. Wilkie Collins has written a novel about all the events, facts and thoughts concerning a fatal intrigue, but he chose a somewhat dull form for it, I think, letting his characters consecutively give their exhaustive retrospective view. Still, this is but a minor objection, because reading the book was a happy adventure. It has deepened my interest in nineteenth century literature. Then there is the added advantage of my having made my acquaintance with a new literary heroine in the person of Miss Halcombe. REFERENCES Eliot, T. S. “Wilkie Collins and Dickens.” The Victorian Novel. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004. 307-14 McCracken, Scott. Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction. 1998 (82 MCC). See Heller, and Philip ONeill, Wilkie Collins: Women, Property and Propriety (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1988). Page, Norman. Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974. Phillips, Walter Clarke. Dickens, Reade, and Collins: Sensation Novelists. New York: Russell & Russell, 1962. Read More