Abstract
Novelists with a mission were hardly a rarity in the Victorian period. From the 1830s, journals of popular education had begun to employ short and serial fiction as a vehicle for messages either evangelical or utilitarian, and as the century wore on a similar medium was exploited by an increasingly wide range of crusading bodies — all the way from the temperance league to the suffragettes. Even writers of ‘bloods’ in penny weekly numbers for a working-class audience typically spiced their melodramatic tales with condemnations of aristocratic vice and praise for honest labour, the most notorious example being the republican George Reynolds who also ran a radical weekly paper. Major writers were themselves by no means immune to the attractions of didacticism, often combining the roles of novelist and journalist in rather similar fashion. From the mid-1840s, those willing to employ works of fiction to advocate their varying solutions to the pressing problem of the ‘Condition of England’ after four decades of rapid industrialization included Disraeli (in the trilogy beginning with Coningsby, 1844), Gaskell (with Mary Barton, 1848, and North and South, 1855), Charles Kingsley (in Alton Locke, 1850, and Yeast, 1851), plus of course Dickens himself (in Hard Times, 1854). In the mid-1860s, George Eliot with Felix Holt (1866) and Anthony Trollope in Phineas Finn (1869) were among the novelists to intervene in the debate around the second reform bill of 1867, which extended the franchise to many working men.
What brought good Wilkie’s genius nigh perdition?
Some demon whispered — ‘Wilkie! have a mission.’
(Algernon Swinburne, Fortnightly Review, November 1889)
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Notes
Scottish marriages could at that time be constituted irregularly without a clergyman or registrar according to three different modes: by bare exchange of consent, by promise and subsequent intercourse, and by cohabitation and acquisition of the reputation of being married. See M.C. Meston, W.H.D. Sellar, and Lord Cooper, The Scottish Legal Tradition (Edinburgh: Saltire Society/Stair Society, 1991), 18–22.
On the connection between Man and Wife and Collins’s earlier sketch for a play on irregular marriages, see Wilkie Collins, The Widows, ed. Andrew Gasson and Graham Law (London: Wilkie Collins Society, 2005), 1–3.
See James Payn and Wilkie Collins, A National Wrong, ed. Andrew Gasson, Graham Law, and Paul Lewis (London: Wilkie Collins Society, 2004), and the discussion of it in Chapter 9.
See Graham Law, ‘Reynolds’s “Memoirs” series and “the literature of the kitchen”’, in Louis James and Anne Humpherys, eds, G. W.M. Reynolds and Nineteenth-Century British Society (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2008).
Henry Norman, ‘Theories and Practice of Modern Fiction’, Fortnightly Review 34 (December 1883), 880.
Barbara Creed, ‘Kristeva, Femininity, Abjection’, in Ken Gelder, ed., The Horror Reader (London: Routledge, 2000), 64.
For detailed discussion of the changes in English family law in the second hall of the nineteenth century, see Allen Horstman, Victorian Divorce (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1985), and
M.L. Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1989).
See Lawrence Stone, Road to Divorce: England 1530–1987 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990), 435–8.
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© 2008 Graham Law and Andrew Maunder
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Law, G., Maunder, A. (2008). Collins as Missionary. In: Wilkie Collins. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230227507_8
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