In the first book centering on the collaborative relationship between Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, Lillian Nayder places their coauthored works in the context of the Victorian publishing industry and shows how their fiction and drama represent and reconfigure their sometimes strained relationship. She challenges the widely accepted image of Dickens as a mentor of younger writers such as Collins, points to the ways in which Dickens controlled and profited from his literary "satellites," and charts Collins's development as an increasingly significant and independent author.
The pair's collaborations for Household Words and All the Year Round explicitly addressed Victorian labor disputes and political unrest, and Nayder reads the stories in terms of the social and imperial conflicts that both provided their themes and enabled Dickens and Collins to mediate their own personal and professional differences. Nayder's discussion of the collaboration and its principals is greatly enriched by archival research into unpublished and unfamiliar material, including the manuscripts of The Frozen Deep.
Lillian Nayder is Professor and Chair of English at Bates College. She is the author of The Other Dickens, also from Cornell.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ix
The Collaborations of Dickens and Collins xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
1 Professional Writers and Hired Hands: Household Words and the Victorian Publishing Business 15
2 Collins Joins Dickens's Management Team: "The Wreck of the Golden Mary" 35
3 The Cannibal, the Nurse, and the Cook: Variants of The Frozen Deep 60
4 Class Consciousness and the Indian Mutiny: The Collaborative Fiction of 1857 100
5 "No Thoroughfare": The Problem of Illegitimacy 129
6 Crimes of the Empire, Contagion of the East: The Moonstone and The Mystery of Edwin Drood 163
Conclusion: "This Unclean Spirit of Imitation": Dickens and the "Problem" of Collins's Influence 198
Works Cited 203
Index 211
What People are Saying About This
Alison Booth
Lillian Nayder's engaging and definitive study of the conflicted relations between the dynamos of Victorian authorship is not only fascinating in what it uncovers about Dickens, Collins, and the works that they wrote together. Unequal Partners also demonstrates what can be gained by synthesizing recent materialist studies of authorship and publication history; cultural studies of class, empire, and gender; and biographical and textual close reading. To read it is to peek behind the screen to find that the Wizard Boz is a brilliant entrepreneur wrestling with an ambitious junior partner. But it is also to witness each stage of their written interaction as Dickens and Collins increasingly diverge on heated issues of the day, from class unrest and the Indian Mutiny, to the independence of women and the changing terms of the literary marketplace.
Carolyn Heilbrun
To one who has long awaited a readable, scholarly account of the personal and publishing relationship between Dickens and Collins this book is as welcome as it is indispensable. Whether your admiration tends more toward Dickens or Collins, you will find this account of their differing views on racism, imperialism, and what Nayder calls 'gender inequality'elegantly set forth. The mysterious influence and mastery the two men had over one another is here fully illuminated.
