The Wilkie Collins Society publishes analysis of the writing of Wilkie Collins. It ranges from literary criticism of the texts to research into how his writing was published and received and what he earned from it.
Events in books
Cornwall Then and Now, December 2019.
Andrew Gasson.
A 21st century visit to six places in Rambles Beyond Railways (1851) with pictures then and now.
Cornwall Then and Now Part 2, September 2020.
Andrew Gasson.
Six more places in Rambles Beyond Railways (1851) as they appeared then and now.
Walter’s Walk – Walter Hartright meets the woman in white, August 2010.
Paul Lewis.
A reconstruction of Walter Hartright’s walk on 6 August 1849 in the first part of The Woman in White. With a new identification of the place ‘where four roads met’.
Who was Mrs. Glutch? December 2021.
Paul Lewis.
Tracking down the real person behind the landlady Wilkie called ‘Mrs Glutch’ in his tale ‘Laid up in Two Lodgings’ published in Household Words 14 June 1856.
Literary criticism
A Wilkie Collins PhD dissertation, December 2003.
Zlata Antonova and Kirsten Hüttner.
Wilkie Collins’s three writing periods examined especially the third and particularly Man and Wife (1870) and The Law and the Lady (1875).
Collins the Campaigner, August 2015.
Andrew Lycett.
Analysis of the campaigns hidden in Wilkie’s novels. Reprinted from Journal of the Society of Authors CXXVI, Spring 2015.
Poor Miss Finch and some Literary Coincidences, March 2022.
Andrew Gasson.
Accusations of plagiarism levelled against Wilkie and the coincidences behind them.
Wilkie’s Two Late “American Stories”: Finds or Fakes?, October 2013.
Graham Law.
Two stories posthumously attributed in local American newspapers to Wilkie Collins, but the conclusion is that neither is by him.
The Possible Influence of Wilkie Collins on Bram Stoker, April 1997.
Katherine Haynes
Analysis of similarities between Bram Stoker’s work and Wilkie Collins.
The Narrators in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, April 1997.
How Collins uses multiple narrators to achieve his dramatic effects.
Publishing
Milking the Moonstone, August 2022.
What Wilkie earned from his great detective novel first published in All the Year Round in 1868 and how he sold the copyright 12 times. Draws on correspondence and his bank account.
Opinions of the Press – Olympic Theatre Woman in White, February 2010.
Edited by Paul Lewis.
A facsimile reproduction of original press criticism of the dramatic version of The Woman in White produced and distributed by the Olympic Theatre in 1871.
The Woman in White at the Olympic Theatre, August 2009.
An analysis of the performances and receipts from the dramatisation in 1871 drawn from correspondence and Wilkie’s bank account.
Censoring The New Magdalen, July 2019.
Paul Lewis
Wilkie’s brushes with the Lord Chamberlain over the dramatisation of The New Magdalen revealed by correspondence and archives. The play opened on 19 May 1873.
What Wilkie Earned from All The Year Round, August 2015,
Paul Lewis.
New information about Wilkie’s pay and profit share from Dickens’s periodical All the Year Round. Drawn from correspondence and Wilkie’s and Dickens’s bank accounts.
Wilkie Collins and his Dear Dutchmen, August 1998.
P J M van Winden.
The copyright battle between Wilkie Collins and the Belinfante brothers in Netherlands.
The Mystery of the Woman in White in Leicester, April 2006.
Valerie Pedlar.
Performances of a dramatic version of The Woman in White before Wilkie wrote his own, and the evidence of the performance for just one night in Leicester on 26 August 1870.
