Andrew Maunder

The British Short Story

Introduction: What is a Short Story?.- PART I.- Introducing the Victorian and Edwardian Short Story.- Victorian Sensations: Supernatural and Weird Tales.- New Woman Short Stories.- Imperial Adventures and Colonial Tales.- PART II.- Introducing the Twentieth-Century Short Story.- The Short Story and the Great War.- Experiment and Continuity: The Modernist Short Story.- The Short Story and Genre Fiction: The Strange Case of the Same Old, Same Old Story.- PART III.- 1945 and After: An Introduction to the Post-war Short Story.- Womens Stories, 1940s to the Present.- Multiculturalism and Relationships: The British Short Story Today.- Bibliography.

The short story and the First World War

of another denomination – a very grave matter for Catholics, in particular. The phrase ‘herding cats’ often comes to mind in these delicate debates. I mean no criticism of either of these two fine books when I plead for future work on chaplains to draw more heavily on comparisons. The editors of Clergy in Khaki rightly identify this as one of the major lacunae in the field, and even draw attention to the potential for studying Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist soldiers. (snape himself has a chapter on ‘The Chaplains of British India.’) Yet the problem begins much closer to home. We now have excellent scholarship on British, Canadian and US aspects of the story, but a glaring omission is the chaplains of most denominations in the German armed forces, the Feldprediger and Militärpfarrer. A comparative study of British and German chaplains both during and after the war would be a wonderful contribution.

Film Adaptation: The Case of Wuthering Heights

To talk of “using” film adaptations of novels in order to teach literature will immediately raise the hackles of all film and television critics who quite justifiably choose to focus on these media for their own sake. One of the reasons that adaptation studies has enjoyed a fairly low status among film critics is, as John Ellis notes, its employment in literary departments to encourage “recalcitrant students … to read the original novel” (qtd. Cardwell, 2002, p. 37). Ira Konisberg’s entry on adaptation in The Complete Film Dictionary actually defines it as a “subliterary discourse” designed to show that “great novels” are resistant to filming (qtd. Griffith, 1997, p. 6). While recognizing the centrality of adaptation studies to “any history of culture” interested in “the transmission of texts and meanings in and across cultures,” Mirceia Aragay also deplores the way it is “often taught in literature departments as a way of sugaring the pill of (canonical) literature for an increasingly cinema-oriented student population” (2005, p. 30). Robert Ray is even more dismissive of the way in which the “same unproductive layman’s question (How does the film compare with the book?)” is transparently designed to elicit “the same unproductive answer (The book is better)” (2000, p. 44). That, of course, is not the model of such comparative study of novels with their adaptations which I want to advocate.

Collins as Journalist

While it is known that Wilkie Collins published something over a hundred non-fiction articles in a variety of periodicals throughout his career, the precise number remains decidedly uncertain. Though the relevant volume of the current edition of the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature came out as recently as 1999, the Collins entry still has quite a few gaps and question marks. Something similar is in fact true of many other major Victorian novelists. The main reason is that anonymity remained the norm in the Victorian press until well after the mid-century, and authors sometimes explicitly requested that their contributions be included unsigned. After a disagreement on the religious line taken by the Leader, for example, Collins requested that ‘my name may never be appended to any future articles I may write’ (B&C I, 83–6), while, as we saw in Chapter 2, Dickens tried to keep strictly to the rule of anonymity in both Household Words and All the Year Round. The office book detailing payments to Household Words contributors has fortunately survived, but that for All the Year Round has been lost, and it is uncertain whether one was ever kept for the Leader. Altogether Collins reprinted less than thirty of his journalistic pieces, almost all in My Miscellanies (1863), with the lion’s share from Household Words, while his private papers often do not shed any light on the obscurities.

Collins and the Theatre

Throughout his life Collins was obsessed by the drama. His first recorded visit to a theatre was in Paris in 1844, when he saw the great French actress Rachel (B&C I, 25). As recorded in Chapter 2, in his early twenties he and a group of friends put on plays at the family home in Blandford Square, and it was his love of such amateur theatricals that first brought him into contact with Dickens. In 1850, he extended his theatrical ambitions, adapting a French play and performing it under the title A Court Duel as part of a charity benefit at the Royal Soho Theatre in Dean Street. In 1854–5 Collins’s regular work as reviewer for the Leader gave him access to a wide range of theatrical performances, and this experience also makes itself felt in a number of articles for Household Words, beginning with ‘Dramatic Grub Street’ in 1858.1 Most famously, his early novel Basil is prefaced by the much-quoted declaration that the novel and the drama are ‘twin-sisters in the family of fiction’ (B, xli), while he later told a French critic, ‘if I know anything of my own faculty, it is a dramatic one’ (B&C I, 208). There is thus a period from the late 1860s to the late 1870s when rather more of Collins’s energies go into the play than the novel. In a letter to his publisher, he even threatened to abandon fiction altogether (BGLL II, 417), while he confided to the actor Wybert Reeve that he harboured the dream of becoming ‘a theatrical manager’.2

Collins and Women

The previous chapter looked at the ways in which Collins’s novels draw attention to the sinister possibilities within the fabric of middle-class life in London, and their impact on the lives of characters both male and female. Here we will consider further how Collins’s texts engage with the roles of women and their assigned place in society. Contemporary reviewers of Collins’s fiction often saw his novels as dealing at least in part with the ‘Woman Question’, or what Queen Victoria termed the ‘mad wicked folly of “Women’s Rights”’.1 In 1856, Dickens was lavish in his praise of Collins’s ‘The Diary of Anne Rodway’, in which a poor London needlewoman investigates a murder, noting ‘the admirable personation of the girl’s identity and point of view’ (Pilgrim VIII, 161–3). Back in 1850, a reviewer for the Edinburgh Review said something similar about Antonina, presenting it as a story of ‘conflict between the old and the new … [between] a pure-minded Roman girl, and a voluptuous senator’.2 Collins was, Lippincott’s Magazine noted in 1868, one of a handful of male novelists possessing ‘the power of delineating a heroine who shall be neither a dressed-up doll nor an impossible angel. Rosamund in The Dead Secret, Magdalen Vanstone in No Name, Marion Halcombe in The Woman in White, and Rachel Verinder [in The Moonstone] … bear witness to the truth of this assertion’ (cited in Page, 180).

Collins’s Education and Reading

On 21 March 1862, approaching forty years of age and at the peak of his popularity William Wilkie Collins sketched out his career to assist Baron Alfred-Auguste Ernouf, a French scholar about to write a critical review for a series on contemporary English novelists.1 This ‘little autobiography’ included the following narrative of the author’s youth: I was born in London, in the year 1824. I am the eldest son of the late William Collins, Member of the English Royal Academy of Arts, and famous as a painter of English life and English scenery. My godfather, after whom I was named, was Sir David Wilkie, the illustrious Scottish Painter. My mother is still alive. I was educated at a private school. At the age of thirteen, I went with my father and mother to reside for two years in Italy — where I learnt more which has been of use to me, among the pictures, the scenery, and the people, than I ever learnt at school. After my return to England, my father proposed sending me to the University of Oxford, with a view to my entering the Church. But I had no vocation for that way of life, and I preferred trying mercantile pursuits. I had already begun to write in secret, and mercantile pursuits lost all attraction for me. My father — uniformly kind and considerate to his children — tried making me a Barrister next.

Collins as Missionary

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.

Collins and London

London is the main setting for several of Collins’s novels, and in this chapter we will examine three of the most striking. These texts — Basil (1852), Hide and Seek (1854), and The Woman in White (1860) — can also be taken as representative of Collins’s novelistic work in the first decade of his career, demonstrating his early attempts to push the boundaries of what was deemed ‘proper’ to mid-Victorian readers and reviewers. Both Basil and Hide and Seek can loosely be classified as bildungsromans (novels of personal development), but they are also mystery novels involving the uncovering of family secrets. The Woman in White is what we would today recognize as a detective story or thriller, but like Basil it uses some of the tropes of the novel of horror to expose the darker side of 1850s England. The ‘great world of London’ (DS, 220) in which each of these novels is principally set was also where Collins lived and worked for most of his life. Born in New Cavendish Street, Marylebone, and dying less than quarter of a mile away at 82 Wimpole Street, he rarely resided more than a few steps from the south-west corner of Regent’s Park. London was, he always felt, his natural habitat, a place where, in ‘the mighty vitality of the great city’ (B, 49), his writing career could best develop.

Collins and the Earlier Victorian Literary Marketplace

At the beginning of Wilkie Collins’s career as an author, the British publishing industry was still only beginning to move towards mass production. Though the first half of the nineteenth century witnessed remarkable advances in printing techniques and a rapid increase in literacy for the most part books remained luxury items readily affordable only to the wealthy. In other words, publishing shifted rather more slowly and unevenly from petty-commodity to commodity production than other key sectors such as energy, transport, textiles, or food. One major cause was the range of onerous imposts on publication (most notably, on advertising, on newspapers, and on paper for printing itself), which remained in force into the second half of the nineteenth century. This was well after most other such restrictions on trade had been removed: even the notorious ‘corn laws’, imposing a tariff on imported wheat, had been repealed in 1846. While the ‘taxes on knowledge’, as they were dubbed by their many opponents, had been originally intended by the authorities principally as a way of stifling political dissent, they continued to serve as a significant source of public revenue. Another important reason can be found in the staunch conservatism of the book trade itself, as symbolized by the reactionary practices of the Booksellers’ Association dominated by traditional firms such as Longmans and Murrays, whose interests lay in maintaining high fixed prices and preventing competitive underselling.