Wilkie Collins Read online

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  A Postscript

  The funeral party gathered at Wimpole Street on the morning of Friday 27 September to accompany the hearse on its journey to Kensal Green Cemetery. Among the mourners were William Holman-Hunt and Edward Pigott from his youthful days; Charles Dickens junior and Frank Beard were there, together with Arthur Pinero and Squire Bancroft. Andrew Chatto and Alexander Watt joined them. Caroline Graves, with Carrie Bartley and her husband, represented the official family. Martha Rudd and her children were not present at the service. Instead a cross of white chrysanthemums was sent “from Mrs. Dawson and family.” Collins despised Victorian conventions to the end; he ordered that there should be no black hatbands or feathers or funeral scarves.

  In his will he divided his estate equally between Caroline Graves and Carrie Bartley, and Martha Rudd with her children by him. Despite his composition of twenty-one novels and seventeen plays he did not die a very rich man, leaving an estate of a little under £11,000. Caroline Graves took care of the grave at Kensal Green until her own death in 1895 placed her in the same earth. Martha Rudd then tended the grave until her death in 1919.

  THE MAJOR WORKS OF WILKIE COLLINS

  Memoirs of the Life of William Collins R.A. (1848)

  Basil (1852)

  Hide and Seek (1854)

  The Dead Secret (1857)

  The Woman in White (1860)

  No Name (1862)

  Armadale (1866)

  The Moonstone (1868)

  Man and Wife (1870)

  The New Magdalen (1873)

  The Law and the Lady (1875)

  A Rogue’s Life (volume publication) (1879)

  The Fallen Leaves (1879)

  Heart and Science (1883)

  I Say No (1884)

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Ashley, Robert: Wilkie Collins (London, 1952)

  Bachman, Maria K. and Cox, Don Richard (eds.): Reality’s Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins (Knoxville, TN, 2003)

  Baker, William: Wilkie Collins’s Library (Westport, CT, 2002)

  Baker, William and Clarke, William M. (eds.): The Letters of Wilkie Collins, in two volumes (London, 1999)

  Baker, William, Gasson, Andrew, Law, Graham and Lewis, Paul (eds.): The Public Face of Wilkie Collins: The Collected Letters, in four volumes (London, 2005)

  Clarke, William M.: The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins (London, 1988)

  Davis, Nuel Pharr: The Life of Wilkie Collins (Urbana, IL, 1956)

  Drinkwater, John (ed.): The Eighteen-Sixties (Cambridge, 1932)

  Ellis, S. M.: Wilkie Collins, Le Fanu and Others (London, 1951)

  Gasson, Andrew: Wilkie Collins: An Illustrated Guide (Oxford, 1998)

  Grinstein, Alexander: Wilkie Collins (Madison, CT, 2003)

  Law, Graham and Maunder, Andrew: Wilkie Collins: A Literary Life (London, 2008)

  Lonoff, Sue: Wilkie Collins and His Victorian Readers (New York, 1982)

  Nayder, Lillian: Wilkie Collins (New York, 1997)

  Nayder, Lillian: Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Victorian Authorship (London, 2002)

  O’Neill, Philip: Wilkie Collins (London, 1988)

  Page, Norman (ed.): Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage (London, 1974)

  Peters, Catherine: The King of Inventors (London, 1991)

  Pykett, Lyn: Wilkie Collins (Oxford, 2005)

  Robinson, Kenneth: Wilkie Collins (London, 1974)

  Sayers, Dorothy L.: Wilkie Collins (Toledo, OH, 1977)

  Smith, Nelson and Terry, R. C. (eds.): Wilkie Collins to the Forefront (New York, 1995)

  Taylor, Jenny Bourne: In the Secret Theatre of Home (London, 1988)

  Taylor, Jenny Bourne (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins (Cambridge, 2006)

  Thompson, Julian (ed.): Wilkie Collins: The Complete Shorter Fiction (London, 1995)

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Peter Ackroyd is the author of London: The Biography, Shakespeare: The Biography, Thames: The Biography, Venice: Pure City, and London Under; acclaimed biographies of T. S. Eliot, Dickens, Blake, Sir Thomas More, and Charlie Chaplin; and several successful novels. He has won the Whitbread Book Award for Biography, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Somerset Maugham Award, among others.

  Credit pai1.1

  William Collins, engraving from the portrait by John Linnell

  Credit pai1.2

  Harriet Collins, by John Linnell

  Credit pai1.3

  Wilkie Collins at the age of one, probably drawn by his father

  Credit pai1.4

  Charles Collins, 1850

  Credit pai1.5

  Wilkie in 1857, by Herbert Watkins

  Credit pai1.6

  Charles Dickens, 1852

  Credit pai1.7

  Charles Fechter

  Credit pai1.8

  The Gallery of Illustration cast of The Frozen Deep, July 1857. Wilkie Collins is leaning forward behind the front row, towards the right, with Dickens lying in the foreground.

  Credit pai1.9

  John Millais, frontispiece to No Name, 1864

  Credit pai1.10

  Arthur Hopkins’s illustration for The Haunted Hotel, 1889

  Credit pai1.11

  Wilkie with Martha Rudd

  Credit pai1.12

  Caroline Graves in the 1870s

  Credit pai1.13

  Ramsgate harbour

  Credit pai1.14

  Nannie Wynne in the 1880s

  Credit pai1.15

  Wilkie in the 1880s, by Alexander Bassano