A very curious and characteristic member of this group, Wilkie Collins,
has not yet been mentioned except by glances. He was a little older than
most of them, and came pretty early under the influence of Dickens,
whose melodramatic rather than his humorous side he set himself to work
to develop. In fact Collins was at least as much melodramatist as
novelist: and while most of his novels are melodrama in narrative form,
not a few of them were actually dramatised. He began as early as
1850--the dividing year--with _Antonina_: but his three great triumphs
in the "sensation" novel (as it was rather stupidly called) were _The
Dead Secret_ (1857), _The Woman in White_ (1860), and _No Name_ (1862).
Throughout the sixties and a little later, in _Armadale_ (1866), _The
Moonstone_ (1870), perhaps _The New Magdalen_ (1873), and even as late
as 1875 in _The Law and the Lady_, his work continued to be eagerly
read. But the taste for it waned: and its author's last fifteen years or
so (he died in 1889), though fairly fruitful in quantity, certainly did
not tend to keep it up in quality. Although Collins had a considerable
amount of rather coarse vigour in him (his brother Charles, who died
young, had a much more delicate art) and great fecundity in a certain
kind of stagy invention, it is hard to believe that his work will ever
be put permanently high. It has a certain resemblance in method to
Godwin and Mrs. Radcliffe, exciting situations being arranged, certainly
with great cleverness, in an interminable sequence, and leading,
sometimes at any rate, to a violent "revolution" (in the old dramatic
sense) at the end. Perhaps the best example is the way in which Magdalen
Vanstone's desperate and unscrupulous, though more than half
justifiable, machinations, to reverse the cruel legal accident which
leaves her and her sister with "No Name" and no fortune, are foiled by
the course of events, though the family property is actually recovered
for this sister who has been equally guiltless and inactive. Of its
kind, the machinery is as cleverly built and worked as that of any novel