Oeuvres de Wilkie Collins (French Edition)

This is the scene that would have confronted the audience, the lantern of the lighthouse back-lit, as John Forster, offstage, spoke the Prologue with a soft musical underlay. Music would have been an important component of the production, but this is one of the most difficult aspects of nineteenth-century play productions to recreate. No musical cues are given in the text of The Lighthouse the instruction for a musical underlay for the Prologue is given in F.

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However, we can get some idea of the style of the music, because a CD of the overture to The Frozen Deep, the next play on which Collins and Dickens collaborated, has been published by the Wilkie Collins Society, and this music too was written by Francesco Berger. They tell us that there were three performances at Tavistock House, but in his biography of Dickens, Peter Ackroyd says that four performances were given. However, since the first of these, he says, was in front of servants and tradespeople, I think this must have been the dress rehearsal.

It would, however, have been helpful to have had some explanation as to why the writer refers to himself — or so it would seem — in both the first person and third person. One can imagine the sort of post-performance discussion that is as much part of amateur theatricals today as it was then. As a play-text it is a slight affair, running to fewer than thirty pages in this edition. There are minimal stage directions and, as Gasson and Radcliffe point out in their introduction, Collins relies on punctuation, dashes in particular, to guide the actors in their interpretation of the speeches.

However, what is especially valuable about this publication is the inclusion of material that is not only interesting in its own right, but which helps to give some idea of what the piece would have been like in performance. But the reviews were altogether very favourable, praising the play, the acting, and the production.

Two years later the play was staged professionally at the Royal Olympic, the theatre with which Collins had a long association, where his adaptation of The Woman in White was finally staged in , and where his greatest theatrical success, The New Magdalen , was mounted in Do you think Wilkie Collins wrote them because he was so unconventional himself?

He lived a very unconventional life. He was attracted to distinctive, dramatic personalities. He wrote a little for the stage and I think he always carried with him that sense of dramatic exposition. He knew how to create embodied, fully-rounded characters. Whilst writing all of these novels — and becoming a celebrity alongside Dickens — he maintained two long-term relationships with different women, neither of whom he was married to.

One was a widow whose children he effectively raised as his own, the other was a younger women he started a relationship with much later. He led separate lives with each of them, deciding not to marry either one. I think it was.

By all accounts he was a devoted partner to both of them and a responsible step-parent. Perhaps he felt marriage was an institution that would shackle him.

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The novels are very much about the complications arising from the legality, or illegality, of marriage: That could be a mirroring of his life and anxieties. His arrangements were an open secret. Tell me about this book. It was originally a play, performed once only in the s. It was laughed off the stage. It works really well: But this is about women who have done all of that, and are dealing with legacies, who are raising children, or looking after nephews.

How liberal do you think he was in his views? Collins was at once forward-thinking, liberal for the nineteenth century, but also a person of his time.

He was interested in thinking about the structures and attitudes that disadvantaged people who were different. He liked outsiders and marginal characters, but he was also not above using stereotypes to reach his audience. Tell me about it. They know him as an author of crazy novels, of the sensation novel. This predates most of that work. He returns to Cornwall in at least two novels. The colouring of imagination that Collins throws over the landscape is as interesting to him as what he witnesses.

He wants to characterise Cornwall as this strange, far-away place where old traditions still survive. They still have a mail coach. What do you do with a novel that has so many strange characters? How do you even begin to define its plot?

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One of the big debates surrounding this novel, and sensation fiction more generally, is what the relationship between plot and character is in a novel like this. Some say realistic characters get subordinated by the energy of the plot. There are so many set-pieces and scenes and idiosyncrasies of personality. He was not the first person to tell a story with more than one narrator. The position of women in this book surprised me.

It seems to be about them being domestically abused. Is this something you think Collins was particularly interested in, or is it naturally part of this Gothic, sensationalist fiction?

The Best Books on Wilkie Collins | Five Books Expert Recommendations

Get the weekly Five Books newsletter. On the surface the novel seems to be a story whereby the trials and tribulations of Laura Fairly are resolved at the end, because Marian Halcombe and Walter Hartright have saved her. At the end it seems as though Marian Halcombe, the odd, ugly woman of the novel, has endeared herself to both the readers and to Walter to such an extent that the real relationship might be theirs. Laura is this kind of invalid for whom they care. Why did you choose it?

The Lighthouse

Some of his serialisations ran for a year in weekly instalments. Having edited one of them , I can see it first-hand. He clearly knows how to write in serialised form, and how that form will then translate into a novel. You can see how he breaks it up. He was addicted to laudanum, as a treatment for gout; an addiction like it appears in the character of Ezra Jennings.

Did his illness and addiction influence his writing? It affected how he was able to write. Illness and addiction to pain relief keep you from your desk.