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Wilkie Collins is
the
fruit of a Collins conference held at the University of
Sheffield in
2005. The contributors are more diverse than those of the
Companion [The Cambridge Companion to
Wilkie Collins,
ed. Jenny Bourne Taylor]; they are at different stages of
their
careers, and many have less established authority on the
material. The
essays are shorter than those in the Companion
and far more uneven in quality. Yet the strong essays in Wilkie Collins are
terrifically
original and generate ideas that do indeed go beyond
Collins and speak
to us about Victorian media and literature. The volume is organized into five sections: "Collins in Context," "Collins and Art," "Collins and Medicine," "Collins and the Law," and "Collins, Theatre, and Film." The section on "Collins and the Law" is impressive and representative of the achievements of the volume. An excellent essay by Anne Longmuir examines The Law and the Lady (1875) and Man and Wife (1870) in relation to the peculiarities of Scots law, including the idea of a verdict of "not proven," which introduces "epistemological uncertainty" and the "possibility of 'undecidability'" (171) into the Scottish courtroom. Longmuir concludes that Scots law and these two texts point to a disruptive "heterogeneity at the heart of Britain" (176) that, unlike the Moonstone, cannot be returned and thus eradicated. Lynn Parker's examination of The Haunted Hotel (1878) in connection with the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill allows her to unpack Collins's representation of the "dangerous aspects" of that holy dyad of Victorian fiction: "the brother-sister relationship" (205). Graham Law closes the section with a fine examination of Collins's views on international copyright. Law (the only contributor to both volumes) explores two relatively unknown articles only recently attributed to Collins, with careful attention to the "specific public and private contexts in which they were written, and the distinct debates to which they contribute" (179–80). Audrey A. Fisch, New York City University Review in Victorian Studies 50:3 (Spring 2008) 495-8 |