Chapter 11 - After Death to T. S. Eliot

Summary

As the end of the 1880s approached, the assessment of Wilkie Collins’s legacy had begun to assume the tone of the prematurely posthumous. In his article ‘A Living Story-Teller’ (April 1888), the critic and writer Harry Quilter sought to remind readers that in their midst was ‘the last of that group of great novelists whose works will make the Victorian era for ever famous’. Despite its title – which Collins was duly obliging by a relentless writing schedule that saw The Legacy of Cain begin its serialisation in 1888 and Blind Love soon follow – the article paints him as an overlooked elder whose ‘ancient quiet claim’ to the public’s attention is liable to be lost among the ‘louder and fresher voices’ of the day. Less from an inclination to prophesise than from cognisance of the author’s declining health, Quilter positions himself as a sort of executor of Collins’s literary legacy: the first to summarise and interpret his contributions as a whole. It is, he writes, a case of doing justice to a neglected author in their ‘last years’, in which circumstances it would not do to wait until his death.¹ Lyn Pykett’s notice of the ‘somewhat obituary tone’ of the piece is right,² perhaps even understating the case, and, in Quilter’s reminder that ‘this article is professedly an eulogium’, readers would be forgiven for conjuring the funerary associations of that word.³ Striving to ‘show something of the nature … and extent of Mr. Wilkie Collins’ genius’, Quilter traces his career from Antonina through his novels of the 1860s to conclude with The Moonstone.⁴ In a verdict that was to be at odds with the critical consensus for some time, he singles out No Name and Armadale as the ‘most fascinating’ and ‘important’ of Collins’s novels, respectively.⁵ But of his entire corpus, Quilter’s praise is unstinting, and the conceit of the article’s title is revealed: Collins is the storyteller par excellence: ‘this author has told stories better than they have ever been told … and probably better than they ever will be told again’.⁶ The piece ends with an appeal for the author to be given his warranted praise antemortem, while it is ‘not too late’.⁷ Only eighteen months afterwards, on 23 September 1889, Collins died at the age of sixty-five from complications following a stroke.