Wilkie Collins
Woman In White Criticism

By Stephen Bray

When The Woman In White by Wlikie Collins first hit the London streets as a serial in 'All The Year Round', a magazine that had only shortly before been started by novelist Charles Dickens, it was a sensation.

Such was its popularity that entrepreneurs produced Woman In White cloaks and bonnets, music shops sold Woman In White waltzes and quadrilles, and The Woman In White perfume became a popular brand. Thakeray read it, as did Albert, The Prince Cosnsort who greatly admired the character of Marian Halcombe.

It is today one of two works by Collins that have been in constant print since first published in book form in 1860. The other work being 'The Moonstone'.

'The Woman In White' is considered to be the first of a genre of works known as 'Sensation Novels.' These are what are sometimes referred to as 'novels with a secret'. These were popular during the 1860s, and the early 1870s. They waned in popularity during the 1880s, possibly because authors started writing with simpler grammatical structures, and a somewhat restricted vocabulary which appealed to people whose education had through no fault of their own been limited. In other words people who were publicly educated.

Sensation novels are considered as a transition stage in mystery fiction and bridge the writings of for example the Bronte sisters, whose preoccupations are largely concerned with the marriage and the English class system, or perhaps some of Dickens' works such as David Copperfield, Great Expectations, or Oliver Twist i.e. 'Social Realism', and stories that prey upon psychological identification, such as Dickens' 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde', or Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein'.

But 'The Woman In White' must take its place in another class of works, which it did not start, but to which it must be considered founding member. This class of work is sometimes called 'The Legal Mystery', or more simply but less accurately 'The Detective Story'.

Whilst detective stories involve around the investigation of fictional crimes, 'legal mysteries' frequently also involve us in delicate points of law.

It should be noted that barrister Sir John Mortimer, the creator of fictional detective, (and barrister), 'Rumpole of the Bailey', asserts that 'The Woman In White' is the finest mystery story ever written.

Collins himself was called to the bar in 1852, having previously entered Lincoln's Inn as a student of law six years previously.

Anyone with exposure to court documents will readily appreciate that 'The Woman In White' in many ways resembles a 'lawyer's bundle', (the summonses, affidavits and statements used in legal proceedings). Indeed it was the approximation of 'The Woman In White' to a legal bundle that prompted www.thewomaninwhite.info to produce a PDF version of the work with numbered paragraphs.

Collins and the older Dickens were friends, and perhaps inevitably it was a friendship in which Dickens was to have greater influence vis-a-vis Collins' writing. Not that Collins necessarily followed Dickens' advice, but when Dickens died in 1870 Collins seemed unable to write with the same energetic inspiration. He drifted into opium addiction and was himself to die on September 23rd, 1889.