Last Things

Abstract

Wilkie Collins experienced his first major illness in his late twenties, when he was laid up for two months and reduced to walking with the aid of a stick, and for the rest of his life suffered increasingly severe bouts of what he typically referred to as ‘rheumatic gout’. Though there may well have been underlying hereditary factors — according to the Memoirs, his father’s symptoms also included ‘[v]iolent rheumatic pains’ which ‘attacked his right hand, arm, and shoulder, his left knee and ankle, and even his eyes’ (Part III, ch. 1) — there can be little doubt that the author’s condition was at least exacerbated by his addiction to rich food and fine wine. One of Collins’s most enduring fictions — almost as elaborate and complex as No Name or Armadale, and sustained over many more instalments — was the denial of any causal connection between his atrocious diet and appalling health. (To celebrate the cheerful inventiveness of his self-deception, we offer you ‘Wilkie Collins on Wine’, an anthology of memorable remarks culled from his personal correspondence.) Those who met him for the first time commented on his semi-invalid status, pasty appearance, and clammy touch. The young novelist Hall Caine (whose reminiscences are not always to be trusted) remembered his eyes as ‘large and protuberant’ with ‘the vague and dreamy look sometimes seen in the eyes of the blind, or those of a man to whom chloroform has just been administered’ (cited in Robinson, 285–6).