Collins’s Circles

Abstract

After Dickens, whose need for boisterous company after literary labour could border on the manic, Wilkie Collins was by nature one of the most convivial of Victorian novelists. With the resounding success of A Woman in White in 1860, his flamboyant presence was much in demand at social gatherings. Following a bout of illness in the mid-1860s, he replied to a renewed dinner invitation from Lady Goldsmid: ‘If I am alive, it is needless to say how gladly I shall take my place at your table. If I am not alive, be so good as to look towards the conservatory, when the butler comes round for the first time with the Champagne. You will perceive a Luminous Appearance — with an empty glass in one hand …’ (B&C I, 247). On his death, William Holman Hunt, one of his oldest surviving friends, still remembered him thus: ‘No one could be more jolly than he as the lord of the feast in his own house … The talk became rollicking and the most sedate joined in the hilarity; laughter long and loud crossed from opposite ends of the room and all went home brimful of good stories.’¹