Collins and the Theatre

Abstract

Throughout his life Collins was obsessed by the drama. His first recorded visit to a theatre was in Paris in 1844, when he saw the great French actress Rachel (B&C I, 25). As recorded in Chapter 2, in his early twenties he and a group of friends put on plays at the family home in Blandford Square, and it was his love of such amateur theatricals that first brought him into contact with Dickens. In 1850, he extended his theatrical ambitions, adapting a French play and performing it under the title A Court Duel as part of a charity benefit at the Royal Soho Theatre in Dean Street. In 1854–5 Collins’s regular work as reviewer for the Leader gave him access to a wide range of theatrical performances, and this experience also makes itself felt in a number of articles for Household Words, beginning with ‘Dramatic Grub Street’ in 1858.¹ Most famously, his early novel Basil is prefaced by the much-quoted declaration that the novel and the drama are ‘twin-sisters in the family of fiction’ (B, xli), while he later told a French critic, ‘if I know anything of my own faculty, it is a dramatic one’ (B&C I, 208). There is thus a period from the late 1860s to the late 1870s when rather more of Collins’s energies go into the play than the novel. In a letter to his publisher, he even threatened to abandon fiction altogether (BGLL II, 417), while he confided to the actor Wybert Reeve that he harboured the dream of becoming ‘a theatrical manager’.²