The first to appear was After Dark, published in 1856. To the modern reader, the unmistakable first appearance of the real Collins in these excellent tales comes with a pleasurable shock after the mild bohemianism of the preceding novel, Hide and Seek. After Dark consists of six narratives of varying length and subject, ingeniously woven together into the pattern of a single story. At their best they are as good as anything the author ever wrote; even at their worst they are free from the perfunctory carelessness that mars so much of his later work.
The Dead Secret (1857) and The Queen of Hearts (1859) show the novelist carrying farther his talent for dramatic construction and his experiments in technique. Both books contain descriptive passages of sombre power.
There follow successively the four best books of Collins' career. The Woman in White (1860), No Name (1862), Armadale (1866), and The Moonstone (1868) are story-telling as fine as the nineteenth century can show. But they make evident that, even at his zenith, Collins was no reader of other men's hearts. He could fashion ingenious puppets to his will, entangling them in the meshes of his intricate and faultlessly constructed plots; but neither Count Fosco nor Captain Wragge, neither Miss Gwilt nor Sergeant Cuff, remains with the reader as a new friend or as a new enemy. Each is remembered, rather, as a striking and skilfully designed marionette, jerking through a Collins drama at the bidding of a delicate mechanism of strings.
After The Moonstone the decadence began, and, to a point, accountably enough. In the first place, the author threw himself into the production of propaganda fiction, with results (as may be seen) praiseworthy but a little ridiculous. Secondly, he paid the usual price of success and began to over-write. Whereas between 1850 and 1868 he published eleven novels and books of tales, between 1870 and his death in 1889 he published eighteen, in addition to a mass of short stories for magazines, plays, and other incidental work. Thirdly—although not until late in the seventies—his health began to fail. With reasons as good as these for a falling off in Collins' work, it were ungracious to inquire whether, had he eschewed reform, controlled his pen, and retained his strength and eyesight, his fiction would have advanced from strength to strength. Perhaps; perhaps not. Let us return from hypothetical dilemma to melancholy fact. After The Moonstone the decadence unmistakably began.
When next he came before the public with a novel of plot, and left for a moment the righting of public wrongs, his offering was mechanical enough. The Two Destinies (1876) is built on a series of coincidences so incredible, that even Collins' candid claim to search the very border-line of impossibility for material of which to make a story cannot reconcile us to their unlikelihood.
The Haunted Hotel (1879), Jezebel's Daughter (1880), and I Say No (1884) mark a slight improvement, and can be read with pleasure for the unfailing ingenuity of their design. The Evil Genius (1886) is in the nature of a bad relapse, from which the dramatic tales never wholly recover, although, of the three remaining, Little Novels (1887) and The Legacy of Cain (1889) are not without flashes of the old skill and invention. Blind Love, finished by Sir Walter Besant and published posthumously, may perhaps claim immunity from criticism.
As a novelist of indignation Collins is pathetic rather than blameworthy. He had the usual fanaticisms of the invalid intellectual—hatred of athleticism, of sport, of legal injustice, of religious intrigue, of social insincerity; and his propaganda novels give expression to his passionate dislikes with a petulant but rather impressive sincerity. Fortunately for the modern reader of books which by their very nature are now out of date, Collins did not fail, even in his tilting at windmills, to regulate his movements with practised skill. Wherefore all but one of the propaganda novels have well-contrived plots and continuity of interest, which those will enjoy who can disentangle the fictional from the instructional in the stories' purpose. These “indignation novels” are six in number:
Man and Wife (1870),
The New Magdalen (1873),
The Law and the Lady (1875),