In the second half of this fine book there are practically no new characters that I can trace. The epithet can hardly be applied to the President of the trial at the Conciergerie.
‘GREAT EXPECTATIONS’
It is now agreed that one of Dickens’s most perfect books is Great Expectations. It is known also that Dickens complied with a suggestion of Lord Lytton’s, which modified the plot—not seriously nor disagreeably. Here again in the second part we have very few fresh characters. We have the Colonel in Newgate introduced to Mr. Wemmick, but he is ‘sure to be assassinated on Monday.’ Let us not forget Miss Skiffins, a good sort of fellow, with a high regard both for Wemmick and the Aged. There is the retrospective Provis, but the characters introduced belong to the past. Finally, in chapter xlvi., we have a pleasant glimpse of the Barley family and of Mrs. Whymple, the best of housewives, and the motherly friend of Clara and Herbert. It is she who fosters and regulates with equal kindness and discretion their mutual love. ‘It was understood that nothing of a tender nature could possibly be confided to Old Barley, by reason of his being totally unequal to the consideration of any subject more psychological than Gout, Rum, and Purser’s Stores.’
These are all the books of which I have made a close personal examination. I believe that the general result will be the same in all save two or three exceptional works, such as Barnaby Rudge. Whether he consciously acted on the principle that no new characters should be introduced after half the story was told, it is impossible to say. It seems certain, however, that he acted upon it.
WILKIE COLLINS ‘AHEAD OF ALL THE FIELD’
Dickens was no great reader, and it is plain by what he did not say, as well as by what he did say, that he did not on the whole admire ardently the work of his contemporaries. But he made a special exception in the case of Wilkie Collins, with whom he collaborated on more than one occasion, as in the story No Thoroughfare. He published in his own magazine some of Collins’s best detective stories, including The Woman in White, No Name, and The Moonstone. Of these stories Dickens put first No Name. The Moonstone he criticised in one of his letters to Wills. At first he thought it in many respects ‘much better than anything he has done,’ but afterwards he wrote, 26th July 1868: ‘I quite agree with you about The Moonstone. The construction is wearisome beyond endurance, and there is a vein of obstinate conceit in it that makes enemies of readers.’ [90]
In September 1862 he wrote in enthusiastic terms of admiration about No Name. This I take to be a very weighty and significant letter, as will appear in the sequel:
I have gone through the second volume [No Name] at a sitting, and I find it wonderfully fine. It goes on with an ever-rising power and force in it that fills me with admiration. It is as far before and beyond The Woman in White as that was beyond the wretched common level of fiction-writing. There are some touches in the Captain which no one but a born (and cultivated) writer could get near—could draw within hail of. And the originality of Mrs. Wragge, without compromise of her probability, involves a really great achievement. But they are all admirable; Mr. Noel Vanstone and the housekeeper, both in their way as meritorious as the rest; Magdalen wrought out with truth, energy, sentiment, and passion, of the very first water.
I cannot tell you with what a strange dash of pride as well as pleasure I read the great results of your hard work. Because, as you know, I was certain from the Basil days that you were the Writer who would come ahead of all the Field—being the only one who combined invention and power, both humorous and pathetic, with that invincible determination to work, and that profound conviction that nothing of worth is to be done without work, of which triflers and feigners have no conception. [91]
Mr. Swinburne in his study of Wilkie Collins writes:
It is apparently the general opinion—an opinion which seems to me incontestable—that no third book of their author’s can be ranked as equal with The Woman in White and The Moonstone: two works of not more indisputable than incomparable ability. No Name is an only less excellent example of as curious and original a talent. [92a]