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COPYRIGHT 2003 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Authorship. By Lillian Najder. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. xiv + 221 pages.
This is a work of exemplary scholarship which offers an admirably full account of the professional working relationship between Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins as collaborative writers, to which all future students of either author will want to return over and again, as an indispensible framework for thinking about this subject. At the same time, I believe that it rides the thesis it develops about the materials so painstakingly assembled in a manner that is too hard, too black-and-white, and too drastically corrective of conventional notions of the stature of the respective authors. But the book is impressive and fascinating, even in its flaws, for it is the scrupulousness of Najder's scholarship that regularly provides the material that raises most of the question marks about the conclusions she draws.
But if my own reservations about this study are to be properly evaluated and understood, I need to start by coming clean about the angle from which I approach it. I am a specialist of Dickens rather than of Collins, and although I have studied and written about Dickens's relationship with Collins, I have done so, I freely admit, from a largely Dickensian perspective, which is rather different from that adopted here. I have no difficulty in agreeing with Najder that there were tensions in their relationship, on both sides, which grew more severe as Collins became more and more of a rival to the elder man, and in finding her discussion of these for the most part illuminating. But I have more difficulty than Najder, on the one hand, in dismissing questions of relative and often differing artistic methods and aims, if not of artistic merit, between the two writers, and on the other, in reaching the conclusion that questions of the "correctness" or otherwise of their respective attitudes to such matters as gender and race are to be considered as the yardstick of their essential divergences.
Collins, Najder is essentially telling us in this book, was a much more enlightened and liberal man than the later Dickens, and the study of their collaborative fiction and journalism reveals how regularly their attitudes on gender and race clash, and how frequently, in the course of their collaborations, Dickens sought to suppress the younger author's voice. That is to say, her mission is not just to overturn J. W. T. Ley's 1924 judgment that "the Wilkie Collins influence ... from an...
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