The Foreshadowed Life in Wilkie Collins's No Name

Abstract

We find in distinct languages striking homologies due to community of descent. --Charles Darwin, Descent of Man There is a little oddity at beginning of Wilkie Collins's sixth novel, which everyone notices, a short Preface that ends by alerting his readers that story they are to read lacks suspense. It demands our attention as a kind of repudiation, because, by 1862, after phenomenal success of Woman in White, Collins's reputation depended upon his ability to hide secrets within elaborate plots. This was bread and butter of Sensational School, and he was rightly considered its leader. Somewhat perversely, then, he says, The only Secret contained in this book, is revealed midway in first volume (xxi). Now most writers would shy away from such a bald declaration as this, even if they were not committed as Collins was to producing a type of fiction driven largely by thirst for uncovering dangerous secrets. very readers whom he had cultivated might lack incentive to go forward. But he wanted to try new ground and to vary form by which he appealed to his audience. Admirable, certainly, but smacking of needy rationalization when one meets it here. Something this new book needed explaining. He felt it. disappointed critics felt it. Was it the struggle of a human creature, under those opposing influences of Good and Evil, which we have felt, which we have known (xxi)? Collins devotes two of three paragraphs of Preface to a discussion of character, and critical response to novel has turned almost entirely on these questions. early reviewers pronounced Magdalen Vanstone an unappealing heroine, unworthy of her happy ending, and they judged her creator to have overstepped bounds of morality in representing her story. It is only in third paragraph that Collins comes to plan of story, and lack of suspense; but this is undoubtedly where he has been heading along. core idea and chief oddity of book, I believe, is this: all main events of story are purposely foreshadowed, before they take place--my present design being to rouse reader's interest in following train of circumstances by which these foreseen events are brought about (xxi-xxii). After secret is revealed, No Name is not a novel of disclosure or discovery, but of inexorable movement toward a foreseen conclusion--with a single, important exception. A stranger, Robert Kirke, sees Magdalen once at a seaside resort, falls madly in love, and finds her by chance in London, one year later, when she is near death and to be evicted from a poor lodging house. She has reached end of her line. Her fall is complete. Without Mr. Kirke's improbable intervention, we are led to believe, she would have died, abandoned in street. As title suggests, No Name is a highly self-conscious exploration of consequences of losing one's identity, and as Jonathan Loesberg and others have argued, concern with identity and its is abiding theme of sensation fiction (117). Writers and readers in 1850s and 1860s were preoccupied with loss of class identity and social identity, which would result, many feared, in merging of classes. particular frisson of sensation novel is traceable, Loesberg says, to this fear (135). narrative of inevitable sequence (117) that follows from loss of name and home is clearly what Collins has in mind in Preface, not mystery at but shared knowledge. What kind of knowledge did Collins share with his readers that would have enabled them to follow links in chain of his carefully plotted narrative? earliest reviews of sensation novel traced it quickly to its source: newspapers. Margaret Oliphant even named a subgenre of sensation fiction Newspaper Novel (501). Sensation novelists were inspired by real events, and readers were drawn in by realization that these stories could be happening anywhere, to anyone. …