Considered one of the first writers of mysteries, and the father of detective fiction, Wilkie Collins used the genres to investigate the rapidly changing world around him, and to upend conventional thinking about society, the home, and the recesses of the human mind.

For general readers today, Wilkie Collins is mostly remembered as the author of two books: The Woman in White, which recently appeared in a list of the 100 best mystery and thriller novels of all time by Time magazine, and The Moonstone, described by T.S. Eliot as "the first and greatest of English detective novels."

For his Victorian readers, however, he originated a genre that caused a stir in the 1860s: the sensation novel.

"They're called sensation novels because they're sensational. They create a sensation in the reader," said Andrew Mangham, a professor of Victorian Literature and Medical Humanities at the University of Reading.

"That was the original idea behind the label sensation is it sort of makes your heart beat quicker. It makes your skin crawl. It makes the hair at the back of your neck stand on end."

"The sensation novel is usually thought of as a kind of domesticated version of the Gothic novel," said Rohan Maitzen, a professor of English at Dalhousie University.

"The Gothic novel is an older form that turns on a lot of mysteries and secrets and lies, on sexual secrets, on blackmail, on threats and dangers and sort of suspense. But the British Gothic novel is typically set in remote places and in distant times, hence the term Gothic.

"The difference with the sensation novel is that it takes a lot of those same parts, the same elements of mystery and suspense, of betrayal or mixed identities or blackmail or murder or adultery, and it moves them home to the here and now. Henry James, who was not himself a sensational novelist, said that they addressed the most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries that are at our own doors."

No one is safe and nothing is sacred in Wilkie Collins's books. They capture mid-nineteenth century England at a time when urbanization and evolutionary ideas were redrawing people's sense of place — and upending the certainties of faith. They also capture a moment of profound transition in how people thought about mental illness and the self, as the emerging field of psychiatry challenged previously-held beliefs about the workings of the mind.

Two hundred years after his birth, Wilkie Collins's work still has the power to make us look twice at the world we think we know.

For this IDEAS episode, contributor and UBC journalism professor Kamal Al-Solaylee speaks with Rohan Maitzen, Andrew Mangham, Radha Vatsal and Andrew Lycett about the enduring power of Collins's work.

Biographies

William M. Clark, The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins (Allison & Busby Books, 1988)
Andrew Lycett, Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation (Hutchinson, 2013)
Catherine Peters, The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins (Secker &Warburg, 1991)

Basil, Wilkie Collins, 1852
The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins, 1860
East Lynne, Ellen Wood (aka Mrs. Henry Wood), 1861
No Name, Wilkie Collins, 1862
Lady Audley's Secret, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, 1862
Hard Cash, Charles Reade, 1863
Armadale, Wilkie Collins, 1866
St. Martin's Eve, Ellen Wood, 1866
The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins, 1868
The Law and the Lady, Wilkie Collins, 1875

Select Criticism

Tamar Heller, Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic (Yale University Press, 1992)
Stephen Knight, Wilkie Collins: The Complete Fiction (Routledge, 2022)
Andrew Mangham, Violent Women and Sensation Fiction: Crime, Medicine and Victorian Popular Fiction (Palgrave, 2007)
Lynn Pykett, Wilkie Collins (Oxford World's Classics, 2009)
Jenny Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (Routledge, 1988)

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Rohan Maitzen is a King's-Dalhousie Carnegie professor and an associate professor of English in the King's-Dalhousie Joint Faculty. Her research focuses on Victorian literature, gender studies, ethical criticism, early 20th century women's fiction, and detective fiction. Her books include Gender, Genre, and Victorian Historical Writing.

Andrew Mangham is professor and director of the Centre for Health Humanities at the University of Reading. His work explores the intersection between literature and medicine. His books include Violent Women and Sensation Fiction: Crime, Medicine and Victorian Popular Fiction.

Radha Vatsal is the author of the Kitty Weeks mystery novels set in the First World War era New York. Her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The LA Review of Books, The Smithsonian Magazine, Kirkus Reviews, CrimeReads, and more. Born and raised in Mumbai, India, Radha received her Ph.D. from Duke University where she studied Victorian literature and film history.

Andrew Lycett is a biographer, author and broadcaster. He has written about the lives of Muammar Qaddafi, Ian Fleming, Rudyard Kipling, Dylan Thomas, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Wilkie Collins. He is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society.

*This episode was produced by Kamal Al-Solaylee and Pauline Holdsworth.