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newspapers seeChristopher Kent, ‘Probability, Reality, and Sensation’,
Dickens Studies Annual
, 20, 1991.
    6 . It will be noted, however, that Collins set
Armadale
in 1851. His motives for this slight antedating were probably to protect himself against accusations of libel.
    7 . The patriarchal role of Dickens in the school is argued in W. C. Phillips,
Dickens, Reade, and Collins: Sensation Novelists
(London, 1919).
    8 . Peters, p. 236 .
    9 . Ibid., p. 275 .
    10 .
Annual Register
, 1862, p. 453 .
    11 . Mary S. Hartman,
Victorian Murderesses
(New York, 1977). Following references are shortened to ‘Hartman’.
    12 . As Altick points out (pp. 525 –6), Collins was evidently very influenced by the case of the poisoner Madeleine Smith. See also Hartman, Chapter Two.
    13 . For Thackeray’s prejudices on race see Deborah Thomas,
Thackeray and Slavery
(Athens: Ohio, 1993).
    14 . Susan Balée touches on this subject in ‘English Critics, American Crisis, and the Sensation Novel’,
Nineteenth Century Contexts
, Spring 1993.
    15 . William M. Clarke,
The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins
(London, 1988), p. 112 .
    16 . The article in the
Quarterly
was by the Reverend H. C. Mansel, April 1863, 481–514. For other attacks of the period, see Norman Page,
Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage
(London, 1974). Collins responds to these attacks in
Armadale
(see Book the Last, Chapter III , note 1 ).
    17 . See John Sutherland, ‘Dickens, Reade, and
Hard Cash,’ The Dickensian
, Spring 1985.
    18 . Robinson, p. 16 .
    19 . See T. S. Eliot’s long essay on Collins (1927), reprinted in
Selected Essays 1917–1932
(London, 1933).
    FURTHER READING
    For many years the standard critical lives of Collins were Kenneth Robinson’s
Wilkie Collins
(London, 1951, reprinted 1974) and Nuel P. Davis’s
The Life of Wilkie Collins
(Urbana: Illinois, 1956). These have been supplanted by two meticulously researched recent biographies: William M. Clarke,
The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins
(London, 1988) and Catherine Peters,
The King of Inventors: Wilkie Collins
(London, 1991). Clarke (a descendant of Collins by marriage) has dug up more than anyone thought possible about Wilkie’s ‘secret lives’ (particularly his irregular sexual arrangements). Working independently, Peters has brought to light much new material on Collins’s early home life and family background. Her book is particularly relevant to
Armadale
in its illuminating discussion of Collins’s obsession with doubles,
doppelgängers
, stolen and recovered identity.
    The traditional (and still informative) critical study of sensation fiction is Walter C. Phillips,
Dickens, Reade, and Collins: Sensation Novelists
(New York, 1919). Good summaries of the accumulated scholarship on Collins will be found in W. H. Marshall,
Wilkie Collins
(Boston, 1970) and Ira B. Nadel and William E. Fredeman, eds.,
Victorian Novelists after 1885, Dictionary of Literary Biography
18 (Detroit, 1983). A good selection of contemporary and later-nineteenth-century commentary is given in Norman Page,
Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage
(London 1974).
    Coming closer to the present, the 1980s and 1990s have seen an explosion of interest in this school of fiction. Most useful to the editor of Collins are works which fill in the socio-historical-literary background. R. D. Altick’s three books –
The Presence of the Present
(Columbus: Ohio, 1991);
Deadly Encounters
(Philadelphia, 1986); and
Victorian Studies in Scarlet
(New York, 1970) – supply an invaluable context to
Armadale
. So too does Mary S. Hartman’s
Victorian Murderesses
(New York, 1976). The complex medical background to
Armadale
is illuminatingly dealt with by Jenny Bourne Taylor,
In the Secret Theatre of Home
(London, 1988). Nicholas Ranee,
Wilkie Collins and Other Sensation Novelists
(London, 1991), is instructive on the political subtexts to the novel as is Philip