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O’Neill’s
Wilkie Collins: Women, Property, Propriety
(London, 1988). As its title suggests, Winfred Hughes’s
The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation
Novels of the 1860s
(Princeton, 1980) directs its attention at the literary context; so does Sue Lonoff’s informative
Wilkie Collins and his Victorian Readers
(New York, 1982).
    Interviewers at the MLA conventions in the early 1990s noted a large number of Ph.D. theses in progress or just completed on Wilkie Collins. The inspiration for this fashionability is largely attributable to D. A. Miller’s influential, Foucauldian
The Novel and the Police
(Berkeley: California, 1988) and Peter Brooks’s
Reading for the Plot
(New York, 1985), both of which reappraise Collins in the light of ‘theory’. A good example of the new wave of Collins criticism is Jonathan Loesberg, ‘The Ideology of Narrative Form in Sensation Fiction’,
Representations
, 13, Winter 1986. Feminist critics have also begun to examine the genre thoughtfully. See, for example, Elaine Showalter, ‘Desperate Remedies: Sensation Novels of the 1860s’,
Victorian Newsletter
, 49, September 1976. This line has been followed up by Tamar Heller,
Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic
(New Haven: Connecticut, 1992).
    On another front, it is noticeable that many of Collins’s novels have been returned to print in the 1980s. There are two other editions of
Armadale
currently available: Catherine Peters’s ‘World’s Classics’ edition (Oxford, 1989) which has extremely valuable annotation and reproduces the 1869, one-volume text; and the ‘Dover’ edition (New York, 1977) which reproduces the
Cornhill
text – it has no annotation but offers the full range of George Thomas’s illustrations.
    The standard bibliographies of Collins’s works are: M. C. Parrish and Elizabeth V. Miller,
Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade: First Editions described with Notes
(New York, 1940, reprinted 1968) and Kirk H. Beetz,
Wilkie Collins: An Annotated Bibliography
(Methuen: New Jersey, 1978).
    A NOTE ON THE TEXT
    The publisher George Smith offered Collins the large sum of £5,000 for the rights to a new novel
(Armadale
as it was to be) in July 1861. The letter in which he communicated the news to his mother records Wilkie’s glee: ‘Nobody but Dickens has made as much… if I live and keep my brains in good working order, I shall have got to the top of the tree, after all, before forty’. 1 As was common with writers at the top of the tree, no subject was specified at this stage. Wilkie Collins’s name was sufficient. Smith’s bid was evidently for the serial and first volume rights (the contract has not, apparently, survived). The proposed work was to be serialized in twenty monthly numbers of Smith’s
Cornhill Magazine
, which had been launched in January 1860 with great fanfare. Smith was legendarily open-handed in his payments, and had recruited Thackeray as editor (he retired in March 1862) and all the great novelists of the day as contributors (less Dickens, who had started his own magazine,
All the Year Round
, in 1859). Collins’s payment was more than the £3,500 Trollope received for
The Small House at Allington
, the novel which immediately preceded
Armadale
, but considerably less than the £10,000 George Eliot was offered for
Romola
(which none the less proved to be a failure as a serial for
Cornhill
, (January 1862–August 1863).
    In July 1861 the expectation was that Collins would provide his new story for Smith to begin serialization in January 1863 or soon after. He had first to provide a new full-length work for Dickens (
No Name
). This, in fact, took somewhat longer than expected, running in
All the Year Round
from March 1862 to January 1863.
Armadale
was put back – initially a few weeks (Collins was quite capable of composing his story just ahead of the printer, although he liked to