Unequal Partners

In the first book centering on the collaborative relationship between Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, Lillian Nayder places their coauthored works in the context of the Victorian publishing industry and shows how their fiction and drama represent and reconfigure their sometimes strained relationship. She challenges the widely accepted image of Dickens as a mentor of younger writers such as Collins, points to the ways in which Dickens controlled and profited from his literary "satellites," and charts Collins's development as an increasingly significant and independent author.

The pair's collaborations for Household Words and All the Year Round explicitly addressed Victorian labor disputes and political unrest, and Nayder reads the stories in terms of the social and imperial conflicts that both provided their themes and enabled Dickens and Collins to mediate their own personal and professional differences. Nayder's discussion of the collaboration and its principals is greatly enriched by archival research into unpublished and unfamiliar material, including the manuscripts of The Frozen Deep.

Lillian Nayder is Professor and Chair of English at Bates College. She is the author of The Other Dickens, also from Cornell.

The Dickens/Collins collaborations and competitions were productive in the authors' lifetimes and subsequently. Lillian Nayder's thorough, clear, and partisan account of Collins's role will assuredly be answered by Dickensians. But they had better consider all her evidence, including the ambiguous, changing material conditions of writing that affected both authors' careers. For she has constructed an exemplary case for the subordinate who rose from dependent to independent Victorian author.

Nayder's juxtaposition of fact and fiction, and her painstaking scholarship, offer fresh insights which renew interest in works which seemingly contain a key to the productive, yet often strained, alliance, between these two nineteenth-century authors.

In Unequal Partners, Nayder graphs a progressively difficult partnership from Collins's initial hero-worship of The Inimitable,... through a more equitable division of labors which still excluded control of the total artistic vision of a work, to Collins's parting company with Dickens in 1862 after eight Christmas Stories.... When Collins returned, he was an established author prepared to challenge the authority of the journal's 'Conductor.' Finally, Nayder provides a refreshing and challenging reading of The Moonstone and The Mystery of Edwin Drood as diametrically opposed in matters of gender and race.

For more than a century, Wilkie Collins's reputation has been overshadowed by that of Charles Dickens, a situation that Nayder goes far toward rectifying.... Nayder's critiques of Collins's The Moonstone faced off by Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood are highlights in this study.

Unequal Partners is a well-written, well-researched, sharply focused book that excels in training our attention on the asymmetries of Dickens's and Collins's professional relationship. In the early 1850's, Dickens was clearly the master, Collins the apprentice, but this model gradually lost applicability as Collins matured as a writer.