Feature: Literature: Interview with Andrew Lycett, biographer of Victorian sensationalist writer Wikie Collins
Published: 28 October 2010
by GERALD ISAAMAN
IT'S amazing – Wilkie is all around me,” insists biographer Andrew Lycett. “Normally I need to go to the far ends of the earth to research the subjects of my books, but this time I am writing about a man who lived most of his days on my doorstep, in either Hampstead, St John’s Wood or up the road in Marylebone.”
As a foreign correspondent for national newspapers, Lycett carried his passport in his pocket when he left home in Primrose Hill because he could be on board a plane heading for Africa, Asia or the Middle East at any moment.
Now, at last, he is on home territory with his latest researches for his next major biography.
He revealed at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature last week that he has just signed a contract with Tony Blair’s publishers, Hutchinson, to write a new life of the Victorian sensationalist writer Wilkie Collins, author of novels including The Woman in White and The Moonstone.
“I was initially drawn to Collins as the father of the British detective story,” Lycett explains. “This followed on from my last biography about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
“I kept on coming across references to Collins as a precursor of Conan Doyle. He was writing detective stories at a time when, as Kate Summerscale’s non-fiction bestseller The Suspicions of Mr Whicher so skilfully underlined, the detective was just coming into people’s consciousness.”
The more Lycett looked into Collins, the son of the painter Williams Collins RA, the more fascinated he became.
“Collins indeed wrote detective stories, but so much more,” he says. “He was the archetypal Victorian sensationalist novelist, writing horror and other types of spine-tingling stories for visceral effect. He was a master of the art of telling a story and that is why he so revered by modern authors.”
Collins seems the archetypal 19th century gentleman. He was a friend of Charles Dickens – editing Dickens’ Household Words – and those in the chattering classes of the day. But what further drew Lycett as a subject for a biography was that he was in fact the opposite of the stuffy Victorian and very much a radical social reformer.
An opium addict – taken because he suffered from a severe form of arthritis – Collins was a Bohemian bachelor, involved in long-term relationships with two women, one of whom bore him three children. Yet he married neither of them.
Perhaps because of his unconventional lifestyle, Collins proved an excellent guide to his age, Lycett believes.
“Wilkie campaigned on all sorts of issues relating to the position of women and iniquities in the law,” adds Lycett.
“In many ways he was a better interpreter of Victorian life than Dickens.”
An added bonus was Collins’s local connections. Collins was born in New Cavendish Street, before spending some early years in Italy and then moving to Pond Street, Hampstead as child, and then to Avenue Road, St Johns Wood, as a teenager.
For most of his adult life he lived at various addresses in and around Marylebone, notably at 90 (now 65) Gloucester Place.
What Dickens described as one of the two most dramatic passages in fiction – Walter Hartright’s meeting with Anne Catherick, the woman in white, in the book of that name – took place on a walk he went on, probably from the Finchley Road.
“I am going to relish research tasks such as pinning down exactly where this meeting happened,” says Lycett. “Working out the details of his relationships with the two women in his life is also going to be intriguing. It seems that all the correspondence between them has been destroyed.”
Indeed in that context Lycett wonders if anyone holds letters or other material relating to Collins, particularly as he was a local resident. Lycett added: “Wilkie Collins was an extraordinarily colourful figure whose professional career and private life yields up all sorts of surprises.”