SOURCE: “More than Sensational: The Life & Art of Wilkie Collins,” in The New Criterion, Vol. 12, No. 4, December, 1993, pp. 31-40.

In the following essay, Allen offers an assessment of Collins's works as modern and enduring, rather than merely melodramatic and sensationalistic.

Wilkie Collins, the author of Victorian masterpieces of suspense including The Woman in White and The Moonstone, seems to have found the secret to a happy life: Do as you please and be damned. He had not an ounce of the native puritanism of the Anglo-Saxon. He loved pleasure of all kinds: food, drink, women, the theater. Visits to France and Italy early in life had confirmed him in the belief that his fellow-Englishmen were hypocrites regarding sex and barbarians when it came to the arts of the table, that “a man who eats a plain joint is only one remove from a cannibal—or a butcher.” His...