Unequal partners : Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian authorship /

Now the pendulum has swung back to the Left: for more than a century Wilkie Collins's reputation has been overshadowed by that of Charles Dickens, a situation that Nayder (Bates College) goes far toward rectifying. Surveying large segments of the Collins canon, particularly his collaborative efforts with Dickens in authorship of Christmas stories, the author points out that Collins increasingly countered Dickens's conservatism--notably in regard to women's, imperialist, and sexual issues (often in combinations)--with the result that the longtime friendship of the two (in which Collins was the subordinate for many years, kept so by Dickens) finally diminished. Collins realized his own value, ultimately turned to publishers and magazines other than Dickens's own, and championed values contrary to Dickens's. Nayder's critiques of Collins's The Moonstone faced off by Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood are highlights in this study; she addresses the books' respective takes on English and un-English topics. However, this reviewer was not convinced about the role of Dickens's Princess Puffer and contagion as Nayder presents it. For upper-division undergraduates through faculty. B. F. Fisher University of Mississippi