Short Fiction Collins, Wilkie: The Frozen Deep and Other Tales (Illustrated). v2, 9 Mar. 2015 2014

[AlexBell]

Wilkie Collins lived in London from 1824 to 1889, a period in which 'the inevitable self-assertion of wealth, so amiably deplored by the prosperous and the rich; [was] so bitterly familiar to the unfortunate and the poor.'

He was short, plump, and short sighted; despite his severe suffering from gout he was a traveller, bon vivant, journalist, satirist, essayist, novelist, dramatist and social activist; and friend, collaborator, and rival of Charles Dickens. He became addicted to laudanum, and several of his characters praise it.

One of his characters says '... isn't it the original intention or purpose... of a work of fiction, to set out distinctly by telling a story? ... What I want is something that seizes hold of my interest... something that keeps me reading, reading, reading, in a breathless state to find out the end.'

In the autumn and winter of 1873-74 Wilkie Collins went on a reading tour of the United States. As he explained in the Introductory Lines and Introductory Note the main book he read from was an expanded version of 'The Dream Woman', and he added an expanded version of his play 'The Frozen Deep' towards the end of the tour. During the tour he wrote 'John Jago's Ghost, or, The Dead Alive', and the three tales together form this book.

His introductions are a fascinating account of the creative process of adapting plots. The first two stories are spooky, almost horror stories, while the third is a romance in a true crime setting. All three contain gently satirical comments on conjugal life.

The source texts were pg1625-h.htm (for 'The Frozen Deep'), pg2038-h.htm (for 'The Dream Woman'), and 'The Dead Alive' from the University of Adelaide ebook library. They were checked against a pdf of the 1892 Chatto and Windus illustrated edition from the Internet Archive. I have included the Introductory Lines and Note, silently corrected typos, curled quotes, restored diacritics and italics, set off letters and documents as blockquotes, used British English, and made changes to spelling, punctuation, and hyphenation using oxforddictionaries.com.

Update 7 March 2015

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[AlexBell]

Version 2 now available. There some changes to the cover and About this ebook, but very little change to the text.