Short Fiction Collins, Wilkie: The New Magdalen. v1 11 Nov 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.'

The New Magdalen was published in 1873. It is one of the most didactic and melodramatic of Wilkie Collins' novels, and deals with a 'fallen woman' who tries to put her past behaviour behind her. But she finds she is branded, 'even when she had earned her pardon in the sight of God, with... an indelible disgrace in the sight of man.' She steals another woman's persona to regain respectability, but the other woman reappears. She and her clergyman husband leave for the New World as 'two of the social failures produced by England.'

The book has an idiosyncratic structure which I have reproduced as best I can.

The source text was Project Gutenberg 1623-h.htm, checked against a pdf of the 1903 Chatto and Windus edition from the Internet Archive. I have silently corrected typos, curled quotes, restored diacritics, italics, and scene breaks, set off letters and documents as blockquotes, used British English, and made changes to spelling, punctuation, and hyphenation using oxford*dictionaries.com.

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