Other Fiction Collins, Wilkie: Hide and Seek, v1, 17 July 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.'

Hide and Seek was first published in 1854, but 'The demand among the booksellers was just large enough to exhaust the first edition.' It was extensively revised and republished in 1861, the year after The Woman in White. The main characters are an artist whose 'inveterate oddities of thought, speech, and action… made all his friends laugh at him and bless him in the same breath'; a 'rattle-pated young man... the most thoughtless of human beings'; a beautiful 'Deaf and Dumb Foundling'; and 'an old Vagabond… with a Black Skullcap' who solves The Mystery of Mary Grice.

The source text was Project Gutenberg 7893-h.htm, checked against the Chatto and Windus 1896 edition. I have set letters and other documents off as blockquotes with left aligned text, and have removed quotation marks within them unless the writer is quoting someone. I have silently corrected typos, standardised the name of a character, curled quotes, used British English, and made changes to spelling, punctuation, and hyphenation using oxforddictionaries.com.

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