Short Fiction Collins, Wilkie: Mr Wray's Cash-Box. v1. 17 August 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.'

Wilkie Collins detested Christmas. In Mr Wray's Cash-Box he lampoons Christmas stories, Shakespeareans, country gentility, the law, and other topics. The book was published by Richard Bentley in 1851 with a long Introduction, and in 1852 with a short Advertisement. Pirated editions of the first edition in the USA in 1862 and 1864 as The Stolen Mask; or the Mysterious Cash-Box added chapter titles.

The source text was taken from www.digitalpixels.org/jr/wc and checked against a pdf of the 1864 edition. I have used the cover of the 1851 edition and the text of the 1852 edition, added chapter headings, silently corrected typos, curled quotes, made changes to spelling, punctuation, and hyphenation using oxforddictionaries.com, and set off letters and documents as blockquotes.

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[harmony row]

This looks interesting, thanks.