Short Fiction Collins, Wilkie: After Dark, v1, 23 April 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.'

After Dark was published in 1856, four years before The Woman in White. The book contains three short stories and three novellas, all with a prologue and contained in 'Leaves from Leah's Diary' which tells how the stories came to be written. Wilkie Collins seems to be exploring structure and technique - including short sections of present tense narrative in one of the stories - and there seems to be less gentle satire and more sensationalism than in his later books.

The source text for After Dark was Project Gutenberg 1626-h.htm, checked against the Chatto and Windus 1902 edition. I have set letters and diary entries off with left aligned text, and have removed quotation marks within them unless the writer is quoting someone else. I have silently corrected typos, curled quotes, replaced diacritics in French words, used British English, added some scene breaks, and made minor changes to spelling, punctuation, and hyphenation using oxforddictionaries.com.

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