Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Authorship

No Love Story LILLIAN NAYDER, Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Authorship (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 221, cloth, $35.00.

When Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins met in 1851, Dickens was a 40-year-old international literary superstar and Collins was a 26-year-old fiction writer eager to get on in the world. Between 1852 and 1856, Collins published over a dozen pieces in Household Words and, when he joined the staff in 1856, quickly became Dickens's most valued contributor. The next five years marked the peak of Dickens's and Collins's collaboration; together they wrote numerous short stories and a melodrama about the ill-fated Franklin expedition to the Arctic, The Frozen Deep. But Collins was also beginning to prosper under his own name-The Woman in White came out in 1860-and, as Lillian Nayder tells the story, he increasingly chafed at Dickens's heavy-handed editorial authority and reactionary positions on political issues. When Collins broke away from all the Year Round in 1862, it was supposedly because Smith and Elder had offered him a hefty £5000 for the novel that would become Armadale, but Collins's artistic and political differences with the man who had simultaneously acted as his editor, collaborator, and mentor may have been as much to blame. Unequal Partners shows the working relationship culminating in the parry and thrust of The Moonstone (1868) and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, cut short by Dickens's death in 1870.

I suspect that many readers who pick up a book on Dickens and Collins will be hoping for some insight into the personal, and perhaps erotic, tensions that shaped this high-profile partnership. Nayder mentions in passing Wayne Koestenbaum's ground-breaking DoubleTalk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration, but only to note that its psychoanalytic framework neglects the materialist concerns that she foregrounds. The evasion is disappointing. One need not endorse wholesale Koestenbaum's assertion that "collaboration is always a sublimation of erotic entanglement, always a glamorous underworld enterprise" (4), to acknowledge that joint creative writing can be an intense, unstructured, and perilously erotic activity. The questions surrounding the personal relationship multiply when one considers that the two men enjoyed their most productive periods of collaboration in the midst of irregular intimate involvements with women-Collins openly keeping a mistress in the late 1850s, Dickens meeting Ellen Ternan for the first time when she performed in The Frozen Deep in 1857. Even if one resists finding homoerotic undertones here, the insights of queer studies would have ideally prompted the author of a book on Dickens and Collins to discuss the personal needs and desires that each man brought to the work and the social rubrics within which they performed their affiliation.

That said, Unequal Partners is a well-written, well-researched, sharply focused book that excels in training our attention on the asymmetries of Dickens's and Collins's professional relationship. In the early 1850s, Dickens was clearly the master, Collins the apprentice, but this model gradually lost applicability as Collins matured as a writer. By the time he joined the Household Words staff, he saw himself both "as a brilliant young writer tutored by the 'inimitable' Charles Dickens and as a resentful and exploited hand" (2). In a tight first chapter that lays out the working conditions at Household Words, Nayder calls attention to the artistic and economic control that Dickens wielded over his underlings. Without quite painting Dickens as a Svengali, Nayder maintains a steady focus on his micro-managerial habits, patronizing attitude toward female contributors (e.g. Dinah Mulock Craik and Elizabeth Gaskell), and willingness to take undue advantage of his writers. For example, although he regularly represented the magazine as having a policy of anonymous contribution, his name was in fact the one name that appeared in every issue, on the masthead, "Conducted by Charles Dickens." This "mononymous" format, as one prospective contributor dubbed it, allowed him to be credited for pieces he had not written, especially in foreign markets. The second chapter takes up the staff-written 1856 Christmas number, "The Wreck of the Golden Mary," to illuminate how fiction mediated the working relationships at Household Words. Nayder persuasively analyzes Dickens's paternalistic self-presentation as the indispensable captain, Collins's youthful "playing along" as first mate (41), and how both writers displaced their professional rivalry onto a miser-Jew figure and the ship's unruly women. Together these first two chapters are a valuable, concentrated rewriting of more celebratory accounts of Dickens's editorial and publishing practices.

The central chapters of Unequal Partners dissect selected collaborations: the successive versions of The Frozen Deep; two stories from 1857, "The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices" and "The Perils of Certain English Prisoners"; and the final collaboration, "No Thoroughfare" (1867). Throughout, Nayder deftly reads the literature as responsive to contemporary social and political problems. The chapter on "The Perils of Certain English Prisoners" glosses a story about pirates, natives, and English colonists off the coast of Honduras in 1744 as a commentary on both rebellion in India and Victorian class conflict. The Frozen Deep chapter-perhaps the best in the book-fills us in on Dr. Rae's report alleging cannibalism among Franklin and his men, Dickens's on-going refutations of it, and the cultural algebra by which a Scottish housekeeper can stand in for "savage" Eskimos. And the analysis of "No Thoroughfare," a Christmas number that combines mistaken identities and mountaineering, draws upon the policies of the London Foundling Hospital and the symbolic value of the Alps for Englishmen eager to offer bodily proof that the nation was physically worthy of its imperial claims.