The Dream-Woman and Other Stories [antikvár]

Note on the Author and Editor WILLIAM WILKIE COLLINS (1824-89) was bom in London, the son of a popular landscape painter. In 1846 he entered Lincoln's Inn as a law student. He met and befriended Charles Dickens (1812-70) in 1851 and contributed to Household Words and All the Year Round. In the latter, he first published his most famous novel The Woman in White (1860). The 'original' woman in white was Caroline Graves, with whom he lived for most of his life from 1859 until his death. He also had three children by Martha Rudd. His finest work was written in the 186()s, when he produced The Woman in White, No Name (1862), Armadale (1866) and The Moonstone (1868), a prototype for the full-length detective novel. After 1870 he produced fifteen more novels of deteriorating quality due to ill health and opium addiction. PETER MILES lectures in English at the University of Wales. Lampeter. He is coauthor (with Malcolm Smith) of Cinema, Literature and Society: Elite and Mass Culture in Interwar Britain (London: Routledge, 1987) and author of The Critics Debate: 'Wuthering Heights' (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990). With David Skilton he has coedited Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (London: Pan, 1982) and Anthony Trollope's Framley Parsonage (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984). He has also edited Everyman editions of Tobias Smollett's The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1993) and Arthur Morrison's A Child of the Jago (1996). Introduction Ours is a Gothic age. The icons we retrieve from the past and rework in our own image are Frankenstein and Dracula, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Jack the Ripper and the Elephant Man. We ourselves write stories about Bladerunners and Terminators, the Thing and the X-Files. Darwin, religious doubt, nuclear fission and the new cosmology, aided by the relativism of postmodern thought, have left their mark. As ideas of a known and benign God and nature have receded, so too have easy assumptions about Civilization as benign, about definitions of life and consciousness, about the place within them of a physiologically and spiritually coherent homo sapiens. In many ways the island of our imaginative existence has become that of H. G. Wells's Dr Moreau; if qualified by kinds of reassurance, our fictions habitually play with the boundaries of a unique and stable human body giving way to fabrication or occupation, mutation or deviation, replication or metamorphosis: a vulnerable body and identity, unconfidently fixed, or loosed into new theologies, new biologies of cloning, new zoologies of alternative or alien forms. The Wilkie Collins who as he sat writing late at night would see a clone of himself rise on the other side of his desk and challenge him for his pen. who found the stairs in his house a jumble of spectres blocking his path and more than once encountered 'a green woman with fangs', wrote out of a Gothicism with differently turned furniture, but one that remains eminently legible and vitally connected to our own. particularly through a popular culture which has yet to dismiss the Victorian mise-en-scene from its own evolving versions of the Gothic. Indeed, it is worth recalling - and without distorting his own aspirations concerning the readership he wanted - that when Collins was refused a memorial in either Westminster Abbey or St Paul's, the plan that was deemed most fitting became the founding of a Wilkie Collins memorial library at the People's Palace in the East End.