Stop Talking About Christmas and Pass Me the Opium

With a weird name like Wilkie Collins, he sounds like a young hooligan from a Dickens novel, perhaps as a grimy compatriot to the Artful Dodger or the scheming school chum to Pip Pirrup. Thank goodness, young Master Wilkie was born to wealthy parents, and was therefore spared a life of poverty and such traumatizing though serendipitous coincidences that plagued the lives of Oliver Twist and David Copperfield.

For the sake of my own amusement, I will break with standard grammar of referring to authors by their last name, and address this week’s writer in question by his delightful first name. Wilkie. If I feel so inclined, I might even throw in a ‘dear Wilkie,’ or ‘that silly Mr. Wilkie,’ because Wilkie Collins is no longer alive, and will never read my blog, and can’t yell at me for mocking his name.

Up until about a year ago, I had never heard the name Wilkie Collins, writer of “The Moonstone,” and “The Woman in White.” Oh, University of Michigan English professors, how I have failed you! My first introduction came while reading a non-fiction book, “The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher,” the history of Jonathan Whicher, a real life Scotland Yard detective from the late 1800s. It was Whicher’s famous skills of observation and deduction that inspired a certain knighted writer to create a character whose name rhymes with Shmerlock Sholmes. He also inspired an equally weirdly named author to write what is known as the earliest forms of detective or mystery novels. That weirdly named author was none other than our previous Wilkiekins.

Really though, I have only good things to say about our sweet little Wilkie. Every once in awhile, I like to read a classic to remind myself how much smarter I am than everyone else. On this occasion, the source of my literary superiority was one of Wilkie’s later works, titled “The Moonstone.” The book follows the scandal surrounding the theft of an allegedly cursed Indian diamond, which was originally stolen from a Hindu temple during the British conquest! Scandal indeed!

Sure enough, Wilkie’s writing made me remember why classics are considered classics. It’s not just because they’re old and our teachers make us read them. Most of them actually are light years better than the shlock clogging the shelves of Barnes and Noble these days.

On top of his immense writing prowess, his royal Wilkiness was also a gentleman of great intrigue and curiosity. I can just imagine the whispering behind fans that occurred whenever dear Wilkie entered a ballroom or tea parlor! Let me enlighten you to a few delectable morsels from our precious Wilkie’s life history. His first job was working for a bunch of tea merchants. Tea merchants! Just think of the sort of mischief he got into under their employment. Next he made friends with Charles Dickens (speaking of serendipitous coincidences!) and they took turns editing and publishing each other’s work while they’re younger siblings got married. Later, he grew a gigantic bushy beard, and from the years 1870 to his death in 1889, he was getting it on with two different women. He married neither.

If nothing else can be said of this grand wordsmith of yore, Wilkie Collins was a professional. The dear old chap included an introduction into “The Moonstone,” where he describes the unfortunate affliction of rheumatic gout that struck him just as his mother was dying of some other horrible British malady. Anyway, this came somewhere in the middle of writing “The Moonstone,” but instead of trying to get some rest, or taking time to mourn the passing of his mother dearest, Wilkie refused to stop working out of loyalty to his fans. He continued to write, dictating to an assistant as he laid suffering in his bed. Kinda makes me feel bad for slacking off on my blog just because I’m on vacation.

“The Moonstone” is the sort of novel that makes me wish I had been born in the Victorian era. I mean they really had every sort of spazzmoid and hilarious character back then. Like Betteredge, the wacky old butler obsessed with Robinson Crusoe, or the spinster cousin who tries to hide religious paraphernalia in her dying aunt’s bathroom, just in case she would like to read about saving her soul while on the toilet. There’s Rosanna Spearman, the hunchbacked, former thief turned second housemaid, who flings her crippled body into quicksand after falling in love with a man above her station. She actually drowns in quicksand! How tragic! How sensational! Add onto that a team of mad Colonels, villainous foreigners with weirdly speckled hair, engagements made and broken, not to mention the amount of opium consumed, and you’ve got more intrigue than a Jason Bourne movie. No, they did not need the antics of teen celebridiots to entertain them in the 1800s. They had dear Wilkie to amuse them.