Wilkie Collins - review

Wilkie Collins
by Peter Ackroyd
(Chatto, £12.99)

On the proof copy of Peter Ackroyd's biography of Wilkie Collins there's one of the most desperate examples of publisher's blurb I have ever come across. "This is also a vivid portrait of Dickens and of Victorian London," it reads, "perfect for the Olympics."

It's hard to imagine a less likely Olympian than Wilkie Collins. His head was too big for his body, his arms and legs were unusually short, he was very short-sighted, had a large swelling on his forehead - the result of a botched forceps delivery - and suffered from a litany of different ailments including something he called "gout of the eyes".

All this could have made him crabby. In fact, as Ackroyd says, Collins was "perhaps the most sweet-tempered of Victorian novelists". Having a sweet-tempered subject often spells disaster for a biography, but mercifully Collins's domestic arrangements were sufficiently exotic to dispel any worries about his temperament.

Given his physical shortcomings, he proved remarkably attractive to women. He never married but spent the last 20 years of his life shuttling back and forth between his two mistresses - an apparently happy arrangement for everyone concerned. Collins was a man of big appetites in every respect: he once grated so much garlic onto a pie that he had to take to his bed with a gastric attack, and when he became a laudanum addict in his thirties, he would swallow enough in a single glass to kill 12 people.

His greatest achievement, of course, was to invent, almost single-handedly, both the Victorian mystery story and the detective novel. He also explored female sensibilities more deeply than his contemporaries - including his friend Dickens. When Collins's fourth novel, The Woman in White, was published in 1859, it sold out on the day of publication. William Gladstone, Chancellor of the Exchequer, stayed up all night to finish it.

While Collins plotted everything out meticulously, he seems to have written in a kind of trance - literally so, as his use of laudanum increased. He confessed to having no recollection at all of writing chunks of The Moonstone, his other huge success. "I was not only pleased and astonished by the finale," he is supposed to have said, "but did not recognise it as my own."

Although Ackroyd is never less than an elegant stylist, he seems to have written this in a bit of a trance too. It chugs along in one gear - a bit of biography followed by a synopsis of a novel, then some more biography - without ever flaring into life or throwing out any startling insights. Occasionally, there's a memorable phrase - Collins's novels, he writes, contain "a complete nervous stew of people" - but normal perfunctory service is soon resumed.

The main problem is that Collins himself comes across as a watery, indistinct presence. It may be quite true, as Ackroyd says, that he was a novelist preoccupied with the idea of "something hidden below the surface". Here, though, he's the one who remains submerged.