Книга: Wilkie Collins, Matthew Sweet «The Woman in White»

Wilkie Collins

William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824 – 23 September 1889) was an English novelist, playwright, and author of short stories. He was very popular during the Victorian era and wrote 30 novels, more than 60 short stories, 14 plays, and over 100 non-fiction pieces. His best-known works are The Woman in White, The Moonstone, Armadale and No Name.

Collins predicted the deterrence concept of mutually assured destruction that defined the Cold War nuclear era. Writing at the time of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 he stated, "I begin to believe in only one civilising influence – the discovery one of these days of a destructive agent so terrible that War shall mean annihilation and men's fears will force them to keep the peace."^{[not verified in body]}

Life

Collins was born in London, the son of a well-known Royal Academician landscape artist, William Collins. Named after his father, he swiftly became known by his second name (which honoured his godfather, David Wilkie). From the ages of 12 to 15^[1] he lived with his parents in Italy, which made a great impression on him. At age 17 he left school and was apprenticed as a clerk to a firm of tea merchants, but after five unhappy years, during which he wrote his first novel, Iolani, he entered Lincoln's Inn to study law. Iolani remained unpublished for over 150 years until 1999. After his father's death in 1847, Collins produced his first published book, Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., R.A. (1848), and also considered a career in painting, exhibiting a picture at the Royal Academy summer exhibition in 1849, but it was with the release of his first published novel, Antonina, in 1850 that his career as a writer began in earnest.

An instrumental event in Collins's career occurred in March 1851,^[1] when he was introduced to Charles Dickens by a mutual friend, Augustus Egg. They became lifelong friends and collaborators. Collins became an editor of Dickens's Household Words, several of Collins's novels were serialised in Dickens's weekly publication All the Year Round, and Dickens later edited and published them himself. Collins's younger brother Charles Allston Collins married Dickens's younger daughter, Kate. Collins also advised Dickens's sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth, when she was editing The Letters of Charles Dickens from 1833 to 1870 (published in 1880) with Dickens's daughter Mary Angela Dickens.

Grave in Kensal Green Cemetery

Collins suffered from a form of arthritis known as "rheumatic gout" and became severely addicted to the opium he took (in the form of laudanum) to relieve the pain. As a result, he experienced paranoid delusions, including a conviction that he was constantly accompanied by a subjective doppelgänger he dubbed 'Ghost Wilkie'. His novel The Moonstone prominently features the effects of opium and opium addiction.

Collins never married, but from 1858 lived on and off with a widow, Mrs. Caroline Graves, and her daughter, Elizabeth (whom Collins called "Carrie".^[1]) He also fathered three children by another woman, Martha Rudd (Marian on 4 July 1869, Harriet on 14 May 1871 and William Charles on 25 December 1874^[1]). Collins met Martha Rudd, a 19-year-old when he visited Yarmouth in 1864. She moved to London in 1867 or 1868 before Caroline Graves issued her ultimatum, either Wilkie married her or she would leave him to marry Joseph Charles Clow. Caroline and Joseph were married on 29 October 1868, in the parish church of St. Marylebone.^[2] Mrs. Graves returned to Collins after two years, and he continued both relationships until his death in 1889.

He is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, West London. His grave marker describes him as the author of The Woman in White.^[3]

Works

Collins's works were classified at the time as 'sensation novels', a genre seen nowadays as the precursor to detective and suspense fiction. He also wrote penetratingly on the plight of women and on the social and domestic issues of his time. For example, his 1854 Hide and Seek contained one of the first portrayals of a deaf character in English literature. As did many writers of his time, Collins published most of his novels as serials in magazines such as Dickens's All the Year Round and was known as a master of the form, creating just the right degree of suspense to keep his audience reading from week to week. Sales of All The Year Round increased when The Woman in White followed A Tale of Two Cities.

Collins enjoyed ten years of great success following publication of The Woman in White in 1859. His next novel, No Name combined social commentary – the absurdity of the law as it applied to children of unmarried parents (see Illegitimacy in fiction) – with a densely plotted revenge thriller. Armadale, the first and only of Collins's major novels of the 1860s to be serialised in a magazine other than All the Year Round, provoked strong criticism, generally centred upon its transgressive villainess Lydia Gwilt; and provoked in part by Collins's typically confrontational preface. The novel was simultaneously a financial coup for its author and a comparative commercial failure: the sum paid by Cornhill for the serialisation rights was exceptional, eclipsing by a substantial margin the prices paid for the vast majority of similar novels, yet the novel failed to recoup its publisher's investment. The Moonstone, published in 1868, and the last novel of what is generally regarded as the most successful decade of its author's career, was, despite a somewhat cool reception from both Dickens and the critics, a significant return to form and reestablished the market value of an author whose success in the competitive Victorian literary marketplace had been gradually waning in the wake of his first "masterpiece". Viewed by many to represent the advent of the detective story within the tradition of the English novel, The Moonstone remains one of Collins's most critically acclaimed productions, identified by T. S. Eliot as "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels...in a genre invented by Collins and not by Poe",^[4] and Dorothy L. Sayers referred to it as "probably the very finest detective story ever written".^[5]

Various factors (most often cited are the death of Dickens in 1870 and thus the loss of his literary mentoring; Collins's increased dependence upon laudanum; and a somewhat ill-advised penchant for using his fiction to rail against social injustices) appear to have led to a decline in the two decades following the success of his sensation novels of the 1860s. His novels and novellas of the 1870s and 1880s, whilst by no means entirely devoid of merit or literary interest, are generally regarded as inferior to his previous productions and receive comparatively little critical attention today.

The Woman in White and The Moonstone share an unusual narrative structure, somewhat resembling an epistolary novel, in which different portions of the book have different narrators, each with a distinct narrative voice (Armadale has this to a lesser extent through the correspondence between some characters). The Moonstone, being the most popular of Collins's novels, is considered a precursor to detective fiction, such as Sherlock Holmes.

After The Moonstone, Collins's novels contained fewer thriller elements and more social commentary. The subject matter continued to be sensational but his popularity declined. Algernon Charles Swinburne commented: "What brought good Wilkie's genius nigh perdition? Some demon whispered – 'Wilkie! have a mission.'^[6]

Bibliography

Portrait by John Everett Millais.

See also:Category:Novels by Wilkie Collins and Category:Plays by Wilkie Collins

• Iolani, or Tahiti as it was. A Romance (written 1844; published 1999)
• Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., R.A. (1848)
• Antonina (1850)
• Rambles Beyond Railways, or, Notes in Cornwall taken a-foot (with illustrations by Henry C. Brandling; 1851)
  • -do.--London: Westaway Books, 1948 (with an introd. by Ashley Rowe); London: A. Mott (with an introduction by J. C. Trewin; 1982)
• Basil (1852)
• Mr Wray's Cash Box (1852)
• Hide and Seek (1854)
• The Ostler (1855)
• After the Dark (1856)
• The Dead Secret (1857)
• A Rogue's Life (1857/1879)
• The Frozen Deep (1857), a play co-written with Charles Dickens
• A Terribly Strange Bed (1858)
• A House to Let (1858), a short story co-written with Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Adelaide Anne Procter
• The Haunted House a short story co-written with Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Adelaide Proctor, George Sala and Hesba Stretton
• The Queen of Hearts (1859)
• The Woman in White (1860)
• No Name (1862)
• My Miscellanies (1863)
• Armadale (1866)
• No Thoroughfare (1867), a story and play co-written with Charles Dickens
• The Moonstone (1868)
• Man and Wife (1870)
• Poor Miss Finch (1872), dedicated to Frances Minto Elliot
• Miss or Mrs? (1873)
• The New Magdalen (1873)
• The Frozen Deep and Other Stories (1874)
  • "The Frozen Deep"
  • "Dream Woman"
  • "John Jago's Ghost; or The Dead Alive"
• The Law and the Lady (1875)
• The Two Destinies (1876)
• The Haunted Hotel (1878)
• The Fallen Leaves (1879)
• My Lady's Money (1879)
• Jezebel's Daughter (1880)
• Who Killed Zebedee (1881)
• The Black Robe (1881)
• Heart and Science (1883)
• I Say No (1884)
• The Ghost's Touch and Other Stories (1885)
• The Evil Genius (1886)
• The Guilty River (1886)
• Little Novels (1887)
• The Legacy of Cain (1889)
• Blind Love (1889 – unfinished, completed by Walter Besant)

Films based on his novels

Portrait by Rudolph Lehmann.

• Basil (UK 1998)
• The Woman in White (UK 1997)
• The Moonstone (UK 1996)
• Zhenshchina v belom (The Woman In White, Russia 1982)
• The Woman in White (UK, TV, 5 episodes, 1982)
• La donna in bianco (Italy, TV, 1980)
• Lucilla (Poor Miss Finch, Germany, 1979, 2 episodes, directed by Wilhelm Semmelroth)
• Der Monddiamant (The Moonstone, Germany 1974, 2 episodes, directed by Wilhelm Semmelroth)
• Great Mysteries (1 Episode: A Terribly Strange Bed, USA 1973)
• Der rote Schal (Armadale, 3 episodes, directed by Wilhelm Semmelroth)
• La pietra di luna (The Moonstone, Italy 1972)
• The Moonstone (UK, 5 episodes, 1972)
• Die Frau in Weiß (The Woman in White, 3 episodes, Germany 1971, directed by Wilhelm Semmelroth)
• The Policeman and the Cook (USA 1970)
• La femme en blanc (The Woman in White, France 1970)
• La dama vestida de blanco (The Woman in White, Spain 1967)
• The Woman in White (UK, 6 episodes, 1966)
• A Terribly Strange Bed (USA 1991)
• Dow Hour of Great Mysteries: The Woman in White (USA 1960)
• The Moonstone (UK, 7 episodes, 1959)
• Hour of Mystery: The Woman in White (UK 1957)
• Sergeant Cuff kann den Mondstein nicht finden (The Moonstone, Germany 1955)
• Suspense: The Moonstone (USA 1954)
• Tales Of Adventure: The Moonstone (USA 1952, 5 episodes)
• Robert Montgomery Presents: The Moonstone (USA 1952)
• Kvinna i vitt (The Woman in White, Sweden 1949)
• The Woman in White (USA 1948)
• Crimes at the Dark House (based on The Woman in White, USA 1940)
• The Moonstone (1934)
• The Woman in White (1929)
• She Loves and Lies (1920)
• The Twin Pawns (1919)
• The Woman in White (1917)
• Tangled Lives (1917)
• The Moonstone (1915)
• The Quest of the Sacred Jewel (1914)
• The New Magdalen (1914
• The Dream Woman (1914)
• The New Magdalen (1912)
• The Woman in White (1912)
• The New Magdalene (1910)

In popular culture

Wilkie Collins is the fictional narrator of the 2009 historical novel Drood by Dan Simmons. The book is based in part on Charles Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood. He also appears as a fictional character in Wanting (novel), the 2008 historical novel by Richard Flanagan.

Actress Sarah Jessica Parker and husband Matthew Broderick named their son James Wilkie Broderick after Matthew's father and Collins.

There are Hidden Object Games based on the Moonstone and The Woman in White.

Blue plaques

On 22 January 2011 at 10.00 am, The Ramsgate Society unveiled a blue plaque at 14 Nelson Crescent, Ramsgate to celebrate the fact that Wilkie Collins took holidays in the town of which he made references in his books. The unveiling was accompanied by a local radio interview with Radio Kent and was attended by the chairman of the Wilkie Collins Society.

Notes

Further reading

• Bleiler, Everett (1948). The Checklist of Fantastic Literature. Chicago: Shasta Publishers. pp. 81. 
• Olive Logan's account of Wilkie Collins, web40571.clarahost.co.uk

External links

• The Wilkie Collins Website
• Wilkie Collins Information Pages
• Works by Wilkie Collins at Project Gutenberg
• Wilkie Collins Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin
• Archival material relating to Wilkie Collins listed at the UK National Register of Archives
• Anonymous (1873). Cartoon portraits and biographical sketches of men of the day. Illustrated by Frederick Waddy. London: Tinsley Brothers. pp. 76–77. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Cartoon_portraits_and_biographical_sketches_of_men_of_the_day/Wilkie_Collins. Retrieved 6 January 2011. 
• The Ramsgate Society Website

Matthew Sweet
Background information
Birth name	Sidney Matthew Sweet
Born	October 6, 1964 (1964-10-06) (age 47) Lincoln, Nebraska United States
Genres	Power pop, Grunge, Alternative Rock
Occupations	singer, songwriter, record producer, instrumentalist
Instruments	vocals, guitar, bass guitar
Years active	1980s–present
Labels	Columbia A&M Zoo Entertainment Shout! Factory
Associated acts	Community Trolls, Oh-OK, The Thorns, Susanna Hoffs
Website	matthewsweet.com
Music sample
"Evangeline"

Sidney Matthew Sweet (born October 6, 1964, in Lincoln, Nebraska) is an American alternative rock/power pop musician. He was part of the burgeoning Athens, Georgia music scene in the early and mid-1980s before gaining commercial success during the early 1990s. He continues to release albums and tour.

Early career

As a teenager in Lincoln, Sweet wrote and recorded songs on four-track cassettes, and in the ninth grade joined the band the Specs which resulted in his first recording on a battle of the bands LP produced by a local radio station. Sweet set off to Athens, Georgia in the early '80s after graduating from Lincoln Southeast High School in 1983 to attend college and join the vibrant Athens music scene, most famous as the home base for R.E.M. and The B-52's. In 1983, Sweet collaborated with R.E.M. member Michael Stipe under the name Community Trolls as well as being in Stipe's sister Lynda Stipe's band Oh-OK, and that year also formed the power-pop duo, The Buzz of Delight with drummer David Pierce (Oh-Ok). They released an EP Sound Castles on DB Recs later that year.

In 1985, he was signed to a solo recording contract with Columbia Records. One album, Inside, was released by Columbia in 1986 to good reviews, but limited success.

Sweet was then picked up by A&M Records where he released his second album, Earth (1989), again without commercial success. This period marked a personal and professional low point for Sweet, as A&M lost interest and his marriage failed.

Sweet quickly recovered and formed a new band including Richard Lloyd, Robert Quine, Greg Leisz, Lloyd Cole, and Fred Maher. The new group spent 1990 assembling Sweet's next work, originally titled Nothing Lasts.

Commercial breakthrough

In 1990, A&M released Sweet from his contract, and he signed with rival Zoo Entertainment. The album, still under construction at the time, was retitled Girlfriend and released in October 1991. This album featured a classic set of pop-rock songs, was considered by many to be an artistic breakthrough, and quickly garnered impressive U.S. sales (spawning a Top 10 single with the title track). The video for the title track was aired on MTV, MuchMusic and Night Tracks and features Japanese animation, of which Sweet is a fan. The animated clips in the video for "Girlfriend" are taken from the movie Space Adventure Cobra, and the video for "I've Been Waiting" uses clips of the Urusei Yatsura character Lum Invader, of whom Sweet has a tattoo.

Sweet's follow-up album, 1993's Altered Beast, was a more diverse and less immediately accessible album than Girlfriend; the album divided fans and critics who had mixed reactions to emotionally intense and brooding tracks like "Someone to Pull the Trigger" and "Knowing People." A second single, "Time Capsule", became a music video classic directed by Douglas Gayeton. The highly conceptual work featured extreme closeups of Sweet singing while supine on the grass. As he performed, his body was slowly covered with cockroaches that ultimately wrapped his body with twine. The final shot showed him pinned to the ground in a literary homage to Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels".

In 1995, Sweet released 100% Fun. The album mixed bouncy pop style with darker lyrics, including a leadoff track, the self-deprecating "Sick of Myself."

Later 1990s and 2000s

Sweet would issue a few more albums in the second half of the 1990s and maintain a devoted core audience, but received little critical acclaim or chart success.

Sweet's international success has been somewhat limited by his fear of flying;^[1] however he gained a significant following in Japan and his 2003 album Kimi Ga Suki * Raifu, was initially a Japan-only release.

In early 2002, he formed the supergroup The Thorns with Shawn Mullins and Pete Droge. He released a new album of solo material, Living Things in late 2004, though the material on the album was recorded in 2002.

In April 2006 he partnered with Bangles rhythm guitarist-vocalist Susanna Hoffs to release a collection of 1960s classics, titled Under the Covers, Vol. 1 featuring their take on such widely known 1960s hits as "Monday, Monday" and "The Kids Are Alright". The album represented a return to the accessible and melodic approach associated with Sweet's early breakthroughs.

Sweet's album, Sunshine Lies, was released on Shout! Factory on August 26, 2008. Accompanying the CD and download formats of the album is a 2-LP set featuring four previously unreleased songs.^[2]

On July 21, 2009, Sweet and Susanna Hoffs released their second collaboration Under the Covers, Vol. 2, which features covers of songs from the 1970s by such artists as Fleetwood Mac, Carly Simon, Yes, Todd Rundgren, and Rod Stewart.

In April, 2010, the Berkeley Repertory Theatre staged the world premiere of the musical play "Girlfriend," which used songs from Sweet's album of the same name, crediting Sweet with music and lyrics. The title of the play is ironic because its two characters are gay boys in their late teens.^[3][4]

Sweet has recently completed work on an album titled Modern Art (currently scheduled for a September 27, 2011 release).

Discography

• 1984 – Sound Castles – DB Records
• 1986 – Inside – Sony Records
• 1989 – Earth – A&M Records
• 1991 – Girlfriend – Zoo Entertainment. Later re-released as a Legacy Edition.
• 1993 – Altered Beast – Zoo Entertainment
• 1994 – Son of Altered Beast – Zoo Entertainment
• 1995 – 100% Fun – Zoo Entertainment
• 1997 – Blue Sky on Mars – Zoo Entertainment
• 1999 – In Reverse – Volcano Records
• 2000 – Time Capsule: Best of 90/00 – Volcano Records
• 2002 – To Understand: The Early Recordings of Matthew Sweet – Hip-O Records
• 2003 – Kimi Ga Suki – RCAM Records
• 2004 – Living Things – RCAM Records
• 2006 – Under the Covers, Vol. 1 (with Susanna Hoffs) – Shout! Factory
• 2008 – Sunshine Lies – Shout! Factory
• 2009 – Under the Covers, Vol. 2 (with Susanna Hoffs) – Shout! Factory
• 2011 – Modern Art – Missing Piece

Compilations

• Luxury Condos Coming to Your Neighborhood Soon - Coyote Records - 1985. Under the name "The Jacks," Sweet, Chris Stamey, and Don Dixon contributed a reworking of the dB's song, Ask for Jill, to this Hoboken anthology, with Sweet on lead vocals.
• In 1993 contributed to the AIDS-Benefit Album No Alternative produced by the Red Hot Organization with his song "Superdeformed".
• A cover of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, performed by Matthew Sweet, is included on the 1995 tribute album Saturday Morning: Cartoons' Greatest Hits, produced by Ralph Sall for MCA Records.^[5]
• Wild - 2007, from The Bigtop (soundtrack) (2008)
• Sweet performs a cover of "This Moment" by Victoria Williams on the tribute album for her, Sweet Relief.^[6]
• Sweet performed a cover of Walter Egan's "Magnet & Steel" for Sabrina the Teenage Witch. It can be found on the 1998 release Sabrina the Teenage Witch: The Album.

Other work

• Sweet appears briefly as an extra walking by the camera in the film Terms of Endearment.
• Sweet has contributed numerous tracks to compilations and soundtracks, ranging from the Carpenters tribute album If I Were A Carpenter to covering Tom Petty's classic "American Girl" for the popular 1980s compilation High School Reunion — a tribute to those great 1980s films, and to soundtracks for Buffy the Vampire Slayer (song: "Silent City"), Brain Candy, The Baby-Sitters Club and Can't Hardly Wait, as well as "Superdeformed" to the AIDS benefit album No Alternative and "Scooby Doo, Where Are You?" to the compilation Saturday Morning Cartoons' Greatest Hits.
• Sweet provided guitar, bass and/or vocals on a number of tracks on Lloyd Cole's albums Lloyd Cole (1990), Don't Get Weird on Me Babe (1991) and Bad Vibes (1993), as well as bass on Cole's recording of "Chelsea Hotel," on the Leonard Cohen tribute album I'm Your Fan.
• Sweet co-produced the Velvet Crush albums Teenage Symphonies to God and Free Expression and co-wrote two songs on the latter.
• Sweet and Jules Shear collaborated to write the title track for Everything's Different Now, the third and final album by 'Til Tuesday. Sweet and Shear also collaborated on Sweet's album Earth, which also included collaborations between Sweet and Shear's then-wife, Pal Shazar.
• He has also co-written at least one song with the Jayhawks, "Stumbling Through the Dark," on which he sang backing vocals, and has provided backing vocals on at least one other Jayhawks song, "Sixteen Down." In addition, the Thorns recorded a Jayhawks tune, "Blue."
• Sweet collaborated with Delerium on a song called "Daylight" from their 2001 album Poem.
• Sweet was the bassist of Ming Tea, a band featured in the first Austin Powers movie, with Susanna Hoffs and Mike Myers.
• Sweet appeared as himself in an episode of Cartoon Network's hit TV series Space Ghost Coast to Coast
• Sweet was namechecked in Kōsuke Fujishima's long-running manga series Ah! My Goddess during a storyline about the male lead, Keiichi Morisato, and his encounter with Schrodinger's Whale (a play on Schrödinger's Cat, this was a whale that existed in a five-dimensional quantum state). Keiichi taught the whale Sweet's song Millennium Blues, and the whale learned Missing Time by itself, thus ensuring (albeit inadvertently) that the species would survive by having a call that they would be able to locate each other by.
• Sweet interpreted a cover version of Magnet and Steel (Walter Egan) for Sabrina The Teenage Witch TV Series Soundtrack in 1998.
• Sweet worked with Anton Fier's Golden Palominos in 1986, Blast of Silence CD, reissued in 1998.
• In 2001, he co-wrote the song "Underneath" with the re-emerging rock band Hanson. The song appeared on Hanson's 2004 album Underneath.
• Sweet provided backing vocals on the title track from Counting Crows' 2002 album Hard Candy.
• "Girlfriend" is featured in Crossroads.
• Cover version of "Girlfriend" is featured in Guitar Hero II.
• Cover version of "Girlfriend" is downloadable content for Guitar Hero III Mobile.
• Sweet performed "Ballad of El Goodo" on the 2006 Big Star tribute album, Big Star Small World.
• Recently, Sweet composed the music for the opening and closing of Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated.

References

External links

• Matthew Sweet on Myspace
• Official website
• Lazy-i Interview: October 2004
• 1997 TV Profile of Matthew Sweet - NET Television
• Exclaim Interview