Contemporary Reviews, Adaptations, and Imitations
May 4, 1860 – Hull Packet
In All the Year Round Mr Wilkie Collins, whose Antonina made him suddenly famous, is continuing his most exciting story of “The Woman in White.” Usually novels composed of extracts from the letters and diaries of the characters moving in the story, are failures: and to this rule Sir Walter Scott’s Red Gauntlet, even, is no exception. Mr Wilkie Collins, is, however, a great artist in the mechanical development of a story, and, therefore, in spite of the continued extracts from “Miss Halcombe’s diary,” and “Walter Hartright’s journal,” and “Miss Michelson’s narrative,” “The Woman in White,” holds the reader in breathless suspense, and we venture to say that the thousands might be multiplied by many tens who, week after week, and month after month, feel it one of their pressing anxieties to know through what new tribulations Mr. Wilkie Collins’s imaginary heroines will have to pass. In other articles in All the Year Round too much of the mannerism which characterized the papers in Household Words is apparent. Mr. Dickens’s own papers “The Journeys of the Uncommercial Traveller,” are interesting enough, but the imitation of Mr Dickens’s style in the same periodical are often sadly dull and wearisome.
Works Cited
“Literature.” Hull Packet and East Riding Times, Hull, England, 4 May 1860, 19th-Century British Newspapers, n.p. Accessed 7 Apr. 2015.