Some years ago I contributed a chapter to a book about Wilkie Collins. The piece was called ‘The Afterlife of Wilkie Collins’ and it was about the many types of adaptation of Collins’s novels: theatre, silent film, radio and television, even the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.  I’m posting it here because I still quite like it but also because of the new BBC TV adaptation of The Woman in White which is dividing viewers quite a lot at the moment.  The essay is from The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins edited by Jenny Bourne Taylor.  It’s also got a short discussion about neo-Victorian fiction from the 1990s and 2000s.

The Afterlife of Wilkie Collins

Rachel Malik

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical spectacular The Woman in White opened in London in September, 2004. Posters featuring a back-lit, white clad woman had appeared on buses and tubes for months before, and the casting of Michael Crawford (the most famous Phantom of the Opera) as the first Count Fosco seemed to lodge Collins’s novel firmly into Lloyd Webber’s world. The official publicity paid its dues to Collins, but acknowledged the story had been appropriated to a familiar repertoire – ‘a love story to which a layer of unrequited love [Marian for Walter] has been added for the musical’ – and the evening clearly offers a branded ‘Lloyd Webber’ experience, complete with souvenir tapestry kits and pill-boxes. Nonetheless, the modern musical Woman in White was strongly shaped by the contexts and forms of Collins’s writing, sensation fiction and, more broadly, the mid-Victorian practices of writing and publishing popular fiction. Far from being a travesty of the ‘original’ novel or a post-modern re-rendering of Victorian gothic, this new musical version can be viewed as a natural offspring of Collins’s novel and its first set of contexts. My emphasis in this essay will be on the continuities between Collins’s novels in their first intertextual setting, and their many and varied versions in British film, radio, television and novels.  In addition to the publishing history of the texts themselves, the history of Wilkie Collins in the twentieth century encompasses some of the earliest silent films, the changing traditions and conventions of BBC radio and television drama, and the historical fiction of Sarah Waters, James Wilson and other ‘contemporary Victorian’ writers.  It forms a crucial part of the continuities and shifts in the significance of the ‘Victorian’ across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

The ‘afterlife’ of Wilkie Collins suggests many histories and in an essay such as this it isn’t possible even to sketch them all. My aim is to consider the versions and revisions of Collins’s writing as a set of processes of production and reception which in turn reflect back on the publishing and reading cultures that shaped Collins’s own work and to which he was highly responsive.  This emphasis makes it possible to explore continuities as well as differences across media and time, opening up an idea of ‘adaptation’ that is neither transhistorical (accurately reproducing the original) nor narrowly bound within its own time. For example the BBC television family serial slot under which The Moonstone and The Woman in White were multiply serialised from the late 1950s to the 70s, predominantly imagines a mixed audience in a flow of other texts in ways directly comparable with Victorian periodical fiction.[1]  In contrast James Wilson’s sequel to The Woman in White, The Dark Clue (2001), offers a decisively modern experience of novel reading as retreat, quite alien from the reading contexts and practices of much Victorian fiction, despite its sometimes startling echo of Collins’s writing.

Adaptation almost always implies a media translation that succeeds the original and a focus on the differences between practices and institutions, especially where literary ‘classics’ are concerned. But as Graham Law and Jim Davis discuss in this Companion, unauthorised adaptations (both printed and performed) often preceded the completion of the original in the mid-nineteenth century, and there were important continuities across drama, painting and the novel.[2]  And while some of the specifics of contemporary publishing – such as the current force of copyright – would look very alien to Victorian eyes, many would not. The mid-Victorian and the contemporary moments of book publishing share many features: fiercely competitive, international in both ambition and practice, dependent on and significantly constituted by the possibilities and limitations of other media, with marketing and promotion as central processes.[3]  The Woman in White was a bestseller in America as well as Britain and was rapidly translated into most European languages. Collins’s writing cuts across a range of media and explicitly addresses different types of reader in ways that facilitate its subsequent translation into film, radio and television. The institutions and practices of these new media were in turn shaped by mid and late Victorian periodical publishing.

Collins’s novels are also intensely dramatic and highly visual.  Like many of his contemporaries, his work was written to be read aloud as well as to be adapted for the stage and the modes of both speech and drama are already inscribed within his writing.  Collins’s did not share Dickens’s talent for gripping public readings (his reading tour of America in 1873-4 was not entirely successful), and he does not adopt the kind of idiolectal and dialectical variation so characteristic of Dickens; but there are many compositional traits that anticipate a spoken and quasi-dramatic context of reading and performance. The use of multiple character narrators, some with highly distinctive speech and thought patterns is, in part, the effect of an imagined context of reading aloud:  Pesca’s benign hyperbole and out-of-context English colloquialisms in The Woman in White and the honest no-nonsense of Betteridge in The Moonstone, for example. And Collins’s writing acutely engages with the drama of speech: witness the deathbed confession that opens Armadale.

It is also saturated in the culture of the image. Collins’s own biography (discussed by Tim Dolin) and his keen interest in the illustration of his novels are only a particular twist on a general culture where the sheer quantity and range of new and/or improved technologies, forms and contexts of seeing – including illustration in books and periodicals, photography, prints for middle-class domestic spaces and the spectacle of the diorama – charged the relation between observing subject and observed object in distinctive ways. The professional artist as paternal figure in Hide and Seek, and hero in The Woman in White; Franklin Blake and Rachel Verinder’s decorative painting as flirtation in The Moonstone; the disturbing paintings and photographs that haunt Miserrimus Dexter’s walls in The Law and the Lady, and the Millais frontispiece to the 1864 Sampson and Law edition of No Name are vivid examples of this interrelation of image and text.[4]  And time and time again the viewer, observer or voyeur is a central figure, calling for modes of description which foreground the spatial placing of objects and persons. These dramatic and visual elements have been taken up in various ways in film, radio and television

Early cinema

Between 1909 and 1916, there were at least eleven Collins ‘adaptations’ produced: four based on The New Magdalen, one on The Dead Secret, one on Armadale, three on The Moonstone and two on The Woman in White.[5]   During roughly the same period, there were seven Braddon adaptations (four of Lady Audley’s Secret and three of Aurora Floyd), and while this cannot compete with Dickens – between 1898 and 1915, there were at least 60 films produced based on Dickens texts – Collins has proved a rich resource for early film, though little still exists to view or hear and records are patchy.   It is The Woman in White which emerges as the favourite for adaptation after 1915, with five productions, the best-known being the 1948 American version staring Sydney Greensheet as Count Fosco (the 1940 version, entitled Crimes at the Dark House is really a gory horror vehicle for Tod Slaughter, king-villain of British B-movies).[6]  The familiarity of melodrama, the versatility of Gothic across media, and a shared commitment to producing ‘bodily’ effects must in part explain the appeal of sensation fiction for early film. As Tom Gunning has argued, early cinema aimed, above all, to shock or thrill the viewer: ‘the impact derives from a moment of crisis, prepared for and delayed, then bursting on the audience’ – the train rushing towards the audience was the most vivid example.[7] Such tactics immediately recall sensation fiction (though without sensation fiction’s complex narrative), and Gunning also locates this strand of cinema in a line of continuity with magic shows and other spectacles which tested the credulity of sophisticated and sceptical fin de siècle audiences.  Like sensation fiction, early cinema provoked in the reader the question: but how can this be possible? And then went on to show us that it is – usually without any recourse to ‘real’ magic or matters supernatural.

Recent work on the early years of silent film has also emphasised the continuities between film and the cultural forms and institutions that preceded it. Music hall and variety have long been acknowledged as models, but the content and reception contexts of early cinema were significantly shaped by nineteenth-century periodical publishing, with its mix of popular fiction, essays and curiosities, and, of course, the important role accorded to illustration. Ian Christie views The Strand magazine (founded in 1891) as a central model, and it is notable that there were 26 adaptations of Conan Doyle stories (mainly Sherlock Holmes) between 1903 and 1915.[8]  But the idea of the literary periodical as a model for early cinema also has a more general force. In the earliest period, films were just a few minutes long, and comprised a character vignette (for example Mr Bumble the Beadle, 1898) or a single moment of dramatic confrontation or sheer spectacle. The film as character vignette, like the early readings of famous Dickens episodes on BBC radio in the 1920s (for example, Barkis is Willing in 1924), immediately recall the performances of Dickens. Many Victorian contexts of production (as today) presumed abridgement, extraction and authorial performance, and these possibilities were likewise textually inscribed.

In these early stages, too, films were packaged and consumed alongside each other: romance and revenge dramas viewed alongside ‘stand-up’ comedy, holiday travel narratives and self-styled anthropology.[9]  They were also viewed alongside a variety of other entertainments: live variety and music-hall acts for example. This frame of consumption supplied one local and immediate intertextual context for viewers. It also suggests an audience conversant with frequent and complex genre switching, and highly capable of varying their intensity and mode of attention. Such patterns of consumption in turn recall the periodical context of much nineteenth-century novelistic production, in which Collins’s writing was so strongly embedded – The Law and the Lady for example, can be read in part as a celebration of popular reading practices, where reading Trials (published reports of criminal proceedings) and solving popular periodical riddles are central to discovering the narrative’s enigmas. Just as the Victorian reading experience was frequently a cross-media one that incorporated spoken sound, image and other printed text, so the early filmic experience was richly intermedial. Early film made varied use of organ and piano music; story outlines and scripts were sometimes distributed to audiences, and  ‘lecturers’ were employed to narrate the story, improvise additional dialogue and, latterly, read the intertitles. And film studios were quick to exploit the serial potential of film. Pearl White, who played Mercy Merrick in the 1910 version of the same title, was dubbed the ‘Serial Queen’ for her roles in the adventure film serial, Perils of Pauline (1914) where she was routinely subject to great dangers from which she equally routinely escaped.[10]

Collins’s characters and narratives do not lend themselves as easily to extraction as those of Dickens. But increased running times (to between 15 and 30 minutes) during the first half of the 1910s opened up narrative possibilities which begin to sound more like conventional adaptations in the reviews which often now supply the only surviving evidence.[11] The Gem production of The Woman in White in 1913 cuts Marian and centres on Count Fosco, whose arrival in London seems to instigate the narrative. He and his wife take charge of Laura and employ Walter. Sir Percival is still the husband-to-be. Laura and Ann are swapped before Ann’s death; so Ann spends some time passing as Lady Glyde. The film ends with the murder of Fosco ‘by the knife of an assassin’. In the Thanhouser production of the previous year, a gory gothic script is supplied by Ann, who writes a message in blood in her dying moments. This directs Walter and Laura to the church where Sir Percival confesses the truth before going up in flames. As in other early versions, the story is radically simplified. Count and Lady Fosco are cut, as are Marian and Mr Fairlie, so constructing a gothic-tinged melodrama where Sir Percival is the evil obstacle to the true love of Walter and Laura (who escapes unaided from the asylum). As in the current Lloyd Webber musical, Ann seems more central, trying to warn Laura about her prospective husband, and present as a silent witness at the wedding.  It is she who directly confronts Sir Percival with the words: ‘I am not mad, and you are not Sir Percival’. Sir Percival shows no premeditation: there is no plot or conspiracy. He is simply struck by Ann’s resemblance to Laura when she confronts him, and when she conveniently faints, he drags her body into a room, quickly drugs Laura and dumps her body outside the asylum gates. In contrast the 1918 Thanhouser production is much more ambitious. All the key characters from the novel are in position (including Pesca), though it is left to Walter to rescue Laura from the asylum because Marian’s attempt fails. Fosco is the mastermind of the substitution plot, though it is Sir Percival who sends Walter to Africa (not Central America) to get him out of the way.

However the strong Gothic marked in these narratives was not the only way of adapting sensation fiction. The 1920 Ideal Films version of Lady Audley’s Secret may be the only extant viewable silent sensation movie, and from its first intertitle, its narrative dominant is the morality tale: ‘Blind yielding to callous selfishness and brooding discontent’ … from ‘first false deed’ to ‘new treacheries’ till… the ‘whole edifice of evil tumbles and crashes from its own rottenness’….’What a tangled web…’.[12]   The film centres on Lucy/Helen’s actions, beginning with her romance with George – unlike the novel, this is never about Robert Audley’s detective prowess. It ends with Lucy taking ‘a deadly sleeping draught’ at Audley Court, after her plan to kill Robert has failed.  Yet a variety of other genres are stitched in between the moralising melodrama. There is the conventional comedy of servants, and an apparently set-piece adventure scene of George sitting round the campfire in the Australian outback. The shock of Sir Michael’s proposal to Lucy (whom the audience knows is married), is comically offset – witnessed by Robert and Alicia who are playing with a pet dog at the time. Lucy pushes George down the well wearing a well-above-the-ankle pleated tartan skirt and a fur-trimmed rain jacket. She also smokes, at one point placing a cigarette in Sir Michael’s mouth. If this is an indictment of modern girls, the Thanhouser productions of The Woman in White play on the continuities with Victorian melodrama while giving Ann a more ‘modern’, active role.

Family audiences

However it is in radio and television that the temporal dimensions of serial narrative become most strongly visible as continuities with the reading, writing and publishing cultures that Collins participated in. For many years Collins occupied the BBC Sunday teatime slot (usually beginning between 5.20 and 5.40), first on radio (there were radio adaptations of Armadale and No Name in 1948 and 1952 for example) and then on television, alongside other favourites – Dickens, Dumas and Scott – and adaptations of children’s classics such as Moonfleet and Treasure Island.[13] A six-part version of The Woman in White (1966) and two adaptations of The Moonstone in 1959 and 1972 (of seven and five-parts respectively) occupied this slot. The 1982 production of The Woman in White shifted the mood – broadcast after nine on Wednesday evenings – a time-slot continued into the 90s. Victorian serials were, of course, far longer than their television counterparts, but the television serial also demands an investment from the viewer in exchange for a promised return of pleasure, a dynamic accentuated if the narrative is finite rather than on-going.

Embedded in the schedule, many of the TV serial’s immediate intertexts – as with Victorian periodical fiction – were local and immediate and given by the contexts of production: the previous serial, the adjacent programming of the day perhaps. And like Victorian family magazines, the BBC predominantly constructed a family audience, jointly and severally: the 1966 teatime serial slot is succeeded by Captain Pugwash, preceded by a post-lunch film ‘matinee’ that follows motor racing from Le Mans – a sequence that imagines a very particular kind of family day that is less marked now as television imagines and constitutes other types of individual and collective viewers. The teatime serial addressed a family collectivity, though its members did not all need to be sitting round the television. The slot was arguably as important a repository and prompt for memories as childhood reading (and latterly listening and viewing), and the history evoked by such programmes was, importantly, the viewer’s own. In this sense there is a sharp distinction between the exciting novelties of serial sensation fiction and the ‘classic’ teatime serial. This slot may also have done much to create a particular class of classics, to which Collins, like Dickens, belongs: the ‘much-loved’, the ‘favourite’ book, where an emotional relationship becomes the key index of the text’s value.

The 1996 Moonstone, broadcast in a two-part prime-time Christmas season slot, belongs to the same tradition, despite its post-9pm scheduling. Packed with well-known British actors, many associated with period drama, the adaptation does not shy away from the ‘dark side’ of the novel but insists most strongly on all-round entertainment.[14] An image of the Shivering Sands bookends the drama and Rosanna’s disturbing compulsions and suicide are richly played on. But these eerie pleasures are strongly constrained by romance, comedy (much is made of the attempted ministrations of Drusilla Clack) and the detective fever that drives the narrative. The role and effect of detective fiction is seemingly contradictory: making the adaptation simultaneously faithful and anachronistic. Fidelity is possible, even in this highly condensed form, because the audience is presumed to know the rules of the detective genre, from both classic fiction and television, and their expectations are richly confirmed. It takes only a short scene to establish the contrast between the ponderous local plod, Seegrave, and the eccentric, sharp-witted, metropolitan Cuff. Reconstructions, red-herrings, outcasts with pivotal knowledge, disguise and amateur detection abound. But it is fidelity to the conventions and audience expectations of classic period drama and classic detective fiction, particularly as stamped by BBC traditions, which shapes the adaptation, at least as much as the text itself. Yet at the same time, the adaptation necessarily misses the instability and ingenuity of the emerging genre in the novel, and its departures from what became familiar conventions.

In contrast, the 1997 two-part version of The Woman in White strongly diverges from the conventions of teatime family viewing, despite occupying the same big-budget, period-drama Christmas slot.[15]  Directed by Tim Fywell (director of TV adaptations of contemporary writers such as Minette Walters and Barbara Vine), it is both strongly modernising and reworks key sensation tropes in the light of current definitions and anxieties. Tara Fitzgerald’s Marian is an all-action feminist hero who must revive a jaded Walter to help her avenge her ‘sister’s’ murder; it is she, not Walter, who faces out Sir Percival in the church after Walter has been immobilised by a timely bump to the head. It is also very much Marian’s narrative (hers is the only voice-over): Walter functions mainly as love-interest and unwitting pawn of Sir Percival during the first half at least, and it is Marian’s voice that encompasses Walter’s first encounter with the woman in white. Yet this frequently transhistorical feminist reading is sometimes modulated by more specific understandings of Victorian gender relations, as later, Walter functions to mark the highly circumscribed space that women can move in. Marian seeks him out after her attempt to discover ‘Ann’s’ whereabouts by searching Fosco’s (Simon Callow) London hotel ends in humiliating failure. Titled male power, even if it is Italian, will always triumph over an anonymous unmarried woman. This intermittent historicism also seems part of a strategy to preserve a darker version of the novel as some kind of ‘family viewing’.  Child sexual abuse replaces illegitimacy as the crucial secret: Sir Percival, who repeated rapes and beats Laura, has also abused Ann as a child. In this sense the adaptation confirms expectations about the dark underside of a repressive society viewed through a late twentieth-century lens. Yet there is only one scene where violence is directed represented (and this is figured as a nightmare – though it turns out to be true); and there is no explicit sex. As a lady, Laura haltingly refers to ‘the act’; Ann’s letter tells of Sir Percival ‘behaving like a husband’ to her when she was a child of twelve. Such phrases meet the expectations of producers and viewers of certain kinds of Victorian speech – euphemistic and formal – but the adaptation also perfectly fits the 12 certificate on the ubiquitous video, at least in part imagined as a multi-generational, family viewing experience.

Contemporary Victorian fiction

Collins has also provided a crucial reference point in the emerging genre of ‘contemporary Victorian’ fiction, which started with Michael Sadleir’s Fanny by Gaslight in 1840 (???) and which has burgeoned since the late 1980s with (for example) A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1990) and Angels and Insects (1992), Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996) and Michael Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2003). James Wilson’s The Dark Clue and Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith (2002) are most directly bound to Collins. In their preoccupation with the shaping drives of Victorian fiction, and the relations between narrators and knowledge they are typical of contemporary Victorian fiction, which, as Kate Flint has argued, engages modern theorising about Victorian fiction as it reworks nineteenth-century narrative.[16]  The Dark Clue is a direct sequel to The Woman in White, and begins with Laura once more out of the picture, and Walter and Marian on a quest for a secret that leads them through the double life of Turner, a life which indirectly echoes Collins’s own.  Walter is in search of a symbolic father and engaged in a quest for self; but the repressed motivations he discovers amount to a predictable set of masculine drives, as the gentle-man turns sexual predator, soliciting prostitutes, even raping Marian herself.

Wilson’s over-familiar tale of a repressed Victorian sexuality that returns in violence against women is a disappointing resolution of a previously nuanced narration.  In contrast Sarah Waters’s fiction is less concerned with reproducing a distinct authorial ‘voice’.  Fingersmith deploys the narrational strategies of sensation fiction to reveal and conceal, rewriting and meshing the tropes of the double and the orphan and turning Collins’s implicitly homoerotic traces into an explicit exploration of lesbian sexuality. Two women, whose lives are both further apart and closer together than seems initially possible, are embroiled in a complex substitution plot whose author appears to keep changing. Sue and Maud can be made to look like each other, as the maid becomes the lady and the lady becomes the maid, but each needs the other to be mis(taken) for the other. The compelling disturbance of narrative expectations is shaped by queer desires, as the novel effects a compelling twist on the double, moving from resemblance and identification to sexual passion. The manoeuvres in the plot are thus intimately bound to the unfolding of desire – until Maud and Sue acknowledge their love, they are doomed to be substitutes, alternatives, separate narratives that do not add up.

The texts and discourses that shape Waters’s work are richer in their range than Wilson’s and embedded in contemporary as well as historical traditions. Fingersmith draws strongly on Dickens too, but it is a Dickens who has already been re-inscribed for the twentieth century, most visibly by Angela Carter. The modes of masculine authority, from the most thuggish and crude to the most chillingly perverse – the obsessive collector and curator of pornography, Christopher Lilly, for example – strongly echo Carter’s ritualised and claustrophobic patriarchy. Carter’s vision inflects some key figures of the feminine too. Mrs Sucksby, is a case in point: a baby farmer who has killed as many children as she has saved, as ruthless as she is sentimental in the interests of her ‘own’, and finally, the mother who makes the ultimate sacrifice.

Wilson and Waters’s preoccupation with sexuality is shared with many other contemporary Victorian novels: Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1968), for example and Michael Faber’s recent The Crimson Petal and the White (2003), which tells the story of a prostitute, Sugar. Sexuality may be canonical and oppressive or dissonant and liberating, but in nearly every case it functions as explanation and resolution. Waters’s earlier Affinity (1999) centres on a female spiritualist and her relationship with a neurasthenic middle-class girl who visits her in prison; the whole interest in whether she is an authentic medium or a grand illusionist is negotiated through the emergence of a powerful and unexpected desire. Every other kind of knowledge seems exposed as a kind of blindness.  Waters’s narratives have the merit (amongst others) of turning conventional narratives of desire upside down, but in ‘modernising’ the no longer sensational secrets that underpin so much of Victorian fiction, sexuality is usually played out in a far more conventional key: the Lloyd Webber musical, like the BBC serial of The Woman in White, replaces the ‘secret’ of illegitimacy with the modern trauma of child abuse.

In Victorian Afterlives, John Kucich and Dianne Sadoff argue that much contemporary cultural production refashions the Victorian period as its privileged other ‘because the nineteenth century provides multiple eligible sites for theorising’ various forms of cultural emergence that appeal to post-modern enquiry.[17] This is persuasive, but we also need to consider the relations between texts and readers, as well as the institutions and practices that have constituted this rather intimate relationship between the Victorians and ‘us’. One of the reasons, surely, that the Victorians speak to ‘us’ is because of their place in childhood reading, listening and viewing (real or imaginary) as much as their formal place in school and university curricula as fiction and history. The cover of Peter Carey’s reworking of Great Expectations, Jack Maggs (1997) – a sepia photo of a ‘real’ Artful Dodger, staring, tersely at the camera – is a clear instance of this distinctive appeal. These texts are at once compelling page-turners and familiar and reassuring: a place of childhood nostalgia for readers, sharpened with contemporary ‘edge’. And in this sense they differ sharply from the experiences of shock and novelty recorded by Victorian readers.

Perhaps we must look to other media for renewed versions of these experiences of nervous shock and complexly constructed incredulity. As we’ve seen, early film played richly on the ‘magical’ properties of the medium. Nearly all of the silent versions of The Woman in White had the same actress play Ann and Laura. The 1913 adaptation of The Dead Secret, considered a proto-text for The Woman in White, also deployed the same actress, Marion Leonard, has earned its footnote in film history as an early instance of double-exposure – magically allowing the actress to be present in both roles in the same scene. This same play on the technical possibilities of illusion, combined with the play on (in)credulity and doubling so typical of Collins’s work is strongly present in Lloyd Webber’s musical. The stage is a circle bounded by a continuously curving screen, used to project the scenery and propel us – sometimes at disorienting speed – to the next scene. Indeed the whole musical is structured within a dioramic conceit: the audience is drawn into a spinning dioramic narrative, whose first image, an abandoned room of discarded toys, provides a clue, to the losses, literal and symbolic, that lie at the heart of the mystery. Beyond this, the musical as form exploits various established forms of repetition. Songs are often repeated to powerful effect: a euphoric country dance that Walter, Marian and Laura join becomes an ironic ‘celebration’ of Laura’s marriage to Sir Percival, and a bitter-sweet marking of Laura and Walter’s marriage at the end. Walter, Marian and Laura all sing the same love song, a melody much repeated, sometimes just as a brief echoic sequence. As a consequence, the past, recent as well as distant, exerts a strong if diffused force, tempering the forward drive of the plot. This gives a context to the ghostliness of Ann which is much played upon – flesh-and-blood or spectral presence? – together with the disconcerting likeness of Ann and Laura. This resemblance is finally turned against Sir Percival when Laura haunts him as Ann’s ghost and terrifies him into confession of his crimes. As in the novel, justice is not done by due process of law. But here, instead of dying in a burning church, Glyde is mown down by a train which comes out of a tunnel and rushes at the audience. Indeed Sir Percival’s death, which replays a mythic moment from film history, is perhaps most importantly and memorably the occasion for audience ‘sensation’.

[1] The Moonstone was serialised by the BBC in 1959, 1972 and 1996; The Woman in White made a brief appearance in the ITV Hour of Mystery series in 1957 and was serialised by the BBC in 1966, 1982 and 1997.  It was also produced on French television as La Femme en Blanc in 1970.  On film and television adaptations, see Andrew Gasson, Wilkie Collins: An Illustrated Guide (OUP, 1998), and Lyn Pykett, Wilkie Collins (Oxford University Press, 2005), p.244.

[2]See also Deborah Vlock Dickens, Novel-Reading and the Victorian Popular Theatre (Cambridge Universiry Press, 1998), pp. 3-4; Martin Meisel, Realisations:  Narrative,  Pictorial and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton University Press 1983).

[3]Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, The Victorian Serial (University of Virginia Press, 1991), N.N. Feltes Modes of Production in Victorian Novels (Chicago University Press, 1986).

[4] See Ira Nadell, ‘Wilkie Collins and his Illustrators’ in Nelson Smith and R.C. Terry (eds.) Wilkie Collins to the Forefront:  Some Reassessments (AMS Press,1995).

[5] The New Magdalen 1910, 1912, 1913, 1914; The Dead Secret (Monopol) 1913; Armadale 1916; The Moonstone (US, Selig Polyscope) 1909; (France, Pathé) 1911; (US, dir. Frank Hall Crane, 1915); The Woman in White (US, Thanhouser )1912; (US Gem) 1913.

[6] 1918 (USA, Thanhouser); 1920, Twin Pawns, based on The Woman in White, (US, Acme Pictures, dir. Léonce Perret; 1928 (USA, dir. Herbert Wilcox); 1948 (USA, dir. Peter Godfrey). Crimes at the Dark House 1940 (GB, dir. George King).

 [7] Tom Gunning, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator’ in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds.) Film Theory and Criticism (Oxford University Press, 2004), p.868.

[8] Ian Christie ‘Sources of Visible Delight: Towards a Typology of Early Film Adaptation’ in Scene Stealing: Sources for British Cinema Before 1930, edited by Alan Burton and Laraine Porter (Flicks Books, 2003).

[9] Reviews of Bloomer’s Mother-in-Law, Andegli (‘Insights into the Habits and Industries of the Natives of Somaliland) and Holiday Resorts of Italy in Supplement to The Bioscope, January 16, 1913, pp.xxxiii and xxxiv.

[10] Donald W. McCaffrey and Christopher P. Jacobs, Guide to the Silent Years of American Cinema (Wespoint: Greenwood Press, 1999), p.295.

[11] The discussion of various versions of The Woman in White is drawn from reviews from The Bioscope, one of the leading British trade papers of the period.

[12] Lady Audley’s Secret ,  Ideal Films, 1920, produced by Jack Denton. Archived on site and can be viewed at the BFI library, Stephen Street, London.

[13] On radio adaptations, see Gasson’s Illustrated Guide.

[14] Anthony Sher, Patricia Hodge, Greg Wise (soon to appear in Ang Lee’s film version of Sense and Sensibility (1997) and Keeley Hawes are some of the star names.

[15] Broadcast at 8.50pm on 28 December and 9.20 on 29 December.

[16] See Kate Flint, ‘Plotting the Victorians: Narrative, Post-modernism and Contemporary Fiction’ in Barrie Bullen (ed.) Writing and Victorianism edited by J. B. Bullen (Longman, 1997).

[17]Sadoff and Kucich, Victorian Afterlife,  p.xi.