Collins’s fiction often exposes the constructed nature of class and social identity by demonstrating how unstable such supposedly ’fixed’ identifiers are, most notably in The Woman in White and No Name.

“Among English novels of the present day, and among English novelists, a great division is made,” Trollope famously argued in An Autobiography:

Trollope drafted An Autobiography in 1875–76, when the critical consensus in favor of “higher realism” had been established for some time. His chapter on “English novelists of the present day” stresses the social and moral responsibility of the novelist, setting the leisurely unfolding of events over striking effects, and pitting “the elucidation of character” over “the construction and gradual development of a plot.” “When I sit down to write a novel I do not at all know and I do not very much care how it is to end,” Trollope observes. “Wilkie Collins . . . plans everything on, down to the minutest detail, from the beginning to the end . . . The construction is most minute and most wonderful. But I can never lose the taste of the construction” (A ch. 13).

There may be an element of truth in Trollope’s contrast between himself and Collins: between his own dense, multiple plots dominated by an overarching authorial persona and the latter’s use of multiple voices and contrasting forms of narrative testimony. But his use of such contrasts is primarily rhetorical and, throughout his writing career, Trollope increasingly draws on “sensational” techniques. As Walter M. Kendrick has argued, “opposites are always economically interrelated” in Trollope’s fiction, which works “in shifting, dynamic relation to the cliche´s of his contemporaries.”

A third of the way through Elizabeth Gaskell’s story 'A Dark Night’s Work', the heroine Ellinor Wilkins is suddenly roused from a pleasurable reverie by 'a mysterious noise - heavy, sudden' coming from her father’s study, giving rise to 'a mysterious instinct [which] made her feel sick and faint. No sound - no noise. Only by-and-by she heard, what we have all heard at such times of intense listening, the beating of the pulses of her heart, and then the whirling rush of blood through her head.' Creeping down the staircase, she sees, 'with a strange sick horror', the body of Dunster, her father’s unpleasant junior partner, 'his head propped on chair-cushions, his eyes open, staring, distended'. 'Ellinor could not have told whether it was reason or instinct that made her act as she did that fatal night', the narrator continues, describing how, almost in a state of trance, she first attempts to revive the dead man, then helps her father and their servant Dixon to bury Dunster’s body in the garden. This is the 'dark night’s work' that forms the climax of the tale - a 'haunting memory' that 'would come and overshadow her during many, many years of her life' (ch. 6).

'A Dark Night’s Work' was published in All the Year Round in 1863. Like Wilkie Collins, her fellow contributor to the journal, Gaskell often used short fiction as a means of generic experimentation, and her story shares many of the features of sensation fiction. It explores the effects of secrecy; it sets an extreme event in a familiar middle-class setting and exploits immediate physiological response to generate emotional intensity; and it traces the physical, emotional and social consequences of Dunster’s death on Wilkins, on Dixon and above all on Ellinor, as the mental shock of the murder itself becomes ‘the incubus of a dreadful remembrance’ (ch. 11).

In 1895 Max Nordau's Degeneration was translated and presented to an English readership. Opening with an attack on wealth and luxury, it seems at first to echo a familiar liberal assault on aristocratic decadence. But Nordau's tone soon changes, and for the most part Degeneration forms a long diatribe against 'the new aesthetic tendencies' in contemporary art, in particular mysticism, Impressionism and Symbolism, encompassing the writings of Tolstoy, Ibsen, Ruskin, Zola, Nietzsche and Baudelaire, the music of Wagner, and the art of Burne-Jones and D. G. Rossetti. In a sweeping overview that reproduces the 'hysteria' that he claimed to see all around him, Nordau insists that the work of modern artists displays all the symptoms of morbidmental pathology. It is they who are both causes and symptoms of contemporary decline and who need, like criminals and the insane, to be studied in the light of the developing disciplines of psychology, psychiatry and criminology.

Between January and May in the same year, H. G. Wells's story The Time Machine appeared as a monthly serial in the New Review. It too paints a stark picture of universal decline. But Wells sets the 'dusk of nations' far into the future, and uses the possibilities of both science and fiction to speculate on scenarios beyond the boundaries of the present. The laboratory dissolves as the time machine accelerates into the future, and the process of evolution is imaginatively speeded up.

Wilkie Collins was a popular and prolific novelist whose career spanned most of the second half of the nineteenth century. It began in 1850, when Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray and Charlotte Brontë were at the height of their powers and George Eliot was still to publish a work of fiction, and ended in 1890, as the Victorian novel itself was drawing to a close, in the era of Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling and George Gissing. Collins published more than twenty novels, numerous short stories and perceptive and witty pieces of journalism. He collaborated closely with Dickens during the 1850s and 1860s and was involved with Dickens in dramatic productions as well as adapting his own work for the stage. He was a busy and hard-working professional writer who negotiated a rapidly changing literary marketplace and was able to make use of new forms of publication and distribution of fiction at both national and global levels.

Collins's popularity as a compelling storyteller, a 'master of suspense' who inaugurated the sensation novel and played a key role in shaping detective fiction has remained undiminished. Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical version of The Woman in White played to packed audiences in London's West End during 2005, and Sarah Waters's novel Fingersmith, which reworks Collins's signature themes of deception and substitution, was shortlisted for both the Man Booker and the Orange prizes in 2003. Meanwhile, in contemporary criticism Collins's reputation has moved from the margins to the mainstream.

At the beginning of November 1889, just over a month after Wilkie Collins's death, a lengthy retrospect by Algernon Swinburne appeared in the Fortnightly Review. Surveying the long sweep of Collins's career, Swinburne praised the novelist's narrative flair: 'far beyond the reach of any contemporary, however far above him in the loftier and clearer qualities of genius' (CH, p. 254). However, 'there are many', he went on, 'who think that Wilkie Collins would have a likelier chance of a longer life in the memories of more future readers if he had left nothing behind him but his masterpiece The Moonstone and one or two other stories' (CH, p. 259). Although much of the later fiction had real merit, Swinburne concluded, and 'nothing can be more fatuous than to brand all didactic or missionary fiction as an illegitimate or inferior form of art' (CH, p. 262), Collins's tendency to engage explicitly with social issues after 1870 could often be heavy-handed.

Swinburne's parody of Alexander Pope stuck stubbornly to Collins's later writing through most of the twentieth century: the last two decades of his life are generally regarded as a long-drawn-out creative twilight, punctuated by 'fitful gleams' (Peters, p. 313). The loss of the steadying hand of Charles Dickens in 1870 has been one explanation of this decline, alongside the continuing influence of Charles Reade, whose minutely researched polemical novels and plays addressed topical issues such as prison reform. Collins's failing health, his growing dependence on laudanum and a host of other medications to relieve the agonising pain of ocular gout and rheumatic illness, together with the demands of two families and his theatrical activities have added to this picture, as literary influence, bodily and mental fragility, a complicated personal and professional life, and a more explicit ideological stance have blended into an overarching narrative that has dominated readings of his later work.

The threads of slavery ran seamlessly through the fabric of Southern society. Whether they liked it or not, many antebellum Southerners dealt with slaves on a near-daily basis. Many of these dealings triggered controversy. Public officials, slave patrollers, and common-carrier owners and operators constituted a number of the defendants in cases where strangers injured the interests of slaveowners. But disputes with ordinary citizens and business owners came up as well. As the following sections discuss, four major questions arose: (1) What duty of care did strangers have toward slaves, particularly when protecting other types of property? (2) What recourse did slaveowners have against those who kidnapped slaves and what did masters owe to slave catchers? (3) What penalties were appropriate for those who traded and gamed with slaves, sold liquor to slaves, or otherwise undercut the authority of masters? (4) When should defendants avoid liability (and perhaps recover fees) for treating another's slave well?

In these disputes where interested parties could not cheaply have transacted, people asked judges to allocate liability and damages. Here as elsewhere, slave law typically apportioned risks as people would have done themselves, had they been able to do so easily. Slave law accounted for relevant externalities as well. Because drunken, merchant, or fugitive slaves might have stirred up their compatriots or stolen from whites, slave law imposed stiff penalties on those who sold liquor to or bought goods from blacks, and on those who facilitated slave escapes. And slaveowners had to acquiesce to some discipline of slaves by outsiders and some reward for those who captured fugitives or treated slaves with special care.

To keep the peace of Southern society, slaveowners relinquished to others a certain amount of control over slaves. Sheriffs, constables, and jailors had some authority over others' slaves, just as they had over others' lives and possessions generally. But these public officials were not the only persons legally entitled to supervise slaves. In lieu of a standing police force, many Southern states established citizen patrols to keep order. Slave patrols might be thought of as a way of institutionalizing the “hue and cry,” an old English practice that required bystanders to shout loudly when a felon escaped and to pursue the criminal until he was caught. The object of pursuit differed, of course: Southern patrollers often hunted those whose only “crime” was attempting to escape a life of bondage. Besides providing for public control of slaves, Southerners also granted some power to private individuals, particularly overseers.

By comparison to present-day disputes, nineteenth-century plaintiffs (slaveowners and otherwise) were more likely to sue – and to recover damages from – public officials rather than the government itself. As the first section reveals, governments hid behind a shield of sovereign immunity, whereas local officials (particularly sheriffs) faced personal liability if they negligendy caused injuries. The second and third sections show that slave patrollers and overseers faced duties of care similar to those of local officials. Although I cannot say for sure that these legal rules were efficient, I suggest that sovereign immunity coupled with private responsibility of public officials probably suited the antebellum system of law and order better than it would fit today's regime.

Slave hiring was common in the South. Slaves' mobility and intelligence helped them adapt to different jobs, locations, and supervisors, so masters could benefit from hiring out slaves when work was slow at home. Yet these same attributes tempted people to exploit hired slaves when unexpected needs or profit opportunities arose. And slaves, being only human, were sometimes careless and disobedient. Consequently, clashes between slave employers and masters often landed in Southern courts. In keeping with the twofold nature of slaves as property and as humans, antebellum judges drew upon principles established in two broad areas of law to design rules governing slave hiring: the law of hired chattels (especially animals) and the law of employers and employees. The result was a set of rules that enhanced the operation of slave-hiring markets.

But slave-hiring law not only reflected other areas of law, it also served as an important influence. Slave-hiring cases provided precedents for many lawsuits involving livestock or free workers. In other instances, Southern judges developed reasoning in slave cases that later appeared in other types of employment disputes. What follows is, first, an overview of the similarities and differences in laws. Next, the analysis turns to cases in which employers and property owners fixed the terms of their agreements. The chapter ends with a discussion of disputes where courts played a more active role in determining the intentions of parties involved in an employment relationship.

Perhaps the most important finding is this: Although slaves and free workers both faced legal duties to behave like “reasonable persons,” slaveowners recovered damages for injuries far more often than free workers. I offer two explanations for this finding.