Cover -- Copyright Page -- Title Page -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- A Chronology of Wilkie Collins -- Abbreviations -- 1. The Life of Wilkie Collins -- Childhood and the Education of a Storyteller -- Collins's Literary Apprenticeship -- The Dickens Years -- Family Secrets and Secret Families -- The Pains of Literary Labour -- 2. The Social Context -- Protest and Reform -- Women, the Law, and Law Reform -- Crime, Criminality, and Policing -- Gender and Sexuality -- Class -- Education -- Religion -- Empire and Race -- 3. The Literary Context -- Novel Reading and Novel Readers -- The Production and Distribution of the Novel -- The Forms of the Novel -- The Novel and the Theatre -- The Novelist as Journalist and Journeyman-of-Letters -- Collins and the Art of the Novel -- Collins and the Reviewers -- 4. Masters, Servants, and Married Women: Class and Social Mobility in Collins's Novels -- Class -- Gender -- Marriage, Family, and the Law -- 5. Sex, Crime, Madness, and Empire -- Sexual Mores and Social Evils -- Criminality and Roguery in Respectable Society -- Madness and its Treatment -- Race, Foreigners, and Empire -- 6. Psychology and Science in Collins's Novels -- Mesmerism, Dreams, and the Unconscious in Collins's Writings of the 1850s and 1860s -- The Sensation Novel and Nineteenth-Century Medical and Psychological Theories -- Collins and the Discourses of Degeneration -- Science and Scientists -- 7. Recontextualizing Collins: The Afterlife of Collins's Novels -- Collins on Film and Television -- Collins in Print -- Collins in Criticism -- Notes -- Further Reading -- Websites -- Film and Television Adaptations -- Index.