Even before the publication of Wilkie Collins’s first commonplace book account of the meeting and subsequent adventures of Charles Dickens and Inspector William Field of the Metropolitan Protectives, Bow Street Station (in 1990, under the novelistic title The Detective and Mr. Dickens),* which I had the privilege and profit of editing, I wondered could there be any other lost or hitherto suppressed Collins manuscripts, perhaps detailing subsequent meetings or collaborations between Dickens and Inspector Field. Little did I know how soon and in what abundance those wishfully imagined secret journals would surface out of one hundred years of suppression.*
In January of 1991, two months after the initial publication of the first Collins journal, I received a phone call from Mr. Allerdyce Clive, the Special Collections Curator of the library of the University of North Anglia. “Professor Palmer,” his voice crackled from across the ocean, “we received four more boxes of papers as part of the Warrington bequest and I have only now been able to open and begin inventorying them. You are going to be quite interested in what I have found.” I knew immediately that he had discovered more Collins papers. I hoped beyond hope that there might be another complete commonplace book continuing the story begun in that first secret journal.
“You’ve found another Collins manuscript?” I asked.
“No, sir,” Mr. Clive answered, and I slumped in my chair. “I’ve found five more full volumes. I think you’d better come and look at them.”
It was an incredible literary discovery. I was on the next plane to England.
This memoir, which, consistent with the first, I have titled The Highwayman and Mr. Dickens, is the earliest in date of composition of those five commonplace books discovered in the late additions to the Warrington collection. It seems that the original collection, which I had explored during the editing of that first Collins journal, had come from the country home of George Warrington. These new papers, however, had arrived later due to a delay in selling the deceased’s London flat, and the neglect in packing and transporting the furnishings and papers therein.
George Warrington’s estate bequeathed the papers of his great-grandfather, Sir William Warrington, the renowned Lincoln’s Inn solicitor and personal counselor to Wilkie Collins (as well as Queen Victoria), to the University of North Anglia. This new discovery consisted of five full commonplace books, all covered in the best leather, and written in the same crabbed hand with which I became so familiar while editing that first journal. Upon arrival in England, and after the examination and authentication of these manuscripts, I was invited by Mr. Clive and the Regent General of the university to undertake their editing for a wider publication.
This memoir of Dickens, Inspector Field, and himself, written (as was the first) in the style of a novel as befits its author, begins with a brief preface in which Collins testifies as to why he writes these private journals, which were not intended for publication until long after the deaths of the principals. Following that brief statement of motive, this journal launches itself rather indecorously (for a Victorian writer) into its narrative. What this rather sexually charged opening indicates is that, in the interim since writing the first secret journal, Wilkie Collins became much more honest and more uninhibited.*
Once again, however, Dickens is the central focus and driving force of the events of these journal pages. His relationship with Inspector Field is one of those felicitous pairings of history from which myths are born. Whereas the first commonplace book of Wilkie Collins presented a driven, tortured Dickens, this new discovery presents a fiercely loyal Dickens, a man determined to pursue the responsibilities of friendship to the furthest limits of personal risk. And always, above it all, looms Field, the master magician of this violent London world.
—William J. Palmer
*That first commonplace book chronicled the meeting and collaboration of Dickens and Field on the bizarre affair of what the Grub Street tabloids of Dickens’s and Collins’s time termed the Macbeth Murders. That initial commonplace book discovery also introduced a rogue’s gallery of denizens of both the Victorian underworld and the upper crust, including Irish Meg Sheehey, Scarlet Bess, Serjeant Rogers, and especially one Tally Ho Thompson, a highwayman turned actor.
*These newly discovered commonplace books were composed between the time of Dickens’s funeral in 1870 and Collins’s death in 1889. From the internal evidence of Collins’s own description of their composition (see his opening Prefatories to this commonplace book), they provided him with a vehicle for memory and the loyal fulfillment of his debt of friendship which he felt he owed his mentor, greatest benefactor, and closest friend, Charles Dickens.
*By closest estimate, this second commonplace book was begun in October 1870, some five months after Charles Dickens’s death and approximately six weeks after the completion of the first commonplace book published under my title, The Detective and Mr. Dickens. As the first journal was begun under the impetus of a chance meeting with Field at Dickens’s funeral in Westminster Abbey, this second memoir is also begun, as Collins explains in his “Prefatories,” under the impetus of another chance meeting, with Forster, Dickens’s authorized biographer.