The best of friends: Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens [Rosey Taylor]

A MOUSTACHE-GROWING competition and a dramatic mountain rescue – there was rarely a dull moment in the friendship of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins.

Both keen on acting, they first met in March 1851 when they were invited to perform in an amateur theatrical production of Not So Bad As We Seem, written by Edward Bulwer-Lytton.

The pair hit it off immediately, and so began a long and fruitful friendship that would continue until Dickens’s death in 1870.

This relationship is now examined in an exhibition – the very first to do so – at the Dickens House Museum, and will run across the bicentenary of Collins’s birth (January 8, 1824).

When the pair met, Dickens, who was nearly12 years older than Collins, had already found international fame having written The Pickwick Papers (published in1837), Oliver Twist (1838), A Christmas Carol (1843) and David Copperfield (1850).

Collins, who as a child lived in Pond Street and Hampstead Square, had yet to publish the work that would make his name: the “sensation” novel The Woman in White.

But the friendship would be of huge significance to both men.

In the exhibition, which includes original letters, playbills, art works and other objects, we learn that in Dickens, Collins “found an alternative to his strict father” and in Collins, Dickens found “a playful companion”.

They worked, holidayed, acted and partied together, enjoyed lively meals, and celebrated birthdays and special occasions.

Such was the trust between them, they even shared secrets, confiding in each other over the years.

There was also a family connection, as Collins’s brother Charles would go on to marry Dickens’s daughter Katey in 1860.

In work, their lives became intertwined. They collaborated on articles in Dickens’s Household Words magazine, as well as on novellas and plays such as The Frozen Deep – an original edition of which is on display in the exhibition.

They would work on 10 stories together – more than either did with any other writer. But Dickens was also Collins’s boss, with the latter made a permanent staff writer for Household Words.

Away from work, there was no shortage of fun. We learn of a holiday Dickens, Collins and their friend the artist Augustus Egg took in Italy where they embarked on a bizarre moustache-growing competition.

In a previously unseen letter to his sister-in-law Georgina in 1853, Dickens laments that the moustaches are “more distressing, more comic, more sparse and meagre… more given to wandering into strange places and sprouting up noses and dribbling under chins – than anything in that nature ever produced, as I believe, since the Flood”.

The comedy and high jinks in their relationship was also apparent when Dickens and Collins went on a walking trip of Cumberland in the Lake District in September 1857. During the trip they got lost up a mountain, then on their descent Collins injured his leg. It was up to Dickens to carry his friend back to the inn.

Well aware of the comic potential this incident appears in their work The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices.

Several years into their friendship and impressed with Collins’s The Woman in White, Dickens’s serialised it in his periodical All the Year Round. It ran from November 1859 to August 1860 to huge success, bringing Collins lasting fame.

Reading a draft of the novel, Dickens was fulsome in his praise: “You know what an interest I have felt in your powers from the beginning of our friendship, and how very high I rate them: I know this is an admirable book… No one else could do it half so well… So go on and prosper…”
Collins eventually resigned from his writing post, prompting Dickens to write: “I am very sorry that we part company (though only in a literary sense).”

On more personal matters the pair were also close. Dickens confided in Collins about his affair with the actress Ellen Ternan. Meanwhile, a letter from Dickens to Collins appeared to reference a venereal disease from which Collins may have been suffering.

But like any friendship, it was not always plain sailing.

In letters home, Dickens comments on the irritating habits of his companion. He complains about Collins’s casual dress for a ballet trip and bemoans how his friends (Collins in particular) “spit and snort rather more than I have ever found it necessary to do”.

It would also later emerge that Collins’s opinion of his friend’s work could be scathing. In a biography of Dickens found in Collins’s library after his death,  annotations made by Collins remarked on the “badness” of Dombey and Son among other criticisms.

And while there may have been a cooling off between the pair in later years, the bond forged during that fateful meeting in 1851 remained.

Indeed, towards the end of his life Collins wrote affectionately of his friend in a letter: “We were as fond of each other as men could be… Nobody (my poor dear mother excepted, of course) felt so positively sure of the future before me in Literature as Dickens did.”

• Mutual Friends: The Adventures of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins runs at the Charles Dickens Museum until February 25, at 48-49 Doughty Street, WC1N 2LX, 020 7405 2127. For information: dickensmuseum.com/