BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 215London (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001). Weston is intent on claiming Maclise for
Ireland; her long fourth chapter on the Dickens-Maclise friendship criticizes Dickens
for his racial stereotyping of the Irish. For a full treatment of Dickens, Forster, and
The Daily News, see John Drew, Dickens the Journalist, chap. 5.
Discussions of the Dickens-Collins friendship have tended to focus on the ques-
tion of who was a good or a bad influence on whom. In his two-volume biography,
Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, Edgar Johnson attempts to balance a nega-
tive view of Collins that followed from Forster’s almost complete neglect of him in
his Life of Charles Dickens. Johnson calls Collins “lazy, skeptical, slovenly, unpunctual”
but also “gentle, warm-hearted and unpretentious” (784); in relation to “The Lazy
Tour of Two Idle Apprentices” he becomes “the indolent and sybaritic Collins”
(879). Biographies of Collins published at the same time reveal an attractive man
who could work as hard as he could play, and whose collaboration with Dickens
affected the development of both writers. See Kenneth Robinson: Wilkie Collins:
A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1952) and Robert Ashley, Wilkie Collins (New
York: Roy, 1952). Sue Lonoff ’s “Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins,” Nineteenth-
Century Fiction 35.2 (1980): 150–70, gives a thorough and just assessment of what
each man did for the other, in life and in fictional technique. The most detailed and
canny account of their collaborative writing may be found in Lilian Nayder, Unequal
Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Authorship (Ithaca: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 2002). Nayder analyzes differences between Dickens’s and Collins’s
contributions to collaborative works, and reveals the greater liberality in Collins’s
treatments of women, class, and imperialism. The crucial text for a study of The Fro-
zen Deep is Robert Louis Brannon, Under the Management of Mr. Charles Dickens: His
Production of “The Frozen Deep” (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966). Brannon
provides the text of the play as it was originally performed, shows Dickens’s changes
in Collins’s draft, and discusses the various contexts for the play. See Lilian Nayder
for a detailed study of Collins’s ideas and Dickens’s revisions.
The structure of triangular desire is described by René Girard in the first chapter
of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Frec-
cero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972). In Between Men: English Lit-
erature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick explores triangular desire in a way that shows the asymmetrical
structure of such triangles, as they are affected by historical changes in gender and
class structures. Her chapters on Dickens’s last two novels uncover what she calls
“the denied erotics of male rivalry” (181) and the linking of “the erotic and the
murderous” (187). My reading of Our Mutual Friend parts company with Sedgwick’s
emphasis on anal eroticism and male rape; her Dickens men approach one another
from behind, while mine are fascinated face to face. But I am indebted to her con-
nection of class difference with male homosocial bonding.
Jeff Nunokawa offers a variant approach in his comments on “Our Mutual Friend
and the Erotics of Downward Mobility” in The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian
Novel, ed. Deirdre David (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 142–47;
Nunokawa notices that “Signs of a sexual taste for class denigration surface all over
Dickens’s novels”—in male characters, at least (142). Robert L. Patten writes a few
fine pages about how bachelor friendship trumps marriage in “Serialized Retrospec-
tion in The Pickwick Papers,” 135–39.