Lillian Nayder is Professor and Chair of English at Bates College. She is the author of The Other Dickens, also from Cornell.

Unequal Partners is a well-written, well-researched, sharply focused book that excels in training our attention on the asymmetries of Dickens's and Collins's professional relationship. In the early 1850's, Dickens was clearly the master, Collins the apprentice, but this model gradually lost applicability as Collins matured as a writer.(Novel) For more than a century, Wilkie Collins's reputation has been overshadowed by that of Charles Dickens, a situation that Nayder goes far toward rectifying.... Nayder's critiques of Collins's The Moonstone faced off by Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood are highlights in this study.(Choice) In Unequal Partners, Nayder graphs a progressively difficult partnership from Collins's initial hero-worship of The Inimitable,... through a more equitable division of labors which still excluded control of the total artistic vision of a work, to Collins's parting company with Dickens in 1862 after eight Christmas Stories.... When Collins returned, he was an established author prepared to challenge the authority of the journal's 'Conductor.' Finally, Nayder provides a refreshing and challenging reading of The Moonstone and The Mystery of Edwin Drood as diametrically opposed in matters of gender and race.(Victorian Web) Nayder's juxtaposition of fact and fiction, and her painstaking scholarship, offer fresh insights which renew interest in works which seemingly contain a key to the productive, yet often strained, alliance, between these two nineteenth-century authors.(Yearbook of English Studies) The Dickens/Collins collaborations and competitions were productive in the authors' lifetimes and subsequently. Lillian Nayder's thorough, clear, and partisan account of Collins's role will assuredly be answered by Dickensians. But they had better consider all her evidence, including the ambiguous, changing material conditions of writing that affected both authors' careers. For she has constructed an exemplary case for the subordinate who rose from dependent to independent Victorian author.(Victorian Periodical Review)

• List of IllustrationsThe Collaborations of Dickens and CollinsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Professional Writers and Hired Hands: Household Words and the Victorian Publishing Business2. Collins Joins Dickens's Management Team: "The Wreck of the Golden Mary"3. The Cannibal, the Nurse, and the Cook: Variants of The Frozen Deep4. Class Consciousness and the Indian Mutiny: The Collaborative Fiction of 18575. "No Thoroughfare": The Problem of Illegitimacy6. Crimes of the Empire, Contagion of the East: The Moonstone and The Mystery of Edwin DroodConclusion—"This Unclean Spirit of Imitation": Dickens and the "Problem" of Collins's InfluenceWorks CitedIndex

Lillian Nayder is Professor and Chair of English at Bates College. She is the author of The Other Dickens, also from Cornell.

Unequal Partners is a well-written, well-researched, sharply focused book that excels in training our attention on the asymmetries of Dickens's and Collins's professional relationship. In the early 1850's, Dickens was clearly the master, Collins the apprentice, but this model gradually lost applicability as Collins matured as a writer.(Novel) For more than a century, Wilkie Collins's reputation has been overshadowed by that of Charles Dickens, a situation that Nayder goes far toward rectifying.... Nayder's critiques of Collins's The Moonstone faced off by Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood are highlights in this study.(Choice) In Unequal Partners, Nayder graphs a progressively difficult partnership from Collins's initial hero-worship of The Inimitable,... through a more equitable division of labors which still excluded control of the total artistic vision of a work, to Collins's parting company with Dickens in 1862 after eight Christmas Stories.... When Collins returned, he was an established author prepared to challenge the authority of the journal's 'Conductor.' Finally, Nayder provides a refreshing and challenging reading of The Moonstone and The Mystery of Edwin Drood as diametrically opposed in matters of gender and race.(Victorian Web) Nayder's juxtaposition of fact and fiction, and her painstaking scholarship, offer fresh insights which renew interest in works which seemingly contain a key to the productive, yet often strained, alliance, between these two nineteenth-century authors.(Yearbook of English Studies) The Dickens/Collins collaborations and competitions were productive in the authors' lifetimes and subsequently. Lillian Nayder's thorough, clear, and partisan account of Collins's role will assuredly be answered by Dickensians. But they had better consider all her evidence, including the ambiguous, changing material conditions of writing that affected both authors' careers. For she has constructed an exemplary case for the subordinate who rose from dependent to independent Victorian author.(Victorian Periodical Review)

• List of IllustrationsThe Collaborations of Dickens and CollinsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Professional Writers and Hired Hands: Household Words and the Victorian Publishing Business2. Collins Joins Dickens's Management Team: "The Wreck of the Golden Mary"3. The Cannibal, the Nurse, and the Cook: Variants of The Frozen Deep4. Class Consciousness and the Indian Mutiny: The Collaborative Fiction of 18575. "No Thoroughfare": The Problem of Illegitimacy6. Crimes of the Empire, Contagion of the East: The Moonstone and The Mystery of Edwin DroodConclusion—"This Unclean Spirit of Imitation": Dickens and the "Problem" of Collins's InfluenceWorks CitedIndex

Lillian Nayder is Professor and Chair of English at Bates College. She is the author of The Other Dickens, also from Cornell.

Unequal Partners is a well-written, well-researched, sharply focused book that excels in training our attention on the asymmetries of Dickens's and Collins's professional relationship. In the early 1850's, Dickens was clearly the master, Collins the apprentice, but this model gradually lost applicability as Collins matured as a writer.(Novel) For more than a century, Wilkie Collins's reputation has been overshadowed by that of Charles Dickens, a situation that Nayder goes far toward rectifying.... Nayder's critiques of Collins's The Moonstone faced off by Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood are highlights in this study.(Choice) In Unequal Partners, Nayder graphs a progressively difficult partnership from Collins's initial hero-worship of The Inimitable,... through a more equitable division of labors which still excluded control of the total artistic vision of a work, to Collins's parting company with Dickens in 1862 after eight Christmas Stories.... When Collins returned, he was an established author prepared to challenge the authority of the journal's 'Conductor.' Finally, Nayder provides a refreshing and challenging reading of The Moonstone and The Mystery of Edwin Drood as diametrically opposed in matters of gender and race.(Victorian Web) Nayder's juxtaposition of fact and fiction, and her painstaking scholarship, offer fresh insights which renew interest in works which seemingly contain a key to the productive, yet often strained, alliance, between these two nineteenth-century authors.(Yearbook of English Studies) The Dickens/Collins collaborations and competitions were productive in the authors' lifetimes and subsequently. Lillian Nayder's thorough, clear, and partisan account of Collins's role will assuredly be answered by Dickensians. But they had better consider all her evidence, including the ambiguous, changing material conditions of writing that affected both authors' careers. For she has constructed an exemplary case for the subordinate who rose from dependent to independent Victorian author.(Victorian Periodical Review)

• List of IllustrationsThe Collaborations of Dickens and CollinsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Professional Writers and Hired Hands: Household Words and the Victorian Publishing Business2. Collins Joins Dickens's Management Team: "The Wreck of the Golden Mary"3. The Cannibal, the Nurse, and the Cook: Variants of The Frozen Deep4. Class Consciousness and the Indian Mutiny: The Collaborative Fiction of 18575. "No Thoroughfare": The Problem of Illegitimacy6. Crimes of the Empire, Contagion of the East: The Moonstone and The Mystery of Edwin DroodConclusion—"This Unclean Spirit of Imitation": Dickens and the "Problem" of Collins's InfluenceWorks CitedIndex