There cannot be a doubt that it is a very great advance on all your former writing

British authors Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins met in March 1851, introduced by their mutual friend, the painter Augustus Egg. By that time, Dickens (then 39) was already a literary star, whereas Collins (then 27) was still an aspiring writer. Both men shared a fondness for amateur theatre, and their first collaboration was on the stage in a play called Not So Bad As We Seem, with Collins playing the butler and Dickens his master. Shortly afterwards, Dickens invited Collins to write for the literary magazine Household Words, which he had founded the previous year. Collins became a regular contributor and in 1856 joined the staff of Household Words; later he also wrote for Household Words' successor, All the Year Round. It was in the latter magazine that Collins' most famous novels, The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), were eventually serialised.

The Woman in White was serialised from November 1859 to August 1860 to great success, boosting All the Year Round's weekly circulation. In January 1860, after Collins had submitted his first instalments, Dickens wrote the following letter, not only praising Collins for his work but also —in a gentle and tactful way— offering some criticism.

Tavistock House, Tavistock Square, London, W.C.,

Saturday Night, Jan. 7th, 1860.

My dear Wilkie,

I have read this book with great care and attention. There cannot be a doubt that it is a very great advance on all your former writing, and most especially in respect of tenderness. In character it is excellent. Mr. Fairlie as good as the lawyer, and the lawyer as good as he. Mr. Vesey and Miss Halcombe, in their different ways, equally meritorious. Sir Percival, also, is most skilfully shown, though I doubt (you see what small points I come to) whether any man ever showed uneasiness by hand or foot without being forced by nature to show it in his face too. The story is very interesting, and the writing of it admirable.

I seem to have noticed, here and there, that the great pains you take express themselves a trifle too much, and you know that I always contest your disposition to give an audience credit for nothing, which necessarily involves the forcing of points on their attention, and which I have always observed them to resent when they find it out—as they always will and do. But on turning to the book again, I find it difficult to take out an instance of this. It rather belongs to your habit of thought and manner of going about the work. Perhaps I express my meaning best when I say that the three people who write the narratives in these proofs have a dissective property in common, which is essentially not theirs but yours; and that my own effort would be to strike more of what is got that way out of them by collision with one another, and by the working of the story.

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 that this is an admirable book, and that it grips the difficulties of the weekly portion and throws them in masterly style. No one else could do it half so well. I have stopped in every chapter to notice some instance of ingenuity, or some happy turn of writing; and I am absolutely certain that you never did half so well yourself.

So go on and prosper, and let me see some more, when you have enough (for your own satisfaction) to show me. I think of coming in to back you up if I can get an idea for my series of gossiping papers. One of those days, please God, we may do a story together; I have very odd half-formed notions, in a mist, of something that might be done that way.

Ever affectionately.

Prior to this letter, Dickens and Collins had already collaborated several times, e.g. on the fictionalised travel story The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices (1857), the short story The Perils of Certain English Prisoners (1857), and the play The Frozen Deep (1857). In later years, they would write one more story together, the suspenseful No Thoroughfare (1867) —a novella for All the Year Round, which they simultaneously developed into a play. 

Incidentally, as mentioned by Dickens in his letter, he and Collins were friends. From the time they met, the men immediately got along and entered into a friendship that lasted until Dickens' death in 1870. Apart from working together, they also took vacations together, travelling in England and abroad (one of their trips being the inspiration for The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices). In the late 1860s, the relationship between the two became strained, with the marriage of Collins' brother Charles to Dickens' daughter Kate often cited as one of the main causes. Nevertheless, the authors remained friends and continued to write to each other. In January 1870, Dickens wrote to Collins for the last time: "I don't come to see you because I don't want to bother you.  Perhaps you may be glad to see me by-and-by.  Who knows?" Sadly, they never saw each other again; Dickens died several months later, on 9 June 1870.

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Source letter: The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. 2, 1857-1870, by Charles Dickens, edited by his Sister-In-Law & Eldest Daughter (1880)

Via: Project Gutenberg

Image (collage): Charles Dickens (left), painted by Ary Scheffer, 1855 // Wilkie Collins, painted by Charles Allston Collins, 1853

Via: Wikimedia Commons