Well, I think his comment about being forgotten in a century is accurate. Almost every schoolchild learns about Charles Dickens. You have to grow up and take the initiative to do your own research to ever discover Wilkie Collins. However good he may have been, he wasn't good enough to gain the stature and longevity that Dickens gained.
Not quite, no. But he is far from having been forgotten.
The Moonstone and
The Woman in White are almost perpetually in print, continue to sell relatively well (quite well for books of that period), are still considered high points in the genre, and continue to garner comments from new readers. Several of his shorter tales are also almost constantly in print in anthologies and the like, especially "A Terribly Strange Bed" and "The Dream Woman" -- the latter being one of the archetypal handlings of the fatal attraction of the premonitory dream, often imitated.
Granted, Collins isn't known "by every schoolchild"'; but then, how many nonetheless popular writers who continue to be read long after they are gone
are so known? Only those accepted into the major literary canon tend to get such recognition. Marlowe doesn't even get this in most cases; and Samuel Johnson is usually only known by name. Yet, as noted, Collins, along with these others, is still
read and known today, both by general readers and by afficionadoes of the field.
I'm sorry, but that statement still smacks far too much of a very narrow, even blinkered, view of literature on the part of Simmons, given such continued attraction for new readers on the part of Collins.
As a contrast -- how many people know the name of Henry James... yet how many people actually
read his work these days? (This is not meant as disrespect to James, whose work is well worth the effort; it is simply noting that the fact that a writer's name is well known, and even that his work is part of a curriculum, is no indication of how viable he remains to the reading public
per se.)
Dickens, of course, has the best of both worlds, as he has been accepted by the literary fraternity wholeheartedly (well, relatively so...) and has retained a popular following, in no little part aided by continuing adaptations of his work to film, theatre, and television.
Speaking of which, here is the listing at imdb for adaptations of Collins' work:
Wilkie Collins (I)
He, too, has had a reasonable share of attention from the various visual media....
Paladin -- I can see where you're coming from, given the romantic element in many of Collins' works; but that is quite common in the novels of the period, whether by greater or lesser luminaries in the literary field. His work was (rightly, I think) known as "thrillers" or "suspense novels" in its time, and his ability to weave an atmosphere of the eerie and supernatural, even with a naturalistic tale, remains quite impressive.
He was also considerably more subtle than one would gather from Simmons' comments, as he could, with a few deft touches, add layer upon layer of interpretation and ambiguity to the incidents in his work, hinting at a much larger scope to which the incidents he presents are as the detail seen within a glass, but which present broader implications to the thought than is seen with the eye. This is most easily discerned in
The Woman in White, where the titular figure hovers like a restless spirit over the entire novel, from her first appearance to the final lines, whether she is a living presence or not. She serves quite well as a presence hovering between the real and unreal worlds, and brings a breath of regions beyond which expands the actual events of the novel to the truly sublime.
However, Collins does demand attentive reading to catch such layering; a casual or careless reading of his work misses a great deal that is there, and may in fact produce a certain confusion concerning aspects of his various tales which,
with such a careful reading, reveal a much closer connection than a mere surface reading allows.
To return to the point made above: A further member of this group, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, was indeed forgotten for many years -- it wasn't until well into the last century that his work began to become once more readily available; yet he has long been regarded as one of, if not
the greatest master of the ghostly tale outside of M. R. James (and James considered himself to be something of a student of Le Fanu). Again, this demonstrates the fallacy of such a view as Simmons puts forth (though the idea that Collins himself may have harbored such fears is not an unreasonable one; most writers who care about their work do, at various points). There is a world of difference between the writers who are touted in the educational curriculum and those whose work is itself remembered; and Collins definitely falls within the latter class....
