The Progress of Taste in Mid-Nineteenth Century England: Art in Wilkie Collins' Early Writing

Abstract

This dissertation shows the extent to which Wilkie Collins reflected the changing mid-Victorian perceptions on aesthetic discrimination in his early body of work. A producer of literary commodities for a middle-class public, Collins had an acute understanding of the pivotal changes brought by capitalist development in what concerned the acquisition of taste: once a matter restricted to a selected few and now, as his career in the field of letters progressed, a right demanded by many. Following a close reading of his literary production, essays and correspondence during the 1850s, Collins emerges as an author thoroughly aware of the democratisation of taste that pervaded a crucial decade of the nineteenth century.