This image is the cover for the book The Frozen Deep and Miss or Mrs, Classics To Go

The Frozen Deep and Miss or Mrs, Classics To Go

"The Frozen Deep": The play's genesis lay in the conflict between Dickens and John Rae's report on the fate of the Franklin expedition. In May 1845, the "Franklin expedition" left England in search of the Northwest Passage. It was last seen in July 1845, after which the members of the expedition were lost without trace. In October 1854, John Rae (using reports from "Eskimo" (Inuit) eyewitnesses, who informed that they had seen 40 "white men" and later 35 corpses) described the fate of the Franklin expedition in a confidential report to the Admiralty: "From the mutilated state of many of the corpses and the contents of the kettles it is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last resource—cannibalism—as a means of prolonging survival." Miss or Mrs.: Another crisp short novel from Wilkie Collins. As one who distrusts the institution of matrimony, he gives us another example of the somewhat strange Victorian marriage laws. The heroine of Miss or Mrs.?, Natalie, is fifteen years old. Her family wants her to wed Richard Turlington, a failing businessman who wants access to Natalie's father's fortune to save his hide. Natalie hates Turlington and secretly marries Launcelot Linzie, her cousin, who is unable to legally elope with her until her sixteenth birthday. Collins is a past master of knowing how to milk a complicated plot to good effect. Well worth reading. (Goodreads)

Wilkie Collins

William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824 – 23 September 1889) was an English novelist and playwright known for The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868). The last has been called the first modern English detective novel. Born to a London painter, William Collins, and his wife, the family moved to Italy when Collins was twelve, living there and in France for two years, so that he learned Italian and French. He worked at first as a tea merchant. On publishing his first novel, Antonina, in 1850, Collins met Charles Dickens, who became a friend and mentor. Some Collins works appeared first in Dickens's journals Household Words and All the Year Round. The two also collaborated on drama and fiction. Collins reached financial stability and an international following in the 1860s from his best-known works, but began to suffer from gout. He took opium for the pain, but became addicted to it. His health and his writing quality declined in the 1870s and 1880s. Collins was critical of the institution of marriage: he later split his time between widow Caroline Graves, with whom he had lived most of his adult life, treating her daughter as his, and the younger Martha Rudd, by whom he had three children.

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