A Rogue's Life

by Wilkie Collins

Overview

This is a charming and very readable novel written in the mid 19th century by a contemporary of Charles Darwin. Written around the time of Voltaire's Candide and Flaubert's A Sentimental Education, this novel also mixes the adventure and unexpected turns of a picaresque work with the protagonist being from a mildly upper class lineage. Like those others, A Rogue's Life trades on the main character's one foot in the noble's world and one foot in the workingman/adventurer's world to shed light on the inconsistencies and moral hazards that appear when those two spheres meet. A Rogue's Life also includes a 'lifelong' love story as well, although this one, fortunately, rewards the reader heaps more than the other works mentioned. ... (Avel Rudenko)

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781636375359
Publisher:	Bibliotech Press
Publication date:	11/11/2022
Pages:	152
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

A prolific author of the Victorian era, Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) wrote "sensation" novels. The forerunners of today's detective and suspense fiction, his best-known works include The Moonstone and The Woman in White. Charles Dickens was his lifelong friend and collaborator, and many of Collins's stories first appeared in periodicals published by Dickens.

Date of Birth:

December 8, 1824

Date of Death:

September 23, 1889

Place of Birth:

London, England

Place of Death:

London, England

Education:

Studied law at Lincoln¿s Inn, London

Editorial Reviews

A calculating antihero charms his way to wedded bliss and prosperity in this early (1856) novella from the lively pen of the great Victorian melodramatist. Frank Softly, black-sheep son of a hardworking physician (and, in Frank's own words, "probably the most impudent man of my age in all England"), fails to follow his father's professional example, but earns "pocket money" as a caricaturist ("Thersites Junior")-not enough, as he's imprisoned for debt-before turning to portrait painting, then art forgery. During Frank's disgraceful young adulthood, he's banished from his family but given a kind of reprieve contingent on his ability to outlive his grandmother Lady Malkinshaw, an alarmingly hale and hearty beldame who survives more perils and pratfalls than Buster Keaton in his heyday. Repeatedly given employment for which he's spectacularly unqualified, Frank becomes secretary of the snooty Duskydale Institution (of science and literature), where he continues to underachieve, before meeting renegade "chemist" Dr. Dulcifer and his splendiferous daughter Alicia, with whom the rogue is instantly, irretrievably smitten. There is, of course, a mystery surrounding the Dulcifers, and when Frank gains entry to their country estate, he becomes unwittingly involved in the sinister doings of the Bad Doctor (who may be thought of as an early version of The Woman in White's villain par excellence Count Fosco). Collins's genius for clockwork plotting is happily wedded to Frank Softly's racy, urbanely egomaniacal voice, as the Bow Street Runners descend on the Dulcifer domicile, Frank loses and regains Alicia with head-spinning rapidity, and the tale's presumably unhappy denouement in fact metamorphosesinto confirmation of Frank's conviction (so to speak): "Nothing will ever persuade me that Society has not a sneaking kindness for a Rogue."A neglected gem: one of Collins's most enticing fictions, and one of Hesperus Press's happiest rediscoveries.

Kirkus Reviews

"A neglected gem: one of Collins's most enticing fictions, and one of Hesperus Press's happiest rediscoveries."  —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher