The Fallen Leaves (ePub)

In 'Fallen Leaves', Mr. Wilkie Collins has touched on some very difficult problems, and has done it with delicacy. Though the main interest of the story does not lie in the plot, but rather in the characters and in the novel situations he has found, yet there is a sense of consistency and completeness, which draws from the reader as he proceeds the keenest interest, in spite of an occasional touch of melodrama, which Mr. Wilkie Collins finds it very difficult to leave behind him. Amelius Goldenheart, the representative of an old English family, has been educated at a socialist institution in America ; and having fallen under a misconstruction, is glad to make his way to England, a tour for which his independent income of £500 a year is a happy sine qua non. On the voyage he makes acquaintance with a certain Rufus Dingwell, an admirable type of the better class Yankee ; and these two gentlemen are speedily on intimate terms with the family of a Mr. Farnaby, a rich City man, of some incidents in whose earlier life we have had a very significant glimpse in the opening. Mr. Farnaby had, in fact, for purposes of his own, to steal and to convey away his own illegitimate child, that he might compel Mr. Ronald, his rich master, to acquiesce in his wishes for marriage with his daughter. In this he completely succeeds ; and the story turns on the interest of the search for this lost daughter, on the success of which the poor mother finds her one hope. The sketches of Regina, Mr. Farnaby's niece, of Phoebe, the maid, and her lover Jervy, are admirably done, and we should not forget the inevitable Mrs. Lowler, who, though her counterparts have been well done by Dickens and others, still, in Mr. Collins's hands, has traits wholly her own. The scene in the low public-house, where Phoebe fell under the anger of Mrs. Lowler, and was cleverly saved from the results of it by Jervy, is very cleverly executed. Mrs. Farnaby soon takes Amelius into her confidence, and charges him to aid her in the search for her lost child, to which he agrees ; and whilst she is allowing herself to pass into the hands of swindlers, Amelius has all unconsciously found the lost child in ' Simple Sally,' whom he has rescued from the cruel treatment of a foul wretch who held her as his property. The style of life to which these incidents conduct us is what gives the title to the book ; but Mr. Wilkie Collins has taken care to treat everything with such caution and reserve that he would be either a very sensitive or a very coarse person indeed who would feel any other than touched and elevated by the picture here presented.