Man and Wife by Wilkie Collins — Bibliomancer edition cover
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Fiction · 1870

Man and Wife

Wilkie Collins

Reading time
about 16.5 h
Length
229,141 words · 446 pages
Structure
68 chapters
Language
English
Era
Victorian

A star athlete's private promise to marry the woman he has secretly courted becomes legally binding under Scotland's own informal marriage law, in a novel written to expose how the era's own laws of marriage — irregular Scottish unions and the near-blank protections given to married women — could trap the innocent and shield the guilty.

Wilkie Collins published Man and Wife in 1870, one of his later novels written explicitly to campaign for legal reform, following the model of his own earlier The Woman in White.

This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text.

Contents

  1. Part the First — The Villa at Hampstead
  2. Chapter I
  3. Chapter II
  4. Chapter III
  5. Chapter IV
  6. Part the Second — The March of Time
  7. Chapter V
  8. Chapter VI
  9. Chapter VII
  10. Chapter VIII
  11. Chapter IX
  12. Chapter the First — The Owls
  13. Chapter the Second — The Guests
  14. Chapter the Third — The Discoveries
  15. Chapter the Fourth — The Two
  16. Chapter the Fifth — The Plan
  17. Chapter the Sixth — The Suitor
  18. Chapter the Seventh — The Debt
  19. Chapter the Eighth — The Scandal
  20. Chapter the Ninth — Anne
  21. Chapter the Tenth — Mr. Bishopriggs
  22. Chapter the Eleventh — Sir Patrick
  23. Chapter the Twelfth — Arnold
  24. Chapter the Thirteenth — Blanche
  25. Chapter the Fourteenth — Geoffrey as a Letter-Writer
  26. Chapter the Fifteenth — Geoffrey in the Marriage Market
  27. Chapter the Sixteenth — Geoffrey as a Public Character
  28. Chapter the Seventeenth — Near It
  29. Chapter the Eighteenth — Nearer Still
  30. Chapter the Nineteenth — Close on It
  31. Chapter the Twentieth — Touching It
  32. Chapter the Twenty-First — Done!
  33. Chapter the Twenty-Second — Gone
  34. Chapter the Twenty-Third — Traced
  35. Chapter the Twenty-Fourth — Backward
  36. Chapter the Twenty-Fifth — Forward
  37. Chapter the Twenty-Sixth — Dropped
  38. Chapter the Twenty-Seventh — Outwitted
  39. Chapter the Twenty-Eighth — Stifled
  40. Chapter the Twenty-Ninth — Anne Among the Lawyers
  41. Chapter the Thirtieth — Anne in the Newspapers
  42. Chapter the Thirty-First — Seeds of the Future (First Sowing)
  43. Chapter the Thirty-Second — Seeds of the Future (Second Sowing)
  44. Chapter the Thirty-Third — Seeds of the Future (Third Sowing)
  45. Chapter the Thirty-Fourth — The Night Before
  46. Chapter the Thirty-Fifth — The Day
  47. Chapter the Thirty-Sixth — The Truth at Last
  48. Chapter the Thirty-Seventh — The Way Out
  49. Chapter the Thirty-Eighth — The News from Glasgow
  50. Chapter the Thirty-Ninth — Anne Wins a Victory
  51. Chapter the Fortieth — Julius Makes Mischief
  52. Chapter the Forty-First — Lady Lundie Does Her Duty
  53. Chapter the Forty-Second — The Smoking-Room Window
  54. Chapter the Forty-Third — The Explosion
  55. Chapter the Forty-Fourth — The Letter and the Law
  56. Chapter the Forty-Fifth — The Foot-Race
  57. Chapter the Forty-Sixth — A Scotch Marriage
  58. Chapter the Forty-Seventh — The Last Chance
  59. Chapter the Forty-Eighth — The Place
  60. Chapter the Forty-Ninth — The Night
  61. Chapter the Fiftieth — The Morning
  62. Chapter the Fifty-First — The Proposal
  63. Chapter the Fifty-Second — The Apparition
  64. Chapter the Fifty-Third — WHAT had happened in the hours of darkness?
  65. Chapter the Fifty-Fourth — The Manuscript
  66. Chapter the Fifty-Fifth — The Signs of the End
  67. Chapter the Fifty-Sixth — The Means
  68. Chapter the Fifty-Seventh — The End
  69. Epilogue
  70. Chapter I
  71. Chapter II

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About this edition

The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.

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About the author

Wilkie Collins

1824–1889 · Victorian

Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) was born in Marylebone, London, the son of the landscape painter William Collins, and spent much of his boyhood in Italy and France before working as a clerk for a tea merchant and studying law at Lincoln's Inn, to which he was called in 1851 without ever practicing. His first novel, Antonina, appeared in 1850; the next year he met Charles Dickens, and the two became close friends and frequent collaborators, co-writing several Christmas Numbers of Household Words and All the Year Round together, among them The Wreck of the Golden Mary (1856), The Perils of Certain English Prisoners (1857) and, in 1867, No Thoroughfare. Collins's own novels, many first serialized in Dickens's magazines, include The Woman in White (1859–60), No Name (1862), Armadale (1866) and The Moonstone (1868), often ranked among the first detective novels in English. He never married but lived for decades with Caroline Graves and her daughter, while also maintaining a second household with Martha Rudd, by whom he had three children; gout and a lifelong dependence on laudanum for the pain marked his later years. He died in London.

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