Looking for a Victorian Thriller Beach Read? Look No Further!

Want a real beach read that will keep you gripped?

Want to be surprised at every turn and read about people as unexpected as they come?

Want to wander around a rambling coastal mansion in Cornwall searching for a horrible secret?

The author immerses herself in her summer read!

There is nothing better than being drawn so rapidly into a novel that you lose track of time and space. This is why you want to read Wilkie Collins, a popular British novelist of the 19^th century. He wrote books that were hard to put down. Facts: He was friends with Dickens. Collins had two common law wives at the same time. He and Dickens frequently left behind their families to ramble to houses of questionable repute in France. He suffered from gout and rheumatoid arthritis and became an opium addict. ¹ But he lived it up and poured his life into his books.

In 1857 he published his first full-length novel. The Dead Secret involves a mansion named Porthgenna on the Cornish coast.  The story starts with the victim of the secret, a prematurely graying servant named Sara, begging her dying mistress not to commit the secret to writing. The dying woman is too afraid to tell her husband herself and leaves it to Sara to give him the letter. Sara abstains from passing the letter on, and, horrified by her responsibility, she hides the letter in a disused part of the house. Her mistress’s parting threat is “You will give this to your master…or I will come to you from the other world.”² 

The tension of the novel continues to ratchet up as Sarah realizes she must return to the mansion and find the letter despite her fear of running into her dead mistress.  Sarah is determined to hide the truth and preserve Porthgenna for her master’s daughter. Complicating the plot is a disagreeable relative, Andrew Treverton. After Treverton’s brother dies, his reprehensible footman, Shrowl, concocts a strategy to fight to make his employer the heir. Soon there are three parties eager to grasp that letter.

In the story we see characters who reflect the ordinary people of the day, minus the playfulness of Dickens’ sometimes fairy tale-like style. As in all of Collins’ novels, he sticks to legal precedents.  Unlike Dickens, who wads his legal mysteries in layers of camouflage, Collins elects to align the story’s legal dilemma with straightforward mistake and fraud.

The best character is the Tower of Porthgenna, a moldering beast of a pile: “The panes of the large window were yellow with dust and dirt, and festooned about fantastically with cobwebs.”³ The very dust seems to collect and gather shapes in the dim chambers, causing the serious gothic reader to grip the book in terror. 

If you are a true fan of Victorian thrillers, this one will win you. 

Wilkie Collins went on to write many novels including two of the most famous sensation novels of the nineteenth century:  The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868). While we don’t know if any of the Lippitts were Collins fans, we are sure you will be once you pick one up to read.

Karen Teal, PhD, is a Lippitt House Museum volunteer, an English professor, and a fan of Wilkie Collins.

1. Andrew Lycett, Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation. (London: Hutchinson, 2013), 110.

2. Wilkie Collins. The Dead Secret. (New York: Dover, 1979), 17.

3. Ibid., 29.