Dickens was no great reader, and it is plain by what he did not say, as well as by what he did say, that he did not on the whole admire ardently the work of his contemporaries. But he made a special exception in the case of Wilkie Collins, with whom he collaborated on more than one occasion, as in the story _No Thoroughfare_. He published in his own magazine some of Collins’s best detective stories, including _The Woman in White_, _No Name_, and _The Moonstone_. Of these stories Dickens put first _No Name_. _The Moonstone_ he criticised in one of his letters to Wills. At first he thought it in many respects ‘much better than anything he has done,’ but afterwards he wrote, 26th July 1868: ‘I quite agree with you about _The Moonstone_. The construction is wearisome beyond endurance, and there is a vein of obstinate conceit in it that makes enemies of readers.’ {90} In September 1862 he wrote in enthusiastic terms of admiration about _No Name_. This I take to be a very weighty and significant letter, as will appear in the sequel: I have gone through the second volume [_No Name_] at a sitting, and I find it _wonderfully fine_. It goes on with an ever-rising power and force in it that fills me with admiration. It is as far before and beyond _The Woman in White_ as that was beyond the wretched common level of fiction-writing. There are some touches in the Captain which no one but a born (and cultivated) writer could get near—could draw within hail of. And the originality of Mrs. Wragge, without compromise of her probability, involves a really great achievement. But they are all admirable; Mr. Noel Vanstone and the housekeeper, both in their way as meritorious as the rest; Magdalen wrought out with truth, energy, sentiment, and passion, of the very first water. I cannot tell you with what a strange dash of pride as well as pleasure I read the great results of your hard work. Because, as you know, I was certain from the Basil days that you were the Writer who would come ahead of all the Field—being the only one who combined invention and power, both humorous and pathetic, with that invincible determination to work, and that profound conviction that nothing of worth is to be done without work, of which triflers and feigners have no conception. {91} Mr. Swinburne in his study of Wilkie Collins writes: It is apparently the general opinion—an opinion which seems to me incontestable—that no third book of their author’s can be ranked as equal with _The __Woman in White_ and _The Moonstone_: two works of not more indisputable than incomparable ability. _No Name_ is an only less excellent example of as curious and original a talent. {92a} This was not the opinion of Dickens. ‘A BACKWARD LIGHT’ On 6th October 1859 Dickens replied to a suggestion by Collins on the working out of _A Tale of Two Cities_. The italics are mine: