Exhibition: Mutual Friends: The Adventures of Charles Dickens & Wilkie Collins

The exhibitions explore one of the great - and most entertaining - literary friendships, tracing the shared work, travels, confidences and, above all, the bond of friendship between two men whose books remain loved the world over.

From the moment they met in March 1851, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins began to work together, beginning a friendship that would continue until Dickens’s death in 1870.

Over the following years, Charles and Wilkie would become co-writers, editors and the best of friends, linked by family (in 1860, Collins’s brother Charles married Dickens’s daughter, Katey), sharing advice and opinions and travelling the world for work and pleasure.

The exhibition explores the huge body of work their friendship produced, from jointly written articles in Dickens’s Household Words magazine, to novellas and plays, such as The Frozen Deep (1856), and a five-part article The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices (1857). The latter was based on a walking tour in Cumberland in which the pair ended up lost up a mountain before ditching their guide and attempting a descent, during which Collins slid down into a river and injured his leg.

Among the exhibits are an original edition of their collaborative play, The Frozen Deep, with notes by Wilkie Collins; a group photograph of Dickens and Collins along with friends and family at Dickens’s home at Gad’s Hill in Kent; Wilkie Collins’s sketchbook; a pencil drawing of Wilkie by Edward Ward; a birthday invitation from Charles to Wilkie written on 6 February 1859 (‘My Dear Wilkie, Tomorrow (Monday, when you will receive this), is my Birth Day. Will you come? Do, if you can, and we'll forget everything but Brighton...’); and Dickens’ personal set of rules and regulations for amateur dramatic performances.

Ian has Visited - review here.