Wilkie Collins drafting a prompt for ChatGPT
Wilkie Collins is often overlooked as a comic writer, but Legacy of Cain (1889) shows him at his best, with several scenes causing me to snort indecorously on the train. The subtle humour leavens a novel dealing with the thorny issue of criminality and genetics, which could have become ponderous in less skilled hands.
Prison chaplain Abel Gracedieu agrees to adopt the young daughter of a woman hanged for the brutal murder of her husband. Determined that she should not be tainted by her mother’s shame, he raises Eunice alongside his own daughter, Helena, and allows people to think them sisters. Even the girls themselves are unaware of their respective parentage. When an indigent and eccentric cousin, Miss Jillgall, appears on the scene, a series of events is set in motion and the putative sisters are embroiled in a love triangle. Malevolent characters appear from the past, and the curious begin piecing together the truth.
The tension is maintained throughout, with the reader initially unsure of the identities of the sisters, and Collins twisting the plot: just as you work out what’s happening, there’s a sudden shift. Different perspectives are presented through the use of journals, and Collins employs this technique to great effect. Although Legacy of Cain was nudging the fin de siècle, it contains all the ingredients of a classic sensation novel from the 1860s: madness, murder, poisoning, drug abuse, and shifting identities. As is often the case with Collins, the good prosper and the wicked pop up again where you least expect them.
The narrator urges readers to judge people on their own merits, rather than on their antecedents. He takes issue with the “doctrines of hereditary transmission of moral qualities,” arguing that Cain’s parents weren’t murderers. The novel is an intriguing contribution to the nature versus nurture debate that raged both then and now. Collins is ahead of his time in his sympathetic treatment of a murderer’s daughter, but undoes some of his good work with the occasional outburst against the New Woman. I shall forgive him, however, as Legacy of Cain is a fine example of a timeless Victorian classic – immensely readable, entertaining, and slightly eccentric.