Rambles Beyond Railways

"I chose this because it’s not the usual fare for people who know a little about Collins. They know him as an author of crazy novels, of the sensation novel. This predates most of that work. It’s a travel narrative: it has elements of his fictional capacity, but it’s really about him and a friend, an artist called Henry Brandling, going into Cornwall on a walking holiday. They’re going into this quasi-mythological world, “beyond the reach of the railway,” which is both true and false. Yes, the mainline of the railway from London hadn’t reached Cornwall by 1851, Brunel’s bridge at Saltash only arrived in 1859, but Cornwall isn’t entirely the back-country they describe it as. It’s about them going the rounds, seeing the sights, looking at the locals, being looked at themselves as interesting people from the outside, finding out about local customs, and turning this into the kind of adventure that the literary market would consume, an exercise in local colour. Very early, about eight years before the serialisation of The Woman in White , before Basil , before any of the novels that go on to make his name. He’s known as a journalist, but he’s not a commodity in the way that he will be ten years later. You do. He returns to Cornwall in at least two novels. In the climax of Basil there’s a cliff-hanger—literally a cliff-hanger—scene set in Cornwall that uses one of the locations from the tour. Very much. The colouring of imagination that Collins throws over the landscape is as interesting to him as what he witnesses. I don’t think he would have ever travelled as a non-writer. He wants to characterise Cornwall as this strange, far-away place where old traditions still survive. They still have a mail coach. When he casts it in his novels, it’s still this place of secrecy, mystery, this foggy place that’s surrounded by the beating Atlantic surf."