m e n o f l e t t e r s century focus on linguistic change over time had obscured deeper truths about language as an abstract system. Joseph argues that although the key elements of the Course in General Linguistics were not original, Saussure’s revelation was to fit them together as a whole.

As Saussure wound up the lecture series that would posthumously make his name, he condensed a lifetime’s thought into a single sentence: ‘The entire system can be envisaged as differences of sounds combining with differences of ideas.’ It was the mapping of this total system, in which tout se tient – ‘every part supports every other’ – that was Saussure’s ultimate contribution. Although forged from a combination of centuries-old ideas, Saussure’s dissolving of language into an interplay between sets of differences would later chime with a modernist sensibility and would be picked up by the structuralists in the 1950s.

Joseph reveals Saussure’s personality through a series of contrasting vignettes.

Descriptions of Saussure as a lecturer show the intimidating scope of his erudition. ‘He warned his students that, to save time, he assumed that they already knew Greek, Latin, French, German, English and Italian,’ reported one student, adding that Saussure had given him zero on an exercise for making a single mistake, ‘confusing a short a with a long a’. For the few students who could survive the rigours of Saussure’s courses, though, he offered them sensitivity, kindness and support.

There was another, less austere side to Saussure. As an adolescent, he was a keen and accomplished poet. While teaching in Paris, he also gambled heavily – offsetting his losses at the horse races at Longchamp with his winnings in nightly sessions of poker. The surpluses and debits were duly jotted down in his notebooks, with headings in Greek letters: πωκερ (poker) and τυρφ (turf ). While much of his career was spent on technical aspects of linguistic theory, he also embarked on quixotic projects like his three-year search for anagrams, ‘syllabograms’ and ‘hypograms’ in classical poetry.

John E Joseph’s biography is a rich, scholarly account, exhaustively detailed, pursuing the Saussure family back into the fifteenth century and forward to the present day. Every twist and turn of Saussure’s intellectual trajectory is mapped out and analysed. Weighing in at over 700 pages, this book will not be an easy read for the non-specialist, which is a shame, given that buried in the detail is a compelling narrative of a great but flawed intellectual. From early on Saussure was destined to be a thinker, to live the life of the mind, but throughout his life he never felt he could pin down exactly what he meant. Joseph puts it well: ‘The piles of manuscripts were as the ruins of his dreams. He spent his life on them, waiting for a perfecting light that never came.’ To order this book for £30, see the Literary Review bookshop on page 39

Literary Review | m a r c h 2 0 1 2 10 m e n o f l e t t e r s c at h e r i n e p e t e r s

Plots Have I Laid ilkie Collins By Peter Ackroyd (Chatto & Windus 199pp £12.99)

Even in his twenties Wilkie Collins looked ‘weird and odd’. His head and shoulders were unusually large, but his hands and feet were tiny; when he bought boots for his mother in Paris he tried them on for size. He was severely myopic. He suffered from rheumatic disorders and nervous tics that worsened as he aged. He wore clothes that were eccentric in colour and cut. He also, like many ugly men, possessed a charm that made him irresistible to women. He was a delightful companion and tolerant friend; adults and children alike always called him Wilkie. He believed firmly that ‘a spoiled child is a happy child’ and the depiction of children in his later novels is clearly that of a man who delighted in his own offspring, though his private life was unmentionable in mixed society. Though more Victorian men than is generally supposed had dual homes and families, Collins avoided marrying either of his two mistresses, Caroline Graves and Martha Rudd. Unwilling to abandon either, he negotiated a compromise where each was aware of the other and eventually accepted the situation.

Yet this benign figure also wrote dark novels with complicated plots and violent situations, featuring adventurous and often transgressive heroines. Though reviewers were frequently critical, his readers revelled in the energy and inventiveness of Marian Halcombe, Magdalen Vanstone and Lydia Gwilt, who fought against the restrictions imposed on them. Like Dickens, his friend and mentor, Collins saw what was wrong with the world, castigating its prejudices and satirising complacent do-gooders. But where Dickens tended to fall back on the operation of individual philanthropy as a solution, Collins appreciated the many different ways in which life might be lived in a more tolerant and open society.

The last quarter of the twentieth century saw a reassessment of Wilkie Col-

lins’s literary reputation that would have surprised and delighted him. With the growing importance of cultural studies to literary criticism, his writing became a topic for academic study: his flouting of Victorian convention and overturning of stereotypes are now his passport to serious consideration. Though The Woman in White and The Moonstone have never been out of print and have always been recognised as early masterpieces of

Wilkie: lady killer mystery and detection, the study of Collins’s less famous work has deepened our understanding. Now that virtually everything he wrote is available in paperback (and much of it also in e-book format), he has become part of the mainstream of Victorian fiction.

For me the clue to both the man and his work is his celebration of difference. Peter Ackroyd is absolutely right when he rejects the commonly held view that there was a decline in Collins’s later fiction because he became a didactic novelist with a message to deliver. The messages were always there. They concerned the social and legal judgements that disadvantaged the poor, those of different race or religion, children, animals and above all women. He fought against prejudice, sometimes in surprising areas. In a number of novels, including the early Hide and Seek (1854) and the late Poor Miss Finch (1872), he argues powerfully that physical handicap can enrich rather than detract from the life of the ‘afflicted’. In each case a young woman is freed by her disability from many of the constraints of society. In an uneven novel that, with all its absurdities, I like more than Ackroyd does, Lucilla Finch can experience her natural sexuality without guilt: ‘Modesty is essentially the growth of our own consciousness of the eyes of others … blindness is never bashful.’

There was, however, a decline in much of Collins’s later work. I can’t agree with Ackroyd’s conclusion that ‘He had a genius for construction, above all else.’ Many of the late novels are diffuse and slackly structured, for a number of reasons. His increasingly frequent illnesses and the opiates he took to control the pain had an effect on his ability to weave together the strands of his complicated plots, while his expensive commitments to his two families forced him to work ceaselessly. Hoping that he could make his fortune in the theatre, he began, with the writing of Man and Wife (1870), to manufacture dual-purpose plots, writing both novel and play simultaneously. The melodrama that worked in the late Victorian theatre was less often effective on the page, though that was not the whole problem. The Fallen Leaves (1879), which Ackroyd calls ‘one of the most powerful and impassioned critiques of Victorian society ever composed by a novelist’, was never intended for theatrical performance. It depicted the life and misfortunes of a sixteenyear-old prostitute, but other novelists were tackling similar themes and it was not only the subject that deterred readers. It is so well-intentioned that I wish I could like it as much as Ackroyd does, but the complicated story is not only badly constructed but ruined by its sentimental, didactic and moralistic style.

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