Wilkie Collins. Book 8

Wilkie Collins. Book 8: 1. Man and Wife; 2. John Jago's Ghost or The Dead Alive; 3. No Thoroughfare.


1. Man and Wife

Man and Wife was Wilkie Collins’ ninth published novel.

The novel has a complex plot, common in Collins’ work. In a Prologue, a selfish and ambitious man casts off his wife in order to marry a wealthier and better-connected woman, by taking advantage of a loophole in the marriage laws of Ireland.


2. John Jago's Ghost or The Dead Alive

The Dead Alive, also called John Jago’s Ghost, is a novella written in 1874 by Wilkie Collins based on the Boorn Brothers murder case.

Rob Warden, one of the nation's most eloquent and effective advocates for the wrongly convicted, reconsiders the facts of the Boorn case for what they can tell us about the systemic flaws that produced this first known miscarriage of justice-flaws that continue to riddle our system of justice today. A tale of false confessions and jailhouse snitches, of evidence overlooked, and justice more blinkered than blind, the Boorns' story reminds us of the perennial nature of the errors at the heart of American jurisprudence-and of the need to question and correct a system that regularly condemns the innocent.


3. No Thoroughfare

No Thoroughfare is a stage play and novel by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, both released in December 1867

Two boys from the Foundling Hospital are given the same name, (Walter Wilding), with disastrous consequences in adulthood. After the death of one – now a proprietor of a wine merchant's company – the executors, to right the wrong, are commissioned to find a missing heir. Their quest takes them from wine cellars in the City of London to the sunshine of the Mediterranean – across the Alps in winter. Danger and treachery would prevail were it not for the courage of the heroine, Marguerite, and a faithful company servant.