Basil

Metadata

Title

Basil

Author

Collins, Wilkie, 1824-1889

Publisher

London : Chatto and Windus

Date

1887

Description

Publisher's advertisements (32 p.) appear after text, dated July, 1887.

In publisher's binding, paper covered boards; advertisements on back cover; pastedowns, and flyleaves.

This is Collins’s second novel, after Antonina, and “A Story of Modern Life.” Basil is high-born but falls in love with a linen-draper’s daughter, with whom he contracts a secret marriage. She is subsequently seduced by her father’s clerk, and Basil discovers them in a sordid hotel with walls so thin that he can hear them copulating (horrifying Collins’s contemporaries). In the resulting fight the seducer is thrown onto a newly macadamized road and horribly disfigured. The unfaithful wife dies of typhus and remorse. Later the rivals meet in Cornwall, and the seducer is thrown into a boiling sea.

Format

vii, 344 p. ; 18 cm.

Language

eng

Type

Publishers' paper bindings (Binding)

Yellowbacks

Publishers' advertisements 1887

Provenance

Stamped in ink on t.p. of Athenaeum's copy: "Received Apr 4, 1888 The Athenaeum."

Citation

Collins, Wilkie, 1824-1889, “Basil,” Yellowbacks, accessed May 3, 2024, http://omeka.philaathenaeum.org/yellowbacks/items/show/321.