of the plot in English
fiction found its culmination in the work of Wilkie Collins, whose
_Moonstone_ is probably the finest piece of mere literary cabinet-making
in the world. All the younger writers of his time were strongly under
his domination and it was quite a necessity for us to have some merely
mechanical central idea round which we could evolve a story which, in
its serial form, should keep the reader perpetually upon the tenterhooks
of expectation. Such an idea I had stumbled on in _Grace Forbeach_ where
one of the characters was made feloniously to possess himself of his
own property and thereby rendered himself liable to penal servitude. I
elaborated this notion in _Joseph's Coat_ and made the development of
the whole fable dependent on it.

Leaving forgotten _Grace Forbeach_ out of the reckoning, _Joseph's Coat_
was my third novel in the order of writing and the second in order of
publication. The second half of _A Life's Atonement_ was written under
difficulties which would have been absolutely insurmountable if it had
not been for that spirit of camaraderie which distinguished the jolly
little Bohemian set amongst whom I had fallen. One chum who lived over
an undertaker's shop in Great Russell Street found me house-room, and
I had a resource from which, for the space of some ten weeks, I was
entitled to draw one pound a week, which came to me in rather an odd
fashion. Every morning a half-crown was slipped under the doormat,
except on Saturdays, when three were left there, one for the needs
of the day and a double allowance for the Sunday. A loaf and a tin of
Chicago beef stocked the larder, and that being once attended to, the
remnant of my income served for such necessaries of life as beer and
tobacco, and pen and ink and paper. The bargain I had made with Messrs
Chambers was that I should receive one-half payment for the book--one
hundred and twenty-five pounds--on delivery and acceptance, and the
other half on the conclusion of the serial publication of the story in
their journal. This left an interval of twelve months between the two
payments, and the first was all but exhausted when my second commission
from the firm reached me. It was then drawing towards the close of the
year, and Mr Robert Chambers wrote me to say that the writer with whom
he had bargained to follow _A Life's Atonement_ had broken down in
health, and asking if I were in a position to supply her place. I went
off post-haste to Edi