←Menu of Letters 1889

Aet. 37, to Edward Tyas Cook, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. In “Wilkie Collins: Why Not Westminster Abbey?” (Pall Mall Gazette, 25 September 1889, pages 1-2), Harry Quilter, in mourning the death (on 23 September) of Collins, said the departed novelist was the greatest story teller ever known and a great moralist as well. “With the noisy self-advertisement of the later Victorian litterateurs he had no sympathy: the oracles of the Savile Club, strident utterers of nothing, beggars, without even the excuse of poverty, who fatten upon the exhumed achievements of the past, or earn a shameful existence by belittling those of the present, knew him not, and he knew not them. … he made literature, not abused it, and while around him disputatious scribes who had written nothing wept hysterical admiration over the indecencies of the French medaeval poets and the synthesized lust of Bourget and Maupassant, he succeeded in proving … that even the saddest social problem of our time may find a right place in fiction.” Some literary names associated with the Savile Club were Besant, Colvin, Dobson, Hardy, Haggard, Henley, Kipling, Lang, Pater, Patmore, Saintsbury, Stevenson, and Todhunter. In 1882 the Club moved from Savile Row to 102 Piccadilly.