Letter from Wilkie Collins, London, to W.H. Wills,1867 May 13 : autograph manuscript signed.

Discussing the terms for his contribution to the Christmas Number of All the Year Round ["No Thoroughfare"] and the financial considerations for the serialization of his next novel [The Moonstone] in All the Year Round; saying "The point you mention had escaped me. I at once admit that there is no difference - so far as you are concerned - between the absolute sale of my work in MS to a publisher, and the absolute sale to "All the Year Around." I might mention, at the same time, that it is to be said, on my side, that the sale remains - in your case as in the publishers - an absolute sale, so far as I am concerned. But I feel that an arrangement which publicly associates my name with Dickens's and which privately associates me with him in the production of a work of fiction, is an arrangement which appeals to me on no ordinary grounds, and which I cannot consent to regulate by any ordinary considerations. I accept unreservedly the pecuniary point of view as you put it - and I will write my half of the forthcoming Christmas Number for Three hundred pounds;" adding, in a postscript, "The other question, about the Serial story is not so easily settled. I ought to have remembered - when I suggested consulting the "No Name" precedent - that this literary commodity purchased of me then was my time, and not the right of periodically publishing my book. Your accountant's figures - quite right as far as they go - don't represent a third of the sum that I actually received for "No Name". Dickens' cheques, in payment of my share of the profits necessarily do not appear - and the fact that my salary and my profits were going on - not only while the work was being published in your journal - but also while I was thinking it out, and writing it for press - are facts unregistered by the accountant, because the accountant knows nothing about them. I will try once more to send you a statement of the figures from my banking book - and of the time from my old diaries. But I am not quite sure that I can undertake this responsibility of asking terms, because my estimate this time cannot be based on actual facts and figures - and the Virginity of a new book is as difficult a thing to sell (with or without benefit of clergy) as the Virginity of a new Girl!"