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No Name (1862-63) by Wilkie Collins is his most structurally cunning novel — the story of Magdalen Vanstone, a young woman who is revealed (when her parents die and their marriage is found to have been legally invalid) to be illegitimate and therefore disinherited under Victorian law, and who spends the rest of the novel attempting to recover what she regards as rightfully hers through an increasingly desperate series of schemes, impersonations, and moral compromises. The novel is unusual in Collins because its protagonist is also its most morally questionable figure — Magdalen is brilliant, determined, and capable of genuine feeling, but the methods she uses (including a marriage she does not want, to a man she despises, purely to recover her father's estate) raise genuine questions about the limits of justifiable resistance to unjust laws. No Name is the Collins novel that most directly parallels George Eliot's serious moral fiction in its sustained engagement with ethical questions, and it contains some of his finest writing.
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No Name (1862)
Complete No Name Book List
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No Name
Wilkie Collins·1862
No Name — Frequently Asked Questions
Is the law that disinherits Magdalen fair?
The law Collins is using — the legal invalidity of marriages where the necessary formalities have not been observed — was a real source of injustice in mid-Victorian England. The children of irregular marriages had no legal claim to their parents' property under the rules of intestacy, and the novel's plot depends on this legal reality. Collins's sympathy is clearly with Magdalen — the law is presented as unjust, and her recovery of her inheritance is presented as justice, even though the means she uses are morally compromised. The novel is part of Collins's sustained project of using sensation fiction to illuminate the specific injustices of Victorian law as it applied to women.
Who is Captain Wragge, and is he a villain?
Captain Wragge is a small-scale fraudster, con man, and genealogist who becomes Magdalen's unlikely ally in her schemes to recover her inheritance. He is one of Collins's finest comic characters — his self-justification for his own dishonesty (he regards himself as a 'moral agriculturist' who 'cultivates the field of human sympathy') is both funny and revealing, and his genuine attachment to Magdalen, which develops over the course of the novel, is one of its most unexpected emotional developments. He is not exactly a villain (he is too genial and too self-aware) but he is not exactly good — he occupies the morally ambiguous territory that Collins found most interesting.
How does No Name compare to The Woman in White and The Moonstone?
No Name is the most morally complex of the three and the one most directly engaged with the injustice of Victorian law. The Woman in White and The Moonstone both feature innocent victims of villainous conspiracies; No Name features a heroine who herself uses morally questionable means to fight an unjust system. This makes Magdalen a more complicated protagonist than Laura Fairlie or Rachel Verinder, and the reader's sympathy with her schemes is correspondingly more complicated. The novel lacks the elegant plot mechanics of The Moonstone and the memorable villains of The Woman in White, but it has the deepest moral engagement of the three.
What is the Victorian law of legitimacy, and how does it affect women?
Victorian inheritance law was based on the legal concept of legitimacy — only children born of a valid marriage had inheritance rights. An invalid marriage (not properly solemnized, bigamous, or contracted without proper formalities) left its children legally illegitimate and without claim to the father's estate. This was a particular source of injustice for women, who had no independent earning capacity and whose entire financial future depended on inheritance and marriage. No Name's plot is organized entirely around this legal reality and Collins's view that it was unjust — the novel is explicitly a critique of the law through the narrative of its consequences.
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