![]() A novel like Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, published in 1860, had yielded a host of spin-off products, including hats and cloaks, a perfume, and even a type of waltz. Not just for novel tie-ins – that in itself was nothing new. In time, even when the novel was largely forgotten, its title would be immortalised in the name of a hat.Īlthough it was published in the 1890s and so was technically a Victorian novel, Trilby was, in many ways, the start of a peculiarly modern craze. He certainly succeeded: Trilby would become the sensation of the age, not just in Britain but in the United States. But owing to failing eyesight, du Maurier had begun to complement his illustrating work with novel-writing as a way of continuing to make a living from his pen. ![]() Du Maurier had made his name as an illustrator: in 1895 he was responsible for the famous ‘ curate’s egg’ cartoon (with its complaisant curate assuring the vicar, concerning the bad egg he’d been served up, that ‘parts of it are excellent’), and he’d even been responsible for coining the phrase ‘bedside manner’ in a medical cartoon of 1884. The cartoonist’s name was George du Maurier and the novel is Trilby (1894). ![]()
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