“Mr. Wray's Cash-Box; or, The Mask and the Mystery. A Christmas Sketch.” (17 December 1851) — An Imitation of Dickens's Christmas Books (1843-48)

Left: Embossed cover for the 17 December 1851 Bentley volume. Right: J. E. Millais' original frontispiece, The New Neckcloth.

Collins's 17 December 1851 “Introduction”

It may possibly happen that some of the readers of this story have in their possession a plaster “mask” — or, face and forehead — of Shakespeare, which is a cast from the celebrated Stratford bust. These casts were first offered for sale not very long since. The circumstances under which the original mould was taken, I heard thus related by a friend (now no more), to whose affectionate remembrance om I am indebted for the specimen of the mask which I now possess.

A stone-mason at Stratford-upon-Avon was employed a few years ago, to make repairs in the church. While thus engaged, he managed — as he thought, unsuspected — to take a mould from the Shakespeare bust. What he had done was found out, however; and he was forthwith threatened, by the authorities having care of the bust, with the severest pains and penalties of the law — though for what especial offence was not specified. The poor man was so frightened at these menaces, that he packed up his tools at once, and, taking the mould with him, left Stratford. Having afterwards stated his case to persons competent to advise him, he was told that he need fear no penalty whatever, and that if he [v/vi] thought he could dispose of them, he might make as many casts as he pleased, and offer them for sale anywhere. He took the advice, placed his masks neatly on slabs of black marble, and sold great numbers of them, not only in England, but in America also. It should be added, that this stone mason had been always been remarkable for his extraordinary reverence of Shakespeare, which he carried to such an extent, as to assure the friend from whom I derived the information here given, that if (as a widower) he ever married again, it should be only when he could meet with a woman who was a lineal descendant of Shakespeare!

From the anecdote I have related, the first idea of the following pages was derived. I now offer my little book to the public, strictly for what it is called on the title-page — a “sketch;” in writing which I have endeavoured to tell a simple story, simply and familiarly; or, in other words, as if I were only telling it to an audience of friends at my own fireside.

W. W. COLLINS.
Hanover Terrace, Regent's Park,
December, 1851.

Summary: Collins's “Crime-and-Detection” Christmas Book

Reuben Wray as a former "shilling" actor of minor roles had been the "pupil" of the great John Kemble at Drury Lane in London's West End ever since he had found a missing piece of the tragedian's costume. In middle-age he has been reduced to earning a marginal living by teaching "elocution, delivery, and reading aloud, price two-and-sixpence the lesson of an hour" (7), according to the advertisement that his grand-daughter, Annie, hangs up in the window of the local chemist's shop shortly after their arrival at Tidbury-on-the-Marsh. He and his bumbling assistant, Martin Blunt, have just arrived in the picturesque and utterly fictional village accompanied by Annie, as the story opens, having taken rooms at No. 12, High-street. The trio have just had to leave Stratford-upon-Avon in a hurry because (as Collins has Wray reveal to Annie and Martin only at the close of the Chapter III) Reuben Wray, having made cast or mould of a mask of the famous Shakespeare bust in the parish church there, erroneously believes that in copying the bust he has broken the law, and that the authorities are now in pursuit of him.

In the second chapter, "Mr. Wray and the British Drama," Collins describes young Wray's professional relationship with the great Kemble, and how, when Charles Kean (1755-1854) revolutionized the British theatre, Wray retired from the London stage to train young people in the provinces in elocution, and help the wealthy to stage plays in great country houses as he brought up his grand-daughter after the deaths of his wife and daughter. Wray is, in short, a much more sympathetic figure than either Dickens's Scrooge or Dickens's Redlaw.

Chapter 3, "Mr. Wray and His Family," completes the introduction by describing Martin Blunt, the outsized male figure nicknamed Julius Caesar whom Millais has depicted in the book's frontispiece: "He is nearly six feet high, proportionately strong and stout, and looks about thirty years of age. His gait is as awkward as it well can be; his features are large and ill-proportioned, his face is pitted with the small-pox, and what hair he has on his head — not much — seems to be growing in all sorts of contrary directions at once (32). However, Martin is "thoroughly good-humoured" as well as candid and innocent: the ideal for a well-meaning prospective son-in-law in a genial Christmas Book. He, too, has a theatrical background, but as a stage-carpenter and general dog's body. When the company's actor playing Julius Caesar fell suddenly ill, he had to step into the role; at least, he was big enough. The incident, then, given in flashback, explains his nick-name. His saving Reuben Wray from some collapsing machinery backstage at Drury Lane led to their enduring relationship in which he utilized his carpentry skills in support of Wray's staging provincial theatricals.

Collins's delivering Blunt's backstory culminates in the moment which the illustrator has realised in the 1851 novella's frontispiece, The New Neckcloth. The woodblock engraving underscores the romantic relationship between Annie Wray and the carpenter, even though seventy-year-old Wray had flown into a passion when the possibility of his twenty-year-old grand-daughter's marrying Blunt was raised. This problem and not the theft and retrieval of the cash-box is the more emotionally engaging subject of the novella.

Hiding in the vestry after a tour group has come through the church to see the grave of Shakespeare, Wray determines to remain in the church the whole night, and at first light make the plaster mould of just the face of the famous bust, a visage which he believes is based on the actual death mask of the dramatist. His early training, working on statuary, has certainly served him well. However, once back in his rooms, Wray feels hungry after his night's adventures, and so, instead of going to sleep, he decides to pop by the local butcher's for a couple of kidneys. There he overhears numerous conversations "about a cast having been taken — feloniously taken . . . from the Stratford bust" (63) overnight. On his way home, he even sees hand-bills posted offering a reward for information leading to the arrest of the supposed malefactor: "Ten pounds reward for apprehending the man who had taken the cast!" (65). Facing the prospect of being transported for life, Wray packs up and, with Annie and Blunt not yet informed why, catches the night-coach out of town, but he is in such a hurry that he absentmindedly leaves the actual mould in a canvas bag behind the Annual Register on his Stratford landlord's bookshelf. And now at the end of Chapter IV Collins introduces a plot complication: the street-wise ruffian who intends to steal the cash-box, “Chummy Dick”:

Instantly, old Reuben banged down the lid of the cash-box, and locked it; as as instantly, without waiting for permission to enter, a stranger walked in.

He was dressed in a long great-coat, wore a red comforter round his neck, and carried a very old and ill-looking cat-skin cap in his hand. His face was uncommonly dirty; his eyes uncommonly inquisitive; his whiskers uncommonly and determinately gruff, in spite of his efforts to dulcify it for the occasion. [pp. 69-70]

In the fifth chapter, Collins introduces both petty thieves Chummy Dick and his acolyte, Benjamin Grimes, who live in the ruinous village of Little London, three miles from Tidbury-on-the-March. We have, in fact, already met “Chummy Dick” back in Tidbury: he had called upon Martin Wray supposedly to solicit elocution lessons for a young client. In fact, he was investigating the cash-box that he had seen Wray carrying through the streets: the reaction of both Wray and Blunt to his touching the box (by apparent inadvertance) had suggested to Dick that it contained something of value. We confirm our suspicions about their plans when the loquacious ex-London house-breaker in the distinctive catskin cap calls upon the son of Judith Grimes, the disreputable publican of Little London's Jolly Ploughboys. He convinces his less acute associate in crime to assist him in stealing the swag the following evening after eleven o'clock, once the watchmen have gone home to bed.

Wray keeps hoping that the young gentleman will appear for his elocution letters, but instead the local Squire, Matthew Colebatch, of Cropley Court, now pays Wray a friendly visit: "Mr. Colebatch was an old gentleman with a very rosy face, with bright black eyes that twinkled incessantly, and with perfectly white hair, growing straight up from his head in a complete forest of venerable bristles (89-90). It turns out that Wray had acted in Colebatch’s failed sensation drama entitled The Mystyerious Murderess at Drury Lane with Charles Kemble, whom the genial, old squire remembers well. Colebatch as the embodiment of the principle of social order will play a significant role in the novella's dénouement.

In Chapter VII, "A Night Visit," Reuben is awakened from drowsing in his chair after dinner that same day by masked thieves (Grimes and Dick), who bind and gag him. Blunt attempts to come to his master's rescue, but is knocked out cold by the experienced house-breaker. When Ben Grimes discovers that the cash-box contains no money, infuriated and made anxious by the screaming of the landlady and her servant upstairs, he angrily tromps on the mask, breaking it into many pieces underfoot. Then he and Dick quickly make good their escape over the wash-house roof. All they have to show for their misadventure is Wray’s purse and pocket-watch, and Annie’s brooch, which she had left on the chimney-piece. Before he discovers the fragments of the mask, Wray is delirious, and then becomes prostrate with grief over the destruction of his prized possession. Nothing either the Squire or Annie can do seems cheer him up or restore him to his former self.

Despite the local physician's many prescriptions and Squire Colebatch’s daily visits — "joked, entrusted, lectured, and advised, in his own hearty, eccentric manner" (124), and, with Christmas just two weeks away, Reuben has failed attempt after attempt to glue the broken sherds together, and seems to have given up all hope of restoring the mask. Only fourteen days and two chapters remain when Annie has an inspiration which Collins does not explain. When he learns that she and Martin will be away three days, Wray seems to lose his sanity, but, at the end of Chapter XI upon Annie's return, he suddenly rallies.

Reuben Wray thus recovers his wits when Annie Wray and Martin Blunt reveal that they have been to Stratford to retrieve the original mould which Reuben had left there, and have made him another mask from it. The medical specialist that the Squire has called in tells Annie and Blunt to encourage his delusion that the robbery was all a bad dream: "On no account let the patient imagine he's wrong in thinking that all of his troubles have been the troubles f a dream" (Chapter IX, 146).

The doctor orders the couple to throw away or destroy the fragments of the mask; in fact, Blunt buries them in the garden. Thus, Collins sets the stage for the action of the culminating chapter. From Blunt the Squire learns the actual history of the mask, but does not believe for a moment that Wray has broken any law in making the surreptitious copy. Indeed, his legal counsel, Mr. Dabbs, confirms that, since Wray made the mould and the cast with his own materials and in no way damaged the original bust, he has broken no law. Consequently, perhaps to exonerate Wray by sharing the blame, he instructs Blunt to make as many copies f the mask as he can in a short time, and sell them at a guinea apiece: by New Year's Eve Blunt has received no less than fifty orders. This suggestion therefore results in a windfall fr Blunt, whom the Squire hires as his building manager for a new crescent on his property. The result is that he will have a steady income and be able to pay the quarterly rent on one of Colebatch’s cottages which will be a suitable home for the trio.

Squire Colebatch, an aged bachelor with no children or family with whom to celebrate the holiday, then invites himself for Christmas Dinner, and persuades Mr. Wray to allow Annie and Martin to marry. The whole is crowned by Annie's plum-pudding and multiple toasts in Colebatch’s port.

"Now we are all happy!" he [the Squire] exclaimed, filling his glass; "and now we'll set in to enjoy our port in earnest — eh, my good friend?"

"Yes; all happy!" echoed old Reuben, patting Annie's hand, which lay in his; "but I think I should be still happier, though, if I could only manage not to remember that horrible dream!"

"Not remember it!" cried Mr. Colebatch, "we'll all remember it — all remember it together, from this time forth, in the same pleasant way!"

"How? How?" exclaimed Mr. Wray, eagerly.

"Why, my good friend!" answered the Squire, tapping him briskly on the shoulder, “we'll all remember it gaily, as nothing but a STORY FOR A CHRISTMAS FIRESIDE!”

THE END. [Chapter X, “Christmas Time,” 171]

Commentary: A Most Peculiar Sort of Christmas Book

Unlike Charles Dickens, who was aged thirty-one in the autumn of 1843 as he was writing the first of his Christmas Books, in the autumn of 1851, William Wilkie Collins, not much younger at twenty-eight, was yet a relative unknown to the British reading public. He had published three minor works: the biography of his father, the painter William Collins (1848), the historical novel Antonina: or, The Fall of Rome in three volumes with Richard Bentley (1850: referenced on the title-page of the Christmas Book), and the autobiographical travelogue Rambles Beyond Railways: or, Notes in Cornwall Taken A-Foot (Bentley, 1851).

Charley [Wilkie's brother, the artist Charles Allston Collins], may have been too depressed to draw an illustration for Mr. Wray's Cash Box, which appeared with a frontispiece by Millais, but no other illustrations, just in time for Christmas. It had some favourable reviews, but did not sell. Ruskin's opinion was that it was a "gross imitation of Dickens . . . not merely imitated — but stolen . . . a mere stew of old cooked meats Jeremiah's cast clouts" is unnecessarily harsh. The book, which hinges on the legality or otherwise of reproducing the bust of Shakespeare in Stratford Church, was perhaps inspired by the Soane Museum "Shakespeare Recess," which contains a copy of the bust. It is an uncharacteristic piece; yet even in this very slight story there is an interest in unusual states of mind. [Peters 111]

The anguished protagonist who is convinced that he has broken copyright law by making the copy of the Shakespeare mask seems a rather un-Dickensian feature of the supposed Christmas Book, but a number of Dickens’s Christmas Book protagonists are dogged by a sense of guilt and failure: Ebenezer Scrooge’s feeling of having failed morally and emotionally with the fiancée of his youth, and Professor Redlaw, whose touch in The Haunted Man robs others of a capacity to feel sympathy and sentiment. Although the little seasonal offering of Christmas 1851, issued just a week before the holiday in order to capitalize on the book-buying yuletide, may lack the quantity of illustrations so typical of the five Dickens novellas issued between 1843 and 1848, the avuncular, slightly confiding first-person narrator, the benevolent squire, and the resolution of the protagonist’s moral conundrum and mania of Mr. Wary’s Cash-Box are all consistent with Collins’s Dickensian models:

The play of imitations and masks, the fears of theft and indebtedness, the threat of madness which occurs when the mask is broken, is ended through a Dickensian benevolence — the squire also gives them [Wray's grand-daughter and Martin Blunt, her fiancé — a couple not unlike Meggy Veck and Richard the blacksmith in Dickens's The Chimes] a house and money — but also through the destruction of the unique copy, and the beginning of a potentially endless and lucrative work of reproduction. [Bowen 45]

When Dickens compacted with Chapman and Hall to produce a heavily illustrated novella for Christmas 1843 (with eight engravings, four of them hand-tinted) he was a well established writer with a string of best-sellers behind him. Yes, producing a small, ornate volume with four hand-tinted illustrations was an expensive undertaking, but doing so was not nearly as risky as issuing such an expensive volume by a relative novice such as Collins in 1851: no wonder, then, that financially astute publisher Richard Bentley skimped on both the binding and illustration. Whereas, for example, the last of the five in the Dickens’s series, The Haunted Man, had seventeen engravings by a well-known team of first-rate illustrators (Sir John Tenniel, Frank Stone, Clarkson Stanfield, and Christmas Book mainstay John Leech), Bentley settled on a mere novice, and contracted with him to provide just one engraving — the frontispiece, afterwards entitled The New Neckcloth.

Collins in the passage realised by Millais in the frontispiece has captured precisely that "special intimacy of tone, a style more colloquial than that which Dickens usually adopted in his big novels" ("Introduction," The Christmas Books, Vol. 1, vii) that Michael Slater contends characterizes these novellas. Collins seems to have adopted this distinctive narrative voice that Dickens had surcharged with an accompanying blend of social commentary, moral lessons, and festive cheer. As with the five examples that Collins had before him, in Mr. Wray’s Cash-Box; or, The Mask and the Mystery. A Christmas Sketch (17 December 1851), the twenty-eight-year-old Collins employs a tight novella structure, a limited cast of memorable characters, and relevant social commentary. The slight, blue rather than red Bentley volume is 173 pages: the same length as Dickens’s The Battle of Life (1846), the fourth of the Christmas Books, for example. Significantly, Collins manages his "imitation" without the usual Dickensian supernatural apparatus: he offers readers no Marley's ghost, no spirit Phantom, and no supernatural visitation of the fairy or goblin guardians of the hearth and home. However, in "Reuben's Dream" in Stratford Church Collins des includes a scene with the fairies from A Midsummer Night's Dream dancing around the Shakespeare bust. And of course the little Christmas Book concludes with multiple helpings of a plum pudding every bit as good (we may be sure) as Mrs. Cratchit's.

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Bibliography

Bowen, John. "Collins's Shorter Fiction." The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins. Ed. Jeremy Bourne Taylor. Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2006. 37-49.

Collins, W. Wilkie. Mr. Wray’s Cash-Box; or, The Mask and the Mystery. A Christmas Sketch. Frontispiece by John Everett Millais. London: Richard Bentley, 17 December 1851. [Dated 1852]. vii + 1-171.

Collins, W. Wilkie. No Name [cheap edition]. Frontispiece by John Everett Millais. London: Sampson & Low, 1864.

Collins, Wilkie. The Stolen Mask: or the Mysterious Cash-Box. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson, Philadelphia, 1862.

Dickens, Charles. The Battle of Life: A Love Story. Illustrated by Daniel Maclise, Richard Doyle, Clarkson Stanfield, and John Leech. London: Chapman and Hall, 1846.

_____. A Christmas Carol. Illustrated by John Leech. London: Chapman and Hall, 1843.

_____. The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang an Old Year out and a New Year in. Illustrated by John Leech, Richard Doyle, Daniel Maclise, and Clarkson Stanfield. London: Chapman and Hall, 1844.

_____. The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home. Illustrated by Daniel Maclise, Richard Doyle, Clarkson Stanfield, John Leech, and Edwin Landseer. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1846.

_____. The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain. Illustrated by John Leech, Frank Stone, John Tenniel, and Clarkson Stanfield. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1848.

Gasson, Andrew. "Plot Summary & Publication History for Mr. Wray's Cash-Box: Or The Mask and The Mystery: A Christmas Sketch." 2010. Accessed 13 August 2025. https://www.wilkie-collins.info/books_mr_wray.htm

Patten, Robert L. Dickens, Death, and Christmas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. 344 pages. ISBN 978-0-19-286266-2. [Review]

Peters, Catherine. Chapter 6: "'The Fire of Artistic Ambition' (1851-1852)." The King of the Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins. London: Martin, Secker, and Warburg, 1991; rpt. Minerva, 19892. Pp. 95-114.

Slater, Michael. "Introduction." Charles Dickens: The Christmas Books. Intro. and notes by Michael Slater. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971. Rpt., 1978. Vol. 1: vii-xxiv.

Created 3 September 2025