Plaque to Wilkie Collins unveiled at Broadstairs

For six weeks in August and September 1859, Charles Dickens’s friend and literary collaborator Wilkie Collins rented a house in Broadstairs.
It was there, in Church Hill Cottage, that he penned the opening chapters of The Woman in White, one of the first Victorian sensation novels and “the quintessential novel-with-a-secret”. 

But it wasn’t only the plot that contained a mystery. There was another riddle surrounding the book that has confounded Collins’s devotees for generations: Where exactly was Church Hill Cottage? Ken Nickoll, a local historian tracked it down (click here for the full article - scroll down to page 2) and persuaded the authorities to put up a blue plaque to mark the cottage.

The unveiling of the plaque on 16th May 2023 was attended by several members of the Wilkie Collins Society and the Dickens Fellowship. This was followed by a reception at the Charles Dickens Museum by the sea, where we were treated to a reading from The Woman in White, performed by the Dickens Declaimers. Here are a few photographs of the occasion.