Mrs Badgery

Wilkie Collins’s ‘Mrs Badgery’, rarely seen since its first publication in Dickens’s Household Words magazine in September 1857, is an enchanting little chip off the block. Like a lot of British short stories, it is absurd, very funny, and in uproarious bad taste. British writers have often enjoyed stories of making a home, and also the theatrical trappings of grief. (George Bernard Shaw commented on the national enthusiasm for requiems). Here they collide, with richly enjoyable results. The narrator is clearly stuck withMrs Badgery for ever. In time, he might even regard her as a picturesque addition to his home, like an indoor and rather saline water feature. Philip Hensher

Is there any law in England which will protect me from Mrs Badgery? I am a bachelor, and Mrs Badgery is a widow. Let nobody rashly imagine that I am about to relate a common-place grievance, because I have suffered that first sentence to escape my pen.