This dissertation shows the extent to which Wilkie Collins reflected the changing mid-Victorian
perceptions on aesthetic discrimination in his early body of work. A producer of literary
commodities for a middle-class public, Collins had an acute understanding of the pivotal
changes brought by capitalist development in what concerned the acquisition of taste: once a
matter restricted to a selected few and now, as his career in the field of letters progressed, a
right demanded by many. Following a close reading of his literary production, essays and correspondence
during the 1850s, Collins emerges as an author thoroughly aware of the democratisation
of taste that pervaded a crucial decade of the nineteenth century