John Everett Millais

Exchanging vows of love with sailor Frank Aldersley the night before his departure, Clara Burnham is haunted by the memory of Richard Wardour, and his mistaken belief that they will one day marry. With her gift of 'Second Sight', Clara foresees terrible tragedy ahead and is racked by guilt. Allied to two different ships, the two men at first have no cause to meet — until disaster strikes and they find themselves united in a battle for survival. It cannot be long before they discover the nature of their rivalry, and the hot-tempered Wardour must choose how to take his revenge. Based on the doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, and originally performed as a play starring both Collins and Dickens, 'The Frozen Deep' is a dramatic tale of vengeance and self-sacrifice which went on to inspire the character of Sydney Carton in Charles Dickens' 'A Tale of Two Cities'. NB: This is a separate work by Wilkie Collins It is a novel, published serially in 'Temple Bar' between August and October 1874 and then published as a book, and is not the play of the same name that Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins collaborated on in 1856 and that they both appeared in and that was subsequently published in 1857.

John Everett Millais (1829-96) is widely regarded as one of the most important artists of his generation. He was a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and was later president of the Royal Academy of Arts. Less well-known are his 400 designs for illustrations, made over a period of 30 years. He was immensely varied both in his style and in the types of literature he tackled - he illustrated poetry by Tennyson and Christina Rossetti, novels by Anthony Trollope and Harriet Martineau, children's books, books of sheet music and religious works, culminating in his celebrated The Parables of our Lord in 1864. Through reproductions of drawings, watercolours, wood-engravings, and printed books and periodicals, this book reveals the variety and quality of Millais' work in this often overlooked area of his oeuvre.