In a letter from Boston, dated 28 November 1867, Charles Dickens, in the course of his second American reading tour, wrote to his younger friend Wilkie Collins:

On 3 December, he added:

and again on 31 January 1868, from Philadelphia he wrote:

Such enthusiasm from his friend and mentor would not be lost on Collins as he shared vicariously in the resounding success of Dickens's second tour. The two men had grown close since their first collaboration in the amateur theatrical performance of Bulwer-Lytton's Not So Bad as We Seem in 1851. They had since co-authored such dramatic works as The Frozen Deep and No Thoroughfare, as well as working together on Dickens's weekly periodicals, Household Words and All the Year Round. The dream of a successful and lucrative run in America, as Dickens had achieved, might well have impressed the younger man and set him to considering the advantages of a reading tour of his own.

Collins's earliest writings revealed a fascination with the uncharted worlds of travel. His first novel, Iolani, was set in Tahiti and displayed ‘a youthful imagination [run] riot among the noble savages’, as Collins himself recalled. Written as early as 1844, it was not published until 1991 when the manuscript emerged from private ownership. In 1850, Antonina: or The Fall of Rome was published. Set in fifth-century Rome, the novel reveals Collins's attraction to the romantic aspect of foreign lands. In addition, he retained nostalgic memories of the trips that he made to the European continent with his parents as a young boy.