WILKIE COLLINS
William Wilkie Collins was born in London on January 8, 1824, to William and Harriet Collins. William Collins was a landscape painter who gained financial security by courting aristocratic patronage; his strict Tory (conservative) political views would later contrast with the bohemianism and political progressiveness of his son. Young Wilkie found more in common with his free-spirited mother, whose family included several successful artists. Before her marriage, Harriet also painted and supported herself by teaching and working as a governess; she exhibited an independence of character that would inspire a number of Wilkie’s fictional heroines.
William was determined to provide his two sons every social opportunity: He sent them to private schools, and Wilkie’s childhood included extended travels in Europe and training in painting. After exhibiting landscape paintings at the Royal Academy and serving an apprenticeship at a tea-importing firm, Collins began writing; he published his first story, “The Last Stage Coachman,” in 1843. In response to increasing pressure from his ailing father to abandon writing, Collins studied law at Lincoln’s Inn. After his father died in 1847, Collins began to pursue writing as a career and never practiced law; however, his legal training served him well when he wrote the first English-language detective stories.
Collins met Charles Dickens in 1851, and their ensuing friendship proved personally and professionally fortuitous. Over the next decade, with Dickens as an active mentor and publisher of his work, Collins wrote prolifically. In 1859 he met Caroline Graves, a widow, who remained, with some interruptions, his companion until his death. A simultaneous long-term affair with Martha Rudd earned him a scandalous reputation, even among open-minded literati. Collins’s unorthodox personal life did little to harm his literary success. Over the course of his career, he published more than twenty-six novels, including The Woman in White (1860), which made him one of Britain’s most popular writers; the other novels Basil (1852), No Name (1862), and The Moonstone (1868); and countless stories, articles, plays, and essays.
Productive until his final years, Wilkie Collins suffered from increasing ill health and laudanum addiction until his death on September 23, 1889. Although some of his work is perhaps overtly didactic in dealing with difficult social issues, Collins’s writings are extremely varied and provide remarkable prototypes for the femme fatale and the modern detective novel.