Wilkie Collins

William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824 – 23 September 1889) was an English novelist and playwright known especially for The Woman in White (1860), a mystery novel and early sensation novel, and for The Moonstone (1868), which established many of the ground rules of the modern detective novel and is also perhaps the earliest clear example of the police procedural genre. Born in London to the painter William Collins and his wife Harriet Geddes, he was named after his father but went by his middle name in honour of his godfather, the painter David Wilkie. The family moved several times during his childhood, and he and his brother Charles were initially educated at home by their mother. The household was deeply religious, and Collins resented the strict church attendance his mother enforced.

After attending a school in Maida Vale, he spent two years living with his parents in Italy and France, where he learned Italian and began studying French, eventually becoming fluent. He later attended a boarding school in Highbury, where he was bullied; one boy forced him to tell a story each night before being allowed to sleep, an experience Collins later credited with awakening his storytelling ability. Leaving school at nearly seventeen, he worked unhappily for over five years as a clerk for a tea merchant. He published his first story in 1843 and wrote an early novel, Iolani, which was rejected by a publisher and remained unpublished in his lifetime.

At his father’s insistence, he studied law at Lincoln’s Inn, though he showed little interest and spent much of his time on his second novel, Antonina. After his father’s death in 1847, he produced his first published book, a memoir of his father. Antonina was published in 1850.

That same year, he met Charles Dickens through a mutual friend, beginning a lifelong friendship and collaboration; some of Collins’s work appeared in Dickens’s journals, and they collaborated on drama and fiction. Collins suffered his first attack of gout in 1853, a condition that would plague him for the rest of his life. By the 1860s, he had achieved financial stability and an international following. In later decades, his addiction to opium—taken for his gout—undermined his health and the quality of his work.