Wilkie Collins was born in January of 1824 in London. His father was a well-known landscape painter and member of the Royal Academy. His mother was also a painter and the family was very close as he grew up. Collins was sickly as a child and never outgrew this. He was always small and had a slightly deformed skull.
He was privately educated and studied painting for a number of years. He began to attend school outside of the home at age 11, but the next year the family moved to Italy and this schooling stopped. After two years they returned to London.
With the help of his father, Collins began to work for a tea importer, where he worked from 1841-1846. He also began to write during this time.
His first story was “The Last Stagecoachman” published in 1843. After this he studied law for a time and worked on his first novel “Antonia; Or The Fall of Rome” published in 1850. During this period, his father died and he dropped everything to write his father’s biography, published in 1848.
In 1851, Collins began a lifelong friendship with Charles Dickens until Dickens died in 1870. Collins collaborated with Dickens on pieces for the magazine “Household Worlds”. Dickens helped Collins bring humor and believability to his characters.
Collin’s personal life was as unconventional for the times as his writing came to be. In 1858 he met Caroline Graves, who was his companion until his death. He also had a relationship with Martha Rudd, whose three children Collins acknowledged as his own. By 1868, Rudd lived with Collins as his mistress while Graves lived with him as “housekeeper”. Graves married another man in 1868, but returned to Collins within two years. Their first meeting was the impetus for his book “The Woman in White” published in 1860.
Collins became known as the father of the British detective story. He put his legal training to good use. His first novel in the genre was ‘Basil” written in 1850. In 1862, he published ‘No Name” again a suspense novel, as was “Armadale” written in 1866.
Perhaps his most famous novel was “The Moonstone” written in 1868. The book involved murder, opium, magic and three mysterious Hindus all rapped around the investigation of the theft of a large diamond with a violent history around it. In the book, the criminal was of the same class as the victim, challenging the prevailing thought that the violence of the lower classes was threatening the peace of the middle class.
Another of his well-received mystery stories was the short story, “The Terribly Strange Bed” written also in 1862. In both this and “The Moonstone” the British detective is sharply drawn in a way that was repeated over and over for generations to come.
Collins began to suffer from rheumatic pains in the 1860’s. To counteract the pain, he used laudanum, a form of opium. He became addicted to it. He wrote about the effects in “The Moonstone” where the crime was actually committed by one of investigators while unknowingly under the effects of opium.
Many of his characters reflected Collins himself. Some, like the investigator, used opium. Others had physical abnormalities like Collins, but were sympathetically drawn. Society of the time were unsympathetic toward the less than perfect.
In 1873 Collins traveled to the United States for a long tour. During the trip he was able to met Mark Twain and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He was impressed by their writing and what he learned of the attitudes of American society.
The death of Dickens in 1870 had robbed Collins of a powerful mentor. His popularity began to decline, as did his health. Nonetheless, he continued to write and, through his writing, comment critically about social issues of his time.
In “The New Magdalen” Collins attacked the attitudes about fallen women, perhaps also a commentary on his own unconventional life. In “The Evil Genius” published in 1886; he dealt critically with adultery and divorce, also a personal theme. He died of a stroke on September 23, 1889 and his last novel, “Blind Will” was published after his death in 1890.
Collins, for most of his career, was one of the best known, best loved and best paid of Victorian novelists. After his death, his popularity declined while Dickens rose. Today, most of his books are in print and films and TV versions of many of his books have been made, including a film of “The Moonstone.”
