Wilkie Collins

William Wilkie Collins was born in London in 1824, the son of the landscape painter William Collins, who was respectable, evangelical, and successful in roughly that order. He was named partly for his father and partly for his godfather, the painter David Wilkie. He spent two formative years of his childhood in Italy, was schooled fitfully, was articled briefly to a tea importer, and then read for the bar without any serious intention of practicing law. The training is visible in the legal scaffolding of his fiction, which is constructed with a litigator's interest in evidence, witnesses, and the establishment of fact.

He met Charles Dickens in 1851, and the friendship that resulted shaped both writers for the next twenty years. They traveled together, wrote together for Dickens's magazines Household Words and All the Year Round, collaborated on Christmas numbers and on the play The Frozen Deep, and read each other's work in proof. The Woman in White (1859) was serialized in All the Year Round and made Collins famous on his own account: a novel constructed as a sequence of overlapping testimonies, organized around a mystery of stolen identity, a sinister Italian count, and a heroine kept alive partly by sheer stubbornness. No Name (1862) and Armadale (1866) followed, both increasingly elaborate, both willing to put unmarried mothers and women without property at the center of the action in ways that made conservative reviewers uncomfortable.

The Moonstone (1868) is the one for which T. S. Eliot's claim — that it is the first, the longest, and the best English detective novel — has stuck, though all three adjectives have been disputed. A diamond looted from a Hindu shrine during the British siege of Seringapatam is bequeathed to a young Englishwoman; on the night of her birthday it disappears; the rest of the novel is the recovery of what happened, told through a sequence of narrators each of whom sees only part of the picture. The Shivering Sands chapter, with its hallucinatory descriptions of the quicksand on the Yorkshire coast, is one of the places where Collins's lifelong use of laudanum — taken initially for the rheumatic gout that disfigured his joints and his eyes — becomes visible on the page. The opium use was constant, prodigious, and well documented; by the end of his life he was drinking quantities that he himself said would kill anyone not habituated to them.

His domestic life was conducted on terms that Victorian respectability did not officially countenance and quietly tolerated. From 1859 he kept a household with Caroline Graves and her daughter; from 1868 he kept a second household with Martha Rudd, with whom he had three children to whom he gave the surname Dawson. He refused to marry either woman and acknowledged the second family in his will, which left his estate to be divided between both households. The later novels — Man and Wife, The Law and the Lady, The New Magdalen — are increasingly explicit social problem fiction about the position of women under English law, and they were increasingly badly reviewed. He died in 1889, at sixty-five.