Collins, (William) Wilkie

Collins, (William) Wilkie (1824–89), novelist. The elder son of the painter William Collins, he was born and lived for most of his life in the Marylebone district of London, and was educated at private schools in London. He worked briefly for a tea importer, and was called to the Bar, but never practised.

His first published book was a biography of his father (1848), followed by his only historical novel, Antonina (1850). His second novel, Basil (1852), was admired by Dickens, who employed him as a writer for Household Words. The two writers became friends and occasional collaborators, and Collins's third novel, Hide and Seek (1854), is his most Dickensian work. His four novels of the 1860s, The Woman in White (1860), No Name (1862), Armadale (1866), and The Moonstone (1868), are his most important works. With the publication of The Woman in White, Collins became a highly successful writer of intricately plotted stories of mystery, suspense, and crime, though his work continued to attract condemnation for sensationalism. (See sensation, novel of.) His portrayal of attractive but transgressive women such as Magdalen Vanstone in No Name and Lydia Gwilt in Armadale, was particularly attacked.

Collins suffered from severe attacks of a rheumatic illness, only relieved by using opium; he made use of the effects of opium in The Moonstone. His opium habit and the loss of Dickens's constructive criticism after 1870 used to be considered the cause of a decline in the quality of his writing. However, his explorations of the darker side of Victorian society and his interest in abnormal physiology and psychology are now seen as innovative, and recent re-evaluation has found much of interest in later ‘novels with a purpose’ such as Man and Wife (1870), The Law and the Lady (1875), and his anti-vivisection novel Heart and Science (1883). Collins had a lifelong interest in the theatre, and five of his original plays were produced, as well as theatrical adaptations of his novels: Man and Wife and The New Magdalen, were produced in 1873. The only play for which he is now remembered is The Frozen Deep (1857), written for Dickens's amateur company, with Dickens playing the lead.

Collins's private life was as much a cause of scandal as his fiction. He never married, but from 1859 lived openly with Caroline Graves, a widow from a working-class background. In 1868 he began another liaison with Martha Rudd, the daughter of a farm labourer. By her he had two daughters and a son. Caroline Graves left Collins in 1868, but returned to him two years later, and remained with him for the rest of his life, though his relationship with Martha Rudd also continued until his death.