Collins, (William) Wilkie

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Collins, (William) Wilkie (1824–89). Novelist. Collins, usually regarded as the pioneer of the detective story, was born in London, son of a painter. He began in the law, but took up writing professionally after publishing a biography of his father in 1848, and becoming a close friend of Charles Dickens, to whose magazine Household Words he contributed. His first big success was The Woman in White (1860), and he repeated it with The Moonstone (1868). He has been identified as an exponent of ‘the novel of sensation’, appealing to a less sophisticated readership with lurid plots of dark secrets, dastardly scoundrels, drugs, and insanity. Collins was unmarried but did not want for female comfort. A splendid portrait by his friend Millais (1850) is in the National Portrait Gallery.

J. A. Cannon

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