William Wilkie Collins :: Essays Papers

William Wilkie Collins William Wilkie Collins was born in London on January 8 1824, the son of the renowned painter William Collins (1788-1847). His father was a religious man, who was disappointed by his son's freethinking nature: Collins refused to conform to parental expectation, failing to make a career at the tea-merchants Antrobus and Co., to which he was apprenticed at the age of seventeen, and at the law, which he entered as a student in 1846. Collins was twenty-two when his father died, and was now determined to become a professional writer. His first book, published in November 1948, was Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, R.A., but, as Julian Symons comments, "he settled after this act of piety to a life of which his father would strongly have disapproved" (8). In a writing career that lasted from 1843, when he published his first story in The Illuminated Magazine, until his death in 1889, Wilkie Collins wrote thirty-three books, and numerous plays and short stories. Although he was already an established writer with the publication of the memoir of his father and his first novel Antonina, it was when he met Charles Dickens in 1851 that his literary career began to take off. Collins regularly contributed to Dickens's magazine Household Words, and the writers even collaborated on a story called "The Perils of Certain English Prisoners" published in the Christmas 1857 number. Collins's first major success was The Woman in White which was published serially in Dickens's new journal All the Year Round from November 1859. In the decade that followed Collins produced the remainder of his best work: the novels No Name (1862), Armadale (1866), and The Moonstone(1868). Although he continued to write for another twenty years his reputation fell into decline as his choice of subject matter veered to the sensational: for example Poor Miss Finch (1872) is the story of a blind girl who falls in love with one of a pair of identical twins whose skin is dyed blue by a cure for epilepsy. Collins himself believed The Woman in White to be his finest work, and stipulated that the inscription on his tombstone should simply read: "'Author of The Woman in White and other works of fiction'" (Symons, 7). Collins and Marriage Collins's personal life was scandalous from the point of view of the bourgeois English society into which he was born. In 1858 he set up home with a woman called Caroline Graves and her young daughter.