Wilkie Collins |
Wilkie Collins (1824-1889)
Wilkie Collins was born in 1824 in Marylebone, London. In 1851 Collins met Charles Dickens when he was recruited as an actor in one of Dickens’s amateur theatrical productions. This meeting resulted in a lifelong friendship between the two authors. From 1853 Collins became a regular contributor to Dickens’s periodicals, Household Words and All the Year Round.
Collins wrote his first play The Lighthouse in 1855 giving several performances at Dickens’s home in Tavistock Place. In 1857 he wrote his best known play, The Frozen Deep, which was staged by Dickens’s amateur company to great acclaim. He is best known for the novels The Woman in White and The Moonstone, the latter often being regarded as the first true detective novel.
Collins had a complex and unconventional personal life. He never married but lived, with the exception of a few years, with widow Caroline Graves and her daughter Harriet until his death. He also had three children by a younger woman, Martha Rudd, whom he kept in separate lodgings.
Collins suffered dreadfully from rheumatic gout which made him an invalid in later years. He died on 23 September 1889 and is buried in Kensal Green cemetery, London. |
