Wilkie Collins

William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824 – 23 September 1889) was an English novelist and playwright known especially for The Woman in White (1860), a mystery novel and early sensation novel, and for The Moonstone (1868), which established many of the ground rules of the modern detective novel and is also perhaps the earliest clear example of the police procedural genre.

Born to the London painter William Collins and his wife, Harriet Geddes, he moved with them to Italy when he was twelve, living there and in France for two years, learning both Italian and French. He worked initially as a tea merchant. After Antonina, his first novel, was published in 1850, Collins met Charles Dickens, who became his friend and mentor. Some of Collins' work appeared in Dickens' journals Household Words and All the Year Round. They also collaborated on drama and fiction. Collins gained financial stability and an international following by the 1860s. In the 1870s and 1880s, after becoming addicted to the opium which he took for his gout, the quality of his health declined and, in turn, the reception of his artistic output.

Collins criticised the institution of marriage. He had relationships with two women: widow Caroline Graves – living with her for most of his life, treating her daughter as his – and the younger Martha Rudd, with whom he had three children.

Early life

thumb|upright|[[Portrait of Wilkie Collins by John Everett Millais, 1850]]

Collins was born at 11 New Cavendish Street, London, the son of William Collins, a well-known Royal Academician landscape painter, and his wife, Harriet Geddes. Named after his father, he soon became known by his middle name, which honoured his godfather, the painter David Wilkie. The family moved to Pond Street, Hampstead, in 1826. In 1828 Collins's brother Charles Allston Collins was born. Between 1829 and 1830, the Collins family moved twice, first to Hampstead Square and then to Porchester Terrace, Bayswater. Wilkie and Charles received their early education from their mother at home. The Collins family were deeply religious, and Collins's mother enforced strict church attendance on her sons, which Wilkie disliked.

In 1835, Collins began attending school at the Maida Vale academy. From 1836 to 1838, he lived with his parents in Italy and France, which made a great impression on him. He learned Italian while in Italy and began learning French, in which he would eventually become fluent. From 1838 to 1840, he attended the Reverend Cole's private boarding school in Highbury, where he was bullied. One boy forced Collins to tell him a story every night before allowing him to go to sleep. "It was this brute who first awakened in me, his poor little victim, a power of which but for him I might never have been aware.... When I left school I continued story telling for my own pleasure," Collins later said.

William Collins had intended his first son to become a clergyman and was disappointed in Wilkie's lack of interest in the profession. At his father's insistence, Collins instead entered Lincoln's Inn in 1846, to study law; his father wanted him to have a steady income. Collins showed only a slight interest in law and spent most of his time with friends and on working on a second novel, Antonina, or the Fall of Rome. After his father's death in 1847, Collins produced his first published book, Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, published in 1848.

The family moved to 38 Blandford Square soon afterwards, where they used their drawing room for amateur theatricals. In 1849, Collins exhibited a painting, The Smugglers' Retreat, at the Royal Academy summer exhibition. Antonina was published by Richard Bentley in February 1850. Collins went on a walking tour of Cornwall with artist Henry Brandling in July and August 1850. Collins managed to complete his legal studies and was called to the bar in 1851. Though he never formally practised, he used his legal knowledge in many of his novels. Caroline Graves died in 1895 and was buried with Collins. Martha Rudd died in 1919.

Works

thumb|160px|left|Captioned "The Novelist who invented Sensation", caricature of Wilkie Collins in [[Vanity Fair (British magazine)|Vanity Fair, 3 February 1872]]

Collins's works were classified at the time as sensation novels, a genre that became the precursor to detective and suspense fiction. He also wrote penetratingly on the plight of women and on the social and domestic issues of his time. For example, his 1854 Hide and Seek contained one of the first portrayals of a deaf character in English literature. As did many writers of his time, Collins first published most of his novels as serials in magazines such as Dickens's All the Year Round, and was known as a master of the form, creating just the right degree of suspense to keep his audience reading from week to week.

The Lighthouse was a melodrama loosely based on Collins's 1853 short story, "Gabriel's Marriage", but set in Eddystone Lighthouse in December 1748. In May 1855, Collins sent the finished play to Dickens, who enthusiastically took over the production. Dickens played Aaron Gurnock, the head lightkeeper, and arranged for Clarkson Stanfield to paint the backdrop. Other parts were taken by Collins, Augustus Egg, Mark Lemon, Mary Dickens and Georgina Hogarth. The production ran for four nights at Tavistock House, from 16 June 1855, followed by a single performance on 10 July at Campden House, Kensington. It was staged at the Royal Olympic Theatre from 10 August to 17 October 1857, as Collins's first professional production. Robson played Aaron Gurnock and George Vining read the Prologue. An American version opened at the New Theatre, New York, on 21 January 1858. There was an amateur production with Palgrave Simpson on 3 May 1865 at the Royal Bijou Theatre (Lambeth School of Art) and further revivals at Shelley's Boscombe Theatre in the 1870s and 1880s. The Lighthouse was translated into French by Emile Forgues.

Collins enjoyed ten years of success after publishing The Woman in White in 1859. His next novel, No Name combined social commentary – the absurdity of the law as applied to children of unmarried parents (see Illegitimacy in fiction) – with a densely plotted revenge thriller. Armadale, the first and only one of Collins's major novels of the 1860s to be serialised in a magazine other than All the Year Round, provoked strong criticism. Reviewers found its villainess Lydia Gwilt to be doubtful, and were further provoked by Collins's typically confrontational preface. The novel was simultaneously a financial coup for its author and a comparative commercial failure: the sum paid by Cornhill for the serialisation rights was exceptional, eclipsing by a substantial margin the prices paid for the vast majority of similar novels, yet the novel failed to recoup its publisher's investment.

The Moonstone, published in 1868, and the last novel of what is generally regarded as the most successful decade of Collins' author's career, was, despite a somewhat cool reception from both Dickens and the critics, a significant return to form. It re-established the market value of an author whose success on the competitive Victorian literary market had been waning in the wake of his first perceived masterpiece. Viewed by many as the advent of the detective story within the tradition of the English novel, The Moonstone remains one of Collins's most acclaimed works. It was described later by T. S. Eliot as "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels... in a genre invented by Collins and not by Poe." The mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers later referred to it as "probably the very finest detective story ever written".

After The Moonstone, Collins's novels contained fewer thriller elements and more social commentary. The subject matter continued to be sensational, but his popularity declined. The poet Algernon Charles Swinburne commented: "What brought good Wilkie's genius nigh perdition? / Some demon whispered—'Wilkie! have a mission." Factors most often cited in Collins's decline have been the death of Dickens in 1870 and with it the loss of his literary mentoring, Collins's increased dependence upon laudanum, and his penchant for using his fiction to rail against social injustices.

The Woman in White and The Moonstone share an unusual narrative structure, somewhat resembling an epistolary novel, in which different portions of the book have different narrators, each with a distinct narrative voice. Armadale has this to a lesser extent through the correspondence between some characters.

Notable works

thumb|Cover of the first edition of The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins, 1879

Antonina, or The Fall of Rome (1850)
Basil (1852)
Gabriel's Marriage (1853), short story
Hide and Seek (1854)
The Dead Secret (1856)
After Dark (1856), short story collection
The Frozen Deep (1857), play co-written with Charles Dickens
A House to Let (1858), short story co-written with Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Adelaide Anne Procter
The Queen of Hearts (1859)
The Haunted House, short story co-written with Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Adelaide Anne Proctor, George Sala and Hesba Stretton
The Woman in White (1860)
No Name (1862)
Armadale (1866)
No Thoroughfare (1867), story and play co-written with Charles Dickens
The Moonstone (1868)
Man and Wife (1870)
Poor Miss Finch (1872), dedicated to Frances Minto Elliot
The Law and the Lady (1875)
The Two Destinies (1876)
The Haunted Hotel (1878)
The Fallen Leaves (1879)
Jezebel's Daughter (1880)
The Black Robe (1881)
Heart and Science (1882–1883)
The Evil Genius (1885)

Screen adaptations

The Woman in White (silent, UK, 1929)
The Moonstone (1934)
The Woman in White (US, 1948)
The Moonstone (UK, seven episodes, 1959)
The Woman in White (West Germany, miniseries, three episodes, 1971, under the German title Die Frau in Weiß)
The Woman in White (USSR, two episodes, 1981, under the Russian title Zhenshchina v belom')
The Woman In White (1982 TV series, UK, five episodes, 1982)
The Woman in White (1997 TV series, The Woman in White, UK, 1997)
Basil (1998)
The Moonstone (UK, five episodes, 2016)
The Woman in White (UK, five episodes, 2018)

References

External links

The Wilkie Collins Website
Wilkie Collins Information Pages
Wilkie Collins Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin
The Ramsgate Society Website
Book of the Week from BBC Radio 4.
Petri Liukkonen: (William) Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) at Books and Writers. Authors' Calendar