Wilkie Collins

The son of a prominent painter, Wilkie Collins was expected to either follow in his father’s footsteps or become a clergyman during his comfortable upbringing in London, Italy, and France. Although he tried his hands at his father’s profession and later went to law school, his interest in writing grew during a stint doing clerical work in his late teens. His career took off in 1951 when he met and befriended Charles Dickens, who would later publish nearly all of Collins’s novels (including The Moonstone) in his weekly magazine All the Year Round, in the serial format common in Victorian England. During the 1850s, Collins and Dickens acted together in a number of prominent plays and collaborated on fiction and playwriting projects. Collins also began publishing in a variety of genres during this period, writing stories and travel narratives, essays and criticism, as well as his first four novels. He won acclaim for the last of these, Hide and Seek (1854), and far more for his 1860 novel The Woman in White, which remains his best-remembered work alongside The Moonstone (1868). These novels cemented his reputation for developing complex plots and are considered foundational texts in the Victorian tradition of “sensation novels,” meaning works aimed at invoking emotional reactions in the reader (much like modern-day thrillers or telenovelas). From the 1870s onward, Collins’s work focused increasingly on social issues like class inequalities and the abuses of the British aristocracy—such as one novel, Man and Wife (1870), dedicated to exposing the absurdity of Scottish and Irish marriage and inheritance laws. In fact, he famously disliked marriage and orthodox organized religion, both of which he replaced with his own, more liberal variants: he lived most of his life with his partner Caroline Graves, but refused to marry her, and then started another family with another woman, Martha Rudd, in 1868. He also claimed to be religious but eschewed and criticized British Christianity throughout his life (including through the character of Miss Clack in The Moonstone).  Collins made a prominent tour of the United States in 1873-4, but most scholars and critics agree that his work worsened from this period onwards. This decline is likely related to the progressively worse attacks of gout (a painful joint disorder) Collins suffered throughout his life; these eventually led him to grow addicted to the laudanum (opium) he took as a painkiller, which also plays an important role in the plot of The Moonstone. His condition progressively worsened until he died of a stroke in 1882.