Wilkie Collins is a key Victorian novelist for sensation fiction, mystery, inheritance plots and social secrets.
Wilkie Collins was born in London in 1824, the son of the successful landscape painter William Collins. He spent part of his youth travelling in France and Italy, then worked unhappily for a tea merchant before studying law at Lincoln’s Inn. Although he was called to the bar, literature became his real profession. His legal knowledge and artistic family background both contributed to the visual settings, disputed identities and complicated evidence found throughout his fiction.
Collins met Charles Dickens in 1851 and became his close friend and collaborator, contributing to Dickens’s periodicals and working with him on theatrical and fictional projects. The Woman in White and The Moonstone made Collins a central figure in sensation fiction and in the development of the modern detective novel. Multiple narrators, documents, hidden marriages, inheritance disputes and unreliable testimony allow his plots to expose weaknesses in Victorian law and domestic respectability. Chronic illness led to heavy use of laudanum, a dependency that also influenced his later life and work. Collins died in 1889. His novels remain important for readers interested in Victorian crime, gender, disability and the legal construction of identity.
