A short life of the author
William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824 – 23 September 1889) was an English novelist and playwright who invented, or at least perfected, two of the most important forms of English popular fiction: the sensation novel (with The Woman in White, 1859–1860) and the detective novel (with The Moonstone, 1868). He was the closest friend and literary collaborator of Charles Dickens, the most popular novelist of the 1860s after Dickens himself, and a writer of extraordinary narrative ingenuity whose best novels are constructed with a precision and suspense that remain effective after more than a century and a half. T.S. Eliot called The Moonstone “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels” — a judgment that has been largely sustained.
Life
Collins was born in London, the son of the landscape painter William Collins, R.A. He was educated partly in Italy (the family spent two years there during his childhood) and was called to the bar in 1851, though he never practised law. His legal training is evident in his fiction, which is full of wills, settlements, marriage laws, and the particular ways in which Victorian legal structures could be used to oppress women.
He met Dickens in 1851, and their friendship — which combined genuine affection, literary collaboration, and a shared taste for theatrical production and convivial living — lasted until Dickens’s death in 1870. They wrote together, edited together (Collins contributed extensively to Dickens’s journals Household Words and All the Year Round), and travelled together. The collaboration influenced both writers: Dickens’s later novels show the influence of Collins’s plotting, and Collins’s characters gained depth from Dickens’s example.
Collins never married. He maintained two simultaneous domestic arrangements — with Caroline Graves and Martha Rudd — and had three children with Rudd. His unconventional private life, combined with his long dependence on laudanum (opium dissolved in alcohol) for the relief of severe gout, made him a somewhat scandalous figure by Victorian standards.
The Woman in White (1859–1860)
The Woman in White — serialised in All the Year Round — was the publishing sensation of 1860. The novel tells the story of Laura Fairlie, a young heiress who is the victim of an elaborate conspiracy masterminded by the magnificently villainous Count Fosco — a fat, charming, music-loving Italian with a fondness for white mice and an absolute absence of moral scruple. The plot involves identity theft, wrongful confinement in a lunatic asylum, forged documents, and a marriage contracted for the purpose of seizing a woman’s inheritance.
The novel’s narrative technique is innovative: the story is told through a series of documents — statements, letters, diary entries — contributed by different characters, each limited to what that character knows and observes. The method creates a mosaic of perspectives that generates suspense through the gap between what the reader infers and what any single narrator can see.
Count Fosco is one of the great villains in English fiction — intelligent, cultivated, physically repulsive, and entirely willing to destroy anyone who stands between him and his objectives.
The Moonstone (1868)
The Moonstone is the first English detective novel — a book that establishes the essential conventions of the genre: a crime (the theft of a large diamond), a closed circle of suspects, a brilliant detective (Sergeant Cuff, based partly on the real Inspector Whicher), false leads, a surprising solution, and the final assembly of all the clues into a coherent explanation. The novel is also told through multiple narrators — most memorably the pious, self-important butler Gabriel Betteredge, who consults Robinson Crusoe as an oracle.
The novel is not merely a detective story. It is also a meditation on British colonialism (the Moonstone was stolen from an Indian temple), on the psychology of unconscious action (the pivotal event involves an act committed under the influence of laudanum, of which the actor has no memory), and on the limitations of rational explanation in accounting for human behaviour.
Other Novels
No Name (1862–1863) is a novel about two sisters who are legally disinherited by an obscure provision of Victorian inheritance law and one sister’s elaborate scheme to recover the family fortune. Armadale (1866) is a sensation novel of extraordinary complexity, featuring the villainess Lydia Gwilt — one of the most compelling female antagonists in Victorian fiction. The Law and the Lady (1875) features one of the earliest female detectives in English fiction.
Collecting Collins
The Woman in White (1860, Sampson Low, three volumes) in first edition is very scarce and brings $5,000–$15,000. The Moonstone (1868, three volumes) brings $3,000–$10,000. Single-volume first editions and later editions are more accessible. Collins’s contributions to Dickens’s journals are collected in their own right by specialists.