While attending boarding school, Wilkie Collins first discovered his talent for storytelling. He was bullied by other boys into telling them stories at night. “It was useless to ask for mercy and beg leave to be allowed to go to sleep”, he complained, but the experience made him aware of his narrative powers. [1]
English novelist and playwright William Wilkie Collins was born on 8 January 1824, in Marylebone, London.
His father, William Collins, a landscape and portrait painter, was tight-fisted with money and firmly believed in all the values of the Church of England. The family was deeply religious and his mother, Harriet, enforced strict church attendance. Wilkie and his brother received their early education from their mother at home.
Formal education was not a pleasant experience for the boy, and he was badly bullied. In 1840, he left school aged nearly 17 and was apprenticed as a clerk to a firm of tea merchants. He disliked the clerical work but stayed with the company for more than five years.
After Antonina, his first novel, appeared in 1850, Collins met Charles Dickens, who became a friend and mentor. Some of his work appeared in Dickens’s journals Household Words and All the Year Round. They also collaborated on drama and fiction.
His work increasing in popularity, Collins gained financial stability and an international following by the 1860s. The Moonstone, published in 1868, has been proposed as the first modern English detective novel. His literary models were Sir Walter Scott, Alexandre Dumas, Balzac and Dickens, all of whom were wonderful storytellers.
During his lifetime, Collins wrote over 30 novels and more than 50 short stories, some of which were published in magazines edited by Charles Dickens, a travel book, plays, reviews, and articles.
Plagued by illness, Collins became addicted to the opium he took for his gout so that his health and writing quality declined in the 1870s and 1880s. He died peacefully in September 1889.