COLLINS, (WILLIAM) WILKIE

born Jan. 8, 1824, London died Sept. 23, 1889, London early master of the mystery story and the first English novelist to write in this genre. The son of William Collins (17881847), the landscape painter, he developed a gift for inventing tales while still a schoolboy at a private boarding school. At an early age he was placed in the tea trade, where his performance was undistinguished. After studying law at Lincoln's Inn, he was admitted to the bar in 1851 but proved to have as little aptitude for law as for commerce. He worked, instead, on an historical novel, painted well enough to have a picture hung at the Royal Academy, engaged in theatricals, and visited Paris. His first published work was a memoir to his father, who died in 1847, Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., R.A. (1848). His fiction followed shortly after: Antonina; or, the Fall of Rome (1850) and Basil (1852), a highly coloured tale of seduction and vengeance with a contemporary middle-class setting and passages of uncompromising realism. In 1851 he began an association with Dickens that exerted a formative influence on his career. Their admiration was mutual. Under Dickens' influence, Collins developed a talent for characterization, humour, and popular success, while the older writer's debt to Collins is evident in the more skillful and suspenseful plot structures of such novels as A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (186061). Collins began contributing serials to Dickens' periodical Household Words, and his first major work, The Woman in White (1860), appeared in Dickens' All the Year Round. Among his most successful subsequent books were No Name (1862), Armadale (1866), and The Moonstone (1868). One of the first and greatest masters of the mystery story, he was a much-imitated writer. The motif of The Moonstone, concerning a cursed jewel that was originally stolen from an idol's eye, has been repeated countless times, and his Count Fosco in The Woman in White is the illustrious original of innumerable bravura villains.