Wilkie Collins

Collins trained in law, disliked commerce and found his real education in the theatre, where a plot had to reveal itself through voices, entrances and evidence. He met Charles Dickens in 1851; the two became close friends, collaborators and tireless amateur performers, travelling together and testing stories aloud before audiences as well as on the page.

The Woman in White, serialised in Dickens's magazine from 1859, turned a moonlit encounter on a London road into a publishing phenomenon. The Moonstone followed in 1868, arranging a theft and its investigation through a sequence of narrators whose testimony is vivid, partial and sometimes wrong. The method helped establish the modern detective novel: a closed circle of suspects, material clues, professional inquiry and a solution the reader can reconstruct.

Collins also used sensation to argue about law. His plots repeatedly expose how marriage, property and respectability could leave women with little control over their names, money or freedom. Chronic gout brought years of pain and heavy use of laudanum; he wrote some of his most intricate work while dependent on it and sometimes described the drug's hallucinated double as though it were another man in the room. He never married, but maintained two households and acknowledged three children with Martha Rudd. He died in London in 1889.