William Wilkie Collins :: Essays Papers

William Wilkie collinsWilliam Wilkie Collins was innate(p) in London on January 8 1824, the son of the renowned catamount William Collins (1788-1847). His father was a religious man, who was disappointed by his sons freethinking nature Collins refused to conform to parental expectation, failing to make a career at the tea-merchants Antrobus and Co., to which he was apprenticed at the age of seventeen, and at the law, which he entered as a student in 1846. Collins was twenty-two when his father died, and was now determined to become a professional author. His graduation book, publish in November 1948, was Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, R.A., but, as Julian Symons comments, he settled after this act of piety to a life of which his father would potently have disapproved (8).In a writing career that lasted from 1843, when he published his first spirit level in The Illuminated Magazine, until his death in 1889, Wilkie Collins wrote thirty-three books, and numerous plays an d short stories. Although he was already an established writer with the publication of the memoir of his father and his first novel Antonina, it was when he met Charles daimon in 1851 that his literary career began to take off. Collins regularly contributed to Dickenss cartridge Household Words, and the writers even collaborated on a story called The Perils of Certain English Pris aners published in the Christmas 1857 number. Collinss first major success was The cleaning woman in black-and-blue which was published serially in Dickenss new journal only the Year Round from November 1859. In the decade that followed Collins produced the remainder of his ruff work the novels No Name (1862), Armadale (1866), and The Moonstone(1868). Although he continued to write for some other twenty years his reputation fell into decline as his option of subject matter veered to the sensational for example Poor Miss Finch (1872) is the story of a blind girl who falls in love with one of a pair of identical twins whose skin is dyed unappeasable by a cure for epilepsy.Collins himself believed The Woman in White to be his finest work, and stipulated that the inscription on his tombstone should simply read Author of The Woman in White and other works of fiction (Symons, 7).Collins and MarriageCollinss individualised life was scandalous from the point of view of the bourgeois English troupe into which he was born. In 1858 he set up home with a woman called Caroline Graves and her young daughter.