COLLINS, WILLIAM WILKIE English novelist, elder son of William Collins, R.A. (1787-1847), the landscape painter, was born in London on Jan. 8, 1824, and died there on Sept. 23, 1889. He was educated at a private school in Highbury, and when only a small boy of twelve was taken by his parents to Italy, where the family lived three years. On his return he was articled to a firm in the tea trade, but later aban doned that business for the law, and was entered at Lincoln's Inn in 1846, being called to the Bar three years later. He took little interest, however, in his new career. On his father's death in 1847, Collins made his first essay in literature with The Life of William Collins (1848). In 185o he published his first novel, Antonina, or The Fall of Rome, which was clearly inspired by his life in Italy. Basil appeared in 1852, and Hide and Seek in About this time Collins made the acquaintance of Charles Dickens, and began to contribute to Household Words, where After Dark (1856) and The Dead Secret (1857) ran serially. Among his most successful subsequent books were The Woman in White (186o), No Name (1862), Armadale (1866), and The Moonstone (1868) . After The New Magdalen (18 73) his ingenuity seemed to become exhausted.
Collins' popularity was great in his own day. He subsequently shared the temporary eclipse of most of the Victorian authors, but regained some of his vogue through the increasing popularity of mystery stories in the early years of the twentieth century. His style approximates, at its worst, to the melodramatic, and he sometimes exhibits all the violence and crudity of the "penny gaff." But he was undeniably a first-class story-teller, a master of situation and effect. His method of telling a story through the mouths of several characters, though sometimes criticised, has been imitated with success by subsequent writers of similar stories, such as Bram Stoker in Dracula, and is certainly well adapted to the progressive elucidation of a mystery. Some of his characters are not only real but uncommon. Later admirers of "Professor Moriarty" and "Arsene Lupin" could find a peer and in many respects a superior to these and similar personages in Count Fosco in The Woman in White, who is the spiritual parent of scores of subtly humorous sardonic villains.