COLLINS, William Wilkie, English novel ist: b. London, 8 Jan. 1824; d. there, 23 Sept. 1889. The eldest son of William Collins (q.v.), the landscape and portrait painter, he also bore the name of David Wilkie, the distinguished academician. Among his friends and in letters he was always known as Wilkie Collins. Edu cated privately, he passed two years (1836-38) with his father in Italy, where he became greatly interested in Italian art, scenery and history. In 1841 he obtained a clerkship in a London firm of tea-merchants with a view to a business career. After five years of this, he began the study of law, and was called to the bar in 1851. While thus hesitating between law and business, he had shown for some time a bent toward art and literature. For land scape especially he possessed talent. His first book to be printed was a memoir (1848) of his father, who died in 1847; but he had written, long before this, (Antonina, or the Fall of Rome,' an historical romance of the Bulwer Lytton type. It was given to the public in 1850. The next year he published an account of a summer in southwest England under the title 'Rambles beyond Railways.' Both books were well received. He now met Dickens, and at once became a man of letters. Thereafter the two novelists lived on terms of the most delightful friendship. They frequently collabo rated on novels, and Collins contributed largely to Dickens's 'Household Words' and the Year Round.> The new influence upon Col lins — Dickens in place of Bulwer-Lytton — was at once manifest in 'Basil' (1852), which dealt realistically with contemporary life in London. From history his descent was quick to a clerk and a linendraper's daughter. Then followed
'Hide and Seek' (1854), 'The Dead Secret' (1857) and numerous short stories like the clever series of ghost tales called (After Dark' (1856). In this early work Collins sometimes displayed great skill in concentrating attention upon a dominant motif which engrossed the reader as well as himself. In his view, the novel was a twin sister of the drama. But he first discovered his extraordinary talent in Woman in White' (1860), which nobody left unread. It was absolutely a new type, depending in incident no wise upon the interest in char acter nor n adventure or ncident as such, but upon the adroit manipulation of incident for first concealing and then revealing a secret. Collins is the father of the detective story. His first great success was repeated in Moonstone> (1868). In other novels of the period he usually molded his plot to a dis tinct didactic purpose. This is particulafly true of 'No Name' (1862), (Armadale' (1866), and Wife' (1870) and 'The New Mag dalen' (1873), all of which are among the most interesting novels of their kind. In 1873 74, Collins visited the United States, where he gave readings from (The Frozen Deep' and other stories which he had just written. Sev eral of his novels, dramatized either by himself or by others, were popular on the stage both in England and in the United States. He was buried at Kensal Green. Notable appreciations of Collins have been written by Swinburne, in Prose and Poetry' (London 1894) ; Quilter, Contemporary Review for April 1888; and Lang, Contemporary Review for January 1890.