Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins was born in 1824, the son of the landscape painter William Collins; employed by a tea merchant, then trained in law without practising it, he met Dickens in 1851 and became his collaborator and friend. He took laudanum for his gout and remained dependent on it. He kept two households with two women without ever marrying, and had three children by the second, Martha Rudd. He died in London in 1889, aged sixty-five.

In the catalogue 1

• NovelThe MoonstoneWilkie Collins · 1868LiteraturePublic domain