Wilkie Collins, who
invented the detective novel with The
Woman in White and The Moonstone,
led a bohemian life, dividing his time and his affections between women in two
households, neither of whom he deigned to marry. Self-indulgent to an extreme
degree, he was fond of pâté de foie gras, oysters, champagne by the pint,
cigars, snuff, and laudanum, of which he could take in enough “to kill a ship's crew or
company of soldiers.” It’s a wonder that he lived to be sixty-five, when he was
felled by a paralytic stroke.
Collins
was born January 8, 1824, in the Marylebone section of London to a prominent
landscape painter, William Collins, and his wife, Harriet. He and his younger
brother were home-schooled by their deeply religious evangelical mother, who
enforced regular church attendance on the boys, much to Wilkie’s annoyance. At
sixteen he was apprenticed to a tea-merchant, a job he hated, but stayed there
for five years while also writing and publishing a few stories. He then began
the study of law at Lincoln’s Inn, at the insistence of his father, and was
called to the bar in 1851.
By
this time, he was gaining some traction as a writer, so he never actually
practiced law, devoting himself instead to his fiction and to hanging out with
literary friends, especially his pal Charles Dickens. Collins’ brother, Charles, married one of Dickens’
daughters. Except for the fact they did not meet until eight years after
Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, the
curmudgeonly Collins might well have been the model for Ebenezer Scrooge. In
various letters, Collins expressed a sour view of the Christmas holidays: he
refers to “filthy Christmas festivities… when the Plague of Plum
pudding extends its ravages from end to end of the land, and lays the national
digestion prostrate at the feet of Christmas.” And in another burst of
Scrooge-like spleen: “the most hateful of all English seasons (to me), the
season of Cant and Christmas”
In
1859 Collins published his first major success, The Woman in White, an eerie mystery novel. This was followed by such other
well-received works as No Name, Armadale,
and his crowning success, The Moonstone. These
suspenseful works, which made pots of money, were serialized in magazines,
giving rise to Collins’ favorite expression: “Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry,
make ‘em wait.”
In
1858 Collins moved in with a neighbor named Caroline Graves and her daughter.
Although they never married, they lived as man and wife for more than thirty
years, except for a brief two-year period when Caroline married someone else,
but then decided she would move back in with Collins. Collins, meanwhile, struck up a relationship with another
woman named Martha Rudd, whom he installed in a nearby house and with whom he
had three children. When he was with her, he called himself William Dawson, and
she and the children took the name Dawson as well.
Not
surprisingly, given his diet and penchant for tobacco, alcohol, and drugs,
Collins’ health began to deteriorate in the 1850s as he suffered constantly
from what he called “rheumatic gout” and “neuralgia,” as well as failing
eyesight. He turned for relief to
a variety of so-called cures: Turkish and electric baths, health spas, hypnotism,
quinine, and, finally, opium in the form of laudanum in increasingly large
quantities.
Collins wavered between belief in the
God of his evangelical upbringing and his later, doubt-ridden free-thinking. As
for an afterlife, his friend Wybert Reeve wrote this about him after the death
of his brother: “The death seemed to have made a strong impression on him, and
led him to speak of a future state of existence, in which he had little belief.
He was a Materialist, and urged that death meant a sleep of eternity; it was
the natural end of all living things.” A few years before his own death,
Collins mused as follows: “Are there not moments—if we dare to confess the
truth—when poor humanity loses its hold on the consolations of religion and the
hope of immortality, and feels the cruelty of creation that bids us live, on
the condition that we die, and leads the first warm beginnings of love, with
merciless certainty, to the cold conclusion of the grave?”
By the
time he was in his late fifties, Collins’ health was a serious concern. Heart
problems made him short of breath, and he began to take amyl nitrate and
hypo-phosphate. In the last year of his life, he was thrown from a cab in a
collision, and his injuries led to bronchitis, and on June 30 a stroke that left
him partially paralyzed. He lingered almost three months, growing steadily
worse. Urged by a friend to go to the country for a more healthful environment,
he declined, saying he was “too much of a cockney” to leave London. He died on
September 23 in his home on Wimpole Street, at the age of sixty-five.
In
his will (in which he left each of his “wives” the sum of £200—about £24,000
today), he expressed the wish to be buried in the cemetery at Kensal Green “and
that over my grave there may be placed a plain stone cross and no other
monument and that there shall be placed on such stone cross the inscription
which my executors will find written and placed in the same envelope occupied
by this my will and I desire that nothing shall be inscribed upon the said cross
except the inscription which I have
herein before directed.” That inscription reads simply: “In memory of
Wilkie Collins, author of ‘The Woman In White’ and other works of fiction.”
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