William Wilkie Collins was born to William and Harriet Collins on 8 January 1824 at London. He had one younger brother, Charles Allston. He was exposed to art and artists at a very early age. Not only was his godfather an artist; his father was a well-respected landscape artist who taught art to support his family.

    Samuel Taylor Coleridge visited the Collins family between 1826 and 1829. He introduced William Collins to the poetry of George Herbert. Wilkie Collins was sent to his first school at 11 years old. His first year there was very successful; indeed, he won first prize.

    On September 19, 1836, the Collins family left for an extended tour of France and Italy, an experience Wilkie claims changed his life forever. Here he learned that food and conversation could be exciting. His parents were concerned about the influence of European attitudes on him.

    He returned to London in August of 1838 and his parents sent him to private school where Wilkie suffered bullying from both the headmaster and the other boys at the school. He was able to escape threats of thrashing from the head boy, an eighteen year old, only by telling him stories at night (like Scheherazade from Arabian Nights).

       When he was seventeen his parents found him a job working in a tea importer’s office on the Strand. During his five years working in tea, Collins began to write light-hearted poems, "epics," and stories. In 1843 his first signed story, “The Last Stage Coachman,” was published in The Illuminated Magazine. After spending time abroad in Paris, Collins returned to his job on the Strand without much enthusiasm. He lasted only six more months there, after which his father admitted him as a student of Lincoln’s Inn where Wilkie studied law. But, before he was eligible to be called to the bar, Wilkie was working on his second attempt at a novel, Antonina, an historical novel set in Rome. On Feruary 17, 1847, After having completed over half of Antonina, his father died. Leaving Antonina behind, Collins turned to writing the promised biography of his father, Memoirs of the Life of William Collins.

    Wilkie Collins was born on 8 January 1824 and died on 23 September 1889. In those 65 years he wrote 25 novels, more than 50 short stories, at least 15 plays, and more than 100 non-fiction pieces. A close friend of Charles Dickens from their meeting in March 1851 until Dickens' death in 1870, Collins was one of the best known, best loved, and, for a time, best paid of Victorian fiction writers. But after his death, his reputation declined as Dickens's bloomed. Now, Collins is being given more critical and popular attention than he has for fifty years. Almost all his books are in print, he is studied widely, and new film and television versions of some of his books have been made. Nevertheless, there is still much to be discovered about this superstar of Victorian fiction.
 

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