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Wilkie Collins (WILLIAM WILKIE COLLINS the son)

WILLIAM WILKIE COLLINS, the son of a landscape and portrait painter, was born in London, January 8, 1824. He died September 23, 1889. After some private education at home he spent three years in Italy with his father. On his return he became a clerk with a firm of tea merchants in London, but tea was not to his taste; he studied law at the famous Lincoln's Inn and was called to the bar in 1851. But he was still drifting; he was not attracted to the law, though he found his studies of great use to him in later days. The death of the elder Collins in 1847 put the son partly in the way of finding himself, for he published his father's life in two volumes the next year. He had been turning over his experiences of three years' life in Italy, and in 1850 appeared his first novel, "Antonia, or the Fall of Rome." "Basil" was published in 1852, and "Hide and Seek" in 1854. He had not attracted the attention of the public as yet. The great event of his life, however, came in 1851, when he made the acquaintance of Charles Dickens.