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Ackroyd's Brief Lives #5
Wilkie Collins
Ackroyd at his best -- gripping short life of the extraordinary Wilkie Collins, author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White .
Short and oddly built, with a head too big for his body, extremely short-sighted, unable to stay still, dressed in colourful clothes, 'as if playing a certain part in the great general drama of life' Wilkie Collins looked distinctily strange. But he was none the less a charmer, befriended by the great, loved by children, irresistibly attractive to women -- and avidly read by generations of readers.
Ackroyd follows his hero, 'the sweetest-tempered of all the Victorian novelists', from his childhood as the son of a well-known artist to his struggling beginnings as writer, his years of fame and his life-long friendship with the other great London chronicler, Charles Dickens. A true Londoner, Collins, like Dickens, was fascinated by the secrets and crimes -- the fraud, blackmail and poisonings -- that lay hidden behind the city's respectable facade. He was a fighter, never afraid to point out injustices and shams, or to tackle the establishment head on. As well as his enduring masterpieces, The Moonstone -- often called the first true detective novel -- and the sensational Women in White , he produced an intriguing array of lesser known works. But Collins had his own he never married, but lived for thirty years with the widowed Caroline Graves, and also had a second liaison, as 'Mr and Mrs Dawson', with a younger mistress, Martha Rudd, with whom he had three children. Both women remained devoted as illness and opium-taking took their he died in 1889, in the middle of writing his last novel -- Blind Love.
Told with Peter Ackroyd's inimitable verve this is a ravishingly entertaining life of a great story-teller, full of surprises, rich in humour and sympathetic understanding.
Short and oddly built, with a head too big for his body, extremely short-sighted, unable to stay still, dressed in colourful clothes, 'as if playing a certain part in the great general drama of life' Wilkie Collins looked distinctily strange. But he was none the less a charmer, befriended by the great, loved by children, irresistibly attractive to women -- and avidly read by generations of readers.
Ackroyd follows his hero, 'the sweetest-tempered of all the Victorian novelists', from his childhood as the son of a well-known artist to his struggling beginnings as writer, his years of fame and his life-long friendship with the other great London chronicler, Charles Dickens. A true Londoner, Collins, like Dickens, was fascinated by the secrets and crimes -- the fraud, blackmail and poisonings -- that lay hidden behind the city's respectable facade. He was a fighter, never afraid to point out injustices and shams, or to tackle the establishment head on. As well as his enduring masterpieces, The Moonstone -- often called the first true detective novel -- and the sensational Women in White , he produced an intriguing array of lesser known works. But Collins had his own he never married, but lived for thirty years with the widowed Caroline Graves, and also had a second liaison, as 'Mr and Mrs Dawson', with a younger mistress, Martha Rudd, with whom he had three children. Both women remained devoted as illness and opium-taking took their he died in 1889, in the middle of writing his last novel -- Blind Love.
Told with Peter Ackroyd's inimitable verve this is a ravishingly entertaining life of a great story-teller, full of surprises, rich in humour and sympathetic understanding.
208 pages, Paperback
First published February 23, 2012
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828 people want to read
About the author
Peter Ackroyd
190 books1,501 followersPeter Ackroyd CBE is an English novelist and biographer with a particular interest in the history and culture of London.
Peter Ackroyd's mother worked in the personnel department of an engineering firm, his father having left the family home when Ackroyd was a baby. He was reading newspapers by the age of 5 and, at 9, wrote a play about Guy Fawkes. Reputedly, he first realized he was gay at the age of 7.
Ackroyd was educated at St. Benedict's, Ealing and at Clare College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a double first in English. In 1972, he was a Mellon Fellow at Yale University in the United States. The result of this fellowship was Ackroyd's Notes for a New Culture, written when he was only 22 and eventually published in 1976. The title, a playful echo of T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), was an early indication of Ackroyd's penchant for creatively exploring and reexamining the works of other London-based writers.
Ackroyd's literary career began with poetry, including such works as London Lickpenny (1973) and The Diversions of Purley (1987). He later moved into fiction and has become an acclaimed author, winning the 1998 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the biography Thomas More and being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1987.
Ackroyd worked at The Spectator magazine between 1973 and 1977 and became joint managing editor in 1978. In 1982 he published The Great Fire of London, his first novel. This novel deals with one of Ackroyd's great heroes, Charles Dickens, and is a reworking of Little Dorrit. The novel set the stage for the long sequence of novels Ackroyd has produced since, all of which deal in some way with the complex interaction of time and space, and what Ackroyd calls "the spirit of place". It is also the first in a sequence of novels of London, through which he traces the changing, but curiously consistent nature of the city. Often this theme is explored through the city's artists, and especially its writers.
Ackroyd has always shown a great interest in the city of London, and one of his best known works, London: The Biography, is an extensive and thorough discussion of London through the ages.
His fascination with London literary and artistic figures is also displayed in the sequence of biographies he has produced of Ezra Pound (1980), T. S. Eliot (1984), Charles Dickens (1990), William Blake (1995), Thomas More (1998), Chaucer (2004), William Shakespeare (2005), and J. M. W. Turner. The city itself stands astride all these works, as it does in the fiction.
From 2003 to 2005, Ackroyd wrote a six-book non-fiction series (Voyages Through Time), intended for readers as young as eight. This was his first work for children. The critically acclaimed series is an extensive narrative of key periods in world history.
Early in his career, Ackroyd was nominated a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984 and, as well as producing fiction, biography and other literary works, is also a regular radio and television broadcaster and book critic.
In the New Year's honours list of 2003, Ackroyd was awarded the CBE.
Peter Ackroyd's mother worked in the personnel department of an engineering firm, his father having left the family home when Ackroyd was a baby. He was reading newspapers by the age of 5 and, at 9, wrote a play about Guy Fawkes. Reputedly, he first realized he was gay at the age of 7.
Ackroyd was educated at St. Benedict's, Ealing and at Clare College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a double first in English. In 1972, he was a Mellon Fellow at Yale University in the United States. The result of this fellowship was Ackroyd's Notes for a New Culture, written when he was only 22 and eventually published in 1976. The title, a playful echo of T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), was an early indication of Ackroyd's penchant for creatively exploring and reexamining the works of other London-based writers.
Ackroyd's literary career began with poetry, including such works as London Lickpenny (1973) and The Diversions of Purley (1987). He later moved into fiction and has become an acclaimed author, winning the 1998 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the biography Thomas More and being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1987.
Ackroyd worked at The Spectator magazine between 1973 and 1977 and became joint managing editor in 1978. In 1982 he published The Great Fire of London, his first novel. This novel deals with one of Ackroyd's great heroes, Charles Dickens, and is a reworking of Little Dorrit. The novel set the stage for the long sequence of novels Ackroyd has produced since, all of which deal in some way with the complex interaction of time and space, and what Ackroyd calls "the spirit of place". It is also the first in a sequence of novels of London, through which he traces the changing, but curiously consistent nature of the city. Often this theme is explored through the city's artists, and especially its writers.
Ackroyd has always shown a great interest in the city of London, and one of his best known works, London: The Biography, is an extensive and thorough discussion of London through the ages.
His fascination with London literary and artistic figures is also displayed in the sequence of biographies he has produced of Ezra Pound (1980), T. S. Eliot (1984), Charles Dickens (1990), William Blake (1995), Thomas More (1998), Chaucer (2004), William Shakespeare (2005), and J. M. W. Turner. The city itself stands astride all these works, as it does in the fiction.
From 2003 to 2005, Ackroyd wrote a six-book non-fiction series (Voyages Through Time), intended for readers as young as eight. This was his first work for children. The critically acclaimed series is an extensive narrative of key periods in world history.
Early in his career, Ackroyd was nominated a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984 and, as well as producing fiction, biography and other literary works, is also a regular radio and television broadcaster and book critic.
In the New Year's honours list of 2003, Ackroyd was awarded the CBE.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 86 reviews
March 5, 2012
Poor William Wilkie Collins, destined forever to fall under the shadow of Charles Dickens, his contemporary and his friend. Poor William Wilkie Collins, a man who wrote two great novels and a lot of middling ones. But, oh, how captivating this master of Victorian melodrama could be, how mesmerising, how compelling. I read The Woman in White in less than a day, horribly fascinated by the dastardly deeds of Sir Percival Gylde and Count Fosco, two of the most delightfully dark villains in all of Victorian literature! The Moonstone, which I also devoured in a fever, is, as T. S. Eliot once said, the first and best detective novel in the English literary canon.
Collins was a Londoner, born and bred. Like Dickens he is a chronicler of the city in a time of great transition. It’s as well that we remember him in this year when his mentor is being so lavishly celebrated. Peter Ackroyd has in Wilkie Collins, not so much a biography as a literary pot-boiler.
It’s a pity, really, because if I were a publisher thinking of commissioning a work on Collins Ackroyd would be the first writer to come to mind. After all, who could be better? Who could be better than a man who wrote masterly biographies of Dickens and of London? But Wilkie Collins is oddly two-dimensional, almost as if the author was bored with the subject, the occasional flashes of brilliance notwithstanding.
There is much to fascinate in the life of Collins, a man in so many ways wholly untypical of his times. He had none of Dickens bourgeois respectability. He never married. Instead he had two long-term mistresses, one of whom bore him three children. Two mistresses, both of whom knew of the other, meant two households and lots of imaginative juggling. There is an interesting parallel here with his fiction, where doppelgangers abound. I’m thinking specifically of Laura Farlie and Anne Catherick in The Woman in White, shadows, perhaps, of Caroline Graves and Martha Rudd, the women in Marylebone!
Like Thomas de Quincy, Collins was an English opium eater. Suffering from ‘rheumatic gout’, a Victorian portmanteau covering a variety of sins (the ‘sin’ in Collins’ case may have been venereal), he took increasing quantities of laudanum, a tincture of alcohol and opium freely available at the time. By his mid-thirties he was drinking to levels that would have killed those not habituated. There were consequences, of course, terrifying hallucinations, the sort of demon that pursued de Quincy, except his pursuer wasn’t a Chinaman (read Confessions of an English Opium Eater!) but yet another doppelganger, another Wilkie Collins.
Ill-health, addiction and domestic complexity did not stop him working, though by his own admission he had no recollection at all of writing large parts of The Moonstone. As a novelist he came at just the right time. Paper taxes had been abolished in the 1820s; there had been important breakthroughs in printing technology and a mass market was developing with the improvement in elementary education. This was all helped along by the expansion of the railway, with travellers able to buy ‘Shilling Shockers’ at the new stations. The Woman in White was an immediate sensation, the first edition selling out within a short space of time. It also caused what we would now call product placement, with Woman in White bonnets, Woman in White perfume and even a Woman in White waltz.
Collins knew his public. He liked to travel around on the new London omnibuses, picking up snatches of conversation, then colouring his fiction. He was really the first modern sensationalist, and how sensational he could be, touching on the lowest recesses of human behaviour – murder, fraud, adultery and blackmail. And, yes, sex! It’s quite rightly said that there is more sex in Collins’ books than there is anywhere else in the fiction of the time, outside underground pornography. In Basil the eponymous hero discovers he has been cuckolded when he listens through a thin wall while his young bride does the wild thing - noisily- with the book’s villain!
Hardly surprising, given his unusual domestic arrangements, he was critical of what he called ‘clap trap morality’. He was particularly critical of the way that women were treated at the time. To compensate for this, as Ackroyd points out, he created in his books fiercely independent women who defied the conventions of nineteenth century femininity.
So, then, there is lots to be going on with about a writer, about his public and about his times. But Ackroyd seems to have taken his own somnambulant trip through Wilkie Collins. It’s a brief life, a mere two hundred pages compared with the thousand or so of the magisterial Dickens. That may not have been so bad – there is far less original material for a life of Collins than there is for Dickens – but the subject does not seem to engage him. His pedestrian treatment certainly won’t gain Collins many new readers. The problem is, in the end, he makes the author sound like a bit of a bore, a measure, I suspect of his own boredom, or, sad to say, declining power as a writer.
I don’t want to be completely unfair. As I said above, there are occasional flashes of brilliance, of the old Ackroyd. He still has a penetrating eye for detail, picking up on the future significance of the magnifying glass in detective fiction from Sergeant Cuff’s use of it in The Moonstone. The prose shines at points but mostly it’s a picture painted in dull monotones. It gives me the appearance of a book written in a hurry. There are far too many crutches, ‘must have’, ‘seems’, ‘is likely’, the sort of authorial interventions to cover lacunae, words and phrases that simply madden me with their silly imprecision, proof that the writer is not the master of his subject. Collins deserves better. At one time Ackroyd could have done better.
Collins was a Londoner, born and bred. Like Dickens he is a chronicler of the city in a time of great transition. It’s as well that we remember him in this year when his mentor is being so lavishly celebrated. Peter Ackroyd has in Wilkie Collins, not so much a biography as a literary pot-boiler.
It’s a pity, really, because if I were a publisher thinking of commissioning a work on Collins Ackroyd would be the first writer to come to mind. After all, who could be better? Who could be better than a man who wrote masterly biographies of Dickens and of London? But Wilkie Collins is oddly two-dimensional, almost as if the author was bored with the subject, the occasional flashes of brilliance notwithstanding.
There is much to fascinate in the life of Collins, a man in so many ways wholly untypical of his times. He had none of Dickens bourgeois respectability. He never married. Instead he had two long-term mistresses, one of whom bore him three children. Two mistresses, both of whom knew of the other, meant two households and lots of imaginative juggling. There is an interesting parallel here with his fiction, where doppelgangers abound. I’m thinking specifically of Laura Farlie and Anne Catherick in The Woman in White, shadows, perhaps, of Caroline Graves and Martha Rudd, the women in Marylebone!
Like Thomas de Quincy, Collins was an English opium eater. Suffering from ‘rheumatic gout’, a Victorian portmanteau covering a variety of sins (the ‘sin’ in Collins’ case may have been venereal), he took increasing quantities of laudanum, a tincture of alcohol and opium freely available at the time. By his mid-thirties he was drinking to levels that would have killed those not habituated. There were consequences, of course, terrifying hallucinations, the sort of demon that pursued de Quincy, except his pursuer wasn’t a Chinaman (read Confessions of an English Opium Eater!) but yet another doppelganger, another Wilkie Collins.
Ill-health, addiction and domestic complexity did not stop him working, though by his own admission he had no recollection at all of writing large parts of The Moonstone. As a novelist he came at just the right time. Paper taxes had been abolished in the 1820s; there had been important breakthroughs in printing technology and a mass market was developing with the improvement in elementary education. This was all helped along by the expansion of the railway, with travellers able to buy ‘Shilling Shockers’ at the new stations. The Woman in White was an immediate sensation, the first edition selling out within a short space of time. It also caused what we would now call product placement, with Woman in White bonnets, Woman in White perfume and even a Woman in White waltz.
Collins knew his public. He liked to travel around on the new London omnibuses, picking up snatches of conversation, then colouring his fiction. He was really the first modern sensationalist, and how sensational he could be, touching on the lowest recesses of human behaviour – murder, fraud, adultery and blackmail. And, yes, sex! It’s quite rightly said that there is more sex in Collins’ books than there is anywhere else in the fiction of the time, outside underground pornography. In Basil the eponymous hero discovers he has been cuckolded when he listens through a thin wall while his young bride does the wild thing - noisily- with the book’s villain!
Hardly surprising, given his unusual domestic arrangements, he was critical of what he called ‘clap trap morality’. He was particularly critical of the way that women were treated at the time. To compensate for this, as Ackroyd points out, he created in his books fiercely independent women who defied the conventions of nineteenth century femininity.
So, then, there is lots to be going on with about a writer, about his public and about his times. But Ackroyd seems to have taken his own somnambulant trip through Wilkie Collins. It’s a brief life, a mere two hundred pages compared with the thousand or so of the magisterial Dickens. That may not have been so bad – there is far less original material for a life of Collins than there is for Dickens – but the subject does not seem to engage him. His pedestrian treatment certainly won’t gain Collins many new readers. The problem is, in the end, he makes the author sound like a bit of a bore, a measure, I suspect of his own boredom, or, sad to say, declining power as a writer.
I don’t want to be completely unfair. As I said above, there are occasional flashes of brilliance, of the old Ackroyd. He still has a penetrating eye for detail, picking up on the future significance of the magnifying glass in detective fiction from Sergeant Cuff’s use of it in The Moonstone. The prose shines at points but mostly it’s a picture painted in dull monotones. It gives me the appearance of a book written in a hurry. There are far too many crutches, ‘must have’, ‘seems’, ‘is likely’, the sort of authorial interventions to cover lacunae, words and phrases that simply madden me with their silly imprecision, proof that the writer is not the master of his subject. Collins deserves better. At one time Ackroyd could have done better.
September 25, 2015
This very short biography of Victorian author Wilkie Collins is breezy in style and it skims the surface of his colorful life. Readers are given facts about his childhood, oddly shaped body, dislike of marriage, two mistresses, friendship with Charles Dickens, travels abroad, and illnesses, but with only 233 small size pages of text there isn’t room to go into much depth about them all.
I would have liked to learn more about how the two mistresses managed--their relationships with Collins overlapped, and though he provided for them and their children as best he could his refusal to marry put them both in a difficult situation. I also would have enjoyed a larger sense of history from the book, and deeper insights into life in Victorian England, but as the subtitle indicates this is “A Brief Life” and I did come away from the book with new perspectives on Wilkie Collins.
I was most fascinated by the ongoing overview of the books and plays Collins wrote that’s integrated into his personal history, with the plots and characters of those works put into the context of his life and time. This quick introduction to Wilkie Collins is like an intriguing appetizer that whets the appetite for more.
I read an ebook advanced review copy of this book provided to me at no cost by the publisher through NetGalley. Review opinions are mine.
I would have liked to learn more about how the two mistresses managed--their relationships with Collins overlapped, and though he provided for them and their children as best he could his refusal to marry put them both in a difficult situation. I also would have enjoyed a larger sense of history from the book, and deeper insights into life in Victorian England, but as the subtitle indicates this is “A Brief Life” and I did come away from the book with new perspectives on Wilkie Collins.
I was most fascinated by the ongoing overview of the books and plays Collins wrote that’s integrated into his personal history, with the plots and characters of those works put into the context of his life and time. This quick introduction to Wilkie Collins is like an intriguing appetizer that whets the appetite for more.
I read an ebook advanced review copy of this book provided to me at no cost by the publisher through NetGalley. Review opinions are mine.
May 28, 2016
My friend saw this on the recently arrived table at his local school library and took it out for me because he knows I'm a Peter Ackroyd fangirl.
My friend then totally outed himself and asked "Who is Wilkie Collins?".
Sometimes I want to cry.
I love Wilkie Collins and I love Peter Ackroyd so it is not surprising that I loved this book. Collins is one of the best mystery writers, and unlike his more famous friend, Dickens, actually writes good women characters. It is wonderful to read a biography of him that is engaging, fun, and expresses love for Collins work.
Now Mr Ackroyd, could you write one about Trollope?
My friend then totally outed himself and asked "Who is Wilkie Collins?".
Sometimes I want to cry.
I love Wilkie Collins and I love Peter Ackroyd so it is not surprising that I loved this book. Collins is one of the best mystery writers, and unlike his more famous friend, Dickens, actually writes good women characters. It is wonderful to read a biography of him that is engaging, fun, and expresses love for Collins work.
Now Mr Ackroyd, could you write one about Trollope?
April 14, 2017
I "met" Wilkie Collins a few years ago when Heather Ordover's CraftLit did The Woman in White. I loved it. It was entirely unexpected and fun and quirky and altogether engaging … and, come to find out, all of those adjectives can be equally applied to the author. And also to this biography – Ackroyd is a deeply enjoyable writer, who obviously has a solid knowledge and affection for Collins. I actually wish this had been longer, deeper – but, as it is, it's lovely as an appetizer, something to whet the appetite for more of Collins's own work.
The usual disclaimer: I received this book via Netgalley for review.
The usual disclaimer: I received this book via Netgalley for review.
March 1, 2016
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Wilkie Collins: A Brief Life is the newest volume in the series of the same name by popular historian Peter Ackroyd, whose London: The Biography I'm a huge fan of; as befitting its name, this particular series is an attempt to present informative and entertaining biographies of various second-tier-famous figures throughout history (past volumes include people like Chaucer and J.M.W. Turner), but in a succinct and fast-moving style within a manuscript that I'm guessing is right around 50,000 words, or barely the minimum length of the smallest novels on the market. And Collins is a natural subject for such a series; although known at his height as the second most popular author of Victorian England (beaten only by his good friend and theatrical collaborator Charles Dickens), the fact is that Collins didn't have an interesting enough life to justify one of those 700-page barnburner bios like you see of other Victorian novelists, a man certainly with his notorious touches (he didn't believe in monogamous marriage, and carried on essentially a polyamorous relationship with two different women for decades), but who by and large spent most of his adult life simply writing and then visiting southern Europe, writing and then visiting southern Europe, like so many of his upper-middle-class British Empire peers. Highly worthwhile as a primer to why the largely forgotten Collins is such an important part of English-language literary history (among other accolades, he wrote Britain's very first detective novel, and virtually invented the genre known at the time as "sensation stories," which in the 20th century morphed into the crime and noir genres we know today), this is a nearly perfect length for getting to know the man without him overstaying his welcome, and comes strongly recommended to anyone interested in the subject.
Out of 10: 9.0
Wilkie Collins: A Brief Life is the newest volume in the series of the same name by popular historian Peter Ackroyd, whose London: The Biography I'm a huge fan of; as befitting its name, this particular series is an attempt to present informative and entertaining biographies of various second-tier-famous figures throughout history (past volumes include people like Chaucer and J.M.W. Turner), but in a succinct and fast-moving style within a manuscript that I'm guessing is right around 50,000 words, or barely the minimum length of the smallest novels on the market. And Collins is a natural subject for such a series; although known at his height as the second most popular author of Victorian England (beaten only by his good friend and theatrical collaborator Charles Dickens), the fact is that Collins didn't have an interesting enough life to justify one of those 700-page barnburner bios like you see of other Victorian novelists, a man certainly with his notorious touches (he didn't believe in monogamous marriage, and carried on essentially a polyamorous relationship with two different women for decades), but who by and large spent most of his adult life simply writing and then visiting southern Europe, writing and then visiting southern Europe, like so many of his upper-middle-class British Empire peers. Highly worthwhile as a primer to why the largely forgotten Collins is such an important part of English-language literary history (among other accolades, he wrote Britain's very first detective novel, and virtually invented the genre known at the time as "sensation stories," which in the 20th century morphed into the crime and noir genres we know today), this is a nearly perfect length for getting to know the man without him overstaying his welcome, and comes strongly recommended to anyone interested in the subject.
Out of 10: 9.0
April 2, 2015
I can highly recommend this short biography which charts the life and career of the author of The Woman in White, one of my favourite Victorian authors. I enjoyed learning about the way he flouted Victorian protocol and lived with his mistress for many years while having three children with another much younger mistress who lived across the park just two streets away. He was free in spirit
and certainly unconventional however in his stories, he did delve into the seedy side of life and of those less fortunate than himself which wasn't always well received by his critics. Hailed as one of the first detective story writers he was quite prolific by choice but also by necessity due to having to keep two families afloat in central London. He wrote 30 novels and over 60 short stories as well as dramatising several of his stories for the stage.
His contemporaries do include an array of very interesting characters including The Pre-Raphaelites and CharlesDickens. Both authors serialised their stories in popular papers and magazines and Collins' work was in great demand selling many thousands of copies. He suffered greatly from ill health due to overindulgence and paid the price living much of his adult life with gout and eye problems but despite this lived a full and relatively long life.
Well worth a read especially if, like me, you are a fan of Collins.
and certainly unconventional however in his stories, he did delve into the seedy side of life and of those less fortunate than himself which wasn't always well received by his critics. Hailed as one of the first detective story writers he was quite prolific by choice but also by necessity due to having to keep two families afloat in central London. He wrote 30 novels and over 60 short stories as well as dramatising several of his stories for the stage.
His contemporaries do include an array of very interesting characters including The Pre-Raphaelites and CharlesDickens. Both authors serialised their stories in popular papers and magazines and Collins' work was in great demand selling many thousands of copies. He suffered greatly from ill health due to overindulgence and paid the price living much of his adult life with gout and eye problems but despite this lived a full and relatively long life.
Well worth a read especially if, like me, you are a fan of Collins.
September 24, 2015
This is a brief sketch that doesn't in the end leave us with a much deeper understanding of Collins, but it does entice you into further reading. There are a few novels I would read just based on how Ackroyd described and analyzed them. Like Basil, for how it talks about obsessive love at first sight, and that other one about vivisection and the creepy scientist.
It was odd though how each and every one of Collins' vacations seemed to be listed here. Who cares...
There was this passage talking about how he hated woman doctors, like most people of his time, and how he had other peculiarities when it came to women. I got the feeling he talked the talk (when it came to independent women in his novels,) but didn't walk the walk (when it came to such women in real life.) A bit like a father saying he's got nothing against so-and-so, as long as they don't date his daughter.
Of course we can excuse him as being a man of his age, but still there were very forward-looking people during the Victorian times too. Though being a radical (or progressive) and being a good writer doesn't always go hand in hand.
It was odd though how each and every one of Collins' vacations seemed to be listed here. Who cares...
There was this passage talking about how he hated woman doctors, like most people of his time, and how he had other peculiarities when it came to women. I got the feeling he talked the talk (when it came to independent women in his novels,) but didn't walk the walk (when it came to such women in real life.) A bit like a father saying he's got nothing against so-and-so, as long as they don't date his daughter.
Of course we can excuse him as being a man of his age, but still there were very forward-looking people during the Victorian times too. Though being a radical (or progressive) and being a good writer doesn't always go hand in hand.
Read
October 21, 2024DNF at page 61.
They say never meet your heroes, because they have feet of clay. I wish I'd never started reading this book. I love Wilkie Collins' books, but the man himself was a pervert. He had a couple of different mistresses and never married, and I just got tired of hearing about his sexual exploits and his flirtations. Really gross.
I think from now on, I will give up on trying to read author biographies, because they are usually not very nice people, and it ruins my enjoyment of their books. I would rather just enjoy the art and not know anything about the artist.
They say never meet your heroes, because they have feet of clay. I wish I'd never started reading this book. I love Wilkie Collins' books, but the man himself was a pervert. He had a couple of different mistresses and never married, and I just got tired of hearing about his sexual exploits and his flirtations. Really gross.
I think from now on, I will give up on trying to read author biographies, because they are usually not very nice people, and it ruins my enjoyment of their books. I would rather just enjoy the art and not know anything about the artist.
December 29, 2024
Before reading this book, the only fact I knew about Wilkie Collins' personal life was that he was friends with Charles Dickens. The man certainly seemed like a character and led an interesting life. I'm still not sure if it adds or detracts from his literature, sometimes learning about an author changes the way you read their works. Time will tell I suppose.
March 6, 2014
Read by Michael Pennington.
blurb - Short and oddly built, with a head too big for his body, extremely short-sighted, unable to stay still, dressed in colourful clothes, 'as if playing a certain part in the great general drama of life' Wilkie Collins looked distinctly strange. But he was none the less a charmer, befriended by the great, loved by children, irresistibly attractive to women - and avidly read by generations of readers.
Peter Ackroyd follows his hero, 'the sweetest-tempered of all the Victorian novelists', from his childhood as the son of a well-known artist to his struggling beginnings as writer, his years of fame and his life-long friendship with the other great London chronicler, Charles Dickens. A true Londoner, Collins, like Dickens, was fascinated by the secrets and crimes -- the fraud, blackmail and poisonings - that lay hidden behind the city's respectable facade. He was a fighter, never afraid to point out injustices and shams, or to tackle the establishment head on. As well as his enduring masterpieces, "The Moonstone" - often called the first true detective novel - and the sensational "Women in White," he produced an intriguing array of lesser known works. But Collins had his own secrets: he never married, but lived for thirty years with the widowed Caroline Graves, and also had a second liaison, as 'Mr and Mrs Dawson', with a younger mistress, Martha Rudd, with whom he had three children. Both women remained devoted as illness and opium-taking took their toll: he died in 1889, in the middle of writing his last novel - Blind Love.
Told with Peter Ackroyd's inimitable verve this is a ravishingly entertaining life of a great story-teller, full of surprises, rich in humour and sympathetic understanding.
Abridged by Libby Spurrier
Producer: Joanna Green A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.
Well worth splashing out for the book when the price comes down a bit.
3* - The House of Doctor Dee
5* - Dickens
4* - Chatterton
1* - The Lambs of London
4* - Shakespeare
3.5* - Hawksmoor
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 7, 2016
Really liked this biography--I liked the length and how quirkily (is that a word?) it was written. Wilkie would have approved!!
July 26, 2016
It's about Wilkie Collins - what's not to like...
October 22, 2015
Biographies and non fiction are always such an interesting genre for me. It must be such a challenge trying to research a person or subject so famous or well known and still be able to bring something ‘new’ to the table. Not to mention write a book that doesn’t read like a boring history timeline with a bunch of dates and milestones in a person’s life.
So I am always intrigued when non fiction and/or biographies come across my nightstand for review, if the person or subject interests me I usually give it a go. Wilkie Collins has been a very interesting literary figure for me since I read Drood by Dan Simmons a few years ago. While I didn’t really like the book itself that well…..the character Wilkie Collins appealed to me so much that I read his novel The Woman in White a short time later.
As I said, sometimes it’s hard as a biographer or non fiction writer to bring a new voice or freshness to a popular or well known subject or person…..but Peter Ackroyd does not disappoint. While this is a relatively short biography, he fills it with interesting details, behind the scenes tidbits, and facts about Collins’s life and literary career. Some were well known, like his friendship with Dickens, while others were new to me such as how much he influenced the detective genre etc.
His writing style was fluid, straight forward, and active. I didn’t feel like I was reading a bland biography at all! It was well written and just long enough to get the job done and keep me interested but also made me want to learn more about Collins. For some people that might be a criticism, but I looked at this novel like it was an intro to who he was and gave a brief background for those who are interested but if you wanted to know more you could read other biographies that were maybe longer or went into more detail.
See my full review here
So I am always intrigued when non fiction and/or biographies come across my nightstand for review, if the person or subject interests me I usually give it a go. Wilkie Collins has been a very interesting literary figure for me since I read Drood by Dan Simmons a few years ago. While I didn’t really like the book itself that well…..the character Wilkie Collins appealed to me so much that I read his novel The Woman in White a short time later.
As I said, sometimes it’s hard as a biographer or non fiction writer to bring a new voice or freshness to a popular or well known subject or person…..but Peter Ackroyd does not disappoint. While this is a relatively short biography, he fills it with interesting details, behind the scenes tidbits, and facts about Collins’s life and literary career. Some were well known, like his friendship with Dickens, while others were new to me such as how much he influenced the detective genre etc.
His writing style was fluid, straight forward, and active. I didn’t feel like I was reading a bland biography at all! It was well written and just long enough to get the job done and keep me interested but also made me want to learn more about Collins. For some people that might be a criticism, but I looked at this novel like it was an intro to who he was and gave a brief background for those who are interested but if you wanted to know more you could read other biographies that were maybe longer or went into more detail.
See my full review here
October 13, 2016
I have always loved Wilkie Collins ! Woman in White and The Moonstone were my two favorite stories so I was very excited to read about his life . Oh ! I almost forgot about Armadale . We have a very olde antebellum home here in Oxford named Armadale and I have always wanted to go inside. It is closed now . We used to have pilgrimages of all the Antebellums along the Main Street of Lamar Drive . The houses were beautiful .
Wilkie Collins was best known for his short stories and especially his first detective story The Woman in White . The longer novel Armadele was very popular also . He was a very unusual character , often described as Bohemian in style ! He wore rather trendy fancy clothing and drank quite a bit while always telling stories.
He was a really good friend with Charles Dickens and the two remained friends throughout life . Later on in life , Wilkie met a woman and fell in love and stayed with her for many years but never married. After some time he met another young girl half his age and fell in ,ove again . They had three children but never married , eventually she left Wilkie and married a man . Wilikie attended the wedding . When Wilkie became ill , she returned and cared for him the rest of his life. He became an opium addict because he could not stop the terrible pain .
He was a successful writer all throughout his career . People read his books as long as he wrote them and they are still published today .
Wilkie Collins was best known for his short stories and especially his first detective story The Woman in White . The longer novel Armadele was very popular also . He was a very unusual character , often described as Bohemian in style ! He wore rather trendy fancy clothing and drank quite a bit while always telling stories.
He was a really good friend with Charles Dickens and the two remained friends throughout life . Later on in life , Wilkie met a woman and fell in love and stayed with her for many years but never married. After some time he met another young girl half his age and fell in ,ove again . They had three children but never married , eventually she left Wilkie and married a man . Wilikie attended the wedding . When Wilkie became ill , she returned and cared for him the rest of his life. He became an opium addict because he could not stop the terrible pain .
He was a successful writer all throughout his career . People read his books as long as he wrote them and they are still published today .
July 23, 2015
A fascinating biography of a little known, unsung hero of English literature. I remember reading (and loving) The Woman in White in college, but little did I know how much he affected storytelling in a lasting way that has carried through to today. He helped cultivate detective fiction, invented sensation novels, and re-created the female characters in English literature. This short and easy to read biography was filled with page-after-page of behind the scenes of an author, a dramatist, and a time in literary history that he considered "a great age for authors."
- Lauren W., Doubleday Marketing Department
- Lauren W., Doubleday Marketing Department
April 14, 2018
An excellent biography of a unique Victorian author! Ackroyd offers a concise, yet very in-depth account of Wilkie Collins's life and inspiration for his writings. Anyone who enjoys reading about the lives of Victorian era writers would benefit from reading this little biography.
June 11, 2017
Interesting short bio.
January 3, 2025
Given his multitude of physical ailments, it is incredible Collins could make any headway in life. Much less craft prose of such energy and elan.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 23, 2013
For an author so lauded in his time, he even rivalled Dickens at times, Wilkie Collins is now mainly remembered for two novels, 'The Moonstone' and 'The Woman in White'. The rest of his work is often, perhaps surprisingly, relegated to also-rans.
Peter Ackroyd tells his story with sympathy and understanding and his detail is, as is always the case with his work, superb. He begins by a less than flattering picture of the Victorian author, 'At five feet and six inches he was relatively short ... his head was too large for his body; his arms and his legs were a little too short, while his hands and feet were too small and considered to be "rather like a woman's".'
Despite these physicalities his writing did not suffer at all. He began with a life of his father William Collins, an artist, starting the book when William died while he was in the middle of writing his first novel 'Antonina'. The biography was a betseller and Collins' writing career was off to a good start.
Thereafter he was writing for the rest of his life, except when he needed a rest from his exertions either from overwork or from illness, with which he was bothered in later life. And his work was well received by the public, especially once he had become a close friend of Dickens who published some of his novels in serial form in his magazines.
He became acquainted with Dickens through his interest in the theatre when the latter asked him to perform in one of his amateur theatricals, 'Not So Bad As We Seem' (I am fortunate to have a playbill from the production). From then on Collins featured in many of Dickens' productions and collaborated with him on a number of them. And despite Collins' success as a novelist, he always had ambitions to be a playwright and have a career in the theatre. Indeed, he was relatively successful in this direction as many of his plays had lengthy runs.
Collins personal life was something of a puzzle; he kept two mistresses who never met each other, although the children he had with one regularly mixed with the family of the other (I wonder who they thought they were?). When he died he left his modest fortune, although quite substantial in Victorian times (£11,000), to the both of them and in turn they both tended his grave after his death.
Ackroyd brings out plenty of biographical information in an entertaining narrative that tells us that Wilkie Collins even had a picture exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1849. Entitled 'The Smugglers' Retreat', it led to the artist William Holman-Hunt proclaiming, '... you might well admire that masterpiece. It was done by that great painter Wilkie Collins, and it put him so completely at the head of landscape painters that he determined to retire from the profession in compassion for the rest.' Victorian literature will be eternally grateful for his decision!
And thanks are also due to Peter Ackroyd for covering his most interesting story in a lively and entertaining way.
Peter Ackroyd tells his story with sympathy and understanding and his detail is, as is always the case with his work, superb. He begins by a less than flattering picture of the Victorian author, 'At five feet and six inches he was relatively short ... his head was too large for his body; his arms and his legs were a little too short, while his hands and feet were too small and considered to be "rather like a woman's".'
Despite these physicalities his writing did not suffer at all. He began with a life of his father William Collins, an artist, starting the book when William died while he was in the middle of writing his first novel 'Antonina'. The biography was a betseller and Collins' writing career was off to a good start.
Thereafter he was writing for the rest of his life, except when he needed a rest from his exertions either from overwork or from illness, with which he was bothered in later life. And his work was well received by the public, especially once he had become a close friend of Dickens who published some of his novels in serial form in his magazines.
He became acquainted with Dickens through his interest in the theatre when the latter asked him to perform in one of his amateur theatricals, 'Not So Bad As We Seem' (I am fortunate to have a playbill from the production). From then on Collins featured in many of Dickens' productions and collaborated with him on a number of them. And despite Collins' success as a novelist, he always had ambitions to be a playwright and have a career in the theatre. Indeed, he was relatively successful in this direction as many of his plays had lengthy runs.
Collins personal life was something of a puzzle; he kept two mistresses who never met each other, although the children he had with one regularly mixed with the family of the other (I wonder who they thought they were?). When he died he left his modest fortune, although quite substantial in Victorian times (£11,000), to the both of them and in turn they both tended his grave after his death.
Ackroyd brings out plenty of biographical information in an entertaining narrative that tells us that Wilkie Collins even had a picture exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1849. Entitled 'The Smugglers' Retreat', it led to the artist William Holman-Hunt proclaiming, '... you might well admire that masterpiece. It was done by that great painter Wilkie Collins, and it put him so completely at the head of landscape painters that he determined to retire from the profession in compassion for the rest.' Victorian literature will be eternally grateful for his decision!
And thanks are also due to Peter Ackroyd for covering his most interesting story in a lively and entertaining way.
January 7, 2017
From BBC Radio 4 - Book of the week:
Peter Ackroyd charts the life of Wilkie Collins. From his childhood as the son of an artist, to his struggles to become a writer, and his life-long friendship with Charles Dickens.
Short and oddly built, with a head too big for his body, extremely short-sighted, unable to stay still, dressed in colourful clothes, 'as if playing a certain part in the great general drama of life' Wilkie Collins looked distinctly strange. But he was none the less a charmer, befriended by the great, loved by children, irresistibly attractive to women - and avidly read by generations of readers.
Peter Ackroyd follows his hero, 'the sweetest-tempered of all the Victorian novelists', from his childhood as the son of a well-known artist to his struggling beginnings as writer, his years of fame and his life-long friendship with the other great London chronicler, Charles Dickens. A true Londoner, Collins, like Dickens, was fascinated by the secrets and crimes -- the fraud, blackmail and poisonings - that lay hidden behind the city's respectable facade. He was a fighter, never afraid to point out injustices and shams, or to tackle the establishment head on.
As well as his enduring masterpieces, "The Moonstone" - often called the first true detective novel - and the sensational "Women in White," he produced an intriguing array of lesser known works. But Collins had his own secrets: he never married, but lived for thirty years with the widowed Caroline Graves, and also had a second liaison, as 'Mr and Mrs Dawson', with a younger mistress, Martha Rudd, with whom he had three children. Both women remained devoted as illness and opium-taking took their toll: he died in 1889, in the middle of writing his last novel - Blind Love.
Told with Peter Ackroyd's inimitable verve this is a ravishingly entertaining life of a great story-teller, full of surprises, rich in humour and sympathetic understanding.
Abridged by Libby Spurrier
Producer: Joanna Green
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01cjm4f
Peter Ackroyd charts the life of Wilkie Collins. From his childhood as the son of an artist, to his struggles to become a writer, and his life-long friendship with Charles Dickens.
Short and oddly built, with a head too big for his body, extremely short-sighted, unable to stay still, dressed in colourful clothes, 'as if playing a certain part in the great general drama of life' Wilkie Collins looked distinctly strange. But he was none the less a charmer, befriended by the great, loved by children, irresistibly attractive to women - and avidly read by generations of readers.
Peter Ackroyd follows his hero, 'the sweetest-tempered of all the Victorian novelists', from his childhood as the son of a well-known artist to his struggling beginnings as writer, his years of fame and his life-long friendship with the other great London chronicler, Charles Dickens. A true Londoner, Collins, like Dickens, was fascinated by the secrets and crimes -- the fraud, blackmail and poisonings - that lay hidden behind the city's respectable facade. He was a fighter, never afraid to point out injustices and shams, or to tackle the establishment head on.
As well as his enduring masterpieces, "The Moonstone" - often called the first true detective novel - and the sensational "Women in White," he produced an intriguing array of lesser known works. But Collins had his own secrets: he never married, but lived for thirty years with the widowed Caroline Graves, and also had a second liaison, as 'Mr and Mrs Dawson', with a younger mistress, Martha Rudd, with whom he had three children. Both women remained devoted as illness and opium-taking took their toll: he died in 1889, in the middle of writing his last novel - Blind Love.
Told with Peter Ackroyd's inimitable verve this is a ravishingly entertaining life of a great story-teller, full of surprises, rich in humour and sympathetic understanding.
Abridged by Libby Spurrier
Producer: Joanna Green
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01cjm4f
September 14, 2015
Extremely readable, fascinating account of the life and works of Wilkie Collins including many quotes by his friend and often co-writer Charles Dickens. I had no idea Collins and Dickens wrote (and often performed in) so many plays together. It was interesting to read about the cult following Collins had after his early works appeared as serial releases in magazines. The Moonstone has always been a favorite of mine and learning about the process of writing it and Collins feelings about it, the public reaction---all of that made my appreciation greater. Author Ackroyd paints a vivid picture of Victorian life in England, Italy, France as Collins travels and writes. A great biography of a truly great writer and a fascinating time. Highly recommend this one.
April 15, 2017
Succinct. The biography that is. Therefore, it will not take you long to read it. This is as set against Claire Tomalin's tour de force biography of Charles Dickens, a friend of Collins, and a much longer biography!
December 27, 2015
Full of fun details of the era, but there are not all that many new details of Collins himself. Well worth reading!
February 1, 2026
Some years ago, I read Peter Ackroyd‘s “Biography of London.” Ackroyd really has a talent at condensing quite a bit of information in a breezy and friendly style that is a pleasure to read. In the hands of some other authors, a brief biography of Wilkie Collins might be dullsville. Ackroyd also does a really nice job of weaving events from Wilkie Collins’ life or overreaching themes into background about many of his short stories and novels.
Ackroyd argues that Willie Collins was master of plot, but not character. I must submit an argument to the contrary, especially having just finished “The Moonstone.“ Collins’ character work in that book is a tour de force. Very few authors can touch the people he created on those pages.
“The Diary of Anne Rodway” is the first female detective short story and “The Moonstone is the first detective novel, yet most high schoolers don’t study Wilkie Collins’ work. And I submit that they should.
Peter Ackroyd does a fantastic job of condensing Wilkie’s very interesting life, including his somewhat unconventional upbringing in the family of a relatively well-known painter of his day, his beloved mother, regular moves, and many trips abroad. As well as health maladies and unfortunate opinions addiction. While I knew that Wilkie Collins had several works appear in Dickens’ publications, I did not realize that the two authors were relatively close friends and had both travelled together and put on several plays, including one that had Queen Victoria in tears! Here are a few choice quotes from the book about Dickens and Collins:
[Augustus Egg] and Collins would converse about the work they saw, much to Dickens's impatience; he had no particular interest in the Old Masters, and considered artistic discourse to be so much humbug. "To hear Collins learnedly holding forth to Egg…about reds, and greens, and things 'coming well with other things, and lines being wrong, and lines being right, is far beyond the bounds of all caricature." Dickens was also mildly irritated by Collins's general untidiness; while Dickens lived in perfect neatness and order, Collins's room was always messy with random objects strewn all over the place.
He [Dickens] did have slight misgivings about his junior partner [Collins], however. He once told Wills that Collins sometimes betrayed a tendency to be "unnecessarily offensive to the middle class."
Both Collins and Dickens, engaged in unconventional and mostly socially unacceptable romantic relationships, which may be another reason that they spent so much time together:
But he never once contemplated matrimony. … It was not a risk he cared to undertake, and instead he engaged in what might be described as two illicit relationships. In an article for Household Words, "Bold Words by a Bachelor," he declared that "the general idea of the scope and purpose of the institution of marriage is a miserably narrow one"… In his novels, too, he dilates upon the injustices and defects of the married state. It was one of his principal themes.
Words new to me: antinomian (Christians are free from moral law due to divine grace), lugger (small ship with 2-3 masts and asymmetrical sail), sirocco (a hot wind, often dusty or rainy, blowing from North Africa across the Mediterranean to southern Europe)
Ackroyd argues that Willie Collins was master of plot, but not character. I must submit an argument to the contrary, especially having just finished “The Moonstone.“ Collins’ character work in that book is a tour de force. Very few authors can touch the people he created on those pages.
“The Diary of Anne Rodway” is the first female detective short story and “The Moonstone is the first detective novel, yet most high schoolers don’t study Wilkie Collins’ work. And I submit that they should.
Peter Ackroyd does a fantastic job of condensing Wilkie’s very interesting life, including his somewhat unconventional upbringing in the family of a relatively well-known painter of his day, his beloved mother, regular moves, and many trips abroad. As well as health maladies and unfortunate opinions addiction. While I knew that Wilkie Collins had several works appear in Dickens’ publications, I did not realize that the two authors were relatively close friends and had both travelled together and put on several plays, including one that had Queen Victoria in tears! Here are a few choice quotes from the book about Dickens and Collins:
[Augustus Egg] and Collins would converse about the work they saw, much to Dickens's impatience; he had no particular interest in the Old Masters, and considered artistic discourse to be so much humbug. "To hear Collins learnedly holding forth to Egg…about reds, and greens, and things 'coming well with other things, and lines being wrong, and lines being right, is far beyond the bounds of all caricature." Dickens was also mildly irritated by Collins's general untidiness; while Dickens lived in perfect neatness and order, Collins's room was always messy with random objects strewn all over the place.
He [Dickens] did have slight misgivings about his junior partner [Collins], however. He once told Wills that Collins sometimes betrayed a tendency to be "unnecessarily offensive to the middle class."
Both Collins and Dickens, engaged in unconventional and mostly socially unacceptable romantic relationships, which may be another reason that they spent so much time together:
But he never once contemplated matrimony. … It was not a risk he cared to undertake, and instead he engaged in what might be described as two illicit relationships. In an article for Household Words, "Bold Words by a Bachelor," he declared that "the general idea of the scope and purpose of the institution of marriage is a miserably narrow one"… In his novels, too, he dilates upon the injustices and defects of the married state. It was one of his principal themes.
Words new to me: antinomian (Christians are free from moral law due to divine grace), lugger (small ship with 2-3 masts and asymmetrical sail), sirocco (a hot wind, often dusty or rainy, blowing from North Africa across the Mediterranean to southern Europe)
November 20, 2019
I usually prefer short biographies to long ones. There is something dismaying about following a character for upwards of a thousand pages only to have him or her die in the last chapters. The Brief lives series by Peter Ackroyd, which includes studies of Chaucer, Turner, Newton, and Poe. His Wilkie Collins: A Brief Life is an excellent study of a neglected author.
Few readers embark on such titles as The Woman in White, Armadale, and The Moonstone. I guess they take up too many smart phone screens.
I have followed Ackroyd's career from the start, and am gratified on the terse, yet cogent treatment of an author I admire.
Few readers embark on such titles as The Woman in White, Armadale, and The Moonstone. I guess they take up too many smart phone screens.
I have followed Ackroyd's career from the start, and am gratified on the terse, yet cogent treatment of an author I admire.
September 1, 2024
A touching brief insight into one of literary giants of nineteenth century England and even beyond its borders. I have seen a few reviews that, perhaps because of the usual weight and length of Ackroyd's work, complain the work is perhaps too light. I disagree but I also knew what I was in for. It is a collection of insights and anecdotes, marked by personal and professional milestones with a lovely sprinkling of Ackroyd's speculation on just where Collins got his literary inspiration from.
This has made me so much more excited to read Collins' other books and also gave me some very useful insights on how the novels were received, as well as the social and personal circumstances in which they were written. I am grateful that Ackroyd never once spoiled the ending to one of the novels, leaving plenty of sensational excitement for me when I read the rest!
This has made me so much more excited to read Collins' other books and also gave me some very useful insights on how the novels were received, as well as the social and personal circumstances in which they were written. I am grateful that Ackroyd never once spoiled the ending to one of the novels, leaving plenty of sensational excitement for me when I read the rest!
July 3, 2022
This was an excellent short biography of an author that I had only heard of but had never read.
In this very readable micro-biography of Collins, you learn of his resistance to Victorian customs (as exemplified not only by his personal life but also by his writings), his illnesses (gout, but others too) that persisted throughout his life, and his intimate friendship with Charles Dickens. You also learn of his travels and how they intertwined with his working habits.
In short, reading the biography made me want to read his novels, which is a good thing, since I tend to find older British fiction more intimidating or inaccessible.
In this very readable micro-biography of Collins, you learn of his resistance to Victorian customs (as exemplified not only by his personal life but also by his writings), his illnesses (gout, but others too) that persisted throughout his life, and his intimate friendship with Charles Dickens. You also learn of his travels and how they intertwined with his working habits.
In short, reading the biography made me want to read his novels, which is a good thing, since I tend to find older British fiction more intimidating or inaccessible.
November 6, 2015
British biographer Peter Ackroyd, who has authored notable and acclaimed series of "Brief Lives" on Poe, J.M.W. Turner, Newton, Charlie Chaplin, he has also written best selling biographies of Shakespeare, Dickens, Moore, Blake, and others. Ackroyd turns his attention to a lesser known Victorian novelist "Wilkie Collins: A Brief Life". Collins wrote the masterpiece classic "The Woman In White" (1860) and "Moonstone" (1868) recognized as the first true detective novel. He wrote numerous other books, and with Dickens co-authored popular serial stories usually featured in newspapers that were eagerly anticipated by the reading public.
As a child Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) known as Willie, had a nervous disposition, did not like school, though read a great deal, and spoke French and Italian. The family enjoyed long holidays in Italy visiting ancient sights, his father was a tallented successful artist, his mother a homemaker. One holiday, lasted over 2 years, as William wanted his young son to learn from life experiences. Collins greatly admired his father, and established himself as a writer with "Memoirs of the Life of William Collins R.A." (1848). He released his book with tremendous pride, his father greatly pleased, the memoir launched his prolific writing career, and demonstrated his skill as an author. Collins often wrote constantly and obsessively, pushing himself, seldom taking much time off.
Known as a "writer of stature" he was greatly admired, he and Charles Dickens frequently traveled abroad and wrote together. Queen Victoria attended a private performance of Collins and Dickens screenplay "The Frozen Deep" (1856). Her majesty sent Collins a personal note, stating her "highest Approval" the first and only honor he would receive from royalty.
By 1858 he was living with Carolyn Graves, and was known to associate with women with questionable reputations. Collins was busy with her remodeling his home and she was known as Mrs. Collins. Collins refused to marry, citing inequality and unfairness of marriage to women, though this was unlikely the real reason. In the Victorian times married women were held in servitude their husbands. Ackroyd points out the "conventions of ordinary life concealed the burden of secrets and irregular relationships". Curiously, during the time of repressed judgmental Victorian era, there is little recorded if his friends or neighbors sensibilities were offended by Collins openly having Graves, Martha Rudd, and her three children to support.
Collins was a colorful dresser, a dear charming man, liked by everyone. Unfortunately, he was afflicted with assorted health problems during his life: gout, arthritis, rheumatism, liver problems, stomach upset, respiratory infections/distress from the damp London fog. Fearing a breakdown, his emotional well being was greatly compromised. He was faint, he could barely get out of bed, easily startled by noise, trembling, unable to sleep. His physician prescribed the powerful mix of alcohol and opium: laudanum (1862). Laudanum was available over the counter, Collins developed a life long dependency on the drug and ingested it in large alarming amounts. Collins seldom let his health issues interfere with his writing deadlines, and produced large volumes of work at a time.
Wilkie Collins was famous and highly regarded and admired for his authorship, in spite of his poor health and unconventional personal life. We have many clues to his truth in this compelling biography, also by reading his novels. Many thanks and much appreciation to Doubleday for the ARC for the purpose of review.
As a child Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) known as Willie, had a nervous disposition, did not like school, though read a great deal, and spoke French and Italian. The family enjoyed long holidays in Italy visiting ancient sights, his father was a tallented successful artist, his mother a homemaker. One holiday, lasted over 2 years, as William wanted his young son to learn from life experiences. Collins greatly admired his father, and established himself as a writer with "Memoirs of the Life of William Collins R.A." (1848). He released his book with tremendous pride, his father greatly pleased, the memoir launched his prolific writing career, and demonstrated his skill as an author. Collins often wrote constantly and obsessively, pushing himself, seldom taking much time off.
Known as a "writer of stature" he was greatly admired, he and Charles Dickens frequently traveled abroad and wrote together. Queen Victoria attended a private performance of Collins and Dickens screenplay "The Frozen Deep" (1856). Her majesty sent Collins a personal note, stating her "highest Approval" the first and only honor he would receive from royalty.
By 1858 he was living with Carolyn Graves, and was known to associate with women with questionable reputations. Collins was busy with her remodeling his home and she was known as Mrs. Collins. Collins refused to marry, citing inequality and unfairness of marriage to women, though this was unlikely the real reason. In the Victorian times married women were held in servitude their husbands. Ackroyd points out the "conventions of ordinary life concealed the burden of secrets and irregular relationships". Curiously, during the time of repressed judgmental Victorian era, there is little recorded if his friends or neighbors sensibilities were offended by Collins openly having Graves, Martha Rudd, and her three children to support.
Collins was a colorful dresser, a dear charming man, liked by everyone. Unfortunately, he was afflicted with assorted health problems during his life: gout, arthritis, rheumatism, liver problems, stomach upset, respiratory infections/distress from the damp London fog. Fearing a breakdown, his emotional well being was greatly compromised. He was faint, he could barely get out of bed, easily startled by noise, trembling, unable to sleep. His physician prescribed the powerful mix of alcohol and opium: laudanum (1862). Laudanum was available over the counter, Collins developed a life long dependency on the drug and ingested it in large alarming amounts. Collins seldom let his health issues interfere with his writing deadlines, and produced large volumes of work at a time.
Wilkie Collins was famous and highly regarded and admired for his authorship, in spite of his poor health and unconventional personal life. We have many clues to his truth in this compelling biography, also by reading his novels. Many thanks and much appreciation to Doubleday for the ARC for the purpose of review.
August 7, 2015
The high Victorian age saw the rise of the novel as we know it. Taxes on paper had been abolished and advances in printing technology led to an increase in book production. Circulating libraries and monthly magazines offered affordable access to literature to the masses. "Shilling Shockers" were hawked for reading on the trains. Millions of working men and women were buying up cheap penny journals.
The new class of readers wanted a new kind of novel. Sensationalism, sentimentality, and melodrama were in demand, and stories about crime and murder. They wanted Genre fiction that took readers on a wild ride, with great plots to keep things moving along.
And Wilkie Collins was a genius at just this kind of novel.
Peter Ackroyd's short biography Wilkie Collins, A Brief Life succinctly covers the life and art of the author of The Women in White and The Moonstone.
With a "painter's eye" and brilliant plotting he became the fourth greatest writer of his generation. He wrote the first English detective story and created the first female detective. A social liberal who disdained Victorian values, he tackled controversial issues, writing about the underclass, vivisection, illegitimacy, and 'fallen women'. His female characters were strong and self sufficient, the opposite of the idealized Victorian female.
He suffered from bad health and was in pain most of his life. He used laudanum in ever increasing doses, grateful for the relief it brought. Later he added calomel and colchicum and inhaled amyl nitrite. Wilkie Collins used a cane in his thirties and by his sixties his health was so deteriorated people thought he looked twenty years older. And yet when working on a book he kept up a diligent pace, even dictating from his sick bed.
Collins determined not to marry, but had a long term mistress Caroline Graves (who already had a child) and later a second mistress who bore him children. The two women never met although their children sometimes mingled at his home.
At university I had a Victorian Studies course in which we read the important books published in 1859. That was the year in which Charles Dickens, in his magazine All the Year Round, published his serialized A Tale of Two Cities. The November issue saw the conclusion of Two Cities and the first installment of The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. (This was also the year Origin of Species was published!)
I later read The Moonstone. I also read a lot about Charles Dickens and learned about his collaboration with Wilkie Collins to write The Frozen Deep, inspired by the lost Franklin expedition which never returned from the frozen north. Franklin's widow didn't give up hope and sent an expedition to find her husband. Collins and Dickens were great friends and collaborated in other plays as well, even acting.
But I knew nothing of the man Collins. And what an odd man he was! He was completely unconventional. He wore flashy clothes, was oddly proportioned, and loved French cooking. Medical science could only offer him remedies that today we shudder to consider, and likely ruined his health even more.
I am left wanting to explore his life in greater depth, to know him more vividly. I also an curious to re-read again Women in White, which spawned quite a fan club, and books I have not read especially Heart and Science which Ackroyd contends is one of Collin's "most unjustly neglected novels" with more characterization.
I thank the publisher and NetGalley for the free ebook in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
The new class of readers wanted a new kind of novel. Sensationalism, sentimentality, and melodrama were in demand, and stories about crime and murder. They wanted Genre fiction that took readers on a wild ride, with great plots to keep things moving along.
And Wilkie Collins was a genius at just this kind of novel.
Peter Ackroyd's short biography Wilkie Collins, A Brief Life succinctly covers the life and art of the author of The Women in White and The Moonstone.
With a "painter's eye" and brilliant plotting he became the fourth greatest writer of his generation. He wrote the first English detective story and created the first female detective. A social liberal who disdained Victorian values, he tackled controversial issues, writing about the underclass, vivisection, illegitimacy, and 'fallen women'. His female characters were strong and self sufficient, the opposite of the idealized Victorian female.
He suffered from bad health and was in pain most of his life. He used laudanum in ever increasing doses, grateful for the relief it brought. Later he added calomel and colchicum and inhaled amyl nitrite. Wilkie Collins used a cane in his thirties and by his sixties his health was so deteriorated people thought he looked twenty years older. And yet when working on a book he kept up a diligent pace, even dictating from his sick bed.
Collins determined not to marry, but had a long term mistress Caroline Graves (who already had a child) and later a second mistress who bore him children. The two women never met although their children sometimes mingled at his home.
At university I had a Victorian Studies course in which we read the important books published in 1859. That was the year in which Charles Dickens, in his magazine All the Year Round, published his serialized A Tale of Two Cities. The November issue saw the conclusion of Two Cities and the first installment of The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. (This was also the year Origin of Species was published!)
I later read The Moonstone. I also read a lot about Charles Dickens and learned about his collaboration with Wilkie Collins to write The Frozen Deep, inspired by the lost Franklin expedition which never returned from the frozen north. Franklin's widow didn't give up hope and sent an expedition to find her husband. Collins and Dickens were great friends and collaborated in other plays as well, even acting.
But I knew nothing of the man Collins. And what an odd man he was! He was completely unconventional. He wore flashy clothes, was oddly proportioned, and loved French cooking. Medical science could only offer him remedies that today we shudder to consider, and likely ruined his health even more.
I am left wanting to explore his life in greater depth, to know him more vividly. I also an curious to re-read again Women in White, which spawned quite a fan club, and books I have not read especially Heart and Science which Ackroyd contends is one of Collin's "most unjustly neglected novels" with more characterization.
I thank the publisher and NetGalley for the free ebook in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
April 12, 2018
Much like a delicious hor d'oeuvre, A Brief Life is a tid bit that prepares the literary pallet and wets the appetite for more. Even those unfamiliar with this Victorian era author will find enough information in this little book to appreciate Collins' contribution to literature. It's a quick, easy read, filled with emotion, humor and strange facts.
Not to be unkind, but Collins is described as having a 'strange' physical appearance, plus having sworn off marriage, one would be surprised if a lady gave him the time of day...But not so, he was quite popular with the ladies and successfully maintained long term relations with not one, but two mistresses. He was the first author to pen an English mystery with a female detective in the lead role. Collins suffered from a variety of painful ailments, which lead to a serious addiction to opium. He had deep, heartfelt appreciation and respect for those serving in the military. With war raging, he became convinced that a local fortune teller could commune with the dead. While this brought him some degree of comfort, it also alienated him from a large section of the population. He tried his hand theater, without much fanfare. He is most famous for his novels, The Lady in White and Moonstone. Collins had an artists eye for detail, in his prose and descriptions - he painted stories with pen on paper, as his father before him had brush on canvas. While he enjoyed the adulation of fans during his lifetime, it is because his works have stood the test of time he is considered a master storyteller today. Just as Chaucer, Twain, Poe and Dickens are held in the highest of literary esteem - Wilkie Collins may be lesser known, but his works are no less masterful.
Peter Ackroyd set out to deliver a brief overview of Wilkie Collins - I'm sure that's why he titled the book "A Brief Life." This wasn't meant to be a 1900 page, detailed history, and it isn't. At under 300 pages, Ackroyd's book does an excellent job of introducing Wilkie Collins to strangers and reminding fans what they liked about his work. Peter Ackroyd talks about Wilkie Collins as though he were telling us about an old friend....sharing stories from his humble beginnings to his days of fame and of course his endearing friendship with Charles Dickens. Years ago when I read Ackroyd's, Charles Dickens biography*, I felt the two shared so much it was like they had some kind of spiritual or cosmic kinship. Now after reading A Brief Life, the dialogue flows so naturally it's as if Ackroyd has a genuine understanding of his subject (Wilkie Collins) through Charles Dickens. (If that makes sense.) I enjoyed A Brief Life and would recommend it to anyone who loves literature, especially those who want to know more about the man behind the covers.
Happy Reading,
RJ
quick note: * Dickens *1991 - large book, well worth the investment of time
Not to be unkind, but Collins is described as having a 'strange' physical appearance, plus having sworn off marriage, one would be surprised if a lady gave him the time of day...But not so, he was quite popular with the ladies and successfully maintained long term relations with not one, but two mistresses. He was the first author to pen an English mystery with a female detective in the lead role. Collins suffered from a variety of painful ailments, which lead to a serious addiction to opium. He had deep, heartfelt appreciation and respect for those serving in the military. With war raging, he became convinced that a local fortune teller could commune with the dead. While this brought him some degree of comfort, it also alienated him from a large section of the population. He tried his hand theater, without much fanfare. He is most famous for his novels, The Lady in White and Moonstone. Collins had an artists eye for detail, in his prose and descriptions - he painted stories with pen on paper, as his father before him had brush on canvas. While he enjoyed the adulation of fans during his lifetime, it is because his works have stood the test of time he is considered a master storyteller today. Just as Chaucer, Twain, Poe and Dickens are held in the highest of literary esteem - Wilkie Collins may be lesser known, but his works are no less masterful.
Peter Ackroyd set out to deliver a brief overview of Wilkie Collins - I'm sure that's why he titled the book "A Brief Life." This wasn't meant to be a 1900 page, detailed history, and it isn't. At under 300 pages, Ackroyd's book does an excellent job of introducing Wilkie Collins to strangers and reminding fans what they liked about his work. Peter Ackroyd talks about Wilkie Collins as though he were telling us about an old friend....sharing stories from his humble beginnings to his days of fame and of course his endearing friendship with Charles Dickens. Years ago when I read Ackroyd's, Charles Dickens biography*, I felt the two shared so much it was like they had some kind of spiritual or cosmic kinship. Now after reading A Brief Life, the dialogue flows so naturally it's as if Ackroyd has a genuine understanding of his subject (Wilkie Collins) through Charles Dickens. (If that makes sense.) I enjoyed A Brief Life and would recommend it to anyone who loves literature, especially those who want to know more about the man behind the covers.
Happy Reading,
RJ
quick note: * Dickens *1991 - large book, well worth the investment of time
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