[1][2] Born to the London painter William Collins and his wife, Harriet Geddes, he moved with them to Italy when he was twelve, living there and in France for two years, learning both Italian and French.

In the 1870s and 1880s, after becoming addicted to the opium which he took for his gout, the quality of his health declined and, in turn, the reception of his artistic output.

He had relationships with two women: widow Caroline Graves – living with her for most of his life, treating her daughter as his – and the younger Martha Rudd, with whom he had three children.

In late 1840, Collins left school at the age of nearly 17 and was apprenticed as a clerk to the firm of tea merchants Antrobus & Co, owned by a friend of Wilkie's father.

Collins started writing and published his first story, "The Last Stage Coachman", in the Illuminated Magazine in August 1843.

[3] Collins said of it: "My youthful imagination ran riot among the noble savages, in scenes which caused the respectable British publisher to declare that it was impossible to put his name on the title page of such a novel."

Collins showed only a slight interest in law and spent most of his time with friends and on working on a second novel, Antonina, or the Fall of Rome.

[6] An instrumental event in his career was an introduction in March 1851 to Charles Dickens by a mutual friend, the painter Augustus Egg.

[9] Collins's story "A Terribly Strange Bed", his first contribution to Dickens's journal Household Words, was published in April 1852.

[11] During this period Collins extended the variety of his writing, publishing articles in George Henry Lewes's paper The Leader, short stories and essays for Bentley's Miscellany, as well as dramatic criticism and the travel book Rambles Beyond Railways.

Collins's novel The Dead Secret was serialised in Household Words from January to June 1857, before being published in volume form by Bradbury and Evans.

The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale, and The Moonstone, written in less than a decade, show Collins not just as a master of his craft, but as an innovater and provocateur.

These four works, which secured him an international reputation, and sold in large numbers, ensured his financial stability, and allowed him to support many others.

His rising success as a writer allowed Collins to resign his post with All the Year Round in 1862 and focus on his novels.

By that time Collins was having difficulty controlling the amount of laudanum he was taking for his continual gout and became addicted.

In 1864, he began work on his novel Armadale, travelling in August to the Norfolk Broads and the village of Winterton-on-Sea to do research for it.

His play No Thoroughfare, co-written with Dickens, was published as the 1867 Christmas number of All the Year Round and dramatised at the Adelphi Theatre in the West End on 26 December.

Collins's novel Poor Miss Finch was serialised in Cassell's Magazine from October to March 1872.

In 1884, Collins was elected vice-president of the Society of Authors, which had been founded by his friend and fellow novelist Walter Besant.

[3] The inconsistent quality of Collins's dramatic and fictional works in the last decade of his life was accompanied by a general decline in his health, including diminished eyesight.

For the last 20 years of his life Collins divided his time between Caroline, who lived with him at his home in Gloucester Place, and Martha, who was nearby.

[22] Collins's works were classified at the time as sensation novels, a genre that became the precursor to detective and suspense fiction.

Dickens played Aaron Gurnock, the head lightkeeper, and arranged for Clarkson Stanfield to paint the backdrop.

His next novel, No Name combined social commentary – the absurdity of the law as applied to children of unmarried parents (see Illegitimacy in fiction) – with a densely plotted revenge thriller.

Armadale, the first and only one of Collins's major novels of the 1860s to be serialised in a magazine other than All the Year Round, provoked strong criticism.

Reviewers found its villainess Lydia Gwilt to be doubtful, and were further provoked by Collins's typically confrontational preface.

The Moonstone, published in 1868, and the last novel of what is generally regarded as the most successful decade of Collins' author's career, was, despite a somewhat cool reception from both Dickens and the critics, a significant return to form.

Viewed by many as the advent of the detective story within the tradition of the English novel, The Moonstone remains one of Collins's most acclaimed works.

It was described later by T. S. Eliot as "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels... in a genre invented by Collins and not by Poe.

The poet Algernon Charles Swinburne commented: "What brought good Wilkie's genius nigh perdition?