Wilkie Collins (1824-89): A Brief Biography Philip V. Allingham , Contributing Editor, Victorian Web; Faculty of Education, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario Victorian Web Home Authors Wilkie Collins Works ... Evangelicalism gave him a distatste for respectable piety and organized religion that was to last his life" (4). At age 22, he became a law student at London's Lincoln's Inn. Collins was called to the bar in 1851, the same year in which he first met novelist Charles Dickens , with whom he is still so closely associated that he has been called "the Dickensian Ampersand." He never practised law, adopting literature as his profession instead. Between 1848 and his death in 1889, he wrote 25 novels, more than 50 short stories, at least 15 plays, and more than 100 non-fiction pieces. A close friend of 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. In Dickens's second weekly journal | |
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