Wilkie Collins

William Wilkie Collins (1824 – 89) was the eldest son of a landscape painter. In 1846, having spent five years in
the tea business, he entered the legal profession and read for the bar at Lincoln’s Inn. It was here that he gained
the experience of the law, the practitioners of it and those individuals who fall under its power, which gave him
much of his material for his writing.
He became a close friend of Charles Dickens, contributing stories to Dicken’s own magazine, Household Words.
Wilkie Collins was the first Englishman to write a full-length detective novel, The Moon-stone. His other famous
work, The Woman in White, is a mystery novel with the kind of bizarre elements and strange characters that
appealed to the author. The same nightmarish quality which pervades much of this novel can be found in ‘A
Terribly Strange Bed’, which is set on the seamier side of Paris in the middle of the nineteenth century.