LONDON

Maria-Sofia Michalodimitraki

Historic sights included on the London Pass are world famous 'must sees' such as the Tower of London, Windsor Castle, St Paul’s Cathedral, Tower Bridge and many more landmarks that are certain to fascinate any visitor.

Visiting London is an unforgettable experience and there is a true breadth of history going back hundreds of years. Round almost every corner there are landmark sights with their own story, and architectural style.

One of the most important people is William Wilkie Collins, or Wilkie. Today he is best known for The Moonstone (1868), often regarded as the first true detective novel, and The Woman in White (1860), the archetypal sensation novel. During his lifetime, however, he wrote over thirty major books, well over a hundred articles, short stories and essays, and a dozen or more plays.

The early years

Wilkie Collins was the elder son of William Collins the celebrated landscape artist and portrait painter and named after his godfather, Sir David Wilkie. His childhood schooldays began in 1835 at the Maida Hill Academy

Wilkie left school in 1841 and was apprenticed to the tea merchants Antrobus & Co. in the Strand. It was here, in what he called 'the prison on the Strand' that he began his writing with his first signed publication, 'The Last Stage Coachman' appearing in Douglas Jerrold's Illuminated Magazine in August 1843. From May 1846 Collins became a law student at Lincoln's Inn and was called to the bar in 1851. He never practised his profession although several lawyers feature prominently in his subsequent novels. His father died in 1847 and his first published book, The Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., R.A., appeared the following year and received good reviews. It was followed by an historical novel, Antonina (1850) and three contemporary novels, Basil (1852), Hide and Seek (1854) and The Dead Secret (1857).

Despite his growing success, Collins's health began to decline during the 1850s and 1860s, suffering from what he always described as 'rheumatic gout' or 'neuralgia'. These affected his eyes with particular severity and he often needed the services of a secretary - provided either by Frank Beard, his doctor and lifelong friend, or Carrie Graves. He visited numerous physicians and tried various remedies including Turkish and electric baths, Health spas, hypnotism and quinine. Ultimately Beard prescribed opium in the form of laudanum as a pain-killer and sedative, but always for purely medical reasons. Over the years Collins developed an enormous tolerance and eventually took daily 'more laudanum than would have sufficed to kill a ship's crew or company of soldiers

The Final Years During the 1880s, Wilkie's always delicate health

continued to decline. Breathing difficulties due to heart problems became more common and he resorted to capsules of amyl nitrate and hypo-phosphate. In January 1889 he was involved in an accident and thrown from a cab by the force of the collision. There followed a severe of attack of bronchitis. He suffered a stroke on 30 June and with further complications died on 23 September.

Many of Collins's later novels do not possess the force and freshness of his earlier works. Nevertheless, he remained immensely popular with the reading public and the Chatto & Windus collected edition continued to be issued for many years after his death. Now, a century later, there has been a great revival in interest both in his enigmatic lifestyle and his unique gift as a master story-teller and constructor of labyrinthine plots.

Some novelsThe Woman in White It was during the 1860s that Collins achieved

enduring fame with his four major novels, The Woman in White (1860), No Name (1862), Armadale (1866) and The Moonstone (1868). The first of these was published in Dickens new journal, All the Year Round from November 1859 to August 1860. It was received with great popular acclaim and ran to seven editions in 1860, alone.

• The Moonstone T. S. Eliot described The Moonstone as the first and

greatest of English detective novels'. It is certainly a landmark in the history of crime fiction and has a strong claim to having established detective fiction as a genre. It influenced Collins's successors from Trollope and Conan Doyle onwards and has set the standard by which other detective novels are judged. During its serialization in All the Year Round there were crowds of anxious readers outside the publishers' offices in Wellington Street waiting for the next installment. Like The Woman in White, it has never been out of print

Armadale Armadale is Collins's longest novel with a complex

story spanning two generations of the Armadale family. It incorporates several of his favorite themes including the supernatural, identity, murder and detection and features a beautiful red-headed female villain.

No Name No Name is the story of the heroine's attempts

to regain her family fortune and represents a plea by Collins against the then prevailing laws on inheritance and illegitimacy. It may be regarded as an early attempt at the didactic novel which Collins pursued more vigorously from the 1870s when he came under the influence of Charles Reade.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:• http://www.wilkie-collins.info/wilkie_collins_biography.htm• https://www.google.gr/search?q=london&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=xXTVUqy0L-q40

QWjrICoCQ&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ&biw=1366&bih=704#q=the+woman+in+white&tbm=isch&imgdii=_

• https://www.google.gr/search?q=london&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=xXTVUqy0L-q40QWjrICoCQ&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ&biw=1366&bih=704#q=moonstone+wilkie+collins&tbm=isch&imgdii=_

• https://www.google.gr/search?q=london&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=xXTVUqy0L-q40QWjrICoCQ&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ&biw=1366&bih=704#q=armadale+wilkie+collins&tbm=isch&imgdii=_

• https://www.google.gr/search?q=london&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=xXTVUqy0L-q40QWjrICoCQ&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ&biw=1366&bih=704#q=no+name+wilkie+collins&tbm=isch&imgdii=_