It’s the birthday of Victorian author Wilkie Collins (1824-1889), whose novel The Moonstone (1868) is considered by some to be the greatest English detective story ever written and whose popularity in his day was exceeded only by that of Charles Dickens.

If you google Collins’ image, you will see that he has the high, prominent, almost bulbous forehead that we’ve all come to expect from Victorians.

Collins was born in London, England, the son of a landscape painter, and said “meh” to his father’s suggestion that he become a clergyman. Instead he studied law in a desultory manner, never actually practicing but using the knowledge he gained in some of his later writing. It was the death of his father in 1847 that prompted young Collins to write his first published book, a memoir. After this he published a couple of novels and met Dickens, joining Dicken’s acting troupe for a time and becoming lifelong BFFs with him. (Fun fact: they acted together in a production of Bulwer-Lytton’s play, Not So Bad As We Seem.)

Collins’ first really successful novel was The Woman in White, which was serialized in Dickens’ magazine, All the Year Round, in 1859-60. It is one of the first “sensation novels,” which were marked by an exploration of Victorian social anxieties such as a fear of losing one’s identity. (Social media-driven fears, such as FOMO, came later.) The novel was an immediate hit and is now considered by some to be one of the greatest novels ever written. It has been adapted for film roughly half a million times, the most recent of which was a five-episode series by the BBC in 2018. The 1860s were highly successful for Collins, who went on to publish No Name (1862), Armadale (1866), No Thoroughfare (1867, co-authored with Dickens), and finally The Moonstone, which as said earlier is supposed to be all that and a bag of chips.

Collins ate rich food, drank a ton of brut Champagne, and suffered horribly from gout. His eyes were described by one friend as “enormous bags of blood!” and he sometimes had to dictate his work while his bloody eyes were bandaged. Pain from the gout led to overuse of laudanum (opium + alcohol), which he ingested in quantities that would have killed an elephant. His health tanked even more in his final years, but he continued working and mentoring younger writers. Wilkie created strong female characters and himself was a proponent of women’s legal rights, but he was not a huge fan of marriage and ended up supporting two separate households, one with Caroline Graves, whose daughter he treated as his own, and one with Martha Rudd, with whom he had three children. When Collins died after a stroke, all of his dependents did inherit from his estate. So there’s that.

Have a gray, weirdly warm Tuesday for a January and stay scrupulously honest to the data.