Wilkie Collins's paternal grandfather.From an impoverished Irish Protestant background in County Wicklow, he
came to London as a young man and made a precarious living as a picture dealer
and restorer.He had literary
ambitions, publishing a number of works including a poem attacking the slave
trade.Memoirs of a Picture
(1805), a lively if incoherent novel, combined fiction with a biography of his
friend, the painter George Morland.Its
account of faking and shady dealings in the art world together with the
improvident and scandalous life of Morland inspired his grandson's A
Rogue's Life in 1856.William
Collins Senior died bankrupt in 1812, leaving almost destitute his Scottish wife
Margaret and their two surviving children, William
and Francis Collins.
MARGARET
COLLINS (d. 1833)
Wilkie
Collins's formidable paternal grandmother, a Scotswoman from near Edinburgh.In her later years, increasingly senile and dependent, she lived with her
son William Collins and
daughter-in-law Harriet Collins during
much of Wilkie's early childhood, first at New Cavendish Street and then at 30
Porchester Terrace where she died on 29 December 1833.She is buried in the churchyard of St Mary's Paddington.
