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William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824 ? 23 September 1889) was an English novelist and playwright known for The Woman in White (1859), and for The Moonstone (1868), which has been posited as the first modern English detective novel. Born to the London painter William Collins and his wife, he moved with the family to Italy when he was twelve, living there and in France for two years and learning Italian and French. He worked initially as a tea merchant. After publishing Antonina, his first novel, in 1850, Collins met Charles Dickens, who became a friend and mentor. Some Collins work first appeared in Dickens's journals Household Words and All the Year Round. They also collaborated on drama and fiction. Collins gained financial stability and an international following by the 1860s, but began to suffer from gout and became addicted to the opium he took for the pain, so that his health and writing quality declined in the 1870s and 1880s. Collins was critical of the institution of marriage: he split his time between widow Caroline Graves ? living with her for most of his adult life, treating her daughter as his ? and the younger Martha Rudd, by whom he had three children.