Author: Collins, William
Biography:
COLLINS, William (1762?-1812: findmypast.co.uk)
Although his family was originally English, he was from a branch that had settled in Ireland in the seventeenth century. He was born in County Wicklow but no birth records have been located. He moved to England and spent time in Scotland where he met and married his wife, Margaret. They had three children: a daughter who died in her infancy and two sons, William John Thomas (1787-1847) who became a respected painter and Royal Academician and Francis James (1790-1833). Collins was a picture dealer but he also wrote prolifically; the memoirs written by his grandson, the novelist Wilkie Collins, mention his many articles in public journals (he contributed to H. S. Woodfall’s Public Advertiser), songs, fugitive pieces, and ghost writing of sermons for a clergyman. At the time of the elder son’s birth in 1787 the family was living in Great Titchfield Street, London. Although Collins was respected in his trade, the family’s financial circumstances were often precarious. In addition to the works listed in this bibliography Collins published a curious three-volume novel, Memoirs of a Picture (1805), which includes a biography of his friend, the artist George Morland. (Morland’s painting, “The Slave Trade,” was based on Collins’s poem of the same name.) Collins became ill in Dec. 1811 and died at home on 9 Jan. 1812. He was buried at St. James’s church, Piccadilly, on 15 Jan. 1812. The record of his death gives his birth year as 1762 but he may have been born earlier. (ancestry.co.uk 16 Feb. 2024; findmypast.co.uk 16 Feb. 2024; ODNB [for William John Thomas Collins] 16 Feb. 2024; W. W. Collins, Memoirs of the Life of William Collins [1848]) SR