This image is the cover for the book My Miscellanies Vol 1 & 2, Classics To Go

My Miscellanies Vol 1 & 2, Classics To Go

Excerpt: "My object in writing most of these papers—especially those collected under the general heads of 'Sketches of Character' and 'Social Grievances'—was to present what I had observed and what I had thought, in the lightest and the least pretentious form; to address the public (if I could) with something vi of the ease of letter writing, and something of the familiarity of friendly talk. The literary Pulpit appeared to me at that time—as it appears to me still—to be rather overcrowded with the Preachers of Lay Sermons. Views of life and society to set us thinking penitently in some cases, or doubting contemptuously in others, were, I thought, quite plentiful enough already. More freshness and novelty of appeal to the much-lectured and much-enduring reader, seemed to lie in views which might put us on easier terms with ourselves and with others; and which might encourage us to laugh good-humouredly over some of the lighter eccentricities of character, and some of the more palpable absurdities of custom—without any unfair perversion of truth, or any needless descent to the lower regions of vulgarity and caricature. With that idea, all the lighter contributions to these Miscellanies were originally written; and with that idea they are now again dismissed from my desk, to win what approval they may from new readers."

Wilkie Collins

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

OTB ebook