Wilkie Collins and Arthur Conan Doyle

Wilkie Collins was one of the best known, best loved and best paid of Victorian fiction writers, and has been called the inventor of the sensation novel.
He was born in 1824.
He wrote 25 novels, more than 50 short stories, at least 15 plays, and more than 100 works of non-fiction.
He was a close friend of Dickens, who was a big influence on him, and who encouraged him to write full- time. His best-known works, immensely popular in the mid- nineteenth century, are The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1867).
After his death, his reputation declined but Collins's work is currently enjoying a critical revival.

Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh on the 22nd of May 1859.
The Conan Doyle family was a large one (Arthur was one often children) and life was hard. Even so, Arthur managed to study medicine at Edinburgh University from 1876 to 1881.
Besides providing him with a medical degree, Edinburgh University also brought Conan Doyle into contact with Dr Joseph Bell, whose amazing deductions concerning the history of his patients were to provide the ideas behind the deductive skills of Sherlock Holmes, the most brilliant detective in the history of literature.