The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was born at Portsmouth and worked as a child in a blacking factory while his father was imprisoned for debt — an experience he drew on for the rest of his life. A parliamentary reporter by twenty, he became the most popular novelist in English with The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) and never lost that place: Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol (1843), David Copperfield, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1861) followed. He died at Gad’s Hill, Kent.

Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) was born in Marylebone, London, the son of the landscape painter William Collins, and spent much of his boyhood in Italy and France before working as a clerk for a tea merchant and studying law at Lincoln's Inn, to which he was called in 1851 without ever practicing. His first novel, Antonina, appeared in 1850; the next year he met Charles Dickens, and the two became close friends and frequent collaborators, co-writing several Christmas Numbers of Household Words and All the Year Round together, among them The Wreck of the Golden Mary (1856), The Perils of Certain English Prisoners (1857) and, in 1867, No Thoroughfare. Collins's own novels, many first serialized in Dickens's magazines, include The Woman in White (1859–60), No Name (1862), Armadale (1866) and The Moonstone (1868), often ranked among the first detective novels in English. He never married but lived for decades with Caroline Graves and her daughter, while also maintaining a second household with Martha Rudd, by whom he had three children; gout and a lifelong dependence on laudanum for the pain marked his later years. He died in London.