ROBERT

See also:

• ROBERT COLLYER (1823— )

COLLYER (1823— )  , American Unitarian clergy-man, was born in Keighley, Yorkshire, England, on the 8th of December 1823 . At the age of eight he was compelled to leave school and support himself by work in a linen factory . He was naturally studious, however, and supplemented his scant schooling by night study . At fourteen he was apprenticed to a blacksmith, and for several years worked at this trade at Ilkley . In 1849 he became a local Methodist minister, and in the following year emigrated to the United States, where he obtained employment as a hammer maker at Shoemakersville, Pennsylvania . Here he soon began to preach on Sundays while still employed in the factory on week-days . His earnest, rugged, simple style of oratory made him extremely popular, and at once secured for him a wide reputation . His advocacy of anti-slavery principles, then frowned upon by the Methodist authorities, aroused opposition, and eventually resulted in his trial for heresy and the revocation of his licence . He continued, however, as an ' Michel Gerard was a popular Breton peasant deputy (see JACOBINS) . 694 to contribute to Household Words, where After Dark (1856) and The Dead Secret (1857) ran serially . His great success was achieved in 186o with the publication of The Woman in White, which was first printed in All the Year Round . From that time he enjoyed as much popularity as any novelist of his day, No Name (1862), Armadale (1866), and The Moonstone, a capital detective story (1868), being among his most successful books .

After The New Magdalen (1873) his ingenuity became gradually exhausted, and his later stories were little more than faint echoes of earlier successes . He died in Wimpole

Street, London, on the 23rd of September 1889 . Collins's gift was of the melodramatic order, and while many of his stories made excellent plays, several of them were actually reconstructed from pieces designed originally for stage production . But if his colours were occasionally crude and his methods violent, he was at least a master of situation and effect . His trick of telling a story through the mouths of different characters is sometimes irritatingly disconnected; but it had the merit of giving an air of actual evidence and reality to the elucidation of a mystery . He possessed in the highest degree the gift of absorbing interest; the turns and complexities of his plots are surprisingly ingenious, and many of his characters are not only real, but uncommon . Count Fosco in The Woman in White is perhaps his masterpiece; the character has been imitated again and again, but no imitation has ever attained to the subtlety and humour of the original .