Mortimer Collins, the only child of Francis Collins, whose Spiritual Songs appeared in 1824, was a prolific novelist and journalist who began his literary career by writing poetry and continued to do so for some twenty years. His career illustrates the pressures upon the Victorian man of letters to produce at great speed a succession of works in the most popular genres. When he died, the Athenaeum remarked in an obituary (5 August 1876) that he had "succumbed, at a comparatively early age, to the severe toil that a life devoted to authorship and the struggle to gain a livelihood by the pen entail."

Edward James Mortimer Collins was born in Plymouth and educated at private schools. He entered the teaching profession but resigned his position in 1856 in order to devote himself to writing. His first poems had appeared in the "Poet's Corner" of Bristol newspapers, and in 1855 he had his...