Wilkie Collins was an English novelist, poet, and playwright writing in the mid 19th century. His writing was very popular; consisting of 27 novels, 50 short stories, 15 plays and over 100 poems. His best-known works were The Woman in White, The Moonstone and Armadale. Collins was greatly influenced by his friend Charles Dickens. Written in 1866 this semi-epistolary novel consists of chapters written in the form of letters between the characters and other chapters written from the perception of the characters. Two cousins are named Allan Armadale as well as both of their fathers. One father gives his son a death bed letter confessing his murder of the other senior Alan Armadale. After a convoluted plot the book concludes with the theme that the sins of the fathers are not visited on the children, and the son of the murderer can turn out to be a good person. Collins will revisit this theme in a later novel.