The Graves of Wilkie Collins, Harrison Ainsworth and Anthony Trollope.
The Tour of Kensal Green Cemetery concludes.
DIRECTIONS
Five graves after Blondin’s, turn left along the grassy track, passing a series of mausoleums that more resemble garden sheds than tombs. Four graves after the broken and leaning column on the right you will find the solid, pink and grey ledger tomb of:-
 ANTHONY TROLLOPE (1815-1882). Although chiefly remembered today for his Chronicles of Barsetshire (1855-67), and for famously satirizing Dickens as ‘Mr popular sentiment’ in his first successful novel The Warden (1855), Trollope was a life- long civil servant in the post office whose legacy to everyday life in Britain was the introduction of the pillar (mail) box.  Backtrack past Blondin’s grave and just before the two large mausoleums on the left, turn left down the narrow grass path, where a little after half way along on the left is the grave of:-
WLIKIE COLLINS (1824-89). Collins was a prolific author whose best remembered works today are The Woman in White and The Moonstone. Despite his unusual appearance - Charles Dickens once quipped that Collins’s head was ‘triangular with a knob on the middle’ - Collins was an enthusiastic and successful womaniser who, in addition to numerous one night stands, also maintained two mistresses and several illegitimate children in separate households. Collins became one of Dickens’s closest friends and their friendship appears to have deepened around the time that Charles Dickens marriage was breaking down in 1857/58. Collins’s libertine lifestyle made him the ideal companion for Dickens over this troubled period, and he began to eclipse John Forster as Dickens closest friend. Their relationship cooled considerable around 1867, possibly because Dickens ( who was twelve years older than Collins) was jealous of Collins’s success with The Moonstone and the play No Thoroughfare.
 Although Collins wrote a further fifteen novels his ill-advise decision to switch from writing mystery and suspense novels to writing books with a social message led to a severed decline in his popularity. At the same time his health began to suffer and, to ease the pain of both gout and neuralgic problems he took ever-increasing amounts of laudanum. One of his servants is even said to have died when he helped himself to half his master’s usual dose of the opiate. Collins himself died in 1889 at the age of sixty-five. DIRECTIONS
Keep ahead along the path. Turn left after the leaning tree and, at the end of that track, go left along the rough, gravel path where at the end on the right, surmounted by a very slender urn, is the tomb of:-
William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882). Ainsworth was born in Manchester on February 4th 1804. His father, Thomas Ainsworth, was a lawyer with a great knowledge of criminal history. He would regale his son with tales of audacious robberies and daring highwaymen. Ainsworth’s first major success, and probably his only remembered work today, was the novel Rookwood in the pages of which he transformed the psychopathically unsavoury 18th century highwayman, Dick Turpin, into a swashbuckling hero. Indeed, the image that most people have today of Turpin as bold, resourceful and noble historical figure is due to Ainsworth’s depiction of him.
Rookwood was a resounding success and Ainsworth became a literary giant of the 1830’s. At his nearby house, Kensal Lodge (this very built up part of London was then little more than a country village some distance the metropolis) Ainsworth entertained the leading young authors and writers of his day and in so doing made himself the most noted literary hosts of the age. He provided a meeting place for such talented writers as Dickens (to him he was an early mentor) and Thackeray, as well as such fashionable young men as Benjamin Disreali and D'Orsay. It was through Ainsworth that Charles Dickens, then an struggling and relatively unknown short-hand reporter, met the publisher Richard Bentley, his future biographer, John Forster, and also George Cruikshank. DIRECTIONS
Continue ahead, turning next right to walk up the slight incline. Just before the path sweeps right, go left along the grass track. Go right onto Oxford Avenue, and exit through the green gates. Keep going ahead, turning right again onto Harrow Road. Go over the crossing, bearing right then immediately left into College Road where the walk ends back at Kensal Green Station.
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