Martha Rudd

Martha Rudd bore Wilkie Collins three children, lived a few streets from the woman he lived with, and was known to the world as Mrs Dawson. She was the daughter of a Norfolk shepherd, one of eight children, and was working as a servant at an inn at Winterton when Collins met her in the early 1860s while researching a novel on the coast; she was about nineteen and he was more than twenty years older. She came to London, and from 1868 he set her up in lodgings under the name Dawson, which he also used - the children were registered as William and Martha Dawson's, and Marian, Harriet and William Charles were born between 1869 and 1874. He divided his time between the two households openly enough that both were known to his friends and neither was acknowledged in print. He never married her, which mattered legally: the children were illegitimate and he had to provide for them by will rather than by law, and he split his estate between the two families. She outlived him by thirty years, kept the Dawson name, and her descendants preserved letters and photographs that are much of what is known about the arrangement. Collins's biographers ignored her almost entirely until the twentieth century. Their son William Charles emigrated and the line continued in England through the daughters. Collins visited Norfolk repeatedly and set part of Armadale on that coast. The family kept the Dawson name in some records for a generation.

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