preparing the type. He returned to England in 1786, but continued his study of Sanskrit, and he afterwards became librarian to the East India Company, and examiner at Haileybury on the establishment of the college there in 1805. Wilkins was knighted in 1833 in recognition of his services to Oriental scholarship, and he died in London in 1836. He was a pioneer in the department of learning with which his name was associated, being the first Englishman to acquire mastery of Sanskrit, and to make a thorough study of Indian inscriptions in that script. He compiled a Sanskrit grammar and published several translations from the sacred books of the East, besides preparing a new edition of Richardson’s Persian and Arabic dictionary, and a catalogue of the manuscripts collected by Sir William Jones, who acknowledged his indebtedness to Wilkins, and whom the latter assisted in founding the Asiatic Society of Bengal.
WILKINS, GEORGE (fl. 1607), English playwright and pamphleteer, is first mentioned as the author of a pamphlet on the Three Miseries of Barbary, which probably dates from 1604. He was associated with the King's Men, and was thus a colleague of Shakespeare. He was chiefly employed in remodelling old plays. He collaborated in 1607 with William Rowley and John Day in The Travailes of the Three English Brothers. In the same year a play was produced which was apparently entirely Wilkins's work. It is The Miseries of Inforst Mariage, and treats the story of Walter Calverley, whose identity is thinly veiled under the name of “Scarborough.” This man had killed his two children and had attempted to murder his wife. The play had originally a tragic ending, but as played in 1607 ended in comedy, and the story stopped short before the catastrophe, perhaps because of objections raised by Mrs Calverley's family, the Cobhams. The crime itself is dealt with in A Yorkshire Tragedy, which was originally performed with three other plays under the title of All’s One. It was entered on the Stationers' Register in 1608 as “written by William Shakespeare,” published with the same ascription in that year, and reprinted in 1619 without contradiction of the statement. Mr Sidney Lee assigns to George Wilkins a share in Shakespeare's Pericles and possibly in Timon of Athens. Delius conjectured that Wilkins was the original author of Pericles and that Shakespeare remodelled it. However that may be, Wilkins published in 1608 a novel entitled The Painfull Adventures of Pericles, Prynce of Tyre, being the true history of Pericles as it was lately presented by … John Cower, which sometimes follows the play very closely.
Mr Fleay (Biog. Chron. of the Drama) says that the external evidence for the Shakespearian authorship of the Yorkshire Tragedy cannot be impugned, and in the absence of other authorship cannot be lightly set aside, but he does not abandon the hope of establishing a contrary opinion. Both Mr Fleay and Professor A. W. Ward (Eng. Dram. Lit. ii. p. 182) seem to think that the story of Marina in Pericles was a complete original play by Shakespeare, and that the remodelling story should be reversed, i.e. that Pericles is a Shakespearian play remodelled by a playwright, possibly Wilkins. Mr Lee (Dict. Nat. Biog., Art. “Wilkins”) says the Yorkshire Tragedy was “fraudulently” assigned to Shakespeare by Thomas Pavier, the publisher.
WILKINS, JOHN (1614–1672), bishop of Chester, was born at Fawsley, Northamptonshire, and educated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford. He was ordained and became vicar of Fawsley in 1637, but soon resigned and became chaplain successively to Lord Saye and Sele, Lord Berkeley, and Prince Charles Louis, nephew of Charles I. and afterwards elector palatine of the Rhine. In 1648 he became warden of Wadham College, Oxford. Under him the college was extraordinarily prosperous, for, although a supporter of Cromwell, he was in touch with the most cultured royalists, who placed their sons in his charge. In 1659 Richard Cromwell appointed him master of Trinity College, Cambridge. At the Restoration in 1660 he was deprived, but appointed prebendary of York and rector of Cranford, Middlesex. In 1661 he was preacher at Gray's Inn, and in 1662 vicar of St Lawrence Jewry, London. He became vicar of Polebrook, Northamptonshire, in 1666, prebendary of Exeter in 1667, and in the following year prebendary of St Paul's and bishop of Chester. Possessing strong scientific tastes, he was the chief founder of the Royal Society and its first secretary. He died in London on the 19th of November 1672.
The chief of his numerous works is an Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (London, 1668), in which he expounds a new universal language for the use of philosophers. He is remembered also for a curious work entitled The Discovery of a World in the Moon (1638, 3rd ed., with an appendix “The possibility of a passage thither,” 1640). Other works are A Discourse concerning a New Planet (1640); Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger (1641), a work of some ingenuity on the means of rapid correspondence; and Mathematical Magick (1648).
See P. A. Wright Henderson, The Life and Times of John Wilkins (1910), and also the article Aeronautics.
WILKINS, MARY ELEANOR (1862), American novelist, was born in Randolph, Massachusetts, on the 7th of January 1862, of Puritan ancestry. Her early education, chiefly from reading and observation, was supplemented by a course at Mount Holyoke Seminary, South Hadley, Mass. Her home was in her native village and in Brattleboro, Vermont, until her marriage in 1902 to Dr Charles M. Freeman of Metuchen, New Jersey. She contributed poems and stories to children's magazines, and published several books for children, including Young Lucretia and other Stories (1892), The Pot of Gold and other Stories (1892), and Once upon a Time and other Child Verses (1897). For older readers she wrote the following volumes of short stories: A Humble Romance and other Stories (1887), A New England Nun and other Stories (1891), Silence and other Stories (1898), three books which gave her a prominent place among American short-story writers; The People of Our Neighborhood (1898), The Love of Parson Lord and other Stories (1900), Understudies (1901) and The Givers (1904); the novels Jane Field (1892), Pembroke (1894), Madelon (1896), Jerome, a Poor Man (1897), The Jamesons (1899), The Portion of Labor (1901) and The Debtor (1905); and Giles Corey, Yeoman (1895), a prose tragedy founded on incidents from New England history. Her longer novels, though successful in the portrayal of character, lack something of the unity, suggestiveness and charm of her short stories, which are notable contributions to modern American literature. She deals usually with a few traits peculiar to the village and country life of New England, and she gave literary permanence to certain characteristics of New England life which are fast disappearing.
WILKINSBURG, a borough of Allegheny county, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., immediately E. of Pittsburg, of which it is a residential suburb. Pop. (1890) 4662; (1900) 11,886, of whom 1336 were foreign-born and 275 were negroes; (1910 census) 18,924. Wilkinsburg is served by the Pennsylvania railway and by interurban electric lines. It is a post-station of Pittsburg. In the borough are a Home for Aged Protestants (1882), the United Presbyterian Home for the Aged (1879), and Columbia hospital (1908). Settled in 1798 and known first as McNairville and then as Rippeyville, the place was renamed about 1840 in honour of William Wilkins (1779–1865), a member of the United States Senate in 1831–1834, minister to Russia in 1834–1835, a representative in Congress in 1843–1844, and secretary of war in President John Tyler's cabinet in 1844–1845. In 1887 Wilkinsburg was incorporated as a borough.
WILKINSON, JAMES (1757–1825), American soldier and adventurer, was born in Calvert county, Maryland, in 1757. At the outbreak of the War of Independence he abandoned the study of medicine to enter the American army, and he served with General Benedict Arnold in the Quebec campaign and was later under General Horatio Gates, acting from May 1777 to March 1778 as adjutant-general of the Northern Department. He was sent to Congress to report Gates's success against Burgoyne, but his tardiness secured for him a sarcastic reception. Gates recommended him for a brigadier-general's commission for services which another actually performed, and succeeded in gaining it, but their friendship was broken by the collapse of the Conway Cabal against Washington in which both were implicated and about which Wilkinson had indiscreetly blabbed. Wilkinson then resigned (March 1778) his newly-acquired commission, but later re-entered the service in the quartermaster
