English novelist Wilkie Collins is portrayed in a close bust CDV, the front mount bearing the printed inscription Mr. Wilkie Collins below the image, showing the novelist in middle age in a three-quarter view facing slightly to his left. Collins wears a dark coat and waistcoat with a white shirt and small bow tie, his full dark beard neatly groomed and his wire-rimmed spectacles resting on his nose, giving him a studious and alert appearance. The composition is tightly framed, the background plain and neutral, with no photographer's imprint visible on the card.

The bust framing and direct presentation are characteristic of the English celebrity CDV portrait series of the late 1860s and early 1870s, and the typeset name on the front mount identifies this as a commercially distributed portrait rather than a personal keepsake. Collins's spectacles are a consistent identifying detail across his photographic portraits of this period.

Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) was one of the most popular and innovative novelists of the Victorian era, credited with pioneering the detective fiction and sensation novel genres in England. His masterworks The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868) established narrative conventions that shaped the development of mystery fiction for the following century. A close friend and collaborator of Charles Dickens, Collins contributed to Household Words and All the Year Round and co-wrote several theatrical pieces with Dickens. His novels were among the first to feature disabled protagonists and to critique Victorian marriage law and inheritance customs.

The reverse bears a penciled inscription reading W. Wilkie Collins with no photographer's imprint visible and dealer code 4/02/11 / BADCEZ / Eb.