DOCSLIB.ORG

Everyday Experiences of Medicine and Illness in the Novels of Willkie Collins

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Everyday Experiences of Medicine and Illness in the Novels of Willkie Collins EVERYDAY EXPERIENCES OF MEDICINE AND ILLNESS IN THE NOVELS OF WILKIE COLLINS By HELEN WILLIAMS A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English Literature College of Arts and Law University of Birmingham January 2015 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Abstract Focusing on the novels of Wilkie Collins, this thesis identifies the ways in which Collins’s narratives outline the complex nature of layperson interactions with, and experiences of, medicine, healthcare and illness in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Drawing on a variety of contextual sources, ranging from letters, diaries and recipe books to newspaper articles, architectural plans and courtroom testimonies, the discussion uses Collins’s work alongside these documents to demonstrate that many of his middle-class readers would have encountered aspects of medicine and illness in a surprising array of settings, spaces, discourses and domains. In bringing these points of intersection to light, the thesis argues that Collins’s work stands as a substantial record of how the lay public energetically and intelligently engaged with medical matters – a point often overlooked – but also emphasises Collins’s own vibrant interest in medicine, bodies and illness. In so doing, the discussion is able to draw out new dimensions to Collins’s treatment of key themes, such as the relationships between bodies and gender, architecture and illness, and medicine and literature, and to provide new readings of a range of his major and lesser-known works. For Granddad Acknowledgements First and foremost, my thanks go to my supervisors: Jim Mussell, Rex Ferguson and Dan Moore. Jim formally supervised this thesis for the first two years, and kindly continued to provide support and advice thereafter, for which I am very grateful. His knowledge, enthusiasm and patience have helped me to achieve far more than I could have hoped. I am similarly indebted to Rex and Dan, whose feedback, assistance and encouragement has been invaluable over the past year, and is greatly appreciated. I must also acknowledge the financial support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the College of Arts and Law Graduate School, which made this research possible. I am grateful, too, for the assistance of staff at the Cadbury Research Library, Birmingham Archives and Heritage, the John Rylands Library and the Wellcome Library. Lastly, my thanks go to my friends and family for supporting me throughout. In particular, I would like to thank my Dad for giving me the encouragement and inspiration to embark on this project, and Adam, for giving me the time and space to finish it. Parts of Chapter One of this thesis form the journal article ‘Much fact and little imagination: female authorship, authority and medicine in Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch’, published in Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies (Summer 2013), and an early version of Chapter Three appeared as ‘Redefining Bodies and Boundaries in Wilkie Collins’s Armadale and The Law and the Lady’ in The Wilkie Collins Journal, Vol. 12 (2013). All archival materials used within this thesis are reproduced with the consent of the relevant archive. Table of Contents Introduction 1 Cabbage leaves and oiled silk: Collins’s experiences of medicine and illness 5 Sensation fiction, medicine and the body 12 Critical work on Collins and medicine 19 Collins’s novels and everyday experiences of medicine 25 Chapter One Much Fact and Little Imagination: (Re)writing Women’s Interaction with Medicine in Poor Miss Finch 31 ‘Poor Miss Finch’ 36 Female communities and medical care 38 Knowledge, ownership and control of the female body 50 The female body as medical spectacle 55 Chapter Two Performance, Permeability and the Male Body in The Moonstone 66 Male bodies and masculinity 67 Vulnerable and permeable male bodies 76 Reading, writing and performing masculinity 85 Chapter Three Substances and insubstantiality in Armadale, The Law and the Lady and Jezebel’s Daughter 103 Beautiful for ever: aging and indeterminacy 106 Rewriting medico-legal narratives of death 120 Building the boundaries between life and death 132 Chapter Four Spatialising sickness in The Woman in White, Armadale and The Law and the Lady 140 Perspectives of the house and asylum 145 Sickness in suburbia 160 The architecture of illness 169 Chapter Five ‘One hideous net-work’: contagion and the city in Basil 188 Nineteenth-century networks 188 Family and lineage 197 Networks of transport and travel 200 Diseased spaces 206 City streets and ‘fever tracks’ 213 Narratives and networks 221 Chapter Six The value of words: challenging physiognomy and vivisection in No Name and Heart and Science 228 The unnameable book: reading skins and texts in ‘No Name’ 229 Dissecting bodies and books in ‘Heart and Science’ 250 Conclusion 270 Collins’s engagement with medicine 276 Layperson relationships with medicine 279 Conceptualising bodies and spaces 283 Bodies of writing 286 Bibliography 290 List of Illustrations Figure 2.1. From ‘Men of the Day No. 39’, Vanity Fair, 3 Feb 1872 89 Figure 2.2. From ‘Caricature Portraits of Eminent Public Men’, Once a Week, 24 Feb 1872 89 Figure 4.1. ‘A South-East View of the Asylum at Ticehurst, Sussex’ 150 Figure 4.2. ‘A View of the Pleasure Grounds and Aviary’ 150 Figure 4.3. ‘The Pagoda in the Pleasure Grounds’ 151 Figure 4.4. ‘South-West View of the Vineyard, Cottage, and the Church, at Ticehurst, Sussex’ 152 Figure 4.5. Map of Ticehurst Asylum and grounds 154 Figure 4.6. West Riding Asylum, Yorkshire 156 Figure 4.7. Coton Hill Institution for the Insane 160 Figure 4.8. Plans for Bearwood House 171 Figure 4.9. First floor plan, ‘A House for an Invalid’ 175 Figure 4.10. Invalid Bed Apparatus illustration 180 List of Abbreviations A Armadale BAH Birmingham Archives and Heritage CRL Cadbury Research Library HS Heart and Science JD Jezebel’s Daughter JRUL John Rylands University Library’s Special Collections LATL The Law and the Lady NN No Name WA Wakefield Archives WIW The Woman in White WL Wellcome Library TM Thackeray Museum Archives Introduction The weather has upset me as well – I am no exception to the family – cold in the head, cold in the throat, cold in the chest – internal upset as well – ha! ha! ha! I am getting used to it – and I laugh like a fiend over my own maladies. There is only one true friend to the afflicted in body – and his name is Brandy And Water – and he comes with particular healing in his wings when he is Hot.1 In the closing months of 1862, as the serialisation of No Name in All the Year Round drew to an end, Wilkie Collins penned this letter to his mother, Harriet Collins, on a topic that consumed him – in many ways – for most of his adult life. Gout, neuralgia, nervous exhaustion, depression, venereal disease and angina were just some of the illnesses and afflictions that plagued him throughout his writing career, alongside which he developed an impressive laudanum addiction and dabbled in a cornucopia of drugs, diets and medical treatments. This letter is, in some respects, unremarkable; from the 1850s onwards Collins’s health is a frequent feature in his correspondence. However, it also encapsulates how Collins, and many others like him, lived with episodes of illness as constant backdrops to their lives, as well as the ways in which they experienced, conceptualised, treated, wrote and read about it. Collins not only regularly succumbed to illness but witnessed the same in his friends and family: like his mother, father and brother Charley, he is ‘no exception’, and indeed several of his ailments, particularly his rheumatic pains, are thought to have 2 been hereditary. Illness was at this time, for many, very much a family affair, with 1 Wilkie Collins to Mrs Harriet Collins, 6 November 1862, in The Letters of Wilkie Collins, ed. by William Baker and William M. Clarke, 2 vols (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), I, 212. 2 Lyn Pykett, Wilkie Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 22. 1 sufferers just as likely to receive treatments and advice from family or friends as from a doctor. Although Collins had a close and enduring friendship with his doctor Francis (Frank) Carr Beard, he also regularly self-medicated (drawing on an inventive variety of home-made treatments, as his letters describe) as he does here, with his ‘true friend’, hot ‘Brandy And Water’. As well as touching on this amateur side to medicine, which existed alongside and in addition to the services that the rapidly growing ranks of general practitioners could offer, the letter demonstrates Collins’s interest not only in his own physical frailties, but what it means to write about illness, and to describe and depict the body. His text is forcefully punctuated by his ‘laughter’ in the face of illness (‘ha! ha! ha!’), a somewhat unconvincing response to the string of maladies he opens with (‘cold in the head, cold in the throat, cold in the chest’ and ‘internal upset’), but this attempt to portray his illness in a certain light, and to stress his own light-hearted reaction to it, is telling.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • A Masculinizing Investigation: the Detective and the Problem of Female Reticence in the Sensational Detective Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins
    A MASCULINIZING INVESTIGATION: THE DETECTIVE AND THE PROBLEM OF FEMALE RETICENCE IN THE SENSATIONAL DETECTIVE FICTION OF MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON AND WILKIE COLLINS By BRITTANY L. PARKHURST A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2007 1 © 2007 Brittany Parkhurst 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS There are many people who have contributed to the success of this project and who deserve acknowledgement. My sincere gratitude is given to Dr. Chris Snodgrass and my director, Dr. Pamela Gilbert, whose enthusiasm, intelligence, patience, and guidance have made this thesis possible. Their meaningful questions, shrewd suggestions, and overall expertise significantly impacted the way I conceived of this project. Further thanks is given to the friends who supported my work by way of advice, a willing ear, or a cup of coffee. I lastly thank my fiancé, Kyle Roberts, for his candid opinions and love. His willingness to set aside his own work to help me develop my ideas prevented (almost all) mental breakdowns. Sometimes you need the confidence of others to take over when yours starts to drop off—all of these people provided that confidence to me. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...............................................................................................................3 ABSTRACT.....................................................................................................................................5 CHAPTER
    [Show full text]
  • The Moonstone
    The Moonstone Wilkie Collins Retold by David Wharry Series Editors: Andy Hopkins and Jocelyn potter Contents Page Introduction 4 Taken From an Old Family Letter 5 Part 1 The Loss of the Diamond 7 Chapter 1 A Record of the Facts 7 Chapter 2 Three Indian Men 8 Chapter 3 The Will 9 Chapter 4 A Shadow 13 Chapter 5 Rivals 14 Chapter 6 The Moonstone 17 Chapter 7 The Indians Return 18 Chapter 8 The Theft 21 Chapter 9 Sergeant Cuff Arrives 26 Chapter 10 The Search Begins 29 Chapter 11 Rosanna 30 Chapter 12 Rachel's Decision 34 Chapter 13 A Letter 36 Chapter 14 The Shivering Sands 39 Chapter 15 To London 44 Part 2 The Discovery of the Truth 46 First Narrative 46 Chapter 1 A Strange Mistake 46 Chapter 2 Rumours and Reputations 49 Chapter 3 Placing the Books 54 Chapter 4 A Silent Listener 56 Chapter 5 Brighton 59 Second Narrative 65 Chapter 1 Money-Lending 65 Chapter 2 Next June 67 2 Third Narrative 69 Chapter 1 Franklin's Return 69 Chapter 2 Instructions 71 Chapter 3 Rosanna's Letter 73 Chapter 4 Return to London 76 Chapter 5 Witness 78 Chapter 6 Investigating 82 Chapter 7 Lost Memory 85 Chapter 8 Opium 87 Fourth Narrative 90 Fifth Narrative 94 Sixth Narrative 100 3 Introduction 'Look, Gabriel!' cried Miss Rachel, flashing the jewel in the sunlight. It was as large as a bird's egg, the colour of the harvest moon, a deep yellow that sucked your eyes into it so you saw nothing else.
    [Show full text]
  • The Death of Christian Culture
    Memoriœ piœ patris carrissimi quoque et matris dulcissimœ hunc libellum filius indignus dedicat in cordibus Jesu et Mariœ. The Death of Christian Culture. Copyright © 2008 IHS Press. First published in 1978 by Arlington House in New Rochelle, New York. Preface, footnotes, typesetting, layout, and cover design copyright 2008 IHS Press. Content of the work is copyright Senior Family Ink. All rights reserved. Portions of chapter 2 originally appeared in University of Wyoming Publications 25(3), 1961; chapter 6 in Gary Tate, ed., Reflections on High School English (Tulsa, Okla.: University of Tulsa Press, 1966); and chapter 7 in the Journal of the Kansas Bar Association 39, Winter 1970. No portion of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review, or except in cases where rights to content reproduced herein is retained by its original author or other rights holder, and further reproduction is subject to permission otherwise granted thereby according to applicable agreements and laws. ISBN-13 (eBook): 978-1-932528-51-0 ISBN-10 (eBook): 1-932528-51-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Senior, John, 1923– The death of Christian culture / John Senior; foreword by Andrew Senior; introduction by David Allen White. p. cm. Originally published: New Rochelle, N.Y. : Arlington House, c1978. ISBN-13: 978-1-932528-51-0 1. Civilization, Christian. 2. Christianity–20th century. I. Title. BR115.C5S46 2008 261.5–dc22 2007039625 IHS Press is the only publisher dedicated exclusively to the social teachings of the Catholic Church.
    [Show full text]
  • Wilkie Collins' Law Books Bernadette A
    Cornell Law Library Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository Cornell Law Faculty Publications 2-12-2007 Transparency and Textuality: Wilkie Collins' Law Books Bernadette A. Meyler Cornell Law School, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/lsrp_papers Part of the Law and Society Commons Recommended Citation Meyler, Bernadette A., "Transparency and Textuality: Wilkie Collins' Law Books" (2007). Cornell Law Faculty Publications. Paper 74. http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/lsrp_papers/74 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Cornell Law Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CORNELL LAW SCHOOL LEGAL STUDIES RESEARCH PAPER SERIES Transparency and Textuality: Wilkie Collins' Law Books Bernadette A. Meyler Cornell Law School Myron Taylor Hall Ithaca, NY 14853-4901 Cornell Law School research paper No. 07-001 This paper can be downloaded without charge from: The Social Science Research Network Electronic Paper Collection: http://ssrn.com/abstract=962746 FORTHCOMING IN SECRETS OF LAW (STANFORD 2007) (AUSTIN SARAT ED.) BERNADETTE MEYLER TRANSPARENCY AND TEXTUALITY: WILKIE COLLINS’ LAW BOOKS I Transparency in Law and Literature The rhetoric of democracy, particularly when correlated with the attempt to spread the rule of law, often insists upon the ever-increasing transparency of political and legal institutions, relying on the visibility of the mechanisms of power and law to obviate any of their adverse effects. The mantra of transparency is invoked throughout the pages of eminent law reviews: “If opacity frustrates and misleads outsiders [to the American criminal justice system], transparency and fuller disclosure can alleviate these problems”i; “Transparency is a core good governance attribute: Open procedures contribute to virtually all of the foundations of legitimacy .
    [Show full text]
  • Disabilities and Gender in the Novels of Wilkie Collins
    Disabilities and Gender in the Novels of Wilkie Collins by ELIZABETH L. AGNEW Submitted to the Office of Honors Programs and Academic Scholarships Texas ARM University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for 1998-99 UNIVERSITY UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH FELLOWS PROGRAM April 15, 1999 Approved as to style and content by: Pa A. Parrish, Facul Advisor Department of English Susanna Finnell, Executive Director Honors Programs and Academic Scholarships Fellows Group: Humanities Gender and Disabilities in the Novels of Wilkie Collins Elizabeth L. Agnew, (Dr. Paul A. Parrish) University Undergraduate Fellow, 1998-99, Texas A&M University, Department of English Many Victorian novelists sought to promote the importance of the individual by placing their characters in situations that allowed them to go outside society's pre-established boundaries. In spite of these novelists' intentions, a closer study of their works reveals that the writers who tried to move beyond society's expectations were often inherently trapped within them. My thesis argues that Wilkie Collins's representations of characters with disabilities show that even though Collins intended for disabilities to help characters supercede societyk expectations for them, thc Victorian context in which he was writing prevented him from completely achieving his goals. In particular, my thesis examines the ways in which Victorian attitudes toward gender influenced Co11ins's portrayals of characters with disabilities. Disabilities served to empower Collins's female characters who either physically embodied Victorian ideals of beauty and purity or who were financially independent. In contrast, women who did not fulfill these expectations were hurt by disabilities, as were all of Collins's male characters.
    [Show full text]
  • Crime and Subversion in the Later Fiction of Wilkie Collins by Lisa Gay
    Crime and Subversion in the Later Fiction of Wilkie Collins By Lisa Gay Mathews Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds: School of English 1993 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. Crime and Subversion in the Later Fiction of Wilkie Collins By Lisa Gay Mathews Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds: School of English 1993 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. With Thanks To Alan Steele for supervising my work. To my parents for financial and moral support. To Ray and Geraldine Stoneham for teaching me to use a word processor. To Bill Forsythe of Exeter University for moral support and encouragement. And lastly, to my four beautiful cats for keeping me company whilst I wrote. Lisa Mathews: Crime and Subversion in the Later Fiction of Wilkie Collins Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. October 1990 Abstract Although some good work on Collins is now beginning to emerge, complex and central elements in his fiction require fuller exploration. More consideration is due to the development of Collins's thinking and fictional techniques in the lesser-known novels, since out of a total of thirty-four published works most have received scant attention from scholars. This is particularly true of the later fiction.
    [Show full text]
  • Wilkie Collins, the Woman in White
    Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White Introduction to the Author: Wilkie Collins Wilkie Collins was born in London to William John Thomas and Harriet Collins January 8, 1824. Collins’ father was a well-known painter and the family changed houses and traveled overseas often during his childhood. After a few years in school and a short period of time as an apprentice for some tea merchants, he studied law at Lincoln’s Inn, “where he gained the legal knowledge that was to give him much material for his writing” (i). After the death of his father in February 1847, he published his first book, Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., RA in 1848. Unsure of what he wanted to do in life, Collins seriously considered becoming an artist and in 1849 he exhibited a painting at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition titled The Smuggler’s Retreat. With the publication of his first novel, Antonina; or the Fall of Rome (1850), Collins found his calling. Charles Dickens was impressed by his work and they quickly became close friends; Charles Allston Collins, Wilkie’s younger brother, would eventually marry Kate Dickens, Charles’ sister. Collins is mostly known for his novels, but his works also include short stories, plays, journalism, and biography. His close friend, Charles Dickens, actually acted and helped produce some of his plays. With the publication of The Woman in White (1860), Collins moved away from theater to focus more on novels that fell under the new genre he helped create: sensation fiction. After Dickens’ death in 1870, Collins “returned to the theatre, producing stage versions of his novels” (i).
    [Show full text]
  • Lssrakt J7Z 77/ 436126 D7^
    po. 31 / WILKIE COU,INS AS WRITER FOR CHARLES DICKENS’ "HOUSEHOLD WORDS" (1850-1859), AND "ALL THE YEAR ROUND" (1859-1870): A SELECTION OF HIS SHORT STORIES, ESSAYS, AND SKETCHES WITH HEADNOTES AND CRITICAL INTRODUCTION Richard D. Seiter A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY March 1970 Approved by Doctoral Committee Department of English Graduate School Representative e BOWLING GREEN STATE LSSRAKt J7Z 77/ 436126 d7^ /ft# ABSTRACT The "grandfather of the English detective novel" is the title which most literary critics assign to Wilkie Collins, the author of The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (I860), His close association after 1850 with that literary giant Charles Dickens makes for an easy comparison and tends to dwarf Collins* reputation. When these two men are evaluated together, they are usually considered to be members of the sensational school of novel writing, which followed ' Dickens’ famous formula—"Make ’em laugh, make 'em weep, and make 'em 1 wait.” Dickens' literary reputation goes far beyond this, but critics V' have had a tendency to dismiss further consideration of Collins' abilities. Mystery and suspense are universally recognized and praised as those qualities which drew the Victorian reader to his novels. But his xvriting has a neglected lighter side which developed early in his career when he was contributing short articles to popular weekly Journals—especially to Dickens' Household Words (1850-1859) and All the Year Round (1859-1870). Seeing Collins as a periodical essayist presents an approach that adds another perspective to his literary career.
    [Show full text]
  • Wilkie Collins, Lo Scrigno Di Mr Wray, Ovvero La Maschera E Il Mistero. [Mr Wray’S Cashbox] Edited with an Introduction by Mariaconcetta Costantini
    Victorian Popular Fictions Volume 2: Issue 1 (Spring 2020) Wilkie Collins, Lo scrigno di Mr Wray, ovvero la maschera e il mistero. [Mr Wray’s Cashbox] Edited with an Introduction by Mariaconcetta Costantini. Translated by Emilia Carmen Cavaliere. Rome: Libreria Croce, 2019, 192 pp. € 16,90. ISBN: 88-6402-371-2 EAN: 9788864023717 Reviewed by Francesca Vinci Wilkie Collins was passionate about Italy, the Italian language and population, as his father William was. Together with his family, William moved to Italy in 1836 “to experience Italian landscape, art, and architecture at first hand and to paint Italian scenes” (Pykett 2005). Their two-year sojourn gave the young Collins a precious chance to learn to speak and write Italian, to discover the local culture and to become acquainted with several local artists. “I had learned more in Italy, which has since been of use to me, among the pictures, the scenery and the people, than ever I learnt at school”, he wrote later in life (Ackroyd 2012). Collins would have been pleased to learn that many Italian translations of his books have been produced in the last century and a half. Since 1884, when the first Italian translation of Heart and Science appeared (Heart and Science was the first of all his works translated into Italian), Collins’s ‘dream country’ has indeed been paying homage to him. Most of his novels have been translated and published, some of them more than once. The Moonstone (1868), for example, has been translated fourteen times, from 1870 to 2016. Similarly, The Woman in White has been translated into Italian ten times from the early 1930s up to 2018.
    [Show full text]
  • Wilkie Collins and Copyright
    Wilkie Collins and Copyright Wilkie Collins and Copyright Artistic Ownership in the Age of the Borderless Word s Sundeep Bisla The Ohio State University Press Columbus Copyright © 2013 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bisla, Sundeep, 1968– Wilkie Collins and copyright : artistic ownership in the age of the borderless word / Sundeep Bisla. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-1235-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8142-1235-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-9337-9 (cd-rom) ISBN-10: 0-8142-9337-9 (cd-rom) Collins, Wilkie, 1824–1889—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Intellectual property in literature. 3. Intellectual property—History—19th century. 4. Copyright—History—19th century. I. Title. PR4497.B57 2013 823'.8—dc23 2013010878 Cover design by Laurence J. Nozik Type set in Adobe Garamond Pro Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 s CONTENTS S Acknowledgments vii Preface A Spot of Ink, More Than a Spot of Bother ix Chapter 1 Introduction: Wilkie Collins, Theorist of Iterability 1 Part One. The Fictions of Settling Chapter 2 The Manuscript as Writer’s Estate in Basil 57 Chapter 3 The Woman in White: The Perils of Attempting to Discipline the Transatlantic, Transhistorical Narrative 110 Part Two. The Fictions of Breaking Chapter
    [Show full text]
  • The “Long” Serialisation of Wilkie Collins's Armadale
    Novel/magazine interfaces: the “long” serialisation of Wilkie Collins’s Armadale Catherine Delafield The serialisation of novels within magazines during the nineteenth century created a textual interface or dialogue between two reading experiences: the long-running serial was contained and contextualised by the overarching magazine series. The relationship between the magazine and the serialised novel has been explored in a number of studies (Hughes and Lund, The Victorian Serial; Hughes and Lund Victorian Publishing 11–34 and 96–123; Turner; Wynne; Delafield Serialization) that demonstrate how the serial was accommodated in a timeframe of reading at intervals whilst being horizontally integrated into the forward- moving periodical. This article draws on these previous studies, and particularly Wynne on Armadale (145–65), as well as my own work on women’s diaries (Delafield, Women’s Diaries 101–18). The paper analyses the appearance of Wilkie Collins’s Armadale in Cornhill Magazine (November 1864 to June 1866) as an illustration of serialisation at the novel/magazine interface. Armadale as a serial demonstrates the impact of these textual interfaces but, as a function of periodical publication, the novel’s interface with the Cornhill extended either side of its appearance in the magazine, creating a “long” serialisation. The article first examines Armadale’s delayed appearance and its consequences for the Cornhill. A context for the serial was created before Armadale was even written when the anticipated Collins novel was initially substituted by the Cornhill’s first sensation serial, written by the magazine’s co-editor Frederick Greenwood. The article next reviews how Collins’s experience as a writer of weekly serials in magazines was reinvented for the Cornhill’s monthly format.
    [Show full text]
  • Gothic Landscapes and Seascapes: Dark Regions in Wilkie Collins’S the Dead Secret
    Studies in Gothic Fiction • Volume 5 Issue 2 • 2016 © 21 Gothic Landscapes and Seascapes: Dark Regions in Wilkie Collins’s The Dead Secret. by Joan Passey Article DOI: https://doi.org/10.18573/j.2016.10106 Copyright Joan Passey 2016 ISSN: 2156-2407 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Studies in Gothic Fiction • Volume 5 Issue 2 • 2016 © 21 Articles Gothic Landscapes and Seascapes: Dark Regions in Wilkie Collins’s The Dead Secret Article DOI: https://doi.org/10.18573/j.2016.10106 Joan Passey Abstract Wilkie Collins's The Dead Secret, arguably one of his most critically neglected novels, exercises the same concerns with ancestry, inheritance, and history as developed in Collins's later works, projected upon a Cornish landscape. In exploring the way Collins uses Cornwall (a location he had already toyed with in Basil and Rambles Beyond Railways), representations of the Cornish, and specifically Cornish seascapes, I propose that Collins is employing Cornwall as an ideal playground in which to experiment with his reworkings of Gothic tropes and motifs. Indeed, Collins's Cornwall provides a means of understanding debates surrounding regional identities and a lens through which to comprehend the Cornish quest to reclaim a notion of Celtic identity in the late nineteenth century. Collins’s use of seascapes, ruins, transgression, and deadly secrets not only reimagines Gothic tropes in a Victorian context, but also uses them to express anxieties regarding disintegration of self, society, and borders in the period.
    [Show full text]