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Arts and Law University of Birmingham January 2015 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties.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.