At the Margins of Mystery: Sensational Difference in the Novels of Wilkie Collins
Clare Walker Gore, Selwyn College, Cambridge, chw37@cam.ac.uk
1. “My purpose here is to alter the terms and expand our understanding of the cultural
construction of bodies and identity by reframing ‘disability’ as another culture-bound,
physically justified difference to consider along with race, gender, class, ethnicity, and
sexuality. In other words, I intend to introduce such figures as the cripple, the invalid, and the
freak into the critical conversations we devote to deconstructing figures like the mulatto, the
primitive, the queer, and the lady.”
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in
American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p.5
2. “ ‘Mr Blake!’ he said. ‘Look at the man’s face. It is a face disguised – and here’s a proof of
it!’ He traced with his finger a thin line of livid white, running backward from the dead man’s
forehead, between the swarthy complexion, and the slightly-disturbed black hair. ‘Let’s see
what is under this,’ said the Sergeant, suddenly seizing the black hair, with a firm grip of his
hand.
“My nerves were not strong enough to bear it. I turned away again from the bed.
“The first sight that met my eyes, at the other end of the room, was the irrepressible
Gooseberry, perched on a chair, and looking with breathless interest, over the heads of his
elders, at the Sergeant’s proceedings.
“‘He’s pulling off his wig!’ whispered Gooseberry, compassionating my position, as the only
person in the room who could see nothing.
“There was a pause – and then a cry of astonishment among the people round the bed.
“ ‘He’s pulled off his beard!’ cried Gooseberry.
“There was another pause – Sergeant Cuff asked for something. The landlord went to the
washhand-stand, and returned to the bed with a basin of water and a towel.
“Gooseberry danced with excitement on the chair. ‘Come up here, along with me, sir! He’s
washing off his complexion now!’
“The Sergeant suddenly burst his way through the people about him, and came, with horror in
his face, straight to the place where I was standing.
... ‘Open the sealed letter first...’ I read the name that he had written. It was – Godfrey
Ablewhite.
“ ‘Now,’ said the Sergeant, ‘come with me, and look at the man on the bed.’
“I went with him and looked at the man on the bed.
“GODFREY ABLEWHITE!”
Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868) (Oxford: Oxford Worlds Classics, 2008) p.444
3. “I looked from the table to the window farthest from me, and saw a lady standing at it, with
her back turned towards me. The instant my eyes rested on her, I was struck by the rare
beauty of her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude. Her figure was tall, yet not
too tall; comely and well-developed, yet not fat; her head set on her shoulders with an easy,
pliant firmness; her waist, perfection in the eyes of a man, for it filled out its natural circle, it
was visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays. She had not heard my entrance into the
room; and I allowed myself the luxury of admiring her for a few moments […] The easy
elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the
far end of the room, set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the
window – and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forwards a few steps – and I said
to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer – and I said to myself (with a sense of
surprise which words fail to express), The lady is ugly! Never was the old conventional
maxim, that Nature cannot err, more flatly contradicted – never was the fair promise of a
lovely figure more strangely and startlingly belied by the face and head that crowned it. The
lady’s complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a
moustache.[...] To see such a face as this set on shoulders that a sculptor would have longed
to model – to be charmed by the modest graces of action through which the symmetrical
limbs betrayed their beauty when they moved, and then to be almost repelled by the
masculine form and masculine look of the features in which the perfectly shaped form ended
– was to feel a sensation oddly akin to the helpless discomfort familiar to us all in sleep,
when we recognise yet cannot reconcile the anomalies and contradictions of a dream.”
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860) (Oxford: Oxford Worlds Classics, 2008), p.31
4. “Rosanna started to her feet, and stood looking towards the voice. I was just thinking of
getting on my own legs next, when I was staggered by a sudden change in the girl’s face. Her
complexion turned of a beautiful red, which I had never seen in it before; she brightened all
over with a kind of speechless and breathless surprise. ‘Who is it?’ I asked. Rosanna gave me
back my own question. ‘Oh! who is it?’ she said softly, more to herself than to me. I twisted
round on the sand and looked behind me. There, coming out on us from among the hills, was
a bright-eyed young gentleman, dressed in a beautiful fawn-coloured suit, with gloves and a
hat to match, with a rose in his button-hole, and a smile on his face that might have set the
Shivering Sand itself smiling at him in return.”
The Moonstone, p.26
5. “ ‘I loved her,’ the girl said softly. ‘She had lived a miserable life, Mr Betteredge – vile
people had ill-treated her and led her wrong – and it hadn’t spoiled her sweet temper. She was
an angel. She might have been happy with me. I had a plan for our going to London together
like sisters, and living by our needles. That man came here, and spoilt it all. He bewitched
her. Don’t tell me he didn’t mean it, and didn’t know it. He ought to have known it. He ought
to have taken pity on her. “I can’t live without him – and, oh, Lucy, he never even looks at
me.” That’s what she said. Cruel, cruel, cruel. I said, “No man is worth fretting for in that
way.” And she said, “There are men worth dying for, Lucy, and he is one of them.” I had
saved up a little money. I had settled things with my father and mother. I meant to take her
away from the mortification she was suffering here. We should have had a little lodging in
London, and lived together like sisters. She had a good education, sir, as you know, and she
wrote a good hand. She was quick at her needle. I have a good education, and I write a good
hand. I am not as quick at my needle as she was – but I could have done. We might have got
our living nicely. And, oh, what happens this morning? what happens this morning? Her
letter comes and tells me that she has done with the burden of her life. Her letter comes, and
bids me goodbye for ever. Where is he?’ cries the girl, lifting her head from the crutch, and
flaming out again through her tears. ‘Where’s this gentleman that I mustn’t speak of, except
with respect? Ha, Mr Betteredge, the day is not far off when the poor will rise against the
rich. I pray Heaven they may begin with him. I pray Heaven they may begin with him.”
The Moonstone, p.183-4
6. “A high chair on wheels moved by, through a field of red light, carrying a shadowy figure
with floating hair, and arms furiously raised and lowered, working the machinery that
propelled the chair at its utmost rate of speed. ‘I am Napoleon, at the sunrise of Austerlitz!’
shouted the man in the chair as he swept by me, on his rumbling and whistling wheels, in the
red glow of the firelight. ‘I give the word; and thrones rock, and kings fall, and nations
tremble, and men by tens of thousands fight and bleed and die!’ The chair rushed out of sight,
and the shouting man in it became another hero. ‘I am Nelson!’ the ringing voice cried now.
‘I am leading the fleet at Trafalgar. I issue my commands, prophetically conscious of victory
and death. …’ The strident wheels turned at the far end of the room, and came back. The
fantastic and frightful apparition, man and machinery blended in one – the new Centaur, half
man, half chair – flew by me again in the dying light. ‘I am Shakspere [sic]!’ cried the frantic
creature now. ‘I am writing “Lear”, the tragedy of tragedies. Ancients and moderns, I am the
poet who towers over them all…’”
Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady (1875) (Oxford: Oxford Worlds Classics 2008), p.206
7. “ ‘Just think of what I am! A poor solitary creature, cursed with a frightful deformity. How
pitiable! how dreadful! My affectionate heart – wasted. My extraordinary talents – useless or
misapplied. Sad! sad! sad! Please pity me.’ His eyes positively filled with tears – tears of
compassion for himself. [...] I was quite at a loss what to do. It was perfectly ridiculous – but
I was never more embarrassed in my life. [...] I said I pitied him – and I felt that I blushed as I
did it.”
The Law and the Lady, pp.232-3
8. “I got up and crossed the room to him. I gave him back his locket, and put my hand,
without knowing what I was about, on the poor wretch’s shoulder. ‘I am incapable of
suspecting you, Mr Dexter,’ I said gently. ‘No such idea ever entered my head. I pity you
from the bottom of my heart.’
“He caught my hand in his, and devoured it with kisses. His lips burnt me like fire. He
twisted himself suddenly in his chair, and wound his arm round my waist. In the terror and
indignation of the moment, vainly struggling with him, I cried out for help.
“The door opened, and Benjamin appeared on the threshold. Dexter let go his hold of me.
“I ran to Benjamin and prevented him from advancing into the room. In all my long
experience of my fatherly old friend, I had never seen him really angry yet. I saw him more
than angry now. He was pale – the patient, gentle old man was pale with rage! I held him at
the door with all my strength.
‘You can’t lay your hand on a cripple,’ I said. ‘Send for his servant outside to take him
away.’
[...] The man came in – the rough man whom I had noticed when we were approaching the
garden gate. Benjamin opened the library door in stern silence. It was perhaps unworthy of
me – but I could not resist the temptation to look in.
“Miserrimus Dexter had sunk down in the chair. The rough man lifted his master with a
gentleness that surprised me. ‘Hide my face,’ I heard Dexter say to him, in broken tones. He
opened his coarse pilot jacket, and hid his master’s head under it, and so went silently out –
with the deformed creature held to his bosom, like a woman sheltering her child.”
The Law and the Lady, p.299-300