Pod Insights The Book Club 13. The Woman In White: Victorians, Sensation, and Scandal About this episode How did Wilkie Collins craft one of the earliest examples of detective fiction? What does The Woman In White reveal about the Victorian society? And, why did the novel cause such a sensation?
Join Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett as they delve into the fascinating story behind the writing of The Woman In White, the world it was born of, and the novel itself.
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Transcript 13,772 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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3:08 Dominic Sandbrook? I had now arrived at that particular point of my walk where four roads met: the road to Hampstead, along which I had returned, the road to Finchley, the road to West End, and the road back to London. I had mechanically turned in this latter direction and was strolling along the lonely high road, idly wondering, I remember, what the Cumberland young ladies would look like, when in one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me. I turned on the instant, with my fingers tightening round the handle of my stick. There, in the middle of the broad, bright high road, there, as if it had that moment
3:53 Dominic Sandbrook? sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven, stood the figure of a solitary woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments, her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London as I faced her. I was far too seriously startled by the suddenness with which this extraordinary apparition stood before me, in the dead of night and in that lonely place, to ask what she wanted. The strange woman spoke first.
4:26 Dominic Sandbrook? To London. So what a chilling scene that is. It's an unforgettable moment from Wilkie Collins's brilliant novel, The Woman in White, which was written and published in 1860. This is the ultimate Victorian thriller, but it's also one of the first examples, I suppose you can call it a very early example in some way of detective fiction, and the supreme example of what the Victorians called the sensation novel. So we are in the heart of Victorian England in the book, but beneath the surface of kind of ordinary, domestic, middle-class life, all kinds of horrors and terrors are poised to strike. And as we turn the pages of The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins uses multiple different narrators to unfold this mystery
5:08 Dominic Sandbrook? story of mistaken identity and all kinds of legal entanglements, female courage, madness, which is a great theme of the book, and this sort of forbidden romance. So, Tabby, The Woman in White, I think it was your idea to do it. It's an absolute chiller, isn't it? And you've read it before, haven't you?
5:29 Speaker 04 I have, yeah. I read it as a teenager, as with so many of these kind of classic novels. But I do remember thinking that portions of it slightly dragged, certain narrators slightly dragged, and we'll explain that concept in a bit. But I absolutely loved one of the heroines of the novel, Marion, who we'll be describing in due course. But yeah, this time around, I couldn't put it down, basically. It's a total page-turner.
5:58 Dominic Sandbrook? I couldn't agree more. So actually, I'd read it also as a teenager, reread it at the weekend, and I was absolutely gripped by it, even though I knew what was coming.
6:09 Speaker 04 Yeah.
6:09 Dominic Sandbrook? I think Wilkie Collins, it's extraordinary that somebody who was writing so, you know, more than a century ago, still has the power to get you to turn the pages. I mean, a couple of his cliffhangers are as exciting as any cliffhanger you will find in any work of modern fiction. There's a sense of tension that drives the whole thing. And, you know, when you're reading it, you completely escape into his world.
6:36 Speaker 04 And I were talking about this yesterday. It's just such good fun, all of it. It's thrilling and it's good fun. And actually a moment I thought so funny.
6:45 Dominic Sandbrook? Completely. It's a rare thing that you would say, because often I think when people read Victorian books, they read them slightly dutifully. You sort of think, well, this will be good for me. This will be very wholesome and improving and worthy and whatnot. I mean, Wilkie Collins's books at the time were definitely not seen by his contemporaries as worthy and improving. They were seen as shockingly sexy and violent and scary and whatnot.
7:05 Speaker 04 The romanticy of their day.
7:06 Dominic Sandbrook? The romanticy of their day. And they actually, they still have that power, I think. I think it's still, they're still quite sexy and shocking and exciting and, and all of this. And, and actually, here's the thing. What's so fascinating about The Woman in White is not just the book itself, but the stories behind the story. So all the inspirations on which Collins drew, the real life cases of, you know, people who had been locked up in asylums or had escaped from legal entanglements, or, you know, had been drawn into these nefarious schemes and whatnot. I mean, these are fascinating stories in and of themselves, actually.
7:39 Speaker 04 Definitely. But the way that the book is, is structured and the way that it's written is also quite interesting and massively builds the suspense. Because it's unfolded by multiple narrators and, you know, sometimes in letters, sometimes it's diary entries. There is no kind of omniscient narrator to ground us or root us or give us a sense of reassurance the whole time. It's almost like you're being presented a case with evidence provided by the various characters and it's kind of left to the reader to work out what's going on. And Collins himself actually trained as a lawyer, so you can see that in the way that this is written.
8:13 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, completely. And the different voices come from different parts of society, don't they? So there's men and women. There are very high status people, but then there are housekeepers and servants and things who are kind of giving their testimony. And you're sort of sifting the evidence the whole time. So it demands something of you as a reader in a very fun and immersive way. You're judging whether you can trust the narrators and, you know, you're piecing together the story as you read. Now, talking about piecing together the story, though, we have to be careful with this book, I think in particular, to avoid too many spoilers. Because I know there will be some listeners who haven't read it and who hopefully will be inspired to read it by our episode. So we will tread a fine line. We will obviously have to
8:55 Dominic Sandbrook? give some things away, but we'll try not to ruin the book completely and not to give you too much, I guess, from the second half or certainly the last third of the book.
9:04 Speaker 04 Those that have absolutely no interest in reading it, well, there's a lot here for you too.
9:08 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, that's true. So we start, don't we, with Walter Hartwright. And he is a drawing master, a drawing teacher. And I suppose in some ways, he's quite a bland character. You know, so he's our initial narrator. What can you say about him? He's an upstanding, decent Victorian young man, isn't he?
9:29 Speaker 04 Yeah.
9:29 Dominic Sandbrook? Is there anything more than that to him, do you think, Tabby?
9:31 Speaker 04 Um, no, I mean, not especially. I think, you know, he's, as you say, he's decent, he's brave. The one, the one interesting thing is, once you get into your mind, the possibility that maybe you can't trust what he tells you, the reader, he comes into a slightly different light. You know, you start to wonder if maybe his feelings aren't always for the person he's meant to have feelings for. You start to wonder how many of the good things or the decent deeds that he does, he actually does do. So that makes him slightly more interesting. But yes, on the whole, he's just kind of an upstanding Victorian hero.
10:03 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
10:03 Speaker 04 So he is walking back from his mother's house in Hampstead Heath. And this is the opening reading that you and I read, Dominic, so
10:12 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
10:12 Speaker 04 just brilliantly. And he's accosted by this frightened and nervous woman dressed all in white. And he knows that she's running from something, she's fleeing something. And she begins to kind of speak cryptically about some powerful man who has wronged her. Anyway, Walter helps her on her way to London. And then another carriage draws up to tell him that a woman matching her description has escaped from a lunatic asylum.
10:38 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
10:38 Speaker 04 Walter then travels the next day to Limeridge House in Cumberland to become a teacher, a drawing teacher for these two young women. But, you know, this, this encounter with a woman in white stays with him. And there, he meets the two ladies in question. This is Marian Holcombe and Laura Fairley, and they are half-sister. They're very different. Marion is kind of plain and quite swarthy. She is funny and very bright and very curious. You know, the minute that Walter confides in her about having had this encounter, she starts digging into it and almost becoming a detective. By contrast, her half-sister Laura is pretty pale, angelic.
11:18 Speaker 04 Maybe not as interesting as her sister, but Laura, crucially, is very, very wealthy. She's an heiress, which Marion is not.
11:26 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes. So we'll talk about these two characters because I think so much of the book and your response to the book depends upon the relationship of these two characters. Marion and Laura, these half-sisters. Just one quick observation. That scene where he meets the woman in white is what the time was one of, you know, it was seen by contemporaries as one of the the most memorable, the most exciting scenes in all English literature. And actually, I think it kind of still is.
11:54 Speaker 04 Oh, I totally agree.
11:55 Dominic Sandbrook? It's an amazing moment when you're turning the pages, you're just a few pages into the book and there's this, it's a brilliant conceit that the guy's walking and then there's a woman dressed all in white who seems distracted and clearly has escaped from a lunatic asylum and wants to know the way to London. And it sticks in your mind as it sticks in Walter's.
12:13 Speaker 04 Totally. But I mean, because I live quite near Hampstead Heath, so I walk there sometimes. And so I was imagining having an encounter like that with kind of dusk drawing in.
12:23 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
12:23 Speaker 04 Totally chilling.
12:24 Dominic Sandbrook? It is brilliant. So anyway, there, he's gone off to Cumberland to teach these two half-sisters. They also have a terrible uncle, don't they?
12:33 Speaker 04 Yeah.
12:33 Dominic Sandbrook? Called Mr. Fairley, Frederick Fairley.
12:35 Speaker 04 Who I find immensely entertaining, I have to say.
12:38 Dominic Sandbrook? And he's an absolutely terrible man because he's a massive hypochondriac. He's quite funny. I mean, the scenes with him are quite funny because he's a sort of, he's a bit of a caricature. At one point, he describes himself as a bundle of nerves dressed up as a man.
12:51 Speaker 04 Yeah.
12:51 Dominic Sandbrook? And he's incredibly selfish, narcissistic. He's, you know, you have to whisper when you're with him because he's talking normal volume.
13:00 Speaker 04 Yeah.
13:01 Dominic Sandbrook? It's bad for his nerves.
13:02 Speaker 04 Yeah, he's quite, um, he's quite like Mrs. Bennett from Pride and Prejudice, you know, who's always banging on about her nerves. But actually, Charles Dance plays him in the BBC TV adaptation of this book very, very well.
13:15 Dominic Sandbrook? Charles Dance plays him? I can't imagine that, actually.
13:17 Speaker 04 Yeah, but very well.
13:19 Dominic Sandbrook? He's just an absolute amoeba of a man. He's got no backbone whatsoever.
13:22 Speaker 04 Yeah.
13:23 Dominic Sandbrook? And then, so you would think, well, what has the woman in white got to do with all these characters?
13:28 Speaker 04 Is she more of like a spectral kind of mirage? Is she more of like a symbol? But no, she's a character in her own right.
13:34 Dominic Sandbrook? So she is a character called Anne Catharick, who basically, as a little girl, it turns out, she had been brought to Limeridge. And she knew Laura and Marian's mother. So she was connected with the family, wasn't she?
13:50 Speaker 04 Yeah, exactly. And she developed a real attachment to their mother because her mother was was very distant, didn't take very good care of her. And she's she's almost quite simple.
14:00 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
14:01 Speaker 04 Anne Catharick, which is why she fixates on dressing in white, because Marian and Laura's mother once said to her that little girls look prettiest and kind of neatest in white. And ever since then, she's refused to dress in anything else. But then, you know, the first real kind of point of jeopardy comes in because Laura receives a letter, who we from, we later discover Anne Catharick, warning her not to marry the man that she has been engaged to for a long time. And this is Sir Percival Glide. And it had been the dying wish of her father that she marry him, even though he's kind of twice her age.
14:35 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
14:36 Speaker 04 And so she's been engaged to him for a long time. But then she gets this letter and that obviously makes her wary. But then there's another thing. She and Walter Hartwright inevitably have started to develop feelings for each other. So upon discovering that she's engaged, he leaves.
14:51 Dominic Sandbrook? Walter is so decent. He goes to, well, he goes to Honduras.
14:54 Speaker 04 That is very Victorian somehow.
14:56 Dominic Sandbrook? It is. He's he does the decent thing. He goes away because he knows she's engaged to this aristocrat, Sir Percival Glide.
15:01 Speaker 04 If you love her, let her go.
15:03 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly, exactly. And basically, even though she loves Walter, and even though she's had this letter telling her not to marry Sir Percival. Laura, because she's very dutiful and very Victorian, thinks, well, I'll have to marry him anyway. And and she does. And so she marries Sir Percival, who actually, we know from the beginning, is a kind of bad man, don't we? Because he, when he arrives at the house, he pretends to be very polite and courteous and friendly. But Wilkie Collins writes it in such a way that it's blindingly obvious that this is just a front and that actually he's a terrible crook.
15:40 Speaker 04 Yeah, and she makes a big deal about the fact that he's kind of, his good looks have gone to seed.
15:45 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
15:45 Speaker 04 And that's, you know, something that we shall be wary of.
15:49 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, the thing that gives him away surely is the fact that he's losing his hair.
15:53 Speaker 04 Yeah.
15:54 Dominic Sandbrook? Because that's pointed out again and again. I found that a little bit too close to home.
15:57 Speaker 04 I've always found you to be very suspect, Dominic.
16:00 Dominic Sandbrook? Thank you. Thanks, Tabby. I'm glad you've gone there.
16:03 Speaker 04 My first impressions, I thought, ah.
16:05 Dominic Sandbrook? I'm glad you've gone there.
16:06 Speaker 04 Here we have a bad seed. Anyway.
16:09 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
16:09 Speaker 04 Finally, eventually, despite everyone's misgivings, Laura does marry Supercival Glide and they go on this honeymoon. And then they come back and they move into Supercival Glide's kind of estate. And this is a very kind of dark and gloomy place called Blackwater Park. And Marian goes to live with them too. But there also in residence are two other very important characters. And this is Count Fosco. He's a good friend of Supercival Glide and he's married to Madame Fosco, a very malevolent character. And she is Laura's aunt. And so by virtue of the fact that Laura is inheriting this vast fortune, she is not. So she's losing out on a lot of money, thanks to Laura. And Dominic, tell us a bit about Count Fosco because he is such an iconic character.
16:54 Dominic Sandbrook? He's very camp. He's one of the supreme Victorian villains. And Count Fosco, he's an amusing villain though.
17:00 Speaker 04 He's brilliant.
17:01 Dominic Sandbrook? He's enormously fat. He's constantly eating fruit tarts and sort of stroking mice. And he has pets, I don't know, canaries and cockatoos or whatever they are. And he's very courteous in a sort of very over the top Italian way. But then you realise quite quickly that he is a malevolent and kind of calculating customer. And he is basically manipulating Supercival Glide so that they're in cahoots, these two characters.
17:31 Speaker 04 Yeah.
17:32 Dominic Sandbrook? And you can tell quite early on, I think, you worry for Laura and her fortune and indeed her sister Marian.
17:39 Speaker 04 But there's this terrible sense of entrapment as well at Blackwater Park. And the powerlessness of these two women faced with like the system and these two men, because all of their efforts. Basically, there's this, at one point, Supercival tries to get Laura to sign something, to sign away a large part of her fortune to him. And she resists all of Marian's efforts to write these letters to their lawyers in London to kind of get help and kind of free them from this dilemma. You know, Count Fosco and Madame Fosco are going into the postbag and checking their letters and they go and they talk to, you know, Laura's lady in waiting to kind of make sure that she doesn't go and spread the word of their situation, you know, it's really throttling.
18:18 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, exactly. There's a suffocating atmosphere. The two sisters realise there's nothing they can do. They are, they are basically at the mercy of these two guys. Sir Percival, who's drinking more and more and clearly has run out of money and is basically, it becomes very, very obvious that he's married Laura for her money and he's determined to get his hands on it one way or another. And then Count Fosco, who you can't have an argument with him because he's always performatively very polite and courteous, but there's a sort of coldness in his eyes and behind his smile as he eats another fruit tart. He is plotting your downfall.
18:53 Speaker 04 Exactly. And also, you know, tickling white mice. He has a real thing for white mice, for birds, for parrots and for fruit tarts. So this makes him extremely malevolent. He's the one that the two sisters start to really fear because they know that he's got some real brains behind that sort of florid, plump face.
19:10 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly.
19:11 Speaker 04 Then we have the reappearance of the woman in white because Anne Catharick appears to warn the sisters once more and she lets slip that Sir Percival has some great secret that if it were shared with the public at large, he would be basically destroyed and brought down.
19:26 Dominic Sandbrook? I mean, let's not give that away because that's, you know, when you're reading the book, you want to find out.
19:30 Speaker 04 It's so juicy.
19:31 Dominic Sandbrook? What is Sir Percival's secret that could destroy him? And can the two, can these two young women find it and use it against them?
19:38 Speaker 04 But there is another dark secret, isn't there?
19:41 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, there is. So there are many, many twists. Marian tries to, she tries to spy on Percival and Fosco in this fantastic, fantastic scene where she's so intrepid, Marian, she climbs out of the window, she's basically on a kind of terrace in the pouring rain, eavesdropping, you know, very sort of like James Bond or something.
20:03 Speaker 04 Yeah.
20:04 Dominic Sandbrook? And she then. Catches a chill because she's been eavesdropping on Count Fosco and Sir Percival while they've been unveiling their plans. She falls ill and is basically stuck in a different bit of the house. And that means that Laura, her sort of pretty sister is totally at their mercy. And they're able then to pull off their, their really, really sinister scheme against Laura, aren't they?
20:30 Speaker 04 Huge spoiler alert here. Yeah. So what they do is they recapture Anne Catharick, who it turns out is already dying. She has a heart condition. And then they trick Laura into going to London where she thinks Marian is. And when she arrives there, they drug her. And when she wakes up, she essentially wakes up in a lunatic asylum. Because what they've done is they have swapped her identity with Anne Catharick's. So they have said that Laura has died, Lady Glide has died. They put Anne Catharick in her coffin, bury her in her grave next to her mother. Meanwhile, Laura is trapped in this asylum and, you know, being told that she is Anne Catharick.
21:11 Dominic Sandbrook? So this, so this allows Sir Percival to say, my wife has died. He can claim all her inheritance and her estate and whatnot. And meanwhile, poor Laura is totally, you know, she's powerless. She's in the asylum. And when she says, I'm actually Laura Fairley, or Laura Glide, as she now is, the sort of ward is saying, no, you're not. You're Anne Catharick. You've gone mad. And she can't get out. There's no way she can get out. Well, or, well, or is there?
21:35 Speaker 04 Or is there?
21:36 Dominic Sandbrook? Because Marian is so intrepid that basically Marian is able to rescue Laura, isn't she? She's able to go to the asylum and bribe. She bribes one of the.
21:47 Speaker 04 She bribes the nurse to get Laura free. Anyway, then they team up with Walter, who's back in England and who, upon visiting Laura's grave, heartbroken.
21:57 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, what a great scene this is.
21:59 Speaker 04 Sees the two sisters veiled.
22:01 Dominic Sandbrook? Amazing scene.
22:01 Speaker 04 And is like, oh my God, she's alive.
22:03 Dominic Sandbrook? This is one of the great moments in English fiction, I think, when Walter goes to the grave and he sees that the woman he fell in love with has died. And then he looks up and there's these two veiled women. Who are they? And one of them is her. He can't believe it.
22:16 Speaker 04 And they kind of team up to try to bring down Count Fosco and Sir Percival Glide by discovering and exposing his secret, which we will not be revealing, but we will be revealing some other crucial information after the break.
22:31 Dominic Sandbrook? We will. So obviously, this is a complicated story, but it's a thrilling story. And it's actually worth pausing to say, if it's thrilling for us, imagine how much more melodramatic it would have seemed to the Victorians. And it's the product of the genius of one man, Wilkie Collins, but it's also a product of the obsessions of the Victorian period. So maybe, Tabby, we'll start with the man himself.
22:53 Speaker 04 Yes.
22:53 Dominic Sandbrook? Wilkie Collins. Tell us a little bit about Wilkie Collins.
22:56 Speaker 04 Wilkie Collins is born in Marylebone in London on the 8th of January, 1824. He's the eldest son of the eminent landscape artist, William Collins, who actually served as partially the inspiration for Walter Hartwright in the book. He's pulled out of school as a boy and they go travelling around Europe. And he says that during that time, you know, living in Italy and France, he learned more than he ever did at school. Then he returned to England and went to a boarding school, which he loathed, very Victorian, somehow, you know, faintly Nicholas Nicollby. And he apparently, allegedly, started telling stories because he was bullied. And in order to kind of wriggle out of the clutches of this school bully or distract him, he would tell him stories. You know, he wrote, "It was this brute who first awakened in me, his poor little victim,
23:41 Speaker 04 a power of which but for him I might never have been aware."
23:44 Dominic Sandbrook? No way, that's a good story.
23:45 Speaker 04 He was, he was an odd looking chap. He was born with a large bulge on the right side of his forehead. He was only five foot six and he had a disproportionately large head and large shoulders, but very small feet and hands. Because of kind of this thing on his head, he was forced to wear glass from a young age and his eyesight really suffered in later life. And he had quite a kind of unconventional, bohemian lifestyle, you know. He famously loved good food and wine. He dressed very flamboyantly and he spent much of his time travelling abroad, which he loved.
24:16 Dominic Sandbrook? He leaves school. He is apprenticed to a tea merchant, that doesn't really work out. He starts writing. He trains as a barrister, but he never really practises law. So although the legal training plays a part in the way he structures this book. He's actually never really been a lawyer, although he's interested in it. He makes his money from journalism and he starts contributing to literary journals. And this is when he meets Dickens. So Charles Dickens is by far the most important influence on Wilkie Collins. And they're very, very close, aren't they? So clearly Dickens has a massive influence on him in a literary sense. So serialization, cliffhangers, a sort of melodramatic plot, all of this kind of thing.
25:00 Dominic Sandbrook? And Count Fosco, for example, this sort of white mice and fruit tart fancying Italian villain. He's quite a Dickensian character in that he's larger than life, he's melodramatic, he's extravagant, all of this.
25:12 Speaker 04 Yeah, and also Dickensian characters often have these kind of minute details. They have certain traits or characteristics or habits. But actually, when I was rereading it this time, I kept thinking about Bleak House. And so, yeah, you can definitely, definitely see the parallels.
25:24 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, so Dickens and Collins would travel together and through Dickens, he becomes pals with lots of writers and artists. And it's Dickens who keeps giving him kind of breaks to write for his literary magazines and things. Now, there are a couple of things about Wilkie Collins that are kind of clues to the nature and the interests of this book. First of all, you've already mentioned this with his bulging head. He has very poor health. So he's constantly got gout and headaches and boils and all of this kind of thing. He, he takes various remedies, so Turkish baths. There's electric baths. Have you ever had an electric bath?
25:57 Speaker 04 No, what's an electric bath?
25:59 Dominic Sandbrook? So an electric bath.
26:00 Speaker 04 Sounds lovely.
26:01 Dominic Sandbrook? No, it's bonkers. Yeah, you'd sit under a machine that basically zapped you with static electricity, so your hair would stand up on end.
26:09 Speaker 04 I bet I'd come out of it glowing.
26:11 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, apparently Benjamin Franklin was a big believer in this.
26:14 Speaker 04 Good looking man.
26:15 Dominic Sandbrook? People were still doing electric baths until the end of the 19th century. And then doctors said, this is insane. Like, this is. Why are you doing this? It's not making you better at all. So there's electric baths. Collins was hypnotised, he took lots of quinine, but above all, his big thing was laudanum, which is a mixture of opium and alcohol. And in those days, you could get laudanum over the chemist's counter. It was sold as, for example, Mother Bailey's quieting syrup. And Collins's doctor said to him, take this, basically, this opium and alcohol mixture for your gout. He took so much of it that he became completely addicted. He would have these, it's a hallucinogen. So he
26:58 Dominic Sandbrook? would have these visions that he was being, I love this detail, this is from Matthew Sweet, a friend of mine, wrote a brilliant essay about The Woman in White, which is the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition. And he points out in this that Collins had these visions where, I'll quote, "a monstrous green woman who sprouted a pair of tusks."
27:16 Speaker 04 Oh my god.
27:18 Dominic Sandbrook? That's what happens if you take too much laudanum. A surgeon told, at dinner, once told Wilkie Collins, said, "You're taking so much laudanum that basically you're taking enough laudanum every day to kill everybody at this table."
27:29 Speaker 04 Oh my god.
27:30 Dominic Sandbrook? Because basically he developed a resistance to it.
27:32 Speaker 04 Yeah.
27:32 Dominic Sandbrook? And, you know, that sort of sense of reality slipping out of control, your health is on the verge of collapse at any moment, that runs all the way through his fiction, not just The Woman in White, but all his other sensation novels.
27:44 Speaker 04 It definitely does.
27:45 Dominic Sandbrook? And then the other thing is his personal life. So tell us about his personal life, because I know you know about this.
27:49 Speaker 04 Yeah, so he had two main relationships throughout his life, two women. He married neither of them. The first was a woman called Caroline Graves, who was a widow with a young daughter, and he lived with her for the best part of 30 years. She claimed that she was the daughter of a gentleman and that her husband had been a gentleman. But in truth, her father was a carpenter from Gloucestershire, and her husband was a short handwriting from a family of stone racers. Anyway, she and her daughter, Harriet, lived together from 1858. Then they had a brief separation when the second woman in Collins's life came on to the scene. But then after that, they lived together for most of their life. But this was not- Kind of thought proper. It was never something they acknowledged in public. She, to
28:33 Speaker 04 the world at large, was seen as and named as his housekeeper. You know, he wouldn't exactly take her to social parties or anything like that.
28:40 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
28:41 Speaker 04 Then the second woman was called Martha Rudd. They met when he was forty and she was nineteen. So as we will see later, that's something very Charles Dickens about that. And he put both of his mistresses in two separate houses, a short walk away from each other. And when he was with Martha, they pretended to go by Mister and Mrs William Dawson, and that's the name that their three children inherited. So you can see from this, Wilkie Collins's like slightly cynical attitude towards the kind of the mores and the morals of Victorian society at large, kind of Victorian establishment with its very proper households, its, you know, patriarchal households, you know, the married angel and and the kind of hardworking gentleman. And I think you can see that in the woman in white as well.
29:25 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, his own life is a sort of rebuke to the standards of the day. And so, to some degree, I think almost all of his novels are running counter to the expectations and the conventions of the time, which actually brings us quite nicely to the historical context. So we're in Victorian Britain in the eighteen fifty's and eighteen sixty's. And as you say, Tabby, this is the high point of the idealized patriarchal.
29:50 Speaker 04 Yeah.
29:51 Dominic Sandbrook? Victorian family.
29:52 Speaker 04 Set in part by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
29:55 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, of course. And the idea that the, you know, Laura, Laura Fairley, the heroine of the book, is your classic idealized Victorian maiden. She's beautiful. She's polite.
30:07 Speaker 04 Beautiful, obedient.
30:09 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, exactly. But Marian, in creating Marian, he's created a character that is rebellious.
30:15 Speaker 04 She's transgressive, yeah.
30:17 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, transgressive, exactly. Now.
30:20 Dominic Sandbrook? That's not the only interesting thing about the culture of the time, I think. So I mentioned Matthew Sweet's essay, he's brilliant about this because this is, I think, what his PhD was on was sort of sensation fiction and how it related to Victorian culture. And well, he basically says, we get the Victorians completely wrong because we think it's all stiff collars and stuffed shirts and whatnot. But in fact, they had a massive appetite for novelty and for gadgets and for shocks and excitement, that this, the 1850s was an age of spectacles and freak shows, all kinds of things like panoramas and dioramas and zoetropes that you would go and see at fairs and at carnivals and at sort of great public celebrations. And a lot of these things were designed to manipulate and trick you.
31:02 Dominic Sandbrook? And you would get a kind of thrill from finding that you'd been deceived, kind of illusions almost.
31:07 Speaker 04 Yeah.
31:08 Dominic Sandbrook? What goes hand in hand with that, there's a new kind of journalism because the newspaper stamp tax was repealed in 1856. So people are producing cheaper newspapers, many more of them. And they're competing with each other by telling ever more sensational stories about crimes and scandals and marital disasters and all of these kinds of things. And at the same time, if you're growing up in the Victorian era, you are reading penny dreadfuls, which are cheap stories, sensational stories about highwaymen and adventures and pirates and detectives and all of this. So what this means is that when Wilkie Collins, when Dickens says to him, would you like to write me for my magazine All the Year Round?
31:50 Dominic Sandbrook? I'd like to write me a really exciting story. The market is there for something that is sensational and shocking. You know, the Victorians already want it and Collins is the man who's going to supply it. And The Woman in White, which is serialized between November 1859 and August 1860, offers Victorian readers a more thrilling and sensational experience than any book that they have ever had before. It's all about tricks and manipulation and madness and twists, you know, narrative twists.
32:25 Speaker 04 And uncertainty.
32:26 Dominic Sandbrook? I think that's such a big part of it, actually. There's no, you know how You would read, I don't know, Jane Austen or George Eliot or indeed Dickens.
32:34 Speaker 04 Yeah.
32:35 Dominic Sandbrook? There's, there's usually a narrator who is, you sort of associate with the author. And the narrator is, is omniscient. The narrator knows everything. And you are safe in the narrator's hands.
32:47 Speaker 04 Giving you a hint about how to think about the characters, a little bit of a clue.
32:52 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, completely.
32:53 Speaker 04 You don't get that in this.
32:54 Dominic Sandbrook? No, you don't know whether to trust anything that the characters are telling you. Sometimes the characters are telling you things that downright wrong. So when Frederick Fairley, who's the massive hypochondriac, the bundle of nerves pretending to be a person. When he tells you, you know, his version of events, the whole time you're just thinking, well, you're an idiot. And you've completely misread what's going on here. And the other thing that Matthew Sweet points out is that because the characters are telling us the story themselves, when these incredibly exciting things happen to them, like they're drugged or they're kidnapped or they're tricked or they're terrified in some way. It's so much more immediate and immersive than if there was a narrator between, you know, mediating it all. So you're, it's as though it's happening to you in real time.
33:39 Dominic Sandbrook? And actually, he quotes a novelist and critic at the time called Margaret Oliphant, forgotten today, but a huge figure at the time. And she didn't like sensation fiction, but she said that it felt so much more immediate. So when Walter first meets the woman in white, Mrs. Oliphant wrote, the shock is as sudden, as startling, as unexpected and as incomprehensible to us as it is to the hero of this tale. Because it feels as though we are Walter and it is happening to us. Now, interestingly, she thought this was terrible. She thought it was too violent, too shocking. I mean, you made the comparison with romanticy. Last week we did a Court of Thorns and Roses, didn't we? And at the time, and lots of people think, oh gosh, that's rubbish and it's, you know, it's polluting literary tastes and all this.
34:24 Dominic Sandbrook? But people thought that about this fiction.
34:26 Speaker 04 Well, we discussed that. We discussed how kind of every age has its next great kind of sensational novel that people say is destroying literacy and corrupting people's minds and stuff. It's always the way. And it's so interesting that now this book, which a lot of people would consider, you know, a bit hefty, maybe a bit unwieldy, from the outside, maybe a bit intimidating. At the time, this was that. It's so interesting.
34:49 Dominic Sandbrook? And we know that people loved it, don't we? Because people would talk about it at dinner and stuff. And there are lots of Victorian bigwigs who were addicted to it.
34:56 Speaker 04 Yeah, well, I mean, famously, William Gladstone, the Prime Minister at the time, he cancelled a trip to the theatre in order to continue reading it, which is just great. I so approve of that behaviour.
35:07 Dominic Sandbrook? So there's merch, isn't there? There's Woman in White.
35:09 Speaker 04 Yeah, great merch.
35:10 Dominic Sandbrook? Perfume, cloaks, bonnet? Would you wear a woman in white bonnet?
35:14 Speaker 04 No, but I'd like to see you in one. Also, interestingly, there was a revival in the name Walter, which is so interesting. People wanted to copy the hero. So I don't know, maybe it's like if loads of little boys have been called Harry, after the Harry Potter books became massive or something. And then also, which is also excellent, there was a trend for naming cats after Count Fosco. I'm gutted I missed out on that.
35:38 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, did you recently reveal that you named one of your pets?
35:41 Speaker 04 Well, no, actually, two of them. So I named my dog Zelda. Well, actually, my brother named my dog Zelda after Zelda Fitzgerald. And I named my cat Seraphina after Seraphina Peccola from The Northern Knights.
35:51 Dominic Sandbrook? Very literary menagerie.
35:53 Speaker 04 Not one inch of that insists upon itself.
35:55 Dominic Sandbrook? No, not at all. So effectively, what Wilkie Collins has done with this book, The Woman in White, is he has invented a literary genre. And I think what he's done is he's taken the violence and the horror that people associated with older books. So actually, Wuthering Heights, the very first book that we did in this podcast, is a good example. Wuthering Heights is often seen as the last great Gothic novel. So the Gothic novels that had flourished in the late 18th century, they're all kind of malevolent counts and women being locked up in towers and terrible family secrets. And what Wilkie Collins does in The Woman in White is he takes all that and he brings it back to modern England. He puts it in a world where people are having cakes and they're going on trains.
36:39 Speaker 04 He situates it in a drawing room as well.
36:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
36:42 Speaker 04 Domestic settings, a bit like we said of Agatha Christie when we were doing our Sherlock Holmes episode.
36:47 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, I think that's a good, I think that's actually a very good comparison, that there are people who are, the, the setting seems in a way quite humdrum. It's quite banal, you know, Walter is just an ordinary, quite boring Victorian art teacher. And he thinks that nothing exciting will ever happen to him. And all of this, this stuff, which is so baroque and so bonkers, people being locked up in asylums is happening in the heart of mid 19th century, ordinary England. And that's what makes it so thrilling.
37:18 Speaker 04 To the chime of the dinner gong or whatever, you know, people are still dressing for dinner, even though after dinner, they're being drugged and shoved into asylums.
37:26 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. And Collins had an express, a lovely expression. He said, this was taking place in the secret theatre of home.
37:32 Speaker 04 Brilliant.
37:32 Dominic Sandbrook? So that even in your kind of middle class home or something, there will be all kinds of madness and secrets and horror and malevolence and whatnot. And, you know, this gave rise to the sensation novel. There were lots of imitators. So there's a writer called Mary Elizabeth Braden, who wrote a book called Lady Audley's Secret, one of the bestselling novels of this period. Actually, another brilliant book, all sorts of poisoning and bigamy and fake deaths and stuff. I really recommend it. But nobody did it better than Collins himself because he did this book, he did No Name, he did Armidale. And then the last of the great four books that he wrote in the 1860s was The Moonstone,
38:11 Dominic Sandbrook? where he sort of took one step further and he turned this into what looks like the formula for detective fiction. So clues, red herrings, the big reveal at the end.
38:22 Speaker 04 Yeah.
38:23 Dominic Sandbrook? The tragedy for him, I would say, is that he writes loads more after the 1860s, but none of it is as good again. Because his sort of more crusading, preachy side takes over at the expense of his entertaining narrative melodramatic side. So his books become a little bit preachy. They're all about kind of marriage reform and legal reform and things. They're never quite as exciting. And then he died in 1819. Um bizarre story, actually, he's he was in a cab accident. He was thrown out of a cab.
38:53 Speaker 04 Yeah.
38:53 Dominic Sandbrook? Injured and then he got bronchitis and then he had a stroke and then he died at the age of sixty five. I mean, he'd been in really bad health beforehand, but it's a kind of a shame that he died in such a weird way.
39:05 Speaker 04 Yeah, that was the end of Wilkie Collins. It is really sad, actually. I like the thought that he had sort of quite a colourful, exuberant life.
39:13 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
39:13 Speaker 04 While it lasted.
39:14 Dominic Sandbrook? With his two mistresses.
39:15 Speaker 04 But we've only just kind of scratched the surface of the woman in white and particularly kind of the dark secrets behind it. You know, so what what the book reveals about the insanity fever haunting nineteenth century imaginations. The sex and violence beneath the surface, but also there are real life inspirations behind the woman in white. There were real cases that inspired the story and we will be delving into those after the break.
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41:21 Dominic Sandbrook? Welcome back everybody to the book club. Now, The Woman in White is a mystery novel above all, and we have promised to unveil some of its secrets. We won't spoil it if you haven't read it, but we will talk about some of the mysteries behind the book if you like. So first of all, the identity of the woman in white. I mean, this is a massive thing, isn't it, Tabby? So in the book, quite early on, we know who this is. We know that the woman in white is this woman, Anne Catharick, who looks just like our heroine Laura Fairley and who has escaped from a lunatic asylum. But, you know, scholars have spent loads of print arguing about who the woman in white really is because there undoubtedly were real life examples of women in white, as it were.
42:05 Speaker 04 Yeah.
42:06 Dominic Sandbrook? From whom Wilkie Collins got the idea. And the first possibility is that the woman in white was basically somebody we've already mentioned, which is his lover disguised as his housekeeper, Caroline Graves.
42:17 Speaker 04 You know, it's no coincidence that people talk and talk about this and have their different theories and stuff because I think Collins himself maybe slightly mythologised this encounter himself. So he is said to have had this run in with a mysterious woman in white himself and that this directly influenced Walter Hartwright's encounter, first encounter with Anne Catharick. He was said to have been strolling home one night from a party in 1858 with his brother and of course, the famous painter, John Everett Millais. And Millais's son wrote a biography of his life and recorded this encounter in the biography. So he said that their conversation was suddenly arrested by a piercing scream which came from a house nearby. Before they could decide what to do, the gate swung open and a woman, young, beautiful
43:02 Speaker 04 woman, dressed in white, ran out into the three of them. And she kind of paused in front of them for a moment terrified. And then suddenly coming to her senses, she raced off again into the shadows. And then Millet is said to have said, what a lovely woman.
43:18 Dominic Sandbrook? Of course he did.
43:20 Speaker 04 Jolly good show, yeah. And then Collins is said to have said, oh, I must find out who she is and run after her. And then the next day, when people said, oh, what happened? Who was the woman? He was quite quiet about it, didn't give much away. But he did reveal that she was a young lady of good birth and position, who'd accidentally fallen into the hands of a man living in a villa in Regent's Park. And he had kept her there imprisoned for many months under threats and under some kind of mesmeric influence. Very Gothic that there's always a maiden trapped in a castle under the mesmeric influence of some kind of dark antagonist. And then that eventually in desperation she'd fled. And that's when she ran into the three young men.
44:05 Dominic Sandbrook? And that's how his relationship with Caroline started.
44:07 Speaker 04 Yeah, the woman in question was Caroline Graves. And this is said to be how they met and how their relationship of, you know, 30 years or so started. Do we believe it? I think probably not. I think it's it's slightly exaggerated. You know, it's super melodramatic. It's full of kind of Gothic horror themes. And also it's likely that he had met Caroline Graves in 1856. So almost two years earlier. But then there's another possibility.
44:35 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, the Henrietta Ward story. So this is a story told by the painter Henrietta Ward. She was married to Collins's great friend Edward Ward. So they're both called Ward, but that's a coincidence. And that she got engaged to him at the age of 14, which I think is too young.
44:51 Speaker 04 I I think that's not a controversial opinion.
44:55 Dominic Sandbrook? And Collins was visiting them one day and she said, oh, let me tell you about this local woman in Slough called Mrs Coffin. Mrs Coffin apparently would dress in white like a ghost and she'd go around and scare children playing in the cemetery after dark. And Mrs Ward said later that Collins walked home all the way across Hampstead Heath, thinking about Mrs Coffin, and that this gave him the idea for the woman in white. And my verdict on this is, it's perfectly possible, but we only have her word for it.
45:26 Speaker 04 Yeah.
45:27 Dominic Sandbrook? And actually, there are much more interesting possible sources than Mrs Coffin. So let's go to the third one, which is a French one. This is a sort of compilation of scandalous criminal trials in French.
45:44 Speaker 04 Yeah.
45:44 Dominic Sandbrook? That Collins had bought at a bookstore in Paris in 1856. And it was called The Recueil des Cause Célèbres by Maurice Mejon. And Maurice Mejon basically went through all the French court records and he found the most sensational ones. And Collins then bought this book and he ripped it off and he wrote magazine articles about the most exciting cases.
46:04 Speaker 04 Yeah.
46:05 Dominic Sandbrook? And there was one case in particular that grabbed his attention and will surely interest listeners who are interested in the woman in white. So it was the story of a French noblewoman called, with the excellent name Adelaide Marie Roger Lucignan de Champignyel, who was the Marquise de Duo.
46:21 Speaker 04 Masterful.
46:22 Dominic Sandbrook? And she lived, I'm just showing off.
46:24 Speaker 04 I know.
46:25 Dominic Sandbrook? And she lived in the, in the 18th century. And basically, she inherited this estate and her brother tricked her out of it with the help of one of their female relatives. So the female relative drugged the Marquise de Duo with some poisoned snuff. She had this huge headache after taking this snuff and she passed out. And when she woke up, she found that she was in the Sault-Petrière Mental Asylum on the outskirts of Paris.
46:57 Dominic Sandbrook? And she woke up and she said, what's going on? I'm the marquise de duo. Let me out. And the attendant said to her, no, you're not. You are Madame Blanville. We have been told that you're mad. You think you're the marquise, but you're not. She eventually managed to get out, uh, the marquise de duo. And her brother had her arrested as an impostor. I mean, that's, that's extraordinary. He's really doubling down.
47:20 Speaker 04 Yeah.
47:21 Dominic Sandbrook? Basically, all her servants said, no, no, this is the real person. But her brother got away with it. She died in poverty without ever recovering either her fortune or her own identity.
47:32 Speaker 04 Yeah.
47:33 Dominic Sandbrook? And in this account, Major mentioned that when she was locked up in the asylum, she was wearing a white dress. So clearly, since we know that Collins read this, we know who's interested in it. This obviously is one of the inspirations for the story of Laura Fairley swapping her identity involuntarily with Anne Catherine and finding that she has been locked up in a lunatic asylum. But it's not the only one. So there are other stories from England, aren't there?
48:05 Speaker 04 Yeah. And this fourth possibility is, I think, probably one of the most famous because it was very famous in, um, England at the time.
48:13 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
48:14 Speaker 04 And this one, this one is very creepy, actually. So this is a woman called Louisa Notte, and she was a wealthy woman from Essex. And she and her four sisters became the followers of Reverend Henry James Prince, who was a revivalist clergyman. He founded this millenarian sect called the Agapemony and the abode of love in Somerset. When their father died in 1844, all four sisters inherited a vast sum of money, six thousand pounds, which today would be about six to 10 million pounds.
48:46 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
48:46 Speaker 04 And Prince, this, this, you know, charismatic kind of cult leader, persuaded three of Louisa's sisters to marry members of his sect so that he could gain control of these vast fortunes. And when it looked as though Louisa might do the same, her mother took drastic action and ordered her son and her son-in-law to forcibly abduct Louisa from her home and imprison her in a villa in London. There, when she continued to kind of. Say insist upon, you know, Reverend Prince's divinity and righteousness and all that. Her family had her certified insane, citing religious monomania.
49:27 Dominic Sandbrook? I mean, are they the baddies there or are they the good?
49:29 Speaker 04 I, you know, I don't know. When I first read this, I was like, oh, no, no, no, the family are the baddies. You should never ever do that. But I think it's a lose lose on all sides, I'd say.
49:39 Dominic Sandbrook? Because she's about to give away her fortune to a guy who's clearly a bad man, a cult leader.
49:44 Speaker 04 I get the sense that her family are quite keen on, rather than kind of protecting her from a scary cult leader. I think they're quite keen to get their hands on the, on the dough.
49:51 Dominic Sandbrook? On the money. To be honest, I think if my relative of mine was going to give all our family's money to a man who set up, who set up something called the abode of love, I would undoubtedly, I would undoubtedly have them locked up for insanity.
50:06 Speaker 04 The title alone would have you taking drastic action.
50:10 Dominic Sandbrook? I'm sorry, you've lost me with the abode of love. Anyway, so she was put in a, in a, in Moorcroft House asylum, wasn't she?
50:16 Speaker 04 Yeah, very nasty. But she managed to escape in January 1848. She was then recaptured, so very Anne Catharic. And then her story reached the commissioners in lunacy and they ordered her release in May 1848. And she successfully sued her family for false imprisonment. And the judge, Lord Chief Baron Pollock famously ruled, you ought to liberate every person who is not dangerous to himself or to others. And this sparked a massive public debate at the time about, you know, legal liberties and the medical authority, i.e. making sure people weren't thrown into asylums that proper examinations, that more than one person kind of decreeing them insane.
50:58 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, then, well, I suppose it raises the question, you know, what is insanity and all this kind of thing, which is too big a subject for us to.
51:04 Speaker 04 Yeah, for the first time, actually, because people started to see insanity as, rather than kind of like a. Almost like something that suddenly came upon people that existed in your body. They started to treat it like an illness rather than.
51:18 Dominic Sandbrook? A moral condition.
51:19 Speaker 04 Yeah, as a moral condition or like a haunting or a possession.
51:22 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, exactly. So that, well, the mid 19th century is the time when, you know, people are fascinated by medicine. They're fascinated, I mean, they're like us, they're fascinated by mental health and ill health. And arguing about exactly how you define it and all of this kind of thing. And this undoubtedly did influence the woman in white as well, didn't it? Because we know that Charles Dickens wrote about it at the time. So it seems likely that if Charles Dickens knows about it, he's interested in it, then so would his friend Collins.
51:50 Speaker 04 He was personally interested in it.
51:52 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, well, we'll come on to this. So, I mean, it's a massive scandal. And actually, you mentioned the commissioners in lunacy, who are these people whose job it is to decide these kinds of things? So one of them was a guy called Brian Proctor, who was a medical witness at the trial, at the Notteage trial. And actually, the woman in white is dedicated to this guy.
52:16 Speaker 04 Yeah.
52:17 Dominic Sandbrook? So Collins is clearly fascinated by this issue. And I think that's partly because at the, precisely the point where he comes up with the idea for the woman in white and is writing it. The issue of lunacy is, is being hotly debated in all the newspapers. Because there have been these kind of lunacy panics, what historians call lunacy panics. Where there'll be great scandals about people being locked up against their will for financial gain. And I think there are, was it four of them in 1858 alone, making the national newspaper headlines?
52:50 Speaker 04 Deliberate attempts to incarcerate people for insanity. And it was four people who were, who were sane, two men and two women. So, yeah, as you say, this was, this was a huge public outcry around this. And the people that suffered worst, you know, when it came to being kind of illegally incarcerated were often Victorian wives. Who were known to have been kind of involuntarily committed to asylums by kind of incompetent or corrupt doctors. Not for their well being, but for the convenience of their husbands, or possibly because there was some kind of fortune at stake.
53:26 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
53:27 Speaker 04 You know, they were, it was, it was kind of used to silence disobedience, disobedient wives. I suspect that this too has been slightly mythologised.
53:36 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, there's a case, isn't there, that's very well known to Collins himself. So one of his friends, or one of his former friends, is trying to do this to his own wife.
53:45 Speaker 04 I think this was definitely, definitely also another inspiration for The Woman in White, because it happened about two years before he wrote the novel. So this is Rosina Bulwer-Litton. She was born in 1802. She was the daughter of a women's rights advocate and an Anglo Irish landowner. And then in 1827, she married a very good friend of Wilkie Collins's. And this is Edward Bulwer-Litton, who was a novelist and a politician. And he, he's the man actually that coined the phrase, the pen is mightier than the sword. And also, it was a dark and stormy night.
54:19 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes. And he, yeah, and he's a playwright. He was a huge figure, literary figure for the Victorians. They're totally forgotten today, really. And he wrote a play that both Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens acted in. So they knew him very well. He's married this woman, Rosina, but he's serially unfaithful and they end up separating and Rosina loses her children.
54:40 Speaker 04 Yeah. He takes her children away from her, which I think would enrage any woman.
54:44 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes. And she wrote, she wrote a novel, didn't she, caricaturing her own husband, called Chievely or The Man of Honour.
54:53 Speaker 04 I admire that.
54:54 Dominic Sandbrook? Twenty years or so go by and Bulwer-Litton is standing in a by-election as a Conservative parliamentary candidate. And he's speaking at the hustings. And who should turn up but his wife, Rosina?
55:07 Speaker 04 You could so see this happening to Boris Johnson, couldn't you?
55:10 Dominic Sandbrook? You could. Who loudly denounces him. You know, you're a, you're a rake.
55:16 Speaker 04 You're a what?
55:17 Dominic Sandbrook? A rake. What did you think I was saying?
55:19 Speaker 04 I don't know. You said you're a.
55:22 Dominic Sandbrook? Right. Well, she probably thought that.
55:25 Speaker 04 Yeah.
55:25 Dominic Sandbrook? She, she says, you're a terrible man. You're all this, that and the other. And he says, well, you're, you're bonkers. And then he, what did he do? He got two thugs to drag her away and commit her to an asylum in Brentford. So two doctors, John Connolly and L Forbes Winslow, who were very eminent mad doctors, as they were called, certified her as insane. Bowel Litten's bidding. And he got, I, I fell down a massive rabbit hole last night reading about this. So he persuaded his, some of his cronies in the press at the Times not to report the, the, the story. But the Daily Telegraph could not be bought and basically led the campaign.
56:09 Speaker 04 That's a first.
56:10 Dominic Sandbrook? And these doctors had to admit that they were, they'd got it wrong. And that she was actually sane. And she was let out again.
56:18 Speaker 04 Yeah.
56:19 Dominic Sandbrook? And Matthew Sweetin, his excellent piece about The Woman in White, says, this clearly
56:25 Dominic Sandbrook? is, is an inspiration. And actually, Rosina, when she read The Woman in White, she said, oh, this is absolutely brilliant. Because Subversive Glide, like Edward Bowel Litten, is past his prime. He's balding. He's bad tempered. He's locked his wife in a lunatic asylum. And Rosina wrote to Collins and said, you know, while he was, the book was being serialized, and said, I'm loving this. I love this. I'll give you more details. And she said, the, the man you're writing about, your villain, quote, is alive and is constantly under my gaze. In fact, he's my husband.
56:59 Speaker 04 Brilliant. Which wife hasn't thought that at some point or another?
57:03 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, exactly. Well, so there's one more twist. And this is about Dickens. And Tabby, you found this, didn't you?
57:09 Speaker 04 I did. I did some digging.
57:11 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, Googling.
57:14 Speaker 04 I, I delved deep into the archives of public information.
57:18 Dominic Sandbrook? So tell us about Dickens.
57:19 Speaker 04 So obviously, Charles Dickens, kind of the greatest celebrity of Victorian period, very good friend of Wilkie Collins, as we have seen. And in 1857, Dickens is middle aged. He has been married to his wife, Catherine York. Kind of ultimate Victorian matriarch for about 21 years. And at this point then, he embarks upon an affair with an 18 year old actress called Ellen Turnan. It's kept secret from the public or as much as possible because he needs to maintain this kind of vision of himself as, you know, compassionate, respectable family man, but gossip about it is swirling in kind of literary circles. So finally, he estranges himself from Catherine.
57:59 Speaker 04 And this domestic upheaval inspired this trip that he and Wilkie Collins went on to Cumberland, which inspired large portions of the women in white, you know, the the train journey, the water heart right takes up there. That's the journey that they took. And he wrote, I want to escape from myself. My blackness is inconceivable, indescribable, my misery amazing.
58:19 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
58:20 Speaker 04 So there's one kind of side story in this that, you know, may have had a part to play in the book. So during this walking tour, well, they come across this hall on the outskirts of Maryport. And it was said to be haunted by a woman in a white dress. And they came across this kind of ghostly legend, and this was a year before Collins, you know, had his encounter with his.
58:38 Dominic Sandbrook? Yet another woman in white.
58:40 Speaker 04 Caroline Graves. Yeah. So I wonder if that kind of led to him exaggerating that encounter. But more importantly, eight years after Dickens died, his wife, his estranged wife Catherine confided to her neighbour, Edward Dutton Cook, that her husband had once tried to have her locked up as a mad woman, kind of in the vein of the stories that we've been telling. What's the evidence for this? Well, there was a letter written by the neighbour in question. And this was discovered a few years ago by this Dickens scholar, John Bowen. It was amongst this massive cache of letters found at Harvard. So in this letter, the neighbour says Catherine had borne her husband 10 children and had lost many of her good looks, was growing old. He even tried to shut her up in a lunatic asylum. Poor thing.
59:23 Speaker 04 But bad as the law is in regard to proof of insanity, he could not quite rest it to his purpose. So. According to this scholar Bowen, the plan was halted by the doctor who refused to confirm that Catherine was in fact insane. The doctor Bowen suggests was this guy, Thomas Harrington Tuke, who is the superintendent of Manor House asylum in Chiswick. Tuke was a friend of Dickens, but then they became estranged around this time. So it all kind of fits.
59:49 Dominic Sandbrook? So yeah, so Dickens has clearly taken inspiration from the stories that he and Collins have been discussing. And he sort of thinks, yeah, she's, she's had 10 kids, she's getting on a bit. Maybe I'll just get rid and lock her up.
1:00:01 Speaker 04 Just come a baggage.
1:00:02 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, I'll lock her up in a mental asylum. Do you think that's
1:00:05 Speaker 04 Shameful from Dickens, if so. Shameful.
1:00:07 Dominic Sandbrook? The thing is, we don't know. It's just based on a story that she's told her neighbour, who's then told it to a friend, I suppose.
1:00:14 Speaker 04 Exactly.
1:00:15 Dominic Sandbrook? But I suppose not necessarily impossible. So the irony of all this is that at the time when The Woman in White came out, that some of the critics said, gosh, it's so sensational, it is so shocking, it's so lurid, and this is debasing the literary tastes of the nation. But the fact is, it's just so, it's so deeply grounded in the realities and in the concerns of the day. The understandable outcry about these women, who are already pretty powerless compared with their husbands because of property laws at the time, and the way that the legal system works, being locked up against their will in asylums and being unable to get out. I mean, you can understand why people find that absolutely terrifying and haunting as a prospect, can't you? And I think there's an aspect to The Woman in White, which perhaps
1:00:59 Dominic Sandbrook? is easy to miss as you get caught up in the story, the fact that it's a crusading novel, that Collins wants things to change, and that running through it, this stuff about the powerlessness of women and the way that the legal system works against them and whatnot. I mean, that's very much there, I think.
1:01:15 Speaker 04 Yeah, it definitely is. Because it's essentially a case against the lunacy laws and the Married Women's Property Act, which essentially made women kind of civilly dead upon their marriage. You know, they lost all of their rights to their husband. And as you can see in the book, the legal machinery of Victorian society, it fails to protect Laura from the machinations of Sir Percival Glyte, her husband. So it kind of highlights the flaws within the law, the kind of ponderous, heavy nature of it, and how dependent it is on class and power.
1:01:50 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
1:01:50 Speaker 04 And the other interesting thing is, is that the book implies that true justice can only be served through kind of The gathering of private evidence and personal retribution. I mean, it's not vigilantes, but it's basically through building a case privately oneself. So in this, Walter and Marian, they bypass conventional channels. They try them at first, they try to contact lawyers, et cetera, but it doesn't work. So they conduct their own investigation using kind of amateur methods of detection, essentially.
1:02:20 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, they set themselves up as private detectives and as adventurers. And they sort of take the law into their own hands to some extent, without giving the game away. Neither Sir Percival nor Count Fosco are conventionally punished by the authorities or by the legal system. They are, you know, massive spoiler alert, but not, this won't be a surprise to anybody that the goodies kind of win. But they, they win by unconventional adventurous means, which is more exciting, I suppose, than it would be if they just won in the courts. But it suggests that the courts are not fit for purpose and that they don't protect women. And, you know, there's a sort of class imbalance that runs through the book, isn't there? The, the one reason that Sir Percival is able to get away with his, his plan
1:03:03 Dominic Sandbrook? is that various housekeepers and servants and maids and doctors and things, they defer to him because they think, you know, he's posh, he's to the man of born. Now, actually, as we will see, there is a sort of twist there.
1:03:15 Speaker 04 There is a twist.
1:03:16 Dominic Sandbrook? And this is interesting because novels of this kind were aimed at the middle class audience. Collins himself is middle class and the middle class characters tend to be sturdy and decent. And actually, when you meet the upper class characters, they're suspect and corrupt. Count Fosco and Sir Percival, aren't they?
1:03:32 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's definitely true. But I think one of the most striking elements of the book, it's not even kind of its portrayal of kind of class and justice. It's the way that Wilkie Collins handles the female characters. And this is an age when, you know, Victorians idealized the family unit, you know, the role of the wife and the mother. It's very, you know, divided. You know, historians often see this as a kind of a moral reaction to industrialisation. But you have very clearly defined domestic spheres. So men dominate kind of the public spheres of work and finance and politics. And then behind closed doors, you have the wife. And they're supposed to be kind of selfless, moderate, chaste, motherly, obedient, all of these things. You know, Laura is a very kind of classical Victorian woman in this sense.
1:04:17 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, completely.
1:04:18 Speaker 04 She is what was kind of known as the angel in the house at this time. You know, Countess Fosco is kind of broken to the will of her husband. She's nothing but kind of an obedient kind of zombie.
1:04:29 Dominic Sandbrook? She's a tool, isn't she? Yeah, she's a zombie. I mean, she is. She's vacant.
1:04:32 Speaker 04 Laura is punished for disobeying her husband's expectations. And, you know, you even see in the latter half of the novel, when Walter is working with the two sisters, Walter is the one that does the digging out in the world, whereas, you know, Marian stays at home and keeps house.
1:04:48 Dominic Sandbrook? I guess Collins reflects that in the portrait of the two principal female characters, the complexities of women's position and his own attitudes towards that, don't you think? So Laura is the idealised Victorian wife. She is pretty and she is compliant and she is, you know, good natured. There's no edge to her whatsoever. Would it be fair to say, Tabby, that she's really boring?
1:05:16 Speaker 04 Yeah, I thought it was kind of interesting. So the first description of her when Walter first, you know, encounters her and kind of struck by love. She's described as a fair, delicate girl in a pretty light dress, trifling with the leaves of a sketchbook, while she looks up from it with truthful, innocent blue eyes. So it's like, she's like a blank slate of a romantic heroine. Her hair is so faint and pale a brown. It's not flaxen, yet almost as light, not golden, yet almost as glossy. There's nothing kind of definitive or, you know, fleshy or stark about her. She's almost like the mirage of a woman. And then you compare that to the descriptions of Marian, who is in actual fact the star of this book. You know, we've said she's transgressive. She is a woman barely defined by her gender. She is constantly attributed with the virtues of a man.
1:06:01 Speaker 04 She becomes kind of the detective of the novel. She goes to these great lengths, brave lengths to save her sister, as we said, you know, lurking outside in the rain to eavesdrop, bribing a nurse to free Laura from the madhouse. And she is a remarkable, I was kept thinking this, she's a remarkable creation by Victorian man. And there's this just brilliant, I mean, it's cruel, but brilliant first description of her. So Walter walks into this drawing room or whatever and sees her from afar and struck by the beauty of her figure and her elegance and her grace, but she has her back to him. And the one thing to bear in mind, you know, as I read this, is that it is a very interesting, kind of colourful description. Contrast that with
1:06:45 Speaker 04 kind of the wateriness of Laura's description. "As I said to myself with a sense of surprise, which words fail me to express, the lady is ugly. The lady's complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a moustache. She had a large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw, prominent piercing resolute brown eyes, and thick, cold, black hair growing unusually low down on her forehead. And yet, her expression, bright, frank, and intelligent, appeared while she was silent to be altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of gentleness and pliability, blah, blah, blah. But the minute she speaks, she comes across as kind of beautiful and attractive. Her dark face lighting up with a smile and softening and growing womanly the
1:07:30 Speaker 04 moment she began to speak. So interesting, you know, it's so vibrant a description."
1:07:35 Dominic Sandbrook? But also, I mean, very ungallant. So Walter, she comes closer and he's like, oh no, the lady is ugly. And the business about the moustache and then she's got a very low brow with all this dark hair and whatnot. I mean, it is odd. I don't know what's going on there with Wilkie Collins. It's so unusual that somebody will create this heroine who is so intrepid, so daring.
1:08:01 Speaker 04 I think he's playing with genders. He's, you know, testing the limits of what a woman can be in literature at this time. You know, she's such a brilliant character. And I kept thinking when I was reading it, it's like, I kept thinking, you know, we only know what Walter tells us, but I think there are times when he's describing his interactions with the two sisters, he sort of gives himself away. It's almost like he's attracted to Marian.
1:08:21 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh.
1:08:22 Speaker 04 In spite of himself.
1:08:23 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, Marian is by far the more magnetic of the two female characters.
1:08:26 Speaker 04 And Count Fosco is obsessed with her. He thinks she's a remarkable person.
1:08:30 Dominic Sandbrook? Count Fosco is basically in love with her himself. I mean, he says multiple times what an amazing woman she is. And you're right. I mean, it's interesting. We only, we see her first, it's the male gaze, you know.
1:08:41 Speaker 04 Exactly.
1:08:41 Dominic Sandbrook? We see her through Walter's eyes. Walter sees her first purely in terms of.
1:08:46 Speaker 04 Physicality.
1:08:47 Dominic Sandbrook? Physicality, exactly. He's shocked and he basically writes her off when he sees the moustache. But then when she starts to speak, he says, oh, she is actually, you know, she's, she becomes womanly and whatnot.
1:08:58 Speaker 04 He allows her to like speak for herself as well. He allows himself to have his initial, you know, prejudice, you know, shaken and recast her as this kind of glorious, funny, brave woman.
1:09:11 Dominic Sandbrook? But the tragedy is that at the end of the book.
1:09:13 Speaker 04 Yeah, when her adventures are over.
1:09:15 Dominic Sandbrook? Her adventures are over and she's pushed back into the kind of domestic space and she's going to have to become a Victorian woman after all.
1:09:21 Speaker 04 And she says this remarkable thing for the time, or rather Wilkie Collins puts these remarkable words into her mouth. She says, no man under heaven deserves these sacrifices from us women. Men, they are the enemies of our innocence and our peace. They drag us away from our parents' love and our sisters' friendship. They take us body and soul to themselves and fasten our lives to theirs as they chain up a dog in his kennel. And she's talking there about how the minute that women are married, they kind of belong to their husbands, they lose their freedom. And I thought that, you know, that's an amazing thing to say for a book written by a man at this time.
1:09:53 Dominic Sandbrook? So let us give this a mark. We always like to mark using a different scale. Tabby, what is today's scale?
1:10:00 Speaker 04 Well, I had something else in mind, but Dominic, as the Count Fosco of this podcast, you insisted upon rating it out of fruit tarts.
1:10:08 Dominic Sandbrook? I thought white dresses was too obvious.
1:10:10 Speaker 04 So how many fruit tarts would you give it out of 10?
1:10:12 Dominic Sandbrook? I'm going to give it eight. And I would, I think in and of itself as a thriller, it's clearly a 10. It's a foundational work in the thriller adventure genre and the kind of mystery genre. And Collins invents the sensation novel with this book. He captures so many interesting things that are going on in Victorian England. So in that respect, it's a 10. But.
1:10:40 Dominic Sandbrook? That's all it is, I would say. So compared with some of the other books that we have done and that we are doing, I think it's perhaps intellectually and stylistically a little unambitious. I mean, I do know he does the stuff with the different narrators, but I think it's one of a book that does what it says on the tin. And if you were to give this to somebody who's really interested in fine writing, they might say, well, it's fine. You know, it's great. It's good fun. But is it any more than that? Also, the truth of the matter is that our hero and heroine, Walter and Laura, are a bit boring and that Marion is the star of the show. But it's a shame that the two characters that Collins
1:11:22 Dominic Sandbrook? holds up as the sort of the lovely romantic couple are quite as dull as they are. So that's why I'm deducting, knocking it back down to an eight. What about you, Tebby?
1:11:32 Speaker 04 I'm also going to give it an eight. I'm deducting two points for pretty much the same reasons as you, because I think that Laura's a bit of a drip.
1:11:39 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
1:11:39 Speaker 04 Walter's just a bit of an everyman. And there's this portion in the middle where the housekeeper's narrating the story. And I thought that kind of lagged a bit. But on the whole, it's just, it's just so much fun. It's great. Like, it's a pleasure to read. It's a real pleasure to read. It's often amusing. It's a genuine page turner. I was, I was thrilled and shocked by kind of each stage of the kind of discovery of what's going on underneath the surface. You're right. I don't think it kind of has the depth or kind of the pointedness. It's one of Dickens's books, or the skill and mastery. But it's, it's much more fun, I think.
1:12:16 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, great.
1:12:17 Speaker 04 But what do we have coming up?
1:12:18 Dominic Sandbrook? So next week, we are doing something much darker, actually. We are doing Toni Morrison's great book, Beloved. Then the week after that, we're doing another, you know, all time classic, really. Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, the great modernist book, the great book of the 1920s. A complete change of tone next. After that, Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games, which I've never read and
1:12:45 Speaker 04 Dominic has volunteered as tribute.
1:12:48 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, I'm looking forward to it because I've never read it. And I know some people generally aged about 10 think it's brilliant.
1:12:57 Dominic Sandbrook? We've got Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Dorian Gray. We've got P. G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Wustas, Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones, and Kenneth Graham, The Wind in the Willows. So that's loads of reading for people to get on with. And some of this is in response to your brilliant suggestions. So please keep the suggestions coming in.
1:13:19 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:13:20 Dominic Sandbrook? I know there's loads more. Loads of people have said they want The Leopard, or they want The Road, or all of these kinds of things. And I promise they will all come. So. All right, Tabby, I'll let you get off to reading Beloved. Bye bye.
1:13:33 Speaker 04 Bye.
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