13. The Woman In White: Victorians, Sensation, and Scandal

Summary

The Book Club – Episode 13: The Woman in White: Victorians, Sensation, and Scandal

Hosts: Dominic Sandbrook & Tabitha (“Tabby”) Syrett
Date: May 11, 2026

---

Overview: Exploring Victorian Thrills and Scandal

This episode of The Book Club dives into Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, its subversive thrills, and the real Victorian scandals beneath the surface. Dominic and Tabby unpick the layers of this “ultimate Victorian thriller,” a foundational work in the sensation and early detective fiction genres. They discuss the artful structure, vivid characters—especially the iconic Marian—and why the book was considered lurid, even dangerous, in its day. The show blends close reading, biography, and arresting stories from the 19th century, making Victorian England leap off the page.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Scene: Sensation and Suspense

• Dominic opens with a dramatic reading of the novel’s haunting first appearance of the Woman in White ([01:41]).
• The book is framed as “the ultimate Victorian thriller...the supreme example of what the Victorians called the sensation novel,” blending mistaken identity, madness, legal drama, and forbidden romance ([02:59]).

“Wilkie Collins uses multiple different narrators to unfold this mystery story of mistaken identity and all kinds of legal entanglements, female courage, madness...and forbidden romance.” – Dominic ([02:59])

2. Novel Structure & Multiple Narrators

• Tabby remarks on the story’s compelling case-file structure: testimonies, diary extracts, and letters with no single omniscient narrator, reflecting Collins’s legal training and immersing the reader as detective ([06:11]).
• The variety of perspectives “demands something of you as a reader” and makes the events more immediate and thrilling ([06:45]).

“There is no kind of omniscient narrator to ground us...it’s almost like you’re being presented a case...Collins himself actually trained as a lawyer. So you can see that in the way this is written.” – Tabby ([06:11])

3. The Main Characters: Virtue, Mystery, and Villainy

Walter Hartright

• Seen as an upstanding, even bland Victorian type—but with potential unreliability as narrator ([08:01]).

Marian Halcombe & Laura Fairlie

• Marian is “plain...swarthy...funny and very bright...almost becoming a detective” ([09:10]).
• Laura is “pretty, pale, angelic...but maybe not as interesting”; her wealth makes her the target of villainous plots ([09:10]).

Sir Percival Glyde & Count Fosco

• Percival is an obvious villain, masking “badness” by “pretending to be very polite and courteous” ([13:35]).
• Count Fosco is “one of the supreme Victorian villains...enormously fat...amusing, over-the-top, Italian, but malevolent, plotting,” characterized by his love of “fruit tarts and white mice” ([15:26], [15:33], [17:25]).

4. Major Plot Points (with Spoiler Warnings!)

• The Woman in White, Anne Catherick, serves as both symbol and active character, connected to the family’s past and present danger ([12:07]).
• Laura receives a mysterious warning not to marry Sir Percival, but because of duty (and parental wishes), she marries him anyway ([13:23]).
• Percival and Fosco’s plot: drug Laura, fake her death by swapping her with the dying Anne Catherick, and lock Laura in an asylum—intensifying the sense of women’s powerlessness in Victorian society ([19:02]).
• Marian’s resourcefulness saves Laura; Walter’s return and key graveyard scene deliver some of the novel’s most memorable moments ([20:30]), leading to justice by unconventional means.

“This is one of the great moments in English fiction...when Walter goes to the grave...he looks up and there’s these two veiled women...and one of them is her.” – Dominic ([20:34])

5. Victorian Scandal and Inspiration

Wilkie Collins: Life and Influences

• Collins’s unconventional, bohemian lifestyle (two mistresses, never married either), poor health, and laudanum addiction influenced both his writing style and themes ([21:28]–[26:04]).
• Charles Dickens’s friendship: key to Collins’s success and inspiration; both were fascinated by melodrama and social issues ([22:48], [23:44]).
• Collins’s fiction reflects a “rebuke to [Victorian] standards of the day” and often centers on secret lives and female agency ([27:58]).
• Real-life scandals about women wrongfully confined in asylums for inheritance or convenience are at the heart of The Woman in White ([44:44]–[51:07]); including the famous cases of Louisa Nottage and Rosina Bulwer Lytton.

The Sensation Novel and its Audience

• The “sensation” genre arose from Victorians’ appetite for shocks, gadgets, and tabloid-style journalism after changes in newspaper laws ([28:25], [29:40]).
• Serial publication encouraged cliffhangers and narrative tricks; The Woman in White was a phenomenon with adaptations, merchandise, and even inspired cat names ([33:41], [33:46]).

“Collins had an expression...this was taking place in the secret theater of home.” – Dominic ([36:04])

6. Feminist Undercurrents & Victorian Law

• The novel exposes failings of the Victorian legal system, especially relating to women’s property and “lunacy laws” ([61:25]).
• Laura’s disappearance into the asylum, dismissed and powerless, becomes a symbol of women’s legal invisibility; only Marian and Walter’s amateur detective work can save her ([62:30]).
• Marian Halcombe, described as unfeminine and “almost a man,” is the true hero, far eclipsing the passive Laura ([65:25]–[68:32]).

“She’s such a brilliant character...she is a remarkable creation by a Victorian man.” – Tabby ([65:25], [68:10])

• Collins gives Marian striking proto-feminist lines:

“No man under heaven deserves these sacrifices from us women...They drag us away from our parents’ love and our sister’s friendship. They take us body and soul to themselves, and fasten our lives to theirs as they chain up a dog in his kennel.” – Marian Halcombe, quoted by Tabby ([69:30])

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “The romanticy of their day.” – Tabby, on the book’s shocking popularity ([05:37], [05:39])
• “He’s just an absolute amoeba of a man.” – Dominic on Uncle Fairlie ([11:51])
• “He has a real thing for white mice, for birds, for parrots and for fruit tarts. So this makes him extremely malevolent.” – Tabby on Count Fosco ([17:25])
• Rosina Bulwer Lytton, inspiration for Laura’s asylum story, writes to Collins:
  • “The man you’re writing about, your villain, is alive and is constantly under my gaze. In fact, he’s my husband.” ([57:08])

---

Key Timestamps for Major Segments

• [01:41]-[02:57]: Dramatic reading of the iconic opening encounter with the Woman in White
• [06:11]-[07:18]: Discussion of structure, legal influences, and reader engagement
• [09:10]-[10:57]: Character portraits: Marian, Laura, Uncle Fairlie, villains
• [19:02]-[20:49]: Plot twist: identity swap, asylum, and Marian’s daring rescue
• [21:28]-[27:58]: Wilkie Collins’s life, laudanum addiction, and outsider status
• [44:44]-[51:07]: Real-life 19th-century cases influencing the plot
• [61:25]-[65:25]: Feminist critique, lunacy laws, and female agency
• [65:25]-[70:03]: Marian vs. Laura, gender subversion, and literary significance

---

Hosts’ Verdict

Rating:

• Dominic: 8 out of 10 fruit tarts—“Foundational...but not as ambitious or finely written as Dickens...Marian is the star, Walter and Laura are a bit dull.” ([70:22])
• Tabby: 8 out of 10 fruit tarts—deducted for “Laura being a drip...Walter’s everyman blandness” but calls it “a genuine page-turner...much more fun” than some literary classics ([71:41]).

---

Coming Up Next

• Toni Morrison’s Beloved
• Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway
• Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games
• Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray
• PG Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, and more! ([72:28])

---

Summary Takeaways

• The Woman in White remains gripping and fresh, mixing Gothic mystery with cutting social critique.
• Collins’s use of multiple narrators, scandalous plots drawn from real cases, and proto-feminist characters made the book both notorious and beloved.
• While the main romantic leads may seem insipid by modern standards, Marian Halcombe stands as a timeless, subversive heroine.
• The Victorian “sensation” craze blends entertainment with a keen reflection on injustice, especially for women—a conversation still resonant today.

---

Transcript

[Tabby]

I sold my car in Carvana last night. Well, that's cool. No, you don't understand.

[Dominic]

It went perfectly.

[Tabby]

Real offer down to the penny. They're picking it up tomorrow. Nothing went wrong. So what's the problem? That is the problem.

[Dominic]

Nothing in my life goes as smoothly. I'm waiting for the catch.

[Tabby]

Maybe there's no catch. That's exactly what a catch would want me to think. Wow.

[Dominic]

You need to relax.

[Tabby]

I need to knock on wood. Do we have wood?

[Dominic]

Is this table wood?

[Tabby]

I think it's laminate.

[Dominic]

Okay.

[Tabby]

Yeah, that's good. That's close enough. Car selling without a catch. Sell your car today on Carvana.

[Dominic]

Pick up.

[Tabby]

Fees may apply. This episode is brought to you by.

[Dominic]

Prime Obsession is in session. And this summer, Prime Originals have everything you want.

[Tabby]

Steamy romances, irresistible love stories.

[Dominic]

And the book to screen favorites you've already read twice off campus.

[Tabby]

Elle every year after the Love Hypothesis, Sterling Point and more. Slow burns, second chances, chemistry you can

[Dominic]

feel through the screen. Your next obsession is waiting. Watch only on Prime

[Tabby]

Girl. Winter is so last season. And now spring's got you looking at pictures of tank tops with hungry eyes. Your algorithm is feeding you cutoffs. You're thirsty for the sun on your shoulders. That perfect hang on the patio sundress. Those sandals you can wear all day and all night. And you've had enough of shopping from your couch. Done. Hoping it looks anything like the picture when you tear open that envelope. It's time for a little in person spring treat. It's time for a trip to Ross. Work your magic.

[Dominic]

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 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.

[Tabby]

Is that the road to London?

[Dominic]

So what a chilling scene that is. It's an unforgettable moment from Wilkie Gollins 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 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?

[Tabby]

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 will be describing in due course. But yeah, this time around I couldn't put it down. Basically, it's a total page turner.

[Dominic]

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. Yeah, 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. And you know, when you're reading it, you completely escape into his world.

[Tabby]

Our producer Nicole 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 at moments I thought so funny completely.

[Dominic]

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.

[Tabby]

The romanticy of their day.

[Dominic]

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 these nefarious schemes and whatnot. I mean, these are fascinating stories in and of themselves, actually.

[Tabby]

Definitely. But the way that the book 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.

[Dominic]

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 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.

[Tabby]

Yes.

[Dominic]

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 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

[Tabby]

third of the book, those that have absolutely no interest in reading it. Well, there's a lot here for you, too.

[Dominic]

Yeah, that's true. So we start, don't we, with Walter Hartright. 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?

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

Is there anything more than. Than that to him, do you think, Tabby?

[Tabby]

No. I mean, not especially. I think, you know, he's, as you say, he's decent. He's brave. 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.

[Dominic]

Yeah.

[Tabby]

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 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.

[Dominic]

Yes.

[Tabby]

Walter then travels the next day to Limmeridge House in Cumberland to become a teacher, a drawing teacher for these two young women. But, you know, this encounter with a woman in white stays with him. And there he meets the two ladies in question. This is Marian Holcomb and Laura Fairlie. And they are half sisters. They're very different. Marian 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, maybe not as interesting as her sister, but Laura, crucially, is very, very wealthy. She's an heiress, which Marian is not.

[Dominic]

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.

[Tabby]

Oh, I totally agree.

[Dominic]

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 Walters?

[Tabby]

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. Yeah, totally chilling.

[Dominic]

It is brilliant. So, anyway, he's gone off to Cumberland to teach these two half sisters. They also have a terrible uncle, don't they? Yeah, called Mr. Fairley.

[Tabby]

Frederick Fairlie, who I find immensely entertaining, I have to say.

[Dominic]

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. And he's incredibly selfish, narcissistic. You know, you have to whisper when you are with him because he's talking. Normal volume is bad for his nerves.

[Tabby]

Yeah, he's quite like Mrs. Bennet from Pride and Prejudice. You know, he's always banging on about her nerves. But actually, Charles Dance plays him in the BBC TV adaptation of this book. Very, very well.

[Dominic]

Charles Dance plays him. I can't imagine that.

[Tabby]

Yeah, very well.

[Dominic]

He's just an absolute amoeba of a man. He's got no backbone whatsoever.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

And then, so you would think, well, what has the woman in white got to do with all these characters?

[Tabby]

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.

[Dominic]

So she is a character called Anne Catherick, who basically, as a little girl, it turns out she had been brought to Limmeridge and she knew Laura and Marian's mother. So she was connected with the family, wasn't she?

[Tabby]

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.

[Dominic]

Right.

[Tabby]

Anne Catherick. 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 Catherick, warning her not to marry the man that she has been engaged to for a long time. And this is Sir Percival Glyde. And it had been the dying wish of her father that she marry him, even though he's kind of twice her age. Yes. 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 Hartright inevitably have started to develop feelings for each other. So upon discovering that she's engaged, he leaves.

[Dominic]

Walter is so decent. He goes. Well, he goes to Honduras.

[Tabby]

That is very Victorian somehow.

[Dominic]

It is. He does the decent thing. He goes away because he knows she's engaged to this aristocrat, Sir Percival Glyde.

[Tabby]

If you love her, let her go.

[Dominic]

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.

[Tabby]

Yeah. And she makes a big deal about the fact that he's kind of. His good looks have gone to seed, you know, and that's, you know, something that we should all be wary of.

[Dominic]

Yeah. The thing that gives him away, surely, is the fact that he's losing his hair.

[Tabby]

Is that not the thing?

[Dominic]

Because that's pointed out again and again. I found that a little bit.

[Tabby]

I've always found you to be very suspect, Dominic. Thank you.

[Dominic]

Thanks, Tabby. I'm glad you've gone. I'm glad you've gone there.

[Tabby]

Here we have a bad seed.

[Dominic]

Anyway, yeah.

[Tabby]

Finally, eventually, despite everyone's misgivings, Laura does marry Sir Percival Glyde. And they go on this honeymoon and then they come back and they move into Sir Percival Glyde'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 Sir Percival Glyde, 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.

[Dominic]

He's very camp. He's one of the supreme Victorian villains. And Count Fosco, he's an amusing villain, though.

[Tabby]

He's brilliant.

[Dominic]

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 realize quite quickly that he is a malevolent and kind of calculating customer, and he is basically manipulating Ser Percival Glydd so that they're in cahoots, these two characters.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

And you can tell quite early on, I think you worry for Laura and her fortune and indeed her sister Marian.

[Tabby]

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 just. At one point, Sir Percival 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 post bag 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.

[Dominic]

Yes, exactly. There's a suffocating atmosphere. The two Sisters realize there's nothing they can do. They are. They are basically the mercy of these two guys. So Percival, who's drinking more and more and clearly has run out of money and is basically. It becomes very, very obvious that he has 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, though, as he eats another fruit tart. He is plotting your downfall.

[Tabby]

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. Cause they know that he's got some real brains behind that sort of florid, plump face.

[Dominic]

Exactly.

[Tabby]

Then we have the reappearance of the woman in white, because Anne Catherick 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.

[Dominic]

I mean, let's not give that away because that's, you know, when you're reading the book, you want to find out what is Sir Percival's secret that could destroy him and can these two young women find it and use it against them?

[Tabby]

But there is another dark secret, isn't there?

[Dominic]

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, Marion, 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.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

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 really, really sinister scheme against Laura. Aren't they?

[Tabby]

Huge spoiler alert here. Yeah. So what they do is they recapture Anne Catherick, 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 Catherick's. So they have said that Laura has died, Lady Glyde has died. They put Anne Catherick 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 Catherick.

[Dominic]

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 Glider, she now is the sort of warders say, no, you're not, you're Anne Catherine. You've gone mad. And she can't get out. There's no way she can get out. Well, or. Well, or is that. Or is that because Marion is so intrepid that basically Marion is able to rescue Laura, isn't she? She's able to go to the asylum and bribe. She bribes one of the.

[Tabby]

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.

[Dominic]

Oh, what a great scene this is.

[Tabby]

Sees the two sisters veiled.

[Dominic]

Amazing scene.

[Tabby]

And it's like, oh, my God, she's alive.

[Dominic]

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.

[Tabby]

And they kind of team up to try to bring down Count Fosco and Sir Percival Glyde by discovering and exposing his secret, which we will not be revealing, but we will be revealing some other crucial information after the break.

[Dominic]

We will. So obviously this is a. It's 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. Yes, Wilkie Collins. Tell us a little bit about Wilkie Collins.

[Tabby]

Wilkie Collins is born in Marylebone in London on 8 January, 1820. 4. 4. He's the eldest son of the eminent landscape artist William Collins, who actually served as partially the inspiration for Walter Hartright in the book. He's pulled out of school as a boy and they go traveling 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 Nickleby. 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, a power of which, but for him I might never have been aware.

[Dominic]

No way. That's a good story.

[Tabby]

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 5 foot 6 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 traveling abroad, which he loved.

[Dominic]

He leaves school, he is apprenticed to a tea merchant. That doesn't really work out. He starts writing, he. He trains as a barrister, but he never really practices 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. 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.

[Tabby]

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.

[Dominic]

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?

[Tabby]

No. What's an electric bath?

[Dominic]

So an electric bath sounds lovely. No, it's bonkers. Yeah. You'd sit under a machine that basically zapped you with static electricity, so. So your hair would stand up on end.

[Tabby]

I bet I'd come out of it glowing.

[Dominic]

Well, apparently Benjamin Franklin was a big believer in this good looking man. 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 hypnotized. 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, his 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 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. Oh, my God. That's what happens if you take too much laudanum. A surgeon told what a dinner once told Wilhee. Collins said, you're taking so much laudanum that basically you're taking enough laudanum every day to kill everybody at this table.

[Tabby]

Oh, God.

[Dominic]

Because basically he developed a resistance to it.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

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.

[Tabby]

It definitely does.

[Dominic]

And then the other thing is his personal life. So tell us about his personal life because I know you know about this.

[Tabby]

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. He. She claimed that she was the daughter of a gentleman and that her husband had been a gentleman. But in truth, her. Her father was a carpenter from Gloucestershire and her husband was a shorthand writer from a family of stonemasons. 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 onto 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 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. Then the second woman was called Martha Rudd. They met when he was 40 and she was 19. 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 Mr. And Mrs. William Dawson. And that's the name that their three children inherited. So you can see from this Wilkie Collins is 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 the kind of hard working gentleman. And I think you can see that in the woman in White as well.

[Dominic]

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 1850s and 1860s. And as you say, Tabby, this is the high point of the. The idealized, patriarchal Victorian family, set in

[Tabby]

part by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

[Dominic]

Yeah, of course. And the idea that the, you know, Laura, Laura Fairlie, the heroine of the book, is your classic idealized Victorian maiden. She's beautiful, she's polite, dutiful, obedient, yes, exactly. But Marian, in creating Marian, he's created a character that is rebellious, she's transgressive. Yeah, yeah, transgressive, exactly. Now, that. That's not the only interesting thing about the culture at 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, and you would get a kind of thrill from finding that you'd been deceived. Kind of illusions, almost.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

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 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, 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 and uncertainty. 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.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

There's usually a narrator who is you sort of associate with the author, and the narrator is omniscient. The narrator knows everything and you are safe in the narrator's hands.

[Tabby]

Giving you a hint about how to think about the characters. A little bit of a clue.

[Dominic]

Yes, completely.

[Tabby]

You don't get that in this.

[Dominic]

No. You don't know whether to trust anything that the characters are telling you. Sometimes the characters are telling you things that are downright wrong. So when Frederick Fairlie, 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 drugs 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're mediating it all, so you're. It's as though it's happening to you in real time. 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 Romantasy. Last week we did A Court of Thorns and Roses. Didn't mean 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. But people thought that about this fiction.

[Tabby]

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, bit hefty, maybe a bit unwieldy from the outside, maybe a bit intimidating at the time this was that. It's so interesting.

[Dominic]

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.

[Tabby]

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.

[Dominic]

So there's merch, isn't there? There's women in wall.

[Tabby]

Yeah, great.

[Dominic]

Merchant perfume cloaks, bonnet. Would you wear a woman white bonnet?

[Tabby]

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.

[Dominic]

Where did you recently reveal that you named one of your pets?

[Tabby]

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 Pekala from the Northern Knights.

[Dominic]

Very literally. Menagerie.

[Tabby]

Not one inch of that insisted upon itself.

[Dominic]

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. 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, like, 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 and he puts it in a world where people are having cakes and they're going on trains.

[Tabby]

He situates it in a drawing room as well.

[Dominic]

Yes.

[Tabby]

Domestic settings. A bit like we said of Agatha Christie when we were doing our Sherlock Holmes episode.

[Dominic]

Yes, I think that's a good. I think that's actually a very good comparison. That they're people who are. 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.

[Tabby]

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 asylum.

[Dominic]

Exactly. And Collins had an express, a lovely expression. He said this was taking place in the secret theater of home.

[Tabby]

Brilliant.

[Dominic]

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 Bradden who wrote a book called Lady Audley's Secret, one of the best selling 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 he wrote in the 1860s was the Moonstone, 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.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

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 1889. Bizarre story, actually. He was in a cab accident. He was thrown out of a cab, injured, and then he got bronchitis and then he had a stroke and then he died at the age of 65. 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.

[Tabby]

Yeah, that was the end of Wilkie Collins. It is really sad, actually. I like the thought that he had sort of quite a colorful, exuberant life

[Dominic]

while it lasted with his two mistresses.

[Tabby]

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 the book reveals about the insanity fever, haunting 19th century imaginations, the sex and violence beneath the surface. But also there are real life inspirations behind the Woman in White. There are real cases that inspired the story and we will be delving into those after the break.

[Dominic]

This episode is brought to you by Attio, the aicrm. Gary here from Goal Hangers. The rest is football. Football moves quickly now. Teams have more data than ever, but the real skill is knowing what actually matters. And it's exactly the same in business. The problem is work gets scattered across platforms. The info is there, but but with so much noise, it's easy to drop the ball. That's why Attio is useful. It's an AICRM designed for how teams actually operate today, fast and in sync. By connecting your tools, you get a complete picture of your business. So while others are scrambling for answers, you just ask Attio what you want to know and you get to the right answer faster. When everything's moving quickly, that sort of clarity matters. Ask more from your CRM. Ask Attio. Try Attio for free at a T-T-I-O.com goalhanger hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Goal Hangers.

[Tabby]

The rest is science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research uk.

[Dominic]

We often think of beating cancer as treatment, but imagine stopping it before it begins. After years of work, Cancer Research UK scientists are launching a clinical trial of lungvax, the first vaccine designed to prevent lung cancer.

[Tabby]

It builds on Tracer X, the world's

[Dominic]

largest cancer evolution study, which tracked lung cancer cells over many years to uncover

[Tabby]

the disease's earliest warning signs. Lungvax is designed to train the immune system to spot these signs early on, destroying faulty cells before cancer develops.

[Dominic]

So it's not treatment, but preventative, with

[Tabby]

the potential to stop lung cancer before it starts. The first stage of the trial starts this year.

[Dominic]

Focusing on people at higher risk, it shows what long term research makes possible. For more information about Cancer Research uk, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org thereest issac did you know?

[Tabby]

About 1 in 3 people with plaque psoriasis may also develop psoriatic arthritis, which causes children, joint pain, stiffness and swelling. Does this sound like you listen to what it sounds like to be a million miles away? Trimfya gusoquimab, taken by injection, is a prescription medicine for adults with moderate to severe plaque psoriasis who may benefit from taking injections or pills or phototherapy. And for adults with active psoriatic arthritis, serious allergic reactions and increased risk of infections and liver problems may occur before treatment. Your doctor should check you for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu like symptoms or if you need a vaccine, imagine being a million miles away. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about Tremphya. Tap this ad to learn more about Tremphaya, including, including important safety information.

[Dominic]

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, we know who this is. We know that the woman in white is this woman, Anne Catherick, 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 women in white, as it were. Yeah, 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.

[Tabby]

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 Hartright's encounter, first encounter with Anne Catherick. 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 Millay'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 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 Millay is said to have said, what a lovely woman. Of course he did, yeah, 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.

[Dominic]

And that's how his relationship with Caroline started.

[Tabby]

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 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.

[Dominic]

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.

[Tabby]

I. I think that's not a controversial opinion.

[Dominic]

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.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

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 that Collins had bought at a bookstall in Paris in 1856. And it was called the Recoil des Causes Celebr by Maurice Meijon. And Maurice Meijon 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.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

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 Roque Lusignan de Champignel, who was the Marquise de Duo.

[Tabby]

Masterful.

[Dominic]

And she lived. I'm just showing off.

[Tabby]

I know.

[Dominic]

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 poison 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 Saltpetriere mental asylum on the outskirts of Paris. 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 Blainville, we have been told that you're mad. You think you're the Marquis, but you're not. She eventually managed to get out the Marquise de Duo and her brother had her arrested as an imposter. I mean, that's. That's extraordinary. He's really doubling down.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

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. Or her own identity.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

And in this account, Mejon mentioned that when she was locked up in the asylum, she was wearing a white dress. So clearly, since we know that Colin's 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 Catherick 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?

[Tabby]

Yeah. And this fourth possibility is, I think, probably one of the most famous because it was very famous in England at the time.

[Dominic]

Yeah.

[Tabby]

And this one. This one is very creepy, actually. So this is a woman called Louisa Nottage and she was a wealthy woman from Essex. And she and her four sisters became the followers of Reverend Henry James Prince, who was 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, £6,000, which today would be about 6 to 10 million pounds. 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.

[Dominic]

I mean, are they the baddest there or are they the good?

[Tabby]

You know, I don't know. When I first read this, I was like, oh no, no, no, the family are the baddest. You should never ever do that. But I think it's a lose. Lose on all sides, I'd say, because

[Dominic]

she's about to give away her fortune to a guy who's clearly a bad man, a cult leader.

[Tabby]

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.

[Dominic]

On the dough, on the money, to be honest. I think if a relative of mine was going to give all our family's money to a. A man who set up. Who set up something called the Abode of Love, I would undoubtedly, I would have doubtedly have them locked up for insanity.

[Tabby]

The title alone would have you taking drastic action.

[Dominic]

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?

[Tabby]

Yeah, very nasty. But she managed to escape in January 1848. She was then recaptured. So very un. Catherick. 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 without proper examinations, without more than one person kind of decreeing them insane.

[Dominic]

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.

[Tabby]

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 a moral condition. Yeah. As a moral condition or like a haunting or a possession.

[Dominic]

Yes, exactly. So that. Well, the mid 19th century is the time when, you know, people are fascinated by medicine. They're fat, 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.

[Tabby]

He was personally interested in it.

[Dominic]

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 Nottage trial. And actually the Woman in white is dedicated to this guy.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

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 called 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?

[Tabby]

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 sea.

[Dominic]

Right.

[Tabby]

You know, they were, you. It was, it was kind of used to silence, disobedience, disobedient wives. I suspect that this too has been slightly mythologized.

[Dominic]

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.

[Tabby]

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 Lytton, 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 Lytton, 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.

[Dominic]

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.

[Tabby]

Yeah, he takes her children away from her, which I think would enrage any woman.

[Dominic]

Yes. And she wrote an. She wrote a novel, didn't she? Caricaturing her own husband called Cheveley, or the man of Honour.

[Tabby]

I admire that.

[Dominic]

20 years or so go by and Bulwer Lytton 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.

[Tabby]

You could so see this happening to Boris Johnson, couldn't you?

[Dominic]

You could. Who loudly denounces him? You know, you're a. You're a rake.

[Tabby]

You're a what?

[Dominic]

A rake. What do you think I was saying?

[Tabby]

I don't know. You said you're a c. Oh, right.

[Dominic]

Well, she probably thought that. Yeah, 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 called, certified her as insane bow Williton's bidding. And he got. 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 story, but the Daily Telegraph could not be bought and basically led the campaign.

[Tabby]

That's the first.

[Dominic]

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.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

And Matthew Sweet, in his excellent piece about the woman in white, says this clearly Is, is an inspiration actually Rosina, when she read the Woman in White she said oh this is absolutely brilliant because Sir Percival Glide like Edward Bullitton is past his prime. He's balding, his bad tempered, he's locked his wife in lunatic asylum. And Rosina wrote to Collins and said 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 man you're writing about, your villain quote is alive and is constantly under my gaze. In fact he's my husband.

[Tabby]

Brilliant. Which wife hasn't thought that at some point or another?

[Dominic]

Yeah, exactly. Well, so there's one more twist and this is about. And Tabby, you found this, didn't you?

[Tabby]

I did, I did some digging.

[Dominic]

Well Googling I think it's a technical term.

[Tabby]

I delve deep into the archives of public information.

[Dominic]

So tell us about Dickens.

[Tabby]

So obviously Charles Dickens, kind of the greatest celebrity of the 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, your 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 Ternan. 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, a compassionate, respectable family man. But gossip about it is swirling in kind of literary circles. So finally he estranges himself from Catherine 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 train journey the Walter Hartright 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.

[Dominic]

Right.

[Tabby]

So there's one kind of side story in this that 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, 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 yet another woman in white, 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 in amongst this massive cache of letters found at Harvard. So in this letter, the neighbor 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. 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.

[Dominic]

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 just had 10 kids, she's getting on a bit. Maybe I'll just get rid and come a baggage. Yeah, I'll lock her up in a mental assignment.

[Tabby]

Do you think that's shameful from Dickens? If so shameful.

[Dominic]

The thing is, we don't know. It's just based on a story that she's told her neighbor, who's then told it to a friend, I suppose.

[Tabby]

Exactly.

[Dominic]

But I suppose not necessarily impossible. So the irony of all this is that at the time when the Woman in White came out, 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 it's 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.

[Tabby]

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 Glyde, 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. 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, etc. But it doesn't work. So they conduct their own investigation using kind of amateur methods of detection essentially, yes.

[Dominic]

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 they, 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 that the one reason that Sir Percival is able to get away with his, his plan 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 are born. Now actually, as we will see, there is a sort of twist there.

[Tabby]

There is a twist.

[Dominic]

This is interesting because novels of this kind were aimed at a 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?

[Tabby]

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 idealize 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 industrialization, 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.

[Dominic]

Yes, completely.

[Tabby]

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.

[Dominic]

She's a tool, isn't she? Yeah, she's a zombie. Yeah, she is. She's. She's vacant.

[Tabby]

Laura is. Is punished for disobeying her, 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. And keeps house.

[Dominic]

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 idealized 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?

[Tabby]

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. 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. From the madhouse. She. And she is a remarkable. I was kept thinking this. She's a remarkable creation by Victorian Mann. 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 colorful description. Contrast that with 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, coal 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 moment she began to speak. So interesting, you know, it's so vibrant

[Dominic]

a description, 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 I think, daring.

[Tabby]

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. Yeah, you know, she's such a brilliant character. And I. 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 that he sort of gives himself away. It's almost like he's attracted to Marion.

[Dominic]

Oh.

[Tabby]

In spite of himself.

[Dominic]

Yes. Marian is by far the more magnetic of the two female characters.

[Tabby]

And Count Fosco's obsessed with her. He thinks she's a remarkable person.

[Dominic]

Count Fosco is basically in love with her himself. I mean, he says multiple times what an amazing woman she is. And. Yeah, right. I mean, it's interesting. We only. We see her first. It's the male gaze, you know.

[Tabby]

Exactly.

[Dominic]

We see her through Walter's eyes. Walter sees her first purely in terms of physicality. 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. She becomes womanly and whatnot.

[Tabby]

He allows her to, like, see, speak for herself as well. He allows himself to have his initial, you know, prejudice, you know, shaken and recasts her as this kind of glorious, funny, brave woman.

[Dominic]

Yeah, but the tragedy is that the end of the book.

[Tabby]

Yeah. When her adventures are over, her adventures

[Dominic]

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.

[Tabby]

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 sister's 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 the this time.

[Dominic]

So let us give this a mark. We always like to mark using a different scale. Tabby, what is today's scale?

[Tabby]

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.

[Dominic]

I thought white dresses was too obvious.

[Tabby]

So how many fruit tarts would you give it out of ten?

[Dominic]

I'm gonna 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 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 kind 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 Marian is the star of the show. But it's a shame that the two characters that Collins 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, Tabby?

[Tabby]

I'm also going to give it an 8. I'm deducting 2 points for pretty much the same reasons as you, because I think that Laura is a bit of a drip, 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 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. That's one of Dickens's books, all the skill and mastery. But it's. It's much more fun, I think. Yeah, but what do we have coming up?

[Dominic]

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 Dominic

[Tabby]

has volunteered as tribute.

[Dominic]

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. We've got Oscar Wilde, the Portrait of Dorian Gray, we've got PG Wodehouse, the Code of the Worcesters, 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. Yeah, 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 want all come. So all right, Tabby, I'll let you get off to reading. Beloved Bye bye Bye.

[Tabby]

Your next chapter in healthcare starts at Carrington College's School of Nursing in Portland. Join us for our open house on Tuesday, January 13th from port to 7pm you'll tour our campus, see live demos, meet instructors and learn about our Associate Degree in Nursing program that prepares you to become a registered nurse. Take the first step toward your nursing career. Save your spot now at Carrington Edu Events. For information on program outcomes, visit carrington. Edu Sci.

[Dominic]

There's a new way to sweetgreen Meet

[Tabby]

Wraps Handheld, hearty and made for life on the move.

[Dominic]

With bold, chef crafted flavors, fresh ingredients

[Tabby]

and over 40 grams of protein, they're

[Dominic]

built to satisfy without slowing you down. Try wraps today in the app [e-mail]

[Tabby]

available at all participating locations.