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The Long Arm of Coincidence

Can you resist a Victorian novel featuring a blind heroine and identical twins, rivals for her love – one of whom turns dark blue in the course of the novel? If not, read no further, but rush off and buy Poor Miss Finch. For readers who have not yet discovered this novel, I shall try not to give too much away. Those of us who love Victorian fiction do so because it panders to our narrative greed. Résumés spoil the appetite.

Wilkie Collins, of course, serves up some very highly spiced tales; and the first thing to admit about Poor Miss Finch is that it is deeply curious. This, of course, is not unusual in Collins’s fiction. His exuberant imagination throws up some pretty odd combinations of protagonists (deaf-mute heroine and a man who has been scalped by Indians in Hide and Seek; a prostitute with a webbed left foot and a Christian Socialist from an American cult in The Fallen Leaves, among many others); and he regularly stretches the long arm of coincidence to the point of dislocation.

There are readers – I confess I am one – who positively enjoy the oddities, even the far-fetched sillinesses of Victorian sensationalist fiction. They will not be disappointed. As if a blind heroine with a pathological fear of dark colours and a dark blue suitor were not enough, the first chapters are crammed with lurid incident. The more extrovert twin, Nugent, has, when the story starts, already dramatically saved his more introverted brother Oscar from the gallows (‘Good God!’ I cried, ‘You are the man who was tried for murder last month, and who was all but hanged on the false testimony of a clock!’); there rapidly follows violent robbery, and a horrid message ‘traced on the back of the child’s frock, with a finger dipped in blood – HELP’. All this even before one of the brothers turns irre

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Can you resist a Victorian novel featuring a blind heroine and identical twins, rivals for her love – one of whom turns dark blue in the course of the novel? If not, read no further, but rush off and buy Poor Miss Finch. For readers who have not yet discovered this novel, I shall try not to give too much away. Those of us who love Victorian fiction do so because it panders to our narrative greed. Résumés spoil the appetite.

Wilkie Collins, of course, serves up some very highly spiced tales; and the first thing to admit about Poor Miss Finch is that it is deeply curious. This, of course, is not unusual in Collins’s fiction. His exuberant imagination throws up some pretty odd combinations of protagonists (deaf-mute heroine and a man who has been scalped by Indians in Hide and Seek; a prostitute with a webbed left foot and a Christian Socialist from an American cult in The Fallen Leaves, among many others); and he regularly stretches the long arm of coincidence to the point of dislocation. There are readers – I confess I am one – who positively enjoy the oddities, even the far-fetched sillinesses of Victorian sensationalist fiction. They will not be disappointed. As if a blind heroine with a pathological fear of dark colours and a dark blue suitor were not enough, the first chapters are crammed with lurid incident. The more extrovert twin, Nugent, has, when the story starts, already dramatically saved his more introverted brother Oscar from the gallows (‘Good God!’ I cried, ‘You are the man who was tried for murder last month, and who was all but hanged on the false testimony of a clock!’); there rapidly follows violent robbery, and a horrid message ‘traced on the back of the child’s frock, with a finger dipped in blood – HELP’. All this even before one of the brothers turns irrevocably blue. (I shall not reveal which, how or why, though I cannot resist hinting darkly that Flaubert was lucky not to suffer the same fate.) Yet Wilkie Collins is not merely sensationalist. Poor Miss Finch is an excellent example of the cross-over genre that is his speciality, written, apparently in tearing high spirits, in the voice of one of his most enjoyably unreliable narrators. Madame Pratolungo, the French widow of a South American revolutionary, takes a job as companion to the young blind woman, Lucilla, the eponymous ‘poor Miss Finch’. Frenchwomen who are employees in positions of trust to vulnerable young women are seldom heroines in Victorian sensationalist fiction. French ladies’ maids and French governesses are apt to be passionate and perfidious. If their eyes flash, it is often with murderous jealousy; and their hair is not reliably their own. But Collins joyously twists his readers’ preconceptions. Madame Pratolungo is in almost every way stereotypical (‘my excitable French blood was in a fever’). She declares herself to be ‘volatile’ and ‘irreverent’, and archly refuses to divulge her age; but it is she who knowingly embraces and glorifies the stereotype. She is as boastful, comic and supremely loyal as a female Brigadier Gerard; and throughout the infinite vicissitudes ofa highly Victorian plot, she remains selflessly devoted to Lucilla Finch. With her much-vaunted ‘excellent spirits’ and good digestion, she makes a first-rate companion. Madame Pratolungo is an admirable addition to the gallery of strong-minded women who throng the pages of Wilkie Collins’s fiction. She is efficient and courageous: it is she who musters the household to respond to that lurid, blood-scrawled message, while Lucilla’s father, the venial and pusillanimous Reverend Finch, hangs back. She is also quick-witted. This provokes some of the creakier moments in the plot, since Collins has laboriously to contrive her absence at crucial moments. But clever people are often mistaken. Madame Pratolungo is not necessarily right in her estimation of men. She adores the memory of her husband, the revolutionary Dr Pratolungo, though he evidently exploited her ruthlessly. It is through Madame Pratolungo’s lively but prejudiced eyes that we view the central drama between the blind young heiress and her twin suitors, which is not so much a Comedy as a Comic Melodrama of Errors. At the beginning of the novel, Lucilla, who has been blind since infancy, is living in the depths of Sussex. Her mother has died; her weak, self-important father has re-married and fathered fourteen more children (the second Mrs Finch is permanently breast-feeding, ‘never completely dressed, never completely dry; always with a baby in one hand and a novel in the other’.) The Rectory is sub-divided; and the Rector lets part of it to his eldest daughter, who has inherited money from her mother’s family. Lucilla, who has nothing in common with her slovenly stepmother, lives as independent a life as possible; but rural isolation intensifies the loneliness of her blindness. She is ready to fall in love with the first man she meets. She falls for the voice of Oscar Dubourg; and ‘it was part of her desolate liberty to be free to dwell unremittingly on the ideal creature of her own dream’. One cannot be sentimentally sure that this first fancy will prove a wise one. Certainly Madame Pratolungo has her doubts. Oscar is not to her taste at all. He is ‘too effeminate’, his complexion too ‘creamy’: her own beloved husband, she remembers, with lip-smacking indelicacy, was ‘brown all over’. When Oscar’s twin brother, Nugent, arrives on the scene, he is physically identical to Oscar, and even Lucilla cannot tell their voices apart; but he is as self-confident as his brother is diffident. He is a dilettante artist who believes in his own genius. Twins and doubles are a staple of Gothic fiction (Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher even boasts ‘identical’ twins of different sexes, a phenomenon unknown in nature). As a hormonally fraught mother of two new-born babies, I was once sent a book about twins in literature to review. This was far from reassuring, since in fiction they regularly turn out to be fratricidal or incestuous  (When they were 10, my twins liked to wear T-shirts proclaiming ‘I can’t remember if I am the good twin or the evil one.’) Collins however eschews simple Gothic dichotomies: neither Oscar nor Nugent are simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The introvert and the extrovert each have moral weaknesses, yet both are capable of generous self-sacrifice. In this novel, however, the twins are chiefly a plot device. Collins’s serious interests centre upon his heroine. He boasts, in his Preface, that Lucilla is the first blind girl in fiction who is not idealized or sentimentalized: he is ‘exhibiting blindness as it really is’. And his central thesis about blindness is remarkably modern. He does not subscribe to the pious Victorian hope that suffering ennobles the character. What he does, more radically, is to suggest that some forms of ‘bodily affliction’ should not be thought of as a disability at all: indeed, ‘it is even possible for bodily affliction itself to take its place among the ingredients of happiness’. Lucilla Finch is, as the modern pieties have it, ‘differently abled’. ‘Don’t forget’, says Collins, ‘that your conditions of happiness need not necessarily be her conditions also.’ Her blindness has compensations. Her sense of touch has become exquisite – she can distinguish the twin she loves by a ‘delicious tingle’ on contact. (The sighted characters can tell them apart only because one is now dark blue.) Being fingered by a pretty girl is of course also thrilling for any man: Collins has to argue for the essential purity of his heroine. As Madame Pratolungo observes, ‘modesty’ is a social construct, ‘essentially the growth of our own consciousness of the eyes of others judging us’, so that ‘blindness is never bashful’. Lucilla is liberated by her loss of sight. But ‘the fearless and primitive innocence of a child’ is a vulnerable freedom, of course, open to misinterpretation. Victorian critics disliked Lucilla. The critic of the Spectator found her ‘unspiritual’; certainly, she is, as he complained, self-willed and lacking in self-restraint. But Collins is not trying to show a character conventionally purified by ‘trials’. Lucilla herself feels no loss, and nothing wanting in her life, except a lover. She is perfectly well-adapted. Nugent introduces her to an oculist, Herr Grosse – a huge, gluttonous caricature of a German, whose thick accent mysteriously infects even his written English. After an operation, Lucilla regains her sight, slowly. Collins doubtless underestimated the extent to which her visual cortex would have been irreparably impaired, since she lost her sight when her brain was still developing. Still, he gives a remarkable depiction of the bewildering and disorientating difficulties inherent in learning to see. Lucilla is distressed by the degree of agnosia she suffers: presented with Molyneux’s Problem, she cannot guess which objects are round and which square by sight, though she knows instantly by touch. Distances and perspectives perplex and frustrate her. Collins, as even the hostile critic in the Spectator admitted, offers a superb exploration of ‘the optic psychology of blindness’. This is modern territory, indeed: one thinks of Oliver Sacks’s The Mind’s Eye, or the story ‘Harmony’, in Julian Barnes’s collection Pulse. Collins was there first. So, if you want a novel which is huge fun, but which is also a serious investigation into the social, physiological and psychological effects of blindness, and offers a fascinating insight into Victorian medicine, Poor Miss Finch is the book for you.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 31 © Caroline Moore 2011


About the contributor

Caroline Moore was the first female Fellow of Peterhouse, but left in 1990 after giving birth to twins (non-identical insomniacs), and became a book-reviewer. She is married to the journalist Charles Moore.

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