Ideas - Wilkie Collins: A true detective of the human mind

Episode Date: April 23, 2024

Considered one of the first writers of mysteries and the father of detective fiction, Wilkie Collins used the genres to investigate the rapidly changing world around him. UBC Journalism professor Kamal Al-Solaylee explores his work and its enduring power to make us look twice at the world we think we know.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad.

The heat had been painfully oppressive all day, and it was now a close and sultry night. The moon was full and broad in the dark blue starless sky. 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. The road to Finchley, the road to West End, and the road back to London. A scene from Wilkie Collins' classic mystery, The Woman in White, published in 1860. A young man named Walter Hartwright is about to meet a stranger who will change the course of his life.

That moment in The Woman in White is a really genuinely thrilling moment. And part of what makes it so thrilling is precisely that Walter Hartwright is just walking down a kind of suburban London street. So it's not the kind of location that is supposed to be dangerous, threatening, or unknowable. And as he's walking down the street, he says, 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. 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 heaven, stood the figure of a solitary woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments. 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. Is that the road to London? she said. She's unknowable to him, like a kind of a blank canvas. Who is this woman? He can't read her identity. He doesn't know. She's not a ghost, but she looks a bit like a ghost. The woman won't reveal much about herself, but she asks for his assistance. She urgently needs to get to London to seek refuge with a friend.

Are you sure that your friend in London will receive you at such a late hour as this, I said. Quite sure. Only say that you will leave me when and how I please. Only say that you won't interfere with me. Will you promise? She came close to me and laid her hand with a sudden gentle stealthiness on my bosom. A thin hand, a cold hand, even on that sultry night. Remember that I was young. Remember that the hand which touched me was a woman's. Will you promise? Yes. One word, the little familiar word that is on everybody's lips every hour in the day. Oh me. And I tremble now when I write it. Where did she come from? Where is she going?

Why is she out here by herself? Why is she touching me on the shoulder? What is my part in this story? Those questions will upend Walter's comfortable life. They will even make him a mystery to himself. Was I Walter Hartwright? Was this the well-known, uneventful road where holiday people strolled on Sundays? Had I really left little more than an hour since? The quiet, decent, conventionally domestic atmosphere of my mother's cottage.

But it's that wonderful emergence of the mysterious from the mundane that makes that moment so delightfully sensational. Who wouldn't want to know? Who wouldn't want to keep reading and find out what happened? What had become of her now? Had she been traced and captured by the men in the chaise? Or was she still capable of controlling her own actions, and were we too following our widely parted roads toward one point in the mysterious future at which we were to meet once more? Considered one of the first writers of mysteries and the father of detective fiction, Wilkie Collins used the genres to investigate the rapidly changing world around him and to upend conventional thinking about society, the home, and the recesses of the human mind. The detective is actually the criminal. You know, the detective is looking for himself and doesn't realize it. 200 years after his birth, Wilkie Collins' work still has the power to make us look twice

at the world we think we know. We're calling this episode Murder, Madness and Marriage, The Sensational World of Wilkie Collins by contributor and University of British Columbia journalism professor Kamal Al-Sulayli. In a previous lifetime, I wrote my doctoral thesis on Wilkie Collins. To this day, my fascination with the man and his work remains stronger than ever. No one is safe, and nothing is sacred in his books. They capture mid-19th century England at a time when urbanization and evolutionary ideas are redrawing people's sense of place and upending the certainties of faith. But they're also a thrill to read, with humor, pathos, and plot twists that justify the mantra he's often associated with.

Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait. Reading Collins for the first time is an immersive experience. So actually, I recall that experience very clearly because I must have been in my 20s. And it was actually my mother who recommended A Woman in White to me in India. I'm Radha Vatsal, a crime writer. I write historical mysteries, and I'm also a student of film and film history. Once the sort of engine of the book gets going, you can't even, you don't even feel like you're reading a Victorian novel anymore. The suspense and the kind of psychological tension that he builds up, I think, is on par better than anything that we have today. And I just couldn't put it down. And when I finished, I was just amazed.

For general readers today, Wilkie Collins is mostly remembered as the author of two books, The Woman in White, which was recently included as the first mystery novel of the modern era in a survey by Time magazine, and The Moonstone, described by T.S. Eliot as the first and greatest of English detective novels. For his Victorian readers, however, he originated the genre that caused the stir in the 1860s, the sensation novel.

They're called sensation novels because they're sensational. They create a sensation in the reader. So I'm Andrew Mangum, and I'm Professor of Victorian Literature and Medical Humanities at the University of Reading, UK. That was the original idea behind the label, Sensation, is it sort of makes your heart beat quicker, it makes your skin crawl, it makes the hair at the back of your neck stand on end because of these very mysterious elements, but also a lot of play with ghosts and the supernatural. They're texts that very much appeal to the psychosomatic connections between the mind and the body. It was a popular genre, not an elite or an erudite genre. It was, in fact, criticized at the time for being the literature of the kitchen,

rather than the literature of the drawing rooms. So I'm Professor Rowan Mateson. I'm a professor in the English department at Dalhousie University, where I teach mostly courses in Victorian literature and in crime and detective fiction. The sensation novel is usually thought of as a kind of domesticated version of the Gothic novel. domesticated version of the Gothic novels. So the Gothic novel is an older form that turns on a lot of mysteries and secrets and lies, on sexual secrets, on blackmail, on threats and dangers and sort of suspense. But the British Gothic novels typically set in remote places and in distant times, hence the term Gothic. So they might take place in medieval Spain or some unspecified remote time in a convent in France or something, but not in England, not today. And the difference with the sensation novel is that it takes a lot of those same parts and it moves them home to the here and now.

So Henry James, for instance, who was not himself a sensational novelist, said that they addressed the most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries that are at our own doors. Collins' formative years were spent in a Britain that ruled the world, a time when, thanks to industrialization, Britain was becoming the world's workshop. It was also the age of the great Victorian cities, Manchester, Liverpool, London. With their influx of visitors, new residents, and new buildings, cities changed the way many Victorians experienced their immediate world. It was a time in which what's sometimes talked about as knowable communities give way to communities that are much more unpredictable and mixed and therefore anxiety-inducing,

from smaller towns where you would likely know your neighbors to big cities where you didn't know where people came from or what their role was. Instead of being able to look to your community to take care of you if you were in trouble, now you were in a city where we were still in the early days of developing centralized social safety networks, ways to look out for people. The police was still a relatively new state apparatus.

A recurrent plot engine in Colin's work is an encounter with a stranger, an encounter that seals the fate of a protagonist. In Basil, an earlier novel set in a bustling London, the aristocratic title character becomes obsessed with the woman he meets on a bus. He's almost mesmerized by her. From the time she entered the omnibus, I have no recollection of anything more that occurred in it. My power of observation, hitherto active enough, had now wholly deserted me. The omnibus in Basel is really interesting as well. It's another great symbol of modernity. The omnibus is a symbol of the daily commute, which becomes possible and

becomes a thing in the 19th century. And Collins describes it as a place in which you're really sort of crammed in with other people and all sort of walks of life. And it's there that he spots Margaret Sherwin, who is beneath him in class. Once upon a time, he would have been introduced at a ball for upper class people that would ensure that he marries someone of the same station. But now, because of urban modernity and the omnibus and the way in which people are sort of crammed together in densely urban sites, means that you get a lot more drama between the classes and a lot of drama that's generated because of cross-class interactions.

Adding to the anxieties of interacting with strangers on city streets was the fear that some of them might pose a threat to the safety of fellow citizens. Petticram was one worry. Another was the realization that the insane, to use the peerish term, were no longer confined behind the walls of asylums and might, in fact, be roaming the streets. Shortly after the encounter with Walter Hartwright on the road to London, Collins reveals that the woman in white has escaped from an asylum.

If you or any of your men meet with the woman, stop her and send her in careful keeping to that address. I'll pay all expenses and a fair reward into the bargain. The policeman looked at the card that was handed down to him. Why are we to stop her, sir? What has she done? Done? She has escaped from my asylum. Don't forget, a woman in white. Drive on. Collins was writing at a time when ideas about madness and the role of the asylum were being challenged by the emerging science of psychiatry. The asylum embodied segregation and institutionalization, which doctors and the public believed to be the most effective response to diseases of the mind.

It provided the setting for an approach called moral management. So the idea of moral management was all about managing emotions. And the way in which this was done was through various activities like gardening, theatrical performances. It was keeping the mind active enough that it could be distracted. So Collins starts writing in the sort of shadow of moral management. He knows some of the key figures through Dickens, but also through others. He knows John Connolly, who's a central figure in the moral management system. And we really see the influence of that style of thinking in The Woman in White, which is very much focused on asylums and the idea that someone can be an escaped

lunatic from an asylum, and the key is to get them back to the asylum. But privately run asylums also triggered the moral panic in the two years leading up to the publication of The Woman in White. Some Victorians feared that the sane could be wrongfully confined to an asylum, either because of lax medical diagnoses, or the kind of criminal plots that Collins and other sensation novelists reveled in. He was sensitive to the fact that women in particular, but not just them, because he

drew on a number of cases that actually involved men who had been incarcerated in asylums. incarcerated in asylums. And this was a phenomenon of the mid-19th century, particularly the 1850s. I'm Andrew Lycett. I am a biographer living in London, and I've written a number of lives of mainly authors. So I've written lives of people like Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Dylan Thomas, and Wilkie Collins, which we're going to talk about. In the 1850s, there was a sort of concocted thing, really, what was described as the lunacy panic. what was described as the lunacy panic. And, you know, there was a furore about the number of women who had been put into homes. Sensation fiction captures a moment of transition

in understanding and treating mental disorders. The medical establishment was beginning to move away from moral management towards a more determinist, evolutionary view of madness as lurking in the blood, uncontrollable and hereditary. The great moment there is the publication of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, which encourages psychiatrists to develop an interest in heredity, in particular, the idea that insanity could be inherited not only from our parents, but from subsequent, from previous generations, maybe 100 years ago. Henry Maudsley was a key figure in this, but so was Forbes Winslow,

who was a psychiatrist who wrote a book called On the Obscure Diseases of the Brain, which was a book Wilkie Collins owned, he read. This book was much more about, as the title suggests, obscure diseases, things that are less obvious. So the idea was that one could be insane without necessarily knowing it, or one could be married to an insane person without necessarily knowing it, because the disease is obscure, it's there sort of hiding in their system. And something very slight or something major or whatever can trigger it and suddenly it bursts that makes madness much less knowable and potentially much closer to home in the woman in white colin spins those period anxieties into a tale of crime mistaken identities and gender exploitation first the cactus tried to solve the mystery of the woman in white.

Then, they must come to the rescue of a woman named Laura Fairley, as she falls victim to a criminal plot by her husband. One of Collins' contributions to cultural life in the Victorian period was to set up the home as a site of intrigue, a secret theater where the people closest to you may be playing different parts. So Collins can be subversive in a couple of ways when it comes to this idea of the English home, or the ideal home, or the ideal woman, as you mentioned. There's a sense in which he is definitely showing that it is not as safe a place as you thought, but he's also, I think, often showing that that ideal itself is not as attractive as people think. One of the best

examples in The Woman in White is that the seeming heroine of the novel, Laura Fairley, strikes everybody, including the hero of the novel, whose name is appropriately Walter Hartwright, because his heart is in the right place. Laura strikes them as the ideal woman. She's soft and blonde and meek, but it doesn't take very long in the novel before we as readers realize that she's a far less interesting character than her half-sister Marion Halcombe, who is the opposite of all those things. The lady's complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a mustache. almost swarthy, and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a moustache. She had a large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw. To see such a face as this set on shoulders that a sculptor would have longed to model was to feel a sensation oddly akin to the helpless discomfort familiar to all of us

in sleep when we recognize yet cannot reconcile the anomalies and contradictions of a dream. The fact that Walter stays in love with Laura is disappointing really from beginning to end. And Collins' own readers were not so bemused by it. They wrote to him and said, who is the origin of this Marian? She's wonderful. I would like to marry her. And I think by doing that, he makes us see that Victorian ideal of the perfect angel in the house, which is sort of the shorthand for that. It's really a kind of an unattractive ideal. It's an uninteresting ideal. It doesn't give you any substance. In much of his fiction, Collins presents marriage as an institution whose scope and purpose are,

in his words, miserably narrow. In The Woman in White, he takes this limitation to a literal level by creating a plot in which Laura has no choice but to sign over her wealth to her new husband, Percival Glyde. I think that's a sign of how empathetic he is, really, to Victorian women and how they become enchained in these spaces. And, you know, the secret theatre of home, you know, it's a place in which tragedies are fought out, the place in which great stories are told, is very clever in sort of revealing the secret theatre of home

and making it a public theatre space again. And we really get an insight into how the places of women, places that were identified by the ideology as the rightful place for women, were actually prisons for many of them. First a prisoner in her own home, and then in an asylum, Laurie's dilemma echoes a view of marriage and madness first articulated in Mary Wilson Craft's book Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman, where the title character is wrongfully confined in a prison by her own husband. Was not the world a vast prison, the narrator comments, and women born slaves?

and women born slaves? I think what's special about Collins and what he shows you can do with a detective story is that he understands crime as fundamentally the product of contexts. The crimes in The Woman in White are specific crimes against individual people, but they're also crimes that have to do with inheritance and with property and with the consolidation of power and with the appropriation of people's identities and social places and with

defining who's heroic and who's a victim. And those are much bigger questions than what one specific actor might do. So later writers who are interested in that tradition, and I would mention especially, for instance, P.D. James, who referred explicitly back to the great 19th century novelists as her influences. They write about crime in that way too, that they build their crimes around social problems, around character. There are modern versions of what in the 19th century were called Condition of England novels, novels about the state. It took a decade after the publication of The Woman in White for Parliament to pass the Married Women's Property Act of 1870.

It gave married women the right to inherit small sums, hold property inherited from close family, and keep their investments. Too late for Laura Fairley, and too little for Wilkie Collins to change his mind about the inequities of marriage laws in Britain. He hates the marriage laws, and he hates some very obvious injustices that are prevalent in his society. He didn't want to subscribe to the normal trajectory of a Victorian

gentleman, and had this very unconventional life consisting of two marriages and two families. Sorry, not two marriages, but two relationships that were very much not marriages. How did Wilkie Collins arrive at his views of marriage? Yeah, I mean, he grew up in a pretty stable family. So I think it was just a sort of consequence of his inquisitiveness about life, that he was iconoclast, a rebel, and he just didn't think that marriage worked for the people that he saw around him. Partly through his friendship with Charles Dickens. He saw that Charles Dickens was unhappy in his marriage. He was working for Charles Dickens on his magazine Household Words in his early writing career. He was party to Dickens breaking up from his wife, Catherine, and taking up with the young actress,

Nellie Ternan. He seems to have taken a while to find himself a sort of stable relationship with a woman called Caroline Graves. She had a kind of interesting history to her because she was a widow by then. But she also had a bit of a, she liked to sort of fabricate her story somewhat. Her name wasn't actually even Caroline, it was Elizabeth. So there was quite a bit of mystery about her background and there was quite a bit of dissimulation to an extent about the way that she presented herself. Nevertheless, Wilkie met her and fell in love with her.

He'd already identified, more or less around the time that he met Caroline, that he liked being a bachelor. And he didn't like the intrusion that women, women in general made on male company, he found himself a second woman to share his life. So he was living this double life. You don't actually use the word, but you get this almost a hypocritical view where in his fiction, marriage is a force intended to control women. In life, he acted as though a force intended to control women. In life, he acted as though marriage was intended to trap men. So marriage is used in Woman in White to sort of attempt to control Laura and get her money. But I do think it is interesting that then in his own life, I think by denying the women in his life, the legitimacy that comes from marriage,

I can't believe that those women were okay with that situation. I bet the kind of social price they had to pay for that arrangement was extremely high. And I would assume that he didn't have to pay for that arrangement was extremely high. And I would assume that he didn't have to pay the same price. So he was living this double life with one woman, Caroline Graves, living in his own house, and another whom he had met while researching Armadale. And he set her up in a house literally only a mile away. So it actually is an interesting kind of observation on the kind of doubleness in his life. Collins himself was haunted by a second self, writes biographer Catherine Peters, a ghostly presence that stood behind him,

a shadow of his shadow. In his later years, he would write about a second Wilkie Collins, with whom he struggled for control of the writing path. This could be a fantasy brought on by the opium to which he became addicted. But Collins returned to the notion of doppelgangers in his fiction often. In Armadale, arguably Colin's wildest novel, a man named Alan Armadale murders a man and marries his victim's lover. His victim's name? Also Alan Armadale. And for good measure, there are two other Alan Armadales in the novel. So there are a couple of interesting things that happen in Wilkie Collins' novels in terms of characters' identities not being unified. I think we're familiar in a lot of literary texts with the idea of the foil character, the character who presents a useful illuminating contrast. So we've

already talked a little bit about Marion Halcombe in The Woman in White, and she's a good foil character to Laura Fairley because where Laura is fair, Marion is dark, her Laura is weak, Marion is strong, her Laura is passive, Marion is active. But another way to think about them would not be as foil characters, but as a character split into two parts, one the acceptable part and one the unacceptable part. And as Laura over the novel becomes more and more passive to the point that she's literally immobilized, Marion becomes more and more active, almost as if some repressed part of Laura is now carrying out the things that have to be done. Collins also doubles up the two villains, Percival Glyde, the dime store English villain who marries and entraps Laura, and Count Fosco, the charming and sinister Italian mastermind of the whole plot.

On Ken Fosco, how important is it that he's Italian, that he's foreign? You're a film scholar as well, and there's a tradition of making the villain a foreign, like whether it's Russian or Arab. I think this whole idea of inscrutability, which is part of his personality, I think can be better represented by foreignness. Like there's something inscrutable, something exotic about him. So he could be Italian, but you're right, he could similarly be from the Middle East or Chinese. If he had been an Englishman, I think, but just by virtue of that, he would somehow have to be kind of more knowable. The way Percival Glide is more kind of a knowable and therefore a lesser figure, like

Count Fosco's danger lies precisely in the fact that he is kind of other and out there. that he is kind of other and out there. It's time to fly the coop, my dads. Arrivederci, Londra. No tears, bambini. You must learn to fare la bella figura. Put on a good show. Always, Count Fosco.

He puts on a good show When British composer Andrew Lloyd Webber adapted the novel as a musical he gave Canfosco a showstopper called You Can Get Away With Anything and the Italian villain almost does You can get away with anything It all comes down to style

You'll have a captive audience as long as you beguile. Yes, you can have your cake and eat it, the love of those whom you betray. if you don't get away. I admit that I'm a criminal obsessed with perfect cries. On Ideas, you're listening to a documentary called Murder, Madness and Marriage, The Sensational World of Wilkie Collins. We're a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada,

on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus,

and being I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. Often considered the father of mystery and detective fiction, Wilkie Collins used the genre to question the world around him and to make readers think twice about the spaces and institutions they inhabit. In many of his novels, it's a chance encounter that tips the world off its axis. When we move to the Moonstone, these encounters are not just in the city. I mean, particularly

the presence of the Indian priests sort of roaming around and being suspicious. So again, that's another form of encounter. But this one has colonial and historical baggage. It's a different kind of encounter from the woman and wife. The encounters in The Moonstone are precisely that. They're encounters on a global scale. Ideas contributor Kamal al-Sulayli brings us his documentary called Murder, Madness, and Marriage, The Sensational World of Wilkie Collins. The Moonstone, published in 1868, revolves around a diamond that's been a source of conflict for centuries. Time rolled on from the first to the last years of the 18th Christian century.

The diamond fell into the possession of Tipu Sultan, who caused it to be placed as an ornament in the handle of a dagger, and who commanded it to be kept among the choicest treasures of his armory. Even then, in the palace of the Sultan himself, the three guardian priests still kept their watch in secret. The novel opens with a bloody scene of colonial theft, narrated by a British soldier in India. I got to an open door and saw the bodies of two Indians lying across the entrance, dead. A third Indian, mortally wounded, was sinking at the feet of a man whose back was towards me. The dying Indian pointed to the dagger in Hearn Castle's hand and said, in his native language,

the moonstone will have its vengeance yet on you and yours. The novel opened with a very violent scene around colonial rapaciousness. So we know that the diamond is not some kind of innocent decorative jewel, but is the result of that kind of English violence abroad. So they bring that into their home. That's Dalhousie professor Rowan Maitzen. The English soldier who stole the diamond leaves it in his will to his niece

to be given to her on her 18th birthday. But the news of the gift is closely followed by reports of three Indian men in the area, later revealed to be Brahmin priests. At one point, the recipient of the diamond, Rachel Verinder, who receives it for her 18th birthday, she's being urged to keep it safe. My lady, turning around to wish them good night, looked hard at the wicked colonel's legacy shining in her daughter's dress. Rachel, she asked, where are you going to put your diamond tonight? First, she said, on her dressing table, of course, along with her other things.

Then she remembered that the diamond might take to shining of itself, with its awful mooning light in the dark, and that would terrify her in the dead of night. Then she bethought herself of an Indian cabinet which stood in her sitting room. My dear, your Indian cabinet which stood in her sitting room. My dear, your Indian cabinet has no lock to it, says my lady. Good heavens, Mama, cried Miss Rachel. Are there thieves in the house? And the answer, of course, is yes, they're all thieves.

They just don't recognize themselves as that. So that is an encounter for them with their own guilt, in a way, as much as anything else. But it is very unsettling to them precisely because they took themselves to be at home. They took themselves to be where they were safe. They didn't think they owed anything to anybody. They thought they set the terms of this discussion and this community, and it turns out they absolutely don't. I'm not going to spoil the ending here, but I still marvel at the fact that, you know, in the grand scheme of things, the Brahmins end up being, in a way, the most noble of them all, the one who sacrificed so much. And I always think that's such a progressive view from Wilkie Kahn's for the period. When you

compare his attitude, for example, next to Charles Dickens on the Indian Mutiny, which is only like a decade earlier or something, it's night and day in a way. Dickens said shockingly, appallingly racist things about the Indian rebellion. And Collins in The Moonstone is much savvier about English culpability. And you're right that those characters are presented. I would say there's some problems in the way that they're presented. There's a kind of Orientalist vocabulary around them, although it's always coming from the English characters, not from some omniscient narrator. So you can always see it as a reflection of the xenophobia and the prejudices of the characters themselves when they describe them in these terms.

But absolutely, those three Brahmins are the only characters in the novel interested in the diamond for spiritual rather than material reasons. They want it back, well, first of all, because it belongs to them, which is not insignificant, but also because it means something to them, not because it's worth something to them. And that seems like such an important distinction. I feel that as someone who was born and raised in India, my understanding was always that like, the British came to India. But it turns out that Indians also went to Britain, and they had their views about it, and they wrote about it. And this is something that I'm getting more involved in and what my new book also deals with, but in America. But in the 19th and 20th centuries, a lot of Indians and a lot of people from other colonized countries went to travel the world.

And I personally think that's fascinating. That's fascinating. So the idea that the Indian characters in the Moonstone kind of had the agency to like leave India and come and look for what they wanted, you know, notwithstanding the way that Wilkie Collins describes them and things. I think that's very powerful. Like and I think especially at this political moment where people are talking, you know, on the right, nostalgically about some time where supposedly cultures were more homogenous. I just don't think that's true. And particularly in cities like London, it was the head of an empire. There were people from all over the world wandering around those streets. When the diamond goes missing, the larger world of colonial loot collides with the assumed tranquility of the English home. Here, Collins takes the mystery genre a step forward by introducing a professional detective, a figure who blurs the line between public and private spaces. One of the interesting things with any detective novel

is trying to see who can and can't solve the crime and what that tells us about the world that the crime takes place in. So the first investigator that comes in in the Moonstone is the local superintendent. And he is completely incapable of solving this mystery because he can't look at the Verinder family as anything but his superiors. So he's timid and deferential in his questions and he doesn't look at them Verinder family as anything but his superiors. So he's timid and deferential in his questions,

and he doesn't look at them as suspects. So a second investigator is brought in, Sergeant Cuff. He's a prototype of the modern detective in his problem-solving prowess. At the reading of the name of the new police officer, Mr. Franklin gave a start. I begin to hope we are seeing the end of our anxieties already, he said. If half the stories I've heard are true, when it comes to unraveling a mystery, there isn't the equal in England of Sergeant Cuff. And in his quirks, in this case, an abiding love for roses.

I began my life among them in my father's nursery garden, and I shall end my life among them, if I can. Yes, one of these days, please God, I shall retire from catching thieves and try my hand at growing roses. So the advantage that C cuff brings is that middle class professional sensibility he has a job he's trained to do his job he's not impressed by the fact that they are technically his class superiors that gives him a kind of authority over them that they didn't expect and the authority includes things like he can rifle through their underwear. And this is not a comfortable thing for people who are used to protecting

their privacy and their privilege. I think Collins creates these dialogues between public spaces and private spaces. He's interested in the threshold between the two. He's interested in who has access to both spheres. So the detective in the Moonstone, for instance, he sort of belongs to the public world of work and policing, but yet he goes into the private sphere of home and investigates and overturns everything and really sort of looks into the lives of the women as well. There's a real sense of trespass about that. He's really not welcome in the house because he persists in seeing everybody as a potential suspect, not just, for instance,

the one person in the house who's known to have a criminal record. It's easy to throw suspicion on someone who fits that profile of a common thief. It's harder to throw suspicion, as he does, on the daughter of the house. Kaffa accuses the daughter of the house, Rachel Berender, of having stolen her own diamond. She furiously denies it. And before too long, Sergeant Cuff is dismissed. The public servant in this case is also a servant to the upper-class public,

someone who can be hired and fired. Cuff leaves the estate without actually solving the mystery. So that really does tell us just structurally that he's not the person who can fix whatever is wrong, whatever the disappearance of the diamond is a symptom of. And I think his failure to understand some of Rachel's actions and his failure to understand her psychology as an upper-class woman is really at the heart both of the plot, but also of that class tension. Absolutely. Rachel's reaction to the loss of her diamond is something that he cannot understand. And she is outraged to a degree that I think quickly seems in excess of having her diamond

stolen in a literal sense. You're really provoked by Rachel's sort of hysterical response to think something else is at stake for her here. And I think as the story unfolds, we realize she does feel violated. And it's easy to read it, I think, as a kind of sexual violation, not literally, but that's how she experiences it. Her privacy has been violated. Her most personal, intimate, strong feelings of trust and love have been violated by what she thinks has happened to the diamond. And we don't hear her side of the story for quite a long time. And so that keeps us at bay as well. But that tells us that we're going to need an investigator who can talk to

Rachel or who can hear Rachel and understand what she has seen and experienced. The investigation spins its wheels until a new figure appears on the scene, a medical assistant who is not a professional detective. Instead, he's a familiar figure in Colin's work, a man or a woman with a tragic history who ekes out the living on the margins of English society. Just going through his work in prep for this documentary, I just noticed like a gallery of the walking wounded

in mid-19th century England. It seems that Collins has such a profound interest on people on the margin of health and on that thin line between sanity and insanity. Where, in your opinion, does that interest come from in Collins? These marginalised figures allow him to look at the real world and the quotidian from the outside. They give him a perspective that isn't right in the heart of it and therefore not subject to its powers. But actually the people who've been ostracized and kicked out. And it's very interesting how those people are often the solution to the story. They often interpret what's going on correctly.

quite used to looking into these questions and these topics from outside from a perspective that didn't subscribe to them and his own sense of himself as cut off from the world through his debilitating illnesses in particular his gout which he suffered from terribly and then he became addicted to laudanum as part of that i think this made him quite a sort of marginal figure himself. Ezra Jennings, the opium addict who helps reveal the identity of the diamond's thief, is based on Collins' own use of the substance. While writing The Moonstone, Collins suffered from what he called the severest illness of his life, the torture of romantic gout. Collins liked to tell friends that he didn't recognize the ending of his own novel, having written it under the influence. A tall tale, but one that echoes a major plot point in The Moonstone, in which a

character in an altered state commits a crime without realizing it. A lot of Collins' characters also act involuntarily under some kind of duress or under some kind of direction from elsewhere, like for instance, under the influence of opium, the conscious self is laid to rest and an unconscious self comes out and acts in ways that the conscious self would never act. So it does provoke you again to think about the self as being fragmented in that way, or at least being multi-layered. And one of the great moments in the Moonstone is where one of the characters finds a piece of evidence and has the shocking revelation that he himself is the thief. You have done me an infamous wrong, I broke out hotly. You suspect me of stealing your diamond.

I have a right to know, and I will know the reason why. Suspect you, she exclaimed, her anger rising with mine. You villain! I saw you take the diamond with my own eyes. The revelation which burst upon me in those words, the overthrow which they instantly accomplished of the whole view of the case on which Mr. Brough had relied, struck me helpless. Innocent as I was, I stood before her in silence.

To her eyes, to any eyes, I must have looked like a man overwhelmed by the discovery of his own guilt. Which raises all kinds of questions about responsibility. If you did it, but you don't know you did it, are you the thief? In fact, the Gothic novel plays a lot in the possibilities of our unconscious selves. There isn't that vocabulary at the time, but we now have that kind of Freudian vocabulary to talk about these ideas of the layers of our consciousness. Often they're represented architecturally. You go down in the basement, you get closer to those lower levels, or maybe you go up into the attic as in Jane Eyre and you discover a part of yourself that ordinarily isn't part of the public front-facing self that you

usually have. So all of these are provocations that I think relate to developments in psychological theory over the century in the sense that people are more than they seem, and you can surprise yourself, repress yourself, or maybe burst out of yourself in some way. And again, in Collins' novels, isn't that kind of fun and exciting, even if it's also sometimes a bit scary or unfortunate? Because it implies that we're really strangers to ourselves. Let alone we cannot know the other and the people around us, but we don't even know ourselves. And also that we may be in conflict with ourselves. in conflict with ourselves. One of the enduring comforts of the detective novel is the promise that these conflicts can be resolved. That's part of what makes the genre so popular to this day

and may explain its original appeal in the 19th century. There were a lot of things changing all at once over the course of the 19th century, and it seems likely that a lot of them contributed to the appeal of a genre in which a problem is proved to be solvable by human means. Laws were changing, especially laws around women's status. The Divorce Act, for instance, and the Married Women's Property Act started to change the sense of what marriage meant, how stable and lasting it was. Religion was under scrutiny thanks to various developments in science and philosophy, so places where you might have looked for stable, reassuring answers about meaning seemed to be being taken apart or put into

question. So it seemed like a much less secure environment. And I think you can add to that the general psychological comfort that comes from getting answers to our questions. We are problem-solving by nature. We are people who like to see patterns in chaos, and the detective novel offers us exactly that. It tells us that things can work out, that there are answers to these questions. And restoring order is probably at the heart of it, that all is well again, the way it used to be, or something along those lines. Although that promise of restoring order, even as early as the Moonstone, can often be shown to be a bit of an illusion, right?

It's shown to us as something that we want, but maybe not something that is lasting. The very last words of the Moonstone are, what will be the next adventure of the Moonstone? So the years pass and repeat each other. So the same events revolve in the cycles of time. What will be the next adventures of the Moonstone? Who can tell? So you may have solved the problem for now, but you can solve a crime. You can't solve crime. And that's why the genre continues to appeal and to proliferate. And so does Wilkie Collins as a writer.

The more I reread him, the more he stands out from his contemporaries and the closer he feels to our moment in time. His 19th century fiction anticipates our own helplessness about a digital world where we are losing control and agency. A world where mental health issues are on the rise and our resources are too limited to address them. A world where global migration and post-colonial reckoning have stoked anxieties and fears of the other. Wilkie Collins understands that a stranger is a frightening thing to most people, but he also understands and makes really clear in his novels that that's a mistake.

It's a kind of category mistake. You see something that seems unfamiliar in your first reaction as the reaction for the characters in the Moonstone, for instance, is to be withdrawn, to be anxious, to reinforce boundaries, to try to police them, to try to exert that kind of resistance. You can't come in. This is my territory. I want to be safe from you. But over and over, what his stories do is they tell you, well, look behind you. Look who's already in the house with you. Look at your husband. Look at your wife. Look at your trusted doctor.

Look at the people that you think are safe and ask yourself, what do you really know about them? And I think that that's a never-ending lesson for all of us. When you're asking a detective to come in and solve the crime, what are you really asking them to protect you from? And I always think the news and social media is in a way an attack on our nervous system, the same way the sensation narratives probably were.

There's so much sensationalism. We don't have, it doesn't have to be fictionalized. It is actually in the real world around us that I feel that just reading the news is comparable to what Victorians would have felt reading sensation fiction. But maybe I'm reading way too much into that. No, I think that's exactly right. And the sense that we're so used to this barrage of quickbait headlines that take advantage of both our fears and our desire for excitement.

And there was definitely sensational journalism in Collins' own day, and he's kind of taking advantage of some of that. He lifts some of his plots right out of the headlines of the day, but he tends to do things with those stories that are much more complicated and sophisticated and invite more reflection about the self and less reflexive antipathy towards the others. So maybe you use the headline to draw someone in, then you turn the story on them. The other thing that Collins does, which obviously doesn't happen in the news today, is he's really funny and he has all the wonderful sentimentality of a 19th century novelist. So he isn't just appealing to our fears and he isn't just appealing to our anger or our prejudices, and he isn't just criticizing us. He's enjoying the full range of human emotions and inviting us

to do that too. It's not just about drawing us in and making us enjoy the fiction. It's about getting us to commit emotionally to the whole process, to try to re-understand how we want to be in the world. And he has that in common with his buddy Dickens, that they really are out to engage us emotionally with the world. And I think both of them hope that if we do that, it makes us more human and that has ripple effect socially, that we engage with each other with that kind of appreciation of our quirks and our strangeness and our lovability. And that will make us a little

bit more tender and a little bit more humorous ourselves. And maybe the novel is especially good at that, whereas journalism is kind of impeded from that, that the novel can rouse us to a full range of humanity. And if crime is the problem, that's a little bit of the solution, maybe. We can hope. You're listening to Murder, Madness and Marriage, the sensational world of Wilkie Collins, by Ideas contributor and University of British Columbia journalism professor Kamala Suleili and producer Pauline Holdsworth. Special thanks to Jamie Thomas King, who recorded the Wilkie Collins readings for us, and to Matthew Lazenreiter.

Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast. If you liked the episode you just heard, check out our vast archive where you can find more than 300 of our past episodes. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Lisa Godfrey. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayed. So the years pass and repeat each other.

So the same events revolve in the cycles of time. What will be the next adventures of the Moonstone? Who can tell?