The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Wilkie Collins · a novel told in a sequence of written testimonies · a preamble and three Epochs · weekly in All the Year Round, 26 November 1859 to 25 August 1860, and in three volumes, 1860 · scored on Collins’s English in the volume text of 1860, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Novel of crime told as a file of written statements; sensation novel, domestic Gothic and novel of detection in one work
Mythos
The double who shares a face; the living woman at her own grave; the Bluebeard marriage with its secret room, here a vestry and a register; the ghost on the road who is a fugitive; the fat, gentle, cultivated tyrant
Phase
From a night walk on the road to London, through a marriage, a substitution and a burial, to a living woman given back her name and an heir at Limmeridge
Presentation
Fiction; a preamble and three Epochs, some dozen written narratives, diaries, letters, statements, a doctor’s certificate and the inscription on a stone, each narrator held to what he or she saw
Register
From Hartright’s earnest narration and Marian’s quick diary to Fairlie’s petulant comedy of nerves, the servants’ plain statements and Fosco’s florid, ironic English
Scale
Two country houses and their households, a solicitor’s office, an asylum, a parish register and a London lodging, with a thread of foreign politics
Governing Proposition
A drawing master meets a woman in white on a night road; a bride who shares her face is married for her money, and the two women are exchanged, so that one is buried under the other’s name and the living one is shut in an asylum as the other. The wager of the novel is that a crime against records can only be told as a file of records: that a woman’s property, liberty and name can be taken from her with paper, and that only patient, documented testimony, set before the reader as before a jury, can give a person back to herself.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“This is the story of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can achieve.” The preamble sets the terms, and then the book hands itself over to its witnesses. What follows is not one narrator’s story but a file: a preamble and three Epochs, some dozen separate written voices, each set down by someone who saw part of what happened and is held to that part. Walter Hartright and Marian Halcombe carry most of the length. The others come and go: a solicitor, an invalid uncle, a housekeeper, a cook, a doctor’s certificate, a dressmaker, and the inscription on a stone.
The novel ran weekly in All the Year Round, Dickens’s magazine, from 26 November 1859 to 25 August 1860, following A Tale of Two Cities in its pages, and came out in three volumes from Sampson Low in 1860. The work scored here is the novel as published in volume form that year, with Collins’s preface; the small revisions of the later one-volume editions are not weighed apart from it. It was built for a weekly public that had to be held, and it was built to hold them on a method that withholds: each witness tells only what he or she knew, and the reader sits as a jury that must wait for the next statement.
It opens on a road. Hartright, a drawing master, is walking to London at night when a hand touches his shoulder, and on the high road there is a woman in white. After she has gone, men from an asylum pass, asking for her. It is one of the great entrances in English fiction, and it is a ghost scene in which the ghost is a fugitive. The figure on the road is Anne Catherick, and the book will take three Epochs to show what she knows and why she is afraid.
Movement II
Hartright goes as drawing master to Limmeridge House in Cumberland. His first sight of Marian is across a room, the figure first and then the face, and the sentence in his narrative turns on it: “The lady is ugly!” Marian is the book’s great creation, with a masculine face and a lament at a woman’s helplessness; the novel gives her a mind its plot cannot use, because she is a woman. Beside her is Laura, the heiress, who has Anne Catherick’s face. The likeness is the hinge of everything that follows, and the book will disclose only late that the two are half sisters.
The house belongs to Mr Fairlie, whose nerves and self-pity are comedy of a high order and whose selfishness is complicit in what is done to his niece. Laura is promised to Sir Percival, and Sir Percival needs her money. The solicitor Vincent Gilmore takes up the narrative to tell of the marriage settlement, and his narrative is the law’s helplessness set down by one of its own: he can see the danger to her property and cannot prevent it. The reader foresees what he foresees, and the narrative tells it anyway; this is one of the places where the serial is long.
Hartright is removed from the story to Central America, an absence the plot requires and the book does not live through; he will come back from its jungles hardened offstage. Before he goes, the First Epoch has set the machine: a wife with money, a husband who needs it, a woman in white who has Laura’s face and a weak heart, and a secret Sir Percival has been keeping. Marian’s diary begins at the close of the Epoch, and from here the book is in her hand.
Movement III
The Second Epoch is Marian’s diary at Blackwater Park, Sir Percival’s house in Hampshire, where the married couple are joined by his friend, Count Fosco. Fosco is the book’s other great creation: fat, gentle, cultivated, with his white mice and his canary, a genial tyrant of almost mythic appetite. The diary is the place in that house where a woman speaks freely. It is quick and alive, and it records, day by day, a marriage closing round Laura and the pressure of the two men upon her property.
Marian climbs out on to the verandah roof in the rain to hear Fosco and Percival talking below, and hears them. The rain brings on a fever, and the diary breaks off. Then the page turns, and the book carries a postscript in Fosco’s hand, written in her diary while she lies ill. The reader learns, as she has not yet, that the private page has been read by the enemy. It is one of the book’s summits, and its dread is of a kind only this form could make: the violation the plot describes is performed on the document the reader is holding.
That is the knowledge the form carries. The crime the novel tells is an offence against records, and the novel is itself a file of records; its question, from the diary to the confession, is whose record is believed. Marian’s record is believed by the reader and annotated by the villain. Change the form and that knowledge goes: a third-person narrative could report the theft of a diary, but it could not hand the reader the stolen page.
Movement IV
With Marian silenced the file thins to fragments. Mr Fairlie gives his narrative, all petulant evasion; the housekeeper Eliza Michelson, the cook Hester Pinhorn and the dressmaker Jane Gould give theirs, plain and partial; a doctor’s certificate gives its own. Out of these pieces, none of whose writers sees the whole, the substitution is done. Anne, whose heart is diseased, dies; a date of travel and a date of death are made to serve the exchange; and the woman who dies is buried under Laura’s name while Laura is consigned to Anne’s asylum as Anne. The gaps between the witnesses are how the conspiracy hides.
The Second Epoch closes on the inscription on a tombstone. Laura has been declared dead while she lives. Her property has passed by paper, a certificate and an asylum’s admission, and her own word counts for nothing once the papers say otherwise: the living woman cannot prove she is herself. This is what the novel brings into the open, a legal and social condition in which a married woman’s property, liberty and name could be disposed of by her husband and his friend. It is shown by situation, on Laura from outside, and Laura is a cipher; but it is shown with force.
The Third Epoch returns to Hartright. Back from Central America, he stands in Limmeridge churchyard before the stone inscribed to Laura’s memory, and a veiled woman rises beside it, and she is Laura. The living woman has walked to her own grave. It is the book’s highest scene of recognition, and the archetype it makes is built, not borrowed: the double who shares a face, the bride in white and the madwoman in white exchanged, one buried in the other’s name. From here the task is to give the living woman back her name.
Movement V
The last Epoch becomes a detective’s account, slow and thorough, and the testimony frame thins as Hartright works. He comes first at Percival’s secret, which lies in a forged entry in the Old Welmingham register; Mrs Catherick’s letter is set into his narrative; and Percival dies in the burning vestry, by his own fire, neat where the rest is earned. Then the Count. Pesca serves a foreign Brotherhood, and the Brotherhood brings Fosco to account: from outside the book’s physics, and convenient.
Fosco’s confession, given under duress and written with the Brotherhood at the door, reclaims the form at the close. It is vain, florid, ironic and unmistakable in its English, and in it he admires Marian still. The date that undoes the conspiracy is placed where it will tell, and the living woman is restored to herself by documents, as she had been taken from herself by documents. The Count is ended by the Brotherhood, and the book closes his account in a Paris morgue. An heir at Limmeridge settles what the double had opened, and Hartright gives the conclusion.
The book made a form and a field. The sensation novel of the 1860s came after it at once: Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne (1861), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and the reviewers’ alarm at “sensation novels”. Collins’s own The Moonstone (1868) took the same plural witness to the head of the English detective novel, Fosco became the pattern of the genial master criminal, and Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith (2002) rewrote the substitution and the asylum. The suspense is spent on a second reading. Marian, Fosco, the form, and the woman by the stone that bears her name are not.
Act III · The Twelve
The plot is a machine of rare closeness, and the machine passes the subtractive test: Sir Percival’s need of his wife’s money, Anne Catherick’s likeness to Laura, Anne’s heart disease, a date of travel and a date of death, the forged entry in the Old Welmingham register. Each is required, and the substitution at the centre stands on all of them. The book is less necessary than its machine, and that holds the axis lowest of the twelve, at the line and not above it. Hartright’s First Epoch lingers; his removal to Central America is an absence engineered rather than lived; Gilmore tells what the reader foresees; the Third Epoch nears Percival’s secret and then Fosco’s slowly. A third of Hartright could go and little be lost. What cannot go is the best of the book.
Score: 7.5 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a married woman’s property, her liberty and at last her very name could be disposed of by her husband and his friend with paper, a doctor’s certificate and an asylum’s admission, and her own word counts for nothing once the papers say otherwise. Laura is declared dead while she lives, and cannot prove she is herself. The book is sharper than the preamble that frames it as “the story of what a Woman’s patience can endure”: Mr Fairlie’s selfishness and Gilmore’s helpless law are shown as complicit, and Marian is given a mind the plot cannot use because she is a woman. Held where it is because the disclosure comes by situation, inside melodrama: Laura is a cipher, and the condition is shown on her from outside.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The book rises by terror and suspense more often than most of its kind, and once or twice to a height. The opening is one of the great entrances in English fiction: Hartright walking to London at night, a hand on his shoulder, a woman in white on the high road, and after she has gone the men from the asylum asking for her. Then Marian on the verandah roof in the rain, listening to Fosco and Percival, and the fever that follows; Fosco’s postscript in her diary, by which the reader learns that the private page has been read; and Hartright in Limmeridge churchyard before the stone inscribed to Laura’s memory, beside the veiled woman who is Laura. The elevation is of dread and recognition, not of tragedy; between the summits lie long plains of investigation.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The archetype is built, not alluded to. The double bears the weight: Anne and Laura, half sisters, as the book discloses late, share a face, and the madwoman in white and the bride in white are exchanged, so that one is buried under the other’s name and the other is consigned to the other’s asylum. The living woman walks to her own grave. Round it stand the Bluebeard marriage to a man with a secret room, here a vestry and a register; the ghost on the road who is a fugitive; and Fosco, fat, gentle and cultivated, with his white mice and his canary, a tyrant of almost mythic appetite. The culture kept the woman in white. Held where it is because the pattern does not question the world it orders: an heir at Limmeridge settles what the double had opened.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The departure is of form and of setting together. Collins tells a novel of crime as a sequence of witnesses’ statements, each narrator held to what he or she saw, and he moves the Gothic out of the Italian castle into an English country house, a solicitor’s office and a London lodging. The epistolary and documentary novel existed; the Gothic existed; the Newgate novel existed. To join them, with the reader as jury and the documents themselves as the plot, was a real turn. The stake was real too: a serial in Dickens’s own magazine, following Dickens, that had to hold a weekly public on a method that withholds, and held it. Held below the gate because its moral world and its ending are those of its inheritance.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Change the form and the book loses much of what it knows. The crime is an offence against records, a register, a certificate, a date of travel, a name on a stone, and the novel is itself a file of records whose question is whose record is believed. Marian’s diary is the hinge: the one place in the house where a woman speaks freely is read and annotated by Fosco, and the form performs the violation the plot describes. The gaps between narrators, Fairlie’s petulant evasions and the servants’ partial views, are how the conspiracy hides and how it is found out. Held below the top because in the Third Epoch Hartright’s narrative becomes an ordinary detective’s account and the testimony frame thins to a device, until Fosco’s confession, given under duress, reclaims it.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Evidence over a century and a half, and it is real. Marian Halcombe, with her masculine face and her lament at a woman’s helplessness, has sustained a long critical return on gender; the legal plot has been read on married women’s property and on the lunacy laws; Fosco on the foreigner, the Risorgimento and the English fear of the cultivated villain; the documentary form on Victorian evidence and the rise of detection. What holds the axis down is the return itself. On a second reading the suspense that drives the book is spent, and what remains is Marian, Fosco, the form and a handful of scenes. Hartright and Laura do not yield on return. The well is deep in two characters and in its method, and shallow elsewhere.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The field is the English novel of its century. The force: the book reorganised what a popular English novel could be, making the respectable household the site of crime and the narrative a body of evidence. Its pressure falls on the genre fiction that grew beside Dickens, Eliot and the Brontës, which is large but not the whole field, and beyond its first heirs its reach is diffuse; that holds it below the gate. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it opened the sensation novel of the 1860s, with Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne (1861), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and the reviewers’ alarm at “sensation novels”; Collins’s own The Moonstone (1868), built on the same plural witness, stands at the head of the English detective novel; Fosco became a pattern for the genial master criminal; and Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith (2002) rewrites its substitution and its asylum.
Score: 8.3 / 10
About a hundred and sixty-six years, weighed on form and presence. The form is whole and stable: printed since 1860, with no textual loss. The presence: continuously in print, in the major classics series, taught in courses on the Victorian novel and on crime fiction, translated widely, and adapted again and again for stage, film, radio and television. Adaptation and fame are presence, count for a tenth at most, and prove nothing on their own. The figure is the first a survival of this span can reach, given for unbroken print and teaching, not for screen versions. What holds it off the widest presence: the book is read as the best of its kind more than as a book the culture cannot do without, and its suspense surface is tied to its genre.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on Collins’s English, with no translation between. The making of plot is masterly: revelations timed across a weekly serial, the date discrepancy that undoes the conspiracy placed where it will tell, and a firm control of what each narrator can know. The voices are differentiated with real skill. Fairlie’s nerves and self-pity are comedy of a high order; Fosco’s English is florid, ironic and unmistakable; Marian’s diary is quick and alive; the servants’ statements are plain and partial in the right way. Charged: the prose, sentence by sentence, is competent rather than distinguished; Hartright’s voice is earnest and slow, Laura’s speech conventional, and the serial habit of a narrator foreshadowing what he did not then know recurs. The making carries the structure, not the language.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Fairlie’s comedy of nerves and the asylum; or Fosco’s opera-buffa geniality and the burning vestry in which Percival dies. One law governs them: a world in which papers rule persons, and only patient, documented testimony can restore a person to herself. The tone holds from the ghostly road to the courtroom manner of the close. Charged: the law strains in the Third Epoch. The Brotherhood that Pesca serves, which conveniently brings Fosco to account, and Hartright’s hardening offstage in the jungles of Central America come from outside the book’s physics, and Percival’s death by his own fire is neat where the rest is earned. Coherent, with visible joins.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Held, not listed. Marriage and its law; money and inheritance; class in the country house, from the master and the solicitor to the drawing master and the servants; the madhouse and the medical certificate; a woman’s mind under constraint; illegitimacy and the parish register; and a thread of foreign politics in Fosco and Pesca. They are joined by one plot: the law of property drives the marriage, the marriage drives the asylum, the asylum drives the erasure. What holds the axis where it is: the book does not hold history, the sacred, labour, or the natural order beyond its settings. Its world is the propertied household and the processes that guard it.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, then The Swerve, The Living Form, Pressure on Tradition and The Made at 8.3. A whole text in print without a break since 1860; a novel of crime told as a file of witnesses’ statements, with the Gothic brought home to the English country house; a form in which the violation of a woman’s diary is performed on the page the reader holds; a method that opened the sensation novel and passed to the detective novel; and a plot timed and controlled across a weekly serial, in voices each its own.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.5, on the line of the Necessity Cap. The machine is required in every part, but the serial is long: Hartright’s First Epoch, Gilmore’s foreseeable narrative and the slow approach of the Third Epoch, with a Brotherhood and a Paris morgue brought in to end the Count. Next above it, The Bottomless Well at 7.7: on return the suspense is spent, and the depth lies in Marian, Fosco and the form, not in Hartright or Laura.
The Necessity Cap is met on its line: The Inevitable at 7.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.3, The Made at 8.3, The Inner Law at 7.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.0 falls five tenths short, and The Swerve at 8.3, Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.2 fall short as well. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 7.5, against 7.5, and The Inevitable stands on the line) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.1, in the band of Tier IV, short of the 9.0 that the summit requires, and it would stand there with the Gate met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, scored as the novel published in three volumes by Sampson Low in 1860, with Collins’s preface: a preamble and three Epochs of written testimonies. It ran first as a weekly serial in Dickens’s All the Year Round from 26 November 1859 to 25 August 1860, following A Tale of Two Cities. The small revisions of the later one-volume editions are not weighed separately. No text of the novel was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Collins’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the first sentence of the preamble and Hartright’s sentence on first seeing Marian. Citations are by Epoch and narrator. Facts that could not be verified, among them the book’s word count, the number of its weekly parts, the wording of Hartright’s first sight of the woman on the road, and the terms in which the preface compares the method to evidence in court, are not given.