Heart and Science

A girl is worn down by her aunt for the sake of her inheritance, and the one doctor who understands her illness is a physiologist who would rather watch it run its course for his research. Collins wrote this in 1883 as a frontal attack on vivisection — he researched the laboratories, put a real one on the page, and told readers in the preface exactly whom he meant to offend. The doctor is one of the coldest villains in Victorian fiction. Fifty-nine plates, from Turner's skies to Frith's quiet interiors, set beside the novel's laboratories and seaside rooms to show the world Collins set his coldest villain loose in.