‘”One Remarkable Evening”: Redemptive Science in Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science‘

Abstract

In his Preface “To Readers in General” at the start of his 1883 novel, Heart and Science, Wilkie Collins asks his audience to concentrate its attention on the topic of vivisection, the controversial scientific practice at the centre of the book’s plot. 1 To assist his readers in doing this, Collins borrows details from contemporary debates about the practice and describes its damaging social effects: the novel’s arch-villain, the vivisectionist Dr Nathan Benjulia, as well as the scheming Mrs Gallilee embody what Collins terms “the result of the habitual practice of cruelty (no matter under what pretence) in fatally deteriorating the nature of man” (38). Though Collins knew of the “detestable cruelties of the laboratory” from pamphlets he had read on vivisection, he aimed his own book to “keep clear of terrifying and revolting the ordinary reader,” a practice of other antivivisection texts with which he disagreed (Collins to Cobbe 1882, qtd. in Farmer 370). Though his Preface promises to offer only “temperate advocacy” for the antivivisectionist cause – Collins professes to leave “the picture to speak for itself” – the narrative is saturated both with lurid allusions to vivisection, such as Benjulia’s nonchalant cleaning of his bloodied hands on his coat-tails, and with heavy-handed moral judgements lamenting the consequences of an “education, directed to scientific pursuits” (38, 287). Collins’s denunciation of medical experimentation, which culminates in Benjulia’s dramatic suicide, is forcefully compelling, for it appears to show a direct correlation between the rise of the experimental laboratory and the collapse of empathy between humans and other living beings, both human and nonhuman alike. With the final union of the two toothsome and sensitive cousins – the artistically inclined Carmina Graywell and the young doctor Ovid Vere – triumphing over the humiliated scientifically-obsessed villains, the novel appears equally to suggest that science as a pursuit exists in conflict with, rather than in support of, the culture that practices it. Moreover, it seems to insist that science remains, ultimately, subordinate to that other expression of humanity: love.