Wilkie Collins’s sentimental secretions: the physiology and feeling of Victorian tears

Abstract

In Collins’s sensation novel, The Woman in White (1860), the heroine’s uncle, Frederick Fairlie, is a sickly and self-absorbed recluse, who cares for nothing so much as avoiding stimuli that exacerbate the “wretched state of [his] nerves” (1974, 66). He thus feels greatly put upon when forced to listen to the appeal of his niece’s maid, Fanny, who is distraught about the threat her mistress faces from the novel’s villain, Count Fosco. Demonstrating the hypochondriac’s interest in all things medical, Fairlie pays special attention to the body fluids Fanny produces: