Poor Miss Finch

"This is one of my favourite Collins novels, because it’s very funny and very touching. It’s about a woman called Lucilla Finch, who is blind from early in her life due to cataracts. Through a radical surgical operation she has her sight restored, only to lose it again. There’s a lot that interests me from the perspective of Victorian science: speculative, abstract science as represented by the English surgeon Mr Sebright versus the radical physiological empiricism of Herr Grosse in the novel, the German oculist. But then there’s also a story about two twin brothers, Oscar and Nugent Dubourg, one of whom as a result for taking medicine for epilepsy turns his skin blue, and is blue for the whole course of the novel. That you find only in a Collins novel: a character who is blue throughout. “He battled throughout his life with the ups and downs of his addiction ” There’s also, of course, the minor character Jicks: a strange child who goes around talking about herself in the third person (“Here comes Jicks…”). Miss Finch herself is centre-stage as this beautiful, captivating woman with a disability, who wins over readers and the other characters. She’s not the only character with a physical disability to be central in one of Collins’s novels. Hide and Seek has a woman who’s deaf and mute, in The Law and the Lady there’s Miserrimus Dexter, who has no legs. Both. He realises they make good characters and he makes a career on idiosyncratic characters, even caricatures. But I think he’s also really just interested in giving them a voice. These are characters who are either only minor in other novels, or there for comic relief. Yet he asks: what’s it like to tell the story from the perspective of someone who’s been blind for life, or someone who’s not been able to hear for life? It is often linked with foreigners in the novels, whether it’s Herr Grosse bringing his radical, possibly dangerous surgical techniques to England, or the poisonous designs of Madame Fontaine in Jezebel’s Daughter , or the English but foreign-sounding Doctor Benjulia in Heart and Science . And an exiled, Italian, secret-society member. It’s both. There was a real anxiety in the British popular imagination in the nineteenth century about science… France and Germany were associated in the popular mind with dangerous science, with experimental science, with experimentation on animals and even, if left unchecked by law, experimentation on humans."