The Arc of Disability in the novels of Wilkie Collins

This thesis examines Wilkie Collins’s engagement with and representation of disability in his fictions. It demonstrates Collins’s range of disabilities and how he subtly and importantly changes social conventions to allow agency to many of his disabled characters. Collins’s representation is not, however, linear or uniform. I argue instead for an ‘arc of disability’ and this thesis follows this arc. The arc’s high point represents fiction in which Collins provides the disabled character with most agency. There is a decline in the arc as we come to many of Collins’s later fiction, in which he becomes less interested in disability. The arc begins with the ‘hidden’ disabilities, peaking with a character who prefers blindness to sight and then declining to a character who is enraged about their disability. Organised in chapters focusing on selected novels it covers the span of Collins’s writing from 1852 to 1888, highlighting the way in which Collins was more advanced than his contemporaries in his attention to disability. Finally, this thesis is intended to fill a lacuna in the way in which Collins’s writing subverts expectations and show his robust research into medical diagnosis and treatments.