Review: Heart and Science by Wilkie Collins

Trade paperback, 381 pages
Published 1996 (contents: 1882-83)
Acquired and previously read November 2011
Reread May 2017

Heart and Science: A Story of the Present Time by Wilkie Collins

"And what did Mr. A. do next?" he [Dr. Benjulia] repeated. "He put his hand in his pocket-- he gave Miss B. a month's wages-- and he turned her out of the house. You impudent hussy, you have delayed my dinner, spoilt my mutton, and hugged me round the neck! There is your money. Go."
     With glaring eyes and gaping mouth, the cook stood looking at him, like a woman struck to stone. In a moment more, the rage burst out of her in a furious scream. She turned to the table, and snatched up a knife. Benjulia wrenched it from her hand, and dropped back into his chair completely overpowered by the success of his little joke. He did what he had never done within the memory of his oldest friend-- he burst out laughing. "This has been a holiday!" he said. "Why haven't I got somebody with me to enjoy it?" (216)

I reread this book in preparation for writing an article on it.* Like my review of six years ago, my article focuses on Mrs. Maria Gallilee, the under-discussed amateur female scientist at the center of the novel, so here I want to write for a moment about Dr. Nathan Benjulia, the vivisectionist who mostly lurks at the margins of the novel, but occasionally (as in the above passage) comes into focus. Like a lot of Victorian novelists, Wilkie Collins makes a connection between vivisection and cruelty to women, though what Benjulia has done here to his cook is much less bad than the spousal abuse in The Beth Book and Lynton Abbott's Children. Benjulia's cook is under the impression that Benjulia is in love with her; this is primarily because she's been reading Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, where (I am given to understand, having not read it myself), Pamela is a cook who marries her employer. Benjulia encourages this delusion until it reaches its climax with her "thr[owing] her arms around the doctor's neck," leading to the scene above.

I find this fascinating for a couple reasons. One is obvious: like a lot of scientists in literature, Benjulia's scientific training renders him morally deficient. Experimenting physically on live animals means that he has no qualms about experimenting emotionally on live humans. Science, thus leads to moral bankruptcy.

Another is, I think, less obvious. The novel, you might guess from the title, sets up an opposition between science and "heart": the ability to experience sympathy, which all of the novel's virtuous characters possess, sometimes to paralyzing degrees (there's a good lawyer, for example, who can't countenance cutting a flower's stem, and at one point the book's hero is aghast when someone steps on a beetle). And like so many Victorian novels, Heart and Science itself is meant to train the reader in sympathy and morality: Collins wrote it to "plead[ ] the cause of the harmless and affectionate beings of God's creation" (38). But though the novel is definitely an anti-science polemic at times (at least, as regards a certain form of 1880s science; Collins's narrator yearns for the bygone days of Faraday), it is somewhat more complicated on where "heart" might originate from. You might get it from reading this novel, but some novels will in fact lead you astray. Benjulia's cook's reading habits have given her a less accurate perception of the world than Benjulia's scientific training has given him, even though in other parts of the novel we are shown the inferiority of scientific sight compared to what we might call sympathetic sight.

Benjulia doesn't have anyone to laugh with, as he bemoans in this passage, and partially that's to blame on the kind of science he practices: Benjulia is so obsessed with professional success (as opposed to the advancement of knowledge) that he avoids society as much as possible, worried that one slip could reveal his plan of research to someone else and allow them to beat him to his hoped-for discovery in the treatment of brain disease. But there is someone who does laugh with Benjulia at this incident. I mean, I don't know that I laughed aloud on reading this passage, but I was amused. The reader here is more on the side of Benjulia than the caricature-esque character of the cook, and I'm not sure what to make of that (it might just mean that to Wilkie Collins a good joke is a good joke, even if it disrupts your novel's carefully constructed moral universe), but it indicates that despite its obviously polemical qualities, despite its title, there are times Heart and Science resists easy dualities.

* The article was supposed to be out by now, but as these things so often go, it's still forthcoming.