Although subtitled “A Domestic Story,” Wilkie Collins's Poor Miss Finch (1872) offers a sensational plot bursting with secrets and mistaken identities. Many of the novel's plot twists and turns center on the transformation of the hero, Oscar Dubourg, from a wealthy white Englishman into a dark blue “Other” when he is treated with nitrate of silver after a serious head injury. While Oscar's medication cures him of his seizures, it also causes agryria, a skin discoloration, which turns him permanently dark blue. The hero's experience of this traumatic side effect is exacerbated by the reaction of his blind fiancée Lucilla, the title's “Poor Miss Finch.” In the novel, Lucilla's blindness leads her to distort visual concepts such as light and color in her imagination, resulting in her desperate fear of dark colors. The novel's central conflict arises when Oscar engages the help of Lucilla's companion Madame Pratolungo in hiding his new dark skin color from the blind heroine. Complicating this situation further is the arrival of Oscar's identical (but still white) twin Nugent, who deviously schemes to elope with the beautiful Lucilla by impersonating his brother.

Unsurprisingly, contemporary readers found this plot improbable and convoluted, with Oscar's color change being seen as particularly objectionable. As one reviewer for the Nation asked, “For what is the aim of this story? That the blind should marry the dark-blue? There is then an excellent opening for some novelist, distracted for a plot, to write about the love of the color-blind for the jaundiced” (qtd. in Page 199). Yet Collins's seemingly sensational skin color transformation, and his choice of blueness in particular, can be viewed as highly strategic when read in the context of the revolutions in color theory and technology that took place over the course of the nineteenth century.

I argue that the author draws on his significant knowledge of the visual arts to reconsider the nature of color and its relationship to race and empire through the creation of a hero who is uniquely placed to question ideas of identity, belonging, and otherness through his color change. The combination of Oscar's blueness and Lucilla's blindness provides Collins with an entry into the complex and multi-faceted phenomenon of color, which is at once “subjective and objective, physically fixed and culturally constructed” (qtd. in Gage, Meaning 7). Because blue people do not exist in nature, Collins can use Oscar to focus on the subjective meanings of colored skin in order to tease out the discursive relationship between color and race in the social imagination. Similarly, Lucilla's blindness sets aside the physiological aspects of color perception, leaving open for interrogation the culturally constructed understandings of color that she has gathered from other people. Overall, the novel's presentation of color and its meanings is didactic in nature: in order to marry the man that she loves, Lucilla must overcome her learned social prejudices through an education in the artistic meanings of color, as represented by the aesthetic principles of Collins's friends in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their champion, the art critic John Ruskin. By bringing the history of the visual arts and color theory to bear on Poor Miss Finch, we can see that the author's exploration of color as both an aesthetic and a social concept contributes to his lifelong engagement with questions of social prejudice and the practices of British empire-building.

Collins's turn to color as a means to explore the nature of prejudice in Poor Miss Finch is informed by several major nineteenth-century developments in the cultural understanding of color. Recent scholarship, spearheaded by John Gage and Michel Pastoureau, has revealed color's history to be a fascinating nexus of cultural and artistic meaning intimately tied to many societal constructions, such as race, gender, and sexuality, which have long interested academics. This work has identified a pervasive Western fear of “contamination or corruption” by the seductive aspects of color, or what artist and critic David Batchelor terms “chromophobia” (22). This fear leads to the impulse to “other” color – and associate the Other with color – that results in color's entanglement with negative cultural constructions such as “the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological” (22–23).

The Western prejudice against color and the colorful can be traced back to the classical preference of line over color in artistic creation. Historically, line was considered by Aristotle to be “the repository of thought in art” (28), while color was viewed as superficial because it “addressed only the senses” (Pastoureau, Black 155). This unequal binary was briefly challenged during the Italian Renaissance in artistic debates over the merits of disegno (line) and colore (coloring). Disegno, a category comprising both invention and drawing, was represented by the classically-influenced artists of the Florentine school, including Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo, while the sensual and emotional aspects of coloring were embraced by Titian, Veronese, and other artists who trained in Venice, a center of global trade and therefore the world's “great emporium of artists’ colours” (Gage, Culture 131).Footnote ¹ Despite the apparent liveliness of this historical dispute, early European art academies were largely built upon the prestige of the old Florentine masters and their classical values. The academies therefore adopted a “hierarchical ordering” of artistic skills that ranked line over coloring, which was presented as little more than the finishing touches to a canvas (Batchelor 29). In England, this hierarchy perpetuated such a prejudice against coloring that when George Field, a prominent colorist (a manufacturer of artist's colors), published Chromotography, or, A Treatise on Colours and Pigments, and of Their Powers in Painting &c. in 1835, his study was met with wide derision for its choice of subject matter. One Athenaeum reviewer denounced Field's “harangue upon this subject,” insisting “colouring is the very last among the great requisites. Expression, design, invention, are all before it” (Shires 2). As this commentary attests, color remained firmly positioned at the bottom of the hierarchy of artistic skills for several centuries following the Renaissance debates.

It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that any real challenge to line's dominance over color was made within European art. Several historical factors contributed to this change in color's fortune. Early in the century, Romanticism's intellectual and social upheavals led to new explorations in color philosophy and the development of a veritable color theory. In 1810, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published his Die Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors), in which he opposed Sir Isaac Newton's analytic treatment of color in the light spectrum and instead outlined a “moral and symbolic value for colours” that was “shaped . . . by the poet's experience of art” (Gage, Meaning 190–91). Goethe's suggestion that color was subjective led to further study of the perceptual aspects of color: French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul developed the complementary color wheel and outlined the law of simultaneous contrast, in which color's appearance could seem to change through its proximity to other colors through the limitations of the human eye. New chemical technologies also made color's manufacture and distribution easier. For example, British scientist Sir William Perkin's invention of aniline dyes and pigments in 1856 resulted in the production of inexpensive and vibrant synthetic paints, making the world of color suddenly accessible to a growing number of amateur artists (Garfield 8).

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, formed in 1848, was one of the first avant-garde movements to adopt these new color technologies.Footnote ² The Pre-Raphaelites rejected the dark and somber tonal range of academic art, which mimicked the faded pigments of the Renaissance masters who favored line over color; instead, Brotherhood artists implemented a brighter palette, using small, precise brush strokes and a layering of glazes to replicate the brilliant coloring effects of late medieval art (the preference for this period gave rise to the name “Pre-Raphaelite,” or before the time of Raphael). To replicate this “intense coloration” (Dolin and Dougan 8), Brotherhood founders John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt developed the new Wet-White Technique, in which the artists applied a fresh layer of white paint over a hardened white ground just before painting. “Over this wet ground,” Hunt explains, “the colour (transparent and semi-transparent) should be laid with light subtle brushes and the touches must be made so tenderly that the ground below shall not be worked up” (198). The combination of small brushstrokes and transparent color over wet white paint resulted in a highly luminous and “enamel-like” paint surface (Sitwell 58). Though initially received with shock and ridicule by critics and public alike, the Brotherhood's colorful aesthetics and experimental techniques did gain slow acceptance, largely due to the support of leading Victorian art critic Ruskin. In their joint promotion of color, the Pre-Raphaelites and Ruskin both reflected and perpetuated the large-scale reassessment of the role of color in the visual arts over the course of the nineteenth century.

Wilkie Collins was particularly well placed to observe this “key moment in the history of color theory” (Shires 1). His father was William Collins, a prominent landscape and genre painter and member of the Royal Academy, and his brother was Charles (Charley) Allston Collins, an artist associated with the Pre-Raphaelites. Wilkie received artistic training as a boy and continued painting as an adult, in what he described as a “humble amateur-fashion for my own amusement” (Letters 1: 53). He even exhibited a painting, entitled The Smuggler's Retreat (now lost), at the Royal Academy in 1849 (Dolin 19). His intimate knowledge of the visual arts contributed greatly to his early literary career: he reviewed art exhibitions as a fledgling journalist in the 1850s, and his first published book, Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., R.A. (1849), was both a sympathetic treatment of his late father's life and “something of a history of the ‘English School’ in the nineteenth century” (Dolin and Dougan 6, 8). The adult Wilkie and his brother Charley were close friends with prominent Pre-Raphaelites Millais and Hunt,Footnote ³ who, along with other painters such as Augustus Egg and William Powell Frith,Footnote ⁴ would meet often at the Collins's house in Blandford Square, which the brothers shared with their mother (Dolin 9).

As Wilkie Collins lived “very much in the society of artists,” as he himself described it (Letters 1: 53), he was well aware of both the innovative coloring techniques and the resulting theoretical debates that developed over the course of the century. Both his father and his close friend (and Wilkie's namesake), Sir David Wilkie, worked with the innovative colorist George Field (Shires 4), as did Collins's friends Millais and Hunt in the next generation (5). In a letter to Hunt, the author demonstrates his knowledge of the changing landscape of coloring when he praises Hunt's painting A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids (1849–50), calling it “such a feast of magnificent colour as I had not seen since I was last in Venice” (Letters 2: 521). Collins's reference to Venice alludes to the Venetian school's championing of coloring in the Renaissance disegno/colore debates, while his language mimics the decadent embrace of color associated with Pre-Raphaelitism and later Aestheticism.

It is in this context – in which Collins witnessed firsthand the revolutions of the early avant-garde art movements and the rise of color's prestige in the second half of the nineteenth century – that I situate the author's interest in color and aesthetics in Poor Miss Finch. In particular, I argue that the novel reflects the emerging Victorian interest in color, which the author adopts as a fresh strategy to further explore the questions of identity and alterity that characterize his body of work. Well before this turn to color in the 1870s, Collins had made a practice of adapting subversive artistic techniques to expose social inequalities based on gender, race, and disability in his prose. In his early masterpiece The Woman in White (1860), the author challenged the restrictive nature of Victorian gender roles by borrowing his characterization from his friends in the Brotherhood, who were actively defying classical beauty conventions through paintings featuring their “dark Venuses,” a collection of physically powerful and androgynous heroines (Andres 83). In the novel's Marian Halcombe, Collins creates a similar heroine whose intelligence and vitality belie her ugly, dark exterior. Marian's dynamism and self-reliance work to illustrate the shortfalls of the childlike, conventional femininity represented by her beautiful and blond half-sister Laura Fairlie. As the interplay between Marian's darkness and Laura's fairness suggests, Collins makes use of another Pre-Raphaelite artistic practice in his “treatment of light and shade,” which Sophia Andres identifies as the “primary narrative technique in the novel” (75). The limitation of this technique, however, was that light was already located on the privileged side of a well-established Western binary with deeply rooted religious, gendered, and racial meanings: the dark Marian, though popular with readers, was overwhelmed by the response to the novel's “overarching symbolic web of whiteness” (Teukolsky 434). Whiteness came to signal Collins's text in the popular imagination, resulting in the development of “an extraordinary fashion for white dresses, white handbags, white lilies and even what were called ‘white’ waltzes” in the wake of the novel's publication (Finlay 141).

Many other works produced by Collins throughout the 1860s also make use of the interplay between light and dark, often as a means to question the racial hierarchies of the era. The author's The Moonstone (1868), for instance, presents the sad case of Ezra Jennings, whose outcast status as a half-Indian and half-English man is signaled physically through his “piebald hair,” a striking combination of jet-black coloring interspersed with sections of shocking white (327; vol. 2, ch. 4). In the example of Collins's play Black and White (1869), the title illustrates how the racial standing of a French nobleman alters with the discovery of his true parentage during a visit to the West Indies: when his mother is revealed to have been a quadroon, the hero's legal status alters from that of white to that of colored and he is subsequently sold into slavery. As Lillian Nayder contends, “Collins uses Count de Layrac to suggest the arbitrary and shifting grounds of ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness,’ and to collapse the distance between them” (268–69). This trajectory – from light versus dark characters in The Woman in White to characters that are both black and white by the end of the decade – points to the author's growing desire to destabilize prominent Western binary distinctions, particularly those related to race and empire.

In the early 1870s, Collins continues his investigations into social conceptions of race, but he replaces the predominant light/dark motifs of these previous works with a new exploration in vibrant color. In Poor Miss Finch, Collins again finds inspiration in the innovative work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. This time, however, he chooses their revolutionary coloring as means to progress beyond the binary racial discussions of the preceding decade and revel in the multiplicity and play afforded by color, creating characters who are pale, tan, brown, and even blue. These many-hued characters defy easy categorization into racial and national hierarchies. The narrative emphasis on color also makes it possible for Collins to incorporate his acquaintance Ruskin's idealized aesthetics, in which art is “infused with moral purpose” (Frick 15), into the novel as a means to rehabilitate the heroine Lucilla (and potentially the reading audience) from both chromophobia and racial prejudice.

While Oscar's color change allows the reader to imagine the experience of otherness from the hero's perspective, Lucilla's blindness enables Collins to conduct a simultaneous investigation into the nature of vision and its relationship to color. The author's depiction of Lucilla is “carefully researched,” with many details of her physical and mental condition, including her deep-seated fear of dark colors, deriving from the case reports of the eighteenth-century surgeon William Cheselden (Peters ix-xi). Described as having been blinded by cataracts as an infant, the heroine understands the world around her through her highly developed senses of touch and hearing, meaning that visual concepts such as color are particularly problematic for her. In exploring Lucilla's rather fanciful notions of color, Collins, in effect, divorces the social meanings of color from the physiological aspects of color perception. The novel demonstrates that Lucilla's exaggerated preference for light colors, of whose manifestations in the physical world she can have no true conception, must therefore derive from the societal preference that favors light over dark. Isolating the social meanings of color in this manner allows the author to begin to tease out the ways in which race is figured through color in Western society or, alternately, how ideologies of color are mapped onto ideologies of racial difference. Furthermore, the correction of her chromophobic tendencies after her restorative surgery enacts a model of aesthetically based moral education that might disentangle these racial characterizations from their dependence on color terminology.

Oscar's color transformation, though it may appear sensational in nature, is as soundly grounded in Victorian medical practices as Collins's depiction of Lucilla's blindness and recovery. The hero's blueness is an accurate representation of a severe form of agryria, a skin discoloration caused by the ingestion of chemical silver in large amounts.Footnote ⁵ Despite the permanency of this side effect, physicians continued to prescribe nitrate of silver for ailments ranging from blindness to gonorrhea until the mid-nineteenth century (Peters xii). Collins's interest in the drug's effects, according to biographer Nuel Pharr Davis, stems from an incident involving his close friend Charles Dickens, who was briefly treated with small amounts of silver nitrate for a “skin disorder” in 1861. The drug reportedly turned Dickens temporarily “blue in spots,” making him feel “unfit to be seen in public” and driving him to seek refuge in the private society of the Collins's lively home throughout his short-lived discoloration (225). Watching Dickens – an extremely popular public figure at the time – experience social discomfort as a result of his physical marking may have provided Collins with the germ for an excellent plot conceit, as well as an imaginative method to depict the experience of otherness through the hero's “colored” skin.

Although Oscar's fantastic color transformation is rooted in Victorian medicine, it also provides the author with a literary remove through which to present his often progressive and controversial positions on race and empire. The color change relies on the cultural tendency to dismiss color as trivial or childish in order to appear to be merely a fancy of the literary imagination, a non-threatening signifier of his otherness that remains somewhat distanced from the realities of racial difference. From contemporary reviews – which focused primarily on the absurdity of the color and blindness motifs – it does appear that Victorian audiences did not read the connection between Oscar's skin color transformation and racial otherness as overly explicit. In choosing blueness, Collins was successful in what Nayder claims was his real objective: to convey his racial commentary through subtext in order for the novel to “pass as ‘proper’ for a conservative readership” (279). After all, Oscar remains biologically white, a point that is continually emphasized by the presence of his pale-skinned identical twin Nugent. The chemical nature of the transformation allows Collins to disavow his political agenda on the surface, while simultaneously placing color and its role as a marker of difference in the foreground of the narrative.

Perhaps because of this blue motif, Poor Miss Finch has also been neglected in contemporary critical studies and is often (and inaccurately) regarded as apolitical in theme, despite Collins's subversive reputation and his clearly racialized treatment of Oscar in the text. For example, Catherine Peters, the editor of the most recent Oxford World's Classics Edition of Poor Miss Finch, claims in her introduction that the novel “is exceptionally free from calls for reform of the law or society” (vii). Most recent critical discussions of the work have occurred within disability studies, yet these readings tend to focus on the treatment of the blind Lucilla rather than what Collins describes as Oscar's “blue disfigurement” (Poor 135; ch. 23).Footnote ⁶ Only two critical articles currently address Oscar's strange color change: Nayder's “‘Blue Like Me’: Collins, Poor Miss Finch, and the Construction of Racial Identity” and Samuel Gladden's “Spectacular Deceptions: Closets, Secrets, and Identity in Wilkie Collins's Poor Miss Finch.” Both recognize that Oscar's blueness symbolizes his otherness in the novel: Nayder successfully establishes “the racial significance [given] to Oscar's altered skin color” (274), while Gladden uses queer theory to read Oscar's coloring as a sign of his sexual and gender deviance as a feminized upper class male. Though both are excellent at illustrating Collins's political agenda, neither exploration evinces interest in how blueness, or color in general, functions as a desirable metonym for the author in forwarding this agenda. In fact, Gladden, who is so sensitive to Oscar's mixed treatment elsewhere, repeatedly dismisses the importance of the character's blue skin, calling “Collins's choice of blue as a marker of difference . . . a purely arbitrary one,” in which “blueness may be replaced by any signifier of otherness” (473). Because he makes the claim that color's linguistic meanings “cannot be ‘fixed’” (476), blue is, for Gladden, “meaningless” and an “empty signifier” (473, 474). However, just because color's meanings cannot be fixed, it does not follow that Collins's choice of blue was arbitrary; instead, it can be viewed as a carefully calculated choice on the part of the artistically-inclined author. He does not choose blue because it is an empty signifier, but because it is a color full of innumerable connotations and cultural meanings that Collins can exploit in his narrative. So, one might ask, what does blueness mean, both in the novel and in its Victorian context?

Blue's usefulness as a signifier of otherness, I argue, is tied directly to the author's ongoing concerns regarding racial prejudice and Britain's treatment of its imperial subjects. Specifically, it is a technique employed to incorporate India into the margins of the narrative. Several strategic moves make allusion to India within Poor Miss Finch. First, the novel's action opens in 1858, the last year of the historical events of the Indian Mutiny. Similarly, the author populates the work with several Indian and returned British colonial characters. The hero's peculiar “blue-black hue” links him to these representatives of India by invoking the image of Krishna (Collins, Poor 256; ch. 35), the legendary Hindu god with the “blue or black face” who “dances through the world, making both love and fun” (Finlay 342).Footnote ⁷ Oscar's coloring also suggests the dark blue shades of indigo, a costly dye whose name means “from India” in Greek (319). As an extremely profitable imperial commodity, the colorant played a substantial role in the straining of British/Indian relations in the mid-nineteenth century through the Bengal indigo disturbances, an uprising that occurred in 1859, the year in which Poor Miss Finch's narrative concludes.

The cause of these disturbances, which later came to be known as the “Blue Mutiny” (Kling 1), was lingering anger on both sides over the events of the Indian Mutiny compounded by a corrupt system in which the Indian farmers were kept in permanent debt to the British planters. To pay off this debt, Bengali farmers were forced to grow indigo for the planters in lieu of their sustenance crops. According to historian Jenny Balfour-Paul, “Resentment boiled over in the autumn of 1859, with huge demonstrations, rioting, and acts of violence” breaking out in protest against the British planters (73). News of this violence quickly spread to England through the efforts of missionary James Long, an opponent of the planter classes, which had often been viewed by the British public as greedy, ill-bred, and potentially embarrassing to the colonial project. Although Long was motivated by his sympathy for the Bengalis, one of the long-term effects of publicizing “the controversy was to rekindle the racial antagonism which had been smoldering during the thirteen months following the brutal Sepoy Mutiny” (Kling 103). These incidents reminded both the British and Indians alike that the peace reached in 1858 was far from permanent. In setting the novel during the period of the Indian Mutiny and the subsequent Blue Mutiny, Collins connects blueness and racial unrest, indirectly evoking the exploitation of the brown men of Britain's empire.

Difference, then, is figured in the novel not only through the color blue, an unusual hue for human skin, but also through its connections to the color brown, which has historically been used by Western scientists to categorize entire populations of Asian peoples.Footnote ⁸ Collins includes a variety of characters of both colors: besides Oscar, there are two other blue characters who have been discolored by silver nitrate, as well as several characters reported to possess brown complexions. Interestingly, these brown men are both Indian and European in origin, defying easy categorization; for example, Lucilla meets a Hindu gentleman with “a dark brown complexion” at a dinner party (118; ch. 20), while narrator Madame Pratolungo describes her deceased French husband as having been a “fine mahogany brown all over” (74; ch. 13). Throughout the novel, the myriad brown and blue characters move in and out of the complex plot, eventually converging in the figure of a blue man who has traveled from India. The analogy drawn between the blue and brown people both mimics and mocks the scientific practice of using color to classify biological difference. Poor Miss Finch demonstrates the faulty logic of conflating the meanings of colors as hues and as human skin tones. People, the author implies, cannot be color-coded like flowers, nor can skin color clearly designate national origin, as seen in the novel's representation of the brown Indian and European characters. Furthermore, Collins illustrates the danger of leaving these implicit connections between color and race unexamined through the heroine Lucilla, whose prejudice does not allow her to distinguish between dark objects and dark people, or between racial others and the chemically disfigured.

Although it is Oscar who experiences the shift from belonging to otherness in his color change, the novel concentrates on Lucilla's struggles to overcome her fears and learn acceptance, because it is she who stands in the way of the couple's happiness. It is also through Lucilla that Collins most clearly demonstrates the implicit connection between Oscar's blueness and racial otherness, as she reacts in an identical manner to both the blue men and the Indian characters that she meets. In these reactions, what Lucilla calls an “antipathy” to darkness is shown to be a form of racial prejudice (74; ch. 13). For instance, when the heroine encounters the “Hindoo gentlemen” at her aunt's dinner party, she is seized with an illogical and racialized fear. In her mind, she “dr[aws] a dreadful picture of the Hindoo, as a kind of monster in human form” (118; ch. 20). Lucilla states “The instant I felt him approaching, my darkness was peopled with brown demons. . . . I had long, lean, black-eyed beings all around me; perpetually growing in numbers, and pressing closer and closer on me as they grew.” When the gentleman takes her hand upon introductions, Lucilla “shudder[s]” and “start[s] back”; at dinner, her anxiety overwhelms her and she is “obliged to leave the table” (118; ch. 20). This depiction recalls the Victorian woman's “sexual panic” in the presence of the racial Other, a common reaction that Nayder suggests was “fueled by the rape narratives in which the political history of the Indian Mutiny was recast” (273). Yet the novel's unsympathetic presentation of Lucilla's actions, which border on the ridiculous and are out of place in this polite setting, illustrate the unwarranted nature of this collective Victorian fear.

This scene of racial panic serves as the catalyst for the sensational events to follow because it presages the heroine's reaction to Oscar's impending color change. In fact, it is through this incident that Oscar first learns of his fiancée's prejudice towards dark colors, when her father, the Reverend Finch, shows him a letter from Lucilla describing the encounter. At this point, Oscar has already secretly commenced his silver nitrate treatment to relieve the seizures that have prevented his and Lucilla's nuptials. Although his skin has already reached a “livid ashen colour,” Oscar is not in the least upset by the “ugly effects” of the silver nitrate; instead, he is extremely pleased with the results of the medication in preventing his seizures. He writes to Madame Pratolungo, “For the last ten days, I have not had a fit. In other words, for the last ten days, I have lived in Paradise” (117; ch. 20).

Yet when he addresses Lucilla's “strange prejudice,” the optimistic tone of the letter fades. Oscar confesses that this discovery has “produced a very unpleasant impression on my mind” and begins to suspect that his “discolouration” may “become a matter of far more serious difficulty than [he] had anticipated” (117; ch. 20). Because Lucilla is blind, he had believed her indifferent to his appearance when, in fact, she is not and cherishes Madame Pratolungo's reports of his “fair” complexion (74; ch. 13). After reading her letter, however, he begins to worry that Lucilla might react with fear to his new dark coloring as she did to the Hindu gentleman’s, and writes with horror, “Think of her shuddering and starting back from my hand when it took hers! No! No!” (119; ch. 20). Although Madame Pratolungo assures him that the blind girl “will see her stupid prejudice in its true light, when she feels it trying to part her from you” (123; ch. 21), Oscar becomes determined to keep the knowledge of his disfiguration from Lucilla. This decision triggers a series of complicated plot events that result in much needless suffering for many of the major characters of the novel.

When rumors of Oscar's color change reach Lucilla's ears through village gossip, Oscar panics and lies, telling her that the dark blue man is his twin Nugent, who has just arrived for a visit. For her part, Lucilla confirms Oscar's fears when she reacts negatively to her next meeting with Nugent now that she believes him to be blue. In a scene that closely resembles that of her interaction with the Hindu gentleman, she experiences an “irresistible nervous loathing” that results in labored breathing, faintness, and heavy sweating when in his presence (159; ch. 26). When the ladies depart, an incredulous Madame Pratolungo enquires why Lucilla is waving her walking cane wildly about in front of herself. The blind girl answers that she is “Clearing the air. . . The air is full of him. I am in a forest of hovering figures, with faces of black-blue” (160; ch. 26). These “hovering figures” of “black-blue” mirror the “brown demons” that Lucilla imagined “pressing closer and closer” to her at her aunt's dinner party (118; ch. 20), indicating the analogy made between the two colors, blue and brown, as markers of difference in the text. Yet her fear of Nugent is shown to be both irrational and immaterial since the heroine is perfectly fine in close proximity to Oscar, the real blue twin, as long as she continues to believe him to be white. In this scene, Lucilla's fearful reaction to blueness literalizes and makes absurd Victorian concerns over “colored” skin.

It is made apparent to the reader that neither the novel nor the characters approve of Lucilla's behavior on these occasions. Aunt Batchford, in fact, is “furious” over her niece's rude reaction to her guest (118; ch. 20). When confronted by her aunt, Lucilla “appeal[s]” to her “to remember that, situated as I am, my fancy is peculiarly liable to play me tricks, and that I have no sight to see with, and to show me – as other people's eyes show them – when they have taken a false view of persons and things.” Lucilla's explanations, however, are made “in vain.” She writes to her father that her aunt “would admit of no excuse for me” and that their quarrel “has hardly left us such good friends as we were before” (118; ch. 20). Aunt Batchford's stand against Lucilla's behavior is the first step in excising the fear of darkness from the blind girl's consciousness; it also suggests a method of excising racial fear from the British social consciousness. Through Aunt Batchford, Collins positions a proper consideration towards the racial Other as a matter of good manners. The social nature of the Hindoo's visit, his status as a “gentleman,” and Aunt Batchford's embarrassment at Lucilla's behavior all imply that the codes of polite behavior must be extended to include members of the growing empire, particularly those who are encountered in the metropole.

Just as Aunt Batchford refuses to condone her niece's treatment of her dinner guest, the narrator is also displeased with what she calls Lucilla's “stupid prejudice” (123; ch. 21). Madame Pratolungo sets the example for her charge and the reader earlier in the text when she meets with another blue man while visiting her family in Paris, an encounter that takes place before she learns that Oscar has been prescribed silver nitrate. Like Lucilla in meeting with the Hindu gentleman, Madame Pratolungo initially reacts with shock and aesthetic distaste on seeing his blue skin, stating, “his horrible colour so startled me, that I could not repress a cry of alarm” (105; ch. 19). Unlike Lucilla, however, the narrator quickly regains her “ease” on receiving the blue man's explanation of his medical discoloration, demonstrating that an initial reaction to difference can be overcome by rational reflection and empathy for others. Madame Pratolungo asserts, “I got used to his disfigurement in the course of my relations with him” and that the man “proved to be a most kind, intelligent, and serviceable person.” Furthermore, by having the narrator regret her “involuntary act of rudeness” in reacting to the sudden sight of the blue Parisian (105; ch. 19), the author intimates that not making the effort to conquer one's fear is an act of social indecorum, as he once again presents the acceptance of difference as an act of courtesy. Lucilla, it is illustrated, would do well to follow the examples set by Madame Pratolungo and Aunt Batchford in her interaction with “colored” people.Footnote ⁹

Lucilla's failure to emulate the ladies’ acceptance of people with dark skin tones eventually leads to her estrangement from Oscar and her ensnarement in Nugent's nefarious plans. The white twin contrives for his German friend Herr Grosse, an eminent and eccentric “surgeon-optic” (193; ch. 30), to operate on Lucilla's cataracts to restore her sight so that Oscar will no longer be able to hide his disfigurement. Once Lucilla recovers from the successful surgery, Herr Grosse allows her to remove her bandages so that she may lay eyes on the members of her family for the first time. Lucilla reacts as predicted to the sight of Oscar's blue skin: Madame Pratolungo reports, “A cry of terror escaped her: she started back, shuddering . . .” (256; ch. 35). Oscar, in seeing the extent of Lucilla's fear, determines to release her from their engagement and run away to the continent. The hero's self-esteem has deteriorated to the point that he believes that his fiancée would prefer the white brother she hardly knows to the blue one whom she loves (meanwhile, Nugent, who knows that Lucilla does not prefer him, is plotting to marry her while pretending to be Oscar). Although Oscar has found the alteration of his skin color somewhat difficult to bear, his negative feelings stem more from his fiancée's terror than from the curious stares of the villagers that he meets. Yet while he is faulted for his cowardice in hiding the truth from his fiancée, it is Lucilla's inability to accept his new dark skin that is the primary cause of their separation. The novel therefore sets about rehabilitating the heroine in order to fulfill the requirements of the marriage plot.

Lucilla's re-education begins with basic lessons in color and aesthetics, as Herr Grosse patiently teaches her to identify shapes and colors by eye. Grosse begins by demonstrating the physical appearance of Lucilla's favorite colors, white and scarlet, as well as that of black, the color that she “hate[s] most” (300; ch. 39), by taking a black hat, a white piece of paper, and a red pen-wiper and randomly distributing them in front of his patient. Without cultural cues to guide her, a frustrated Lucilla finds that not only can her eyes not distinguish between the objects, but that she cannot differentiate between the color she despises and the ones she has always cherished. As her “surgeon-teacher” demonstrates (300; ch. 39), Lucilla must replace her previous fanciful and socially constructed “notions” about color with a new understanding that better reflects each hue's physical manifestations (298; ch. 39).

Herr Grosse's lessons reflect the color philosophy of the German Romantics, whose color theory challenged previous scientific theories regarding light and color. When Sir Isaac Newton established his “order of colors” as a measurable sequence of light consisting of distinct violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red wavelengths, he effectively removed black and white from their previous positions within the realm of color (Pastoureau, Black 148). The legacy of Newton's spectrum – in combination with the “chromoclasm” or moral sanction of colors that characterized the Protestant Reformation (Pastoureau, Blue 100) – is that “for almost three centuries black and white were considered and experienced as ‘noncolors’” (Pastoureau, Black 11). The Romantic color theorists were among the first to openly challenge Newton's treatment of color, particularly in early works such as Goethe's Theory of Colors and Phillip Otto Runge's Farben-Kugel (The Color Sphere), both published in 1810. The artist Runge's three-dimensional color sphere in particular (Figure 3), worked to counter the previous scientific tradition by carefully positioning “the polarities of light and dark” alongside “the scale of colours in tonal order” (Gage, Culture 203). While the positioning of white on top of the sphere and in the first of the four views may privilege light over dark, overall the hues are divided equally and each is presented in the same spatial relation to the others. The result of this relatively democratic presentation of shades and hues was the reinstatement of black and white into a working artistic color system.

Figure 3.

Philipp Otto Runge, “Colour Sphere (Die Farbenkugel).” Painted engraving, from Farben-Kugel oder Construction des Verhältnisses aller Mischungen der Farben zueinander, und ihrer vollständigen Affinität, mit angehängtem Versuch einer Ableitung der Harmonie in den Zusammenstellungen der Farben. (Hamburg: Friedrick Perthes, 1810).

Like his fellow countryman Runge, Herr Grosse takes pains to illustrate that black and white are just two hues out of the many in the great scale of colors. Because the heroine had grossly exaggerated the phenomenon of color in her own imagination when blind, she is at first disappointed to observe the physical appearance of these colors. When Herr Grosse arranges the various colored objects about her, she exclaims, “I see nothing as bright as my favourite colors here” (299; ch. 39). She protests that a white piece of paper is not white enough; her favored view of white was “Fifty thousand times whiter than that!” Similarly, “Scarlet was not half as red – black, not one hundredth part as black – as her imagination had figured them to her, in the days when she was blind” (300; ch. 39). In learning the scale of colors in their physical forms, however, the imagined distance between light and dark begins to collapse for Lucilla as she gains a more balanced and practical understanding of color and light along the lines of Runge's Farben-Kugel.

Throughout this fascinating scene, Collins investigates the complex relationship between the perception of color as a physical entity and its complicated web of subjective social meanings. While a frustrated Lucilla admits her confusion in differentiating between the colors laid out before her, she maintains that she felt an immediate distaste at the sight of the black hat. When blind, Lucilla had claimed to be able to feel the difference between light and dark colors through her “wonderful delicacy of touch,” reacting to contact with Madame Pratolungo's purple dress as if it “hurt” her fingers and cajoling her new companion to always “wear pretty bright colours, to please me!” (14–15; ch. 3). Now, Lucilla tries to regain some of her previous authority by insisting to Madame Pratolungo that the hat had “affected her disagreeably” even though she “didn't know it was black” (300; ch. 39). While Madame Pratolungo allows her charge to “feel some little encouragement,” Herr Grosse ponders the possible meanings of Lucilla's claim. While he dismisses her preference for white as “the fancy of a young girls [sic],” or learned behavior, he is apt to attribute her feelings towards red and black to a physiological reason within the eye's structure (298; ch. 39). He declares, “in these cataracts-cases, it is constantly scarlets that they almost see. . . . It is always black that they hate. For this also there must be a reason – and I must find him” (298–99; ch. 39).

The structure of this contradictory scene, in which Lucilla is both wrong and potentially right about her color preconceptions, may stem from Collins's extensive research in ophthalmology, a field that was experiencing a “Golden Age” in the 1850s and 60s following the German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz's invention of the ophthalmoscope (Carpenter 6). Helmholtz posited that the three types of cone photoreceptors in the eye were responsive to blue, green, and red wavelengths, a hypothesis (later proven in the twentieth century) that could account for Lucilla's differing levels of sensitivity to various colors as described in the novel. This may be an occasion where Collins's desire to “exhibit[] blindness as it really is” (xxxiii), as he claims in his dedication, complicates his lessons in breaking down light and dark hierarchies, which are so emphatic elsewhere in the novel. Also at play in this scene is Collins's stated aim of presenting Lucilla as a capable person who happens to be blind in order to demonstrate that “the conditions of human happiness are independent of bodily affliction” (xxxiv). In leaving Lucilla's visual dislike of the black hat unchallenged by Herr Grosse and Madame Pratolungo, Collins preserves his heroine's agency in her interpretation of her own senses while also demonstrating the difficulty of separating the objective and subjective values of color.

After this difficult experience, Lucilla is rewarded for learning Grosse's scale of color values when she is allowed to gaze out the window at the splendor of England's South Down Hills. In contrast to her first sight of the colored domestic objects, the awed heroine declares that she finds “no disappointment here” (302; ch. 39). The description of Lucilla's first glimpse of the natural world is highly symbolic of her visual awakening; Collins writes that “the clouds were parting; the sun coming out; the bright gaps of blue in the sky were widening every moment.” As Lucilla views light and color in its proper place in nature, divested of corrupt social meanings, she begins to understand the concept of natural beauty and it exceeds all her expectations. She exclaims, “I have never thought, never dreamed, of anything half so beautiful as this!” (302; ch. 39). This passage replaces her diseased imaginings with a heavily aestheticized and moralized brand of nature worship reminiscent of that of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their supporter John Ruskin. Like the Pre-Raphaelites, whose motto was “truth to Nature” (Dolin 9), the art critic Ruskin regarded “the natural world . . . as the foundation of human morality” (Parkes 599). When Lucilla becomes “overwhelmed by her own ecstatic sense of the glory of the sky” (302; ch. 39), Collins draws attention to the role of nature and Ruskinian aesthetics in Lucilla's moral improvement.

Color is vital in this version of aesthetics, as Ruskin thought that only “pure, vibrant color” could represent “nature in its most animated state” (Parkes 598). In fact, Ruskin was one of the earliest nineteenth-century art critics to favor color over line, as he “imagined drawing as basically an arrangement of areas of color and tone rather than a manipulation of line” (Bermingham 243). In The Elements of Drawing (1857), Ruskin instructs the beginning artist to recognize that “Everything that you see in the world around you presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colours variously shaded” (27). Here, Ruskin's aesthetics corresponds with the goals of artists such as the Pre-Raphaelites and the later Impressionists who painted en plein air (in the open air) to emphasize natural light and color patches over line and chiaroscuro. These artistic values, promoted by a luminary that Collins had first met and read in the 1840s (Davis 46),Footnote ¹⁰ are integrated into Poor Miss Finch through the roles played by light, shadow, and color in the heroine's new aesthetic experiences, which are described in a painterly fashion. When Lucilla travels to the seaside resort of Ramsgate with her aunt to complete her recovery, for example, she finds herself enraptured with “all the beauty of land and sea, all the glory of cloud and sunshine” (Poor 330; ch. 43). As the heroine walks along the town's cliffs and beaches, soaking in “the pure light, with all those lovely colours,” she slowly regains her health by drawing strength from nature (345; ch. 44).

Once Lucilla gains a new aesthetic understanding of the natural world and color's place in it, she is able to begin reconciling herself to the blue skin of her future husband, a moral progression that is demonstrated through her sudden encounter with another disfigured blue man. During a walk on the beach with Nugent (who has followed her to Ramsgate and is still pretending to be Oscar, safe in the knowledge that Aunt Batchford has never met either twin), the two lovers encounter a stranger, strolling contentedly with his family. This man possesses the same “black-blue complexion” that Lucilla had seen and feared on Oscar's face upon first regaining her sight (339; ch. 43). Although she is “startled” at first by the coloring of the stranger, Lucilla follows the model established by Madame Pratolungo's earlier interaction with the blue Parisian by quickly regaining her composure. Lucilla's recovery is made possible by the fact that she has finally learned to view color aesthetically: she only spots the blue man because her eye was drawn by the “peculiar colour” of his wife's ensemble. Once she recovers from her surprise, she finds herself able again to “admire the lady's dress, and the beauty of [their] children, before they had passed” (339–40; ch. 43). This appraisal of the family illustrates that the heroine now views the Indian officer's skin color in a similar aesthetic manner as she does the color of his wife's dress, as only one of many possible color hues visible in the panorama of beach life. In learning her colors, Lucilla learns to value the physical properties of color over the subjective social meanings that had previously dominated her understanding when she was blind.

This passing gentleman represents the final convergence of the brown and blue characters that have punctuated the narrative. The man is described as an “Indian officer” (340; ch. 43), and he serves to directly connect the spaces of empire with the motif of blue coloration. Although it is clear that the Indian officer has taken silver nitrate, the man's hereditary skin color underneath the blue discoloration is left uncertain. Nayder proposes that by “Describing this ‘black-blue’ gentleman as ‘a retired Indian officer’ rather than as an Englishman retired from the Indian service, Collins purposely obscures his racial identity” (275). In the substitution of his blueness for the details of his heredity, Collins divorces the man's external appearance from his internal being. The color of the man's skin, like the color of his wife's dress, is presented as an external detail of little importance to the person underneath, who is portrayed simply as a happy man on vacation with his beautiful family. A passing old woman, having witnessed the encounter, stops to speak to Lucilla. She says,

Lucilla's reply that she agrees “entirely” marks an important turning point in her ongoing lessons in the acceptance of difference. The happy family of the Indian officer seems to offer her a tantalizing vision of her own domestic future with Oscar, should she learn to reconcile her fears of color and otherness.

As if inspired by the happy future before her slipping away, Lucilla begins to do just that. Not only does she insist to Nugent that the blue man “has not frightened” her, she suggests that they invite his blue brother to live with them after their marriage (340–41; ch. 43). She explains that it was her “own imagination” that had frightened her when she viewed Oscar's blue face, but that she “soon got over it” (341; ch. 43). She maintains that she “feel[s] none of the absurd terror of the poor man which I felt when I was blind. Now that I have seen for myself what he is really like, I can feel for him” (306; ch. 40). The amazed Nugent asks Lucilla whether she “could have lived quite comfortably with my brother's blue face before you every hour of the day?” She responds, “Quite comfortably – if he would have been my brother too” (341; ch. 43). Having overcome both her metaphorical and literal blindness, Lucilla here takes the first step towards her reconciliation with the discolored Oscar.

Although Lucilla has demonstrated moral growth in informing Nugent that she could accept his brother's blueness, she and her aunt are still unaware which twin is visiting them at Ramsgate. When Nugent realizes that Lucilla would have accepted Oscar's new dark coloring with time, he pushes her into eloping with him, sparking a dramatic climatic sequence in which Lucilla is held captive until the ceremony can take place. By the time that Madame Pratolungo and Oscar can rescue her, the convalescent heroine's health has deteriorated so severely that her eyes are damaged beyond repair. Yet Lucilla easily accepts her return to her former blind state, since she associates her brief ability to see with the trauma of the elopement. Because it was her metaphorical blindness and irrational fear that sparked the novel's conflict, rather than her physical disability, the heroine's lack of sight is not presented as an obstacle to her future happiness with Oscar. Instead, the novel has achieved its goal of educating the heroine and she keeps with her the valuable lessons that she has learned about distinguishing the physical from the social meanings of color as she settles down into her new domestic life as wife and mother. The rejected Nugent, meanwhile, flees from the repercussions of his actions by joining an arctic expedition that is eventually lost, rather fittingly, in the frozen white polarscapes of the far north.Footnote ¹¹

Through his blind heroine, blue hero, and white villain, Collins's novel works to position race as a question of aesthetics rather than biology because an appreciation of aesthetics, as Lucilla's story suggests, can be learned by anybody at any time. While Lucilla begins the novel by claiming, “If I married a man with a dark complexion, . . . I should run away from him” (74; ch. 13), she ends it happily married to a dark blue man and the mother of two children just as beautiful as those of the Indian officer (426; epilogue). Her aesthetic lessons demonstrate both the irrational nature of her early horror of dark colors and dark skin, as well as the simplemindedness of elevating light colors and light skin beyond their physical meanings. Lucilla's fears, it is illustrated, are completely out of proportion with the reality of color, just as the Victorian imagining of racial difference, fueled by ignorance and distance, is out of proportion with the political realities of its empire. To demonstrate this point, Collins once again broaches the topic of Britain's empire in the final pages of the novel, erasing the racial signifiers previously associated with Oscar and transposing them onto Lucilla's extended family.

In the epilogue, in which Madame Pratolungo sums up the first twelve years of Lucilla and Oscar's “tranquil” and “happy” marriage (423; epilogue), Collins demonstrates that Oscar's discoloration need not determine his future happiness anymore than Lucilla's blindness dictates hers. Just as Lucilla accepts her return to blindness, resisting Herr Grosse's repeated requests to operate on her eyes a second time, so too does Oscar appear to find peace despite his discoloration. He is last heard “whistling blithely” in the background over his work, while Lucilla gives their daughter a piano lesson in the next room. In these final domestic scenes, all physical descriptions of Oscar's discoloration drop out of the narrative. His late twin Nugent, the previous sign of Oscar's biological whiteness, is replaced by Oscar and Lucilla's son, also named Nugent, whose “bright blue eyes” and “rosy face” reinforce the idealized English complexion possessed by both his mother and his father before he turned blue (426; epilogue). In the end, Collins removes the specter of miscegenation that had been hovering over the courtship of Lucilla and Oscar in order to render their marriage and children acceptable to a conservative readership.

Being Wilkie Collins, however, he cannot but transfer the sign of racial difference and imperial contamination to another member of the Finch family in a final act of subversion. In the penultimate paragraph of the novel, Madame Pratolungo reports that Reverend Finch, Mrs. Finch, and Lucilla's stepbrothers and sisters have immigrated to “one of our distant colonies” where the reverend “harangues the ‘natives’ to his heart's content” in his new position as bishop (426; epilogue). Mrs. Finch writes home that she is worried that her young daughter Jicks, a beloved character and “the wandering Arab” of the family, “will end in marrying ‘a chief’” (426; epilogue). This fleeting reference to miscegenation is comical when applied to the greedy and pompous Finch family, whose worries appear uptight and outdated to progressive narrator Madame Pratolungo. When combined with the repeated references to blue or brown imperial characters throughout the novel, however, the Finch family's emigration and racial fears function as a final reminder to the reader of the ever-growing entanglements between metropole and empire and the subsequent need to update protocols regarding polite behavior.

In the end, Oscar's color change and Lucilla's lessons in Ruskinian color aesthetics allow Collins to broach taboo topics of race and empire metaphorically, couching his progressive lessons of racial acceptance in the less politically-charged realm of color and the visual arts. Like his heroine, Collins is able to break away from his previous dependence on black and white dualities (as seen in The Woman in White and Black and White) through the multiplicity of color, while also taking advantage of recent advances in the fields of optics and color theory. By depicting Lucilla's lessons in the meanings of aesthetics, color, and difference in Poor Miss Finch, Collins models for the reader a means to unlearn social prejudices and disentangle the physical meanings of color from culturally-constructed racial hierarchies.